Shepherd (12 page)

If he didn’t move, he could last long enough to fire pleasure in her body three or four times. Definitely a worthy experiment for another time. First a tease of her dusky nipples. He groaned against her as her thighs wrapped around his hips, driving him deeper inside her.

Determined not to give in, he delivered one more hard suckle to each breast and then lifted his head to capture her mouth with his. Tongues twining, he shifted, generating a light rhythm against her pussy. Judging from the slight whimper she issued against his lips, not enough pressure to allow her to peak. Good.

The slow, maddening withdrawal almost killed him, but the way her body arched against his with the motion and her long guttural sound of pleasure as he followed with a stroke fast and deep was worth it. He glanced down at the contrast of her perfect brown skin against his paler flesh and swallowed hard. How had he warranted such a prize?

Bent on a distraction before he erupted too soon, Clay grazed her lovely neck with his lips. Beneath her skin, he could feel the race of her pulse, hear the rasp of her breath with each thrust. He kissed beneath her ear, the rhythm and grip of her delicious body tightening around him. Her fingers dug into his shoulders as her moan rose into an intoxicating cry, rushing him toward his finish. Not yet; he wanted this to last.

“Clay.” Her fingers gripped his hair, trying to turn his head. “Please. Let me see.”

He blinked back the wetness, surely sweat, for he hadn’t felt an emotion strong enough to classify as tears in decades.

Luminous and golden, her eyes searched in his, first his own and then his implant. A soft curl of her lips started, cut off by a final long cry as she climaxed around him. Her muscles fisted on his cock, and her fingers clutched harder in his hair as he let loose a growl with his own orgasm. Enough, barely enough joy, if he buried himself in this woman for a thousand years.

But God didn’t grant such gifts to monsters like him.

Spent on top of her, he took pleasure in the sweet, torturing fingers that stroked along his neck as if she sensed his thoughts. Not possible. If she knew of his past—the things he’d done—she would never accept him, never stay. Then again, she was his prisoner. She had no choice.

He rolled to her side and nestled her close. Her snuggling against his body sparked a sweet, sharp pain in his chest. He covered her leg with his and trailed his fingers from her hip to her belly. Soft, smooth, and so delicate beneath his calloused, hard hands. A quick tease to the curls at the apex of her thighs and he reversed direction. Brushing across her belly again, he paused.

“The scan missed your Regent anti-fertility tab.” His fingers stroked from her navel to the hollow by her hip.

“I don’t have one. The Regents intended me to be a breeder.”

He froze, a harsh chill stealing the air from his lungs. She had told him this earlier. How could he have let something so critical hide from his thoughts? He pulled away. “Do you realize what we’ve done?”

Her brow rose with a hard press of her lips. “I made love to a man of my choice for the first time in my life. Don’t you dare make me regret it.”

Scrubbing his face with his hand, he tried to figure out a way to explain, to clarify the repercussions. “You ran away from the Regents’ dictates. Why would you put yourself—and a kid—at risk with such a rash decision?” He swung his legs off the side of the bed, giving her his back as he shook his head. He should have taken precautions. It just never entered his head. Not once since she entered the room did he think about using protection. He glanced over his shoulder.

The scowl on her face was hot enough to blister his skin. Fine, he deserved it, but not for what she thought. She drew the covers up her body and moved to her knees. “I’ve been told what to do every step of my life, Clay. I’ve had a long time to consider what I would want if I ever had the chance to choose.”

She didn’t get it. He had explained the enhanced parts of his body, but for a smart woman, she just wasn’t getting it. “You can’t choose me, this—” Or maybe she did understand and was not as smart as he’d given her credit for. “Shit, you’re crazy.”

“And you’re an arrogant ass.” She slammed her knuckles into his shoulder. “My body, my choice.”

“This—” He gestured down the length of his body. “What they’ve made me into, might transfer in the DNA.” He clenched his hands and turned, giving her a clear view of his scars and muscles. “You haven’t known me for more than a few days. You can’t possibly know you want this, what it means. Hell, I don’t want this.”

Grabbing the sheet, she launched from the bed, stalked around the edge, and stared down at him. “Don’t you dare tell me I don’t know what I want. I’ve had more time to consider my children, my life, and my desires for the future, than you could possible imagine.” Her forefinger jabbed his chest. “I know you’re strong, compassionate, and smart—excellent qualities to father a child.”

Before he could argue back, she scrambled over him, her knees braced around his hips, the sheet falling as she fisted her hands in his hair to keep his gaze on her. “No matter what they did to you—enzymes, DNA modifications, transgenic virus—I can handle who my children will be. They’ll turn into whatever my values and love can give them. They will be my choice.”

“You want more than one,” he croaked. He’d felt almost faint at her comment, but he didn’t dare press on about the risk of her pregnancy from their actions right now. She was ablaze with indignation and damn glorious in her naked fury. A slight flush darkened her cheeks to rosy caramel, her anger a bright gleam in her eyes. Just looking at her, he didn’t care if she wanted hundreds of kids; he’d comply. He just needed to fuck the living daylights out of her. Reality could wait until later—almost. “Esme, this is a dangerous world, a dangerous lifestyle.”

“Life’s dangerous.” She let go of his hair, smoothing her palms along his cheeks. A calculating expression replaced the previous heat. “If you don’t want more than one, I can always search for another candidate.”

Red-hot possession boiled out of nowhere. He spun her beneath him on the bed and ripped the sheet from her body. With a pointed stroke of his rock-hard cock against her belly, he pulled back on her hair to demand her attention. “No others. Not now, not ever.”

She only smiled a cattish grin. “That’s sounds awfully certain for a man who doesn’t trust me enough to give me back my shoes.”

“I’ll show you certain, Sugar.” He released her long enough to capture both her legs and drape them over his shoulders. He pushed slowly into her moist heat. A foreign satisfaction pulsed through him as he watched her head roll back and her fingers dig into the blanket. “I’m going to stay inside you so long that you’ll never be able to remember anyone else there, ever. No other man, Esme. Just me. Say it.”

Her moans circled in the air around him as he bent above her, doubling her over and allowing him deeper, letting him control every sensation, allowing him the position to mete out his thrusts in excruciatingly delicious slow measure. He counted the strokes to retain his own control, but her lip caught between her teeth as she refused to answer.

A faster set of thrusts and her lips parted. He slowed again. She groaned and pummeled his arm with her fist.

“I didn’t hear you, Esme.” He sped his pace again, pleased to see her head roll and her eyelids lower in pleasure.

“Just you, Clay,” she panted. “Please, let me come…so close.”

“You can stand this longer, Sugar.” He bent and teased a hard chocolate nipple with his teeth.
Sugar
. At her deep moan, he suckled it hard. She’d released the bed sheets, holding his shoulders with a grip so tight, he knew he’d have claw marks. The pain and her unfettered pleasure drove him faster, speeding her toward her climax, the ripples of her muscles pulling at his cock in a glorious rhythm. Damn, yes. She was his. He might doom her to an existence of darkness and danger, but no one else would have her. No one else would taste her skin, witness her pleasure, and die glorious deaths in her arms.

I’ve fallen in love with my captive, and I am so fucked.
The thought reverberated through Clay’s brain along with the tight draw of his balls and quicksilver rush of his climax.

***

“Countdown—forty-eight hours.”

Esme bit back a curse at the system announcement’s annoying drone and rolled to the side of the bed to grab her shirt. “I need two kegs.”

She was hardly surprised to turn and find Clay half dressed. What gave her pause was the nylon harness fitted with buckles and carabiners he wore strapped over his pants and shirt. “Are you certain you should risk a climb? We have anti-grav devices. I started a new design that should work.”

“Anything else you’ve designed that you might want to tell me about?” His head lifted with a raised brow, but his cyber eye still matched his own blue. A good sign. Only the solid silver of the closed patch represented true anger or suspicion.

“If I hadn’t worked on the glove, I’d never have been able to find and help you.”

At his continued stare and lack of comment, she squirmed, though in annoyance, not fear. In spite of their intimacy, he was still pulling the hard-line approach, determined to make her work for every inch of ground. “It’s not like I planned it.”

The final buckle clicked, and he pulled the tab to tighten the straps between his legs. “Everything just a game to you?”

“Yes.” It was. Other people’s junk, generators, power cells were all one big world of fun. The only fun she had. How fast she could design and how seamless the integration for some valid use only added to the spike of the thrill. “However, making sure the squads didn’t find you wasn’t a game. You were lucky you have friends.”

He glanced up. “You do know you broadcasted on a full channel, Sugar?”

Her look of shock must have registered, given his low-level curse.

“If you trusted me on the network, I would have known.”

“Oh, no you don’t.” He waved a finger at her before he left the room.

One quick recon of the outer screens showed a steady march of business in the Down Below marketplace and relatively little else in the other sectors. The New Delphi communications screen was running news blurbs. Ty Vier, dressed in an immaculate navy Regent thigh-length jacket and matching pants, flashed briefly in an interview with several anchors in front of the Justice Building. Esme held back the shiver that ran down her spine at the glimpse of the gleaming grain of the building’s recycled stone. She had come close to dying beneath the tower, and no one would have ever known or cared.

She slid off the bed and followed Clay to the console room. “How did you end up with a Regent as a cohort in crime?”

Clay stopped gathering halo bulbs to see what had prompted her question. He frowned at the screen and went back to work. “I’ve known him for a long time. He saved my life.”

Whoa. “Vier was the one who brought you from the northern region? How did he end up a Regent in New Delphi? Those positions aren’t exactly bought and sold.”

“Ty was raised by his mother. She hid him. His dad knew nothing about him. Evidently, Mom knew all about his father.” He fastened slings to hold the halo bulbs to one of the carabiners at his waist. “After his mom died, Vier headed east to claim his legacy.”

The cold chill rippled along Esme’s skin, erupting in goose bumps. She glanced back at Ty’s image on the screen and had only enough time to gather her supplies before Clay disappeared down the hallway. “Who was his dad?”

He gave her a hard look over his shoulder. “You haven’t guessed? Vier is the only descendent of none other than Regent Aloysius Vier Monfort. Sole owner and chairman of Vier Distributions, kelp-distribution plants for three continents. Also known as the Butcher of the Eastern Peninsula.”

Esme glanced back at the screen with a frown. The Butcher’s claim to fame wasn’t the kelp industry keeping millions of people alive but his adamant support of the containment squads. Trained mercenary groups hired to ferret out and eliminate pockets of infected humans, which sprang up in the wild outreaches of the reconstituted cities. Coming out of her thoughts, she barely caught Clay skirting around the next corner and jogged to catch up. “But he—”

“Doesn’t quite follow in Daddy’s footsteps? No.” He sped up. “I figured he’d go adapt to his new life. Money, privilege—he kept showing up down here instead and took his grandmother’s name, Vier.”

Stunned to hear Monfort’s name, one she and so many others in the rogue groups learned to despise, she almost halted. Determined not to allow Clay out of her sight, she rushed on, finally double-timing to keep pace. The heated flooring ended at their next turn.

While the shirt she wore of Clay’s reached her knees, providing warmth, her toes started to numb after several more corridors. Even her anklebones felt the chill.

She distracted herself by cataloging all the paraphernalia he’d managed to attach to his clothes, finding very little in his gear worth noting. “Why all the old technology?”

Clay paused at a heavy metal door, pulled back several restraining bars, and then secured the open door to the wall. He scrounged in a closet beside the door, swung a winch mechanism from inside toward the top of the doorway, and then secured it to a bolt affixed to the ceiling.

“The kegs are in an old brewery section in one of the basement levels. Over the years, this building acquired layers—with varying technology levels. The walls have started to decay. There are pockets of space where a signal will cut out or risk corruption. Old technology proves more reliable with the interference of erratic electronic signals. And we’re short on time.”