by Angel Payne
“Guess it doesn’t matter, right? Because Lani won’t care about getting your remains back. Shit, this won’t affect her at all. She’ll just move right along, like you did after Luna—”
“Franz!” Shay bellowed. “For fuck sake!”
“Stop.” Zoe screamed it at nearly the same time. Or thought she did. The sound wasn’t like anything she’d ever heard herself make before. It was desperate. Grieving. Pathetic. A world bursting in her heart, needing him—loving him—and no time to express it.
No more time before he left and risked it all with that madman.
How could they have no more time? They’d made an art form out of turning minutes into eternities…yet now they were filled with this dread. This pain. This hurt she’d never asked for.
On sobs she couldn’t hold in any longer, she pushed past them all, out of the room. Past the living room, she walked out onto the Italian stone patio, overlooking Rok’s Fantasy Island of a pool area. Five different rock waterfalls cascaded into a curving pool, with the middle waterfall serving as a “curtain” to a swim-up bar connected directly to the wine cave.
She could use half the cave’s inventory.
She settled for stumbling across an arching stone bridge, onto a round island that extended into the far end of the pool. It was the perfect retreat, dark and solitary, especially because the majority of the island was a padded bed with a lot of pillows that screamed go ahead, bawl on me. Their only downfall was their colors. Gold, tangerine, red. She blinked hard, wishing for Samantha Stevens’ powers to simply change everything into graveyard grays, browns, and black. Sí. Shitloads of black.
Forget it. She was almost too blind to care anymore, anyway. Letting the tears blast her senses as hard and fast as they wanted, she fell onto the mattress and instantly hauled three of the pillows close, wrapping her trembling body around them.
She tried to laugh it off, to tell herself she looked as lame as a fifteen year-old counting the hours until her boyfriend left for camp, but that washed as long as it took for her to look back through the glass at the living room and view everyone’s rifles lined up against the couch, clean and shiny and ready for action.
This wasn’t lame. Or adolescent. It was the reality of realizing that she’d fallen in love with the wholeness of a woman’s mind, heart, and soul, and now faced the grown-up pain of accepting the more-than-decent chance she’d lose it.
In less than ten hours.
She grabbed another pillow and stuffed it against her face, hating the ache that weighed on her chest and the effort of pulling in every breath.
Nothing changed when long, strong fingers pried that pillow away. Then the one below that. And all the others, too, until her arms were empty…but only for a moment. After he tossed the pillows aside, Shay replaced their weight with his. He was everywhere, beautiful and huge and warm and solid, pulling her even closer, tangling their legs into each other. It was impossible not to breathe him in, his forest spice blending with the wildflowers on the desert wind, enticing her even closer…but Zoe froze. Locked down. How could she give any more when he was about to take it all away?
There was only one answer.
“I can’t.” Her rasp was a desperate sough into his chest. “I can’t, Shay…I can’t, I can’t…oh Dios, I can’t…”
“But you already have.” His declaration was even softer than hers, given as he tracked her tears with his lips before ending at hers and taking her in a kiss that felt like a prayer. “And I already have, too, my beautiful, tiny dancer.”
Her heart skidded to a stop. She jerked her face up to meet his gaze, glowing with molten shadows that confirmed so much without having to say the words. Oh Dios, if he said the actual words, she’d shatter like one of Rok’s Limoges vases. It meant enough—the whole damn world—simply to see it in his eyes. “Shay…”
“Ssshhh.” He kissed more fervently at the moisture on her face. “Baby girl, listen to me. Franz…he feels like crap. He didn’t mean to freak you out.”
“You don’t say.” It was working as the go-to sarcasm for the evening.
“The guy has substance for his weird willies, okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“After Luna died, they activated Tait back to the unit prematurely. He fucked up the coordinates on a kill shot—bad. One of our guys almost bought the farm for it.”
“Ay Dios mio,” she uttered.
“No shit,” he commiserated. “The whole thing happened on Franz’s watch, so needless to say, he’s a little freaked about Tait tagging on an op that’s going to involve a lot of fluidity—and stress.” His jaw firmed and his eyes warmed. “But I’ve been talking to my brother a lot over the last two days, Zoe. I heard all about the training he endured for this new Sharks program. The ‘H’ in their acronym, SHRC, is for ‘hostile’—and they mean it. He’s gotten smarter and tougher in his training for the team, so he’s ready, in every way, to end this shit with Adler. And so am I.”
Zoe let her hands flatten against his chest. She could feel his heart thudding through his T-shirt, and she wished she could save every miraculous beat into the pads of her fingers. It made her response even harder to get out. “But at what cost? To perhaps both of you?”
Shay breathed slowly in. Then out. He dipped his head in order to fully meet her gaze again. Oh, hell. His eyes were brilliant with the solid gold of his inner Dom now. Sure enough, his next words were a quiet but definite command.
“Listen to me well, baby girl. I’m not going to die. Neither is Tait. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Sir,” she whispered.
“Then look at me again, so I know.”
Zoe slipped her hands up to frame the sides of his face. They were set in such determination, her thumbs and forefingers formed ninety-degree angles. “You take my breath away, Shay Bommer.”
A slow grin, full of a devil’s mirth and a satyr’s sensuality, curled the edges of his lips. “Well, not yet, tiny dancer.”
She let him lean in, settling his mouth over hers in a tender yet carnal exploration, filled with teasing stabs of his tongue that soon had her sighing into him, wordlessly begging for more. She raised her hands and pushed them into his thick hair, savoring the honeysuckle on the wind that sifted through the strands along with her fingers.
Shay groaned as she pushed her hips up against his, parting her legs at the same time. He roamed his hands over her breasts, pulling at her nipples through her bra, as they opened their mouths and mated tongues in unbridled passion.
“I need you.” She finally dragged her mouth away long enough to plead it. “Being with me…merging with me…”
“Yeah.” He filled it in, again taking the pressure of the words away from her. “Yeah, baby girl.” After fitting his mouth even harder over hers, he reared up on his knees, trailing a hand over the simple bathing suit cover-up in which she’d left the Vdara. “Let me see you, dancer. All of you.”
By the time she was fully nude, he was, too. Zoe lowered back down, making sure there were pillows behind her head so she could simply gawk at him in a long moment of greedy delight. His shoulders were broad as a linebacker’s and sculpted with equal care, sloping flawlessly down into his biceps and triceps. His pecs, the part of him her fingers always craved to explore the most, were a matched set of gleaming, oh-my-God perfection. Two more rippled rows defined his abdomen, but they were no decent preparation for the molded steel of his thighs—and the shaft that extended, massive and equally muscled, from their juncture.
Her breath snagged and she was certain he’d heard it. She was also certain she saw the edgy tic fire away in his jaw.
“Shay?” she prodded.
He smiled a little but the look seemed forced. “Yeah, baby girl?”
She sat up, deliberately taking him by the balls with one hand and his dark purple crown with the other. As she moved her hands toward each other, exploring every ridge and vein in his glorious cock as she did, she told him, “I don’t give a s
hit if you got shafted by a gamma ray, or gnawed by a spider, or probed by an alien to make you this way. I’m just damn glad you are.”
Looking like the cat who’d just devoured the canary, Shay impaled her with a heated stare and pushed her back into the bed. This time, his knees shunted hers apart—landing the pulsing head of his sex at the needy wet lips of hers.
“Probed by an alien?” He hunkered his brows while giving her lips a couple of fierce bites. “I should ‘probe’ you brutally for that, earth female.”
“Oh, yes.” She smiled and kissed him back. “You definitely should.”
As Shay lunged his length all the way into her pulsing core, Zoe cried out in a perfect mix of pain and pleasure. Her heart tumbled end over end. She let her head fall back, giving in to the heaven of letting this man fill her, fuck her…love her.
She was fifteen again. Alive only for the moment again. Desperately seizing every second that passed, working with Shay to stretch it into an eternity for the ages, filed under the heading of Magic.
They’d make it count—because they had to. Because they always did.
Because they always would.
Please God…because they always would.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Be safe.”
“Or die trying.”
Shay allowed himself a thin smile as Hawk and Zsycho uttered the final words before the team went radio silent. He wove the gritted comfort of them into his muscles, using the strength to maintain his stance in the middle of what seemed an abandoned mining camp. Fast glances, using only his periphery, confirmed the intel that Double-O was able to knit up about this place. Four buildings from the mid-1800’s. One freshly built structure, which Ghid confirmed as Mom’s sterile lab and a quarantine room if they ever needed it. There also seemed to be a newly seeded athletic field, and a picnic pavilion under construction. Ghid had told them about all that, too. Many of the guys hadn’t been outside in years. The chance to work in the sunshine—or even the rain and the snow—was paradise to them.
Shay cued up a vision of his own heaven, girding his mind and soul with it in this eerie moment filled only with his breath and the wind. Her indigo eyes, thick with passion. Her exotic lips, parted on her climax. Her open arms and burnished nudity, given so fully and beautifully to him.
He’d know that heaven again. Soon. He swore it with every fiber of his being.
I’m not going to die, dancer. Neither is Tait. Understood?
Her answering smile spread across his mind like a rainbow, helping him brace against the November wind that gashed down again from the mountains. It was a double scythe on this plain, gusting from the ranges on both sides then converging into a blade straight down the camp’s main road to cut through every layer of his head to toe white Gore-Tex.
White. Shit. While he understood Homer’s mandate, he fucking hated it. The white made it impossible for him to blend with any of the landscape around here. On the other hand, it made him look like goddamn Storm Shadow—not his favorite GI Joe on the planet, if that’s what they even considered the guy. He’d take Duke Hauser any day. Duke would refuse to go into an op in white anything, except his BVDs.
Sorry, Duke…but I’m doing this for a cause higher than you or me.
The wind whipped up again. Shay would’ve raised a middle finger to the mountains in retaliation but he was damn grateful for those cliffs right now. They’d made it possible for the team to bribe a Grand Canyon sky tour pilot into changing up his course by a few miles then letting them gang-bang it out in a jump that had Hawk and Zeke instantly begging for a do-over once they’d all gathered their chutes. Hours of crossed fingers had followed the jump, everyone hoping that Homer and his band of merry men didn’t have radar sophisticated enough to notice their “creative” in-fil to the area. Since everything went smoothly when Shay met Homer’s driver-cum-henchman at the front entrance of The Bellagio, climbing into the town car just as the crowd ooo’ed and ahhh’ed at the first morning performance of the hotel’s famous fountains, the group paused for a small but short celebration over the radio. First hurdle cleared.
By that point, Franz had led the team over miles of harsh terrain, still with a few left to go before they could rest in their ready positions for this exact moment.
The meeting they’d been preparing for.
Shay swallowed in an attempt to re-wet his throat. Briefly wiggled the tips of his fingers, though he had no gun or knife to reach for. Homer’s instructions were specific. He came alone in the town car. He wore the damn ninja outfit and nothing else.
He only thanked fucking fate that the driver goon was an amateur. Though the ape had been thorough about the frisking shit back at the Bellagio, he never thought to scrape Shay’s ears for comm pieces. Didn’t really matter since Double-O had insisted on supergluing a backup piece straight onto his scalp, then securing it by winding his hair around the base. That process had been as comfortable as a root canal.
“I’ve got eyes on I-Man.” The voice, down to a whisper, was Ethan. “Repeat, eyes on I-Man but nobody else.”
“Check,” Zeke responded. “Nothing from our bird’s nest, eith—wait. Cocksucker at two o’clock.”
“Check,” Hawk growled. “I’ve got him too, Zsycho.”
Shay appreciated the confirmations but they weren’t necessary. From the second Homer stepped out onto the packed dirt avenue, thinning hair blowing against his craggy cheeks and haphazard beard, Shay’s gut constricted as if a fully-armed hostile had emerged. Homer wasn’t dressed in a traditional payraan tumbaan, though. Beneath his thick bulletproof vest was a black turtleneck that topped khaki pants and rugged terrain boots. He seemed a harmless cross between Gilligan’s Professor and Jeremiah Johnson. But Shay would be damned or dead if he believed that for a second.
As Homer got closer, Shay noticed more movements from the doorways of the old wood buildings. The new arrivals were a lot more what he was used to: younger men dressed in camos or black battle gear, armed and tense as hell. But closer scrutiny showed him newer details…much more revealing information. One of the men had Ghid’s missing rhino horn—sprouting from the center of his forehead. Another had bear claws in place of hands. And they all glared at him like the one guy who’d been taking a leak when the IED hit their truck.
“Shay.” Homer rushed through his last few steps before giving a hug like a doting grandfather coming to visit. The bastard smelled like one, too. Old mints, bad hair gel, halitosis that gave new meaning to the term coffee breath…the list went on but fortunately the man let him go. “Welcome back. As you can see, your brothers are happy to see you.”
Shay didn’t bother to point out the obvious, that the statement couldn’t be farther from the truth. These men felt no kinship with him, despite the fact that his side of the return-to-papa terms had been the granting of their freedom, including the deliverance of Oliver, Nika, and Damian from the A-51 facility. But Shay didn’t blame them for being suspicious of the dream. He would be, too.
“Let’s get on with it.” He didn’t bother inflecting the words one way or the other. “One way” would’ve encompassed his rage, “the other” his revulsion. Homer didn’t give a flying crap about either. “Where’s Mom?”
The words seemed to hit Homer like an insult. “Why are you being so nasty?”
Shay curled his hands into dual fists. “I didn’t know nice was part of your terms, asshole. Awww, damn,” —he knocked one fist against his thigh in oh-shucks emphasis— “guess you missed out on asking for that one. And forgive me for not floating you a freebie. When a guy knows he’s returning to the life of a goddamn lab rat, the happy dance gets scooted to the bottom of the priorities list.”
Homer expelled a long sigh, again pulling the Grandpa Joe card. “It troubles me to hear you say that.”
“Fuck. So sorry. Oh, wait. ‘Troubling Homer.’ That one’s on the bottom of the list, too.”
The man pushed back the graying mop of his hair before grabbing Sha
y by both elbows. “Don’t you understand this, Shay? Don’t you see? You’re the one, my boy—my perfect example that the serum can work without any hideous side effects. And it was because you used it as a boy. I’m certain of it!” His features turned gruel gray as anger fulminated across them. “I was certain of it all those years ago, Shay—but your mother wouldn’t listen. Even though the evidence clearly pointed to it, she refused to use children as test subjects.”
Shay glowered. “No shit. Imagine that.”
He might as well have farted for the effect it had on Homer’s royal roll. “We’re going to figure it out now, Shay—together.” He lifted a hand to Shay’s face. “You’re the key. You’re—you’re amazing.”
Shay twisted his head away. “I’m just me, dammit. And I just want to stay me, as one piece, not chopped up into tissue samples for petri dishes.”
The man rushed at him again. “That’s not your complete truth, boy, and you know it.” He seized the front of Shay’s vest in order to jerk him closer. “You’ve been wondering, too, Shay. You can’t stare me straight in the face and tell me that you don’t want to find out the truth about that magic pumping in your veins.”
The snakes of revulsion and rage coiled tighter together in Shay’s gut—because the fucker was right. Questions about all of this were now the subconscious demons that jolted him awake at night, the empty rooms his soul roamed in its quest toward defining who the hell he was anymore.
He’d fallen in love. And he was pretty damn certain Zoe felt the same. But had she fallen in love with him…or merely the beasts who roamed in his blood?
He needed to know—
“But not like this.” The conclusion ripped from him in a snarl as he pushed back again from Homer. “Don’t you see, Homer? We can’t do it like this!”
For one moment, just one, it seemed as if the man heard him—and understood. That was before Homer shook his head with a resigned slowness and murmured, “There is no other way, my boy. You’ll see that we’ll find the answers fast. And then the fun part will begin, and won’t you like that?”
