Wanted and Wired

by Vivien Jackson

  Feeling was coming back into her long-numbed empathy, seeking a connection other than sex. She wanted to heal him, hold him, care for him.

  Okay, there were other things she wanted to do to this man, no use lying to herself. But the other wants, the deeper wants, surprised her. Made her feel ridiculously human.

  “It doesn’t hurt, querida,” he said, referring to his head wound.

  “It looks like hell, though.”

  “You can’t even see it right now.”

  “But I know what it looks like.”

  “My alterations have dulled the nerve endings in some areas and affect the way I feel pain.” His gaze met hers, and that spark she’d tasted on his mouth arced between them. “Besides, I deeply suspect you’re just searching for an excuse to play doctor.”

  So. Busted.

  “And you’re assuming I’m playing,” she volleyed.

  “Aren’t you?” His face was dead serious when he said that. No teasing, no expression at all. Machine still, that face, but she could feel the tension in his arms, his neck. His lips were parted, and his leashed breath came quick and warm.

  With a suitably salacious reply on the tip of her tongue, Mari hooked his gaze on hers, braced her left hand against his seatback, and reared up onto her knee. In the process, she dragged that gearshift the full length of her thigh.

  He slammed his eyes shut. The fingers at the back of her head cricked, catching hair and tugging. The deep groan that escaped his mouth was seismic.

  Ohhhhh, right.

  Mari promptly forgot whatever flirty thing she’d been about to say. She blanked on where they were, the TPA’s betrayal, Heron’s not-hurty wounds, and all manner of other things. Damn near forgot her own name, because right then, she recalled what she’d figured out earlier. About the car.

  “Wait.” She looked down at him, her knee pressing painfully into the leather base of the gearshift. “So the alts just dull pain, right?”

  “What do you mean?” He was made of strain.

  Mari rocked forward, bringing the other leg across, settling her right knee in the center of the driver’s seat. Which meant she now straddled both his right thigh and the shifter.

  When she arched her body over him, bringing her face closer to his and nudging the shifter knob with her inner thigh, his face lit up in bright agony.

  “Can you feel, you know, other things?” She turned her hand, pushing her palm against the leather seatback. Her fingers bent, raking nails over the leather, digging her knuckles into the sleek muscle beside his spine.

  Heron shuddered and murmured something she couldn’t understand, not even with the com. In a rough voice she hardly recognized—where were all his careful modulations now, hmm?—he said, “Mari, are you asking me whether I am so hard right now that I could fuck you through three layers of clothes?”

  Her mouth went dry. Damn straight that’s what she was asking.

  And then, in a surge of motion and an inarticulate groan, his hands were on her hips, bringing her snug against him. Well, he wasn’t playing, that was for damn sure. His cock was at least as hard as the shifter, even confined as it was in his pants. She had a hankering to set it free and check for sure. God, she ached to see him naked. From what she felt of this topography, ass-bare Heron would be a sight for sore eyes.

  “Mari…”

  Dangit, her hardpoints were situated all wrong. She needed to adjust, center herself over his lap better, for better aim. And how was she gonna get herself out of these pants? In a multiutility or a fully automated vehicle, maybe. In this car, though, no way. Too cramped. They hardly had enough room to breathe, no less get suitably nekkid. Argh. She adjusted her weight, nearly fell over, and braced one hand against the cool impact side window.

  “Feel this, then.” She caught his bottom lip with her teeth, tugged until he opened for her, and tongued a fire kiss along his hard palate, heedless of his will or breath.

  This time he did kiss her back. Hell yes, he did. Hot, lip-bruising, breath and teeth and tongue and vibration—ooh, was that a growl? And in the midst of this all-the-way-to-the-toes kiss, he circled her waist with his long hands, slid them up her torso and over her shoulders, and wrenched the reinforced buttons on her armored shirt. They came off. Every single one of the suckers. He shoved the shirt down her arms, yanking her hands from their supporting positions at the seatback and window, but couldn’t snag it all the way off, ’cause she was still wrapped around him.

  He caught her before she could fall backward, one hand solid between her shoulder blades and the other further down her spine, but her arms were essentially trapped in the mess that used to be her shirt.

  No matter. Heron dipped his chin and bit the neckline of her stretchy undershirt. He pulled. It tore. Not all the way, but enough. He traced the ripped edges with kisses. His breath was hot on her collarbone, silky and delicious and chased by the lightning-hot swipe of his tongue.

  She wasn’t in control of this encounter anymore. How’d he do that, turn the tables on her? Didn’t matter. She wasn’t particularly in control of her body either. She was shaking, not thinking properly, not anythinging anymore. Just wrapped up in a bigger tangle of passion.

  She gave up, closed her eyes, and let his hands cradle her, his body warm her, his breath and kisses and soft words bathe her. The rest of her senses took over. All she could do was writhe and feel and roil and burn.

  “Do you have any idea how hard it was not to do this back at the Pentarc?” he asked, clearly unaware she was way past making coherent words. “Or last summer, when we were staking out that skin trafficker in Miami? What is it about you and me and cramped spaces?”

  If she had to say, probably balls-out lust. That was what was between them in cramped spaces. And in other spaces. That and…oh, holy yes. His mouth had sussed out the best sensitive spot low and in between her breasts, and he was nipping it. Good lord, if he didn’t watch it, she was going to come right here with her pants still on.

  He was still talking, in between all the other oral athletics, but Mari was having a real hard time caring what he was saying. His voice pebbled her skin like Jacuzzi bubbles on naked flesh: bubble, bubble, hot mutter, fuck yeah.

  “I lied,” he was saying. “I can’t let you go on another downtime without me. I don’t care if you are playing. I don’t care if you despise what I am. This time, I can’t…”

  Even as he murmured on about things that she really ought to be paying better attention to, the corner of his mouth found her nipple. His teeth followed, and with a howl, she arched back hard against the steering wheel.

  It never even crossed her mind that there might be a horn in it.

  Loud fucker, too.

  Chapter 7

  “Oh, hey there. Sorry for the delay! We have reached cruising altitude, and no one is currently shooting at us. Win! I was going to let you know, but Kellen told me to leave you two alone.” The voice coming in through the GPS speaker on the dash sounded unholy chipper.

  Mari had wondered who was flying this plane, but other things had needed her attention more urgently. Now that somebody was actually talking to them from the plane proper, she figured she would have been fine with a few more minutes of happy ignorance. Wasn’t like they were falling out of the sky or anything.

  “Good on you, Kellen,” Heron muttered. Then louder, “Chloe, if we’re pressurized, I guess you can unlock the hatch and let us in.”

  “Sure thing!”

  The chirrup fuzzed out, and Mari opened her eyes.

  “Finish this later?” she managed.

  “Count on it.”

  It physically hurt to disconnect herself from Heron. True, a lot of that was residual ache, bruising from the job, and rough treatment at the hands of those mercenaries, but still, it hurt. She retreated to her own side of the car, shrugging the armored shirt back on her shoulders
and running a hand through her wild hair. She could only imagine what she looked like.

  “Gorgeous,” Heron said, and the stare he leveled at her might have been made of lightning.

  “You reading my mind again, partner?” Mari grinned.

  “Actually, no. Merely making an observation.”

  “Observe all you want, then. You messed me up plenty.” Mari didn’t look away from Heron, but she saw a circular door, like a port hatch, open in the wall toward the front of the cargo vent. She guessed that was the way to the body of the plane.

  “Not half as much as I wanted to.”

  Oh yes, that hurt, too. But the good kind of hurt: he didn’t even have to touch her to get that throb going between her legs.

  “Got one more question before we head on in,” Mari said, reaching back and twisting her hair into an impromptu braid. It’d slip out of its confines shortly, but right now, it cooled her superheated skin. “You said you’re integrated with the car and stuff, but how deep? I mean, I touch this here gearshift, for instance, and you feel…”

  Heron raised one brow and leaned over her, not touching. Her door hissed open.

  “When you’re doing it? I feel everything.”

  Well then. Mari put some extra wiggle into her ass as she turned on the seat, swung her feet out the yawning door, and stood up on shaky legs.

  • • •

  There wasn’t a door to hold, but Heron paused beside the opening and gestured for Mari to go in first anyway. She about laughed out loud: look at him, getting his manners on even after what’d just happened in that car. She went through, holding the sides of her now-buttonless shirt. The undershirt was ruined completely, and unless she wanted the crew’s first impression of her to be “Hey, tatas!” she figured she’d make an effort to keep herself covered.

  The hatch retracted, spinning inward and receding into a reinforced track on the edges. Judging by the double-cylinder baffling and big-ass seals, Mari figured this plane could probably make it to ultrahigh altitude, maybe to full orbit. Though probably not while Heron’s car was in its cargo clamp.

  Mari looked up at a whooshing sound, only to realize that it wasn’t a whoosh at all: it was the sound of a whole flock of folks swarming her and Heron. Well, a flock of three.

  One was perky, blond, and with boobs that defied every natural law. It didn’t take Mari long to figure out which of the crew was Chloe. Her pixie-adorable face tilted in cartoon concern. “Dr. Farad, are you bleeding?”

  “Here, let me help you…”

  “Tell me nothing’s broken…”

  And on.

  Mari flexed her achy hands, rubbed them against the scraps of her armored shirt, and took in this fluttering. Dr. Farad, eh? The name rubbed on her mind. Had he put that name on their contract? She thought maybe he hadn’t, but her memory, as always, was for shit. Nothing new about that, but it did annoy her, missing this detail about her partner.

  One of the crew guys, lean and lanky and making those Wranglers look fine, yanked a scanner out of his back pocket and circled around Heron, getting a good look at that bloody port.

  The other guy hung back, shrugging dark hair out of his face and shoving his skinny fists deep into the pockets of his black utility pants. He had an ash-gray smear on his chin and smelled like axle grease. He wore his nerves right out in the open, practically vibrating with anxiety, and somehow, that comforted Mari. Everything honest with this guy, no secrets.

  Heron submitted the back of his skull to the cowboy’s laser scan but kept talking. “I need an uplink to Chiba, a high dock on the tether, and a sterile med unit, preferably one with a crash cart and LOM module.” Without turning his head, he looked around, pegging each of them with some sort of unspoken command. “And, everybody, this is Mari. She will need a coffee and rum and a soft place to rest. Querida, meet the crew: Kellen, Chloe, and Garrett.”

  Or, as Mari sorted them: cowboy, perky blond, and squirrel-nervous mechanic. She nodded to them all in turn. To their credit, nobody said anything about the sad state of her clothing.

  “Erm, Dr. Farad? I really don’t think we should mention Chiba in front of her.” Garrett jammed a thumb in Mari’s direction.

  “You can trust her.”

  “Trust,” Garrett said in a voice that made the word sound just terrible. “You know they are tracking her. I can prove it. She’s…”

  “My partner,” Heron said evenly. “Settle, G.”

  “They?” Mari repeated, her attention snagged on that eep-inducing word tracking. He was referring to the feds, presumably. How would they be tracking her? Hadn’t Heron scanned her for bugs and signals? Their drones typically didn’t go this high. Satellites?

  “Yeah, they.” Garrett nodded enthusiastically. “Our illuminati overlords.”

  Mari had no idea what to say to that.

  “Oh good grief,” Cowboy Kellen muttered, not even looking up from his data scanner. “Y’all will be lucky this gal don’t run screaming to all the vid channels about nutcases in spaceplanes. Don’t you mind him, Miss Mari.”

  “This is not an abduction scenario,” Garrett shot back. He turned to Chloe. “We need to scan her.”

  “Hey,” Chloe said, petting down Garrett’s anxiety without having to so much as touch him. “I can do that, after the coffee and rum and soft places finding. Let me take care of it, okay? And in the meantime, I bet the car could use some petting and love, what with all it has been through.”

  His agitation wilted, and her soft murmurs followed him out of the cramped hatch space, back into the cargo hold.

  Kellen was frowning at the data pad, analyzing whatever info he’d scanned off Heron. Mari had a half moment of privacy with her partner.

  “I could use some clothes, too,” she said in a voice meant just for him. “Again. Does it seem to you like I’m spending half my time changing clothes?”

  He towered over her, up this close, and he raked a gaze down her body, lingering on the frayed, buttonless edge of her overshirt. It wasn’t like he reached out or anything, or even that he moved at all, but Mari could feel a tsunami of heat surge right off him. “Thank you for a scintillating visual.”

  She swallowed and tried real hard not to dissolve into a puddle right there. She flexed her fingers and then tucked them in tight.

  “So, a LOM module. That’s lights-out management, right? You shutting down somebody’s system, Dr. Farad?”

  He cracked a smile, dispersing the tension as if he could order it around like another member of his crew. Frustratingly, it appeared to obey. “Sort of. I’ll be the subject on this one.”

  Mari flared a look up at him. “It does hurt, doesn’t it?” She made a gesture toward the back of her own head, but of course, she meant his.

  Heron’s smile was patient. “Not really. I told you before. But I need Kellen to take a look at the damaged area anyway.”

  Mari swallowed. “Why?”

  His mouth tightened, but he didn’t meet her eyes. “Because I’m transmitting. And I can’t seem to make it stop.”

  • • •

  Heron’s airship-plane-thingy had a cockpit up front, more like a cubby really, and Mari followed Heron and Kellen that way. It didn’t take too long for those two to sink into some techspeak sublanguage with bits of English interspersed. Mostly expletives.

  Mari was right there with them on the shit-fuck-goddamn assessment of the situation. Heron was transmitting? What was he sending? And who was listening? A big part of her recognized that Heron had his big brain engaged in solving this problem already, and pretty cowboy Kellen was on the job as well. She couldn’t add much in terms of brain power, so she stayed quiet.

  When they swept into the cockpit, still chattering about containment units and surgical processes, Mari hung back by the hatch, watching Heron.

  He was in his element, completely in co
mmand. Hot.

  He peeled his gloves off and slid into a high-backed chair, thick with impact wadding. Pilot’s chair? Or captain’s? What was the correct terminology? Mari operated on the outside of proper military rank and prided herself in having no clue, but this time, she might have enjoyed knowing.

  Before today, she’d never thought of Heron as part of something other than their little partnership. The two of them against the world. Had a romantic ring to it, yeah, but it wasn’t true. He also had a Mama Weathering and a whole crew. Probably others out there, too. He and Mrs. Weathering sure hadn’t brought all that contraband into the Pentarc by themselves.

  Networks, relationships. Context. It all fit, and Mari could’ve thunked herself upside the head for not imagining all this for him, for not even asking. For assuming that his life during downtimes was as bare and isolated as hers. It made sense a guy like him wouldn’t be alone. Made sense people would love him.

  The moment he sat down, he sank into the digital morass the way a fish sinks into ocean after spending too long a time on dry land. Surfaces all around him lit up with images and numbers and weird punctuation. Code, probably.

  Mari made one half-assed effort to get a sense of it before her eyeballs started to ache. Heron didn’t even seem to notice how confusing this place was or how she was standing there with nothing to do and her clothes barely hanging on. Nope, his hands were going on those glyphs, and the plane responded like a kitten being petted. It purred now its master was home.

  No. Wait. That wasn’t the ship. Unless the ship was wee and furry and nuzzling her shin. Mari looked down. A cat looked up.

  A cat. On a plane. For reals.

  Well, mostly for reals. On second look, it was kind of a wrong cat. It was tiger-striped maroon and white, on the small side, but with visible alterations, including a set of horns to project a holographic user interface. It stared straight back at her. Curiously? Mari couldn’t figure out whether the little fluffball was offended that a stranger was on its ship or was scoping Mari out as a potential food dispenser. Either way, it was clutching the rubberized floor with its claws but clearly wasn’t freaked out. Probably this critter had logged more hours in the air than Mari had.