Serafina and the Virtual Man (Book 2 of the Serafina's Series)

by Marie Treanor

  “It doesn’t hurt,” Jilly assured her and walked forward. Behind her, she was aware of Sera’s gasp when the scan began, and then she was in, and Adam stood a foot away, looking at her.

  His face was quiet, closed. Her heart turned over. His arms had felt so strong, so good around her, his mouth caressing hers a revelation she longed to repeat with her whole body and soul. She wanted those hands, hanging so loosely at his side, on her body, on her naked flesh. She wanted to see him, touch him…

  It’s just lust. I am human after all.

  She drew in her breath, trying to focus. There were so many things she wanted, needed to ask him. And yet what came out in a rush was, “Did you kill James Killearn?” Are you James Killearn?

  “Yes.”

  That’s good, she told herself desperately. If he was James Killearn or any part of him, he surely wouldn’t have confessed so calmly to killing himself, not the fury that had destroyed the Ewans’ spare bedroom because Adam had slept in it.

  But there was no time for more. Sera stepped out of the green light, looking bemused. She gazed in fascination at Adam. “Fuck,” she said.

  “All things are possible with VR,” he said sardonically and spread his arms. “Be my guest.”

  Sera’s eyes narrowed. “Mr. Literal,” she observed.

  “This is Sera,” Jilly said hastily.

  “I know.” Adam held out his hand.

  Surprise, or perhaps curiosity, must have overcome Sera’s suspicion, for she reached out and shook his hand. Her eyes widened, no doubt at the solidity of the contact, and then Adam released her and strode to the nearest computer, his fingers flying over the keys.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said urgently. “Your friend won’t scan. Get him out of there.”

  “Blair!” Sera cried, rushing back the way she’d come.

  “Christ, how did that happen?” Adam straightened, dragging his hand through his hair. “It was working perfectly when you two came through. Is he all right?”

  “He’ll be fine,” Jilly said confidently. “He just has different—physiology. I doubt your program can recognise him.” She hadn’t thought of it before, but it made perfect sense that Blair wouldn’t be able to use the VR machine like humans could. Everything about him would be wrong, from his bodily organs to his brain waves. After all, the guy was dead.

  “Different?” Adam frowned at her. “In what way? Shit, he doesn’t have a pacemaker, does he?”

  “No,” Jilly said cautiously. “I’m not sure his heart beats at all, to be honest. Blair is—Shite, there’s no easy way to say this. Believe it or not, he’s a vampire.”

  “A vampire,” Adam repeated. “How would you feel about ‘not’?”

  Jilly shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me. I didn’t believe it either when we first met him. Doesn’t change what he is, though.”

  Adam’s gaze bored into her. After a moment, his breath seemed to catch on what might have been a silent laugh. His lips curved. “You’re amazing, do you know that?”

  Warm blood suffused her cheeks. Some of it was embarrassment; the rest felt terribly like pleasure. Perhaps fortunately, Sera walked back through the green light.

  “He’s fine,” she said briskly. “But the machine doesn’t seem to like him. He’ll wait for us. So,” she moved hastily on, “you’re Genesis Adam who created all this?”

  He inclined his head. “Well, me and a few engineers who built the hardware. And the developers who helped make the games.”

  “Modest, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged, faintly amused. “Just truthful. Mainly.”

  “Mainly?” she pounced. “Why did you kill James Killearn?”

  “He was trying to kill me.”

  “Why?”

  Adam hesitated, then sat down on the nearest chair. “Good question.”

  “Did you owe him money?” Sera asked.

  “No, I’d never seen him before in my life. He just dived at me from behind the curtain in Dale’s sitting room, wielding a knife as long as your arm.”

  “Did he cut you?”

  “A bit,” Adam replied, raising his forearm involuntarily.

  “Show me,” Sera invited.

  His smile was twisted. “There’s nothing to see. My program was in the database long before I was cut.”

  “So there’s no sign of where he shot you either? Convenient.”

  “He didn’t shoot me. He died before I was shot. Are you a cop in the hours of daylight?”

  “I’m thinking of applying,” Sera said. She glanced at Jilly, then back to him. “Would you humour me? Just walk with Jilly and me to the door.”

  “You’re not very trusting for a psychic,” he observed.

  “I con for my living, Mr. Adam. I don’t trust anything. Take his hand, Jilly.”

  Jilly was about to object. She already knew what would happen, and Sera was wasting time. Then she felt the shock of Adam’s touch, his warm fingers closing round hers, and she realised this was all about touch. Sera’s touch. She wanted to say something, to tell him about this gift of Sera’s, in case he believed her comment about scamming. She did scam, of course, from time to time, but that didn’t detract from the rest.

  Jilly felt like an automaton, walking the few paces toward the trigger point.

  “Are you really Genesis Adam? Is he really in there?” Sera reached up with her free hand and tapped his forehead.

  “All that’s left of him.” Adam put one foot in front of the other, and it disappeared. He brought it back whole while Sera watched, apparently fascinated. “I can’t leave here,” he added. “And if you go beyond this point, you won’t see me anymore. I only exist in the VR program.”

  “But you’re more than that,” Sera argued. “You know what happened to you after your program was made, after you died…or is this part of a game? Did you program that too?”

  His lips twisted. “God, no. Even I couldn’t have come up with anything that sick.”

  Sera dropped his hand and glanced at Jilly. “I can’t feel anything of Killearn in him or anywhere in here. Find out anything you can and call me or Blair. I’m going to wrestle poltergeist.”

  Sera walked over the trigger point and vanished. Watching her go, Jilly tried to squash the rising panic. She had to remind herself that she wasn’t frightened of anyone.

  Adam didn’t let go of her hand. Instead, he tugged her backward, away from the edge of their virtual world, and shifted around to face her, looking down into her eyes with a crease between his serious brows.

  “Is that what you thought? That I’m really the spirit of Killearn, your poltergeist, playing tricks? Is that why you brought her here?”

  “Yes,” Jilly said miserably. “I mean no, only sort of. And I brought her here just to see. She thinks she’s looking after me.”

  “She is,” Adam said, twisting his fingers through hers. “I’ve seen her in action. Do you look after her too?”

  “I try, but I can’t keep her away from the vampire.” Jilly drew in her breath, hated the faint shudder she heard in it. “Look, she needs everything she can get about Killearn’s death to help her disperse the poltergeist. Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “Nothing, except he was strong and vicious and wouldn’t give up.”

  Jilly nodded. “Yes, that sounds like what he’s left behind. How did you get the upper hand?”

  “I suppose I don’t give up either. Not when it came to our lives or his. And I’m stronger than I look.”

  “You look pretty strong to me,” she said, eyeing his biceps. “Or did you program those as extra?”

  His dark eyes lit with amusement. “This was me in nerd mode, right down to the old T-shirt and comfy jeans. All you see is all you get. I run when I remember, and I have a wee gym in my flat.”

  “I know,” she said without thinking.

  His brows lifted. “You do?”

  She flushed, tried to draw her hand free of his and yet wasn’t sorry when he held firml
y on to her fingers. She lifted her chin. “I went there. To find out what I could about you.”

  “And what did you learn?”

  “That you took nothing with you to Australia, not even your portrait of Roxy.”

  He frowned. “I don’t understand the Australia thing.”

  She drew in her breath. “Well, I have a theory about that. In fact, I have a few theories I need you to listen to, and you’re not going to like any of them.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Okay. Let’s go somewhere more comfortable, and you can hit me with them.”

  “Adam, we haven’t got time to play games!”

  “We’re already talking faster than we could in real time. Why not do it with a little luxury thrown in? Sera doesn’t need you, does she?”

  She tried to laugh. “With Blair around? Are you kidding?”

  “Then let’s go.” He released her hand, strode to the nearest computer, and did a lot of clicking, followed by a bit of keying and a bit more clicking. She watched him, acknowledged the ache of pity and longing in her. Along with a more down-to-earth appreciation of the neat, tantalizing shape of his denim-clad bum.

  He shouldn’t be dead. He just shouldn’t be dead.

  Still bent over the computer, he looked back at her across his shoulder. A smile played around his expressive lips. His eyes were warm, sending butterflies scattering from her stomach throughout her whole body. “JK? I liked kissing you. I liked it a lot.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Her lips parted; heat flooded her body, along with dizziness as the world swam and whirled around her, shifting, changing. And when the earth righted under her feet, he was drawing her into his arms, and they were swaying to very tinny, scratchy jazz music.

  “What the…?”

  “1920s Chicago,” he murmured in her ear.

  She was wearing a long, floaty dress of light, sky-blue georgette. Adam wore a white shirt and waistcoat with his tie loosened. They seemed to be alone in an opulent room with a parquet floor and a magnificent chaise longue. Adam danced her around, and she saw there was also a large bed draped in velvet and embroidered silk. They were dancing alone in a hotel bedroom.

  She said, “Please tell me Al Capone isn’t coming for us. Or are you Al Capone?”

  “Undercover cop. You’re a dancer at the secret speakeasy club downstairs, and one of Capone’s lieutenants is paying court to you. I’m hoping you like me better.”

  “But you’re lying to me.”

  “On the contrary, I’ve just told you the truth.”

  She swallowed. “Isn’t that cheating to join the game halfway through?”

  “I wanted a quiet bit with no shooting guaranteed. So we can talk.”

  “We’re dancing,” she pointed out. To a jazz recording coming out of a horn that should have had a small white dog sitting under it.

  “Can you think of a better way to talk?”

  Offhand, she couldn’t think of anything better at all than dancing in his arms, one of his hands burning at the small of her back, the other lightly clasping her fingers. His dark eyes were excitingly warm as they gazed down at her face.

  He said, “Tell me.”

  She drew in her breath with her thoughts. “Okay, I think you did die when you said you did. After the fight with Killearn in August.”

  His head dipped, his cheek touched hers, warm and rough with stubble. Unfamiliar pleasure seeped through her, along with little spirals of lust she recognised but no longer feared. For she understood too that he was hiding his face from her, hiding the pain he knew she’d inflict—and that was also something she related to all too easily. Involuntarily, her fingers slid farther over his shoulder to his neck, drawing him closer.

  His body felt so good against hers, hard and warm, yet quite unthreatening. On the contrary, the strength in his arms made her feel oddly safe—a rather dangerous assumption, considering.

  She said, “Were you into drink and drugs, Adam?”

  “I’ve read the stories, and no. I never made the statements I’m supposed to have made.” His arm tightened. “Unless I’ve forgotten. It took a while for other things to come back to me. But if I was doing all that, I’d never have made this.”

  She sagged against him with relief. “That’s what I thought.”

  His arm squeezed in instinctive response, gathering her closer, and although he was taller than her by several inches, her body seemed to fit against his like a jigsaw, every curve and plane melding. Those little spirals of lust began to lengthen and unravel into something much stronger and more all-pervasive.

  Her fingers tangled in the soft hair at the back of his neck. “So I think your death was kept hidden,” she said, with a shade of desperation, “and a false trail to Australia carefully laid. I don’t think it’ll stand up to investigation, but the great thing about this was, no one saw any need to investigate. It was an open-and-shut case with all the right paperwork to prove it. The groundwork was already laid with your public descent into drugs and rehab.”

  “Then it was no knee-jerk reaction to a mistake,” he said slowly. “It was planned for a long time before my death.”

  He knew, she realised. He knew it was Dale. There was relief that she wasn’t the one to break it to him, but mostly she just hurt for him.

  “I’d hoped it wasn’t,” he said with such difficulty that she pressed her cheek closer to his, as if she could absorb his pain and take it away from him. “There were other people in the house that night, besides Dale and Petra and me and the bloke I killed. I heard them. So did Dale and Petra—the noise seemed to panic them way beyond what was already going on. If I had to be shot, I wish it had been by those strangers.”

  Jilly closed her eyes. “They weren’t strangers,” she got out. “They were my brothers breaking in to steal stuff. Someone put them up to it with false promises of an empty house. They’re not that bright. They ran away when they heard the gunshots. They thought it was Dale shooting at them.”

  For a moment, he didn’t say anything; then he lifted his head a little to look at her. Her cheek felt cold.

  “You have quite a family.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I realised he was dead,” Adam said steadily. “I stared at him, stared at my aching fingers, my brain numb. I wasn’t even relieved to be alive by then. I was just beginning to wonder what the hell I was going to do about it when this huge explosion seemed to rip my ears off. I remember falling forward, realizing I’d been shot in the back, and then the pain hit. And that was it, apart from a few hazy, fevered dreams. Until I woke up looking at you in the test lab.”

  She hugged him, pressing her cheek to his once more. “Where were Dale and Petra while you were fighting with Killearn? What did they do?”

  “I don’t really know. They shouted a lot. I remember Petra squealing, and Dale yelling at her to get out of the way. I caught glimpses of them sometimes, sort of circling around us, looking terrified. I kept wondering why Dale didn’t help me, why he didn’t realise this was life or death for me. But he’d never been a fighter, not in the physical sense. I put it down to that.”

  He drew in a shuddering breath. His arms tightened again. “I’ve no idea where they were when I was shot. Not in my line of vision. They weren’t even on my mind anymore. I was thinking about the man I’d killed.”

  “Stop,” she said. “Stop thinking about it now. I’ve got it. It’s all right. It will be all right. Sera’ll set you free.”

  He stilled, and stupidly, it was only now that he’d stopped dancing that she registered they’d been doing a kind of informal waltz all the way through the traumatic conversation.

  Slowly, he detached his cheek from hers once more. “You mean she’ll send me away. That’s not free. If I was free, I’d be here with you. And I’d be alive.”

  Her heart beat and beat, every stroke both pain and warm, soothing joy, because she was up there in his thoughts and desires. “Freedom isn’t the same as wishing,” she whis
pered. “Sera can explain it better than me. You mustn’t cling to the world.”

  His lips quirked. “The world clung to me first. But I have to say death with you, JK, is a surprising pleasure, even with all the other crap.” The veiled pain in his eyes seemed to have dissolved into a warm, growing heat that caught at her breath. “Fuck, you’re beautiful. Why did I not know you before?”

  “We never moved in the same circles.” It wasn’t a bad effort, although the mockery was spoiled by the strange quivering of her voice, which she couldn’t seem to control.

  “Didn’t we? We’re both computer nerds; we both play games.” He seemed to be inhaling her, his nose and mouth hovering over her lips, and cheek, her ear, her hair. “We even lived in the same city for the last eight years. God, you smell good.”

  “I don’t know why. I don’t wear perfume.” Did I just say that?

  “Maybe it’s shower gel or shampoo, or maybe it’s just your soft, warm skin…”

  His words amazed and enchanted her. No one had ever spoken to her like this, certainly not in such a deep, quiet, sweetly arousing voice. More than that, his lips finally brushed the skin of her cheek, soft, butterfly-light, and skimmed down slowly to the corner of her mouth. She gasped, aching for his kiss, reaching for it, and he gave it, his mouth closing fully on hers, sinking, parting her lips for the entry of his tongue, and she was lost.

  It was like the first kiss, only more so. There was no panic about this one, no desperation because of the approach of enemy soldiers or the discovery of an only-too-real body. There was just him, and his exciting, exploring mouth, and his strong arms holding her close into his hard, wonderful body. He made no effort to hide his erection. In fact, he pressed it against her so that she could feel the whole length of it, even moved his hips in a deliberate if lazy caress, and her own body reacted without permission, arching into him, redoubling the thrill of the whole embrace.

  His palm cupped her cheek, he deepened the kiss, enticing her tongue into his mouth, stroking and caressing it with his. His teeth grazed her lips. And she responded to everything from blind instinct, seeking ever greater closeness, ever greater pleasure as the heat of blatant desire coursed through her, urgent, demanding.