Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection (158 page)

She froze as if stunned to paralysis by the reminder, then abruptly her hands came to rest on his shoulders. “Are you sure you’re healed enough? I don’t want to—”

“I assure you.” His voice hummed along her exquisite jawline, raspy and low, drawing her back into the moment as one hand dropped to the clasp of her pants and the other splayed across the curve of her neck. “I am healed.” The clasp came free. “More than enough.” His fingers ran under the material and down her hip to cup her ass and pull her tight against him. Let her feel the proof for herself.

“Okay then.” It was a breathless hush grazing his mouth as a vanguard of her lips and her tongue, demanding and desperate. Her touch lost any vestige of tenderness it may have previously held, nails scraping through his hair to drag him closer while the other hand mimicked his earlier actions upon his pants.

The fire which flared within her was his drug. He let it consume him, giving himself up to the high her passion evoked.

A battle raged between their refusal to allow any space to come between them and their need to be free of the nuisance of clothing. After several aborted attempts she managed to shove his pants and briefs off together while he drove her backwards to the bed, sparing a haphazard motion to finish discarding her own in the split-second before his arms engulfed her anew.

Yet as the full length of her body pressing bare against him flooded his senses, panic suddenly pushed back against it.
What if the coming hours changed everything, and she was lost to him? What if this was the last time he would hold her in such a manner? What if this was the last time he would hold
her
? At this pace it would end before it had begun, gone forevermore….

She gripped him close, and it took the entirety of his concentration to pull away the tiniest sliver. “Wait…slow down….”

Her expression darkened in concern, casting a stark contrast to the hunger blazing like novas in her irises. “Are you all right?”

His hand glided up her spine and along her shoulder to find her cheek. “
Yes.
Of course.” Fingertips traced the outline of her lips, already swollen and raw.

“I just want to….”

They passed too soon over such a graceful, slender neck.

“Freeze this pocket of time….”

On reaching alabaster shoulders framing a perfectly sculpted collarbone, the words caught on his breath.

“Freeze this feeling….”

A pause at the hollow of her throat, so delicate for someone so astoundingly fierce.

“And memorize everything about it….”

Her heartbeat raced beneath his palm and satin skin.

“About you….”

She inhaled deeply, her chest fluttering as it rose and fell under his caress. “You’re afraid something will go wrong with the procedure. Do you want to…talk about it?”

“No, I think it will work. And no, I don’t want to talk about it.”

I want to hold you here and never let you go. I want to….

Her nose wrinkled up in frustration, and it was all he could do to speak. “Except, I have to wonder.”

Here it was. The fear he’d dared not voice until now—when it was all but too late—because when stacked alongside the survival of humanity his fears mustn’t matter. “Will you be the same person when you wake up?”

She stared at him in silence for longer than should have been, silver irises glittering full of stars in the dim, ethereal light.

An eternity passed.

She nodded faintly. “I think so, yes.”

But he saw his own fear reflected in her eyes. The fact that she was going to do it anyway spoke volumes about the woman she had become, yet made this all so damn much harder.

His lips hinted at a smile. “Even so.”

He shifted his palm to rest at her sternum and ease her onto the bed. He followed her down and held himself partially above her on one elbow.

Slow.

His hand trembled from the effort of not racing and clawing and grasping as it returned to her cheek then retraced its steps, brushing feather-light across her jaw, then her neckline. It continued on, tracing the curves of her breasts. His eyes chased its path, drinking her in.

“Let me savor the way your skin feels beneath my fingertips.”

His head dipped to place a soft kiss on a nipple.

Remember.

“Beneath my lips.”

“No.”

His gaze jerked up, startled. “
No?
”

She was grinning, devilish and seductive and tremulous and almost sorrowful. A firm hand pressed to his chest and urged him onto his back.

Her words were a throaty purr at his ear. “I will be here when this is done, and the day after that, and the day after that. I promise you. Still, if you insist on collecting memories to savor…I want you to savor this. Remember this.”

Her mouth ghosted over his neck to kiss the base of his throat. A hand danced along his chest, to his hip and back again, as she planted a thousand kisses upon the breadth of his chest. His pounding heartbeat leapt to meet each one as his skin flushed with a newfound deluge of straight-up, unbridled lust.

Her kisses wound a circuitous path down his abdomen. Her lips were silk, her touch intoxicating, her fingertips electricity gliding across his thigh as she dipped lower.

The muscles in his abs jumped as teeth followed tongue, sending jolts of pleasure blasting through his head and under his skin. “Alex—”

Breath was required for further speech, and the capacity to breathe abandoned him as her tongue swept over him. Yes, he thought he could find a way to remember this, remember how she….

How many minutes had passed? If they were outside of time and space it didn’t matter, did it? Head drowning from a torrent of ecstasy, he reached for her nonetheless. As mind-blowingly extraordinary as this was, he needed more.

He needed
her
.

His lips moved; he wasn’t sure any sound emerged. “Come here.”

A corner of her mouth curled upward as she complied by slithering up his chest and driving him to the cliff of madness. She hovered above him, hair falling in waves to envelop him in its cocoon.

“My love….”

Her voice was a whisper, but it crashed through him with the force of a hurricane. Then her lips met his, ardent yet somehow serene, hungry yet somehow gentle.

His arms wound around her as they rolled to face each other. Her leg wrapped over his hip and they became one without thought, without effort. He vowed never to forget that moment—a frozen instant of perfection—in case it never came again.

Her eyes didn’t close, nor did his. They remained locked on one another as their bodies fell into a languid but deep rhythm, one which seemed as though it might carry them through the darkness until the light returned.

He allowed it to do so, losing himself in the sea of sensations. Her hands sweeping along his back and clenching in his hair, every centimeter of her body drawn tightly against his own, sensual and supple and strong, the heat within her body and within her eyes that convinced him she was alive. They were alive.

Then the fervor of each and every sensation surged beyond his capacity to control, and he could only follow where she led.

My love.

Captain Roge Kessler’s eyes didn’t rove down the hallway as he strolled past it, but he did note its status in his peripheral vision. Two officers from Security Bureau stood watch outside the door to Solovy’s room; the other two were positioned at each end of the corridor. The closest guard knew him by sight but was trained well enough to not react to his presence. He continued traversing the intersecting hall as if headed to his own room.

Navick’s suggestion of eight-hour shifts had been intended in jest and taken as such. They had worked out staggered sixteen-hour shifts such that four agents were on duty at all times. His second stint had started a few minutes before his charges departed Logistics for their lodging. Flores had collared a would-be assassin an hour earlier in the garden behind Logistics, so if he needed a reminder to be on heightened alert—which he did not—it would have sufficed.

These Metigens, or else a lot of crazy, determined and suicidal people, wanted Alexis Solovy and Caleb Marano dead. Badly.

A door two-thirds of the way down the hall on his right opened, and a young woman in BDUs stepped out. She looked up at him briefly as he passed, and he responded with the casual nod one gave to strangers.

As he did so he took in a number of details: the tendons corded stiffly along her neck to betray a state of extreme tension and the shimmer of a personal shield visible solely in infrared via his ocular implant, for instance. Mostly, however, he noticed the blade hilt cupped in her palm despite her attempt to hide it by holding her arm snug against her side.

He continued on for another two paces then whirled and leaped forward to tackle her while her back was turned. The blade extended as they hit the ground, and his hand slammed her wrist to the floor an instant before the tip would have sliced into his thigh. Her head jerked up to swipe his jaw in a glancing blow as he wrenched her other arm behind her.

“This is an outrage—I’m a sergeant in Terrestrial Aeronautics!”

He grunted in exertion but managed to secure wrist restraints around her struggling arms. “That doesn’t disqualify you from being an attempted murderer, Sergeant.”

The guard stationed at the near end of the corridor came charging around the corner with his gun drawn; Kessler waved him off as he pocketed the woman’s weapon. “I’ve got this. Get your ass back to your post unless you want someone else to slip through the net.”

The guard hesitated. “Do you need me to call for backup?”

“Nope.” He hauled the woman to her feet, spun her around to face him and shoved her into the wall. Then he delivered a hard right hook to her jaw. Her head slammed against the wall behind her and rebounded to sink to her chest.

He grabbed her by the arms once more to prevent her from collapsing to the floor and began dragging her down the hall.

Sanchez, need you upstairs to take over floor duty for twenty.

Brigadier Navick? We got another one. Military this time. I’m bringing her in.

28

NEW BABEL

I
NDEPENDENT
C
OLONY

O
LIVIA STARED OUT THE LONG
wall of windows at the street below. The sole outward sign of her displeasure with what she saw was the steady
tap-tap
of her nails on her left thigh.

She hadn’t left the building housing the Zelones headquarters and her penthouse since returning from Pandora. To do so would have been an imprudent risk she need not take. She maintained access to all she required in order to control her galaxy-spanning enterprise from right here, thus there was no reason to taunt death by walking among the increasingly brutal and uncivilized rabble.

The neighborhood had been raucous bordering on riotous for nearly a week. Now, however, there was an actual riot. For several blocks in every direction people filled the streets, shouting and fighting and tossing a variety of implements at the façade of her building. Not only her building, but mostly her building to be sure.

Yes, it seemed these people had congregated to express some grievance they had with her organization. Something about wanting food or shelter or protection—though if the protection they sought was from the aliens, this was beyond her ability to provide even had she desired to do so.

As for the other demands, it was not her fault New Babel’s infrastructure did not instantly supply bedding, lodging and sustenance for the influx of over two million refugees in less than a month. Not when most of those refugees arrived with no means of supporting themselves. Well, perhaps she bore some small responsibility. But these refugees arrived fully aware New Babel possessed no government and no safety net.

She sensed Aiden draw near to join her at the windows. He’d taken an escorted skycar here the night before, implicitly admitting he too had no desire to risk the chaos of the streets. The rioters below possessed numerous weapons of varying strength, and soon after he’d arrived they’d begun shooting at any skycars in the vicinity. In the pre-dawn hours they had managed to shoot down the last one to approach her rooftop landing pad.

As such, he was now effectively trapped here with her. She hadn’t ascertained how he felt about it, for he continued to give nothing away in his expression or tone.

“I checked in with a couple of my people. They’re seeing the same thing at my offices.”

She looked over curiously. “You have crowds rioting outside your headquarters thirty kilometers away?”

“It’s not surprising the beggars would claim the same grievances against me as they do you.”

“No, but two simultaneous and targeted riots at widely disparate locations
is
surprising. It means they have organizers who are capable of controlling and mobilizing a large number of people.”