Her eyes bored into him, pools of dark energy, and then the intensity shifted. One eyebrow climbed up her forehead. “You brought me here, to your treasure vault, and you don’t expect a shitload of questions? Seriously?”
He blinked, lowered the intensity of the light. “Okay then. Ask away.”
But she didn’t. Not immediately. He showed her the way to a set of circular wrought-iron stairs. They creaked when she stepped up, and the center pole wobbled. He reassured her that it was safe, and she went right up. He wasn’t sure if that indicated that she trusted him or that she didn’t give two shits about her own safety.
He hoped for the former. Suspected the latter.
They went through other rooms with stores of stuff. Silks from Xi’an, vintage machine parts, bootleg French wine.
She paused beside an open-topped box crammed with what looked like old textiles. Gilt leaf glittered through lace and dust. A corner had fallen aside, revealing the delicate craftsmanship beneath. The 1902 Kelch Rocaille was a new arrival, one he hadn’t logged and sorted yet. He needed to get right on that. A piece like this deserved to be crated more securely, stowed in the vault until he could find a good home for it.
“What?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Just reminded me of this house outside Houston, back when. Some big-haired gal had taken over her grandad’s petrochem company and invited my father over to talk about something sciency. Don’t know what, but it wasn’t the mech-clones, or he sure as hell wouldn’t have brought me along. Anyhow, that gal, she had a whole shitload of eggs like this one.”
“Fabergé. The McFerrin family of Kingwood used to own the largest private collection.”
His team had braved the ruins of north Houston to retrieve McFerrin’s collection. Some things he had no qualms trading on the black market, but these were unsellable, legacies of not one but two eras on their way out. Besides, he had a line on the owner, or heir, and would see these objects safely home. Heron wasn’t a thief.
Her finger hovered centimeters above the egg, but she didn’t touch it. “You know folks who’ve been to Texas since secession? How…?”
He gestured at the crates. “This is what I do, for the most part, when I’m not working with you.”
“You’re a treasure hunter?” She said it like it was something impossibly noble.
He ducked his head, pulling the light beams off her face. “I take care of precious things.”
He expected more questions from her, but she didn’t ask anything after that. Reticence was odd for her, but he would have been more surprised if she’d exhibited no human reaction to this day’s events. She’d been through the wringer. He just hoped it was over, or nearly so.
At the eighth floor, he established a connection with the Pentarc system, and by the ninth floor, he dared log on to his mirror to check the status of law enforcement. So far, Pentarc seemed to be off their radar. Thankfully. He pinged his extraction team, and Garrett, his copilot, responded: weather delay made them still eighty-six minutes out.
And the bad news just kept coming.
At the tenth floor, he opened a half door into a closet, handed Mari through it, and then led her out onto a balcony off an uninhabited, west-spire living unit. They took the fire escape up to the eleventh floor without speaking.
His room in this spire was 1121, and he passkeyed them in, then reset the box, digitally wiping traces of his presence. And hers.
With only a slight hesitation, he let her precede him into the unit. His home. Ish. Well, one of his homes, one of the several places he could stow away, meld into the walls. Relax. He’d lived in a total of seven countries before age ten; he had a fluid definition of home.
The lights were motion activated, and they flared when Mari stepped in past the kitchenette, taking it all in with a glance. She turned, pierced him with a hot-whiskey gaze, and nodded toward the glass-brick shower tucked in a corner behind the refrigerator.
“So, now we got all the bad stuff out in the open, you mind if I get naked?”
It took pretty much every micron of control for him to say simply, “Be my guest.”
• • •
Mari showered alone, alas, though she could see Heron’s shadow through the glass-block wall the whole time. He’d told her she was safe enough here in the Pentarc, and she believed him. They hadn’t seen another living soul the whole way up, probably because of their twisty secret-passagey way of getting here. They were as good as alone. She could shower, get cleaned up, take a breath. He’d plan out her next move, something that definitely wasn’t in their contract, though she wasn’t complaining.
She felt wobbly about being on her own right now, like the first moment she was alone, the darkthing made of guilt would eat her bone-bare and chase her wounds with lemon. Heron soothed that a bit. Not with hot toddies or kisses but with gestures that seemed second nature to him.
Like showing her his stuff. She hadn’t expected that. Funny, she hadn’t been aware for the last year that she was thinking up a nonwork life for Heron, populating it with things she thought he might be into. The fantasy Heron mostly spent his time in dark rooms, eating takeaway and coding on one of those giant, vintage supercomputers. She’d never thought he might be Indiana Jonesing all over the war-ravaged globe, handling priceless Russian eggs like they belonged in his big hands. The new info changed her view of him some. But she liked it. It fit.
She located his shape again as she squeezed lather through the sponge bristles, letting foam globs drip down her belly.
Some of her job-related tension was sloughing off with the decadent warm water, but he was still smack-dab in the zone. Focused, palms flat against the smartsurface countertop, tension evident in his stillness.
She watched his blurry outline through the shower wall. If she’d had her com in, she might have listened in to see if he was speaking out loud. She wished she could see his face clearly.
What she wouldn’t do, what she shouldn’t do—and what she out-of-her-gourd desperately wanted to do—was slither out of the shower stark naked and dripping, lean back on that narrow bed, and sling him a come-hither he couldn’t possibly resist. She knew ways to work tension from a man’s body—and from her own.
True, Heron shied away from her flirting generally, and she had some good guesses why. Professionalism, for one. Also, he didn’t understand her process. And how could he, really? How could anyone get it if they hadn’t swirled death and sex until the whole thing blended into a desperate right the hell now?
Take advantage of the now, because the later, the alone, was going to hurt. A lot. And it was going to be equally bad whether she was in a cell somewhere or a cabana in Cabo. He was all about saving her from the authorities, but that wasn’t where her worst threats came from.
She needed connection, touch, to chase away the darkthing. She was the pin on a teeter-totter, one end bringing death, one bringing joy, and they were badly out of balance. She needed to see orgasm break over somebody’s face—orgasm because of her, because she could create something not horrible and guilt-making.
She needed that. From him. And apparently, it was the one thing he didn’t put on offer.
As it was, about all she could do was swirl the sponge and hope he was spying on her half as much as she was spying on him. But she doubted it.
“Look at me,” she whispered, pressing index fingers behind her ears where he might if he held her head for a kiss. “See me. Damn you, there’s a naked woman right here.”
He didn’t look. Of course he didn’t.
Hot with disappointment, she ducked her head under the rush of water, pushing her fingers back into her hair and squeezing the soap from it. Water couldn’t clean her completely, though. She knew what she was, what she’d done. Shame marked her.
She closed her eyes, thankful this time that he hadn’t looked. That he didn’t realize.
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Steam surrounded her. That subtle neroli scent wasn’t just in the car. It was in his soap, too. This lather didn’t suck the moisture out of her skin like that sulfate-ridden crap she usually used. Expensive. Another one of his “precious things”?
God, what was she even doing here? She didn’t deserve this…care.
Outside the shower, Heron still looked tense. He must have read something bad on the smartsurface, because he stood and stalked to the far end of the living unit, over by the bed. Something in his posture made her nervous. Or nervouser.
She reached back and palmed the cracked ceramic knob. It slid back into the wall, and the stream of water trickled to a stop.
“Everything okay?” she called, leaning head and shoulders out of the stall.
He turned his face toward her—damp and naked and just-out-of-the-shower her—then slid it right past without so much as a hitch. A lesser man might have made a comment. Or pushed her ass-first up against the glass-block wall.
Heron, on the other hand, was the picture of professionalism. “Law enforcement still hasn’t found us, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Mentally sighing, Mari snagged a thin towel from the post by the commode niche and wrapped it around her body as she stepped out of the shower cube. “Good thinkin’, then, bringing us here. Thanks, partner.”
He didn’t reply, but his eyes tracked her movements like she was a radar target, the subject of intense interest for a fraction of a moment but not much longer. No emotion there, no clue to his thoughts.
She bent to dry her legs. She had fresh clothes folded neatly in her duffel by the door, but her just-scrubbed skin felt raw, hot. Instead of reaching for her clothes, she donned a cheap terry bathrobe that had been hanging on a peg by the towel rack. Big one. Its hem dragged the floor, and the sleeves more than covered her hands, but Mari didn’t mind. There was something yummy about wearing his clothes. She tied the sash and wrapped her hair in the already-damp towel.
When she looked up, he was still at the far end of the apartment, paying attention to anything but her. Dangit.
She wrung her hair with the towel and watched him fiddle around in the kitchenette. Tea. He was making tea. She reached for her com and held it against her throat, counting her pulse. The pinch of the embeds flared along her skin.
“Hey,” she said, heading to his end of the narrow apartment. She plopped down on the bed, within touching distance. “I probably ought to let Aunt Boo know I’m still breathing, in case she sees vid saying otherwise. You got a security code to log in?”
This close, it was everything she could manage not to grab him and pull him down here with her. Her hand might have even moved in his general direction, but the floppy sleeve disguised it.
“Um, no.” Frowning slightly, he went back to the kitchenette.
Maybe the sight of a mostly naked her sitting on his bed was just too much for him. Nah, not likely. Though a girl could hope.
The conk of ceramic and the scuff of his boots on linoleum: things that were supposed to settle and comfort. But Mari knew nothing was going to settle her right now. At least, nothing short of an orgasm so intense she passed out.
“I don’t log in to the cloud here, not directly,” he said. “The Pentarc system is closed and only interfaces with the world outside at intervals. It’s inconvenient sometimes but provides a buffer between the cloud and…me.” As if one were a danger to the other, though between the two, Mari would put her money on Heron. “But you can give me your message, and I will send it along to your aunt.”
He put the tea things aside, and Mari told him her Aunt Boo’s handle and dictated a short note: “Am fine. Did a bad thing, though. Running. Like it or not, you’re connected to me, so it’s probably a good idea for you to hide out a while. Sorry, Auntie B. Love you.”
Heron removed his gloves and pressed his palms against the kitchen counter. Casual, like he was just leaning there. Nothing lit beneath his hands, no navigation display, and his posture looked more like meditation than a brain-machine interface. It occurred to her right then that this interaction might not be. Human, that is.
Heron wasn’t a mech-clone; he had been born a whole-organic and lived at least part of his life without implants. But he’d been altered along the way so much that she might well have been watching one machine brainspeak to another, straight through that kitchen counter.
Straight through his hands. Sharp knuckles, long, tapered fingers with a glint of sense-tips on the ends. Wires probably augmented his reflexes, aided in the transmission of instructions from neural to muscles, and sensory inputs ran back up to command and control. That was all pretty standard. But most post-human alterations included comprehensive rebuilds, which covered over the metal and obvious bits. He must have kept the sensors on the ends of his fingers bare for a reason. Either that or he hadn’t gone through a government-licensed clinic.
Like so much of him, though, the things that she would have once considered off-putting or creepifying were just…him. Confident, capable, badass him. Her partner. She ached to feel those long hands, tipped in quicksilver, on her skin, every contour and crease. She wanted to kiss them and look at them and tell him they were beautiful. That he was. To her.
She didn’t move.
“All right.” He lifted his hands, flexed his fingers, and retrieved his teacup and hers. “Your message is queued in the Pentarc and should upload shortly. I insulated it so it can’t be tracked back here, just in case authorities are monitoring your aunt’s communications, which, let’s face it, they probably are.” He skirted the counter’s edge and reached one cup toward her. Chamomile wafted off the top.
“Thanks.” Mari breathed in the steam, trying to recapture the threads of their conversation, which kept slipping away through the film of yearning she fought. “But really, you never log on to the cloud?”
He didn’t reply and wouldn’t meet her gaze. Just retreated back to the counter and sipped his tea. And that was answer enough.
“Dang, how do you do anything? All that monitoring and job prepping and… I mean, you have to connect somehow.”
Heron blinked slowly and blew the steam from his cup. “This is really what you want to discuss, querida?”
No. She’d rather discuss getting him out of those clothes and over here on this bed. She shrugged, trying for casual. “Nah, I guess not. Thank you for sending my note.”
“You’re welcome.” He pinned her with a look over the rim of his cup.
She swallowed. Her skin hummed like high voltage needing ground. That shower hadn’t relaxed her one bit, and at this point, she wasn’t sure if the nervous energy sparking all over her was guilt or regret or lust. Most likely a combination of all three. “So now what?”
“I have someone coming to fetch you, once you get dressed and have something to eat. There’s a helipad on the south half spire, level ten. If you still want to go to Cabo San Lucas, they’ll take you.”
Would you go with me? “Who’s they?”
“My crew.”
“This the same crew that does the treasure-hunting stuff with you?” She dropped her gaze to the duvet, picked at a piece of embroidery fuzz, and tried not to sound too needy when she added, “Y’all have something lined up for after you deal with me?” She imagined he planned artifact extractions sort of the way he did shooter extractions like hers. Couldn’t be too terribly different, right, braving danger to fetch a barrel of rare wine or a girl with a gun?
He’d gone still. She couldn’t read those dark eyes, but something in his posture had changed. He seemed…confused? Embarrassed? Definitely out of his comfort zone, but still too in-control of his face and body for her to get a clue what he was thinking.
“You’re all I’m concerned with right now, Mari.”
Wait. What?
A thought sliced through all her confusion and guilt. She was one
of the precious things he took care of? Like a Fabergé egg or a bolt of raw Chinese silk. Her? Was that what he’d been implying? No way. No way. And yet…
An anchor dropped deep in her chest.
She had never been a precious thing. Not to anybody. She’d been an angry-making burden to Aunt Boo, a disappointment to Dad, a fun career move to Nathan.
Was this what it felt like to be wanted, just for herself?
• • •
Heron had to look away from her. Mari. On the bed. Mostly naked. Twenty-seven degrees warmer than ambient temperature and dew-damp from her shower. She would taste like salt and hot cinnamon, and his mouth filled with want of her.
She had no idea how cruel this teasing was. Nor how much control it took not to shove her down into the cheap arco bed and fuck her raw when what he really needed to concentrate on was getting her out of here, keeping her whole. Keeping her safe. Keeping her asshole father as far away from her as possible.
He put the counter between his body and hers, flexed his fingers against the cool surface, and opened the data flow in through his palm sensors. Flash log. Info flood. Surge. Steady. This was the sort of input he understood, could interpret and handle.
Not the temptation reclining on his bed. Couldn’t handle that one bloody second longer.
He breathed, regulated his pulse, parsed incoming data. Beyond these walls, out in the information cloud, law enforcement was still scrambling. Good.
But…no, something wasn’t right. Something with the elevator. Something out of balance. Hoist cables flinched; knurled rollers groaned. A sense-tipped finger pressed the button for this floor. A finger with no ID informatics embedded. Not a resident, not a citizen, not a member of law enforcement. But coming this way just the same.
Someone off-grid coming to his floor precisely when Mari was here and her image and vital statistics were flashing all over law enforcement bulletins? Statistically not coincidental.
Enemies had found them. Here. In the Pentarc. In his sanctuary. His. Fury sliced up his veins, but he settled it instantly. Soothed it. Shhh.
Wanted and Wired Page 4