by Elsa Jade
He seemed ready to forge a new path. With hands and tongue that sparked her nerves and heated her blood to molten metal, he was a six-foot-plus soldering iron and she was purest flux, binding…something, she didn’t know.
Shedding the last of her clothes, she clutched at him. “Come here,” she gasped.
Lifting himself over her, he grasped her wrists and pinned them above her head, stretching her. His gray eyes glinted. “I’m right here. Not going anywhere.”
That’s what they all said. Until they left. Impatient, she squirmed against him. “Still too far,” she complained, splaying her knees. “Missing it by a country mile.”
With a huff of amusement, he nudged his belly up against her core. “A country mile isn’t so far, comparatively.”
Feeling around with her fingers over her head, she found the crinkly foil. She flicked the condom party pack toward him. “Then let’s go, cowboy. Take me for a ride.”
Chapter 4
With his pulse racing so fast, Delta knew his nanites must be shining in full display. On a transgalactically connected planet, the sight of that silver glow would send shockwaves of fear and horror through the populace, knowing they’d been invaded by lethal shrouds. But here was the queen of her own tiny realm, inviting him with open arms.
And parted legs. He sucked in a sharp breath, and the force of his circulatory system going round and round was powerful enough to smash particles.
He’d already admired the aesthetics of her, the same as he was entranced by the yurk—a fierce and mighty creature, self-contained and supremely at home in her own skin. Like him, the yurk had been designed and bred for a war she’d never asked for, but on Earth, unlike the rest of the matrix, she reveled in her new freedom with no fear of what tomorrow might bring. Lindy too would never sacrifice the pleasures of today for fear of tomorrow. Both females would spread their wings and take to the sky to defend what was theirs…and to glory in the moment.
As a Delta shroud, he’d never had a choice or a chance to live. To the shroud matrix, he’d only ever been a useful distraction or adjunct, a tiny cog in a deadly machine. But centering himself along the axis of Lindy’s body gave a new direction to his existence that had always seemed lost in the empty oblivion of space. At this moment, with her, he could be more: a source of pleasure, release, solace. Oh, he’d come very far indeed.
Angling himself between her legs, with one hand he opened the condom packet (and thank the many invisible and semi-incorporeal religious entities of this planet for romance novels, or this moment would’ve been very confusing) and diligently sheathed himself (also, curse the callous, indifferent, anonymous consortium who had designed him for death, without the programming or proportions for procreation; the romance novels hadn’t given him exact calculations, but he could extrapolate where he was lacking) all the while his synapses, both organic and synthetic, firing off the best-case scenarios for making her want him, not just tonight but for as long as this yellow sun burned.
With his other hand, he ruffled between the curls of hair—colored like fresh-cut iron but silky—and parted the outer lips of her sex, unfurling the fleshy wings within. Atop those, he knew he’d find the real treasure.
He dipped his head between her thighs, inhaling the musky aroma her arousal. That perfume reached deep past his programming into the core of his organic self, like the wild calls of the wolves he heard echoing across the valley on some dark nights. He wanted to roar too, a victory cry that despite all that had been done to him, there was some part of him that the engineers and programmers and cruel beings who’d made the killer had not touched.
Only Lindy touched him now.
How could he make her want him? When he’d been in town, getting his library books, he’d gone through the archived newspapers and found the announcement of her wedding. Her wife Amber had been smaller than him, of course, but also smaller than Lindy herself. Not delicate exactly, but lean and edged and colored with the rich, earthy tones of her indigenous lands. As a Delta V—fifth and last—he knew better than to try to take anyone’s place. But in his own mind, he wanted to acknowledge that memory. And maybe, yes, exploit the familiarity to make a place for himself.
So his nanites adjusted him a little smaller, narrowing his tongue, thinning his lips—Deltas were good at making themselves less. At the same time, he pushed fine charges of electricity through his skin, from the tips of his fingers and even his tongue. The skill was meant for interrogation or execution had his specialty programming ever been activated, but he would use it to give Lindy pleasure instead.
She writhed underneath him, uttering breathy little moans more primeval than the howling of wolves. The sound pumped up his flesh inside the latex, and he had to reach down to adjust himself.
“Bring that here,” she whispered. “Now.”
While his nanites could perform a certain amount of body modification, dismembering that member could be— Oh, she just meant she wanted him to penetrate her.
Obligingly, he crawled up her body, peppering her with kisses and delicate shocks as he went. And her moans and shivers echoed through his biofeedback system so he felt her pleasure as his own. Shrouds got to keep their pain/pleasure receptors during their initial calibration and training—since pain and pleasure were so useful as incentive—but those receptors would’ve been burned out during their activation.
Yet another reason to thank gods that he’d never been claimed and to curse the consortium for their enslavement.
But if anyone had to hold his key, he would willingly offer it to Lindy Minervudottir.
Holding himself above her on one hand, he smoothed the tip of his erection through her folds, slick from his efforts to arouse her. Deltas couldn’t do smug and arrogant, but as he stared down into her clear blue eyes, heated to high-summer blue with passion, he felt…good. Not just his nanites mirroring her stimulation, but satisfied within himself.
And he wasn’t done yet.
He stroked into her, watching her closely. When she arched back, closing her eyes, he channeled his nanites into expanding and pulsing the length of his swollen flesh. He vibrated within her—oops, too weird. Her eyes flew open, her stunned gaze clashing with his. Obviously that wasn’t something an Earther male could do for her—not even in romance novels.
And yeah, that did sound a little smug and arrogant in his own head. So he vibrated again, barely perceptible this time, nanites set to tickle instead of stun. She let out a low, keening cry that throbbed with the rhythm of his strokes, and that beautiful flush of her excitement tinted places on her where the Big Sky sun never touched.
Places he touched.
Oh so very smug and arrogant. And possessive too. He’d never had anything of his own; all of his synthetic parts and even his organics belonged first to the consortium and then to the keyholder who had bought his matrix. But for this moment at least, he had Lindy. She was caught between his arms, sensually pierced on his pulsating shaft.
Smug, arrogant, possessive, and about to lose the control he’d bragged to her about. His nanites’ electrons, excited by her presence to a higher level about a billion times stronger than coffee and donuts combined, rushed through his system, pinging chaotically off each other, making his whole body shiver.
With every clench of her inner muscles around him, Lindy drove his overwhelm higher. The thin latex was no barrier to his nanites, which relayed and amplified every infinitesimal caress of her flesh around his. Her panting breath inflamed his energy level even higher—could a mere Delta go supernova?
But she was reaching for some cosmic zenith, his body sensed, and his nanites were resolved to get her there.
Setting his teeth in his lower lip until he tasted the pain, he thrust into her, minutely adjusting each stroke to maximize her blushes and panting. His plasteel parts would last longer than diamonds, and his nanites nearly as long, so he could keep up this pace long past his demise from his own pleasure.
Suddenly she jackknifed, h
er spine bowing. Grabbing his backside, she yanked him tight against her. Her muscles fluttered, outside and in—his nanites reading and recording the biological tectonics to review for improved future efforts.
Her blue eyes flared wide. “Delta,” she gasped.
It wasn’t even really a name, just a designation, one assigned to him by careless beings. But when she said it, she meant him. And she made him hers.
Her orgasm wouldn’t leave a mark on him, not even on the molecular level, and yet he was blown completely off his trajectory. His whole body seized in mimicry of hers, and he gasped her name as she had his, his body arching like hers had, but in the other direction, so the only point of connection between them was his flesh joining hers—arcs of two circles connected at one lone point, like the Strix Ranch brand.
His nanites rushed to the connection point, seeking to complete the imprinting. The latex was nothing to microscopic robotics that could eventually work their way through plasteel. But the barrier was a reminder, and he clamped down hard on his wayward particles.
She had come here for one night of respite, escaping her memories of this point along the planet’s rotation around the sun. She had not come looking for another mate, not even a new lover, nor was she seeking to claim a runaway alien killer.
He’d never had a choice to be what he was, but he wouldn’t take away her chance to know what he was.
One last thrust from him inverted her arc, curving her around him like rays of visible light bending into a rainbow, wringing another sharp cry of release from her. When she flopped back to the gray quilt with a grunt of satisfaction, he stayed suspended over her, willing his nanites to return to their regularly scheduled programming, dispersing their collected kinetic energy through his muscles.
Her lashes flutter down, almost invisible against her skin. But the lingering flush on her cheeks gave them away. Especially since he was looking so closely, transfixed by the fine, pale strands, settling like snowflakes over the heavier lines of years of sun on her skin. She fascinated him, the same way the first time he’d seen snow had entranced him. He’d stood outside for hours, watching the perfect crystals, like falling stars, each one melting like a tiny, delicate bite against his sensitized skin.
And when the sun had risen, his new world had been transformed.
After a moment Lindy looked up at him, and a darker pink flush bloomed farther across her skin—a reaction which he identified as half embarrassment and unease and three-quarters lingering pleasure. That didn’t add up, but it was a mathematical oddity that he’d just have to accept. Despite the half measure of post-coital awkwardness, she stretched luxuriously against him. The satiny strong grip of her flesh around his sent all his nanites surging back in that direction. He stroked himself in her again and couldn’t hold back a smile when her eyes flared wide again.
“Wait,” she stuttered. “Didn’t you…?”
He held himself above her on locked arms. He wouldn’t let himself fall unless she could be there to claim him. “Does wait mean stop?” He tilted his head.
“Just for a moment.” She braced her palms on his biceps, staring up at him. She let her legs, which had been locked behind his thighs, slide down to tangle around his. And with the move he hadn’t been anticipating, she rolled him to put herself on top.
Defying gravity, his nanites surged up his undaunted erection, and it seemed to him that if they’d had little voices, they’d be singing like alien wolves calling to the full, white, twin moons that were her breasts rising above him. “Got a few hours before morning chores,” she drawled. “You gonna take me on another midnight ride, cowboy?”
“How far you want to go?” He pressed his heels into the bed, lifting her until she clutched at him with a giggle.
The sound was light, playful, but it tore through him like a blaster, and instead of protecting him, his plasteel and nanites seemed to quiver, wanting more.
Of all the heavenly bodies, he wanted only hers. And somehow he needed to show her that he was worth more than a fifth of zero.
***
In the very earliest morning, she fell into an exhausted sleep. If not for his nanites, Delta would’ve done the same with a smile on his face. Instead, he lay beside her, letting every electron slowly settle with each of her quiet breaths. Against the grays of his room, her hair, which had come undone in the night, seemed more gold and her nipples more pink, the same hue as her kiss-rouged lips.
And he needed her more than he had just a few hours ago.
Wooing her had seemed like such a brilliant idea, but he wasn’t an Alpha leader, or a Beta organizer, or a Theta strategizer. He didn’t have anything that would tempt an Earther queen to make him her willing slave.
A restlessness that had nothing to do with his extra energy drove him from the bed. After covering her with the star quilt, he dressed and let himself out.
The dogs were still slumbering in their preferred beds by the front door when he padded down the hallway, boots in hand. Though Chip started to get up, Pickle merely groaned, so Delta waved them both down. Seemed unfair to make everyone else suffer with his sleeplessness.
He stepped out onto the porch, into the pre-dawn darkness—and froze.
Their hats, which they’d bumped off in the middle of the yard when she kissed him, were on the front step.
He took a long stride backward, grabbing the rifle from inside the doorway and flicking off the porch light. The move was automatic; though his shroud programming had never been fully activated, he still had the baseline training, not to mention the experience of a Wild West cowboy.
And his queen was sleeping inside.
He scanned the silent shadows. The solar-powered yard light had dimmed, running low from the weaker autumn sun, and for the first time, he almost wished he was fully activated to have access to all his shroud toolset.
Of course that would make him a murderous monster, so.
Nothing moved through the dark. Mach and Lun-mei weren’t due back at the ranch until the end of the weekend. The yurk—although she was learning to play fetch from the dogs and might be willing to return the hats instead of eating them—was locked up snug in her stall while she slept off yet another growth spurt. No one came to the Fallen A uninvited.
And no one was ever invited.
Racing laterally along the porch, his bare feet making no noise on the old boards, he jumped the railing and did a speedy recon of the immediate vicinity. All the stored kinetic energy made him faster than any Earther should see, but if he caught anyone creeping around, shock at his appearance would be the least of their problems.
The last intruders at the ranch—Tanner Cross and his henchgoons, as Lun-mei called them—had come to threaten Mach about eminent domaining the Fallen A for a big game hunting ranch. They’d accidentally seen the yurk, and Mach and Lun-mei had used the last of their memory clearing compounds to erase the experience and then point the local authorities at Cross’s misbehavior. Since then, Cross had kept a low profile, but Delta didn’t doubt the greedy, unscrupulous Earther still had nefarious plans.
As he circled the ranch house, his pulse was an unwavering metronome, his nanites responding to the potential threat with converged focus. Only the hidden-deep part of him raged—a wolf defending its territory.
But there was no one, nothing to be found.
Which left only one possibility for the prowler.
Though he returned to the house and hung up the rifle, bringing the hats with him, Delta was more tense than before.
But since there wasn’t anything he could do about it, he went to the kitchen instead. With Lun-mei spending time at the ranch—her primitive, organic needs involved more nutrients than coffee and donuts—the kitchen was the best stocked it had ever been. And while his shroud training had included zero in the way of culinary expertise, due to the fact that the nanites only needed raw carbon for power, he’d watched her make breakfast twice and it didn’t seem that hard.
He arranged the
eggs, bread, and various condiments with the same care he would’ve lined up his armaments before battle. Except he wouldn’t have needed to impress his keyholder—that being had already paid for him, while he still needed to show Lindy what he was worth.
For no reason, his nanites started to churn: an attack of nerves. He turned to the coffee maker instead. Coffee always started the morning right for Lun-mei, so maybe it would work on Lindy as well. The crunch of grinding beans was jarring in the morning stillness; not unlike the cacophony of his nerves and nanites at the moment.
But when he went to dump the fresh grounds into the machine, Lindy was standing in the kitchen doorway, flanked by the attentive dogs.
At the sight of her, everything seemed right again.
Though she was dressed again in her county-western uniform, the pearl snaps of her shirt as pure and unsullied as the distant moon, he imagined even without the supplemental shroud technology lost in the crash, he could almost see through her flannel and denim to the pink underthings he’d unveiled last night. The touch of hectic color in her cheeks would forever remind him of the ruddy flush of her nipples and the darker velvet of her sex. The steady beat of his pulse practically rattled the fly of his own jeans.
She inhaled deeply and smiled at him. “Coffee,” she said with delight, as if every ranch didn’t have coffee.
Although her enthusiasm was only adjacent to him, not at him directly, he’d take what he could get. “I thought we’d have some breakfast before we get to chores.”
“Second most important meal of the day,” she said with a nod.
He waited a moment as the brewer finished gurgling and handed her a cup. “What’s the most important one?”
She drew a breath, held it, then let it out with a self-conscious snort. “I was going to say something bold and slutty like ‘you as a midnight snack’, just to show you how cool I am after last night, but…” She rubbed one hand under the braid going down her neck in a single plait. The strands around her face were damp, darkened to iron against the silver-gold. “I guess I’m not as high-key hep and happening as I like to pretend.”
