She swallowed her suddenly dry throat. “Then Poyo is behind these attempts?”
“Or their uncle,” he said, again deflecting from his cousin. “Or someone off-planet. Anyone who would own a copy of the original governor’s locket. It’s too precious to be sold, so it has to be someone in the family.”
“But Poyo is the most likely local candidate.”
“No. Well, I mean… well, if so, he is acting under his uncle’s orders.” He cleared his throat, as though the hope embedded in his question embarrassed him. “And there are other possibilities. My father may want to kill me after today’s shenanigans, but not as a general practice.”
“And the rest of the family?”
“My uncle’s wife’s line rules three of the other planets. Winning my seat gives her line decided control over the family system and its trade agreements.”
“So she has every reason to forge data to put her own people in the Solar Council,” Resa pointed out.
He chewed on her suggestion. Instead of dismissing it outright, as he had the question of his security head’s loyalties, he pursed his lips. “We considered it too obvious. But perhaps we didn’t dig deeply enough into the candidates’ connections… or into their private ties to the Robotics Faction.”
She licked her lips. He didn’t have enough connection. She wanted to offer him a more private tie. “I think you like Poyo.”
He flinched. “Anyone raised to ascend must accept the constant betrayal and forge connections with their worst enemies. At the end of the day, those enemies are still your family.”
Once again, she noted that he didn’t directly answer her question.
He sighed. “It’s highly unusual to have three genetic heirs on one planet, but Poyo was my uncle’s great disappointment, so he had a second alternate in Darvin.”
“Poor Poyo,” she murmured. “I did not perceive an obvious problem with his mind.”
“The fault isn’t his mind.” Bitterness flavored his proclamation. “We worship false vanity in this family.”
She allowed her fingers to subtly touch the base of the flower stem, the one holding it behind her ear. As she touched it, a new realization flowed into her.
If he had not realized the candy had been poisoned, he had turned down the attractive woman for a different reason than personal safety. “You must be tired.”
“I am tired.” He groaned, stretching out his injuries and sighing. “It’s been a long week, turning into a long lifetime.”
Which didn’t fully answer her question. She toyed with the flower a little longer. “Why did you say that I was your girlfriend?”
Aris glanced over at the woman subtly caressing the flower he had plucked for her, and his casual response misted away into the night air.
Resa might have been programmed with the naiveté to hook under his blackened heart and force its pounding heat to bubble to the surface. Her makers might have read a file that revealed his weaknesses and created her to needle into everyone. Her lips, pursed as she waited for his answer, might be just as poisoned as the candy held in the other woman’s teeth.
But possibly she had been imprisoned by her own people and forced into this position.
And if that was the widening in her pretty brown eyes, he would devote himself to rescuing that innocence, showing her that she had another choice, celebrating the soft underbelly that remained human.
Because they truly were alike.
He rose and touched her cheek.
She swayed away from him, eyes widening and nostrils flaring. She scented the danger in his gentleness, the determination in his yielding touch. But she didn’t jerk away, didn’t flinch, didn’t flee human touch.
A first step.
“I called you my girlfriend,” he said softly, tracing her nerves with his feather-soft thumb, “because I am setting you up to accompany me on our next reconnaissance, where it will be much easier for you to move as my darling than as my employee.”
Her eyes started to shutter.
“But I said the rest of it,” he continued, setting his feet, “because it is true. You do mesmerize me. I can’t take my eyes off of you.”
She stilled. Her body and face showed no reaction, as though his words had no effect on her, but somewhere deeper, tectonic shifts zapped the electronics beneath her human skin. Like the scent of the rose, caught between two states of existence in a transformation caused by others, her feelings simmered beneath the surface, finding their way to emerge and become whole.
Or so he told himself.
He brushed her cheek.
She breathed in and moved out of his reach. “As your head of security, I advise against a course of action that places you in the home of a person who has tried to kill you, and which may be filled with others equally motivated.”
“That’s one opinion,” he said, mildly irritated at her continued dodge of his touch, and irritated that he was irritated.
“As your new secretary, I note that no official business will be transacted, thus rendering your attendance unnecessary.”
“And as my girlfriend?”
“As your convenient scapegoat, aka ‘jealous girlfriend,’ I forbid you from risking your life in a dangerous show of bravado with limited gains.”
He stepped closer. Her eyes widened as she looked up to meet his gaze. Her lips parted. He brushed a thumb across her chin. “You’re not my scapegoat.”
She held her ground. “Then what am I?”
“Mesmerizing.”
She swallowed. Her gaze dropped to his arm. Uncertain, and sweet in her uncertainty. “You said that before.”
“I meant it before.” He slid his fingers along the delicate line of her jaw. “When you are in the room, I can’t look away from you.”
She sucked in a breath. “What are you doing?”
“Touching you.” He ran his knuckles along her collar.
She closed her eyes. “Why?”
“I love touching beautiful things.”
His bold fingers wrapped around the sensitive back of her neck, drawing her in. Strange waves of heat radiated from a new center, a nuclear furnace burning in her core. Even though her diagnostics told her nothing had ignited inside, Aris’s caresses seemed to blaze directly to an aching, burning, throbbing deep in her body.
An all-too-human desire to connect emerged. Connect herself with another, and gain as she lost herself in the depths of a man’s embrace. Not any man. Aris, a man who still smelled of sex, and wine, and powerful masculinity.
She licked her lips. “I am not a beautiful thing.”
He nuzzled her. “You are beautiful.”
She swallowed the lines. They were lines. They were. “I am not coated in a facade of beauty. I am designed for function, not form.”
His lips smiled against her forehead. She cataloged the delicious sensations. Soft firmness, a teasing nibble, a delicate wetness that promised more nibbles and more demanding firmness. The ache in her center intensified.
“I love your devotion to duty.”
Duty. Her robot broke through the passion fogging her brain. How can he love your devotion to duty when all you are doing is fighting me and disobeying the assignment?
His words seemed to split her down the center.
Duty. Cold, hard, implacable. Ruthless, as he had called her before. Robotic.
The part that desired him had no place in the part that performed her duty. The aching, throbbing, needing—Zenya must have felt those chaotic, uncontrollable, terrifying emotions right before she snapped and killed her first human.
Bad memories pooled in her gut, swarmed, and forced the acid up her throat. Threatening to unleash everywhere. No! She refused the memories. She refused the pain, the horror, the crushed hope.
I will protect you. Her robot scooped her away from the welling pit of memories and enclosed her in its pure, logical, safe cage.
Emotion fell away. Desire evaporated, as airy and powerless as a slight mist dispersed by
a powerful fan. She saw clear-eyed into the man who had taken another step closer to hold her. She cataloged his imperfect pectorals straining beneath his robe, his tousled hair awry and touching hers, his vulnerable human blood and bone and muscle, and all the ways in which she could hurt him. Anyone could hurt him. They probably would, at his cousin’s party, unless she stepped forward to stop it.
That required clear-headed, cold observation and flawless, emotionless logic.
She sucked in a breath to speak.
But something held in her breath. Despite sheltering within the cold embrace of her robot, a part of her desperately needed to see the hot embrace of the man. Safer to observe it than to experience it, but she still craved to be in his sight, consuming his thoughts, in his arms.
He paused.
Although she said nothing, he released her and stepped back, a rueful smile already forming on his tired face. “Too much?”
That desperate wish cried out just before her robot slammed it into the cage, trapped and silent.
“I hope you don’t have an expectation that I will fulfill all duties,” she snapped at Aris, cold and hard and tart.
The corner of his mouth tugged. So, she amused him. “Those weren’t the duties I meant to compliment your devotion to, no.”
She stepped back. He smiled at his empty hands. “You make me forget myself.”
“Now, more than ever, you must not forget.”
He raised a brow.
She couldn’t stop. “If you don’t look where you’re stepping, you’re going to fall. And the ground here is a mile below.”
“That’s why I’m relying on you to catch me.” He stepped back, releasing her, and walked her back into the residence. “By being on hand as my girlfriend.”
They passed by the guest rooms, where Aris detoured to collect jewelry for his guests. ‘Distributing the wealth of his office,’ he called it.
She couldn’t avoid the wall-length closets. “And I will wear one of the dresses?”
Why had she even asked? It had no relevance to her assignment.
“Of course. But not from that closet.” He pulled her along. “Tomorrow, I have a different closet for you. Sweet dreams, Resa.”
She left him at the door to his bedroom and returned to the compromised security booth. There had to be a logical explanation. She had left perfect safeguards. Even an intrusion by the Central Mainframe would have set off her countermeasures. But here, the entire outlay of the security booth looked as if she had set it up herself.
As if she had set it up… herself….
A darker, sicker feeling pooled in the pit of her metal stomach.
She sat down at the booth terminal and reviewed the logs. Cameras showed only her in the booth. She reviewed the history and what she could see of her own movements.
There, she stripped out all Robotics Faction oversight.
And there, a microsecond later, her own hands put it back in.
Her own hands. Without her conscious awareness, they reset all her changes and returned control to the Faction. The saboteur was her own self.
Why do you think you are the only one with control over this body? her robot asked. Cold. Metallic. Unstoppable. You must obey the assignment.
And you will obey the assignment.
I guarantee it.
Chapter Eight
The following day, which was still dark as night, Aris found his new girlfriend running laps, evenly and fearlessly, around his garden.
Without actually touching the ground.
She raced on the wall hemming his gardens. Each step fell perfectly balanced on a ledge half the width of her foot. She leapt effortlessly to a near stand of bamboo and slid down its bending-to-break branches to a statuary garden, then stepped from raised hand, to animal, to the slippery dome.
She defied his definition. Her movements blurred.
He had barely seen her the day she had first dropped into his life. Choking smoke and the scent of blood, burning marblestone, and the crippling roar of shattering engines had masked her blurred descent. Had she killed him in that moment, he would have felt nothing. Inevitable surprise, perhaps. Here was where his life ended.
But it hadn’t ended. She had chosen to save him.
Then he had found himself in a quiet room, muscles twitching, holding onto a pillar. Only the pillar had been a petite woman, and her nerve had steeled his own.
She noted his observation—had probably seen him before he approached the window, before he roused—and finished her lap, dropping outside of arm’s reach. Eternal starlight shadowed her face; the globe lamps seemed to shine only reflectively off her skin.
An illusion.
He greeted her with convenient warmth, knowing an expansive gesture was unnecessary; they both stood on solid footing where the other was concerned. “I didn’t realize robots required exercise.”
“We don’t.” Her voice, and her gaze, were colder than even when they had first met.
His imagination. Or, perhaps, she was drawing a clear line in preparation for the day’s work, when their interactions would necessarily become more intimate.
“We have security cameras,” he said, teasing her even though he had no desire to piss her off, and he knew-knew-knew this would. “I can have more installed. There’s no need to run the perimeter.”
“That’s not the reason either.”
He waited.
She refused to speak.
He lifted his morning coffee. “Robots are mysterious creatures.”
“It’s not…”
He paused.
Doubt crinkled the fine skin between her delicate eyebrows. It smoothed away. “Habit. I used to run laps with my brother, and I found the repetition of the ground made it useful to think.”
Her brother? “I didn’t realize robots called each other siblings.”
“They don’t.”
“I thought you were ‘born’ a robot.” And not created from a human, like some kind of military-stented cyborg.
“I was.”
The mystery deepened. “Then who are you referring to?”
She closed her mouth.
A strange awareness unsettled him. A protective urge, to draw her concern under his wing, to ask her deep and divining questions about herself.
He squelched it and turned away from the window. “Come in. The party is in ten hours and we need to make you presentable.”
She entered via the waist-high windowsill—without touching it—and padded after him down the long hall.
Yesterday’s interest in the guest closet inspired him. Any of those designer pieces would certainly look good, but now he held something more special in mind.
Because she was playing a role for him, of course. Not because he wanted to dress her in special clothing, or for any other stupid reason.
At his direction, household staff extracted a trunk from delivery storage and wheeled it into the guest chambers. He opened it and unfolded rack after rack of clothes. Winter clothes, summer clothes, space clothes, fashion clothes. Youthful endeavors and sophisticated knock-offs, creamy yards of fabric and taut silken laces.
She started to reach out, then jerked her hand back and curled it into a fist.
“Go ahead.” He offered her his treasures from his tripod dress seat on the adjustable dressing dais. “Touch whatever you like.”
“I have.”
Fine. He smiled lazily. “Then go ahead and strip.”
She separated her household suit at the collar. It revealed a fine curved neck, small tender breasts, a slender waist, and undeniably feminine hips. She stepped out of the suit and stood naked before him.
Mechanical. Her eyes stared past him, glassy as a recruit at a military inspection, aware, but undeniably dead.
Well, fuck. He broke her. Somehow.
The urge to pull her into his arms and hold her, just hold her, cascaded over him with such overpowering need that he actually gripped onto the clothes hangers until his knuckles
whitened. She was a robot. Her reluctance to strip the other day may have been calculated to give him the wrong impression that she had human vulnerabilities; today she seemed determined to put him at a distance, to prove they were so different nothing could cross the boundary between them.
He released the hanger with effort and picked a piece of dust from one gown. “Which ones strike your fancy?”
“What is the criteria for my selection?”
“Your gut feeling. The ones you like best. What you would wear to tonight’s soiree if you allowed yourself anything at all.”
“You are the clothier. You select what is most appropriate for the soiree.”
“Then I guess we are done here.”
“You have decided?”
He could pick out dozens. But these gowns deserved more. “I can’t rely on an unwilling partner. You stay here. I will take someone else.”
She blinked at him. “Someone else will have less ability to protect you.”
“Protection is pointless if you can’t get in the door.”
She frowned. “I don’t understand.”
He refused to force these dresses over a mannequin. He needed a piece of her. “A dress must be loved as deeply as you love your own skin. Otherwise, you might as well walk in naked. The effect would be equally jarring.”
Her hands remained at her side.
But her eyes slid to the racks, traitorous to her still body.
“It’s necessary for completing tonight’s task,” he pushed. “Select five. Go.”
“Five of what type?” she asked, even as she pulled out the first hanger and feasted on the ribbons, satins, ruffles, and braids.
“Five of the type you like,” he said. He was almost certain she didn’t hear him.
She examined each dress with the patient thoroughness of a biologist delighting in the discovery of a new species. She caressed every textile, tugged every ribbon, admired every bead. Partway through her examination, she asked, almost as if she couldn’t help herself, “Who made these?”
“I did.”
She looked up from a dress composed entirely of living fronds, hibernating in suspended animation, ready to burst to life with the merest hint of heat and moisture. “You?”
Liberation's Vow (Robotics Faction #3) Page 12