Kingston 691: Book Two of Cyborgs: Mankind Redefined (11 page)

King breathed slowly. He felt irritation growing. But what was the cause? He set down the glass of tea before he crushed it in his tense fingers. He scanned his mind—no logical deductions were available about his stressful reaction. He scanned his feelings verifying he was indeed angry, but why was he so pissed?

“So…you’re saying Seetha’s coffee date is a one hundred percent human male?”

Annalise snorted again as she shrugged. “I can only assume it. After her experience with you, I can’t see my daughter ever allowing another cyborg into her life.”

King put his hands on his knees. Were his fingers shaking? Yes. Yes, they were. How strange. He started running diagnostics before speaking. “Can I ask why you think her dating a cyborg is out of the question?”

“Good God, King. This is all just supposition on my part. Pay no attention to me. When it comes to Seetha, I talk too much anyway. Plus, this truly is none of my business. Seetha bought you for her own reasons. She gave you up for them too. At the moment, she’s just trying to move on with her life like you have. When you didn’t come see her after she first got back, she wrote you off permanently, as most any woman would. Whatever you’ve decided now, I think you’re too late.”

“I don’t understand. I specifically came here today to check on her,” King said, finding it hard to believe he had made Seetha mad with his absence. Where was her gratitude for him saving her? Or her patience to wait out his confusion? It had taken him all the time since her return just to get this far. And he was here. Where the hell was she? What was she doing with another man?

While analyzing possible scenarios, his mind created an image of Seetha testing some other man’s proficiencies. He couldn’t see the man’s face, but he could damn well hear her breathy whispers of praise. He wanted to kill the faceless man…which some part of him knew was a totally inappropriate response. When his mind erupted in flashing lights, King closed his eyes.

“Kingston, are you okay? You’re sweating profusely and your face is red. If you get upset and break any of my family heirlooms in here, I’m going to banish you to the patio next time you visit,” Annalise warned.

Laughing harshly at her threats, King lifted a hand with now obviously trembling fingers and touched his forehead. Feeling perspiration dampening his brow, he sighed in exasperation. Then he looked at Annalise’s arched eyebrow and felt his mouth twitch. Laughter followed and gratefully relieved the pressure building inside his skull…and his chest.

“Fucking hell—this is some messed up shit. I thought about Seetha being upset and my head is killing me now,” he declared.

To his amazement, Annalise choked on her tea again as she laughed. “You remind me of my son. Watching you come to terms with yourself is like watching a teenage boy figure out he likes a girl more than he thought. His wife almost married someone else while he was making up his mind about her.”

King leaned forward and covered his eyes with the palms of his hands. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately. I’m sorry I swore like that in front of you. Are you saying Seetha is dating just because I didn’t come see her? I’m trying to grasp the logic of her actions, but it doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Annalise rolled her eyes. “Now I understand why they invented Cyber Husband programming. You were never this clueless with Seetha before…or with me later. I’m not sure I like seeing you so unsure of yourself.”

Despite his decision to keep his efforts private, his tongue was suddenly spouting the truth to Annalise.

“They removed the husband chip that was programmed for you. A few days ago I asked them to put a chip reprogrammed for Seetha back into me. They have the capability still, but they refused my request. The scientist assigned to my restoration is insisting I talk to Seetha without it before he’ll even discuss putting it back in.”

“Are you saying you
asked
to be reprogrammed for Seetha? Why would you do that, King? My comments were just me joking. No woman is worth doing such a thing to yourself again, not even my daughter. If you can’t like Seetha without the chip, then I don’t think you need to be with her. Go find a woman you do like. It would be better for all of us.”

“I can’t,” King exclaimed, letting his hands fall away. “I can’t move on. I need…I don’t know…
closure
, I guess.”

Annalise snorted. Now she knew why Seetha was in such a rush to insert a new man into her life. King’s confusion about the past was as charming as it was disarming, but his emotional distress would be sheer hell on a woman’s nerves.

“I think your chance at finding closure just came through the front door. Let me go tell Seetha you’re here.”

Chapter 9

After her mother announced she was heading back to the garden, Seetha looked down at the teal tunic and leggings she wore and sighed. They made her look even thinner than she did already, but she had purchased them primarily for comfort, not sex appeal. Good thing too, since the guy she’d just left had shrugged her off the minute he’d seen how tall she was compared to him. His shallow judgment irked her because he hadn’t told the truth about his own height. He could have spared them both two hours of their time if he’d just been honest in his profile and said he wanted to date a short woman.

Regardless of her lame coffee date, she was not going to let herself be discouraged. There were plenty potential men left on the list she’d compiled. She had sporadically arranged coffee and lunch dates throughout the week since it was her last free one before starting her work at Norton. Dr. Winters had called the day after she saw her. They’d reached a compromise of waiting one week to start instead of two.

So today was all the closure the man waiting for her in her mother’s favorite sitting room was ever going to get. This wasn’t just about him. This was about her own healing too. She had very little energy left over from what happened to her to deal with King’s issues. He could just go back to his restaurant and the new life he had been building for himself before her mother talked him into rescuing her.

Chanting her decision like a mantra, Seetha charged into the sitting room only to freeze in the doorway. Her determination to feel nothing sentimental got swept away by the pleasurable rush she got from the sight in front of her eyes. King was calmly sitting and reading something on his handheld. He looked so good in the chair. He looked like he belonged. It was like the room and she had both just been waiting for King to wake up from his Rumplestiltskin-like cybernetic sleep and come home to them.

Seeing him sitting there so calmly was surreal. It reminded her of her studies in theoretical physics. There was a theory about time really being more of a big circle instead of happening along a linear line. In school, she’d thought those theories weren’t worthy of labeling themselves scientific. Now she was experiencing the past and the present converging in a giant smiling man once again sitting in the chair she had lovingly bought for him.

The pain of those years without King instantly returned in full force. Seetha could all but hear her heart cracking open again as she stared at him. Finally, she couldn’t bear looking anymore. Forgetting her less than feminine appearance as she dealt with her shock, Seetha stumbled to the sofa across from King and fell onto it, putting her face immediately in her hands.

Skipping all pleasantries, she mumbled through her fingers. “Did you come here to torture me, Kingston?” There was no way she could say a casual hello when she wanted so badly to climb into his lap and be held.

King locked his screen and slipped the handheld back into his pocket. He hoped doing it slowly would give Seetha time to recover from her surprise to see him. He scanned her vitals as he watched and was alarmed by the thunderous sound of her heart beating so hard, not to mention the low, pain-filled moaning she wasn’t even conscious she was doing.

“I’m sorry. That was the restaurant calling. I sort of slipped out to come here and have stayed away longer than I intended. I’m glad I did now. It’s good to see you again, Seetha.”

Seetha dropped her hands and rolled her eyes before looking at him. “I know you don’t understand why I get so disturbed around you, but I can’t just turn my reactions off to make you more comfortable. You’d do me a big favor if you’d just forget I existed. I mean for real this time—not just as part of some cybernetic overhaul.” She stood and sighed. “And for the sake of the Goddess, please take that damn chair with you when you leave.”

“Why? What’s wrong with the chair? I see no flaws in its design.” King ran his hands over the rich, textured fabric where his arms rested perfectly with no undue pressure on any one spot. As a cyborg, he could tell an engineer with an appreciation for size and dimension had picked it out.

His gaze lifted and took in the current version of the woman he’d seen in the vid recordings. Seetha was gaunt and unhappy looking today. A woman her size needed to be filled out. If he got to feed her on a regular basis, it wouldn’t take long for her to pack on a few pounds. Now why would he be considering that? He narrowed his gaze as he pondered it.

“There’s nothing structurally wrong with the chair,” Seetha said, swinging her arm. “It’s you in the chair. It makes me think of things I’m trying like hell to forget. Can’t your cyborg brain get how hard that is for me?”

King’s gaze followed the arc of her hands as she talked. Even her arms were too thin. The desire to feed her was both strong…and strange feeling. He’d thought he’d come to say goodbye to her. Apparently the conclusion had been in error. What he really wanted to do was hold her, or let her lean on him again, like she had on the air transport when she slept.

“I’d be happy to remove the chair from the house, but I don’t think that’s going to fix our problems. We seem to have some unfinished business between us.”

Seetha snorted. “No—
We
—don’t. Any problems are totally mine. Your Cyber Husband days are over and I’m sure I’m just one more woman you hate because of it. You don’t even remember anything about our time together. I know damn well my absence wasn’t exactly keeping you awake at night before my mother told you what was going on. That’s pretty much the sum of our combined truths, isn’t it? I would think you’d be happy to have such a clean slate for your real do-over.”

King settled his body more deeply into the chair and tented his hands in front of him. Everything about Seetha shouted go away, but every time she spoke, he heard a phantom husky laugh echoing inside him somewhere. His slacks got tighter just thinking about her hand tracing the same paths. Sex had never, to the best of his human side’s recollection, ever been something he let determine his actions. The woman before him might be the single exception. It required investigating and he couldn’t do that with her pushing him away.

“I’m sorry if my presence here causes you additional distress. It wasn’t my intention when I decided to come see how you were adapting,” he offered.

King blinked at the lightning suddenly flashing again behind his eyes. He had merely said the same words he’d said to Annalise. Now that they weren’t in danger, and he was finally confronting Seetha in person, there was a lot of things he wanted to say to her. None of it included saying goodbye. Apparently, his brain was having some sort of fit over his waffling.

“Being sorry doesn’t help anything, King. While I’m grateful you rescued me, I’d prefer we never saw each other again. It would be easier for both of us.”

Since he could hear in Seetha’s voice that she was ready to end things, King decided he had to stop her somehow. After running through possible scenarios with high failure points, he decided there was only one thing that would work in their situation and buy him the time he needed. He decided to do the one thing a cyborg found nearly impossible to do. He decided to lie until he could decide what he wanted from the woman confronting him.

King took a moment and consulted the notes he’d kept about the vids he’d watched. It didn’t take long to find what he sought. “You bought this chair for me to use at your mother’s. It fit me so well, you bought an identical one for our house. I think that’s why I feel so comfortable in it. Do you still have the other one?”

“Oh fucking hell…how do you know that? Mother told you…didn’t she?”

Beside the factoid reference in his notes, he’d written “proof of her affection” and other potential explanations for why Seetha had bought two chairs that fit him perfectly. Seeing her have a meltdown over his statement was more drama than he’d bargained for though—her swearing was evidence of the stress he was causing. It took all his effort not to run to Seetha’s side when she literally fell back down on the couch and went pale.

“No…just fucking no. I don’t believe you came up with that on your own. Why are you pretending you remember us?”

For a couple of minutes, all Seetha could do was shake her head in disbelief. It was like hearing the impossible, only she couldn’t handle hoping for the impossible any more. She had set the impossible aside already.

“I’m not pretending anything.” King rubbed his forehead, ignoring the nagging pain as he forced his secret thoughts and notes into words. “Annalise told me how clear her memory was of the two of you buying the chair. I suddenly got a bad headache and started sweating. Next thing I know I’m yelling the ‘f’ word and your mother is laughing at me. Then you came home. The moment I saw you, I knew we weren’t over yet, Seetha. You can’t convince me you think we’re finished either. I think we both need closure of some sort.”

Seetha shook her head. “No, I don’t need anything from you…and this is not happening. You’ve been ignoring me. All this time—I know you forgot me, King—you forgot everything. They erased your storage area and rebooted you back to the beginning. You lost everything we were to each other.
I know
I did not imagine losing my life with you. I have witnesses. There is no way your body could have kept seven years of memories hidden for so long without someone figuring it out before now.”

King thought quickly. “Amnesia patients do it all the time. My restoration scientist compared me to one the other day, and I think he was right. Sometimes amnesiacs get it all back. Maybe I’m going to get everything back as well. It was what I was thinking about before the restaurant called. I was wondering how soon I was going to get it all back.”