Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two (24 page)

That scared the hell out of me, too.

Feeling him reacting to something he must have felt on me just then, while I was thinking about all of that, I gripped his arm tighter in my hand.

“I love you, Nik,” I said. My face warmed as I realized I meant it. I let my voice drop to a murmur. “You know I do. You know I love you.”

His eyes met mine. I could see them faintly in the blue-green light of the fish tank.

I had no idea what color they were, though, or what the stare meant.

His voice was gruff.

“You love me,” he said. “But you don’t want to promise me that?”

Hesitating, I shook my head. “No, I don’t. Not yet. Not forever like that.” Watching his face, I waited for Nik to think about my words before I added more cautiously. “...It’s too soon for me, Nik. But I’m not doing this...or anything else...with anyone else. And I won’t, okay? Not without talking to you first. I just need more time, all right?”

“I would have with her,” he blurted. “Razmun’s sister. I planned to give my lock to her. When we were married...before, most likely.”

I tensed. I could tell he was trying to reassure me somehow, or maybe clear up what he thought was some kind of misconception on my part about Razmun, and whatever he’d caught me thinking about the two of them. But it didn’t reassure me, not really.

Not at all, actually.

In fact, it kind of pissed me off.

“Okay,” I said, fighting back annoyance and mostly failing. “What am I supposed to do with that information, exactly, Nik?”

I felt the heat behind my words hit him somewhere via the lock connection.

I couldn’t tell
how,
exactly, though.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just thought––”

“Forget it,” I said, again fighting the anger out of my voice. “So what are you saying? You don’t want to do this now?” I heard the disappointment in my own voice. “Do you want to wait, Nik? On the sex, I mean.”

He seemed to think about my words.

While he thought, I couldn’t help picking up flickers of things through the connection we shared. I felt desire there, a frustration that he didn’t seem to be bothering to hide. I felt a kind of anger aimed at himself, too, mostly around his knowledge that he’d said the wrong thing in trying to reassure me about Razmun...or maybe Razmun’s sister...or maybe both of them. That frustration worsened as it mixed with the desire, clouding his ability to think.

I caught glimpses of pictures in his head even as I thought it, most of them pretty graphic as he thought through what we’d been about to do, and if he was willing to wait. I didn’t say anything while he thought through the different implications of my question.

I didn’t try to figure out which direction he might be leaning before he spoke, but his words didn’t exactly surprise me when he finally got there.

“I really want to do this,” he confessed.
 

I nodded, swallowing. “Okay,” I said. “Is that a yes then, to sex?”

“I’ve been having trouble sleeping, Dakota.”

“Sleeping?” I said, confused by that part for some reason.

“Yes,” he said. He pressed his lower body against mine, closing his eyes. “I want you. I’ve wanted you for months now...longer. Since before...like you were thinking just now. Since I met you, Dakota. It makes it difficult to sleep, especially sharing a bed.”

He met my gaze, and I saw that taut look back on his face. More than that, the utter lack of guile there threw me, even before he went on.

“I’m sorry about what I said,” he added. “You misunderstood me.”

I shook my head. “Let’s not talk about that now. Seriously.”

Nik nodded, but I saw another flicker of frustration skim his expression.

As I watched, a denser thread of desire rose to his eyes, eclipsing the rest.

“I thought you knew,” he said. His fingers slid down my face and neck, startling me, right before he started caressing my hair. I relaxed as his fingers traced liquidly over my skin, as he rested more of his weight on me, looking at my eyes. “I told you I wanted you...many times,” he murmured, kissing my throat. “I showed you through the link...I asked you for it, Dakota, even after that first offer. I thought you knew why I was sleeping with those humans...and on Palarine, why I did it again. I wanted you. I knew you wanted me, too, but I thought you wouldn’t let yourself. I thought you didn’t want to act on it because I was morph...”

His words came out in a low stream, pulling at me.

I flinched at his mention of other women, but I didn’t stop listening.

I felt my skin flush between that and what he was doing with his body and hand, but more than that, from the increasingly graphic pictures that flickered behind my eyes as he spoke...pictures I had to assume were coming to me through that line stretched between us. I felt that electrical-type charge running through my skin as those pictures came faster, the same sensation I remembered from Palarine. The only other time I’d felt anything like it was when we woke up in that abandoned residency room together, when we’d been wrapped around one another and naked like this.

I felt Nik’s indecision strengthen when I didn’t answer right away.

After a few more seconds, I felt a sharper pang from that jealousy.

His jealousy, that is...Nik’s. That time, at least.

Somewhere in that, I saw an image of Gantry, of Gantry looking at me with those intense blue eyes of his. Before I could make much sense of that––

“No,” Nik said, his voice suddenly gruff. “No, we shouldn’t.”

“Why?” I said. “Are you seriously worried about Gantry?”

“You know why. I just told you why.”

I stared up at him, frustrated. “Because I can’t tell you for
absolute certain
that I’ll never want to be with anyone else ever again?”

“Yes,” he said.

I let out a frustrated sigh, collapsing on the mattress. “Nik. Jesus...”

Before I could go on, though, the light flicked on.

It caused both of us to jump violently, and then to stare at the person standing by the switch.

Irene huddled there, her hair looking like an angry, dirty-blonde cat screeched silently from her head. She wore her black, silk kimono that stopped around mid-thigh and had a bright red koi fish splattered like blood across the front.

Irene blinked at the two of us, an openly bewildered look on her face as her eyes focused enough that she understood what she’d walked in on.

I saw color creep up her neck to her cheeks as she took what must have been a pretty compromising snapshot of me and Nik, with him lying on me, naked, and me below him, also naked, with him gripping my wrist in one hand while I clutched his bicep in my other one.

Despite the increasingly embarrassed look I saw crawling over her face, Irene still blurted out the words that she must have come out here to say in the first place.

“Someone’s outside!” she said. “I just saw them, in the tree!”

Before I could make sense of what she’d said, Nik was already on his feet.

He walked directly back to Irene’s room––still nude, I might add––before I’d finished fumbling around the rumpled blankets for my shirt.

By the time I found it, had it over my head and climbed off the creaking mattress, stubbing my toe on the metal frame and cursing while I hopped, Irene had already followed Nik back to her bedroom. When I caught up with them, Irene crouched behind Nik while he stared out her window. The light was off, either because Irene never turned it on, or because Nik turned it off so he could see better in the dark. I angled closer to the two of them, pushing my hair behind my ears and waiting for my eyes to adjust after that sudden influx of light from Irene blinding us in the other room.

I couldn’t see anything.

Well, that’s not precisely true.

I saw the tree outside Irene’s window, and the thick, bald and winding branches that always made me think of that movie,
Poltergeist,
where the tree smashed through the window and then proceeded to yank that little kid out of bed and try to eat him.

But I didn’t see anyone there.

Even as I thought it, Nik gave me a glance.

Then, as if by mutual agreement, we both moved directly up to the window itself, pressing our faces to the glass and peering out into the darkness to the ground below. Irene followed behind both of us, clutching Nik’s arm as she peered from behind him.

I thought I caught a flicker of movement, and I saw Nik flinch.

“Did you see who it was?” I asked him.

Nik shook his head. Even so, his face looked more taut than usual.

Staring at his expression, I felt my chest tighten. I looked at Irene, watching her stare out at the same dark, scanning the rose bushes that clustered at the base of the magnolia tree, as if expecting her peeping tom to still be in there, somewhere.

“You’re sure it wasn’t a dream?” I asked her. “You really saw someone?”

Irene nodded, looking back at me, her eyes wide with fear. “I wasn’t asleep...I was reading. His face was pressed against the glass. He wore one of those ski masks...”

She trailed, maybe seeing something in my face.

I did feel myself shudder a bit, right before I gritted my teeth.

“Fantastic,” I muttered.

Nik continued to scan the view outside, as motionless as a statue, but for his eyes.

“Nik,” I said, my voice still low. “Where did you go the other day? When you left the house after the terrorist attack. Did you go anywhere that Razmun and his people might have seen you?”

Nik slowly shook his head. Then, as if rethinking his answer, he glanced at me and tilted his head in a somewhat more ambiguous shrug.
 

“Technically, yes,” he said. “...I was in a place that they could have seen me. But even if they did, they would not have known who I was.”

“Why not?” I said.

“I did not go in human form.” Again, he paused. “Well,” he said. “Not for most of it.”

“You didn’t?” Irene said, wonder in her voice.

I ignored her words other than to grimace a little. I kept my eyes on Nik.

“What form did you go in?” I pressed.

“A bird,” he said at once, glancing at me.

He looked back at the window. His eyes looked light in color under the faint illumination from outside, despite the pupil swallowing the iris. I found myself staring at him, at the lines of his face and especially his mouth, even as he went on.

“...Bald eagle,” he added, pronouncing the words with precision. He made a kind of swooping gesture with one hand. “A sea bird. Brown wings and body...white head. Hooked beak. Feathers. Talons. Raptor classification, according to your documentation...
Haliaeetus leucocephalus.
Gantry gave me the specifications.”

At what must have been a blank expression on my face, Nik explained further,
 

“...I have been practicing Earth species, to give me a wider range of movement. Gantry is assisting me in this. He thought it would be of benefit, in terms of camouflage.”

I swallowed, not sure what to say to that, either.

“Okay,” I said finally. “So what do you mean, ‘not for most of it’?”