She sighed with more forcefulness than she wanted to and, when she looked at him, saw a sadness in his smile that echoed her own.
She touched his mouth with her fingers one more time. “We have work to do,” she told him.
He nodded, then draped one arm over her shoulders. She wrapped her arm around his waist and headed for his bedroom, where her blinking array of MOD-tech was now their only lifeline, their only hope.
18
Agapi mou. My darling. My love. Theo knew the phrase because he’d been raised speaking Greek, but he’d never before said it to any woman out loud. Not through his high-school years, not through college or the police academy. He’d never said it to Camille.
To speak those words in the language he’d heard from infancy was too intimate. It exposed his heart.
Yet he didn’t give a damn that it had been only two days. He’d touched Jorie, kissed Jorie, argued with Jorie, and fought by her side. There was no doubt. Agapi mou.
It was just another bit of damned irony that this was the worst possible time for him to feel that way.
He sat on the edge of his bed and watched her tap requests into the yellow-green screen, listened to her utter soft commands in Alarsh. It was almost one-thirty in the morning, officially Christmas. Children everywhere were snug in their beds, dreaming of Santa Claus and sugarplums or however the old poem went. Yet zombies and the Tresh were more likely to land on their roofs than eight tiny reindeer.
Helluva Christmas present.
Jorie stopped tapping at the screen and rubbed tiredly at her face.
“Anything I can help with?” he asked, because he felt so useless and because he wanted her to know she didn’t have to carry the burden alone.
She looked over her shoulder. “No, but thank you.” She went back to her computer with a soft sigh.
He stood, restless energy unsettling him. He wanted to stay awake in case she needed something, but to just sit there and listen to his mind think—and his heart break—was driving him crazy. Hurry up and wait had never been his strong point, which was why he liked detective work. He could always find something to do.
But here, too much had happened, and so much of it had been out of his control. He needed to refocus…yes. He grabbed his guitar case. Duty belt and weapons were carefully placed on his nightstand. Boots came off. He propped his pillow against the wrought-iron headboard and brought his guitar into his lap. The well-worn Brazilian rosewood was smooth and cool under his fingers—and very familiar. He dug out his slide, then picked aimlessly at a few strings until a blues refrain he’d been toying with came to mind. Zeke had been busting his butt for over a year now about his reclusive ways since his divorce. You still singing The Down Home Divorced Guy Blues? was Zeke’s constant taunt.
So Theo actually started writing the song. He closed his eyes and let himself sink into the sassy notes of the music, keeping time with one foot against the blanket. He hummed the melody softly—he was still working on the lyrics.
The tension leached from his neck and shoulders. He went through the refrain twice, then something made him open his eyes. He realized the room had grown quiet. He no longer heard Jorie’s voice or her tapping on the screen just on the edge of his hearing. That’s because she’d turned, her eyes wide in question.
Skata. He should have asked if playing his guitar would bother her.
“Sorry. I’ll stop.” He shifted forward to put the guitar back in its case.
“No. That’s blissful.” A small smile played across her lips.
“I don’t want to disturb what you’re doing.”
“I’ve done all I can for now,” she said, and rubbed her hand over her face again. “Until the zombies take a new action, I can only watch and wait.”
“And the Tresh?”
“I’m no threat to them until the zombies wake again,” she continued. “And since they know more than I do about the Sakanah, they may not consider me a threat at all.”
Theo could hear the strain in her voice at the mention of her ship. He wished he had answers for her, but that too was out of his control.
She motioned to his guitar. “Please. It sounds so nice. And I need something else to think about for a little while.”
Was that why she let him kiss her? Was that part of the playacting they’d started—he’d started—earlier? And he had started it, he admitted ruefully.
But somehow, no, he didn’t think she was toying with him. And he hoped it wasn’t only his male ego making that claim.
He glanced at his watch: two-ten. He pulled another pillow against the headboard, then patted the mattress. “Come, sit with me.”
It would be temptation, Jorie next to him on his bed. But playing his guitar would keep his hands occupied. Because after what had happened in the hallway, he knew if he touched her again, he wouldn’t be able to stop.
She pulled off her boots, then climbed across his bed on all fours, looking almost childlike, an impish smile on her face. She settled next to him and drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them.
He found himself playing Traveling Ed Teja’s “Blue Light,” because it was soft but upbeat at the same time. Somewhere in the middle of the song, Jorie’s head came to rest on his shoulder. He smiled to himself and kept playing, going through the song a second time, then segued into Teja’s “Blue Dime.”
He plucked the last few notes softly. She’d curled up against him, her knees resting against his thigh.
He put his guitar and case carefully on the floor, tucked the G-1 under his pillow, then turned off his bedside lamp and drew her into his arms. She murmured something unintelligible. He smoothed her hair back from her face and she settled into slumber again.
Theo listened to her breathing, the muted clicking of her computer, and the rustle of the night breeze through the fronds of the palm trees outside.
It was Christmas, and somewhere, sweet voices were singing, Silent night, holy night…
While all of unholy hell waited just beyond his door.
Jorie woke to a dim, shadowed room and a man’s arm draped over her waist. She recognized the intermittent click-whir of her tech and saw the green glow of a nil-tech timekeeper on the wrist lying across her forearm.
Theo. His breath ruffled her hair. Everything he was tugged at her heart.
She glanced at his wrist again—she knew how to interpret the symbols to this locale—and then at the pale light filtering through the covered viewports. It was just before sunwake. She—they—had been asleep for a little more than four sweeps. Hours, she corrected.
With no emergencies, no Tresh transporting in, no zombies crashing past—bliss, that.
She slipped out from under his arm.
“Jorie?” His voice was thick with sleep.
She thought of the last few times she’d slipped out of a man’s embrace in bed. She hadn’t heard her name whispered, but another female’s. She touched her finger to his lips. “I’ll look in on Tam and be back.”
She would. She desperately needed rest, and if the zombies were in an inactive phase—she checked her readouts as she padded by, and they were—then she wouldn’t look a gift fermarl in the ears. She needed all her strength for when the next spur hit.
Her scanner showed Tamlynne to be resting comfortably, her shoulder healing with only a little swelling. But some of the clamminess had returned to her skin. Jorie remembered that well. The nightmares she knew so intimately weren’t over for her lieutenant yet. The implant’s removal only halted further damage. Suzanne Martinez had no way to correct what had already been done.
The med-techs on the Sakanah could help, she thought, as she slipped back into Theo’s bedroom. But her ship wasn’t here.
She sat slowly down on the edge of the bed, not wanting to wake him. She was fully capable, as her brother often reminded her, of worrying enough for the both of them.
Galin. How long before a Guardian officer delivered the news of the destruction of the Sakanah and the dea
th of his sister? Just after he’d learned of the loss of his longtime friend? It wasn’t that Galin wasn’t strong—he was. It pained her that she would be the cause of such suffering….
“Hey.”
Theo’s arms went around her and Theo’s warmth encompassed her as he sat behind her on the bed. And only then did Jorie realize she was shivering, her breath coming out in small hiccuping gasps. Hell’s wrath. Would the damage the implant caused never grant her peace? Or had seeing Prow and Sem reawakened old horrors?
“Hey,” he said again, his voice a low rumble. He drew her back against him. “Come here.”
She turned in his embrace and let him lower her to the bed, fitting herself tightly against him. She couldn’t stop shaking.
“Is Tammy okay?”
She nodded under his chin. “Fine.”
“What is it, agapi mou?”
“Nothing.” She buried her face into his shirt and bit her lip to try to refocus her body’s reaction. It didn’t work. “It’ll pass.”
Strong hands massaged their way up her spine and down again.
“You’ve had a very stressful few days,” he said.
“Yes.” But she’d had worse. She should be able to handle this. That too made her weary.
He worked the muscles on the back of her shoulders with a gentle pressure. She sucked in a series of long breaths, tried to focus on the sound of Theo’s heartbeat. Focus on the fact that Cordo Sem was dead. Davin Prow, she thought, might have been wounded. There was something about that encounter she felt she was missing, but she couldn’t bring it to mind now. The last thing she wanted to see in her head was Prow.
Slowly, the knife-edged insanity that wore a Tresh Devastator’s face slipped back into the depths of her mind where it belonged. Thankfully she’d only gotten the shakes and not awakened screaming from a nightmare. She felt limp, a little boneless. Theo’s fingers slowed.
“Better?”
“Thank you.” She pulled her face off his chest with a sigh, then rolled away from him, onto her back.
He leaned over her, his lips touching hers with a light kiss, then pulled back. “You’re welcome.”
He propped himself up on one elbow and watched her. “You want to tell me now what happened?” he asked after a long moment of silence, during which she was far too aware of the heat of him next to her.
She laid her fingers on the edge of her sweater near her collarbone. “Bad memories.”
“The implant the Tresh put in you.”
“Yes. Ten years past.”
He folded his hand over hers. “How long before it was removed?”
“Forty-four of your days.”
He uttered an unfamiliar series of harsh words. “But you still remember the pain.”
“It has nothing to do with remembering. The Tresh device is insidious,” she continued. “You know that word?”
“It causes collateral damage.”
“Even Tamlynne, with the few sweeps it was in her body, will have resultant issues. It’s good, then,” and Jorie realized it was, “that I’m here. She may have small episodes, and I can help her work them through.”
He was nodding but frowning slightly. She thought she knew why. “Guardian restrainer implants are noninvasive. Not like the Tresh one. There’s no neural interface.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “So mine just gives me a zap if I piss you off.”
She owed him the truth. “Yours does nothing. I neutralized it.”
His eyes widened. “When?”
“When I did my funny stuff.” She gave him a small smile. She liked that phrase he used. It was so very much Theo. “Before we went to capture the juvenile zombie at your park. Kip Rordan…” She forced from her mind the question of whether he was dead or alive. “I was worried he had some issues with you.”
“You mean an intense mutual dislike?”
“He had the command codes when I wasn’t here. And his understanding of the mission, his goals, were different than mine.” She sighed, her mind coming back to the one fact she couldn’t push away. “If they’d only listened—”
“Hey.” He kissed her lightly. “You can’t change the past. Let it go, Jorie. All you can do is what’s here and now.”
“But—”
“I know. Believe me, I know. When you beamed me up to your ship, I thought I’d lost everything, everyone. I reacted stupidly, getting angry, going over all the mistakes I’d made that brought me there instead of thinking and looking at what I had where I was. What I could work with. What I could do.”
She remembered his bursts of temper and his subsequent, not always successful, attempts at self-control.
“And last year when Camille and I split up—”
“Camille?”
His mouth pursed wryly. “I was married. Spoused.”
“Oh.” There was a female he loved. Jorie’s heart wilted.
“Was,” he repeated. “I fell into the same stupid trap. Remember you told me about the guy who cheated on you? Loren?”
“Lorik.”
“I went through the same thing.”
“She had you and chose someone else?”
“That was only one of the wonderful things she did, yeah.”
“Vomit-brained slut bucket.”
Theo barked out a laugh. “What?”
“It’s an expression. Sadly, it doesn’t render well in Vekran.”
Still chuckling, he dotted her jaw with kisses.
She turned her face and found his mouth. His mirth abated and he sighed against her lips.
“We should get some sleep,” he said.
“Yes.”
But he didn’t move and she didn’t move.
His mouth brushed hers again. “You should have kept that zapper implant in me working,” he said, his voice rough. “Keep me under control. Make me leave you alone.”
“I don’t want you to leave me alone.”
His breath fanned her cheek. “Last chance. Say, ‘Go away, Petrakos.’”
She ran her hand up the side of his face, then through his short hair. “No.”
He closed his eyes, leaning into her touch, his capitulation sending a wave of desire through her. She knew he was aware of how dangerous this was. It could only cause them both heartache.
But she might not live so long. All she had was now. Wasn’t that what he said? Here and now. And right here and now, she wanted Theo Petrakos very, very much.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and brought his face back down to hers, letting him lead with kisses and answering with caresses of her own. His body was taut muscle that yielded to her fingers. She arched up into him and he groaned.
“You’re making me crazy, babe.”
“I think that’s good.”
“Do you?” He watched her through hooded eyes dark with passion.
“Yes.” Her fingers found the waistband at the back of his pants and pulled his shirt away. She needed the heat of his skin under her hands.
“Oh, babe.” He kissed her hard, then pulled back. “You’d better be very sure what you want—”
“I want,” she told him, more than a little breathless because her fingers weren’t the only ones now doing the exploring. His hand had slipped under her sweater and sleeveless tracker shirt to cup her breast and tease her nipple. “Theo, I want you.”
She felt his body throb in response even as he said her name, his kiss deep and desperate. He tugged at her sweater, and she pulled away from him just long enough to sit up and yank it and then her shirt over her head. Bliss, when she rolled back to him, his own chest was bare and they were heated skin to heated skin.
Her shorts came off next, his pants, their socks, clothes flying into the dim corners of the room. Then hands were replaced by mouths, kissing and nibbling and leaving hot, wet trails. His touch left her panting, damned near delirious with pleasure. She murmured to him in Alarsh because her brain couldn’t find any Vekran words.
He moved up her body to
claim her mouth again. “Tell me what you’re saying is good,” he rasped against her lips, the touch of his hands and the feel of his body throbbing against hers intoxicating.
“Very good. Oh—”
He thrust inside her, hot and hard.
“—yes!” she gasped, heat and tingles of ecstasy spiraling through her as she moved in rhythm with him.
His kisses deepened as he took her over the edge with him. Sparks of pleasure raced again through her veins as he groaned her name, shuddering into her. Then, even spent, his fingers threaded into her hair and he nibbled on her ear, her neck, and back up to her mouth.
Their bodies were hot, sweat-slickened. He turned on his side, gathering her up against him, curving his body around hers as he drew the sheet and blanket over them. He murmured something exotic-sounding in her ear. It wasn’t Vekran or his English.
“Hmm?” she asked, his warmth lulling her into sleep.
He kissed her shoulder. “I’ll tell you in a few hours. Sleep.”
“Is it good?”
Laughter rumbled in his chest. “It’s good, agapi mou.”
“What does that—”
“I’ll explain that too. Hush now. Naptime.”
Jorie didn’t remember falling asleep. But waking up again was a blissful experience, with Theo trailing kisses down her neck. She didn’t know the time, but the room was brighter. “I should look in on Tam.”
“Just did.” A strong hand slid slowly down her hip, pleasure radiating in its wake. “Brought her some water.” He nipped her ear. “She’s a little weak, but I think she’ll be okay.”
Decadent. Wanton. Jorie dutifully chastised herself as Theo shifted his body on top of hers, his hands and his mouth working magic. She surrendered willingly, let herself stay in the here and now just for a little while. She’d have the rest of the day to ruminate about her problems.
And there might not be a tomorrow.
She returned his magic with some of her own, mesmerized by the heat in his dark eyes and by that delicious, feral grin that had captured her from the moment she first saw it. He was a man who loved life. He was a man who was not afraid of duty—or death. She felt as if she’d known him forever. And knew that no matter how long she would know him, it would never be long enough.
The Down Home Zombie Blues Page 26