by Black, Incy
“It’s Helena.”
“Fine. Helena. I did not ask for your son to have me locked up in a containment suite beneath the Cube. I did not ask for him break me out of there so I could attend my own funeral. I did not ask to watch a man lose half his face to a bullet, and I didn’t ask for Will to chase me down in the woods and then secret me away to his loft. I did not ask to be injected with an unstable drug…”
Her voice climbed several octaves, her grip on the burn slipping. “I did not ask to scramble tunnels only to be locked up in a torture chamber underground. I did not ask to watch rats tear each other apart. I did not ask to find my brother’s body twisted at the bottom of a shaft…”
She had to shout. How else to be heard above the crushing crescendo of blood rushing her head? “What I do ask is that you. Do. Not. Threaten. Me.”
Helena looked amused rather than put out about being bellowed at in her own home. “Wow, looks like my son was wrong. Far from being frosty, you’re quite the little volcano.”
The doorway darkened, filled by a pair of broad shoulders belonging to one incandescent man. “What the bloody hell’s going on? I leave you alone for two lousy minutes, and next thing, you’re yelling and cursing the place down.”
She blew her top and erupted. “Don’t you dare try to fucking control me. I’ll fucking curse if I want to,” she screamed. “And,” her voice broke over the bale of barbed wire that lodged in throat, “I don’t think your mother and I are going to get along.”
The silence was deafening.
“That was my fault. Maybe we should give her a minute,” Helena suggested, rising from the bed.
“You think?” Will barked. “What the hell did you do to her?”
Helena ignored him. “Feel free to stay as long as you need, Angel,” she invited quietly. “I’ll make sure you’re not disturbed. By anyone.” She shot a sharp glare at her son. “I’ll bring you through something to eat.”
Exhausted. How was it even possible to feel so damned beaten and still breathe? “No. Please. I’m not hungry.”
Fighting a battle with her lungs, she pulled the tangle of hair from her face. Her first born—not that that was a remote possibility—she offered up to whatever sorry deity was listening, if neither of them mentioned the wet sliding her cheeks. Will and Helena could give her that surely? “I just need to clean up and sleep. I apologize for my behavior and language. I’m usually better at coping under pressure.”
Helena tipped her head. “You’ll find everything you need on the shelves in the bathroom, Beautiful. And some of Will’s old T-shirts in the chest of drawers over there. William. Out.”
She could see he wanted to argue, but his mother had him in the eye equivalent of a half-nelson hold, the fierce glint in her eye also warning that no one would enter this room once the door was closed. Not even if backed up by the full military might of the Chinese.
Will retreated. His mother pulling the door shut. The hushed snick as it closed promising safe.
Her shoulders relaxed. Her lungs stopped fighting her. She blanked her mind to the fading sounds of argument between mother and son as they disappeared to wherever.
That’s what she wanted. To disappear. Failing that, amnesia. No Rhys. No MoD or the Service. No BT11. No more people trying to kill her. No strange woman spitting threats. No Will… No Will?
Must have been the effects of exhaustion and emotional overload, because the chill that hit her was as immediate as it was bone deep and severe. Like being sliced by iced razor blades in flight. Christ, the pain was corporeal, but, on first-name terms as she was with Arctic and sub-zero, she would live… Maybe. BT11? The Service? The MoD? The kill-order hanging over her? She’d have to survive those first.
…
Who knew how many hours later, she was dragged from the sleep of the dead by a short draft of chilled air against her spine as the duvet lifted and a warm, hard body slipped into bed beside her.
And she might still have slid back into blissful oblivion, had Will not decided she needed jostling into a more accommodating position, turning her around 180 degrees, his insistent arm tucking her close to his side, her head to his broad chest.
“Your mother promised I wouldn’t be disturbed,” she mumbled irritably.
“Not a promise she had any right to make. And I’m not here to disturb you. Feel free to go back to sleep.”
“Will, you shouldn’t be here. Certainly not without a stitch of clothing on.”
“Why not? It’s my old bed,” he said, still fidgeting her into place. “Besides, I like holding you. You’re warm and you’re soft and you smell good.” Hand behind her knee, he lifted and draped it across his lower midriff. His very low midriff. “There, now go to sleep.”
What? Was he completely delusional? How?
She could feel him. All of him. Skin on skin. Hot and Hard. No itchy scrubs offering some pretense of a barrier.
Her heart pounding to escape, too aware she was one big rosy flush, she discreetly inched her leg higher, away from his extremely proud prod.
“Settle,” came a growl.
“I can’t,” she cried, pushing up on her elbow and sweeping her hair aside, her knee now a bare few inches from his chin. “You’ve got an erection the size of a cricket bat.”
His eyes stayed closed.
“Live with it. I’ve had to—for weeks. It’s not as if I haven’t held you like this before.”
“Beside you. Not over you. Not completely nude.”
“You’ve got a T-shirt on,” he pointed out, running his palm down the length of her back and up again.
A delicious little shiver followed the trail set by his hand. “Yes, but you haven’t. And stop doing whatever it is you’re doing.”
“It’s called stroking. You’re supposed to find it soothing.” He opened one eye. “Knew you were skittish. Told you so outside the theater after that God-awful ballet.”
His clever fingers had found their way to the ultra-sensitive area just over her coccyx and were drawing lazy little circles.
She dropped her forehead to his chest. “Will, you do understand that none of this is real? That life or death situations distort reality. That right now neither of us can trust how we think, how we feel, or even how we think we feel.”
“Shush. Close your eyes. Too many thinks and feels in that sentence, none making sense. You’re overtired. Sleep.”
He couldn’t just order her to sleep and expect it to happen. “You and I, we don’t… Fit. Under any other circumstances, you and I would be so far apart from intimacy and togetherness, it would take a space rocket to travel the distance.”
He moved like lightning. One heartbeat she was draped across him. The next, he had her rolled under him.
“What wasn’t real, Angel? That shower, when I held you naked in my arms for the first time and you, so stunningly magnificent I could not breathe, asked if I minded your scars, some self-inflicted, some courtesy of Cymion Gray, you worrying they might be a turn off? Or how about when in the woods, I shared the most incredible experience of my life watching you come so hard you couldn’t breathe? How non-intimate and fictitious was that?”
“Get off me.”
“No. I haven’t finished,” he said. “How about when you cracked and shared with me the secret about Cymion Gray? How about in those tunnels, me holding you in my arms night after night because although you needed comfort, you didn’t know how to ask? How about when I shared about why I’m unlikely to advance in the Service? How about you saying sorry? How about you feeling safe enough around me to freak the hell out? How about you asking me for a memory that would never die?”
“None of it was real,” she whispered.
“Good, then this won’t matter.” His mouth on hers was angry and insistent, but she tasted his hurt.
And God help her, she opened to him. Kissing him back. Her fingers finding the back of his neck, his hair, clutching so he couldn’t escape. Needing this small snatch of time to be r
eal.
The sole of one foot anchored to the mattress, she flexed her body and rolled him. He rolled her back, lips still fused to hers, giving her his body weight, only when he decided the time was right, shifting to one hip to ease back but still lip locked.
The foreplay wasn’t tender; it wasn’t slow. It was hot, raw, and urgent. Lots of nips—him. Lots of nail scoring—her.
Both wanting to mark, both wanting hard, both needing fast. Both angry. Both hurting. Both hungry. Both panting, sweating, groaning, moaning.
Looming over her, his arse to his calves, his hands found her T-shirt, and he ripped it wide from collar to hem. The loose material then bunched behind her in his fist, the sleeves tight, he held her shoulders flat and unmoving.
Laid bare, just enough moonlight sneaking through the quartered windowpanes, she watched his eyes flare as he devoured her, braced between her splayed legs, his big hand to his big cock, slow pumping.
“Real,” he insisted, his free hand at her back releasing cloth and sliding her ribs to cup her breast. Squeezing, when she foolishly shook her head.
“Real,” he growled, a sharp slap to her outer thigh.
Back arching, her hips lifting, she hissed.
“Yeah, real,” he grunted, shuffling back, his body lowering, his wide shoulders wedging her thighs wider, his hands slid beneath her to lift her to his mouth.
A long, low growl vibrated her slit. “Oh, God,” she breathed, her fingers finding purchase on the sheets, curling and gripping hard.
He didn’t lap; he didn’t suck. He foraged, his tongue penetrating her deep.
It was sudden, it was shocking, the keenest of erotic invasions pulling from her the hardest, longest orgasm of her life, the one he’d given her in the woods now just the merest hint of what he could do.
Her still coming, he reared upright to his knees, taking her with him. Her legs wrapping his hips, his cock probing, positioning. He thrust up, high and hard, at the same time as he dropped her into his lap. “Next time, we’ll try slower,” he groaned. “Can’t hold on any longer.”
One arm across the top of her shoulders, the other supporting her bottom, his hand gripping her hip, he did all the work, lifting, forcing down, lifting, forcing down, his thrusting cock triggering a second wrenching climax from her and a feral shout from him.
He held her tight, as if hanging on to her meant life, until the little aftershocks passed and her breath ceased to hitch.
Then he laid her down and braced over her on his arms, he stared, intently, before flipping onto his back beside her.
Neither of them spoke. Only the jag of their uneven breaths broke the weighty silence.
What now? Did she snuggle, thank him, rest a hand on his chest? What? Yes, she’d had sex before, but never this. Never un-reined passion uninhibited and out of control. Perfunctory, she was used to and could deal with. Intimacy on a level that seared her soul, no.
“Didn’t wear a condom. I’ve never not worn a condom.”
Her skin pulled tight. What? That was his sole focus after giving her not one but two orgasms of the century. And taking an almighty one of his own.
“Didn’t wear a condom,” he repeated flatly.
She was aware of that; she could feel his come sliding the inside of her thigh. She clenched her inner muscles, for some strange reason needing to keep that hot trace of him inside her just a little longer.
“Not since Diana have I not worn a condom.”
Diana? Lovely compliment after what they’d just shared, that he should feel comfortable breathing out his dead fiancée’s name with such reverence.
Unable to find the sheet for cover, she pretended, as if her life depended on it, that she didn’t need its protection. “No STDs here, and I’ve got an arm implant,” she said, clinically, her eyes to the ceiling, wet. It wasn’t that she wanted tenderness. It wasn’t that she needed close. Truly it wasn’t. Had to be tiredness making her eyes smart.
“Oh, and thanks for the reality fuck. You can go now,” she informed him, her tone carved ice, so cold she imagined frost climbing the walls of the bedroom, the maps and posters turning brittle.
She felt him go solid beside her, then the mattress dip as he sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Wide shoulders hunched, head down, he said not one word.
Then, twisting at the hips, he leaned back and captured her chin. He searched, God help her. Searched, no, mined her eyes looking for…something.
“Completely locked down,” he said, shaking his head. “Can’t cry. Can’t laugh. Not freely. Twenty years of Rhys dictating your every thought and emotion. No wonder you heard my words, but the meaning was beyond you. I’ll try one last time. Not since Diana have I ridden bareback. No inclination to, so it hasn’t been a challenge for me not to remember to roll on fucking protection.”
“Good for you,” she whispered, not daring to throw at him her first response. That since Diana, he’d done nothing but wear protection, just not of the prophylactic kind.
“Christ,” he said releasing her and pushing to his feet. “What’s the bloody point…? Were it humanly possible to revive Rhys, I’d do so just to kill him all over again.”
Horrible. She spotted the sheet on the floor, leaned over the side of bed, grabbed, and covered herself with it. “I may not mourn my brother, but you do not get to speak his name. You didn’t know him. His thoughts or how he felt.”
“And clearly, for all your woo-woo mind skills, nor did you.”
“Fuck off.”
He laughed. It wasn’t pleasant. “Thanks, but I already did. Not ten minutes ago.” Then, faster than light traveled, his arms braced on the bed, so deep in the mattress she had to angle away wildly not to fall into him. “I know what it’s like to give your soul to a dead person, Angel. Rhys stole enough from you while he was alive; he’s not getting any more of you now that he’s dead. You’re mine, and I don’t share.”
She only released her breath when the door slammed with him on the other side. She’d been a pet project—Rhys’s. She wasn’t about to become the same to Berwick. So they’d had sex, big deal. Getting physical in the most pleasurable of ways was a healthy way of relieving stress, a way of reaffirming life and hope and… Oh, bollocks. Who was she kidding?
She tugged at the sheet around her, retrieved the pillows and eiderdown that had been cast on the floor when things had got a little vigorous, and huffed her way back onto the bed.
She couldn’t psych her way out of this. The textbook had not yet been written to help her navigate Will Berwick, and probably never would be. There was certainly no theory to explain her. She’d have to rely on her instincts and emotions to guide her through this mess—pity she trusted neither.
Chapter Twenty
Will left it until mid-morning before ordering Angel to the kitchen, his mother the very unhappy messenger.
Two angry women whose good graces he had to inveigle his way back into—bloody marvelous.
Two angry women, who would not be angry if they’d just hit bloody pause and take one goddamn moment to consider things from his perspective.
Him flying blind, his neck tucked between his thighs, head angled to kiss his own backside good-bye. Angel to keep safe, a crisis that could tear apart the nation’s armed forces to avert, the Service doing fuck knows what. Rhys’s body to recover without detection. A convincing legend to plant which would keep the man very much alive in the eyes of the MoD and Service and threatening exposure should an “accident” befall his sister—
Worrying about the possibility of Angel needing institutionalizing. Worrying if she didn’t, because those bastards in the MoD would want her blood stripped so they could reverse engineer it to get the new BT11 formula. The VIPs he’d likely have to cap to stop that happening. Lies, lies, and more lies to be woven and knotted if this whole nightmare was just. To. Stop—
Jesus, a little leeway—was that really too much to ask?
His brow creasing, he glowered at the botto
m of his empty coffee mug.
He had no problem owning his arse-hattery. Angel and he would be having an in-depth conversation about his behavior last night, later. But what he’d done to earn his mother, Helena, pointedly ignoring him, he had no clue.
Angel, perched high on a stool across the breakfast bar from him, all regally defiant and throwing ice as only she could, had yet to touch a single one of the refreshed coffees his mother kept setting in front of her.
Dragging the sugar bowl across the marble counter, he leaned forward and ladled three spoonfuls of sugar into Angel’s coffee. “If you’re not going to eat, drink that. I’m not having you keel over during what’s about to happen.”
Two gray eyes—winter-Siberian, flat and desolate—lifted his way.
Fuck. He needed that resolute chill to die. It wasn’t her. Not the real her. Her ice belonged with Rhys, not him. “You didn’t eat last night. Your blood sugar level must be low,” he told her, his tone much softer so she’d at least consider a thaw.
A slow blink, a long empty stare. “Explain ‘during what’s about to happen.’”
“Helena’s experienced. She’s going to draw your blood. The courier will be here shortly to collect the samples.”
“Blood samples? My mistake, I thought I had already told you that I am clean,” she said, icicles clinging from each meticulously pronounced word. “What is next, a vaginal swab?”
White fire tore through him. He banked it back. Angel might channel Antarctica like a pro, but with ninety-three kills to his name, he mastered in Boomerang Nebula degrees of chill. “I get that you’re pissed, but I don’t deserve that remark, and it’s unworthy of you. Have you forgotten you have an untested drug doing Christ knows what to your mind and body? I want a discreet but full work up done on your blood, the chemicals identified and neutralized if necessary. You saw how those rats ripped into each other. Do you think I want that for you? Do you think I’m not going to kick some serious off-the-grid medical arse to make sure that does not happen?”