His hand rested on her waist, hot and possessive. She swallowed on a dry throat. Although she was not a dainty woman, his palm spanned her belly. He had always made her feel powerfully feminine.
He yanked something on the hover, and the engine hushed to silent. Her feet lifted off the ground, floating her up to eye level.
“What did you find?”
He held up a control chip. “Someone’s been throttling you.”
She swore. She’d barely been able to get away from the attack. “Dammit, Vi.”
He threw it on the ground. “Or it was put on by the murderer.”
“You were locked up.”
He fixed on her. “I was.”
She swallowed.
At eye level, his gaze burned, sweet and hot, and startling awareness pounded into her center. The kiss from three weeks ago flashed between them, as close as yesterday. The day thinned to the same reckless edge, daring her to close the distance, to cup his face, to give herself one more taste.
“Give me a reason to trust you,” she said. “Why did you kill your last spotter?”
His jaw clenched and released. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“As your second spotter and possible victim, I’d like to make that determination.”
“He accepted a hit. A couple hundred for me to ice a guy’s wife and kids.”
No. “You didn’t.”
“I refused and thought it was over.” He looked away. His lip curled in disgust. “I was a naïve, naïve bastard."
“You took the shot?”
“He was the spot. We were in the heat of combat. He lit up the target.”
For the first ten years, Logen double-checked every one of her targets. He made her so paranoid she triple-checked herself. What finally broke their stalemate wasn’t even in the heat of battle. While on a routine escort mission, she had spotted some civilians in trouble and broke orders to call it in. Now she understood.
“One more thing.”
He looked at her again.
“Admit your stents aren’t working.”
Shock cleared his features. “Yes. They are.”
No way. When he told her about his old spotter, his face lit with fireworks. Mostly guilt and remorse, but also anger and sadness.
Emotions no stented soldier would ever be able to reproduce.
“Why are you lying to me?”
“I’m not.”
“I know you are.”
He started to clench his features in denial, but then realized that made her point, and quickly tried to act emotionless. “You’re crazy. And there’s no time for this. Give me the hover disk.”
“You are a terrible liar.”
Something rustled in the shadows behind them.
Logen drew her roughly behind him and faced the new threat.
A crocodilian twice as large as the one he had killed stumbled out of the brush on stumpy legs, raised its snout to them, and set upon eating the dead one.
“We’ll go up together,” she said.
Logen deactivated the hover and her exoskeleton. He held her against his broad shoulder as he widened the straps and squeezed into them.
“This is going to be a tight fit,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” She tested him, leaning a little too close. “I’m sure you’ve heard that one before.”
His dark eyes burned from under his brow.
The day turned sizzling bright.
He disengaged. “Hmm.” He tightened the exoskeleton.
Her shins pressed against his. He winced and sucked in a breath, and then the exoskeleton continued tightening, forcing them together.
One massive thigh slid between hers.
Delicious friction eased and intensified her hunger.
The waist cinched tight. His taut belly pressed to hers and locked.
Temptation urged her to grab his hard ass and rub herself against him until his control broke.
She curled her hands around the exoskeleton, unbalanced. “This is a bad idea.”
“I wanted to leave you here.” He clicked the hover disk, still resting in the small of her back. They rose half a foot, bobbing above the mushy greenery. “I still can.”
The crocodilian raised its spiny head. Guts dropped from its jaws. The predator slithered toward them.
“Go,” she ordered.
He was already gripping the lowest vines and swinging them higher. The crocodilian fell away from them.
He climbed the bulbous, gnarled, twisting tree, hand-over-hand up the trunk. The hover disk assisted their ascent.
The tree was like its own ecosystem. Every hand-hold dislodged squirming residents, and every time they pushed through another layer of leaves, they startled creatures that lived in its strata.
Some possessed teeth and viciousness that made the crocodilian below look tame. All made an incredible cacophony, a virtual wall of sound that drowned their movements out.
And Logen carried her. Lithe and graceful, strong and unstoppable. Despite their near-weightlessness, he sweated from the heat. The biceps she longed to curl her fingers around bulged from exertion.
She tried not to focus on the hard power of his thigh flexing between her damp legs. Or his body pressing against hers, forcing her to feel every inch of his masculine appeal. Or the soft grunts of exertion, sending her forbidden ideas of teasing other noises from him with her teeth and her tongue.
Tracing the bead of sweat down his corded neck with her tongue...
“Tell me your stents aren’t working,” she said suddenly, to keep herself from doing exactly that.
He grunted. “Not gonna.”
Well, then.
She leaned in to him and nuzzled his kissable ear. “Logen.”
He sucked in a breath. “What?”
“Logen...” She teased the sensitive lobe with her lips, giving in to her long-held fantasies. “Logen, tell me...”
He gripped the branch, swinging in place. His voice roughened. “Quit it.”
What a delicious catch. She flicked her tongue against his heated flesh, enjoying the quiver. “Or else what?”
He didn’t answer.
She took the lobe between her teeth.
He groaned. “Shit, Talia.”
The long, hard masculine length of him pressed against her thigh. She gave herself greater license, spreading her hands across his broad back, dipping beneath the shreds of the uniform he had worn for his whole confinement. “Why don’t you come clean?”
“You... are not... fair.”
His hot, rough tension pulsed an answering heat in her blood. She wanted to cling to him. She wanted to strip him naked. She wanted him filling her up, with her legs squeezing him deeper, until the world disappeared in passion.
The strength of her desire shook her.
She pushed back, forcing a gap between them.
The heat in his gaze burned hotter than any denial of his feelings.
“Tell me the truth,” she said. “Your stents aren’t suppressing as they’re supposed to. Why lie?”
“Because.” He closed his eyes and shook his head, and then he opened them and started climbing again. “How can a man with emotionless stents be accused of a crime of passion?”
They broke through another layer. The thick fronds fell away and the sky glimmered through, white between the final greenish-blue layers, promising.
“The truth is you weren’t.” She shared with him everything they understood about the Faction’s orders. “Whoever else has stents is the real murderer.”
“You believe me?”
“Yes,” she said.
They broke through the canopy.
Sunlight burst down on them, warm and soothing. The trees swayed gently, rocking them to and fro, and Logen held them to the top securely. Behind them, a curl of smoke revealed the final resting place of Base One. Logen got his bearing for the Supply Depot. From up here, it looked like only a few hundred trees away.
Overhead, glitterin
g mica in the high atmosphere told her that they were not showing up on satellite, even if the satellite were passing directly overhead right now, which it wasn’t, unless it had been knocked out of orbit.
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said, finally. His voice was still a little uneven. He cleared his throat and started descending. “No one else believed me.”
She traced the thick scar along his jaw. A violent firefight had put it there, and even his thickest armor couldn’t protect him from all the lasers.
“Well, they didn’t have the benefit of seeing you change. You have real emotions for me.”
His eyes widened slightly. “No.”
“Hmm?”
“I don’t.” He spoke too quickly, and descended rapidly down into the canopy again. “I don’t feel emotions.”
“You just admitted your stents are malfunctioning.”
“Yeah.” He wiped sweat from his brow. “But it’s different.”
“How is it different?”
He wiped the sweat again. “It’s not feelings. It’s something else.”
She rubbed her thigh distractingly close to his bulging masculinity. “Are you sure?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Humble of you to say so. Most men would boast.”
He eyed her sideways.
Yes, she had just teased him for the second time in one afternoon. And he was pushing her to do it again, too. “You took a hell of a beating for me.”
“It happens.”
She let her fingers trace the scar she had only looked at before. His skin felt warm and firm beneath her touch.
He sucked in a breath. “Don’t.”
Enjoying how it affected him, she had no intention of stopping. “I almost believed your lies. You care, Logen. You have a cascade of feelings. So why are you trying to say that around me you feel nothing?”
One breath went by. Two.
Nerves stirred in her belly. She needed this answer. It felt like her whole life depended on it.
He swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his manly throat. “Because.”
“Because why?”
His brows drew together. “You’re important.”
Her heart thumped. “To you?”
“To everyone. And you’re my teammate. Yeah. You’re the most important spotter. Spotter and Gun.”
Wait.
She drew back. “Teammate?”
“Yeah.”
“You get a hard on for all your teammates?”
He stared beyond her, out at the canopy.
“Answer me.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You said that already.”
“Nothing,” he said more firmly, and moved them toward the Supply Depot. “I’d have a hard on with any woman.”
“You didn’t react when Vi or Navina interviewed you.”
“Right now, it’s only you, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s like a twitch. Or one of those hit-the-knee things. A reflex. You’re not special. It’s a base, physiological reaction.”
“A base, physiological reaction,” she repeated. “Oh.”
“That’s all. I don’t even like you.”
He reached for a branch, missed it, and swung over the abyss. Contorting the exoskeleton, he swung the opposite direction and then made the next connection.
I don’t even like you.
“It must be uncomfortable to be this close to someone you don’t really care about,” she said.
He shrugged. “No choice.”
“You’re pretty dedicated to your job, for someone you don’t even like,” she heard her voice say, as her heart fell all the way into hell.
* * *
Logen took them to the edge of a cliff by treetop, and then climbed down and into a cave in the middle of the cliff.
Talia pointed out pools of water to assuage their thirst, which caves were occupied, and to watch out for the strange inhabitants that stretched out huge necks crowned with mouth-tentacles.
And, when he released the exoskeleton in the center of the dry, shallow cave, she eased away from him with a deep sigh. “Thank goodness for that. I couldn’t take one more minute. Teammates shouldn’t get too close.”
It stabbed him in the chest.
Logen moved deeper into the cave, investigating every deadly nook and crevice.
Good thing he had reassured her that he wasn’t too interested. If she remembered how personal his interest in her really was—if she knew the stents were allowing more than his physiological reactions through, and how strong those feelings were—then everything would break again.
Just like it had all those weeks ago, the night she died.
Although if she teased him with her hot little mouth the way she had up in the treetops, it was going to get a hell of a lot harder. His cock, his resolve, his promise never to bring up his feelings again... Just one more tug on his earlobe while her thighs squeezed his, and—
“Logen?”
“Yeah,” he called. His voice echoed in the darkness.
She moved closer. Distrust tightened her voice. “You disappeared.”
“I’m right here,” he said.
“Don’t go so far.”
He finished his circuit and limped back to her, assessing his strength. Everything ached.
“Let’s sit nearer the entrance,” she said.
“We’ll be more vulnerable to anything passing by.”
“We’ll also be able to see them. I don’t like the look of the back wall. It’s not solid. You don’t know what’s going to come out of it.”
He joined her closer to the mouth. “Take off your suit.”
She raised a brow. “Do you say that to all your teammates, or am I special?”
A sizzle of heat flared between them. His cock hardened to rebar. Her professionalism always kept a distance between them before. Now she’d lost it, and he was struggling to keep up.
“All of them,” he said. “When they’re injured on the shoulders like you are.”
She pouted—pouted?—and turned away from him, and lowered her suit.
The red site made his stomach knot.
He was going to fucking kill whoever was behind this attack.
Using sticky forceps, he managed to remove the glass. Her body had already started to encase some of the shards, and it hurt to yank them out again. But better to get them out now than let them encapsulate or work their way deeper.
She endured his treatment silently, her hands clenching the exoskeleton until her knuckles were white.
“There.” He used up the only spray of skin regeneration cream. “Maybe it won’t scar.”
She eased the torn collar up gingerly. “I don’t have a problem with scars.”
“You’ve got a pretty high tolerance for ugly.”
“They’re not ugly. The only people without scars are ones who have never lived. Scars are a sign of life.”
Her comment eased him like a shaft of sunlight. He had never been good-looking, and now, by anyone’s standards, he was horribly disfigured by a warzone of scars and the more recent beatings. But she didn’t look at him like his nose had been broken thirty times. She looked at him.
She noticed the dried blood on his cuff. “You should have saved some for you.”
He shut off the pain. “I’ll heal at the Supply Depot.”
Streaks of gold crossed the sky and melted into pale blue, then deep indigo. The sweat stuck to him from the hot day turned cold in the night, trapped by his thin suit, but he didn’t want to take the ripped fabric off. It was his only defense against the jungle.
Safety suit. Force shield. Meal bars. Water hydrolizer. His brain ticked off the things his body craved as the day dissolved unwillingly into deadly night.
Something screamed in the cave above them. Snarls made Talia jump and edge closer to him. He held himself still, ready for action, but the snarls quieted and turned to suggestive crunching, and then more silence.
Her touch tingled agai
nst his bare skin where her hand was curling around his weapon.
A big fucking gun. That’s what he wanted. Something that could crack the whole cliff open, like the powerful cliff-breaker, or maybe even a step up, a hull-cracker. Something that went in a cannon that had to be bolted to a planet because otherwise the force of its blast would move a ship out of orbit. If he had that, then his near nakedness wouldn’t matter. He would be able to protect Talia against a hundred alien predators and a thousand metal-plated bastard robots.
The snarls receded, but Talia didn’t put the space between them again. He sat as still as possible. Hoping that if he didn’t move, she wouldn’t either.
She lifted her hand away, killing that hope, and chewed on her fingernail. “You know, it’s too bad.”
His thoughts exactly.
Then he realized she hadn’t been talking about putting distance between them. “What is?”
“Hm? Oh.” She let her hand rest next to his thigh again and leaned on it. Yes. “We should’ve skinned that crocodilian and taken it with us. The skin would be nice and warm, and the meat would last us weeks.”
His mouth salivated, but his brain didn’t like the idea of having raw, bloody meat hanging around. “It was probably inedible.”
“No, that one was edible.”
He looked at her.
Her profile was just visible in the darkness, complete now as rays touched the cliff above for first moon rise.
“I read the reports.” She shifted on the hard ground. “We can eat most creatures, including insects and reptiles.”
He did not remember, but he also hadn’t paid attention. Anyone trying to live off the land in a jungle like this had bigger problems than keeping fed. But now that they had solved the bigger problems, her foresight was going to be the thing that kept them alive until they hit the Supply Depot.
“Good memory,” he said.
Her lips curved, but the beautiful fringes of her lashes made her eyes look sad. “I had this recurring fantasy that I outran Rezo and survived in the nature preserve until he was captured. Finding my own water, building a shelter, scavenging. First thing, I researched it on every new planet. Now comes the real test.”
She was amazing. He just lay on his bunk between missions and watched war holos. She was so determined, and such a survivor.
“This is no nature preserve,” he said.
“Yeah, I know.” She laughed softly. “I thought that preserve was such a wilderness. There, only two species could have killed me! And they were rare. I was much more likely to die from exposure.”
Resurrection Heart: Robotics Faction - Cyborg Mercenaries Page 8