Cyborg Seduction: A Science Fiction Cyborg Romance (Burning Metal Book 3)

by Lisa Lace

  Making herself as comfortable as she could, Rachel returned her attention to the cyborg leader. He was quick and intelligent, but he used his stature and attitude to intimidate others. He wasn’t the same man she had known many years ago, but every so often he made an expression or moved in a way that seemed oddly familiar.

  It had been a long time ago, in a small town that seemed so far away that it might as well have been on a different planet. Rachel was young and impressionable, eager to find herself but unsure of where to look.

  Robert had been on the outskirts of her awareness growing up. She had seen him play football or walk by her in the hallway, but she had never given him a second thought. Robert came from the wrong side of the tracks. He was nice enough, but there was always an element of otherness about him that her subconscious couldn’t move past.

  He became unforgettable the day he saved her life. She had been upset, tears blurring her vision as she walked home from school. She couldn’t remember what had seemed so important to her at the time. It was probably something earth-shattering like a fight with a girlfriend or a bad grade on a test. Rachel had looked both ways before crossing the main road through town, but on that cloudy afternoon, she didn’t notice a gray truck rushing toward her. She felt the massive impact of something slamming into her body and throwing her to the other side of the street before she heard the sound of squealing brakes behind her.

  She had landed hard, smashing her head against the ground. Before the fall, her backpack had been slung over one shoulder. Now it was lying on the curb with its contents spilled out. A heavy weight rested on top of her, but she was so dazed that she couldn’t push it off. When she regained control of herself, Rachel looked up into light azure eyes. The dark blonde eyebrows over them were pulled together in concern.

  “I’m sorry about that. Are you all right?” The man slowly lifted his weight from her body. “I wasn’t sure I would get to you in time.” He held out a hand to lift her to her feet.

  Rachel felt dazed, and not just because she had almost been run over. The only thing she could see was Robert’s handsome face. She wondered why she had never noticed him before. When Rachel had talked to her girlfriends about their crushes, his name never came up. Somehow, she wanted nothing more than to feel his strong arms around her again. “I think I’m okay.”

  “You look like you’ve seen better days. You’re crying.” He reached out a finger to wipe a tear from her cheek.

  Suddenly feeling self-conscious, Rachel swept her remaining tears away with shaking hands. “That was something else. I’m okay. Thank you.”

  Robert had nodded but frowned at her with a look of concern on his face. “Let me walk you home, at least.”

  Rachel had gladly consented. They hadn’t said much, but they didn’t need to. A sense of peace and comfort descended over her when she was with Robert. That night as she lay in her bed, she told herself that she was thinking about him purely due to his heroic actions. She couldn’t imagine having feelings for him.

  The next day proved her wrong. She found herself looking for him between classes and going out of her way to loiter in the halls, hoping she would run into him at his locker or the water fountain. At the end of the day, he was at the bottom of the steps that led up to the school. Rachel passed by him with her eyes looking down, confident he had been avoiding her. But Robert broke off from his friends the moment he saw her. “Can I walk you home?”

  Their new tradition of walking home together, even though his house was nowhere near hers, didn’t take long to turn into something more. He took Rachel to the movies, parties, and dinner. They held hands in-between classes and snuck kisses behind the dugout on the baseball field. She couldn’t think of or talk about anything but him.

  He was her first lover. It was a rainy night in March and the air still carried the chill of winter, but promised the warmth of spring. Robert’s parents were out of town, and Rachel had told her mother that she was staying the night at Jessica’s house. He had taken her by the hand up to his room. There were no candles to cast a romantic glow or rose petals spread out over the bed, but he had been gentle and sweet as he laid her down.

  Rachel remembered him saying, “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.” There was an urgency in his eyes that Rachel couldn’t ignore. She knew that what she saw in his eyes was a reflection of her heart.

  “I want to.”

  As they made love, she was strangely grateful for the truck that had nearly run her over. Without it, she would never have come to know Robert or have given a relationship with him a chance. Once they were together, she couldn’t imagine herself with anyone else. They lay with arms and legs entwined as they listened to the beat of the rain on the roof. She had childishly imagined they would always be together that way. In her dreams, they would graduate in a couple of months, spend their summer together, and go to the local community college. She’d had other plans for bigger universities, but she was willing to put her dreams on hold for Robert.

  In the summer, everything changed.

  A rash of petty crimes throughout town had the citizens of Harriston on full alert. They locked their doors and loaded their guns, determined to do whatever it took to catch the anonymous troublemaker slashing tires, breaking into tool sheds, and setting fires. The first suspects were the people police knew to be hellions. Robert had served his share of detention and been caught out after curfew, but Rachel knew he didn’t have a criminal personality. He was her boyfriend and hero. She could see him as nothing less.

  When the police dogs began sniffing around Robert’s house, something changed inside him. He grew distant, talking less to Rachel and sometimes ending their dates early. Silence met any attempts to ask him what was wrong. He was beginning to withdraw. She had a feeling she knew why, but there was nothing she could do to stop it. Robert had lost interest in her.

  One night, as they sat in his truck on the edge of town, she thought about asking him if he still wanted to be with her. Rachel didn’t want to break up, but she knew what was coming. It would be better to get it over with instead of waiting and wondering where his mind was.

  Robert beat her to the punch. The cicadas were so loud outside that he had to roll up the windows so she could hear him talk. The cab of the truck was hot and stuffy. “Rachel, I know who they’re looking for.”

  The words came out of her mouth before she could think. “It doesn’t matter. I still love you. We can run away together.”

  “It’s my brother.” Robert wouldn’t look at her, preferring to stare through the windshield at a corn field instead. “He’s the one who’s been destroying things. He’s got issues, you know? I tried to talk to him, but he doesn’t want to listen to me. He won’t even tell me why he’s doing this.”

  Rachel’s mind raced as she looked for a solution. She felt awful knowing that Robert’s brother was in trouble. At least she knew more about the problem with Robert. He wasn’t unhappy with her; he was unhappy with his home life. “Have you talked to your parents? He’s still a minor. Maybe they can work something out with the police.”

  Her boyfriend shook his head. “They’ve been trying everything they can imagine. He’s done things like this before but not to such a degree. It’s only going to get worse from here on out. The cops think it’s me.”

  “You’ll have to turn him in, won’t you? You can’t take the fall for him. I know it’s only vandalism and petty theft, but you don’t deserve to have a criminal record.”

  Robert finally looked at her with sad blue eyes. “No, I don’t. But there’s no way for me to escape. You know how they are in this town, babe. If they suspect my brother or me, our family will always have a stigma attached to us.” He was right — everyone knew all the gossip about each other in a small town. “I’ve decided to join the military.”

  Rachel found it difficult to draw a breath. The air felt heavy in her lungs, and her body seemed unwilling to expel or inhale air. She rolled down her window despit
e the annoyance of noisy insects. “I’ll write to you. We can be together when you come back home.” Secretly, in the deepest part of her heart, she wanted Robert to ask her to marry him. He would still have to do basic training alone, but they could reunite wherever they stationed him. She hadn’t envisioned being an army wife as part of the future, but she would take what she could get.

  Robert squeezed her hand. “Rachel, that’s not fair to you. You deserve better than that. You’ve always deserved better than me.”

  “That’s not true.” She tried to protest further, but Robert lay a finger against her lips.

  “You and I can’t be together anymore. Don’t make me be mean about it.”

  Hot tears streamed down her face. “Make love to me one last time. Let me have that, at least.”

  “Don’t do that to me.” His hand gripped her so hard that she thought her fingers might break, but she didn’t want him to let go.

  “Please, Robert. I want you.”

  It didn’t matter that they were in a beat-up old truck in the middle of nowhere. Rachel didn’t want to let Robert go, but he was going to leave no matter what. She took what she could and kept part of him in her heart. He would leave, and someone else would have him. A stranger would feel the heat of his strong chest against her breasts, his hard cock between her thighs, and the safety of his arms around her.

  Robert didn’t belong to her anymore, and her world had shattered.

  Rachel blinked and shook her head to bring herself back to the present moment as Wrath stood nose to nose with Clayton. Her memories were part of a different lifetime. For a while it had felt like her life was over, but she had moved on as time passed. She went to the college she had chosen before Robert saved her. She had dated other men, loved them, and then lost them. There had been no reason to think about the boy she loved in high school. Someone told her that he had died in combat. Rachel shed a tear for him, but that had been years ago.

  Now he stood in front of her like Lazarus, breathing the same air she did.

  Chapter Nine

  Wrath sat back down and considered the idea of the consultant trying to bring the cyborgs back to Cyborg Sector. The easiest way to deal with the proposal was to kill Clayton. He wouldn’t have to listen to the human’s drivel or make any more decisions. He wanted to know what the other cyborgs thought about Clayton, but he was reluctant to look weak. Wrath knew their biochips were failing.

  The first problem the cyborgs had noticed with the biochips was their communication problems. Clayton might be telling the truth about one thing. It was possible there was an error in their locational system a year ago, leaving Cyborg Sector without a way to locate Green Squad. As the months went by, there were other instances when it became evident that their circuitry was breaking down.

  The cyborgs began to get headaches, which was an experience they had never had before. Some were minor, but others left the members of Green Squad writhing on the cave floor. The others were helpless; all they could do was wait and watch their comrades suffer. The pain eventually subsided, leaving each cyborg to wonder when it would be his turn.

  Wrath hadn’t missed the way Rachel looked at him as he spoke to Clayton. At first, she had been intimidated, just as he wanted.

  As his conversation continued, the look on the girl’s face began to change. Rachel still stared at him, but she no longer looked terrified. Now she gazed with intense interest, leaning forward like she wanted to get closer to him. She was no longer crying. Instead, the reporter curiously examined him.

  He growled to himself. A mere human shouldn’t unnerve him at all. It was bad enough to have the male try to convince him to return to Cyborg Sector and slavery, but the female had no right to affect his emotions. She parted her lips as though she were about to say something to him. He turned away before she could speak.

  The soldiers scattered throughout the cave watched him almost as closely as the humans did, waiting to see his next move. His first loyalty would always be to Green Squad, but it was becoming harder to make the correct decision. He knew how to work within the parameters of orders. Today he had little information. Wrath needed to get everything he could out of the human.

  “You said that there are some repairs you can do here,” he said skeptically, purposely keeping his back toward Rachel. “What are you capable of?”

  A drop of sweat ran down Clayton’s face. “Not much of anything. I only know what I’ve learned while observing the real scientists in the lab. They brought me in to help them figure out which parts of Cyborg Sector could consolidate and what they could shut down. I specialize in helping corporations downsize.” He sighed, his eyelids suddenly drooping with exhaustion. “I’ve watched some training videos. They’ve trained me to understand what’s going on with cyborgs in the middle of rehabilitation.”

  “What you’re saying,” Wrath replied slowly, allowing the words to roll around on his tongue, “is that you’re useless to us.” He twitched the fingers on his right hand impatiently.

  The consultant watched Wrath’s movement and stood up straight immediately. “I’m the opposite of useless. I can’t do much for your biochips, but I can serve as an effective mediator between you and Cyborg Sector. I can speak for you, letting them know your desires and requirements. You don’t have to have any other interactions with humans. They know me and won’t harm me.”

  Clayton’s words came faster now. His eyes darted around the room as if he could find a phrase that would convince the cyborg of his value. “Maybe we can make a deal with them. You can have them come here to perform some routine maintenance, and they can help you find a place to live. We can make it work for you.”

  Wrath glanced at his men and then back at Clayton. It would be asking a lot to put the lives of his brothers into the hands of this nervous human. “I don’t have any reason to trust you,” he snarled. “You’ve already lied to me about who you are and what you can do. Why should I believe you would ally yourself with us?”

  “Well, ah…” Clayton licked his lips apprehensively. “I didn’t mean to lie. But I know that nobody, especially someone like you, is going to give a shit about a consultant. My job is improving a company’s management skills.” He laughed quickly. It was a sound like dry leaves rubbing against each other. “It’s ridiculous that I’m even here.”

  “You aren’t answering my question!” Wrath roared, getting to his feet. He was becoming restless and found himself unable to sit in one position for long before it became uncomfortable. The cyborg knew his men could see his problem. The humans might sense it as well. He wanted straight, hard facts, and he wasn’t getting them. Playing guessing games with Clayton wasn’t helping. A pain jabbed at his skull just behind his ear and began to spread around his head. “I don’t care why they sent you. After spending some time with you, I wouldn’t be surprised if they sent you here hoping you’d die in the desert, either from the heat or by my gun. I asked you why I should trust you. The only thing you have shown me is that I can’t.”

  “I’m sorry.” Clayton had no idea what to say. “I’m nervous, and I don’t want to die.”

  With a minute flick of his wrist, Wrath started charging his plasma gun. A muffled thud inside his body indicated that the weapon’s safety protocols were disengaging. He felt a mildly intoxicating sensation as energy was rerouted from other parts of his body to supply the firearm. It was a gratifying feeling that he hadn’t experienced in a long time.

  Wrath had warned the other cyborgs to refrain from using their plasma guns unless necessary. They had plenty of ammunition for conventional weapons that wouldn’t call attention to them, unlike their built-in armaments. The terrorists had left behind rifles that did not create high-pitched squeals while charging or send out a ball of blue flames upon discharge. They also didn’t drain the cyborgs’ energy levels.

  When it came to dispatching Clayton, he needed something that would display the power of Green Squad to the humans. Rachel would be the only witness to cyborg s
uperiority, but Wrath would take whatever he could get. If necessary, he could eliminate both of them with two quick volleys from his gun and leave the bodies in a place easily accessible by Cyborg Sector. The corpses would keep them off Green Squad’s trail.

  Wrath waved the plasma gun in Clayton’s direction. He didn’t even need to aim carefully at such a close range. “I understand that you don’t want to die, but unfortunately I’m not confident you’ll survive a single shot.”

  “Don’t do it, Robert!”

  The woman’s scream seemed to use every bit of air in the cave. Wrath pivoted to see Rachel on her knees in the sand, one hand reaching out for him with her fingers spread apart. Wide green eyes implored him to listen. On another day, the sight would have made him more determined to take action.

  But there was something about Rachel that made him freeze in place. Wrath twisted his mouth in anger when his muscles refused to obey him. This human female had no right to give him orders or interrupt his plans. Her empty words should have encouraged him to pull the trigger instead of thoroughly stopping his proposals.

  “Who are you talking to?” he hissed.

  The shock of her bold interjection took over Rachel’s face as she sat back down. Her eyes became wider as she looked from Wrath to Clayton and back again. “I don’t want to see you kill anymore. I know you’re better than that, Robert.”

  “What did you call me?”

  Chapter Ten

  Time had slowed down for Rachel. She imagined that she could feel every atom in her body. Every fiber of muscle, every nerve ending, and every piece of her hair seemed to be alert and standing on end. She had never felt so alive but couldn’t believe the situation she found herself in was real. Her fingernails dug into the dusty earth underneath her as she tried to understand where she was and how she had gotten here. It didn’t feel like she had merely taken a plane to New Mexico and ridden in a van to her location.