Passion Model (17 page)

I’ve experienced a lot of sensual pleasures in my life. They can’t be avoided in Newcity. Enfolding myself into that hot water, though, allowing the heat to seep into my abused body, and sharing it with Declan, surpassed anything I’d ever encountered.

There are men who, sensitive to the ordeal we’d just shared, would allow a woman to simply soak in the water without expecting her to force her injured body to engage in intimacies. Thank my God-of-choice Declan is not a man like that. He put one hand on my shoulder and the other behind my head, and kissed me.

I sensed a heat in him that had nothing to do with the temperature of the water cradling us, and I thought of the Nivian with a smile. Declan had been jealous. My lips curved beneath his until he urged them open and swept the inside of my mouth with his tongue. Then I couldn’t smile anymore.

My hands slid up to tangle in the thickness of his damp, dark hair. He pushed against me, the tub giving us little room to move. My back pressed against the smooth plazglass, and my legs parted to allow him closer to me. He moved between my thighs, his erection nudging my stomach, his chest scraping my breasts. He left my mouth long enough to murmur my name, then slanted his lips back across mine before I could reply.

I had to answer with my hands and my tongue, and by slipping my heels over the back of his bent legs to urge him closer to me. He responded, slid his hands from my neck and shoulders to my buttocks, and lifted me. He moved into me with no resistance, my legs hooked around his waist, my arms wrapped around his neck. And still we kissed, kissed, each breathing in the air the other let out, until we filled each other completely.

I came within seconds, and he took my moan inside his mouth and answered with one of his own. His finger curved around my rear, pulling me closer and sliding me back. I rode the crest of my climax and shuddered with it, then felt it rise again within me.

He twisted his hips against me, giving me that last bit of pressure, and I felt stars explode inside me again. He joined me this time, his buttocks clenching beneath the hand I slid down to clutch with. So sensitive had I become I felt every throb as he spent himself inside me.

He put his lips to mine softly one more, then rested his head against my shoulder. I smelled his hair and held him close. I didn’t want to let go.

Arousal can make anyone forget the body’s most stringent complaints, but after orgasm it’s harder to ignore them. Declan and I separated, each going back to the small space the tub allowed us. I sunk into the water as far as I could. I couldn’t stretch out, but the heat still felt good. I dozed a little, content for now in the afterglow of our lovemaking.

“I do love you, you know.” His quiet words startled me into opening my eyes.

“We don’t really know each other very well, D.”

My answer didn’t put him off. “Do you have to know someone to love them?”

I curled my arms around my knees to think for a minute. “I think it helps.”

He tucked an escaped strand of my hair behind my ear. “What color is your hair, really?”

I fingered a section of violet. “Red.”

“Red like a retscan beam or red like a Shaddran sunset?”

“I’ve never seen a Shaddran sunset.”

He settled back in the water. “I have. It’s beautiful. I’ll bet your hair is that color.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant.” I sighed. “Declan, my heart is telling me one thing, but my mind…”

“Don’t listen to it,” came his advice, coupled with a kiss that flushed my cheeks even more than the hot water had.

“Things might change between us,” I ventured, hating the practical part of me that seemed determined to keep him at arm’s length despite all we’d been through. “After this is over.”

“Tell me about your childhood,” Declan said as though I hadn’t spoken. “And I’ll tell you about mine. Tell me your favorite color, food, what books you like to read.”

His questions made me smile. “What is this, twenty questions?”

“I want to know you, Gemma,” came his reply. “So you won’t have any reason to doubt that I love you.”

Declan must’ve earned his strength of character on his own, but heredity had granted him his charisma. In that moment, it was clear who he was and where he’d come from, because I could have no doubt he meant what he said.

So we talked long into the night, until at last the fire burned out and the water turned cool, and then we crept back to our rooms and slept curled in each other’s arms.

The Annvillian traders turned out to be a husband and wife who owned a rust bucket spacecraft that looked like it would fall out of the sky before it could break atmosphere. My palms began to sweat at the sight of it, and my heart trip-trapped in my chest. Kaelyn squeezed my hand, offering me as much comfort as she could.

The wife, a mousy, plump woman with a kind face, looked at Kaelyn with something like wonder. “She’s pretty, ain’t?” she asked in a thick, Annvillian accent. She reached to touch Kaelyn’s silken hair, and Kaelyn shrunk away from the woman.

The husband of the team kept glancing nervously to the door of the warehouse they used as a hangar. “What you got for trade?”

We’d paid for Fustroff’s hostel by digging in our pockets for items we thought might be worth something in an Offworld market. Simple luxuries like the chocobar Kaelyn had tucked into her bag were worth a lot more in Oldcity, but wouldn’t be enough to get us Offworld.

“I have this.” I showed him the iridium ring glittering in my palm. He reached for it, and I closed my fingers around the metal. “You get it when we’re safely out of atmosphere.”

He rubbed his hands together with another shifty glance at the door. “And the rest?”

Declan stepped forward. “When we get to Annvilla. Five thousand Intercolony Credits.”

The wife still looked wistfully at Kaelyn. “My little girl had hair like that, wunst.”

“Would you hesh up, woman?” the man snapped. He shrugged. “Our Becky got the Cleonan pox some years back. She died of it.”

“I’m sorry.” My compassion for the woman was marred by her husband’s shifty manner and lack of sympathy to his wife’s feelings. “When can we leave?”

He began to tick off a list on his fingers. “I have to load the bays awhile, and chart the course—”

Now the wife, perhaps sent over the edge by his casual dismissal of her pain, whirled to face him. “Whyn’t you tell ‘em the truth? You’re gonna take their money and—”

“Shut up, woman!” The trader backhanded his wife to silence. A bright runner of blood trickled from the corner of her mouth, but she didn’t even sob. Dry-eyed, she cast one last longing glance at Kaelyn, and then went up the ship’s rickety pull down staircase to disappear inside the hull.

“Take our money and what?” Eddie’s voice was cold.

The three of us presented a formidable sight, even for a trader who must’ve been used to far rougher company. He stepped back and passed his hand over his bearded chin. Another glance at the door had me turning to look too.

The cost and risk of adding psi boosters, computer chips that gave the user telepathic, empathic or precognitive abilities, had kept me from adding such enhancements. Plain old woman’s intuition ruled me now, and just before the door opened, I knew what I’d see.

“I’m disappointed in you, Caldyx. Didn’t that time in the survival camp teach you anything? Never underestimate your enemy.” Howard Adar strolled into the warehouse hangar, flanked by four secbots and a pair of uniformed officers.

Declan stepped forward to meet him. “Let us go, Dad. It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“What I wanted,” Howard bit out from between gritted jaws, “was to have a son who could take up the reins after me! And if I couldn’t have that, at least one who knew our world and his proper place in it.”

“I have no place in your world. Not anywhere.” Declan raised his hands to show he held no weapons. “Let us go, Dad.”

Howard barked out a laugh that reverberated into echoing ugliness. “And have you gallivanting around the Intercolony for everyone to see?”

“I won’t be trading on my name anymore. You don’t have to worry about it.”

Howard gestured for the secbots and Ops behind him to move forward. “I might believe that of your Adar point of honor, Caldyx, but what about your little friend?”

He put enough contempt into the word to make it an insult.

“Gemma has more honor than you’ll ever have.” Declan spoke calmly, though his father’s voice kept rising.

“She’s nothing better than a tencredit whore! She’s not even human anymore, she’s mecho!” Howard’s voice rose to an angry shriek like the grinding of rusty gears.

“She’s what I am, Dad,” Declan said calmly. “And neither of us is worth your disgust.”

Howard trembled with the force of his rage, and his once handsome face purpled. “I wanted to let you die on that operating table, rather than see you become this.”

I saw Declan’s shoulders twitch as the words must’ve struck him hard, but his voice was still calm when he replied. “I used to wish that same thing, Dad. But not anymore. Let us go.”

“I can’t!” Howard roared. “You’ll ruin me!”

“It’s too late for that,” I told him. “You’ve ruined yourself. There are more witnesses than us, Howard. More people who know the truth.”

“You think so?” He looked back at the officers who accompanied him. “I suppose you’re right.”

With a jerk of his head he motioned to the secbots. “Kill them.”

We had no time to protest. Secbots have no free will, no morals, nothing but the programmed need to obey orders. They lifted their weapons and shot. The uniformed officers had no time even to cry out before they fell.

Eddie let out a hoarse cry, then launched himself toward Howard. “You son of a bitch!”

“Him too,” Howard said almost casually.

Eddie, unlike our doomed peers, was prepared. He dodged out of the way and avoided the secbots’ shots. One winged by me close enough for me to feel its heat.

“You can’t just kill everyone who goes against you!” Declan cried.

Now it was the father who was calm against the son’s agitation. “I can,” he said. “And I will. I will do whatever is needed to keep the Adar name unsullied.”

I surprised even myself with how swiftly I moved. I pushed my legs into a combination jump/run that put me next to Howard in a heartbeat.

“I can kill you,” I said. “And I don’t need a lasergun to do it, either.”

“You could,” he replied calmly, with a serene smile. “But you won’t. You’re not bred to it. You’re not meant for it.”

He was right, at least on the latter two accounts. Whether I would or not, neither of us would discover, because at that moment Kaelyn, startled into flight by Howard’s outburst, ran toward the shelter of a stack of crates waiting to be loaded on the ship. The secbots turned toward her, their jointed arms each lifting identical laserguns.

“Shoot that freak!” Howard ordered.

“No!” The shout burst from my throat with the force of a bullet.

Kaelyn froze, eyes wide, wings for once stilled in shock. A breeze from the open hangar door lifted the silk of her hair away from her face, highlighting the lovely, alien features that so incensed Howard Adar.

I didn’t have time to think, I just reacted. I flipped myself forward onto my hands and kicked my legs over my head. Once, twice, I flipped end over end to end up between my daughter and those who sought to cause her harm. I stood just in time to shield her from the shot that hit me in the chest and would’ve hit her in the head.

Instant, blinding agony ripped through me, and I went to my knees. I pushed her down behind me, still shielding her, and the second shot took me in the right shoulder.

Kaelyn scrabbled on hands and knees behind the shelter of the crates. I sank to the ground, willing away the pain, trying to no avail to force my body to respond. Declan moved so fast that to my pain-dimmed vision he seemed to blur.

He kicked the gun from the closest secbot and sent it hurtling to the floor, where it skittered along the cracked pavement and disappeared beneath the ship. Without stopping, he jammed a fist into the secbot’s optic center and ripped out its eyes, complete with dangling, sparking wires.

Eddie leaped on the other bot’s back and tore away the control panel at the back of its neck. The bot swung at the waist and tried to shake him off, but Eddie didn’t stop until he’d torn out the handful of wires that made up the bot’s communication system.

I couldn’t black out, no matter how much my body wanted to. The pain that should have sent me spiraling into darkness stabbed me into a state of almost hyper lucidity. As it was, I heard every word, saw every action.

As though oblivious to the fight going on around him, Howard stepped toward where I lay on the dirty floor. The haze of pain that wouldn’t let me pass out seemed to line him in brightness, while Eddie and Declan’s struggle in the background to subdue the secbots blurred.

“You’d sacrifice yourself for that thing?” Howard asked me, his face showing his incredulity. “That inhuman creature? You’d die for that freak?”

“She is my child, and I would die for her, yes.” Speaking took a great effort. Blood burbled to my lips, bringing with it a taste like rust. I swam against the tide of pain, unable to simply give up and let it take me. “Too bad you’ll never know the depth of that love.”

“You pity me?” Howard loomed over me, his features so familiar to Declan’s, yet so foreign. “You mecho, you freak of nature? You dare to pity me?”

“I think you deserve my pity,” I tried to say, but nothing came but a whisper and a froth of copper on my tongue.

Now, at last, the red glimmer of unconsciousness flickered at the edges of my vision. My sight narrowed, until all I saw was Howard’s face, his shoulder as he reached into his pocket, his hand as he brought up a weapon of his own. And then, finally, the dark eye of the gun as he aimed it at my head.

I waited for the end, and it didn’t come. Howard stiffened, his eyes widened, his arms flung out like a startled infant’s. A hole appeared, black around the edges and red inside, in his chest. Daylight glimmered through it for a brief moment, and then he fell.