Light Unfolding: A Reverse Harem Science Fiction Romance (Wings of Artemis Book 8)

by Rebecca Royce

  Ari shook his head. “Distracting you, yes. You do medicine really well, taking your mind and making it do something else. It’s not necessarily going to fix it, but your pressure rose slightly. That’s a good sign.”

  Yes, it was. “And my pulse?”

  “Scary. But I’ve seen worse.” He smoothed my hair off my face. “I’m going to put you in the med machine, get all your levels worked out, and I’d rather not have you hysterical and fighting. I’ll do it even if you are, but if you’re calm it’ll be faster. We just got your face back. I don’t want it blocked away from me any longer than it has to be.”

  I nodded, but the tears came again. “I’m blowing this. I’m sorry. You guys somehow got here, and I am ruining the reunion. How did you get here? And hi, Jackson. I never said hi.”

  He smiled at me, his gaze kind. “Hi, Waverly. I love you. No apologies. Please. Nothing to be sorry about. All will be well.”

  Ari nudged me into a prone position, and the bed I was on changed, converting into the med machine that would hopefully make all of this feel slightly better. He was right. I was going into shock. Seeing Rohan had… what? Shoved me over? I would have to figure it all out later. It didn’t matter. The lid was closing over me and the medicine was working.

  The ship jolted again, and Rohan’s face came into view. I’d lose consciousness soon. “It’s just the black hole. We had to get back into it before Olivia blows the entrance.”

  Okay. Okay. I’d…

  I woke up in a bed, and it took me a moment to realize where I was. I’d passed out on the med table after losing it in the med bay. I’d all but attacked Rohan and completely destroyed our unexpected reunion. I was on Artemis. Ari liked patients to wake up more comfortable than the med machines if he could, and he’d clearly managed it here.

  I wasn’t alone. Movement next to me caught my attention, and I rolled over to find Jackson, eyes closed, pressed up against my back. It had been ten months since I’d had this, since I’d seen any of them, and they must be asking themselves why they bothered.

  No, that wasn’t what they were thinking.

  Waverly, everyone hates you.

  My father’s constant refrain in my head was never helpful. Ignoring it until it went away or until I could figure out how to psychologically banish him worked better.

  Orion was no more. Or at least it wasn’t as it had been. In the future it would be something quite different. Or in the now. Or the… hell, I hate time travel.

  I reached out to smooth Jackson’s hair off his face, and his eyes opened slowly. He blinked before giving me the most adoring smile I’d ever seen from him. My heart stuttered. That wasn’t the look of a man unhappy he’d manipulated the waves of time to get to me.

  “Hey, lady.”

  I wrapped my arms around him, squeezing him tightly. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s the last apology I want to hear you make. Okay?” He kissed my cheek. “Just glad you’re here and you’re going to be better. I promise.”

  He was such an optimist underneath his gruff exterior. “It’s just gone. I knew the whole time I was there it was on a countdown, and yet I didn’t leave it because I had nowhere to go… I…”

  Jackson lifted his brows. “Maybe you knew we’d come for you there, too. Maybe you understood in your soul we’d never leave you there.”

  I decided what I really wanted to do was listen to Jackson’s heartbeat. That was all I needed to do right then. “Thank you for coming. How did you?”

  “Wes had a prototype scanner that Canyon messed with to make work. It doesn’t time jump like the others but it could follow a time stream in the black hole, its original purpose. We made it work. How long were you there?”

  They never ceased to amaze me with how smart they were. “Ten months. How did you figure out I was there? How long were you in the black hole?”

  Melissa and Diana’s husbands had spent years inside of the thing getting to them. Jackson didn’t look older, but that could be deceiving.

  He shifted on the bed, linking our fingers before he brought our joined hands to his mouth. He kissed the top of my hand like doing so was as important as breathing to him. The feel of his warm lips, watching him do it, stole my own breath. But who needed air in this moment?

  Jackson lifted his gaze to meet my own once again. “Melissa remembered you were on Orion. We cut it close, didn’t mean to, but this isn’t yet an exact science. Although, I think Canyon intended to make it so when last we talked about it.” I hadn’t seen him yet. Or had I? The med bay was something of a blur to me in my memory. No, I didn’t think I had.

  “She remembered me? It was awful. I never want to think of her like that again.”

  He nodded. “She’s had some mind erasing, so she recalled it all of a sudden, like a dream. So we made it happen, terrified we’d miss the date. And it took a year. So not much longer than you. Should have been longer, but this is Canyon, after all. He made it faster right away.”

  I smiled. If ever a person could shorten a black hole trip it was him. “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to make things worse again, but I have to tell you something that I think is important.”

  My chest tightened. I swallowed. “Go on.”

  “Am I right to assume that you left the scanner in a cave? The one that brought you here and didn’t return you?”

  He was. I’d checked on it periodically. “Yes. Why?”

  “There were some strange readings right after… well, after. Canyon, ah, monitored them and sent them to Rohan who, using historical data of the planet, was able to correlate that they came from a cave. It had to be the scanner. Nothing else made sense. I’m rambling. There was subspace interference, a jolt in time. Like it was moving at a different pace than the rest of the planet. They realized it had to be the scanner and then I remembered something.”

  I’d actually followed him through all of that. “What did you recall?”

  “Diana and Lewis have a story from the time they met. It basically goes that they went to a cave with a hot spring. It turned out to be on a different timeline than the rest of the planet. Freaked everyone out. They thought they were gone hours and it was all day. They went back, found the device, turned it off, brought it back to study it. Long story short, it was because they had the device, her husbands were able to travel across the black hole to find her years later.”

  I gawked at him. “The scanner?”

  “The scanner you left there. So weird and… I don’t know… kismet as it sounds, you are basically responsible for all of them being together now. If I believed in fate or whatever, I’d say it had to happen.”

  I didn’t know why I launched myself at Jackson right then but I did. I kissed him so hard he might never wonder if I loved him, if I wanted to be with him, if I cherished every second we were together. I’d missed him every moment we were apart. I pulled his shirt off and he made an oomph noise before he let go of me to start unbuttoning mine.

  My beautiful, inked up man. The place over his heart remained empty. He told me he was going to put something there that reminded him of me. But he’d probably been a little busy saving my life to think about it. I kissed the blank spot, and he massaged the back of my head.

  Jackson flipped me over until he was on top. I sighed. Yes, I preferred it this way. I really did. I wanted him in charge. He took one of my nipples in his mouth, moaning when he did. I loved the sound, and before long, I dug my fingers in his back in response. How could the pain feel so good?

  He hardened above me, and even with his pants still on, I could feel his cock pressed against me. I cupped him on the outside of his pants. He jumped beneath my fingers.

  “Fuck, lady.” He sighed. “I love you.”

  I loved how he said those three words. I’d never expected to hear them, ever. Now they filled me with warmth I needed more than I could even fathom. “Jackson. I believed in the beginning that you guys would come. Then I stopped. I’m sorry. I had come to think
I would never see your face again.”

  He nodded. “I had moments where I lost it, too. A year in this black hole. What if we got there too late? But here we are. I love you, Waverly.”

  I ran my hand down the side of his face, feeling his whiskers. “I love you, too.” I tugged on his pants. I intended to show him just how much. We undressed each other in stops and starts. He wanted to kiss me, and I had no issue with that. His mouth would meet mine, and when we came up for air, he’d get back to taking my clothes off.

  A mess of arms and legs, I wrapped myself around him and waited for him to press inside of me. When he finally did, I cried out, the feeling of coming home all consuming. His movements were jerky, and I could barely create a rhythm before pleasure overtook me. I shook in his arms while he trembled against me. We came, hard, together.

  I closed my eyes. There was so much wrong in the universe but there was this, too. And this was so beautiful I couldn’t contain my tears, this time the happy version.

  3 The Black Hole

  I showered and left a sleeping Jackson in my bed. Well, I assumed it was my bed. I looked around the dimly lit room. The ship was on nighttime lighting, meant to keep us in some semblance of day-night rhythm even in the darkest of space. It might be nighttime, but maybe because I’d been knocked out I wasn’t tired.

  The others might be asleep, although I doubted it. Canyon and Rohan didn’t need very much. The room was filled with my clothes, which meant someone had the wherewithal to grab my things before leaving The Farm. I was grateful for the thought. Without wearing the same thing every day, it would be easier to be on this ship for however long it took to get through the black hole.

  I leaned over to kiss Jackson on his cheek. He didn’t budge. His eyes moved under his lids and he was adorable. The fact he didn’t budge showed how exhausted he was. That and the dark circles under his eyes. My guess was the stress of getting to me had been huge and his sleep sketchy over the last year.

  Leaving him to rest, I padded out of the room on as quiet of feet as I could manage. The ship buzzed, a background noise I would have to get used to again. Artemis had been the vessel my brothers and Paloma had used to rescue me. I’d noted the noise the last time too, but it had eventually become something I could tune out. The same would happen again. Until then, it wasn’t an unpleasant sound. It just meant the ship was working.

  My father’s ships had not been designed for comfort. They were war vessels and had a constant ringing that was either loud or deafening, depending on where you stood.

  I walked toward the control center on the other side of the ship and nearly collided with Rohan around a corner. I made an oomph noise as his arms came around me.

  “Oh.” I laughed, squeezing him. “I keep beating you up.”

  He pressed his lips to the top of my hair, kissing me there. “I was hurrying because I heard you coming, and I wanted to see you sooner. My fault we collided. I might be losing my touch with balance and stealth.”

  He was so funny. How did anyone think he was scary? “Or you just know you don’t have to be stealthy with me. I’m so sorry I attacked you.”

  “Wavey.” I loved how he called me that. “You couldn’t hurt me if you tried. You were not in your right mind. I could see it. I even understood it. The planet was destroyed along with everyone you knew there. You’d been through trauma getting there. Don’t even give it another thought.”

  He was so ridiculously sweet. Although, outside of me, I doubted anyone in the universe knew. I reached up to him and his mouth met mine. Rohan kissed me like a starved man receiving sustenance for the first time. Leaning all my weight against his body, I pressed against him. He always made me feel small, and it was a sensation I treasured since I so rarely felt that way.

  His arms came around me even tighter, and when he pulled back, his lids were hooded. “I lost you to the universe.”

  “I thought I’d never have this moment with you, never know what it was to feel your love again.”

  My Super Soldier blinked away tears. “I… I don’t cry.”

  I shook my head. “I won’t tell a soul. Besides, it doesn’t count unless you let them stream down your face. So you didn’t technically cry.”

  He gave me a side smile. “Is that the medical definition?”

  “Sure. Why not.”

  He took my hand and pulled me into the kitchen. It was empty. He shut the door behind him with a loud thump. Or maybe it just seemed that way considering how quiet the room seemed otherwise. I was very tuned into sounds right then.

  His hands rubbed over my arms, touching the exposed skin gently. “Wavey, I would blast the universe into pieces for you.”

  “Thank you.” I kissed his chin. “You don’t need to do that. Apparently all you need to do is transverse time and cross galaxies.”

  He opened his mouth, but I distracted him from whatever he was going to say by leaning against the table. His gaze roamed my body before coming back to my face. “If you come over here, Rohan, I can show you just how much I missed you. The things I thought about in my bed at night when I wasn’t crying. The things I imagined.”

  He took a step forward. “You thought about me in bed?”

  “Did you ever think about me?”

  Color tinged the olive skin on his cheeks. “Wavey, from the moment I met you, on this very ship, I’ve thought about you almost constantly. You are always in the back of my mind. Even when I think about other things. So yes, I think about you when I do go to bed. I wake up thinking about you. For the last year on this ship I’ve awakened so hard in the morning that for an hour, I could hardly function for wanting you.”

  I squirmed on the edge of the table. That had been so much more than I’d been expecting. “I don’t know what you saw in me that day, but I’ll be eternally grateful you saw it.”

  He walked toward me slowly. When Rohan wanted to, he could move like a predator. Right then I was his willing prey. He stopped right in front of me. “I need you.”

  That was quite an admission from Rohan. I doubted he’d ever uttered those words before in his life. “I’m right here.”

  “I keep having to convince myself of that. Another two minutes and I wouldn’t have gotten to you on time.”

  I reached out my hand, and although he didn’t take another step toward me, he linked our fingers. It was a start. Rohan had never had anyone in his life, not even as a baby. He’d been raised in a lab to be the perfect executioner. Somehow they’d not managed to kill his heart. I didn’t know how he’d held on.

  “Another two minutes and you’d have been blown away with me.”

  He squeezed my fingers. “That would have been fine. Better that than an existence without you. I was never supposed to be here very long anyway.”

  “Rohan,” I snapped at him, not even caring about the tone of my voice. “Don’t you ever say that again. Do you understand me? You are very important. Not just to me but just to existence.”

  He finally stepped toward me. “Your fierceness is one of your finest qualities. I mean, among many. I can never decide what about you I love the most.”

  He used the word so freely; it might have been easy to forget he hadn’t grown up saying it any more frequently than I had. I’d at least had my mother for just a little while. Rohan had never had anyone. I would never take for granted that he’d given his heart to me.

  I sat up just a little. “Rohan, I need you as much as you need me.”

  He kissed me so gently that it was practically a sigh. He stroked his hand along my back before he dropped our linked hand to cup the side of my face. We stayed like that for long moments. I could feel his love for me in every caress. I hoped he could experience the same.

  He leaned me back on the table, stepping up on one chair to lean over me before placing all his weight on his elbows down on the table. He bit down on his lower lip and then lifted his eyebrows. “Hello, Wavey.”

  “Hello, Ro.” I touched his lip where he’d bit it. Qu
iet moments could be the best. My heart beat loudly, I could hear it in my ears. He scooted back off the table. What was he doing?

  He tugged off my pants, and I grinned at him. When he didn’t unbuckle his own pants, I reached for him, but he stepped back. “You’re not the only one with fantasies. This one is mine.”

  I sucked in my breath. What did he have in mind? I cleared my throat. “Me on the edge of the kitchen table?”

  “You everywhere.”

  He thumbed my underwear down and discarded it before he dropped to his knees.

  “Rohan?”

  “Let me. Please.”

  I’d never deny him anything. My cheeks heated up as he pressed his mouth against me. I’d thought of a lot of things but never this. Mostly because I was pretty sure I’d find the whole thing embarrassing. I didn’t know why. I’d be really happy to have him in my mouth.

  His tongue caressed my clit in a circle and all of my thoughts fled. Oh, yes, there was nothing to worry about with this. It was absolutely fantastic. I moaned, the deepness of the sound surprising me. Had there ever been anything like this?

  My noises must have encouraged him on. He moaned but picked up the pace in the way his tongue circled my clit. I squirmed. This was the sweetest torture. He pushed my knees wider apart. I couldn’t stand it. I had to… I had… I exploded around his mouth.

  Euphoria rushed through me as I watched Ro through hooded eyes. He stepped back. He was so hard he tented his pants with arousal. Rohan breathed heavily.

  “Can I?”

  He was asking? “Of course.” Slowly, he dropped his pants to the floor. I wanted to do for him as he’d done for me. Squirming, I got off the table and fell to my knees in front of him. He was hard, thick, veined, and my mouth watered, but when I tried to touch him he pulled back. I lifted my eyes. What was the problem? I throbbed inside, wanting so much to do this.

  “If you do that, I’m going to go off instantly. I don’t want that. I want to be inside of you.”

  I nodded. I was disappointed, but there would be time for that. In fact, it seemed we had nothing but time in however long this journey through the black hole took. He pointed at the table. “Back on it.”