Harder Than Diamond

by Jacey Ward

  What are you doing? Coy hissed silently. He’s already sizing us up!

  “I don’t recommend skinny dipping at Lake Scranton at this time of year. Also,” she added with a self-deprecating chuckle. “I don’t recommend skinny dipping and leaving your clothes on the shore as the tide is coming in.”

  Luke’s face turned beet red and he laughed nervously, but to Coy’s surprise, he lost the wariness in his eyes.

  “I forget what it’s like to be young sometimes,” Luke chuckled. “I can’t even remember the last time the wife and I went down to the lake.”

  “Oh! You really should go soon! It’s beautiful. I’ll draw you a map to a hidden cove. Your wife will love it,” Shay told him, winking. “That’s where James proposed to me, isn’t it sweetheart? That’s why we’re back here on our one-year anniversary.”

  The last of the suspicion faded from Luke’s eyes and he smiled warmly.

  “Happy anniversary,” he said cordially. “I won’t keep you. Enjoy the new years. They all go by so quickly when you have kids.”

  “That’s what we keep hearing,” Shay laughed, grabbing Coy’s arm. “But that won’t stop us from having a family, will it, babe?”

  Coy didn’t know what to say but he was spared as Shay led him toward the stairs, waving goodbye to Luke who resumed whatever the hell he’d been doing before his need to investigate had overcome him.

  “What. The. Hell. Was. That?” Coy choked when they entered the house. “How did you even come up with so much bullshit so fast? How did you know there was a Lake Scranton? Shit, how did you even know we were in Scranton? I don’t remember telling you!”

  “I have an uncanny sense of direction,” she replied. “I inherently know where I am. Always.”

  Coy could only gape at her.

  “How can you inherently know where you are if you’ve never been here?” he managed to sputter and she shrugged.

  “No idea. I just do.”

  Coy knew he shouldn’t be as shocked as he was but he couldn’t stop marveling at all he was learning about Shay.

  “And how about the bullshitting? Is that one of your many abilities?”

  Shay snickered.

  “It is but it’s not a superpower. I honed that particular skill while bartending through college. It’s not hard to fool people if you know how to read them.”

  “You bartended through college? Your father is richer than God,” Coy replied, dumbfounded.

  “He wanted me to know what it was like to work for my money. Of course he helped me but he insisted that I do my part too.”

  What made him change? Oculus? His wife? Something else entirely?

  “Should I be worried?” Coy asked, shifting his thoughts away from Geoff Collingwood. That problem had taken a place on the backburner for the time.

  “About?” Shay replied curiously.

  “Your aptitude for BSing.”

  Shay turned and wrapped her arms around his neck.

  “I think we should both be worried,” she replied softly. “But not of each other.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, pulling her close. “You’re absolutely right.”

  Because at this point, who else can we trust?

  Chapter 9

  A low moan escaped her lips but she was still running in her dream, trying to get away from…whom?

  Shay turned to look behind her but she could only see the shadow of a face.

  “Coy?” she murmured fearfully, but the word caught in her throat. Then a delicious shiver of awareness traveled over her body. Hazily, she felt strong hands on her back, massaging away the tension. They traveled lower, pulling one hip back so she was lying on her back. The magical hands urged her legs apart and the dream faded away until her dark eyes opened to take in the unfamiliar ceiling above her.

  A sigh slipped from her lips as felt the thrash of a firm, hot tongue against her clit and she realized what was happening.

  With a gasp of pleasure, she sat up and took in the thick curls moving rhythmically, the feel of strong palms cupped beneath her buttocks and drawing her fully against him.

  “Jesus,” she breathed, sinking back to savor being woken in such a way.

  This is so much better than waking in a strange place after sleepwalking.

  She heard Coy chuckle without breaking his flow, the vibration sending shockwaves through her and Shay groaned again, arching upward.

  His tongue teased the throbbing button between her quivering thighs and without any effort, she felt the build up of her orgasm inside her.

  As his tongue played with her clit, she felt his fingers easing inside her, slowly stretching and filling her. Arcs of pleasure lashed through her bloodstream, forcing a cry from her throat as he stroked her deeply.

  “I’m coming,” she breathed irrelevantly. She was sure he knew her every thought and every feeling already, like he had possessed her body a thousand times before.

  “Oh, my god…yes…” she cried, letting herself fall apart against his stubbly face. His fingers tightened around the firm skin of her ass and he lapped every drop of her climax until she was twitching pleasurably beneath him.

  Upward, he retraced the lines of her body, inch by tortuous inch, stopping to lick and taste what seemed like every sensitized bit of silky skin on her body.

  When they were face to face, she cupped his face in her hands and met his gleaming eyes steadfastly.

  “I’ve never been woken up like that before,” she murmured.

  “Get used to it,” he growled, plunging into her without warning.

  A scream reverberated from her throat, the sudden penetration of his cock deep inside her sending a pleasure-pain of pure ecstasy tearing through her body as he filled her, her pussy still deliciously tender from the pounding he had given her the previous night. He slowed, concern lighting his eyes but Shay bucked upward firmly.

  “Don’t stop,” she ordered him. “Don’t ever stop.”

  It was all the confirmation he needed and Shay clenched against him, her interior walls sucking his large cock fully inside her. Her inner muscles clenched, struggling to accommodate the steel rod piercing her sheath.

  She groaned, as his mouth found her nipple, torturing the tender tip with his teeth. “There you go,” he urged, as he thrust deeper inside her. “Let me hear your pleasure, baby.”

  Coy brought her legs up against his shoulders and she locked her ankles around his neck, hands splayed against the washboard of his perfect abs.

  “How are you even real?” he moaned, muscles rippled under her fingertips as he fought for control of his body. “Don’t want this to ever end,” he gritted out. “Fuck.”

  Coy’s jaw clenched as he continued to drive himself into her. He was in her body, in her mind, and he felt every tremor of pleasure that was coursing through her not once, but twice.

  As her second climax overtook her, the ripples and contractions of her pussy caused the ecstasy to rise in him so strong, so hot, that he couldn’t deny it any longer.

  Coy growled one final time, plunging his fist into her hair, arching his head back as the feelings ripped through his body. The maelstrom tore through him until he couldn’t escape it, couldn’t fight it and he erupted inside of her with such force that he knew she’d be branded on his brain forever more.

  He could still feel the tremors of her body, squeezing the walls in her pussy, sending little lightning bolts of pleasure through her mind.

  He grinned with satisfaction, his gaze meeting her eyes. The wonder he saw in her gaze was enough to stroke his ego a tad.

  “Fuck me,” Shay muttered and Coy laughed.

  “I thought I just did.”

  He propped himself up on a hand and stared into her face.

  “Damn, you’re beautiful.”

  “You’re starting to sound like a broken record,” she teased.

  “You know I’ve been in love with you since I was twelve years old.”

  She blushed at the sincerity of the words.

>   “I know the feeling,” she murmured. “How could we have known then that we’d be here right now?”

  A shadow crossed over Coy’s face and he sighed.

  “Well, this isn’t exactly what I saw for our future back then.”

  Reluctantly, Shay let the feeling of euphoria slip away.

  “So what is our next course of action?” she asked. “We can’t just hide out here forever.”

  Tempting as that is.

  He must have read her mind because he smiled softly and stroked her cheek with his finger.

  “I need to get in touch with my other cousin, Audrey. She might know what’s going on with Roan.”

  “She also might be with Roan,” Shay reminded him. “And then she’ll track you.”

  “No one can track me,” Coy replied dryly. “I’m one of the world’s best hackers.”

  She blinked.

  “Hackers?” she echoed. “I thought you said you were in finance…oh never mind. I get it.”

  She didn’t know what to make of that information.

  “I use my talents mostly for good,” he offered. “Well, that and tracking Oculus’ finances – and their connections.”

  “That’s why my father hired you? Because you’re a hacker?”

  Coy shrugged and sat up, turning away so that she only saw the flex of his broad shoulder muscles.

  “Word gets around,” he replied. “And I take the jobs because it broadens my network of people who can link me to Oculus.”

  “As a hacker?” she asked dubiously. Coy’s eyes narrowed and he pierced her with his steely gaze.

  “I don’t expect you to understand my choices,” he replied. “But please don’t judge me for doing what I’ve had to do to help keep my family safe.”

  He added a silent thought which Shay was sure she wasn’t meant to hear.

  And yeah, if I got a chance to kill the organization, damn straight I’d take it.

  “I’m not judging you,” she said quietly, sitting and putting a hand on his strong back. “I’m just trying to understand.”

  He glanced at her over his shoulder and whatever he saw in her face seemed to convince him. He pushed his body back onto the bed and lay back to stare at her.

  “When I was a kid, I only wanted to get out of the compound. I thought when I could finally leave, I’d be done with Oculus and see my family at Christmas and when I wanted to. When I look back now, it was probably more about control over my life than it was about Oculus, really. We had an extremely structured childhood, my cousins and I. We only had each other for friends, and Oculus seemed to be a dark cloud that hung over us. Always. And influenced every single decision we made. I didn’t really understand why Oculus was the driving force in everything in our lives… and I rebelled. A lot.”

  Shay listened quietly, hearing the slight bitterness in his tone.

  “It seemed to me that we had enough power to take down the entire world and that a little faction shouldn’t be such a large influence on us for three generations.”

  “You have a point,” she agreed. “What did your father say about that?”

  “His answer was always the same—we don’t know enough about Oculus to know what they’re capable of. For all our power, we lived in fear. I hated it and I vowed I wouldn’t live like that.”

  “What changed?”

  “I started to realize that my father was right. I could feel them watching me, waiting for something, but who the hell knows what? We started to believe that they knew exactly where we were, and who we were, years ago. But they never made a move – or at least, never the move we anticipated.

  “See, decades ago, Oculus tried to tear my father and his three brothers away from my grandfather when they learned what the four boys could do. They shot and killed my grandmother – right in front of her husband and small kids. After that night, the boys were scattered across the country, placed in foster homes, separately, by an agent that my grandfather trusted,” he paused, staring off into the distance as if he could see the tragedy through his father’s eyes.

  “But then the agent was killed by Oculus. He was the only person who knew how to find the boys…it took my grandfather more than twenty years to find them all, to bring them back. That’s why we’re so close now – because we have to be. We can only trust each other. But as a kid, that lack of freedom chafed – for me at least. And I wanted to break away, work on my own,” he met her eyes. “But like I said, it seems like Oculus is watching, waiting for something, and every time we got close to them, another wired would materialize and we started to see that Oculus was really much bigger than we’d ever imagined.”

  “Wired?”

  “That’s what we call ourselves. We’re hard-wired with different abilities, some of which you know about, but some would blow your mind if you ever saw them.”

  “Like what?” Curiosity flowed through Shay. “Could anything be more amazing than being able to control the weather?”

  “My cousin Roan can control matter. Well, re-arrange it, actually, and walk through walls. Which I gotta tell you, also sucked while we were teenagers, and wanted…privacy…to – well, you know.” She covered her mouth to stifle her laughter at the look of embarrassed chagrin on his face.

  Oh, what growing up in a house full of psychically power-enhanced people would be like.

  “One of my uncles can freeze time,” Coy said quickly, obviously trying to wipe out the hilarious picture she saw in her mind of him “seeking privacy” as a teenager.

  “Holy shit.”

  Coy shrugged and nodded, satisfied that he had distracted her.

  “I guess I’m a little desensitized to it all.”

  I can’t imagine ever being desensitized to all this, Shay thought, her head spinning but then again, she had not grown up around it constantly.

  “And you never told me…back then, I mean. I don’t blame you, of course, but can you imagine how different my life would have been if I’d known then what I know now? If I’d gone with you to your compound?”

  Coy’s jaw clenched.

  “You never would have made it out of there alive,” he said bluntly and she paled.

  “What? Why not?”

  “My father was following me that week, the week we met. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that anyone brought to the compound uninvited wouldn’t live to tell about it. You see, after what happened to my grandfather all those years ago, he’s a little more ‘radical’ than the rest of us. A tad overprotective, you might say.”

  Her eyes darkened.

  “I’m sure he was just trying to scare you,” she murmured. “No one would have killed a young girl.”

  “Maybe not,” Coy agreed. “But those words stuck around in my head well enough for me to want to forever cut ties with my family – at the time, anyways.”

  Shay turned toward him, her face filled with compassion.

  “You wanted to leave your family because of me?” she murmured.

  “Maybe,” Coy admitted.

  “Your family needs you, Coy. Whatever bad blood you had before, it takes a backseat now.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m just trying to decide what to do next.”

  She smiled and touched his face, drawing him closer to her lips.

  “I know you are and I have faith that we’ll figure this out together,” she told him. “Even without SHAY and your hacking expertise.”

  He returned her kiss tenderly and then rolled on top of her, causing her to squeal as he rained kisses down her neck.

  “Is it wrong that I’m horny again?” he muttered, his breath hot in her ear.

  “Yes,” she laughed but she didn’t push him off. “We have work to do.”

  He buried his face in her neck and inhaled deeply.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I feel a change of weather coming on.”

  Shay looked at him curiously.

  “Like I told you before, I’m not as good at controlling it as Uncle Aiden is, but I’m the b
est damn weathervane you’ve ever seen.”

  Chapter 10

  “Come on, Audrey. Pick up.”

  But the phone continued to ring until his cousin’s voicemail picked up and he was listening to her bright but professional message.

  “You’ve reached Dr. Audrey Conway. I’m unable to take your call right now—”

  Coy hung up before the recorded message completed and he exhaled.

  “No luck?” Shay asked and he shook his head, unhooking the scrambling device from the house phone.

  “Still no answer.”

  “Maybe you should call Roan back. Maybe this was all a misunderstanding,” Shay offered hopefully but Coy knew that wasn’t the case at all. If anything, he could feel in his gut that something was terribly amiss.

  Audrey always answers her phone. If she saw me calling this many times, she would answer.

  “What else can we do?”

  “We can’t do anything. I can though,” Coy replied. “You need to stay here. I’m going back to the compound.”

  Her face twisted in shock.

  “No! No way,” Shay cried. “You can’t go to the compound alone. Who knows what you’ll be walking into?”

  “That’s exactly the point—I have no idea what’s going on. If my family needs me, I can’t just sit around here doing nothing.”

  “Well, neither can I!” Shay protested. “How do you expect me to do the same thing?”

  He met her eyes earnestly.

  “Shay, I love that you want to help, but there’s nothing you can do. If Oculus has somehow gotten to my family, you’ll be in danger if you come to confront them.”

  “So will you!”

  “Yeah, but I’m impervious to injury,” he reminded her.

  “And I’m quicker than I look!”

  They were at an impasse, their gazes held and Coy could see that she wouldn’t back down.

  “Shay, if anything happens to you—”

  “Nothing will happen to me!” she cried. “I’m not some bonsai tree that needs to be handled with care!”

  She has no idea. She hasn’t seen what can happen when Oculus is involved.

  “Maybe I haven’t,” Shay snapped, again reading his thoughts. “But you’re the one who decided to fill me in. You can’t lock me out now.”