Cyborg Nation (22 page)

His—He was so focused on turning that over in his mind and trying to figure out why it made him feel things he couldn’t entirely grasp that he was startled when he felt the brush of her lips. He sucked in a shaky breath, too stunned to move at first and then fighting to remain still when it settled inside his mind that
she
was kissing him. She wasn’t just allowing him to touch her and kiss her.

It was the fear that she’d stop and move away that held him in thrall as much as the unique pleasure it gave him. When she pushed at his shoulder, disappointment filled him, but he yielded, rolling onto his back.

She followed him, shifting her upper body onto his chest and nuzzling her cheek against his. So this was what it felt like to have her do the things to him that he did to her, he thought dizzily. He’d known it must be pleasurable. It had given him pleasure just doing it, but he hadn’t considered what it might feel like if she did it to him instead. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might want to.

He had to fight another round with his urge to dominate when she had thoroughly explored his ear and moved to brush her lips along his. The tip of her tongue, moving lazily along his lips drove him to distraction. He wanted to spear his fingers through her hair and hold her tightly while he explored her mouth. The moment passed, the opportunity to seize control as she drifted lower, exploring his neck. He swallowed with great effort, feeling as if he was choking.

As she charted a meandering trail downward, moving her lips over him, tasting his skin with her tongue, nipping lightly at him with her teeth, the struggle to remain passive grew harder and harder. Instinct warred against a need and desire completely alien to him and incomprehensible because it was something he hadn’t known before.

“What did you mean when you said ‘we want to contract’?” she murmured, almost idly as she traced her tongue in a small circle around his navel.

A warning flickered in his mind, but he was mesmerized by that warm tracery and the hopefulness that clogged his throat that she would move just a little lower. “Us,” he rasped thickly.

“Us?”

When his mind bogged down in a war between reason and need, she shifted lower. His body clenched so hard when she ran her tongue over the tip of his cock it pulled his shoulders off the bed. He gritted his teeth against pleasure that was so intense it was almost closer to pain than pleasure when she followed by inclosing just the head of his cock into her mouth and sucking until it felt like his head would implode and his lungs collapse. “Me, Gabriel, and Jerico,” he rasped out when she stopped and his heart started again, threatening to beat its way out of his chest.

She sucked on him again, this time running her tongue along the sensitive rim of his cock head. He clawed at the bed, curling his fingers into the mattress to keep from falling off as his entire equilibrium went haywire. “You could do that?” she asked, her voice low, almost as mesmerizing as her mouth.

“Must,” he gasped out, anxious to get the conversation over with so she could put her mouth to better use. “Law.”

She began to stroke her hands over his cock as if she was strumming an instrument. She was, and his heart was pounding out a deep bass backbeat and threatening to explode as she tuned every nerve ending from the root of his cock to the tip with a dexterity that had every one of them screaming and tearing at his guts. “A law?” she prompted. “On your world?”

“Yes—no less than two, no more than four males in a unit,” he ground the words out.

Before he could drag air into his lungs again, she closed her mouth over him and he completely lost his breath and his mind along with it. He felt his hips come off the bed as heat engulfed him and the muscles of her mouth worked over his cock. Sounds were forced from his chest with the little air he’d managed to drag into his lungs, but he could no more control that than he could the jerk of his hips every time her mouth engulfed him and then pulled away again.

He was going to die, he thought dimly. He was going to suffocate from lack of air, or choke on his heart. He couldn’t bring himself to stop her, though. He couldn’t focus on anything except his greed for the feel of her mouth to go on forever, killing him by agonizingly slow inches. His body fought him every step of the way, threatening to snatch that glorious feeling away from him by exploding.

He finally reached a point where he knew he was losing the battle. The moment that certainty settled in the back of his throat, however, a new urgency rose, the desperation to spill his seed at her womb. Summoning every ounce of strength and willpower he still possessed, he jackknifed upward, clamped his hands on her shoulders and jerked her toward him. Twisting as he brought her down again and rolling over her as he shoved her against the mattress, he stabbed at her blindly, plowing his cock back and forth along her cleft several times before he managed to connect with the mouth of her sex. She was wet. His mind couldn’t grasp more than that, didn’t fully grasp even that much, merely registered a vague sense of relief when he felt wetness allow him to sink deeply inside of her with no more than a handful of frantic thrusts. Even as the muscles along her channel closed around him like a tight fist his body began to jerk and spasm, spewing his seed into her.

A sense of profound relief filled him when his body finally stopped convulsing. Shoving himself upward with one shaking arm, he tipped sideways and fell off her and straight into oblivion.

Chapter Fourteen

Feeling vaguely let down that Gideon had come before she could, Bronte lay with her eyes closed until she’d caught her breath and finally turned her head to look at him. A mixture of amusement and irritation filled her when she saw he was asleep.

Sex was obviously a potent tranquilizer for him. The wonder was that he’d managed to stay awake long enough the first time to make sure she really had agreed to enter into a co-habitation agreement with him.

Stifling the urge to chuckle, she studied his face, wondering if she’d imagined the most truly bizarre proposal she’d ever had.

Not that she’d had that many.

Actually none.

She wasn’t sure how she felt about it—strangely vacillating was as close as she could come. She wasn’t even certain of why she’d agreed. She puzzled over that for a few minutes and decided she did know. She’d agreed because there something so crazy and desperate about his absolute determination to convince her that she couldn’t bring herself to say no.

Because she felt like, right or wrong, it could only be that she meant a lot to him. Love was probably stretching it—a long way. On an intellectual level, she knew he couldn’t possibly know what love was. That didn’t mean he couldn’t feel it, but she didn’t honestly believe he was capable of it.

And it still didn’t matter. She’d had people who claimed to love her who would never have gone through half of what he had to have her. It wasn’t just the sex either. That was almost the strangest part about it. He wanted her. He hadn’t made any bones about that, or spent a lot of time agonizing on whether to seduce her or not.

But he’d refused to give in to his own needs until he could make her agree.

That
was dedication!

Realizing that the longer she stared at him the more she wanted to touch, she finally slipped out of the bed and went to bathe, more than half expecting him to wake up and join her. He didn’t, but she had plenty of company in her thoughts. She went back over what he’d said to her, trying to focus on that rather than what he’d done, which wasn’t easy.

She’d been in such a state at the time she’d suspected she must have somehow misunderstood him when he’d said ‘contract with us’. He’d been in such a state while she was questioning him about it that she hadn’t been sure she could put a lot of faith in what he’d told her.

It occurred to her rather forcefully, though, that Gideon hadn’t been working alone any of the time. Jerico had behaved the same way toward her. She suspected poor Gabriel would have too except that he’d had a good bit more trouble controlling his own libido.

And she’d been mad as hell when she’d questioned him and discovered he was under orders to tease only, not to please.

They hadn’t all been behaving that way just because Gideon had ordered it, or just for Gideon’s benefit! Gideon had said ‘us’. He’d changed that to ‘me’ when she’d asked him about it, but then he’d told her the law on his world required ‘no less than two, no more than four’. Gideon was also the one who’d told her they had no mates and no hope of having one.

Because there had been far more male cyborgs than there had been females! The company had churned out thousands as soldiers, god only knew how many more for construction and other hazardous jobs, to say nothing of those sold as pleasure bots. The demand for females hadn’t gone much further than female pleasure bots for men and maids.

Even if the company had succeeded in destroying a good portion of the cyborgs when they’d gone rogue, there would still probably be a hugely disproportionate number of males to females.

So they’d enacted a law requiring the women to take two to four men if she contracted?

Considering monogamy was still the most commonly accepted co-habitations, that was almost mind-boggling—especially since those societies that
did
practice multi-partner family units were primarily made up of one male and several females.

They usually did that, though, because of a disproportionate ratio of female to male.

Which, apparently, was what the cyborgs had decided to do.

That was actually pretty deflating. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just deflating. It hurt, too. Even though she’d told herself she knew Gideon probably wasn’t capable of feeling affection, or love, she realized that, deep down, she’d convinced herself he felt
something
. All it was, though, was a … Neanderthal male determination to have a female!

The bastards!

She stewed over that for a while, considered telling them all to go to hell. It dawned on her after a little while, though, that she’d already deduced there had to be many times more male cyborgs than females.

And she was going to be stuck on a planet with them with no way to escape!

Considering the way Gideon, Jerico, and Gabriel had behaved, she couldn’t imagine what it might be like to have three times that many fighting over who was going to get her. That horrifying thought quashed the vague notion circling around in her mind to teach the three a lesson by rejecting their offer.

She wouldn’t even have wanted to if not for the fact that it hurt, and it wouldn’t have hurt if
she
hadn’t felt anything for them—not the same way, anyway, she reflected. She wasn’t going to do something stupid just to get even with them.

Some courtship, she thought indignantly!

On the other hand, they couldn’t help it. She thought that was what had suckered her in to start with—this
need
she had to mother everybody—they were so needy. They didn’t know it, but they were.

Anyway, she couldn’t overlook the fact that they were willing to fight each other for her at the drop of a hat. She would feel much safer having to live among the cyborgs if she had three that were perfectly willing, and able, to pound anybody that looked at her crossways into the dirt.

She was still peeved about it!

She discovered when she left the bath that Gideon had awakened and left. Feeling a little put out about that, she finally shook it off and looked around for her clothes.

She was more than a little put out when she saw the uniform. She’d thought that tearing noise was the sound of the interlocking mesh closure. She hadn’t realized that Neanderthal idiot had shredded the thing when he couldn’t get it off of her!

Dropping it to the floor again, she stalked to the door of the cabin and opened it.

Gideon, she saw, was in his seat at the helm, Jerico and Gabriel standing behind him and they weren’t making any attempt to talk quietly among themselves.

“What are you doing?” Gabriel asked, puzzlement in his voice.

“Looking for the contract,” Gideon responded absently.

“What contract?” Jerico asked quickly.

Gideon lifted his head to stare at the two men blankly for a moment. As he did so, however, he caught sight of her. “The co-habitation agreement,” he said slowly.

“Did she agree? What did she say?”

Gideon looked up at Gabriel uncomfortably.

Bronte stared at the three men, feeling disbelief settle and twist in her belly. Despite the fact that she’d thought the three were conspiring against her, it was another matter entirely to find herself facing them and have all doubt removed.

Gideon, she realized, looked uncomfortable because he’d ditched his ‘comrades’ the moment he’d seen the lay of the land.

She was tempted to wait and see how he planned to get himself out of this one. On the other, she
knew
how this story was going to end—in the hold where all of their disagreements ended up.

“She said you have to ask her yourself,” she answered before Gideon had come up with a response, crossing her arms and leaning against the door frame.

Jerico and Gabriel both whirled guiltily at the sound of her voice and froze like two hunting dogs that had just spied their quarry when they saw her standing in the doorway of the cabin completely nude. Gabriel recovered first, striding quickly toward her. Jerico was about two steps behind him and Bronte was beginning to regret the impulse to toss that challenge into a potentially volatile situation--as she so often did regret her impulses, and with good reason since they usually turned out badly.

Just as she straightened away from the doorframe to run, Jerico threw one leg out and tripped Gabriel up. Gabriel hit the deck and slid toward her several feet, but as Jerico leapt over him, he managed to snag Jerico around one ankle. Caught as completely off guard as Gabriel had been, Jerico pan-caked on the deck within a few feet of her.

Instead of trying to leap over him as Jerico had done, Gabriel leapt on top of Jerico, slammed his head against the deck a few times and then slugged him in the face with his fist for good measure. He beamed at her as he got to his feet.