God, if only he didn’t have his shirt off. She just wanted to think about the effect her terrible behavior was clearly having on him—if his exhausted state was anything to go by. He looked as if he’d just tried to kill himself with a five-hour run, so admonishing herself was really important.
But sadly, all she could think about was his bare chest. For a long, long moment she simply stared, gaze unwavering, mind frozen in a kind of feedback loop. He’s half-naked, her mind kept saying, even though she didn’t need reminding in the least. No one on earth could have missed that fact. People in space could probably see his chest, considering its general width and breadth.
He practically filled the tiny screen. And he’d sort of sprawled out too, so she could really see every plane and curve—from the flat, firm slabs of his pectoral muscles, to the almost shocking tautness of his abs. She hadn’t even realized men actually got those little bumps, in real life. They seemed like something invented by advertising companies, to better show off a nice pair of underpants.
But no, no. He had them. And he had those firm slanting shapes on either side of his stomach too—the ones that pointed like an arrow to a man’s groin, in a way she absolutely would not think about.
He didn’t have a groin.
He had a smooth, asexual space, like a Ken doll. Nothing there to trouble her, no hint of anything alluring, and certainly nothing she could focus on to the detriment of her mental health. It was all just featureless plastic and she was completely impervious and beyond reproach. She wasn’t still staring and staring at him like a maniac, and if she was it was purely out of concern.
He’d been lying there for kind of a long while, now. And when she went back through the CCTV, she could see he really had been running for an unnerving amount of time. She watched him dart between those faintly spooky trees and leap over gnarled obstacles, until the watching started to become something else again.
At which point, she gathered her nerve and went out to him. Just as a worried colleague. Not as anything else. And to prove it, she took a bottle of water. She took a cold compress. He couldn’t think anything else of this when she was armed with those items.
Yet he did. She could see it all over him the second she stepped outside. He froze at the sound of her boots on the decking, then immediately sat up. It seemed to pain him a little to do it—as though his muscles had seized in the meantime—but he got there. He put his back to her, and with a back like that the message was very clear indeed.
It looked like a great curved door to some impossible prison. Completely unapproachable, and with absolutely no way of getting in.
“I think that was longer than twenty minutes,” she said, finally, but winced as soon as she’d done it. The words seemed even more hollow than the water bottle and the compress—as if she were just some company stool, echoing policy. And though being a company stool was a slight improvement on being a swooning fool, it didn’t help her with him in the least. His shoulders stiffened the moment she said it, and when he spoke his voice had this terrible withering tone that she’d never heard before.
“If I followed company advisories, I’d be as flaccid as undercooked fish,” he said, and she responded without thinking. It just happened, in reaction to that tone.
“Yeah, just look at me,” she said, intending something obvious and funny. Something to lighten the mood in the face of those rough-edged words. She even laughed a little somewhere in the middle of her sentence—only he didn’t seem to find it amusing at all. Oh no, he really didn’t find it amusing.
He whipped his head around the second she spoke, which was shock enough on its own. But then she saw his expression and wasn’t really sure what to think. She hadn’t known he could be so…so indignant. Hell, she hadn’t known he could be angry at all, to the level he was currently exhibiting. He was so ever-still and glacially cool she’d started to take this state for granted—a fact that seemed just as stunning as his suddenly fierce expression, now that she was really thinking about it.
Here was this big, surly man, trained to kill and hired to be aggressive. And yet it was his anger that seemed unusual. Not the opposite. Not a sudden act of kindness or a gentle gesture—he was kind and gentle all the time, in truth. He made the food and didn’t look and was always so mindful of her, and when he was annoyed by something, it had to be the best possible thing he could be annoyed about.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” he said, and though her insides sort of jolted to hear him be so sharp, they did it for all the wrong reasons. She’d never enjoyed a man being sharp with her, before. But then, she’d never known a man to speak so harshly while saying something so, so good. Oh it was so good to hear someone take back an insult he hadn’t even made. And he went on, too. Dear God, he went on.
“You shouldn’t think of yourself like that. I don’t think of you like that,” he said, and all she could think was, So how do you think of me?
Despite knowing he’d already answered that. His words were so insistent it felt as if he’d placed his thumb over that knowledge inside her—that knowledge of her own plainness, and softness—and rubbed over it until it blurred. Suddenly, they weren’t indisputable facts, processed in an objective, uncaring manner by her always critical eye. They were something else, instead. Something that shifted as he stared at her, then slid all the way off a cliff when he abruptly stood.
It was one thing to deny something he said while sitting down. But quite another once he’d drawn himself up to his full six-foot-seven height. And to top it off, he was still bare-chested. He was bare-chested, and said chest was kind of visibly going up and down, and she could see sweat glistening on skin that had turned a kind of honey hue in the dying light, and oh God, was that a tattoo on the curve of his left shoulder?
She suspected it was. She could just make out two shapes that looked like wings, intersecting briefly in the middle before finishing with a twist at the top—like a headless angel, she thought.
It was very hard to argue with a headless angel. It was very hard to argue with all that. Her mouth had gone so dry she couldn’t even manage the joke she’d been intending. He’d made it something serious with his heaving pecs and his heat-inducing tattoo and his insistence, and now it had to remain that way forever.
“I see you…differently to that,” he said, but she could tell he was doing it against his will, now. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him look so caught, so caged. He’d started down this path and couldn’t do anything but follow it through, even if following it through made him say something he didn’t want to.
Even if it made her heart pound in her teeth—and maybe his too.
He certainly looked like his heart was hammering. His eyes were almost a different color, as though a fierce and unwanted feeling had set the glacier alight. She could see the flame burning at the core and feel its heat fanning against her face.
It should have scared her off.
It should have stopped her speaking.
Instead, it lit a fire in her too.
“How do you see me, then?”
She wasn’t sure what she expected him to say in response. But it didn’t matter. The important part was that for one stunning second, she wasn’t afraid to hear him say anything. She wasn’t afraid of a careless word like kid or a less careless one like ugly.
Far from it. She was actually greedy for his response, in a way she hardly understood or recognized. Her heart had moved on from her teeth, and now fluttered somewhere high up in her head. She realized, distantly, that she was holding her breath—but for what? For what?
He couldn’t be about to say that. Not that. This strange attraction she kept feeling only went one way, no matter what she’d seen in the labs. It had to go only one way. She’d grown accustomed to that state of affairs; she’d grown comfortable with it. There was safety in unrequited desire, and if he suddenly and truly removed that safety she wasn’t sure what would happen.
But more importantly—she wasn’t
sure what she would do. Her will had become so strange lately she no longer knew how to predict it. There was a chance she’d laugh it off if he said what she thought he might be about to say, but there was just as good a chance that she wouldn’t. That she would walk up to him instead and take that strange, still face in her hands and kiss and kiss and kiss those tender lips.
So it was a good thing, really, when he answered as he then did.
With a kind of boiling-over silence and barely stifled anger, and long, violent strides that shook the entire house from its foundation.
Chapter Five
She slept soundly after the strange confrontation on the deck. As though his pointed, near-disgusted reaction had taken hold of her shoulders and shaken all the odd, near-obsessive feelings out. He was right, of course. He shouldn’t have to give her some comment on how he saw her. And more than that—she shouldn’t want him to.
It just didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the job, and she drifted off with that in mind. She counted tasks to do, organizing and reorganizing them in her head. Setting up the below-ground train was of primary importance, because a batch was almost ready for shipment. The little icon had started winking at her just before bed, so that was priority.
Then after she’d dealt with that, there was the town visit.
She’d put it off until now, reveling in this blissful, shut-off solitude and the illusion of security their supplies provided. But even if they wanted for nothing, she knew what people expected. People expected you to behave a certain way. They wanted signs that you were human and normal, and shopping for groceries was one of them. Attending town meetings was another—and though she loathed the idea, she had scheduled them into her diary.
To the townspeople, she would be Lisa.
And he would be the rather duller and kind of incongruous Norman, despite the fact that he could never possibly be a Norman in a million years. She’d seen the alias in the contract and almost done a double take, but she supposed it didn’t really matter. They didn’t need to see him, after all. She would be enough, because she was the wife, and wives did things like that.
Wives swanned around in grocery stores while wearing neat little sweater sets. Wives socialized at town meetings and made excuses for their important husbands. Or at least they did according to Endocon. Apparently, even when playing pretend the stereotypes still applied—a point that hadn’t really bothered her on first reading of the contract, but kind of had ever since.
And she knew why too. She could see it clearly, now that she could also see what kind of wife she would really be. She grasped it as though through misted glass, just a little blurred and obviously completely out of reach, but plain nonetheless.
There she was—a woman who cared nothing for the outside world and its petty concerns. Who didn’t mind if she hadn’t worn the right clothes or shared the right gossip, and instead enjoyed the strangest things. She knew this woman would love this secret world of silence and strange passions, she would just adore it if…
She stopped there in mid-thought, unable to finish. A strange pang got in the way, so full of longing and sadness she couldn’t quite admit to it at first. She didn’t want to admit to it, and yet the end of that sentence forced itself on her anyway.
A woman who would love this secret world of silence and strange passions…she thought, as something pricked behind her eyes. If only it were real.
* * * * *
She awoke disoriented with a hint of the same dread she’d had the morning before. There was something pressed against her, again. Despite all the reasoning with herself, and the storming off, and the knowledge that this could never be real, she’d crossed the line drawn in the bed for the second time.
Only this transgression was worse. Oh so much, much worse. It felt as though their bodies had been glued together. She could actually make out the thin layer of perspiration between them, as if they’d been this way forever. She must have moved across a second after falling asleep—and probably due to that stupid if only thought. What sort of fool tried to set firm boundaries with if only?
She should have thought about disgusting, nightmarish things, like those mutant spiders that took over Australia. She would never have done this after imagining exploding insect eggs being laid in her ear. She would have stayed on her side of the bed and his arm would never have been over her—
She came to a grinding halt, there. Mainly because her brain had just twigged that she’d used his instead of hers, but also because she couldn’t quite come to terms with that idea. She’d only just made some kind of peace with her own bouts of accidental cuddling, so this turnaround was a little too much to take. It ground against the grain of the man she’d built up in her head—the one who half-hated her and didn’t speak to her and couldn’t bear to look in her direction.
He just wasn’t the sort of person to do this.
But he was doing it anyway. That was definitely his arm across her belly. She couldn’t possibly mistake it for something else, like a roll of duvet or a cushion or maybe one of her own limbs that she’d somehow detached from her body. All three of those possibilities were tiny and featherlight, by comparison.
His arm was akin to half a dead cow suddenly sprawling across her. Her stomach was starting to develop pins and needles, even though stomach pins and needles sounded impossible—and there was something else too. Something that made her flush hot, and then cold. And then hot all over again.
It was the way he was holding her.
He was holding her.
And unless it was her imagination, this holding felt almost…sort of…maybe a little bit…possessive. Oh God, was this what possessiveness felt like?
Of course, she couldn’t be sure. She certainly had zero experience to draw upon, and only the vaguest impression of what such a thing looked like in a man. When she tried to imagine, her mind just threw up images of some nameless grunt, barely conscious of anything but his need to draw his woman close.
A ridiculous idea, if ever she’d had one.
But to her horror, her body responded to the image. Heat bloomed through her the second the idea occurred. Her nipples stiffened—visibly, oh Lord visibly—and her sex seemed to grow three sizes. She could absolutely feel those plump lips straining against the material of her pajamas—a phenomenon that seemed impossible and absurd until it actually happened.
Now it was completely possible and the opposite of absurd. It was life or death and deadly serious, and all because he had maybe hauled her to him. The whole thing wasn’t a certainty, and yet her mind was already running away with the idea. He probably did it roughly, her head said, fierce with a need he just couldn’t help. Even in sleep he couldn’t help it. He just wanted it so desperately he had to take, he had to stake his claim, he had to grab her and grab her and oh fuck she needed to stop thinking about this.
It was insane, anyway. He’d likely just rolled over in the night and mistaken her for a pillow. And if he wasn’t the kind of person to make that mistake, well, she just wouldn’t focus on that part. Or on the memory of him always lying in the same spot, no matter what happened.
Instead, she planned her escape—just like last time, only a hundred times more difficult. Last time she hadn’t needed to work her way out from underneath something, but this time she did. And just to make matters more complicated, the something in question appeared to weigh about a thousand tons.
Lifting it was a complete impossibility. She wasn’t sure she had the upper body strength to even attempt such a task…hell, she wasn’t sure Superman would have had the upper body strength. It was sort of like trying to move a bar of wet lead, which left her with precious few options.
She tried sliding out, but sliding just made her realize something unsettling. He wasn’t simply sprawled over her, the way she’d tried to pretend a moment ago. He really was holding her. His arm was curved around her body like a meaty hook, designed to keep her in. If she attempted to scoot sideways she’d just end up butting
into the shovel of his right hand, and once she had he’d definitely wake up.
She had to go the other way. In order to escape, she had to actively move toward him—or at least, move toward the arch between his shoulder and his biceps. There was this little triangle of space that seemed very promising, so she just wiggled into it. She twisted her hips and eased herself back, full of a soaring sense of triumph, so sure and certain that freedom was just around the corner…
And then she felt him.
She felt the solid planes of his chest against her back and the meat of his thighs all tense beneath hers and oh God most of all, oh most of all…
That was his cock, pressing into the curve of her ass.
She knew it was. She knew it even though she didn’t want to know it. Her mind tried to go to another place where things were much more understandable and reasonable and rational than this, but her body wouldn’t let it.
Stay, it said, so you can feel every little bit of this.
And she was helpless to resist. If he’d been another person—just one of the many faceless, nondescript men whom she’d encountered in her life—maybe she could have resisted. If the heat hadn’t immediately overwhelmed her and the shock of it hadn’t struck her in the gut…maybe. Maybe.
But as things stood, all she could do was lie there and let it sink in.
Sergei Dehane had an erection.
And not just a half-wilting morning wood sort of erection, either. This was the real deal, as stiff and solid as she could imagine a cock being. It seemed to weigh against the curve of her ass in this really unsettling way—as though it had started to collapse under the pressure of its own immense size.
But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it?
And then he shifted and her eyes almost bugged out of her head. Something that felt like a fist nudged against her, but of course it wasn’t a fist at all. It was the thick head of his cock, hot and taut and oh God, oh God…was everything just a little bit slippery there? She wasn’t sure she should be able to feel it, but after a second of subtle rubbing she knew she’d identified it correctly. His big, stiff cock was leaking pre-come so copiously it had gone through whatever he was wearing and wound up on the bared skin of her lower back.
Almost Real Page 5
