Bastian: A Secret Baby Romance

by Lauren Landish

  Dad and his executives showed up at five minutes to noon, just like we expected, wearing his normal business suit. He gave Rebekah a kiss on the cheek and shook hands with Robin, all professional like, before taking a seat along with his colleagues. Robin waited until everyone was seated, then she started on her prepared speech for all the attendees and set up the demonstration of the suit I was about to give.

  The first test was actually the toughest on the system, a barbell squat. We had borrowed one of those strongman style frames from a powerlifting gym in town, and loaded it with over a thousand pounds of plates. In total, it came out to over fifteen hundred pounds including the frame, which I supported by the spinal column of the skeleton. Since the exoskeleton was a bit taller than I am, getting under it was a bit of a challenge, but once I did, the squats were easy, no harder than getting up and down out of a chair.

  I did twenty before letting the frame down feather-light, much to the amazement of the audience. “While adjusting for the power and speed of the skeleton takes some practice, notice that Wes didn’t have to do anything unnatural with his movements. He just squatted up and down like you might do in the gym every day. By the way, yes, Wes is a big man, but his lift was over three hundred pounds heavier than the current world record, and any one of you could’ve lifted it,” Robin expounded, and I could see we had them.

  For the rest of the hour, I demonstrated different capabilities of the Mark IA. Taking the guests outside into the industrial park behind the lab, I jumped, ran, dragged a truck across the parking lot, and more, all while barely breaking a sweat. When I was finished, I nimbly maneuvered the unit back inside the lab, ducking my head to avoid the door, and latched into the recharging stand, powering down. I could tell by the look in my Dad’s eye that we had made it.

  Collins Robotics was a success.

  Chapter 12

  Robin

  Wes’s initial assessment was a bit off, but not too far so. While Gerald and the Brandt Medical executives were enthusiastic about our product, it was still a long way to our final goal.

  Thankfully, investment from Brandt Medical, which agreed to share in development of the Mark IA for medical purposes, gave us the financial backing we were looking for, and sales of the unit brought us to the attention of industrial and other applications. Soon, you could find our units being used in everything from helping old people take walks with their grandkids to mountain climbers using it to scale peaks like Everest and K2. It got so bad that eventually the Nepalese government stopped counting ascents of the major Himalayan mountains using the Mark IA.

  When the Department of Defense approached us, we showed them the Mark III, our first unarmored full-body exoskeleton. The shoulders were, as expected, the hardest to replicate, along with the spine. Still, the suit worked great, and the DoD soon looked to use our suits in various jobs behind combat lines. The first time I saw a two thousand pound cargo container being loaded onto an Osprey aircraft by one of our suits to deliver humanitarian supplies for tsunami relief in the Philippines, tears were in my eyes.

  Despite my mom’s words to Wes, we set our wedding date pretty far in the future. It’s just the way Wes and I are. We finally got Mom and Gerald off our backs by promising that when the Mark X was ready, we’d have our ceremony.

  That day took us a while, and in that time, Collins Robotics went from that old laundromat and just me and Wes working, to a fifty-person team, including assembly, testing, and coders who were more skilled than even Wes and me. It was actually a relief, letting him and I work more on the designs of the next stages of our series, while our employees worked on enhancing our previous designs.

  They had some good ideas, and our designs got better and better. We even had our own doctor on staff, whose whole job was to give her input on how to better connect the suit’s skeleton to the human body. It was another edge we got a leg up on.

  The Mark X was our crowning achievement, a total prototype that we worked on in private. It was a one-of-a-kind unit, customized for only one man, Wes, to wear, and was a total publicity stunt. We even debated painting the thing red and gold until our legal department advised us that we didn’t want Marvel, Sony, and maybe two or three other corporate conglomerates down our throat.

  In the end, the Mark X was coated in black and gold, in homage to our high school alma mater if anyone asked. Standing almost seven and a half feet tall, it weighed over seven hundred pounds.

  Wes

  I swear, it wasn’t my idea. Robin and I were lying in bed one night, when suddenly she rolled over to me with the idea on how to debut the Mark X. “We told Mom we’d get married after it was ready for the public,” she said, “so why not make it part of the ceremony?”

  “Babe, that thing is armed,” I replied, kissing her hand and stroking her face. “I mean, do you really want to have a fully armed exosuit as part of our wedding ceremony? It intimidates me, and I’m the guy that is supposed to be wearing it.”

  “Hey, don’t forget that the Mark X2 is for me,” Robin replied, mentioning the Mark X’s shorter twin, scaled just for her. “We could have them both completed at the same time.”

  “We could,” I replied, warming to the idea. “But before that, I had another idea.”

  “What’s that?” Robin replied, her breath catching when I laid my hand on her breast through the white t-shirt she was wearing to bed. “Oh . . . ”

  Stroking my hand over her breast through the slightly rough cotton, I kissed Robin gently, pulling her on top of me. The long, raven’s wing black hair that I loved so much flowed over us like a private curtain, our kisses becoming hotter and more passionate. Straddling my hips, her pajama-covered mound ground down onto me, still so tight and perfect even though we’d been together for a few years by now. The one time I asked her how she did it, she winked at me and told me it was an Indian secret. I didn’t really understand, but I can say I am a happy man regardless.

  My cock ached inside my pajama bottoms as Robin rubbed her hips back and forth, teasing both of us. With her breasts squashed against my chest, I instead focused on rubbing her back and ass while her lips and teeth nibbled at my ears and neck. Pulling at her t-shirt, I urged her to sit up so that I could see her.

  “You see me all the time,” Robin teased, sitting back and playing with the bottom hem of her shirt. “You sure you aren’t getting tired of it?”

  “Never,” I replied honestly. “You’re just as beautiful now as you were when we first made love in that wrecked airplane.”

  “Speaking of which,” Robin said, lifting the shirt to just below her breasts, “I want to go back for our honeymoon.”

  “What?” I asked, a little confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Canada. I want you to take me back up there for our honeymoon.” Robin laughed, dropping the shirt and tweaking my nose. “I want you to take me where you wanted to that first time. Just you and me, and hopefully . . . ”

  “Yes?” I asked, resting my hands on her thighs. I rubbed the firm skin with my thumbs, gathering what control I could.

  “I was thinking it’d be really lucky if we made our first child up there,” she said, pulling her shirt off and revealing her glorious upper body to me. It is another way that Robin is amazing to me, the way she and I think along similar lines so often. I had been pondering the idea of having children, but I knew that Robin was so focused on building our robotics company that I didn’t know when to broach the subject.

  “Then let’s go to Canada for months, if you want,” I said, reaching up and cupping her breasts. “But this time, we’re driving.”

  My fingers playing with her nipples drove Robin crazy, and she couldn’t form an answer, although her hips pushing down harder on my cock seemed all the answer I needed. Pulling her back down on me, her nipple lined up with my eagerly sucking lips, licking and pulling the hard little nub deep into my mouth. Sucking and running my hands over her ass, we brought each other to the point of madness before she pushed off of me,
desperately pulling at her pajama bottoms.

  “Fuck me,” she moaned once she had her bottoms all the way off, barely giving me time to push my own pants down before she swung her leg over and mounted me cowgirl style. My cock sank deep into her wet depths as she impaled herself on me in one smooth motion. “Fuck me and give me everything you have.”

  I couldn’t resist, not that I’d want to. Robin’s tanned skin glowed in the soft light of our bedroom while her hips moved back and forth, a soft sheen of sweat glistening on her spine and the firm, rounded globes of her ass. Robin put her hands on my thighs and rode me, her ass moving up and down, her pussy swallowing my cock over and over.

  I don’t know what came over me, but my hand moved of its own will, reaching out and smacking her right butt cheek flatly, the skin reddening with the stinging crack. Robin paused and looked back, surprise and desire written on her delicate features. “Do it again,” she gasped, her hips starting up again.

  Soon, the bedroom was filled with the echo of my hands smacking her ass while her hips smacked into mine. With each slap, our desire grew, until I couldn’t take it anymore and pulled her back on top of me.

  “Now I really fuck you,” I growled, rolling us over and pulling her hips off the bed. My cock hammered into her, the warm red skin of her ass quivering. Robin turned her head to wail, her lustful cries driving me higher and harder until the sweat stung my eyes and my cock was burning for release. When her pussy clenched around me and her cries became the sharp, lustful growls that meant she was coming, I could hold back no longer. Our groans mixed, and I plunged myself as deep as I could, filling her with my come. My back crackled as I arched so hard that I thought I may have pulled a muscle. But all I could feel was Robin’s body, the bliss of our union, and the ecstasy that came from releasing myself in her.

  Robin

  The day of our wedding, everything was ready. We had originally wanted to do the ceremony at Gerald’s mansion, but as Wes and I planned, getting our parents out of the way so we could spring our surprise entrance would be too difficult to do without their knowing. Instead, we rented a large banquet hall at a country club, which just happened to be next to a golf course that we used for the ceremony itself.

  Mom and Gerald were greeted at the entrance to the club by the manager, who was conveniently distracting our parents for us. They assumed we were already there, getting ready to walk down the aisle. Meanwhile, we were lifting off in a Blackhawk helicopter from the small, private airport ten miles away. The manager made some kind of excuse about the golf cart being screwed up, so they’d have to walk the half mile up to the banquet hall, giving us time to make our grand entrance.

  When the helicopter was near the tenth hole, Wes told the pilot to hover at 5000 feet, discreetly far enough away that none of the guests were suspicious, until we were sure Mom and Gerald were both seated in their chairs. The altar was set up to look over the fairway for the first hole, a rather picturesque setting that had been used in a semi-famous movie about golfing years before. Wes closed his face mask and sent a signal to the Minister of the Wedding with some kind of transceiver. “All right, hit it.”

  The crowd of about a hundred people, mostly employees of Collins Robotics and their families, but also a few of Wes’s old Army buddies, and one old man that Wes had whispered to me he suspected was Oscar from his secret agent days, all looked to the altar as the minister stood up.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you,” he said in a slight Midwestern twang. “I get to start this ceremony off in a way that is a first even for me, and I’ve been doing this for going on twenty-five years. The bride and groom have planned a unique entrance for all of you, so if you’d please stand up and direct your attention above us.”

  The helicopter pilot did his job perfectly. Swinging around, he parked us right where we wanted, about twenty yards north of the wedding party and a thousand feet up. We had designed for the Mark X to be able to handle larger falls, but we didn’t want to put too big of a divot in the turf. The country club was being nice as it was.

  “Ready, babe?” Wes asked over our private intercom circuit. “Just remember, take it like a drop from a basketball hoop. Let the suit do the work for you.”

  It took more guts than I had anticipated to slide out the side of the Blackhawk. I had done the calculations over and over; freefall time was supposed to be just over eight seconds, and we’d hit the ground at just over a hundred and fifty miles an hour. Basically, I dropped out of a helicopter into a car crash, and was depending on my design to let me walk away alive.

  Those eight seconds were both the shortest and the longest of my life, even more so than the plane crash. Part of my mind was in total freak-out mode, shutting down and making the whole fall seem like only a blink of an eye. Another part of me slowed time down to a crawl, so it felt like I was up there for what had to be a minute at least. I found out later that the feeling was normal, the result of your brain being in panic mode.

  Thankfully, I was able to hang onto Wes’s instructions to me to keep calm and let the suit do the work. Hitting the ground, I let my knees bend and roll, the suit working perfectly. It wasn’t until I was on my feet that I realized that instead of The Wedding March, the band was playing Back in Black, and I started laughing. Mom and Gerald were both on their feet, and part of me felt bad for the expression on Mom’s face. Still, she recovered well and joined in the clapping, Wes and I striding toward the altar together. I had to give it to the minister—he recovered well from the shock, and spoke again into the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bride and Groom.”

  Wes

  After the ceremony was over and Robin and I were back in normal clothes, Dad found me and hugged me, right before giving me a sharp smack on the shoulder.

  “If you ever try to scare the bejesus out of Rebekah and me like that again, you’re going to find out you’re not too big to get a whoopin’ from your old man,” he joked, smiling with tears in his eyes. “But it’s beautiful, son. And you’re the second luckiest man in the world today.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said, looking toward the front of the reception hall, where the Mark X and X2 were on display, an appreciative crowd of people gathered around. “Although I will have to respectfully disagree with you on the ‘second luckiest man’ bit.”

  “I’m sure,” Dad said, taking a drink from his flute of champagne. His eyes turned toward the Mark X, a whistle coming between his teeth. “A thousand foot drop, and it still looks like you just got done giving it a wax job. Do I want to know how much those things cost?”

  “Nope, but trust me, they’re going to be great PR ambassadors for the company,” I said. “Let’s face it, the Mark X is bad-ass.”

  “And of course you and Robin get to go play with them as often as you want,” Dad said with a grin. “Like your typical sports car owner. Yours just doesn’t have Lotus on the hood.”

  Dad and I laughed before an older man, maybe ten years older than him came up, offering his hand. “Congratulations.”

  I went with my instincts and shook his hand. “Dad, could you give us a minute? I’m sure Robin would love to talk your ear off about the design or something.”

  Dad nodded and left us. I guided the gentleman outside, where the sun was just starting to go down, the golf course covered in amber gold light. “Those are two hellacious divots you caused,” the old man said, pointing toward the holes on the fairway. “Glad you hit only a few yards out. Won’t mess up anyone’s tee shot.”

  “Oscar?” I asked, and the old man nodded. “It’s been a few years. You’ve been keeping tabs on me?”

  “I never stopped keeping tabs on you,” Oscar replied. “Although this is the first time I’ve personally watched your little creations in action. Your work is impressive.”

  “Thanks, I’m a lucky man,” I said for what felt like the tenth time that day. “I don’t want to sound suspicious or anything, Oscar, but why today?”

  “I heard from a friend that you we
re going to be putting on a show today, and that, combined with the fact that you were getting married, caused me to come and pay my respects. I was right in both regards.”

  “Thank you,” I said, offering him another handshake. When Oscar didn’t let go, I tilted my head to the side. “What is it, Oscar?”

  Oscar grinned, and I swear I watched twenty years fall off of the man’s face. “Wes, how would you like to help out your country again? Except this time, I was thinking maybe as part of a two-person team?”

  I looked at him, then looked over my shoulder at the Mark X and X2. The offer was tempting. Adventure, action, and with Robin by my side? My life would be a living comic book at that point.

  But I also remembered the bad side of comics. Danger, lack of family opportunities, and the inevitable death of the characters, usually by horrible means. Then Robin came into view, resplendent in the cocktail dress she had chosen for the reception, and my mind was made up for me.

  “Oscar, there might come a time that the X or X2 would be used in just that way. But for me personally, I have to pass. Didn’t your source tell you? We’re planning on starting a family.”

  Oscar nodded and let go of my hand, clapping me on the shoulder. “Well, we might approach you two in the future, but I understand. Go and enjoy. She’s a beautiful bride.”

  Oscar walked away, toward the front entrance of the club and a waiting car, I was sure. Going back inside, I found Robin, pulling her into an embrace and kissing her on the lips. “Well, not that I mind, but what was that for?” she asked me, while a few onlookers cheered.

  “For giving me everything I could ever want,” I whispered in her ear. “Now, let’s get this dinner and reception over with. There’s a lake in Canada calling our names.”