Parallel Seduction (7 page)

"In that dream," he purred against her lips, "we were strangers. But you're no stranger to me, Hope."

With his fingers he rubbed her between the legs again, alternating between stroking her slick wetness and thrusting inside of her. With one hand she stilled him, drawing in ragged breaths. "Scott, please."

"You bet!" he cried, and rolled atop of her almost completely. But then he groaned, and not from arousal.

"Damn my legs. Damn it all to hell!"

She gave his chest a light shove, pushing him back off of her. "It's okay to go slow here, you know." Still holding her, he kept one hard leg between both of hers, collapsing onto his side again.

"Slow doesn't work for me. Not how I operate."

She laughed. "I can pretty much see that."

"It feels like we need to rush. Anything can happen here, Hope. Between us, in this war. I don't want to hesitate or poke around."

"Um, seems you love to poke around."

He snickered. "You're a very bad girl."

"With a taste for very bad boys, quite obviously." She felt him shift on the bed, and their shared pillow pushed down. He was leaning on his elbow, studying her, she could tell. "Look, I want you," he said. "Not a little bit, and not later. It's intense and it's now. We've got to fucking seize this thing, Harper. Just go for it, and not think why."

Her heart rate gyrated insanely, causing her to struggle for breath. Light-headed, she wondered if getting hot and bothered was threatening her insulin levels. Despite what he was saying, she knew she had to slow down, absolutely had to. Besides, there were things she wanted to know about him. She zipped up her pants and turned toward him, trying desperately to see his features, but it was impossible. Only the dimmest, vague outlines of his face were visible to her: the dark head of hair, the much lighter skin. A wave of melancholy crested over her; she'd finally found him. All these years of mediocre love and mediocre relationships and she'd found her guy, but she'd never gotten to truly see him.

"I need to see you," she blurted in frustration. "You know everything about me, and I can't see worth shit."

Gently he took hold of both her hands and drew them to his face. "Then see me. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."

With her fingertips she outlined his full lips, feeling the way they turned up at the corners in a slight smile. Working outward in a circular pattern, she took in every line of his face, every detail—the rough beard growth, the weathered feel of his skin. His nose was long and straight, but had a bit of a bump in its bridge.

"You broke your nose," she observed, rubbing her finger back and forth over the slight ridge in his bone structure.

"Some Antousian bastard slammed me in the face with his K-12 a few years back."

She cocked her head, exploring other planes of his face. Thick eyebrows—she'd seen those during his captivity, when the lighting had been better—and seen them even closer in her visions of him. They arched elegantly and were surprisingly soft, and she ran her fingertips back and forth, playing with the silky hairs. Then, feeling downward, she rubbed the bridge of his nose again.

"Why didn't you let the healers fix this?" she asked.

He snorted. "They did. You're feeling the result."

"Not bad, Dillon. I kinda like it." It was a sensual, sexy aspect of his already rugged face. She continued, tracing the outline of his jaw, feeling a tiny scar on the edge there. The flesh was raised, a neat line running parallel with his jaw. "And what about this one? What happened here?"

He grew pensive; she could feel it. "Jared and I were playing in the palace courtyard and I tripped," he said reflectively. "Years ago … a million lifetimes ago."

"You knew each other as children?"

"My parents were friends with his. We lived there at the palace." These were his scientist parents, the ones he'd told her had been working to cure the plague back on Refaria. The ones who had taken human bodies in order to live and solve the virus.

"Have you forgiven them?"

"The
vlksai
who ruined my nose?"

"You know what I mean, S'Skautsa." She refused to let him sidestep the question about his parents.

With a soft exhalation, he collapsed backward into the pillow, leaving her hands suspended in the air. For a moment she stayed perfectly still, then carefully closed her fingers, dropping both fists to her sides. This was his greatest pain; she had seen that much when he'd opened up to her about his mixed genetic heritage.

"They died years ago, killed by their own people—the same ones they'd fought so hard to save. My genetic map is totally fucked. Always has been."

"Your body is human," she observed in a quiet voice.

"Even more fucked."

"Why would you say that? Do you really hate my people that much?"

Beside her, he jerked slightly, as if the words had hit a painful mark. "I don't hate humans," he said at last. "I hate that I'm part human. And why I am, that's the most atrocious part of all."

"You're just their son, Scott."

"The son of parents who seized human bodies, hosts." His voice got louder. "Took two human lives so they could live—"

"In order to save millions of their people," she finished for him.

"That wasn't what I was going to say."

"That's what you told me a few days ago in your hospital room," she reminded him.

He chuckled low. "You obviously caught me in a moment of weakness."

"Do you know anything about the two people whose bodies they took?"

"The two people they murdered, you mean?" Bitter anger edged his words.

"Who were they?" She refused to fall into his carefully laid verbal trap.

"I never knew anything about them. They were taken to Refaria after being abducted from Earth. Groups of them were brought for harvesting—that's what they call it, you know. Not murder. Harvesting."

"How does it work?"

"My kind can invade a body, the right kind of host—our ability to assume a formless nature allows it. Our match with humans was always perfect, particularly for seizing a new form. My parents grew sick, and rather than succumb to their illness, they stole two human hosts."

A few days ago he'd told her how so many of his race had been stricken with the plague, had resorted to their formless state rather than die, and then had sought out human bodies rather than remain in their ghost state. Hope shivered; what he described was grotesque, but it wasn't the point of their conversation. As an FBI linguist she was in the business of focusing, not being distracted by off-base issues. "Maybe you're Irish," she said with a quiet laugh.

"Why do you say that?"

"Your coloring … you have freckles, too, don't you?"

"Some. But I thought your Irish were all redheads."

"Don't tell Colin Farrell that," she said under her breath, then added, "There's a big Spanish influence in parts of Ireland. I was just thinking that's one possibility. Or perhaps German."

"Then I'm totally screwed."

"I don't get it."

"Think about it this way, Hope—since you bring up the Germans. How would you feel if you were descended from the Nazis? Knowing what your people were capable of?"

He had finally lost her. "I wouldn't care."

"If your parents were German?"

"Um, Scott, the Nazis were defeated a long, long time ago."

He clasped her by both arms, holding on hard. "But my people, the
vlksai,
haven't ever been stopped. That's what I live with, Harper. Every day."

"But you're Refarian in your heart; that's what you've said. So why not be proud of your human heritage? Why not embrace that and your ties to the Refarian people, and forget the rest?"

He was holding on to her still, and she felt slight tremors in both his hands. His breathing was staggered, rough. But he said nothing: not another word, not for a very long time, and it occurred to her that this man of hers, the one from her dreams, was more haunted than she might have possibly imagined. And he'd let her in on that secret, something she suspected he very rarely did with anyone. Now if only she could help him heal—really heal, in his heart, which had suddenly become far more important to her than the physical injuries in his body.

He said, "You haven't told me anything about
your
family."

She chuckled. "Yeah, and you're just changing the subject."

He took her hand in his, brought it to his lips, and dragged a slow kiss across her knuckles. "I want to know you—everything about you. Your future, your past. I'm not a wait around kind of guy, like I said. So start talking, Harper."

She stroked his face. "Good grief, you're sexy."

"Now look who's getting all distracting on me." She could hear the catlike satisfaction in his voice. The man knew how impossibly hot he was; she'd be willing to bank on his having worked it on plenty of occasions before, too. He'd admitted his much while in the medical center.

"But you are sexy." She leaned forward until her lips met his softly. "And beautiful, and you shouldn't always be in so much pain."

He stiffened, pulling back from her. "No more about my people or my parents."

"My dad's a lieutenant general in the army," she blurted. "And my brother? My twin brother, Chris? He's a special agent with the FBI. You should know that. Know that I am attached to important people, and maybe they can help all of you. At least eventually. Besides that fact, my dad will start demanding answers very soon, too."

"Where do they think you are? Dead?"

Hope flinched. She'd wanted to avoid this part of things, but she knew she had no choice. "Chris and I are extremely close. Extremely."

"What's that supposed to mean?" She almost thought he sounded jealous.

"We're connected. We've always just had this … well, you of all people will get it. An ability. An ability to talk inside each other's minds. To communicate. It's not usually a human thing, but I can assure you that he knows I didn't die at Warren."

"You talk across distances?" He was slightly breathless, amazed-sounding.

"Short-ish ones. It's bizarre, I know. It's not par for the human course."

"Define a short-ish distance."

"Oh, like Colorado to here."

"Hope, this is serious." He jolted upward in bed. "Does your brother know that you're here? That you've joined with us?"

She shook her head adamantly. "I haven't told him anything. But he feels that I'm alive and safe—I let him feel that. Nothing more."

"Damn it all to hell! I don't like this connection, not one bit."

"You're jealous of my brother?" It was truly a first, to have another man care about how close she and Chris had always been.

But it was clearly very serious business for Scott. He gripped her by the upper arm, his voice low and intense. "It's a connection that I hope to share with you one day—and I want to be the only one."

She sucked in a breath. "Do your people do that? Connect that deeply?"

"It's a Refarian gift, but my closeness to Refarian ways, to the spiritual gifts, their God, All … has led me to believe I will be able to bond."

Without meaning to, she'd placed a hand over her heart. "I want that, too."

He bent over her, buried his face against her chest, right where her heart was thundering crazily. "Please don't betray me to him," he whispered. "Don't let him know where we are based. Protect me—all of us, Hope."

She ran her fingers through his wiry, slightly curling hair. "How could I ever betray you?"

"I don't know." His voice was riddled with deep emotion. "I don't know, but then why am I suddenly so afraid of it?"

"Because you've finally let yourself care for someone. And it just so happens to be me."

He lifted off of her, sitting on the side of the bed, and she had the sense that her words had staked him in the heart, had pierced some kind of outer layer of protection that he always kept secured around himself.

"Eventually I'm going to have to call Chris." She drew in a breath. "Let him know that I'm all right. I can't stay here indefinitely without contacting my family."

Scott groaned. "Not advisable."

"It's even less advisable for some kind of APB to go out on me. Think about it, Scott: I work for the FBI. People aren't just going to let me drop out."

"My people should never have let you on that transport."

She scowled at him. "You wish I hadn't come?"

"Any one of those soldiers should have calculated your personal connections and booted you off that craft."

She sat forward, sidling next to him. "I had to know you'd be all right, Scott. I couldn't just let you lift away, never being sure. You could have sent me away at any point before now. But you didn't. Just like I couldn't stay behind on that base without you."

He cupped her face within his hand. "Then be with me, here, now. Understand why I can't let you contact your people. At least not yet."

"I guess this means you won't be giving me back my cell phone."

He kissed her heatedly, letting his mouth answer everything. After a long, languid stroke of his tongue against hers, he whispered, "If I gave it back to you, would you use it?"

"I would want to, but I know the GPS would enable them to track me."

"We have a security perimeter that would prevent that for up to three minutes. After that, they could triangulate your position. Scott slipped his arm around her, studying her; she could sense it. "See Anna," he whispered at last. "She's got your phone, but if you talk more than two minutes? We're all as good as dead."

K
elsey watched in silence as
Jared entered their bedroom. Filthy, he had mud crusted into his scalp, along his jaw, on his jeans. Every inch of her husband was soiled, soaked through with dampness and earth. Closing the door behind him, he stood there, simply watching her. The familiar almond-shaped eyes narrowed to keen slits, flashing with electric energy. The full lips drew into a thin, determined line. He tilted his fine-boned face upward; it was like the granite countenance of a stalwart mountain. He appeared resolved. His very stance challenged her to defy him. But he didn't utter a word, brushing past their bed, where Kelsey sat reading his ancestor's journal, and into the bathroom. After a moment she heard the sound of the shower running, then the glass door opening and closing. But he never even spoke to her.

Suddenly Kelsey felt furious. This was probably their single chance to conceive a child. How dare he remove himself and offer her zero explanations? Slamming her book shut, she climbed out of bed and stormed into the bathroom, feeling her hands tremble with emotion.

She stood, staring at him through the steamed-over glass stall door, but he never turned to face her, instead standing mutely under the stream of water. She knew he sensed her, but was obviously ignoring her on purpose. This tactic of his only intensified her fury.

"Excuse me, but, uh, where have you been?" she demanded, planting a hand on her hip.

For long moments he said nothing, staring upward into the stream of water. Then only, "Protecting you."

"Oh, that is such bullshit!" she cried. "Try that on another stupid human, Bennett."

He shook his head. "Nothing is worth your life, Kelse, not even a baby."

"You weren't going to hurt me."
You would never hurt me!
She'd said it the first time they met, and it was even truer now.

Her husband remained still as a statue, refusing to look at her. At last she opened the door, steam clouding before her eyes. "Talk to me."

His reply came as a barely audible whisper. "I nearly killed you."

"No, no, you didn't," she disagreed, and slowly he turned to face her.

"What I am almost killed you," he continued thickly. "And I can't risk that, not ever again. Don't ask me to either."

"This isn't just your decision, Jared."

"Don't you understand?" he shouted, rounding on her. In the wetness of the shower, she thought she saw tears in his eyes. "I cannot touch you in my natural state. I have said it from the beginning. I cannot! The power is too much; it would destroy you."

"So, then you don't touch me," she said. "Duh, Jared, this isn't that hard. We set rules, limits."

"Kelsey," he ground out. "At the springs? I couldn't stop myself. I had to have you; it was all I could do to keep away. I fought it off, but I came so close to falling upon you. And if I had?" He made a choking sob and averted his face, burying it in his hands.

"Shh, Jared." She stepped into the shower, still wearing her nightgown. The water instantly plastered it against her chest and thighs. She took him into her arms and shushed him, cupping his face and forcing him to see her. "Look at me. I'm okay," she reassured him. "I'm right here, and I'm fine."

"You have no idea, Kelsey," he groaned. "The thing I most want, even now?" He glanced at her, his expression guilty and pained. "The thing that is driving me toward the edge of madness? Is just to touch you with my other self. To take my fire and lick it all across your skin and consume you with my blazing touch. I want to pull you inside that inferno, that part of me that … is all wildness and fury." He gave her a horrified glance, but one filled with hunger, even now. "It's terrible and it's true. I still want it, even now, almost to the point of irrationality. The drive is blinding me—enough that I don't trust myself with you, not like this. That's why I didn't come back."

"You don't know that it's not safe." She kissed his muddied cheek, tasting blood there on the skin where he'd managed to scrape it somehow. She lapped at the wound with her tongue, wanting to soothe him.

"Yes, we do know, Kelsey!" he thundered, jerking apart from her. He slipped, almost losing his footing, but caught his hand on the smooth tile of the shower. "Don't ever invite me again like that! Never again!"

She followed him to the edge of the shower, intent. "Why not, my lord?"

His chest rose and fell with pained panting sounds. His eyes flared bright. His jaw flexed and tightened. And Kelsey smiled; his season had only been beginning, and now he was back with her, where he belonged. So long as they stood together in this, they would be okay.

"Stay away," he ground out, trying to back up, but she caressed his cheeks with her open palms. She pushed him backward, against the slick-tiled wall of the shower; she had him exactly where she wanted him.

"Jareshk," she purred in his ear, "your season is upon you, my lord."

Throwing his head back, he released a keening, guttural sound and spun her hard against the shower wall, pinning her from behind. Forming his body along hers, he held her there. "You wish to tease?" he rumbled in her ear. "You wish to tempt?"

"Take me," she urged, splaying her hands to catch herself against the slippery surface of the shower.

"You have no idea what I am," he threatened, his voice rumbling with barely restrained energy and lust.

"I
do
know you."

He jerked her soaked nightgown up about her waist. Spreading her thighs with his hand, he parted her, driving up into her harshly. The sheer force of his roughness caused her to gasp aloud; faint pain and ecstasy blended in that moment.

"I told you to stay away," he cautioned, his voice reaching an unrecognizable timbre.

"Why … would I … do that?" She laughed, her voice catching. He drove up into her again, one arm braced around her shoulder, the other grasping at her hip. It hurt a little, but it felt wondrously pleasurable, too. Divine. Pure. Everything she'd ever wanted with Jared, all these years, seemed to boil down to this very moment in which their physical bodies joined in a union of flesh and sweat and slickness.

He no longer spoke, making only untamed, groaning sounds against her ear. Nothing else: no Refarian words, no English. Just the unadulterated sounds of a fevered Refarian taking his mate in their shower, the most natural thing in the universe. And then he gentled, slowing his pace, restraining his urgent thrusting. He paused, slipping one palm over her breast, stroking her firm nipple beneath his rough fingertips. She could feel how hard he wrestled to hold back, when what he wanted most was to take her, hard and fast and raw.

"I'm yours, Jared." She panted, leaning her forehead against the tile of the shower. "Don't hold back.
Please,
I'm yours."

With a low rumble he pinned her firmly against the wall and teased her into a quick, feisty rhythm. They moved as one, aligned like the core of the very universe, perfectly in tune. Back and forth, in and out, they found that white-hot center of their bond. Felt it unfurl like time itself.

But he couldn't hold back for long. Not in the deepest throes of his mating season. Once again he drove into her hard, over and over, until after a few demanding moments he shot into her, a warm feeling that she'd not experienced with him before. She'd only read about it in the Refarian mating books. It signified a D'Aravnian male's highest fertility, his seed—often warm inside of her—had achieved a nearly volcanic quality. For a long moment after her own orgasm had speared through her body, she staggered against the shower wall, feeling dizzy and weak from the sharp, burning essence he'd left inside her. He braced himself there, pressing wet kisses all over her face, her eyes, her neck.

"I'm sorry," he kept mumbling, sounding embarrassed. "So sorry. Sorry, Kelse."

"Why are you apologizing?" she managed to pant, still trying to breathe from what he'd done to her.

"I hurt you."

"It's okay."

He drew in a shuddering breath. "Not smart, this."

"It's
okay,
Jared."

He wrapped both strong arms around her from behind, cradling her against his muscular torso; she felt safer than she ever had with him. She wished she could translate that feeling to him somehow, but knew that she couldn't. He tried whispering in her ear, "I—I—" He wanted to tell her something, but then just shook his head, kissing her shoulders, licking at them with his tongue.

"Tell me," she urged.

"It was all I could do not to Change, Kelsey," he admitted in a whisper. "Promise me. If this happens again, just … leave me. If I Change, leave."

Although he said he could kill her, the one thing she most wished for in their lovemaking was for
him.
All of him: his fiery, gorgeous self that she loved with every bit of her heart and soul.

"Promise me!" he begged.

"I promise," she affirmed, nodding, and he buried himself against her, the two of them slipping to the floor, the stream of water falling onto their glistening bodies.

"Good." He groaned, rolling onto his back. His eyes drifted shut, the water pelting his jaw, washing away the last remnants of mud on his face. "This is good, human wife," he managed, then passed out completely.

For a long time—until the water ran cool and then cold—she sat on the tiled floor of the shower, his head cradled in her lap, just watching him. Afterward, long after she'd turned off the water and sat there in her clinging, wet gown, he remained there, unconscious and unaware that he slept, and still she watched him. She watched and she wondered: Did the fire building inside her abdomen mean what she hoped?

Had they managed to create a baby tonight? She pressed her eyes shut and prayed that her instincts were correct: that a new D'Aravni had come into the universe.

"H
ope, where the hell are
you?"

She adjusted the cell phone against her ear; they had only a few moments if she didn't want Chris and the entire FBI to get a fix on her position. Scott had given her an outside limit of three minutes and she didn't want to even touch that fault line before hanging up.

"I'm fine, totally fine," she reassured her brother, blinking her eyes against the muted glow of the television.

"Yeah? Well, just so you know, Mom and Dad thought you died in that explosion."

"Shut up." She leaned back into the sofa pillows behind her. She felt terribly guilty, even as she knew her twin was lying, totally talking out of his ass.

After a lifetime of closeness, he knew how to work her, and yeah, she felt bad thinking about her family, but at the same time she had serious doubts that any of them had ever really believed she was dead.

"Sometimes it's like you—" His voice cut out momentarily as the reception wavered. "—anything happened to you. God, Hope, what were you even thinking?"

Adjusting the phone against her shoulder, she sank deeper into the sofa. She was calling from an alcove in the main cabin that the aliens had dubbed their "media center." It was a small, cave-like room containing a massive flat-screen TV with surround sound, and—rock her world—an Xbox. Apparently even these aliens had twenty-first-century entertainment needs, technologically retroactive as the equipment might be for their intergalactic crew.

"You don't know anything, Chris," she grumbled, watching the CNN crawler on the muted television. "That's the problem: You always think you know it all, when you don't know crap."

"Tell me what I'm missing." He sounded so sincere, utterly sincere, and it only made her feel worse.

"I've gotta go soon." The clock was ticking; it would be only a few more moments before he could get a fix on her position.

"Not without telling me what's going on."

"I'm fine, Chris, just fine. Stop worrying so much. I'm happy. I'm well; nothing's going wrong."

"So far." He didn't exactly sound convinced.

"I'm on the right side of things for once!"

"For once?" he scoffed. "Geez, Hope, why does everything always have to be so totally extreme for you to feel like you're alive?"

"You know what? You suck. You totally suck, and I'm hanging up—"

"Why? 'Cause I called it?"

"Because you never get me, and you always think you do." She rose to her feet, pacing in circles about the small media room. "Stop doing that. Stop being so sure you know exactly what's going on in my head when you're freaking clueless. Did it ever occur to you that maybe, just maybe, I actually know what I'm doing? That I'm with these people for a reason?"

"You're way too easily led."

"Shut up!" She held the phone a few inches away from her mouth. "God, you're too easily
annoying.
I'm hanging up now. I'm alive, okay? I'm alive and fine and happy. For once. I guess that's more than you can stand."

There was a crackling silence, and she drew the phone back against her ear.

"Sis, I believe in what you're doing … at least, I think so. I saw what happened at Warren. Just be careful. Watch yourself. Okay? Keep up with your meds and be smart."

"I'm a freaking genius."