God.
Too much. Too much input. Too much feeling. He didn’t have a response plan for this, at least nothing he was capable of implementing right now. He still wanted her. He wanted this, over and over and… Capacitors surged, and he knew his muscles would respond momentarily. Couldn’t do anything about it. “I need to… Mari, fuck it, be still.”
“Yeah.” She obeyed. Willful, wild Mari obeyed. He guessed she didn’t do it often, and he felt honored. The part of him that grasped for control, that needed to order the universe according to his own damned design, woke with a roar.
His hands clamped her hips. He had no idea how hard, just hoped it wasn’t too hard. Hoped he didn’t break her.
Relays fired, metal engaged. Ropes of augmented tissue stood out in relief on his thighs.
He grounded his heels against the bamboo floor and pushed up at the same time as his hands brought her down, impaling her, burying his cock balls-deep in her body. Wet heat enveloped him, all of him. More than just his cock. So overwhelmed, for a moment, he had a sensation of drowning. Breathless. Subsumed in her heat, her passion, and her grasping cunt.
And then he did it again. Pelvis to pelvis, bones and structure crashing against each other with so much force, she held on tight to avoid whiplash. She pressed her forehead to his, and he could feel the reverberation of each thrust through her skull, echoing in his.
He’d meant to make this good. Had meant to woo and win. Had meant to care and protect, always.
Failing, he was failing. He was hurting her. Her joints gave, her thighs no longer supported her weight. She was one breath from rag-dolling, and he couldn’t.
Stop. Couldn’t stop. Couldn’t. Breathe. Couldn’t.
Warning. Breach. Overload.
Surge.
No, no, no.
And then through the furor, her voice reached, found him. “God, Heron, you got no idea how much I wanted this. You. In me. Fucking me. The hell yeah, baby. Come for me.”
Through it all, she was still there, his partner, his Mari. Whole and intact and riding him thrust for thrust.
It’s okay, she was telling him. You’re okay.
And he was.
Inhuman, out of control, miserable in failure, ecstatic in sensation, and…okay.
He had mapped out much of the material plane, knew how matter interacted, but this connection wasn’t on any diagram he knew. And yet it was incontrovertibly the strongest force in his universe, the tether that bound him to her in that moment.
He wanted it to never end.
His body strained, pushing into her, through her, melding, conforming, inhabiting. Releasing.
“Querida.”
He paused, infinite and falling, until his muscles screamed from the strain, and she just held him. Forever.
Movement, when it came, was slow, soft, slipping where friction had been before, like kisses inside his skin.
Peace.
She slipped her arms beneath his, wrapping them around his body, ducking her face against his throat. His arms came round her, too. He didn’t tell them to. They just did.
His mouth moved against her hair. “Vida, estamos en paz.”
• • •
They so were. “Life, we are at peace.” It was an old poem, and she didn’t recall the poet. She knew the sentiment, though. She felt that peace as well, sifting through the jumble of her soul, white-ashing the fires there. She’d known a sort of peace the last time she’d climbed to this hilltop. Only now, with Heron beneath her and around her and inside her, her whole concept of peace was being resettled.
Peace wasn’t about a lack of conflict or guilt. It was about finding a pause, a touchstone moment where all those plans and ghosts and struggles could just…sit a spell.
The wild ride of her life wasn’t over, but it was changed indelibly. He’d changed it. And she’d let him.
Heron moved back along the futon, bringing her with him, settling the duvet over their still-tangled bodies. Mari had a thought about taking off her dress, about keeping it clean for the next day ’cause it was so pretty, but she didn’t have the energy to move that much. No way she could force her muscles to do the wiggle and scooch that such a disrobing would entail. Instead, she laid her still-clothed body over his naked one, set her face against his scarred chest, and let his peace wash all over her.
Chapter 10
She woke up ’cause something smelled good. With the sorts of images she’d been boiling in her mind, and after the stuff she and Heron had done last night, that something could have been all kinds of organic goodness. Turned out to be bacon.
Mari rolled over and let the duvet slide off her hip. She stretched like a satisfied kitty.
“Hungry?” Heron’s voice made her belly tighten, but not necessarily with hunger.
“Ummhmm.” Mari opened her eyes but couldn’t force herself to move yet. The free-fae must have fulfilled their contract and scuttled off, because today, it was just a room. Last night, it had been magic.
The low, on-the-floor bedding fit in fine with the sparse furnishings, taupe and black with slashes of gold. High-impact glass several feet thick stretched along one wall, a gigantic porthole. It might have been morning, but all Mari saw were stars and infinite black. She wondered which end of the Chiba Station she was looking out of. Not that she had any compass on the vast universe.
Heron was sitting crisscross-applesauce on the far side of a Japanese table, eyeing her over a buffet of breakfast feastery. He hadn’t gotten dressed yet, and Mari mentally added him to her list of things she wanted to put in her mouth. She crawled to the end of the bed, stretched out on her belly, and palmed a peach from the bowl.
“They got hydroponics on Chiba or what?”
“Unlikely, but an undocumented transport unloaded about fifteen pallets on the cargo level of the lift when we came up. The food is fresh.”
“Undocumented transport such as your plane?”
He smiled and picked up a muffin. “It was our payment for the dock.”
Steep price. Nanos weren’t the only regulated materials, and in the postpesticide era, farm-fresh goodies were worse than rare. Mari couldn’t remember the last time she’d bitten into a piece of real fruit.
This one tasted fine, sparking delicious all over her taste buds. Her stomach burbled, and she realized that with all the shit that’d gone down yesterday, she’d forgotten to eat. Well, looked like there was plenty of food here to make up for it. She polished off the peach, biting deep into the stringy part near the core and sucking the drips of juice off her bottom lip.
Heron watched her intently the whole time, and that had a peculiar effect on her body as well. She wanted him. Again. Right now. Right there on the table. She wanted to lick peach juice off the plane below his navel and smear fresh-churned almond butter all over his nipples. Oh, she had plans, she did.
Trouble was, Heron hadn’t made a move toward her, despite him being naked and all. Couldn’t see his lower half below the table edge, but she suspected that he was too evolved for something as sloppy as morning wood. Even with all that lack of control he’d been talking about last night, there was no way he was randy as she was.
’Cause if he was, they wouldn’t be jawing over breakfast. They’d be at it like rabbits, and the bacon could come later.
Of course, he could also just have hygiene standards. Scruffy as she felt this morning, she shouldn’t even be thinking seduction. Fuzzy teeth, hair a wild mess. Oh yeah, she was sure a prize first thing in the morning. It was a wonder he didn’t hightail it back down that tether.
Mari slid her gaze off his and studied the spread, giving her brain a stern “down, boy.” A corner of paper peeked out from below some wax-wrapped cheese.
Wait, paper? No way. She hadn’t seen real, pulp-made paper in years. This was the near-priceless sort, too: heavy, thick, creamy. She reached,
pinched its corner, and read the name on the outside.
“Who’s A. R. N. Farad?” Impossible to say such a pretentious name in a normal voice. She did stop short of laughing outright at it, though.
Heron sat up straight. He raised one hand like he was about to snatch that note away, but then he drew back. “Um, that’s me. Atreus Raymond Neruda Farad.”
Mari snorted, but kindly. “That’s…well, hell, honey, it’s awful. Whoever sparked up calling you Heron instead gets a cookie.”
“You can thank Adele when you see her next.”
Mari caught his uncertain grin and tossed it back with extra warmth. And when that didn’t quite send the message she wanted, she scooted around the end of the table and dropped a kiss on his shoulder. “Plus, Heron sure slides on the tongue easier.”
Given his typical reserve, it wasn’t like she expected him to come back with a searing remark about tongues sliding, but she thought he might make some comment on the kiss. He didn’t budge. Mari put a good foot and a half between them, but man, it was hard.
He calmly smeared jam on a biscuit, clearing the crispy gold edges by a precise half centimeter all around and letting her innuendo float on by. “Heron of Alexandria designed automatons, tiny lifelike machines. I built my first combinational logic circuit when I was six. My mothers were far too impressed.”
“Ain’t saying you aren’t impressive.” By habit, her tone was light and flirty, but her attention had snagged on the paper. On that trying-too-hard name. Cogs in her brain clicked just as sure as if she had machine parts of her own.
She had seen this name before. She’d seen it written before. On paper, cheaper stuff, but still paper. Thumb-tacked to a cork wall in an office in the middle of summer. Heat had pooled in the cleavage of her sundress and poured through the wide-open windows. Dad liked the windows open, even in the furnace of a Texas June.
Funny, she could see herself standing there in Dad’s office, looking at the corkboard, and she knew what that girl must be feeling, right down to the stifling lack of breeze, but that was just it: she was looking at the girl. Not being the girl. That girl, the one in the office, the one who looked sort of like Mari, was a way softer somebody, the sort of fragile gal Heron would want to snatch up and protect against the chaos of the world.
It wasn’t Mari, though. Not the person she knew herself to be. And for some reason, that made her want to cry ugly.
Instead, she focused hard on the paper. “So who’s sending love letters to A. R. N. Farad?”
“It’s not a love letter.” He paused so long, Mari had to peek at him. Caught him nibbling the unjammed edge of the biscuit. “It’s from the queen. She has kind of a crazy affection for paper. At any rate, she got a halo up early this morning to scrub all transmissions outbound from the station, so I don’t have to work so hard to cut them off. It’s an incredibly kind gesture. While we’re here on Chiba, I can concentrate on…other things.”
She looked up, and Heron was smiling that slight, almost shadow smile. The one she caught on his face when he thought she wasn’t looking.
He raised his eyebrows minutely. “The letter goes on to list amenities of the suite. Fully equipped med lab, organics removal unit—which isn’t as alarming an alternative to showering as you’d think…”
“Oh! Don’t let me forget to tell you about plans I got for you and naked and a shower.”
His voice rubbed a low note when he said, “Noted.”
Noted. Post-it note. Sticky. Klaxons went off in her brain.
In her voyeur-like mind’s eye, the girl in the university office bent and picked up a Post-it scrawled over in ballpoint blue: 2:30 data review w/A. R. N. Farad. The sticky gunk on the back had worn off, but the message looked important. Wouldn’t want Dad to miss a meeting. She tacked it back on the board.
It wasn’t a memory, not in the same way that she remembered eating protein pretzels for dinner the night before last or how Heron’s hands felt against her naked ass when he held her in the Pentarc yesterday. This memory was different. It was sorted along lines of relevancy: office to summer heat to corkboard to Post-it to…him. A. R. N. Farad. Heron. As if a whole shitload of relevant information was just dumped into her brain pan, she knew instantly all about him.
She swallowed and smoothed the envelope. “A. R. N. Farad was a visiting fellow, not sure from where, but he had an accent. Dad bitched about him a lot, thought he’d lure funding away from biorobotics. I…met him at a Juneteenth faculty party the summer after my freshman year in Austin. Serious science boy, no boozing, no chance he’d follow me out on the porch for a smoke after dark.” She rubbed the side of her thumb over the ink. It didn’t smudge. “My memory is crap most times, but I do remember you.”
His voice was soft as kitten fur when he said, “And I have never forgotten you.”
She didn’t dare look straight on at a man who said something like that, all loaded with portent. “So all these years, you kept track of me?”
“More or less, yes.”
“Sweet, but what a lot of work.” She waited, wondering if he’d name it something else.
He paused. “Sorting data is a hobby, so dedicating a channel to you wasn’t difficult. I found comfort knowing that you were safe and out of Texas. Then, of course, you torched that shipping container of mech-clones in Belize, and suddenly, you were on the TPA’s radar. They’d been buying batches of mechs, trying to literally build an army of infiltrators.” In her periphery, he flashed a tight smile. “You delayed that plan somewhat.”
“Fucking up other people’s fantasies—yep, that’s me.” But inside, she was bubbling. So he had been her guardian angel in the background all those years. Speaking of fantasies. “I sure hope those Texas fuckers told Dad when you and I teamed up. Bet that made him madder than a sack of cats.”
Heron studied the table laden with food, intense study, like he was looking anywhere but at her. “I didn’t sign on to contracts with you because I wanted to irritate Damon Vallejo.”
“Why then?” Tell me I’m important to you. He’d dropped plenty of clues, but Mari’d been fooled by folks before, fooled into thinking they cared more for her than they did. She needed a declaration in plain speaking. Well, didn’t need it. Not really. Just wanted it real, real hard.
Heron set his biscuit back on the tray. He stared at it for a moment, like he was thinking about what he wanted to say next. Pause like that couldn’t be good. Mari sat on her folded legs, bracing for another secret, another reveal, another seismic shift in her universe. She wasn’t sure she could stand one that parted her inexorably from this man.
“I wanted to work with you for a couple of reasons. The first was that I had achieved a level of autonomic suppression that would allow me to be near you without obvious and uncomfortable reactions.”
“I make you uncomfortable?”
“In the best possible way.” He lifted his gaze, raised his eyebrows fractionally, and steamed a look right at her. Nice look. Nasty look.
Oh. Okay, then. “And the other reason?”
Liquid dark eyes sparked, gentled. Or maybe it was the face around them. She’d never thought of his eyes as particularly expressive before.
“Just keeping track of you wasn’t enough anymore. I wanted to be near you, talk with you. Touch you. Even if I knew you were repelled by post-humans.” His gaze slid off her again, like she was made of butter.
“What?” she said before she could help herself.
“Things,” he said softly. “We were speaking of things. I am a thing. A pleasure thing, if you wish to use me as such, but not much of a man anymore.”
Mari could barely move. What the hell was he talking about? She opened her mouth but couldn’t find words other than a repeated “What,” now with additional “the fuck?” tacked on at the end.
“You never made a secret that you hated all mech-clones and
especially your father’s creation, the queen.”
Her previous elation whooshed out, and Mari deflated. Her ass dug into her heels until they both ached. “But you aren’t a mech-clone. You’re a… I don’t even know, and I don’t give two shits. Look, I hated Peetey because she took up all of my father’s attention. Because he spent holidays with her, not me. Because he loved her, not me. I hated her because I envied her, Heron. Not because of what she was made of. And it doesn’t even matter, because I’ve never thought of you as being like her. You’re so not like her. You’re…” She bit the inside of her cheek. Hard. Let the skin drag through her teeth when she exhaled. “Sane. Smart. Safe. Also badass. I mean, hell, you even intimidated Damon Vallejo. Not to mention all this time you’ve been planning my jobs, making what I do so much smoother. Making it…effortless. More fun than work. And all that time, I was balls-out flirting and thinking you just didn’t want me.”
“I always want you.”
Something wet blurred her vision, and she blinked it away fast. Couldn’t think of words, though. How did a girl even respond to something like that?
Well, if the girl was Mari, with sex, apparently. She leaned forward, bent her face against his chest. Smooth skin warmed her lips, her eyelids. “Heron?”
“Yes.” His hand, one hand, stroked her arm, skated up to her shoulder. Crazy what kind of want that single hand could evoke. Or maybe she was just too tuned into him.
She tried to focus, but man, it was hard. “You said the queen’s halo would fix those transmissions so you could concentrate on other things, right?”
“That is almost verbatim what I said, yes.”
Mari fanned her breath out over his sternum, wondering if it would stretch to his nipple. “So you gonna tell me about them other things or what?”
He flinched, a warm earthquake on her forehead. “Just tell you?”
She pressed a smile against his skin. Oh, that felt good. He was messing with her now. All the churning violence of reconnecting with those memories sloughed off, replaced by a hum right above her clavicle, exactly where his hand rested. “Or, you know, if you’re all set on being my plaything, you could offer a product demonstration.”
Wanted and Wired Page 18
