by Jane Galaxy
After dinner, after jazz in a nightclub, they parted in the hallway outside their rooms, and he pressed his lips to her temple, a hand on her shoulder.
“So. . . .”
“So,” Vanessa said evenly. He had no idea how to respond to that. Jax couldn’t remember the last time he’d told a woman goodnight and then just left.
He could reach in, brush his fingers over her cheek, and see where things took them. Run his hands over her skin until he could feel goosebumps, pull the scarf out of her hair and shake it loose, listen to her sharp little breathy gasps and feel the familiar rush and accompanying high of sex.
But he didn’t.
Instead, Jax said, “Sleep well—we’ve got an early flight tomorrow.”
“Oh? Where to?”
“It’s a surprise,” he said, and winked at her before keying into his room.
Jax stood with his back against the door and gave a long sigh.
It was a perfect night to get tangled up in bedsheets, feel the soft, slick press of a woman’s hips underneath him while she begged him please, Jax, oh God yes.
And yet. Here he was standing against the door, actually not seeking it out. He didn’t even feel bad, really, just—some emotion he didn’t have a word for. Significant. Weighty. Those weren’t emotions, though. The sound of a door closing in the hallway outside made him blink, and he realized that Vanessa had stood outside her door for a few moments, maybe waiting for him.
Or maybe she was thinking, too.
The next day they were back in the jet, with Vanessa lobbing her guesses about their next destination past his head to pass the time.
“Zurich.”
“No.”
“Milan.”
“Nope.”
“Monaco.”
“Monaco’s back the other direction!”
“The other one! Madagascar!”
“That’s a much longer flight away than you think it is. I’m pretty sure it is. Is it? We should ask the captain.”
“New South Wales. Tanzania! Los Angeles! Oh my God, we’re going to LA!”
Jax put a hand to his forehead and bit back a laugh.
They landed on Kos in Greece and began driving north. Vanessa stared at him from across the car.
“We didn’t just fly here for better waters, right? That can’t be a thing. Do people who vacation here do that?”
Jax relented.
“There are a lot of refugees living on the island. A non-governmental organization wanted someone high-profile to come and help out to bring some attention back to the human side of things.”
Vanessa raised her eyebrows, and Jax realized she might have actually been surprised.
Celebrity visits to stricken areas was a weird area of fame. A rich and usually white person in linen clothing and expensive sunglasses taking a tour of a tent camp to look at tired people and play soccer with children—there was always the justification that it helped bring awareness to a cause or issue and was done for the sake of donations, but it didn’t change the fact that the whole thing usually felt like going on a sympathy safari.
Bringing along his own photographer suddenly felt like a spotlight that could sear his skin right off; was any of this a good idea? Even before the scenery began to change as they headed into town, it felt exceptionally weird, unnecessary, an invasion.
It would require a lot of tact to walk a line that thin, to help and not get in the way.
But it had been . . . easy wasn’t the word, but maybe easier than he’d thought, to let Vanessa go to her room alone the night before, so maybe he would be able to summon up more dignity than he’d always assumed himself capable of.
Jax pulled himself off the leather seat in the back of the car, already perspiring.
The liaison with the NGO, a young man named Sotirios, led them through the streets where families were camped in tents or sprawled in sleeping bags on soggy beaches near the port where cruise ships docked.
“They get wet every time a ship comes in and the water rises,” said Sotirios, “but they stay here, because it’s close to the police station and the safest place for them.”
Jax was assigned to help a group of Czech and Dutch university students distribute fruits and vegetables, then haul bags of ice back and forth from the waiting trucks to a huge column of people lined up five across who waited hours for some food, supplies, and relief from the heat. He didn’t know where Vanessa had gone until he saw her green crocheted top where she was crouched down in a group of women, taking someone’s portrait.
In Kos, checking in, he texted Natalie, then realized too late that it was probably some horrifying hour there.
Bank transfer has cleared, she replied.
He didn’t announce this to Sotirios or the other volunteer workers. The heads of the NGO would get an email informing them of his $100,000 donation in the morning, after he and Vanessa were gone.
“You’re quiet,” she said later that evening on the chartered boat.
“Get some nice photos?” he replied, coming to life and leaning forward to sip his drink again. Vanessa watched him quietly. “I don’t mean me, exactly,” he said, and chuckled, looking down into his drink.
“It was strange to be there, to finally see it in person after it’s been all over the news,” she said, agreeing with him even though he hadn’t said that.
He must have been making an odd face, or a careful lack of expression altogether, because Vanessa cocked her head to the side at his silence and wouldn’t look away from him.
“I dunno, I guess celebrity humanitarianism is weird,” he said.
“How so?”
He paused and tried to think of the right way to say it.
“It’s all image.” He shook his head; it was an obvious thing to say. “Everything about me is. But there’s all these layers to it. If you’re too sympathetic, you look like you’re enjoying it too much and get accused of being fake. If you aren’t sympathetic enough, you come across as cold and uninterested. I’m never sure which is worse. And the only way to really convince people that you’re truly, honestly serious is to keep it a secret, and let it get leaked years later.”
“It does sound complicated,” she murmured.
“I mean, all I did was kick around a soccer ball with some kids, it’s not like I was taking serious photojournalism pictures instead of pap shots to prop up a movie star’s ego or something.” He managed to say this with a completely straight face but looked at Vanessa out of the corner of his eye.
She blushed and ran a hand over her hair, looking slightly embarrassed.
“I mean . . . yes, I will admit to doing that, but it’s not like anyone was going to pay me tens of thousands of dollars to make people feel bad about wars they can’t stop.”
Jax leaned on the railing of the boat. “Is that the only reason anything’s worth documenting?”
Vanessa hmmed quietly.
“Touché.”
They landed on Santorini, where a villa overlooking the ocean and a volcano beyond waited for them. Everything was blue and white, and Jax sat looking out over the edge of the pool down to the waters below, watching the sky turn navy and finally indigo.
“Do you want to see any of the photos?” she asked, sidling up and sitting on the couch next to him. They’d long since eaten the platters of olives and cheese that room service had brought and were lounging around in the bathing suits they’d been too lazy to take off after an afternoon swim.
“I don’t want to ruin the surprise,” he said. “And I trust your skills.”
“Why did you ask me to do this?”
“To rehabilitate my image,” Jax said.
“Mmm, the set photos got that covered. Why bring me to the Mediterranean? Why take me out in a Bugatti and fly all the way to Greece?”
They listened to the ocean shifting far beneath them, under the villas and against the rocks. Somewhere in the distance a bell was ringing in a faint echo.
“I like you.” Jax did
n’t look at her. He couldn’t look at her; suddenly, he was more a teenager than he’d ever gotten to be. It was a sensation like being pulled in two directions at exactly the same time in exactly the same amount. “You’re sarcastic, and you’re funny in the way that I think I’m funny.”
Vanessa’s mouth pursed into a knowing smile.
“You’re not nearly as funny as I am,” she said, and she leaned over and kissed him.
She pulled away, barely brushing the tip of her nose over his, and let thick strands of her hair draw across his shoulder, sliding down his chest. Reaching back, Vanessa undid the top of her bikini at her neck, breathing out as her breasts suddenly appeared and sunk gently into the palms of his hands. Jax kissed her again, and her mouth moved slowly, lightly against his.
He pressed her back along the edge of the bed, the white curtains floating ever so slightly in the breeze. Kneeling, he leaned into her and ran his lips in slow circles around and over her nipples, his hands lazily trailing below to slip the rest of her bikini down over her thighs.
Jax felt his mouth make a gentle sucking pop over the soft space of her navel, and at Vanessa’s gasp imagined winding a slick wide ribbon gently around her wrists and over the slats in the bedframe. He split open her lips gently with one thumb and ran it in a slow oval along the inner rim of her, warm and comfortable, before dipping his head to kiss her, slick and fragrant.
He set her knees back against the sheets with his palms, moved his tongue across her, pressed it in, and slowly drew it out and up against her clit, doing it over and over until her stomach had clenched and her breaths were coming sharp and tiny, accompanied by a soft, high-pitched sound.
“You are awesome at that,” Vanessa admitted when she caught her breath. He stretched out next to her and realized that he didn’t particularly care what happened next. It was so satisfying on its own to make her feel good—and that was enough.
“That’s just amazing,” she said, and he realized after a second that she wasn’t looking at his cock. Vanessa rolled onto her side and drew a V shape down the indentations in the sides of his torso. Jax shuddered and had to grab her shoulders to stop himself. “God, it’s like you’re carved out of two different pieces.”
“It’s called an Apollo’s belt.”
“No way,” said Vanessa, arching her back to pull her hair back and let it loose, “those are cum gutters and you know it.”
“That’s . . . incredibly undignified,” said Jax, startled and unable to think of anything cleverer, and then he realized that his brain wasn’t cleared up—it was waiting. Vanessa slid again, rolled so that her breasts met his chest and she was looking down into his eyes, and kissed him.
“Hang on,” he murmured into her mouth, and reached blindly behind him toward the nightstand, but Vanessa beat him to it, closing the drawer with her wrist and biting the edge of the condom packet with her teeth.
Everything was so easy with her, it was absurd.
After she rolled it down his length, Jax made to sit up with her, but she pushed him firmly back down into the bed and rose up onto her knees, ran one hand from the base of his cock to squeeze it just beneath the head, and guided it into her with one slick, easy motion, her muscles already thick and primed with heat.
Vanessa sighed and closed her eyes, placing both palms flat on his chest, squeezing her breasts together and sliding up and down, picking up the motion with a longing moan. Jax leaned back farther into the bed, just letting his body enjoy the building sensation and the visual of her pussy lips turning a deeper shade of pink, the soft tan skin of her stomach glowing slightly rosy now, Vanessa throwing her head back to gasp again right as his abdomen tensed, his balls clenched, and he sank back, flooded with a cushion of thick hazy relief.
She flopped back onto the bed beside him with a bounce and looked over at him, amused.
“We should go to Bali next time.”
The response from the private security guards had turned from bullets to heavy weaponry barrage, the sound going from a series of melodic ricochets to thunderous blasts that shook the ground and knocked the breath from his body.
The Steel Knight planted the boots of his exoskeleton more firmly against the ragged bits of cement floor and used the trans-subsonic receiver to let out another blast wave of pulse energy, knocking the fresh fighters back and making them grip their heads, ears ringing.
Private security firm, his ass—these were Special Ops recruited to protect something big. Nobody who purchased Dirk Masterson’s ruthlessly acquired technologies needed to hide or protect them this desperately; hell, half the software was probably available for download somewhere on Tor. But this . . . this military industrial response was overkill. He was just coming in to get a simple circuit board. One that made better medical imaging possible, okay, and technically this was breaking and entering and stealing, but still.
It was the principle of the goddamned thing. Let a guy with good intentions steal shit in peace, maybe.
Suddenly, more men in black gear began to descend on him, not just in waves from the open warehouse doors, but through the ceiling.
His armor was good, but it wasn’t strong enough to take on an entire army without significant damage. Two of the guys, covered by men with automatic weapons, were assembling something behind the blasts from the firefight. He focused on that, began to power on the dynamic thrust laser, and—
The sound that usually accompanied the laser turning on and firing died into a slowly spinning-out whine.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he muttered between gritted teeth. Something in the laser was off; he’d repurposed it wrong, or he’d used it all up, or the impact from one of the ground artillery that had hit him a few moments ago had knocked power to the main charging unit—
He smacked the control with his hand, forgetting for a moment that the glove went through to the exoskeleton, and only succeeded in crushing the entire panel that gave him any kind of offensive weaponry at all.
Fuck. He was fucked.
The two men on the floor were moving faster, making final preparations for whatever it was that they had assembled. It looked black and metallic, and he did not want to find out what it was—
They were finished with the device; the men who’d been cover distraction now moved their weapons out of the way, and he was staring down the barrel of whatever it was. Dirk considered his options, and decided that in the end, it was better to go down not just swinging, but making a statement, too. He could still run the skeleton in manual, but it would be harder, and not the least because he was already exhausted.
Steel Knight’s exoskeleton took one step back, and then a running start off that, throwing him into a line of soldiers and crushing them, barreling straight toward the mysterious device as it flickered and glowed on, arcing power through its barrel and into the central component of the laser, powering it up and, he realized with dim surprise, the exoskeleton suit back on—
Chapter Ten
SHE’D BEEN THINKING about Claudia the whole car ride from the airport back into Queens.
Jax had wanted to buy her something to remember the success of their pairing up—this he’d said with something close to a conspiratorially rakish grin—but she couldn’t see herself needing things once she got back home. Someone at the French hotel had bought her new outfits for zipping around in cars worth the gross national product of a Central American country. She now had several sets of diamond solitaire earrings for wearing to gala events, or while wearing a hoodie and fighting traffic on a bike. Whichever.
All her camera equipment was up to date, and if she did get new gear, she’d have to redo her bags and get used to new lenses. That wasn’t impossible, but Vanessa did pride herself on being able to afford her own equipment. And somehow it seemed like a stretch of irony for Jax Butler, of all people, to finance the career of a pap outright.
“You can’t go home without a souvenir,” he said, hoisting himself up to sit on the edge of the railing at the Santorini vil
la overlooking the cliffs. It didn’t seem to bother Jax that he had his back to a hundred-foot drop onto volcanic rocks, but then, that was just the way he was.
“I know,” said Vanessa with an idea, and tugged on his sleeve to get him to come down. She put the camera in his hand. “Stretch your arm out.”
“Like this?” Jax wobbled the camera up and down, pointing it at the sky and the sea behind their heads.
“Fire at will,” she said teasingly, and he held the lens steady, setting off the shutter.
The result was the last photo currently on her memory card—actual evidence that she’d been in Europe with him for the last few days, and the closest she’d probably ever get to admitting (beyond payroll authorization forms) that she was the one who took the pictures in the first place.
It was slightly up their noses from how far he had to crouch down to wrap the arm holding the camera around her shoulders and press their faces side by side, but it was the only actual picture of Jax and Vanessa together in Europe. Evidence that she’d finally put the expensive passport to good use, proof that she had been spending time with him, the logical conclusion to the phrase I like you.
Vanessa stood outside the door to the apartment and set the bag that still didn’t quite feel like hers on the floor.
I like you.
He’d said that, and she’d kissed him.
There was a television down the hall tuned to the late broadcast of the local news, and somewhere in the building somebody had the water running; she could hear pipes leading from the basement boiler clanking and jumping around.
She wondered how long it normally took before a person forgot what it was like to have everything catered and brought to her.
It would be embarrassing to try the door and then have to fish for her keys only for Claudia to open it and startle her, and so Vanessa tried the key first before anything else. It wasn’t locked.
