Liberation's Kiss: A Science Fiction Romance (Robotics Faction Book 1)

by Wendy Lynn Clark

  Well, Cressida did like the sealotter’s soft fluff and the goofy grin. The plush was much less scary than the actual animal, which was the size of a commuter shuttle and swam the oceans sucking everything into its ginormous mouth and filtering it out gills in the side of its blind head. But she hadn’t had enough time to get attached. “It’s okay. We can share.”

  Her little sister still hesitated.

  Cressida mooshed it against her. “Go on. Squeeze.”

  Mercury’s small hands grasped the plush tight. “Then what will you squeeze?”

  “When I want to squeeze”—she put her arms around Mercury and hugged with all her might—“I’ll just squeeze you both.”

  Mercury squealed.

  “Double squeeze!” Cressida cried.

  “Double squeeze,” Mercury repeated, giggling.

  Her brother’s ropey arms swept around the two of them. “Triple squeeze!”

  Cressida felt herself crushed between her brother and her sister, sandwiched perfectly between them, exactly where she belonged.

  ~*~*~*~

  Cressida awoke with tears in her throat.

  The memory was so vivid. She had been so grateful to be in that place, with her whole family together and everything forgiven, that waking up now, here, alone, as an adult, hurt. She just wanted to go back. She wanted to go back. But that couldn’t happen no matter how hard she wished it.

  She sighed and wiped at her eyes.

  Navidi’s second moon, Alefar, shone like yellow-green cheese through the distant windows.

  She stretched slowly on the bed. The plump mattress was just as full and thick as she had always imagined, ever since she’d first learned of its existence and eagerly, then jadedly, awaited the general’s invitation to visit. She rolled over.

  Xan rested on the bed, his dark head against the backboard, arms crossed over his wide chest, legs long atop the sheets. His eyes were closed, breathing regular.

  Was he sleeping?

  She shifted closer. He had obeyed her order not to be within arm’s reach, although apparently she should have instructed him not to sleep in her bed either. Perhaps androids did need to sleep. Strange.

  She didn’t know much about robots. Unlike her sister, she had been more interested in her alarm pet’s cheerful recitation of her daily itinerary than in rewiring its vocal chords to speak in a helium pitch.

  Her throat closed.

  Xan’s aquiline features were so smooth and beautiful, perfectly formed for masculine perfection. Even the scar at his forehead only made him look more like a rough-and-tumble guy. Why was he helping her? What did he mean that his assignment had changed after he’d met her? Did he really intend to take her off planet, and if so, what would happen then?

  Why did he keep trying to kiss her?

  Her belly heated, needing only the tiniest whisper to awaken the ember. How easy it would be to go to him and tumble into his arms. His lean masculine power, squeezing her against him, teaching her about her own inner wildness. Giving in to her secret desires, clinging to him as he rocked her over the edge of passion. Earlier today, his teeth nibbling on her jaw—

  She squeezed her knees together, trying to force the throbbing ache down. If only he were an ordinary man.

  Then, of course, he’d be long dead by now, and her with him.

  She would rather stay on this isolated island for a hundred years than face one more second of the terror she’d experienced in the last three days. But staying here wasn’t an option any more than hiding under the bed had been one.

  Look at what had happened to her old bed.

  ~*~*~*~

  When Cressida awoke again, gentle light flickered through the windblown palms and cast sleepy shadows across the empty sheets beside her.

  She rose and stretched. A bird of paradise trilled. Her stomach growled.

  She scooted out of bed, sliding from the thick, rumpled sheets down to the polished wood, and padded to the closet. Several different types of outfits hung from antique hooks, most of them optimized for her size range. Well, she’d always known she was the general’s type. She slid into a morning robe, fastened the belts, and walked down the stairs as the clothing stretched and shrank to fit her body.

  Cressida ate a breakfast of creamy fried banana cakes with date muffins and sliced fruit glace. Then she ordered seconds of everything. It had only been three days of starvation. Would she never be full again?

  She put away her dishes—tidy, tidy—and stepped out on the back terrace.

  Decking led to mossy steps in the soft forest floor. She waded through a crowd of purple butterfly-catchers, ducked beneath a curtained fig tree, and emerged in a sheltered lagoon. Green water lapped against silver rocks, gently rocked by a tinkling waterfall. Paradise birds tempted brassy fish and harried the gentle hellbenders and smaller mudpuppies paddling below the shadows of the rocks. She dipped a toe into the liquid. Warm and gently fizzy on her skin.

  Well, there was no posted sign warning her off of swimming…

  She undid her robe and glided gently into the center of the pool. The water slid up around her legs and armpits, into her unfamiliar places. Home bathing was restricted to mist showers or reclaimed orbital standing baths that swished cleansers around her in a claustrophobia-inducing tube. Nothing like the natural luxury of this freedom. She flipped over on her back and stared at the sky. Overhead, the wind whipped the trees, but here remained a pocket of calm.

  Somewhere up there, in the almost-visible stars, were her parents.

  Also somewhere up there were the Robotics Faction’s satellites.

  She ducked beneath the water, feeling the bubbles tingle on her skin. Once, she had believed all robots to be her guardians, like a child looking up to familiar uncles. Among the many things, she longed for that naiveté again.

  Then, perhaps, she could allow her feelings for the one android who seemed too infuriatingly human.

  When she surfaced, Xan was striding down the path. Her chest lifted, bubbling up like the water. She took a deep breath to calm it, and the added buoyancy floated her breasts almost to the nipple.

  He stopped at the edge of the lagoon, angling his body to keep the house and beach path in view. Her personal guardian, naturally attuned to danger. A new flight suit stretched tight across his rugged body, like he had selected a broken one and couldn’t get it to trigger to match his size.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked, hoping it sounded like a question and not a lonely demand.

  He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Down at the beach, scoping out our exit options.”

  “Flagging down a passing ship?”

  “Sticking out my thumb.” He set his feet, as powerful an image of a man as the first miners, the founders who had ventured to this moon and planted the first operations. “See if anyone takes a damn bite.”

  The question lingering in the back of her mind moved forward. She floated toward him, disturbing a flock of paddlers and scattering them around her. “Why do you swear?”

  He cupped the back of his neck. A smile started on his lips, boyish, and he looked up at her from under his brows. “Is it a problem? I could stop.”

  “No, I just find it a little strange. Sentries use polite language and servos use only preprogrammed sentences. This linguistic choice isn’t a product of the way you’re raised.”

  “It kind of is.” He found a spot to hunker down and leaned his back against a rough palm trunk. “I’m an x-class, ninety-eight subclass, type four. The ninety-eight stands for human conciliation, and type four operates best in groups. They fed me a steady diet of soldier flicks and team-sport real-time vids and then simmed me into both. My graduate work was to go to a military bar with a human wingman and pick up chicks.”

  She tried not to eye him skeptically.

  He shifted. “What?”

  “Did they grade your performance?”

  “Yeah.”

  Okay, now she tried not to feel the immediate stab of irri
tation, flushing through her system. She dove beneath the water, swimming in the bubbles, thrashing to keep the snarky questions from boiling up. How well had he performed? Was he trying to get in a practice session with her? Or was he going for an A+ performance? She surfaced and breathed steadily at the sky. There were bigger problems for her to deal with today. This was stupid. And not worth her time.

  “Hey,” he called out from the shore.

  She ignored him, swishing around the gorgeous lagoon.

  “Why does that upset you?”

  “It doesn’t,” she said. The words echoed in her ears.

  “I think it does.”

  “I think it doesn’t,” she said, her voice rising in sing-song.

  “Your heart rate is elevated, your body is tensed, you’re avoiding eye contact, and you’re—”

  “Okay!” She splashed upright, the water draining off her like her dignity. “All right, I’m a little upset.”

  The intensity in his gaze burned, smoke rimmed with green fire. “Why?”

  Her cheeks heated. She felt even stupider, even as her belly clenched. She gripped her elbows, bobbing lower in the lagoon. “I’m just— I’m— It’s nothing, so forget it.”

  “Not gonna happen.”

  She rubbed her forehead, striving for the calmness that a discussion about education ought to be. How dumb to have thought she was in somehow special to this metal-plated specimen of male sex. “Anyway, so, you slept with some women.”

  “No,” he corrected. “The assignment was to ask them to go to a hotel. If they say yes and walk into the lobby, you pass.”

  Strange, the sensation of hesitant relief that flowed into her. “So you didn’t sleep with them?”

  His brows folded. “Why would I?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not the assignment.”

  “And you never do anything outside the assignment,” she said sarcastically.

  “Not until three days ago, no.”

  She bit her lip.

  He tilted his head. “What’s your real question?”

  Apparently the human-conciliatory type meant mind reader. She gritted her teeth to ask the question she really did want to ask. “Have you ever slept with anyone?”

  “No.”

  “No one at all?”

  “Androids don’t have biological desires.”

  She floated in the pool. Could she believe him? Her body cried out its refusal. He had done a heck of a job convincing her otherwise these past few days.

  “Look. When would I have had the time?” He laid out his palm. “I finished my training and got stuffed into cold storage. I woke in isolation, came to this moon, and here I am, still trying to figure out what the hell is going on.” He hesitated. “What?”

  Okay, then. If he was being honest.... She sucked in a breath. “Then why do you keep trying to sleep with me?”

  He looked away.

  She felt the coldness across the water. “Never mind.”

  “No, wait.”

  She swam to the shore, told him to look away, and pulled herself out. The gentlest breeze dried her, and she refastened her robe, feeling its perfect silk against her skin.

  “Cressida.”

  She didn’t want to hear his answer.

  He caught her ankle. A gentle arrest, a palm around her, pleading with her not to go. “I upset you when I said this before, but the truth is, I don’t know. It’s not part of any assignment. I don’t understand it.”

  Assignments again. She turned to him. “Normally, you have to do what you’re assigned. You said that changed when you met me. Why?”

  He fixed her with hard, stone eyes. “Will you sit down?”

  She stepped back, jerking her ankle away.

  He studied his empty hand, dropped it in his lap, and turned to the hellbenders swimming patterns in the water. “If you leave partway through my explanation, you’ll get an incomplete understanding, and then you’ll feel much worse.”

  “I won’t leave.”

  He raised a brow.

  She put her fists on her hips. “I won’t.”

  He sighed. “In the diplomatic residential courtyard, I got accosted and reprogrammed. A rogue female disconnected me from the Faction and removed the impetus for completing my assignment.”

  A cold ball formed in her belly. “So the only reason you’re not trying to kill me right now is because that rogue woman stopped you less than fifty feet from my bedroom and installed another program?”

  He nodded.

  “Then what if you get reconnected to the network? Suddenly you want to kill me again?”

  “Well—”

  “Or what if she installed a program that executes on a delay?” She heard her voice rising, but the cold seeping into her bones caused such a trembling she felt like she was under the overpass all over again, staring at the sudden shock of metal just after she had thought he was safe. “You’re like a grenade that could go off at any time! How can you sit here like nothing is wrong?”

  “Are you going to run?” he asked quietly.

  She realized she’d already taken several steps away. She wavered, the historical instinct to run fighting the impulse to trust, just a little longer, that it was all a mistake. That there was something more.

  This was Xan. She needed to trust him.

  She retraced her steps until she was standing before him. “No.”

  His jaw clenched. “I’m sorry.”

  “Just explain so I can feel safe again,” she said. “Are you not a grenade?”

  He scratched his head, a rueful smile curving his lips. “Honestly? I don’t know.”

  She hugged herself. “That doesn’t make me feel better.”

  He flashed to her and sobered. “I don’t know who installed the other program, so I don’t know her intentions. I don’t even know if she’s human. The Faction will deconstruct the code when they disassemble me completely.”

  She swallowed. “Disassemble?”

  “That is the usual consequence for an android that goes off assignment.”

  She knelt at his feet. “But it wasn’t your fault.”

  His brows drew together. “What does fault have to do with anything?”

  She sat back on her heels.

  “I don’t really care either way.” He cupped the back of his neck. “It’s not like I have a biological imperative forcing me to stay alive and transmit my genes. Up until a day ago, I, like all of my brethren, had only one imperative: to enact the will of the Faction. And now…”

  He released his hold and filled his eyes with her. His expression changed to awe, almost pleading, and his voice turned raw, as if she could answer his questions.

  “What is it about you that makes me so fucking compelled to hold you?”

  His question stole her breath.

  He shook his head. “Even now, when you distrust and fear me, I just want to yank you into my arms and squeeze you until your eyes glaze with pleasure and your breath comes in gasps. It’s not an assignment. It’s not the will of the Faction. I just want you. I want to memorize every single molecule, from the inside to the outside, from the chemical bond to the neuro-physical configuration, so that I could be your resurrect if you needed it.” He smacked his arms. “It feels like burning under my skin, but when I query my dermal receptors, they report nothing but ambient temperature. I don’t understand these sensations. I need you.”

  The words set her on fire. He was as lost and confused by these feelings as she was, and he would suffer just as greatly if the Robotics Faction caught them. Android and human, they were the same.

  And he wanted her. Just like she wanted him.

  Her body throbbed.

  He stared at his hands. Then, he opened them wide, as though he were attempting to release his feelings for her. He frowned at the open palms and closed his hands again.

  She shifted closer. Terrified to give in, unable to keep him at a safe distance with his confession. “So, even now, you wan
t to touch me?”

  He focused on her. “Even now.”

  She licked her lips. “And you can’t control it?”

  “It’s pulsing in my hands, under my skin, in my cock. But”—he took a deep breath—“I promise to keep my distance. More than any desire of mine, I want only to give you pleasure.”

  She was having trouble thinking. Her body pulsed on its own rhythm. “Physical pleasure?”

  His fingers whispered across her cheekbones. “Every kind.”

  She sucked in a breath. It would be so easy for her to let herself go again, as she almost had at the breakfast bar yesterday. His rippling biceps encircling her, skillful cupping her heavy breasts and bringing her to sharp aching points as he squeezed her nipples, drove her fantasies. She had been so close to bending over the bar and asking him to make her forget everything in his demanding possession.

  But what was she thinking? The Robotics Faction wouldn’t forget her for a moment. She couldn’t give in to weakness.

  She tucked a ticklish lock of hair behind her ear. Her whole body tingled. “It’s not that I don’t like you, um, touching me.”

  He focused on her intently. “No?”

  “Well”—she tucked in the lock of hair again, even though it was already tucked—“you kind of said that you intended to cut me open, and let’s just say it’s a hard image to forget.”

  He blinked. “Wait. What?”

  “You said that you were going to find out what was wrong with me no matter what.” Why did he look so surprised? Had she hallucinated when he’d said that? “You said it when you told me to decide whether to go with you or stay behind.”

  “That’s because we want to know why the Faction is trying to kill you. If we can’t figure it out by other tests, exploratory surgery might hold answers.”

  “You didn’t say exploratory surgery,” she accused. “You said you would cut me open.”

  “What are you thinking? I would come at you with a knife?” He shook his head, his denial frayed with hurt. Her fear hurt him. “You really think I would do that?”

  She cupped her elbows. “You’re the one who said you’d kill me if you have to.”

  “I keep telling you that the easiest way to do that would be to just turn you over to the other x-class. Instead, I’m doing everything in my power to keep you alive. Why can’t you trust me?”