Cyborg (7 page)

“I don’t particularly care for the sarcasm either,” he said tightly.

“Too fucking bad.”

He caught her jaw in one hand, forcing her to look at him. She made an aborted attempt to pull free, but realized fairly quickly that she couldn’t. Instead, she glared at him coldly. He studied her in angry silence for several moments before his expression softened. “I wounded you.”

Surprise at his perception flickered through her. “You wish,” she said derisively, but not nearly as convincingly as she would’ve liked.

“You are wrong. I do not wish it at all,” he said. “And I think we have much more in common that you are willing to admit.”

“Wrong. We have nothing in common,” Amaryllis said tightly, feeling her anger rise once more as it occurred to her to wonder if he meant to bring up her bionics again.

“You may hate me for what I am, but you are not … indifferent to me.”

The comment took the wind out of her sails. “What?”

Releasing her jaw, he trailed his fingers lightly down her throat, across her collar bone and down between her breasts. Amaryllis’ breath caught in her chest as he traced a light circle around each trembling globe. Even through the cloth, his finger felt like a firebrand. Her nipples puckered, stood erect, begging for his touch.

Her reaction embarrassed and infuriated her. Before she thought better of it, she swung at him. As if he’d anticipated her retaliation, he caught her wrist mid-air, pushing her back against the bunk and pinning her with the weight of his body. His eyes gleamed as he stared down at her. “I am cyborg, no more than a machine. Surely you are not offended by my touch?”

Amaryllis swallowed with an effort.

After holding her gaze for several long moments, his gaze slid downward, settling on her breasts, heaving now with her efforts to drag in a decent breath of air. With deliberation, he leaned down, covering the tip of one breast with his mouth. Heat, like fire, instantly flowed through her, clouding her mind. She tensed, tried to block her mind to the pleasure that immediately assailed her. Her heart began to thunder in her ears so frantically that she could hear nothing but its drumming and the rush of air as it sawed almost painfully in and out of her laboring lungs.

She might have been completely naked for all the difference the thin fabric made.

She was sorry she wasn’t.

She wanted to feel the moist heat of his mouth on her skin.

As if he’d read her mind, he nudged the fabric aside and covered her nipple with his mouth, sucking, teasing the sensitive tip with his tongue. She gasped as a fresh rush of mind sundering sensation boiled through her. Her belly clenched almost painfully.

Her femininity quaked, gathering heat and moisture.

With an effort, she summoned her defenses, closed her mind against the maddening stimulus, certain that he would stop if she could convince him she found no pleasure in his touch.

He seemed to sense her battle. Instead of accepting the lie she tried to tell with her body, instead of teasing her and then releasing her, he continued to suckle and torment her nipple until her shaky defenses crumbled, until she was drunk with the euphoria of pleasure, her mind chaotic, and she became so weak she felt as if she would black out.

It wasn’t until all resistance was leached from her and she went limp that he ceased to torment her. It took several moments to gather the strength to lift her eyelids when he released her at last and lifted his head to look at her once more. She couldn’t even manage a look of reproach, certainly not one of indifference.

Apparently satisfied with what he saw, he rolled off of her and lay down on the bunk on his side, tugging at her until he’d tucked her back against his chest. “Rest now.”

It took several moments for that to sink in to her heat fogged brain. Rest?

Amaryllis thought, abruptly outraged. Her whole body was on fire!

How could he do …
that
and then just fucking stop?

As irritated as she was, Amaryllis only tensed, yielding without any more protest than a slight resistance. She’d had time to cool, if only slightly, and time to remember, belatedly, that she was supposed to be lulling him into a false sense of security, supposed to be trying to seduce
him
so that she could overcome him.

She stank at this.

It didn’t take a mental giant to see that she was in far more danger of being seduced than he was.

She also had a bad feeling that the longer it took to accomplish such a mission, the less likely it was that she’d be able to go through with it. Machine or not, he had personality. It might be as maddening as it was appealing, but it wasn’t something that she could feel indifference about.

It was one thing, she realized, to target an unknown entity, trust that it was no more than a runaway machine, and blow it to bits. It was quite another to cozy up to one who looked, and felt, and acted like a human being and commit an act that would feel like cold blooded murder.

She was fairly certain she wasn’t going to be able to go through with it.

Why couldn’t he have been like he was supposed to be? Cold. Mechanical.

Unfeeling. Why couldn’t he have been insane?

Damn him anyway! How could he have seen through what she’d been so carefully hiding from herself? She wasn’t going to be able lie to herself, or to him, that she was immune to him.

Maybe it was merely a psychological reaction to being taken captive? She’d never been captured before. She’d had training for it, but no scenario had been anything like this. The expectation had been that she would be tortured--with pain, not pleasure.

Maybe she hadn’t properly assessed the situation to start with? Maybe killing him was not only not necessary to her own survival, but entirely the opposite? Contributing to her downfall?

“It would be easier to avoid broaching a painful topic if I knew what it was.”

Despite her distraction, it didn’t take her two seconds to realize he was harping on their earlier disagreement. Amaryllis gritted her teeth. “Jeez! Could you just drop it? It doesn’t matter.”

“If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be angry.”

She tensed, considering rolling from the bunk and stalking across the room to put some distance between them. His arm tightened as if he knew exactly what was running through her mind. She relapsed, fuming.

He fell silent. She didn’t know if he was sleeping or not, but his hold didn’t loosen and she found she couldn’t maintain either her anger or her tension. Slowly but surely it seeped away. The desire he’d aroused in her didn’t.

He was warm. He breathed. His body was hard, but in the sense of well honed muscle and tissue, not cold metal.

He felt good.

He felt damned good.

He’s a machine! She mentally screamed at herself.

Why the hell had they made them so real? Stupid, conceited, megalomaniacs!

What was it about humans and their preoccupation with perfection anyway? Why create something so perfect it was better than the real thing? Because they liked to think they could do a better job than nature? Hell, that wasn’t all that damned hard! Look at her! A freak of nature if there ever was one. She should never have been born at all, much less survived outside her mother’s womb.

She should be glad he’d pushed that particular button and summoned her personal demons. It was enough to remind her to keep her distance in every way possible.

If she could just keep reminding herself of that, she might get through this.

Amaryllis didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry that Dante hadn’t pursued the matter. On one level, she harbored a good deal of regret. She couldn’t recall ever having been so quickly, or thoroughly, aroused that she’d become lost in it. She was sorry it had ended without the promised fulfillment, especially since the incident seemed to have left her body in a ready state that showed no signs of going away and only added to the tension she was already feeling about her situation.

On another level, she realized that she’d been spared a step that she would never have been able to retrieve. If Dante had possessed her, given her the pleasure his touch promised, she feared she would’ve been addicted to his touch in a way that she would never be able to free herself from.

She didn’t want to be tied to him in any way. She couldn’t afford to be. Her life might well depend upon escape and she couldn’t afford to be torn by conflicting desires.

The cyborgs, if they discovered she was not one of them, would almost certainly perceive her as a threat to their plans, whatever those were. They might decide to simply keep her, in which case she would never be allowed to see her family again. Or they might decide that it would be better all around to kill her.

One thing about the situation plagued her.

Why had he decided to help her? Why hadn’t he simply turned her over when he realized that she was human?

She would’ve felt better if she’d known that.

She would’ve felt even better if she could’ve put some distance between the two of them.Her situation didn’t truly allow that. She managed distance of a sort, though, by refusing thereafter to share the bunk with Dante. She slept when he was gone. When he returned to the cabin, she occupied herself with her thoughts or her workouts. There wasn’t a great deal that she could do for hours on end, confined to the one, small cabin, but it was sparsely furnished.

She needed to keep fit. More than that, she needed something to work off her excess energy. It was far better to exhaust her body in staying fit than to simply stare at the walls and allow her imagination to take her places she didn’t want to go.

Dante didn’t try to interfere, or even try to converse with her after that first night.

If he hadn’t been a cyborg, she would have been inclined to think he was brooding over the fact that she so assiduously avoided any sort of physical contact with him. He often watched her instead of sleeping. She made it a point never to look directly at him, but she could feel his gaze.

If he hadn’t been a cyborg, she might have been inclined to think that the ‘lesson’

he’d given her to show her that he was well aware that she found him attractive, whatever her prejudices, had backfired and caught him, too.

That would require an admission on her part that she wasn’t ready to concede, however.

He behaved very much like a human, but she knew he’d been programmed to do so. Even the sexual aspects of his behavior, although it had taken her by surprise, didn’t really change anything. For all she knew, he might have been designed to be a pleasure droid. Most of the cyborgs had been designed as soldiers. Before she’d met Dante, she’d thought they all were, but that didn’t mean that they were. She could’ve been wrong.

She had an uneasy feeling that she hadn’t been, but she resolutely refused to acknowledge it. She tried very hard not to think about it at all, but with indifferent success. She’d experienced an awakening on that first night they spent together. Each time she felt his brooding gaze upon her, it was like a touch and her body warmed and images rose in her mind that made her body vibrate with anticipation. Each time she failed to keep her own gaze from straying to him, she felt heat begin to rise inside of her, felt her pulse begin to beat a little faster.

After weeks in space, confined in so small an area, she’d almost begun to hope she would be discovered. She supposed that accounted for her carelessness.

Or perhaps it was only that Dante had made her so aware of her femininity that she’d become preoccupied with the distant ache that found no surcease.

She’d stayed far longer beneath the pounding water of the shower than she should have, caressing her own aching body with her soapy hands until the discomfort grew to be too much to bear. For someone who’d spent most of her life trying to divorce herself from her body, it seemed doubly difficult to find this new awareness of it that she couldn’t chase away no matter how hard she tried. Finally, she’d turned to washing her hair. She’d just rinsed the soap from it when she finally sensed a presence nearby.

Her heart leapt into her throat as the realization sank in that she’d been vaguely aware of the sensation of being watched even before she’d begun to wash her hair, too preoccupied with the ache between her legs and the uncomfortable tenderness of her breasts to consciously acknowledge it, but aware in some distant corner of her mind.

Her instincts had atrophied from boredom and disuse.

She had to force her frantic mind to function, consciously call her training to her aid.

She’d alerted him, however, by the sudden tension of her body. Even as she swung into action, he countered her strike, slamming her into the back wall of the stall.

For all that, the collision was carefully controlled and didn’t even knock the breath from her. Amaryllis blinked the water from her eyes and looked up at the man pinning her to the cold metal wall.

“Dante!” she gasped, torn between relief and dawning anger.

He was furious. That much was instantly obvious. “That was either unbelievably careless … or calculating,” he ground out.

Right up until the very moment he spat the accusation at her, Amaryllis had carefully avoided the fact that she had dallied in the shower because she knew Dante would be returning soon. She’d convinced herself that she would be in and out before he returned, but she’d made no attempt to hurry.

She’d wanted to bait him.

She wasn’t certain why, but her transparency embarrassed her and because it did, it also angered her. “I don’t have an internal clock like you do!” she snapped.

The reminder angered him far more than she’d expected it to. Grasping her hand, he guided it to the crotch of his uniform, molding her palm over his heated erection. It was huge, rock hard, and throbbed at her touch like a live thing. Amaryllis’ eyes widened. Her heart faltered, then began to race. Heat curled low in her belly. Her mouth went dry and the breath froze in her lungs.

“Does that feel to you as if I feel nothing?” he ground out. “If I were no more than a cold, unfeeling machine, do you think desire would torment me every time I look at you?”She licked her lips nervously, tried to gather moisture into her mouth. “You were probably designed as a pleasure droid,” she said a little shakily.