Mach One

by Elsa Jade

  Actually, she was feeling a little itchy. Probably because it had been so long since she’d been sexed.

  Damn, and she couldn’t even blame alcohol for her lewd, crude thoughts.

  She’d blame Mach Halley instead.

  Since she’d seen him, something about him had called to her like a faint beacon she hadn’t known she was listening for. Yes, she’d been exhausted, and then concussed, and he’d wrapped her in a blanket, and probably it was all just the romanticism of saving a little life together. But that was as good a start as any toward a friendship, right? Well, that and a beer or two.

  Also, he had nice, big hands. She tried to picture them cradling the puppy… Another flash lit in her mind—not pain this time, but it gave her pause.

  Was her attraction to him a beacon…or a warning?

  Maybe curiosity didn’t kill cats, but it definitely ensnared Lun-mei.

  Before she could act on it, a swaggering shape bumped up behind her. She ignored it; they were in a bar after all. But Mach stiffened, his silvery eyes going flat and cold.

  She glanced over her shoulder. And instantly felt the same.

  “Halley, did you get my last letter?”

  Tanner Cross wasn’t as big as Mach—no one was, really—but what the real estate developer lacked in poundage he made up for in pomposity. Not to mention the two henchgoon jerks lurking behind him with identical smirks. Even if Cross hadn’t run afoul of her boss, she would’ve known who he was; he was the sort everyone in Diamond Valley talked about. Half the things said were contemptuous and half were admiring, sometimes both, but Cross was impossible to ignore. Partly that was because of his volume.

  She winced at him booming over her head and at the sight of his horrendous houndstooth hunting jacket that managed to be the one shade of green not found somewhere in nature.

  “Well, did you?” he barked. He had the belligerent yap of a dog standing behind its own fence, but she didn’t kid herself that he wouldn’t bite. Or that his two henchgoons wouldn’t back him up with any show of legal, social, or physical force.

  Mach put his elbow on the bar, taking his time. “Maybe,” he drawled at last. “Didn’t read it.”

  “Didn’t—” Cross sputtered in rage. “This county needs my business, and you didn’t want to read.” The rage devolved into a sneer.

  “Didn’t need to. Because I’m not interested.”

  Cross’s sandy eyes narrowed. “The county commissioners are interested in the revenue I’d bring in.”

  “Then they can give you their land.”

  “I’m offering you well above market value, Halley.” His eyes were mere slits now, barely wide enough to slide a stick-up note under. “If this goes to eminent domain—”

  “You can’t do that,” Lun-mei said.

  Very slowly, his eyes widened enough to include her in his glare. For a moment, she could tell he didn’t know who she was. Like there were so many Taiwanese veterinarians in this town. “Oh really?” he said, clearly stalling as he tried to place her.

  “Eminent domain in this country allows expropriation for public use only. Which doesn’t include your rich friends drunkenly chasing imported animals around Carbon County.”

  He spat out, “Are you a lawyer?”

  “It’s the Fifth Amendment,” she said sweetly. “Applies to everybody. You need to study that before you can pass the citizenship test.”

  With a snarl, he elbowed around her to crowd Mach. “Listen, Halley. If you think—”

  Between one syllable and the next, Mach was on his feet. He gripped Cross by the leather patch over the shoulder of his hunting jacket. “I think you should go away now. And not send me any more letters.”

  Barely flexing, he removed Cross from the space between himself and her.

  The developer squawked, less Rottweiler than shih tzu compared to Mach. She shouldn’t smirk. But she did.

  “There won’t be another offer,” Cross warned as he backed away, tugging his jacket back into place. “Just an eviction notice.”

  “I won’t read that either,” Mach said in a low voice. “There aren’t any words that are going to move me off the Fallen A.”

  Cross blustered off, dragging half the attention of the bar with him. The other half was on Mach.

  A ruddy flush stained his cheeks, making his scars more obvious, and he turned his back on the room, facing her, though he kept his gaze on the pint glass in his fist. “Sorry about that.”

  “That you didn’t deck him?” She waved her hand before he could answer. “I know, I know. Violence is never the answer. But sometimes it feels like it could be if I wasn’t so damn short.”

  After a long moment, he huffed out a breath and sat back on his stool. Just one cheek of his denim-clad butt, as if he couldn’t quite settle, but close enough. “Should I have punched him for touching you?”

  She tucked her chin. “What? No. I meant for him threatening to take the Fallen A. I can take care of myself.” She flashed a sly grin at him. “While he was yelling at you, I unwrapped one of my fruit chews and stuck it in the pocket of his very expensive coat. By the end of the night, it’ll be a squishy mess.”

  Mach stared at her. “If he’d caught you—”

  “I did a rotation in an aquarium. They called me Lightfingers Lun-mei cuz I could take blood samples from a fish without knocking off a single scale.”

  “That’s…impressive,” he murmured.

  She flushed at his diffident tone. “I didn’t mean to get in your way—”

  “No. It’s just… I don’t think anyone has ever stood up for me before.”

  She met his somber gaze. “Well, maybe they did but you were so tall you didn’t notice they were actually standing in front of you.”

  His lips curled, but he shook his head. “No. Short as you are, you are the only one.”

  He’d only downed a mouthful of the second beer before Cross interrupted them while she’d finished her ginger ale. “Hey,” she said with so much cool casualness she was surprised she didn’t spontaneously turn hipster. “What do you say we get out of here?”

  He looked at his unfinished drink and then at her. Just when she was starting to blush, he stood, yanked out his wallet, and slapped down two twenties without looking at the bills. Wow, she was worth that much?

  When he held out his hand, the flush in her cheeks spread through her whole body, sinking deep. If she touched him again, it wouldn’t stop with fingertips.

  Gazing into his eyes, she grabbed his hat off the bar and plunked it on her head. For courage. It settled almost to her shoulders, blinding her.

  A soft sound reached over the pounding of her heart. He was chuckling. He tipped the hat back just enough to meet her sheepish stare and held out his hand again.

  With a deep breath, she put her hand in his.

  He pulled her gently but inexorably off her stool. Which actually made her shorter, so annoying. But the silver glint in his eyes ignited something in her that seemed to lift her even higher than his strong hands.

  Staring down at her, he said only, “I’ll follow you.”

  Chapter 9

  She led him to her truck—he had to wrestle the passenger seat belt this time, reminding him of her delicacy—and took him back to her apartment over the garage. As before, her cat made a run for the door then turned tail upon seeing him.

  She grinned up at him. “If you do ever decide to give up ranching, I can think of a new career for you.”

  “Scaring small things?”

  In the glow of the night light over her door, her dark eyes shone. “I’m not scared of you.”

  He’d already noticed that. And it scared him. Which shouldn’t be possible since his programming couldn’t credibly assess her as a threat.

  Maybe that was why he was scared.

  Whatever the reason, the beat of his heart was so heavy he wasn’t sure even he’d be able to carry it. Closing the door behind them, she set her keys on the table with a soft jingle t
hat clanged in him like an alarm bell.

  “Lun-mei. I need to tell you…”

  When he hesitated, she gazed up at him expectantly. “I’m a doctor—just an animal doc, admittedly—but still, there’s pretty much nothing you can say that will shock me. I’ll insist we have safe sex, of course, but everything else is negotiable.”

  The pressure of his pulse hurt him in deep places. “You brought me here to have sex…”

  She tilted her head. “Yes?”

  He almost groaned. “Then once again I’ll be following you.”

  Her head tilted the other way, as Chip and Pickle sometimes did at surprising noises. “So you’re a virgin.”

  That deep pulse didn’t just hurt, he thought it might collapse him from within. Or explode. “There was a woman who didn’t mind my size and look”—in the dusty upstairs room of a saloon not too many miles from this place but a hundred years previous; his gold had been enough even then—“but I think perhaps I didn’t pay as much attention as I might’ve.”

  Lun-mei prowled up to him. Though she’d taken off his hat when they got to her truck—just as well, since she couldn’t have driven with it flopped over her eyes—he wouldn’t have minded a bit of protection between him and her piercing black stare. “Are you paying attention now?”

  Every pore of his skin felt flooded with awareness. “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Then I think you’ll do fine.” She lifted one hand toward his chest but paused with her fingertips hovering over the pearl snaps down his midline. “Do you want to have sex with me now?”

  The promise of heat and pressure hovering at the ends of her fingers hinted at an experience that would crystallize his years of pretending to belong here, that would turn the cold, black coal of his life into diamond. “Yes,” he said again, a noise almost like a growl.

  Her smile was like none she’d given him before, this one wicked and dangerous. “Come here then.”

  Not follow, not lead, move together, take turns, a dance. He’d witnessed dancing but never attempted it, though it looked somewhat like the combat exercises he’d endured to unite his implants, organic musculature, and battle sequences. He took a half step forward into her touch. The contact jolted a breath from him, harder than a punch.

  She curled her fingers between the buttons and glided backward toward the screens in the corner, hauling him with her—toward the bed.

  “Here’s the thing, Mach,” she murmured. “It’s been awhile for me too. We can remember together.”

  The thought of her remembering sent a gong of dread through him, but it was drowned out by a chorus of more enticing sensations. Her clever fingers popping the first snap on his shirt. A puff of cooler air across his fevered skin. The sight of her pink tongue flicking across her lower lip, leaving a glimmer in the muted light filtering through the windows. Her dark eyes glinting like the night sky.

  For all of his existence in this place called Big Sky Country, he rarely looked up for fear of what he’d see coming for him, but now… Maybe he could learn to love the stars through her eyes.

  She rocked up to the tips of her toes, balancing herself with her hand on his bare chest. Looking up at him through her lashes, she whispered, “If you want a kiss, I’m afraid you’re going to have to meet me more than halfway, at least while we’re standing.”

  A kiss. He had been on Earth a long time, but there was so much to learn and not everything had equal survival value. Or so he’d been trained.

  Maybe he’d underestimated kissing.

  With her hand gliding up to the back of his neck, she gave him a little tug. He yielded to the invitation and bent down and…

  Ah! Her lips pressed softly to his and then parted. Hopefully her teeth weren’t as sharp as the yurk’s, but if she wanted to bite him—

  With the slightest tilt of her head and barest flick of her tongue over his upper lip, his swirling, nervous thoughts sank into pure sensation.

  A slick satin like the tightly furled bud of a wild rose drenched in spring rain. A shuddering gasp of spicy ginger. A jolt like lightning igniting his blood when he tentatively touched his tongue to hers. Every single moment like a tiny new universe blooming into being, joining with the others, expanding outward through his veins at spacetime-warping speeds.

  In the midst of all his careening wonder, slowly, so slowly, she unfastened all the buttons of his shirt, each tiny pop breaking something crucial inside him. His control? The invisible chains of his programming? Or the rest of his fears, maybe.

  When she spread her hands inside his shirt, pushing open the edges, she might as well have been hacking his systems, stripping his security protocols, exposing his vulnerabilities—laying all his secrets bare.

  Except none of that ancient history mattered, not compared to what she made him feel now. Like he was whole and real and strictly himself, regardless of the implants and nanites and deep-wired coding, most of it inactive so he’d never been more than half alive.

  Until her. Now all of him burned and sparked and throbbed, a machine failing—and coming to life.

  As she tugged the flayed shirt down his arms, momentarily binding him, he dropped to his knees in front of her. When the flannel pooled around him, she laced her fingers through his hair, tilting his face up. Her golden-brown face was as beautiful as a sun, touched by the pale reflected light like a moon hanging above him in his own private sky, and he swayed toward her, yearning.

  Her fingers tightened in his hair, holding him fast. “If you ever need me to stop…”

  “Never,” he breathed.

  She gave him a shake with just enough force to send a shiver down his spine. “Never say never.”

  That had been the crux of his lethal program: To never say never. But with every moment in her company, he was seeing that he was more. Not just bigger and badder. Also gentler, capable of laughter.

  And of loving.

  He steadied himself with his hands braced high on her thighs. His palms spanned the front of her jeans and his fingers curved toward the small curve of her backside. His breath seethed in his throat when she tilted her hips toward him.

  “Will you take off my pants?” Her question was a low purr.

  Would he ever not do what she asked? He stripped off the layers between him and her skin like they were nothing more than scraps of cloud in the way of a freefalling ship. Though an instinctive part of him demanded he fall right into her, the scent of her—warm and musky-sweet like ripest fruit—steadied him.

  Resisting the irresistible lure of the target he’d found right before his eyes, he gazed up at her. “Take off your shirt too?”

  Watching him through heavy-lidded eyes the whole time, she grasped the hem of her shirt and peeled it over her head, leaving her only in some filmy scrap of material clinging to her torso via thin ribbons over her shoulder. The veil was a tease that skimmed her hipbones and fluttered against his taut knuckles, gusted by his panting breath.

  “I’m ahead of you,” she taunted softly as she took a step back. “No jeans.”

  He surged to his feet, kicking off a boot and a leg of his trousers with each pace that he pursued her toward the bed, and his belt buckle crashed to her floor. The sometimes inconvenient appendage in the center of his body bobbed with each frantic shake, but with every stride it reoriented on her, a tracking system that, once locked on, would never fail him. As she tumbled back onto the mattress, she laughed, a light, joyous note that reverberated through him.

  The sound and her retreat triggered something in him, and he pounced, wanting to seize it, capture her. He clamped his hand over her bare ankle, the fine bone of her heel cupped in his palm.

  She stilled. “Mach.”

  No question in her voice, no fear, but he froze, his gaze swung to her sun-moon face. “Lun-mei.”

  Her smile broke him. “My feet are ticklish. Come up higher.”

  He had to think for a moment—a deliberate override of his primitive and programmed instincts to conquer and
possess—but he unclamped his muscles and slid his fingers up the swell of her calf to her knee.

  She angled that knee outward. “Higher.”

  His breath was harsh, as if he’d been waging war for the last hundred and fifty years, when he focused on the shadowy place between her thighs. He followed the straight muscle of her thigh with his fingertips, splaying her wider, but his focus on the goal was unwavering.

  “Mach,” she murmured again.

  He froze, every muscle seizing again. All the universe would tremble like the cells in his body if she ever learned the power she had over him: off, on, off, on.

  “Look at me,” she commanded softly.

  He dragged his gaze upward, tracing her like enemy terrain: peaks, valleys, places where he might get lost forever and only his plasteel bones would survive…

  When he reached her shimmering black gaze, his awareness shifted.

  Not lost. Found.

  “Come here.” Her husky whisper strummed along his every nerve, as if even his synthetic parts were now tuned to her presence.

  Careful not to crush her with his size and weight, he crawled up the bed beside her. She touched his shoulder—the one he’d stuck in the yurk’s mouth to protect her, though no evidence of the bite remained. With only the lightest pressure, somehow she rolled him to his back. So much for unyielding plasteel bones…

  She straddled his thighs, bracing her small hands on his chest. Though she weighed nothing compared to him, the clench of her legs around his and the spread of her fingers over his few remaining original organs seemed to immobilize him.

  Not to mention the proximity of her sweet heat to his aching flesh. He quivered with the need to join with her, but she’d told him to pay attention and so he was watching her face.

  And the way she bit her lip.

  A faint note of alarm tamped down his arousal. “Lun-mei…”

  She traced one fingertip over the nanite pathways in his skin. “In this light, they look…”

  He craned his neck to look down at his own body. It had been crafted and honed as a tool—not his, of course. It belonged to some careless keyholder who had lost him.