by Cara Bristol
Except Illumina didn’t fly. She was lucky to be alive. Genetic and biomed info on Faria was scant, but it was common knowledge that removal of their wings resulted in fatal hemorrhage. Against the odds, she’d survived.
He strode toward her. Her eyes widened before she shuttered them behind a neutral expression. “May I join you?” he asked.
“You’re the boss.” She jutted her chin at a vacant chair.
Dale swung it around and straddled it.
She set down her fork.
“Eat,” he said. “Don’t let me stop you.”
“No, it’s all right.” She folded her hands in her lap.
“How are you getting along?” He tried not to stare at her plate. How could someone so small consume so much? Of course, she wasn’t eating now; he’d interrupted her meal.
“Fine.”
“Better than fine, I’d say. I heard you fixed Baby.”
“Baby?”
“That’s what we call the ZX7M.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s cranky.”
“Oh. That makes sense.”
“I wanted to thank you for an extraordinary job.” Mostly he wanted an excuse to seek her out.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
“My cyber team is top-notch, but we might never have discovered the shield virus.”
“You have to know what to look for.” She ducked her head, but not before a flash of luminescence lit up her cheeks.
“What did you look for?” No idle question. If a spacecraft had been infected with a shield virus, it could happen on another. All the techs had to be trained.
She looked up. Her face seemed to glow from within. “The only thing that was left. Your team had eliminated every other possibility.”
Simple enough, except his top cyber experts had been stumped for months. Even if her qualifications had been real, they wouldn’t add up to the sum of his team’s experience.
“How’s everything else? The barracks, the food—” he glanced at her plate and then scanned the mess hall. “Have you gotten to know any of the other employees?” Small groups of people were eating together, talking, laughing, but she’d chosen to sit alone.
Already ramrod straight, she stiffened further. “Do you always take such an interest in your workers?”
Friendliness and approachability encouraged crew members to bring problems to his attention. He couldn’t fix what he didn’t know about, and he much preferred dealing with small issues before they ballooned into crises. He would have commended Illumina for her contribution in any case, but more than positive employee relations had motivated him to seek her out. Truth? He had jumped at the chance to see her.
To touch her, to tangle his hands in her hair, to kiss…
Dale stood up and righted the chair. “I take an interest in my shop. I won’t keep you any longer. Enjoy the rest of your meal.” He stalked away. Employees waved and shouted greetings, and he stopped by their tables to chat for a bit. On his way out the door, he halted. He spun on his heel and went back to her table.
He bent his head to her ear and said in a low voice, “If you’re running from something, you’d be better served if you tried to blend in by joining the other workers for a meal, instead of sitting alone.” He strode out of the mess hall.
* * * *
Alarm ratatatted in her chest with a too-familiar beat. Illumina dragged in air and grabbed for calming thoughts. Don’t panic. Doubt isn’t the same as knowledge.
She’d learned that lesson well. There’d been suspicion about Alonio, but he’d erased the facts, and without concrete knowledge…well, here she was.
She pushed her plate away, appetite replaced by queasiness. Hunger had evaporated the instant she’d sensed the object of her obsession had entered the mess hall. She had a visual eidetic memory, and Dale’s image had burrowed into her mind, interrupting an already-fitful sleep with sexual dreams. Disturbing and inappropriate, but at least they crowded out the nightmares.
If she had one wish—beyond guaranteed safety—it would be a night of nothingness, to lay her head on the pillow and drift into the void until morning—or what passed for morning in a sublunar environment.
Way to go.
Only on Deceptio a week, already she’d screwed up the plan to avoid attention. She’d drawn her supervisor’s notice by whizzing through his little training program, fixed an “unfixable” spacecraft, and topped it all off by being rude to the big boss and furthering his suspicion.
Illumina studied her co-workers. She hadn’t meant to be standoffish, but the idea of engaging in conversation filled her with dread. The other workers would be curious, would ask where she’d come from, where she’d worked in the past—what could she say that wasn’t a lie? Every conversation led further into deception. Each lie provided another opportunity to trip up. She’d already proven how easy that was.
But Homme was right. Distance invited gossip, so she would do as he suggested and introduce herself to a tableful of employees and ask to join their group.
Tomorrow.
Tonight she would remain alone and figure out how to eradicate her growing attraction to her boss, who’d stirred out of dormancy a sexual awakening that compelled her to glance at his office dozens of times a day.
Personal contact with her employer would be crazy. Intimacy, disastrous. He wouldn’t physically harm her—although she sensed an edge in him—but he threatened her peace of mind, her self-defense plan. He distracted her from the vigilance required for survival. Deceptio was a mere pit stop on a destination-less journey. She would catch her bearings, build up her stamina, and then search for a new place to hide. She’d resigned herself to a life on the run, because it was the only way to elude Alonio. The longer she stayed in one location, the greater the likelihood he would find her, even if there was no record of Moonbeam’s existence, and Deceptio was charted as uninhabitable.
Temptation might have convinced her to scratch the itch while she regrouped and attempted to devise a plan, but the microprocessor in Homme’s brain made bodily contact fraught with risk. What if, in the heat of passion, she slipped into his mind? Integrated into his software? Altered him as easily as she’d rewritten the code in the ZX7M? It was unlikely, but it could happen. Even if she caused no damage, he would feel violated to have her inside his head, privy to the private data stored on his microprocessor. Her personal code of honor would not permit the violation.
She rubbed her temples. Among the rare sensate Faria, she’d been a prodigy, in a class of her own. Her ex, with much more modest abilities, wouldn’t have been able to find her so easily except he had an advantage. Their conjugal bond.
He’d been her husband, her lifemate.
Only in very few and unique instances did Farian law allow for dissolution. Their case had been one of the exceptions. After the attack, the marriage had been voided, but the law could not dissolve the psychic filaments giving him an edge in finding her. One by one, as she could bring the threads to awareness, she severed them, but she had no idea how many their bonding had forged or how many remained.
“You will always be mine. Till passing do us part.” How loving Alonio’s words had sounded—until she realized the danger bound to the vow. Until his growing mental instability and bursts of violence had led her to attempt to annul their union, until he caught her, until he sliced off her wings and left her for dead. Until he hunted her to fulfill his promise.
The threat would never cease. He’d proven it. He’d broken all his vows, except for the one. Till passing do us part.
But for now, at her temporary haven, she could rest, allow her body to finish healing, and figure out where to go next. She had to do everything she could to stay focused on staying alive. Getting involved with Dale Homme would not further that goal.
Who said anything about getting involved? Certainly not him. He’d never been anything but professional. The fire snaking its way through her veins originated in her alone. Homme had d
one nothing deliberate to kindle it, to encourage it, or, in fact, to indicate any mutuality. Her feeling that he observed her from his office lair was imagination, a fruitless fiction she conjured to fill the loneliness, soothe a longing for connection. Farias mated for life. Since she’d dissolved her marital union, there would likely be no other mate for her.
Lust fueled her desire for the cyborg. It stood to reason suppressed physical desires would seek an outlet. Any space station in a meteor shower. Except she hadn’t noticed a rise in temperature, the tingling and swelling in her feminine core, and the persistence of sexual fantasies until her path had crossed with Dale Homme.
She eyed the males eating in convivial groups. Should she wish to alleviate the problem, the chop shop offered a variety of species from which to choose—many handsome and virile males—and willing, if the glances they shot her way served as an indication. But their interest left her…uninterested.
Not so the one man she’d be wise to avoid. His deep voice and the way it rumbled through her was arousing enough, without the attraction of oddly appealing close-cropped bristly hair, the height and solidness of his muscled body, his confident posture, and how his size dominated the space—so different from Farian slenderness. Never could she have envisioned she’d be attracted to a part-machine, part-human. If anyone would have suggested it, she would have laughed.
Alonio could not match the cyborg’s brawn, but he possessed other assets to ensure he won any physical confrontation. She would not endanger her employer by putting him in a position of having to defend her—not that he would. It would not take a losing battle for her to be handed over to her murderous ex-lifemate, only a well-presented argument. She could not meet him without becoming hysterical, and he would argue his side of the “facts” in his calm, convincing way. Dale would believe him the way everyone else had.
She would leave Deceptio long before that happened.
Chapter Four
Dale surveyed his domain. Timers had dimmed the lighting to mimic evening, and the spaceships in various stages of teardown and reassembly formed hulking shadows on the floor. Unless slammed by an urgent deadline, he didn’t run a late shift, so the employees had long since retired.
As he should have. He couldn’t blame his insomnia on Baby. The craft had aced three more of Giorgio’s test flights, performing like there’d never been a problem. He should be sleeping like an infant himself, but he’d lain awake in his quarters. Finally, he’d admitted defeat and stomped to his office. If he couldn’t sleep, maybe he could work.
He’d been too antsy to do that either. Baby had provided a challenge, but not the flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants rush he’d gotten in Cy-Ops. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed the clandestine cyborg force until last year when his buddy Kai Andros had asked for help after a mission had soured. Though he no longer worked for Cy-Ops, Dale had piloted a shuttle onto the enemy’s space station and rescued Kai and his protectee, Mariska. It was the most fun he’d had since he retired as a covert operative. He’d felt alive.
Carter Aymes, Cy-Ops director, would hire him back in a heartbeat, but he couldn’t abandon the Moonbeam employees who depended on him. He’d worked damn hard to build a thriving clientele—no mean feat when you sometimes operated on the shady side of the law and couldn’t advertise your services. And it wasn’t like he wasn’t providing some do-gooder service to the galaxy. Carter had hit him up for specialized vehicles several times. So had various officials of various planets. Like the Xenian emperor.
Still, he missed the euphoria of Cy-Ops, the fear and excitement merging into one glorious, powerful rush, the satisfaction of making a positive difference in the galaxy, and the pride in knowing that he and his band of cyborg brothers and sisters did what few others could do. They achieved the impossible.
As a cyberoperative, he’d extracted many individuals from sticky situations.
How was he going to extract himself from the mire of his life?
And what was he going to do about Illumina, the real reason for his insomnia? Who was she? Why was she was here? She shouldn’t have been let anywhere near Baby until those questions had been answered. But she’d fixed the craft when no one else had been able to.
He’d taken a risk hiring someone with falsified credentials, but she intrigued him like no other woman ever had. She was a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma, to quote a legendary statesman. In the two weeks since she’d come on board, his preoccupation hadn’t lessened, it had grown. The conflict she aroused sent his body into war.
His head argued for dismissal.
His heart whispered to hold off.
The same gut that had urged him to hire her now clenched with suspicion.
His cock hadn’t swayed. It still wanted inside her.
A light flashed in the shop, and his groin tightened, sensing her presence before he detected her flowing silver hair. He’d met many beautiful women. Slept with some of them. None had provoked such a strong reaction. Why her?
And why was she wandering the shop at night?
All body parts reunified and sent his feet charging down the stairs.
* * * *
The bony protrusions where her wings used to be prickled with warning. Illumina spun around.
“What are you doing?” Dale’s gaze flicked from her to the door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. She willed herself not to glance at the Flight Control Center and focused on his face.
“Taking a walk. I couldn’t sleep.” Fortunately he’d caught her after she’d come out of Deceptio’s control room and not before.
“Is that so?” He loomed over her, and she tilted her head. His pupils dilated to obscure the green of his irises. A muscle twitched under his right eye.
“I’m not violating any rules, am I?” She clutched the lapels of her robe, resisting the temptation to let the garment slide off her shoulders. She’d given no thought to her dress—hadn’t known she’d needed to as the shop should have been deserted—but had grabbed the first item handy and fled her room as if her life depended on it.
Because it did.
“You tell me.” He folded his arms.
She couldn’t tell him that out of her first dreamless sleep in months, she’d bolted upright, wide awake, her heart pounding with a realization of Deceptio’s vulnerability. Its computer controlled the cloaking device that hid the landing strip on the moon’s surface and operated the descender that allowed ships and personnel to enter the plant. With the correct secret code, anyone could gain entry. She wasn’t safe at all! She was one hacked password away from capture.
“I decided to take a stroll,” she said.
She had sprinted to the computer control room, interfaced with the network, and changed the protocol to block outside access and program a failsafe. An employee on the inside would have to provide the passcode. If a login attempt occurred from off moon, the system would lock down the descender and sound an alarm. Next she amended Deceptio’s written operating procedures with the new instructions, sending a memo to the pilots and Flight Control as if the change had originated from Dale. The new protocol didn’t make Deceptio impenetrable but much more secure. Moonbeam personnel would know someone was trying to gain entry and could mount a defense.
If Dale had been aware of the vulnerability, he would have fixed it, but that didn’t mean he wanted her reprograming the computer without prior permission. If he learned the extent of her abilities, he’d be as likely to view her as a threat as an asset.
“Walk with me, then,” he said.
What choice did she have? He gestured, and she stepped into place beside him. Constructed of sound-absorbing material, the floor muted noise. It captured their footfalls, as well, allowing them to stride quietly through the shop. Low lighting transformed the spacecraft into dark metal beasts. Together they walked from the completed area containing three ships awaiting delivery through the manufacturing area with five craft in different stages and into the parts department. Programmi
ng, including her area, Diagnostics and Repair, was located in a different part of the sublunar building.
“So why couldn’t you sleep?” he asked.
“Why couldn’t you?” she countered.
“I was thinking…about you.”
“Me?” Her voice came out as a squeak. She cleared her throat. “What about me?”
“That’s the question. What about you, Illumina?” Her name in his rough voice sounded liked a caress. Her stomach fluttered, and that libidinous heat flooded her from the inside out. “Why are you here? What’s your story?”
“I-I needed a job. I don’t have a story.”
“Everybody has a story.”
“What’s yours, then?”
He didn’t speak for a long moment, and then he exhaled. “I’m a cyborg.”
Of course, she knew that but couldn’t say so. “Oh.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
Her shrug touched off a stab of pain between her shoulder blades. “I’m not,” she said, trying to stick as close to the truth as possible. “You’re different from most men.”
“I’m not sure if that’s a compliment.”
“Fishing?” Despite herself, she smiled. Surely he knew he stood a head above the others. He was a powerhouse of strength and brawn. Ropy thick sinews corded his arms. Muscles flexed in a chest so broad it strained his uniforms. The rocky surface of Deceptio couldn’t be any harder than his abs.
“Inquiring,” he said.
“You’re larger than most men I’ve known—bigger than anyone here, in fact. From what I’ve heard”—what she’d gleaned—“you possess a sharp mind.” She sensed a keen intelligence, human but cyber-enhanced. He was very perceptive. She would be smart to keep her distance.
“You flatter me,” he said.
