Pistons and Pistols (2 page)

He laughed aloud, as if freed somehow by her proclamation. “By all that is good and right in this world, I swear to you, Gabriella Upstairs, that I will always love you. I have always been and will always be eternally devoted to you, my darling. I could never think of you as anything but my virtuous angel, no matter what you do.”

Gabriella pressed her thighs together to still her rising lust. Her heart beat a jackrabbit rhythm beneath her aching breast. She was on fire with hunger, with need, with want. And why shouldn’t she be aflame? She was a full-grown woman in love, and he a full-grown man in love. They should do what came naturally to a couple who cared for one another so deeply.

She seized both of his hands, warm and fleshy and so very large, into hers, and guided them to the fastening of her gown. He paused as he met her gaze with his own. Smiling, she nodded, assuring him that this was indeed what she wanted. With trembling hands, Atom pulled at the tie of her gown, parted the fabric in a gentle sweep, then slipped it past her shoulders until it came to a rest in the crook of her arms. Only then did he lower his eyes to her nude form. He stared at her nakedness for a moment, the sharp hiss of his appreciation forcing a blush of unease on her. Again a sudden shame surfaced. Here she sat, exposed to a male for the first time in her life, and without so much as even a hint of a proposal of marriage. What was she doing?

As if sensing her embarrassment, he held her face between his cool palms and assured her, “You’re beautiful. So beautiful. Just like a lady and an angel should be.” He kissed her, full and sweet, for just a brief moment. Then he pulled away, swallowed hard and asked, “May I…my angel…may I have the honor of being the first to touch your beautiful body?”

She shuddered at the tenderness of his request. What was she doing? She was about to make love with the man with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life, that’s what she was doing, and that was all right with her. With a soft groan, she begged him to feel her. “Yes. Yes, please, Atom. Touch me now, before I lose my mind with desire for you.”

Gabriella moaned as his fingertips brushed her beaded nipples, then gasped as he grabbed her breasts in his strong hands. Yes, this was what she longed for. This was what she needed. His hands on her body. She looked down to watch him touch her, to watch his hands move across what she had saved so long just for him.

His hands.

Gabriella narrowed her eyes at his hands. Something wasn’t right about them. She snatched his left hand away from her breast and held it up to her face. It was all flesh, all bone, as it should be. She pulled his right hand from her body, holding it to her face as she eyed it with worry. It, too, was all flesh, all bone. That wasn’t right.

Atom Loquacious’s right hand was made of clockworks, not flesh.

She raised her face to meet his. “Who are you?”

“I’m your one and only true love,” he answered.

Gabriella sighed as she recognized the words. They were the very same words she had longed her whole life to hear. Words she pretended her husband would say to her on their wedding night. They were fantasy words, which was fitting given the situation. She sighed. “You’re just a dream.”

As she spoke, the room filled with a bright light, as though the sun itself were rising from behind her dresser. In the background, somewhere, a deep pounding noise began. All the while, dream Atom nodded. “I’m afraid so, Guppy.”

She narrowed her eyes at him again. “What did you call me?”

The room around them grew brighter. The volume of the pounding increased. Dream Atom’s voice took on a southern twang and feminine falsetto as he shouted, “Wake up, Guppy!”

Gabriella awoke, alone, in the early morning brightness of her small room. Her sheets were bunched at the foot of her cot. Her gown lay open, exposing her nudity to anyone who cared to take a peek. It was the third time this week she’d had such a vivid dream. It was also the third time she’d been late for the morning meal.

The pounding was a steady beat on her door. Magpie’s muffled shouts bled through the wooden barrier between knocks. “Get up, girly! You’ve overslept. Again.”

“I’m awake,” Gabriella shouted in return. She sat up and pulled her gown closed, wondering if there were a ghost of a chance that Atom was dreaming of her too.

She smiled with the idea as she began her morning routines.

* * * *

Rose Madigan wasn’t a happy woman.

Not today. Not this morning. In the normal course of events, she liked to think of herself as a cheerful person, at least since her horrible husband had died. Life was better now that Bill was gone. Except for today. Today she was miserable. Even with Click lapping at her breasts like the frisky puppy he always was, she was hard-pressed to remember when she had ever been so disheartened.

She was almost as wretched as she had been when Bill was around.

Almost, but not quite.

Her lover stopped his gentle worship of her full breasts, pulling himself up to ask, “What vexes you, my captain?”

She sighed as she rolled away from him. “I don’t know.”

“Of course you do.” He pulled her to him, staring down at her, wearing that eternal grin of his. “It is written all over your beautiful face. You’re filled to the brim with worry.”

“I know. But I can’t imagine why.” It was a lie. She knew exactly why.

As if he’d plucked the very reason for her morose mood from her brain, Click nodded and said, “It’s our new recruit.”

Rose pursed her lips, made unhappier by Click’s choice of words. “For the last time, you ninny native, he is our employer, not a crew member. He has hired us for a job, not joined the crew.”

Click’s smile said he knew he had the better of her, yet again. “Whatever it pleases my captain to believe, I too shall believe.”

“Damn right you will.”

“Then it’s our employer that vexes you.”

Rose was tempted to lie, but it was no use. Somehow, the gorgeous Tahitian could read her like an open shipping log. How he knew her so well, she had no idea. She tried her best to maintain a professional detachment from him, when not in the throes of passion of course, but she supposed one’s professional life was bound to leak onto one’s personal life when one shared a cabin with one’s cabin boy.

A cabin and a bed.

“Yes,” she confessed. “He vexes me.”

“I don’t see why.” Click dropped himself on the mattress beside her. “I like him.”

Rose snorted. “You like everyone.”

“True. But I also like how he likes our Guppy.”

This simple truth made Rose smile. Rose didn’t just like how Atom treated their youngest crew member, she loved it. Gabriella deserved someone as dashing and handsome as Atom. He treated her with such tenderness it made Rose’s heart ache just to watch him watching Gabriella.

“Me too,” Rose said, the hint of a smile surfacing. It didn’t last long. “Even so, we know next to nothing about him.”

Click shrugged. “What’s there to know? He’s a nice young man.”

Rose’s concern wasn’t Atom’s manners, which were extraordinary considering he had spent so long on his own. Her worry lay in the lad’s mysterious life. For starters, he wasn’t all man. Not all human, anyway. Beneath what appeared to be flesh and bone, Atom Loquacious was half made of clockworks. No one could be sure that even the parts that weren’t mechanical were entirely organic. Not even Atom himself knew for certain.

Aside from his right arm, which was an obvious construction of bright metal gears and pistons, the strange nature of Atom’s composition was well hidden. He looked and acted the very picture of a human male. Yet, just beneath all of that charm and grace, there ticked a heart of clockworks. If Rose hadn’t heard it ticking away herself, she would have never believed it possible.

Only two others aboard the Widow knew the truth about Atom. Dot, the ship’s medic, and Jayne, the ship’s tinker. Both women swore themselves to secrecy, allowing Atom to maintain a certain level of discretion about his condition. Since their discovery, he’d kept the fact to himself, leaving Rose to wonder if he ever planned on sharing it with her crew. But most of all, she wondered when he was going to tell Gabriella. He had asked the captain’s advice about revealing his nature to the young girl, and Rose told him to be honest. After all, brutal honesty was the one thing she treasured the most about Click, and just one of many things she never received from Bill.

The sound of Click’s voice overpowered her worry, pulling her from her drifting thoughts. “It’s not just him.”

Rose narrowed her eyes at her lover, wondering if he had once again read her mind with his strange native ways. “What do you mean?”

“It’s our mission.”

She looked to the ceiling, seeking a higher power’s assistance with her confusing companion. “It’s not a mission. It’s work. And yes, I’m worried about it. What I can’t understand is why no one else is.”

“Why worry? It’s an honorable task you have taken up on our behalf.”

“It’s a pointless task. For all we know, the doctor is dead. Do you really expect us to find him? After half the country has searched for him?”

Click’s smile grew wider, telling her that yes, he expected that very thing.

Rose huffed in frustration as she turned away from him again. “You’re hopelessly optimistic.”

“And you are ceaselessly beautiful.” Click nestled his body against hers, his every hard angle melding into her soft curves. While kissing and licking her shoulders and neck, he brought his hard cock to her heat, slipping it between her thighs, rubbing it against her puss, teasing her sex with his rigid desire.

Rose groaned as he cupped her breasts.

He kneaded them between his hot palms as he worked his sex against hers, pushing and prodding but never entering her hold.

“Stop teasing,” Rose commanded.

“Yes, my captain.” Click pushed himself into her with his usual ease.

His strokes were light and gentle, just enough to pleasure her without sending her into screams of ecstasy. This had been his habit the past few days, and Rose worried their little tryst on the island weighed on his mind. She wondered if she would ever see his wild side again. Perhaps when this was all done, and they were both without worry once more, she would seek out a truly deserted island for a week’s vacation with nothing but Click to satisfy her every need.

Continuing to kiss her neck, he plunged her depths as she pushed back to meet him stroke for stroke. It was going to take forever to climax like this, which might have been his goal all along. Trying to speed things along, she touched herself, running her fingers over her clit as he fucked her from behind. Rose reached lower, to feel his cock moving in her puss. When she reached even lower, to grab his balls, Click grunted in surprise.

“You like that?” she asked.

He whispered in a growl, “I love everything you do, my captain. I love your hot hands on my body, your wet mouth against mine, your velvet sex wrapped ’bout my cock. I love it when you give yourself to me completely.”

Click lowered his hand to her pussy, stroking her clit as she fondled his heavy sac. Rose groaned while he worked a thick digit alongside his own cock, then another, fingering her puss even as he fucked her. The feeling was exquisite, the added girth stretching her, filling her to a delightful degree. She released his balls, grabbing her own breasts instead.

“Yes, Click,” she said as she pulled at her nipples. “That’s amazing. Don’t stop.”

Click lifted his lips from her neck long enough to say, “Never, my captain. I will never stop pleasing you.”

Despite her pleasure, Rose made the mistake of glancing at the clock on her desk. She groaned again, this time from regret. Click was trying to please her, and as usual she didn’t have the time. Yet as he slid another finger deep beside his hardened desire, with a mutual gasp from each of them, she knew she had to make time. It was the most profound lesson she took away from that cursed island. She would always make time for his affections.

Because she could never know if it would be the last time.

Chapter 2

Breaking the Fast

In which we prepare for the road ahead

Atom never took breakfast with the crew. He had explained to Rose that, because of his physical idiosyncrasies, he took nutrients in a different way than normal humans. The kid seemed reticent to explain what he meant, so she didn’t press him for details. All she knew was that Gabriella took him a full tray every morning, and in an hour or so he brought it back quite empty with the rest of the crew none the wiser. For all she knew, Atom tipped the food overboard, then ate stardust and moonbeams when no one was watching.