Hidden Heat (6 page)

I kissed him, keeping my hand slowly in play, and he seized my hips, kissing me so desperately that I almost lost control and just let him take over. Pressing my naked breasts against his warm chest, I let go of his cock for just long enough to tug down his pants and underwear.

“You might wanna sit down for this,” I whispered against his lips, and he immediately stepped out of his remaining clothing, tugging me backward towards the bed.

I sank to my knees in front of him and he sat on the edge of the mattress, leaning down to kiss me again, hard. When I pulled back his eyes were dark with lust, and I felt another quiver deep inside me, where I needed to feel him. But not yet.

“Your turn.” Before he could reply, I leant forward and licked across his head, then took him into my mouth, putting all the tricks I’d learned in the past to work. Scott cursed softly, holding back my hair with one hand and gently encouraging me with the other.

Putting my own desires aside, I focused on his, learning his unique responses and most sensitive spots. He gave low, appreciative groans as I pushed him closer to the edge and, just as I thought he was about to lose it, he tugged me away by the hair, growling with frustrated pleasure.

“C’mere.” I rose to my feet with an accomplished smile, letting him draw me down to the bed with him. His hands and lips were rough with desire, and the shameless slut inside me responded with gasps and sighs. He pulled off my underwear with a couple of sharp tugs, and then pinned me to the mattress, rolling my nipples between his fingers and kissing me so heatedly that I could hardly think.

“Please,” I gasped between kisses, reaching down between us to rub his head against my demanding clit. Scott nipped my neck, hard enough to leave a mark, but I didn’t care anymore. All that mattered was the deep pulse of my desire, and all I cared about was getting off. “Fuck me…”

He took one endless, excruciating moment to give me
that
grin again. “Soundproofed room, remember? Let me hear you.”

He drove inside me hard enough that I cried out sharply, revelling in the freedom of being as loud as I damn well wanted with no repercussions. “Oh, God, more…”

I didn’t need to tell him twice. I dug my fingers into his shoulders enough to hurt, and he responded to my rough touch with hard, confident movements that drove me further and further out of my mind. I cried out over and over, bracing my heels against the mattress, meeting him thrust for thrust, and trembled as the tension within me grew to impossible heights, accumulating but never breaking. I half sobbed, unable to take any more of the almost painful pleasure, then suddenly I shattered, wrapping my legs around Scott’s waist and rocking with him as the waves of pleasure crested and ebbed, leaving me exhausted but sated.

Scott responded to my intense climax with a groan, the feel of my release triggering his, and he thrust within me a few more times, breathlessly riding out the sensation. We collapsed together in a tangle of limbs, gasping for air, drifting on the afterglow, and for a few minutes I couldn’t remember anything but the fact that I was here with Scott, recovering from the fucking of my life.

As soon as I had the strength to move, I tilted my head up to brush my lips across Scott’s jaw. He shifted into a more comfortable position and returned my kiss softly, his expression as satisfied as mine probably was. “That…was epic.”

“Definitely worth all the subterfuge,” I agreed, stretching my limbs out one by one with lazy, post-coital languor. “Even if the police are preparing to storm the house and arrest us right now, at least I can die happy.”

Scott rolled his eyes at the gallows humour. “Trust me. We’re safe here.”

“I am trusting you. Didn’t you notice?”

“Oh, I noticed. Wanna trust me again later?” He tightened his arms around me and I closed my eyes, feeling ridiculously safe and secure. How had I managed to find this little piece of heaven, when I’d thought I was destined to be alone forever?

“Mm-hmm…”

For a while, I just let Scott stroke my hair. He was always telling me to relax, and right now, I was the very definition of the word. I was on the edge of sleep when his quiet voice roused me. “Holly?”

“Hmm?”

“How’d you manage to fake the suppression?”

I considered putting off the question, leaving it for another time. But he needed to know, and at least here I knew we wouldn’t be overheard. So I told him.

“My aunt Leah works in the clinic; she’s one of the suppression doctors. Usually family isn’t supposed to be involved in the procedure, but she was filling in for the scheduled doctor. He’d gone home sick. Since Leah’s last name is different to mine, no one realised.”

Scott watched me thoughtfully. “She did the procedure?”

I nodded, remembering.

“You’re sure you want to go through all this again?” My aunt’s expression was concerned. “Holly, statistically speaking only twenty per cent of third-timers strike it lucky; fewer if they’re women. Why don’t you think about this some more?”

“Will thinking about it change the result?” I was terrified, but I had made up my mind. Better to be put out of my misery than to live in hope of something that couldn’t be.

Leah shook her head slowly. “This might not be meant to be, you know.”

Defensively, I drew my knees up to my chest on the bed, hugging them and glaring at her. “Whose stupid rules are these, anyhow? I studied hard. I passed all my academic tests with flying colours. And just because I sometimes think about sex that makes me a bad doctor, even if I know twice as much as someone who manages to pass the procedure and hardly studied? It’s not fair, Aunt Leah!”

She nodded, biting her lip. “I know. It’s far from a perfect system. But it’s what the law requires.”

I had a few choice things to say about that, but I kept them to myself. “Just…do your best. It’s not your fault if I fail again. I know that.”

Without replying, Leah prepared the IV that would sedate me and I stared up at the ceiling morosely, blinking back tears. I had to try—if I didn’t, I’d spend the rest of my life regretting it and wondering if it would have worked.

“Keep calm, Holly.” My aunt swabbed my hand free of bacteria then hooked me up to the IV. I winced at the pain as the cannula needle pierced my skin, and closed my eyes as I waited for the sedative to hit my system. “I’ll do everything I can.”

Around an hour later I woke up, groggy but not in too much discomfort. Most of the procedure was undertaken with nanites and hololasers, but I’d had a splitting headache after the first time. Hormone dams could be a little tricky, they’d admitted.

“Aunt Leah?”

There was a brief pause, then my aunt walked into view. From her face, I already knew there was a good chance that the post-procedure test had failed. Even so, I had to ask. “How did it go?”

From somewhere behind the bed, a robotic voice announced, “Procedure successful.”

I stared at Leah. “It worked? But before, they had to make me look at stuff and touch it and hear…”

She leaned over the bed and spoke softly, her shoulders hunched with tension. “I took the test—your recorded biorhythms and my suppressed reactions. You’re registered as a success, Holly.”

A jolt of disbelief made me as numb as I’d always assumed suppression would be. “But if they find out, we’ll both be…”

Killed. Executed. Murdered.
I didn’t know which of the words to use, so I kept quiet. Leah squeezed my cannula-free hand, her smile both pained and genuine. “Don’t get caught, and we’ll be fine. Be careful. For both of us.”

Scott listened to my story in silence, shaking his head in admiration. “We could use someone like your aunt in the committee. Is she still a clinician?”

I shivered a little as my body cooled and Scott pulled a blanket over us, tucking it around me with obvious concern. “No. She disappeared a few weeks later. They called her in for interrogation about something… I don’t even know if it was related to suppression. She never got to the meeting. Maybe she went underground to protect me.”

“I’m sorry.” He kissed my forehead gently, and I tried a smile. It fell flat and he noticed immediately. “Hey… She’s probably fine. If they were on to her, there’s no way you’d still be free, right?”

“I guess,” I murmured. “God, I was so selfish. I
had
to be a doctor, and she was just trying to help me…”

“It was her idea, though, right?”

I nodded, wishing it would make me feel better. “I should have just accepted that it wasn’t meant to be before it got that bad.”

Scott snorted. “Way too many people just accept the way things are. Committee’s trying to change that, but it’s gonna take time, I guess.”

We lay there quietly for a while, both lost in our own thoughts about the screwed-up world. Then Scott asked, “Why d’you wanna be a doctor so badly?”

That one, at least, was a less touchy subject. “Are you sure you wanna see? It’s pretty scary.”

He propped himself up on an elbow, morbidly curious. “You have scars? Show me.”

“Okay…” I kicked off the blankets and pressed my thumb firmly to the holoswitch just beneath my hairline at the back of my neck, in the standard place doctors installed them these days. The smooth replacement skin down the left side of my body flickered, then the hologrammatic image ghosted up over it, a perfect image of the scarring and flaws I would still have if not for the nanotech that smoothed my outer skin. The old injuries were still there, below the surface, invisible to the eye and undetectable to the touch, but if I got injured there again the doctors would at least know which spots were most vulnerable—the holomap saw to that.

“Ouch.” Scott’s eyes widened but he didn’t seem grossed out. I would have had to get pissy with him if he had. “What happened?”

“Explosion. I was twelve and there was a menial revolt going down in the city. It just kind of came out of nowhere, this riot—police versus menials—and things got nasty. There was some sort of homemade device, and some of the shrapnel got as far as me. I was lucky to survive, but I was side on and there was a sign at head height that shielded my face and neck.”

“Fuck. That’s bad.”

“No kidding. Hurt like hell, too. But the doctors who worked on me used experimental nanos and somehow they managed to patch me up. Ever since then… I’ve wanted to do the same for other people.”

I let the hologram fade and Scott kissed my side affectionately before pulling the blankets back up over us. His lips sent a tingle through me, but I was still too tired to pursue it. “How about you? Why do
you
wanna be a doctor?”

“Cause I look damn sexy in a white coat.” Somehow, he managed to keep a straight face…at least, until I burst out laughing. Then he grinned, shrugging. “Nah. I just wanna fix stuff. Some people like repairing car engines… I like repairing organs. Theoretically, anyway. Not like I’ve had chance to do more than study textbooks and cadavers.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Fix ‘stuff’? These are people, you know.”

“I know. And when they’re conscious, I can be nice to them. When they’re injured and anaesthetised and bleeding to death, I can fix them, then wonder what they do for a living when they wake up. Otherwise, I’d probably have a nervous breakdown or something. You don’t worry about that?”

Shaking my head, I thought about it. “But that’s why I’m gonna be a specialist, not a trauma surgeon. It’s all about the bedside manner.”

“And now we come full circle, back to the class we first met in. I see what you did there.” I kept quiet, waiting for the inevitable, and he didn’t disappoint. “Wait—you don’t like my bedside manner? Coulda fooled me…”

“That was just predictable.” It had been a crazy night of anxiety, fun, lust and angst, and I was really starting to feel the effects. Muffling a yawn behind my hand, I burrowed further under the covers. “Sleep now?”

“Sounds good to me…” He raised his voice a little. “Lights off.”

The dim lighting faded to darkness, and I closed my eyes as he brushed his lips across the back of my neck. “Night…”

I thought I heard him murmur something in response, but I was too busy sliding into sleep to catch it.

Chapter Six

When I woke up, I almost thought that I’d dreamed the events of the night before. It seemed too daring to have been something I would ever do… But then I heard the hiss of a soundproofed door, opened my eyes to find myself in Scott’s room and revised my assumption pretty quickly. “Morning.”

“Morning, yourself.” He was wearing boxers and nothing else, and that was almost as interesting as the mug of coffee he held out towards me. Until I’d had my first caffeine hit, though, I was going to be about as good in the sack as a ragdoll.

Propping myself up with pillows, I took my first sip of the steaming liquid, smiling appreciatively as I found the bitterness tempered by the perfect mix of cream and sugar.

“How’d you know how I take my coffee?”

Scott shrugged. “I didn’t. It’s how I take mine.”

Maybe we were some sort of match made in heaven. I wasn’t going to argue against it at this point. “How’d you sleep?”

“Not bad. Your snoring didn’t keep me awake for long.” His carefully deadpan expression was a little too rehearsed, and I shot him a mock scowl, not bothering to protest my obvious innocence.

He sat close to me, sipping his own drink, his thigh brushing mine. Though he was sitting on top of the bedcovers and I was still underneath, it felt like the contact forged an unexpectedly strong connection between us. I rested my head on Scott’s shoulder between sips of coffee, still waking up.

“You’re really not a morning person, huh?”

I shook my head. “Need lots of caffeine and cold water to wake me up.”

“How about sharing a shower with me?”

I pretended to consider the idea, while my inner self laughed hysterically at the thought that I might turn him down.

As if.

“I could see if I can handle that.”

I wrapped the sheet around myself and let Scott tow me down the hall towards the bathroom. A door farther down the hallway opened and a dark-haired guy in faded jeans and an oversized T-shirt stepped out. I froze like a rabbit in headlights when I saw the tattoos ringing his wrists, and Scott felt it, putting an arm around me immediately.