Danger That Is Damion (32 page)

His ears were ringing. “A few seconds, and that was too long. I’m getting Cassandra to run a brain wave test now. Sit down while I get her.” He didn’t want to risk her falling and hurting herself.

“No,” she said quickly, her feet planted, showing no willingness to sit. “We’ve discussed this. The test solves nothing, and besides, it’s Sterling’s birthday. A few seconds isn’t a bad blackout. It was ten minutes this morning. It’s probably because I’m hungry. I need to eat.”

He slid his hand into her hair. “Damn it, Lara.”

“Damn it, Damion.”

“You’re hiding from the test because you know you won’t like the results.”

“Because I know the results change nothing.”

“Let’s do the blood exchange.”

Her eyes clouded. “Let’s go eat hamburgers and birthday cake and drink beer. Isn’t that what Sterling wished for?”

“Lara,” he whispered.

She kissed him and then traced his lips with her finger. “I bet I can drink more beer than you without getting drunk.”

GTECHs didn’t get drunk. “I’m already drunk—on fear for you.”

“I can think of much better things for you to be drunk on,” she said, sliding her arms under his, her chest pressed to his. “I’ll show you later.”

“Maybe I should take you back to bed and tie you there,” he said. “Then call Cassandra to do the damn test.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“Yeah I would, on both counts, with varying degrees of pleasure.”

She studied him, the humor fading from her beautiful, still too-pale features. “I would really like to go have a great evening and pretend to be a normal couple out with friends. I know, like so much else, it’s a façade, but it would be a really, really wonderful way to spend the night.”

Damn, this woman twisted him in all kinds of knots he’d never wanted to be twisted in. She thought she didn’t belong here, that if she dared believe she did, it would be taken from her like everything else in her life had been. Worst of all was that she was right in some ways to feel such things. Time wasn’t on her side, or his. He had to act, and he was going to. He knew what he had to do. He could only hope a night with friends, a night out together, would help her understand when he did what he had to do.

He drew her hand in his and kissed her knuckles. “I keep telling you, we’re as real as it gets, and so are the friends we’re about to spend the evening with.”

***

Bittersweet. That’s what a night out with Damion and his friends was to Lara. Moe’s was hopping with Renegade standard black fatigues. It appeared Friday night in Sunrise City was like Friday night everywhere else—busy and fun-filled.

Sterling’s party was, in fact, overflowing beyond the four square tables their group had turned into one long one, with regular toasts and shouts to Sterling from various locals. The immediate party, though, was Damion and Lara, along with Michael, Cassandra, Jesse, Chale, Houston, Emma, Caleb, Kelly, and of course, Sterling and Becca. There were pitchers of beer everywhere, and a Spider-Man cake in honor of Sterling in the center.

Apparently Sterling called Caleb “Superman” and Michael “Batman.” Tonight the two had officially knighted Sterling “Spider-Man,” which, Lara decided, seemed fitting, since apparently, pre-Becca, he’d done insanely ridiculous, highly dangerous things on a regular basis. She spent most of the next half hour after the food was cleared laughing at the outrageous Sterling stories, her back to Damion’s chest, his hand resting on her stomach.

“My fondest memory,” Michael said, from down the table, across from her, and next to Chale, “was when Sterling threw Damion across the conference table.”

“Hate that I missed that,” Chale said, directly across from Lara.

“Me too,” Houston agreed from beside Chale.

Lara eyed Damion. “I guess you pissed him off?”

“He was delusional that day,” Damion said, and held up his mug of beer toward Sterling. “Right Ster?”

Sterling lifted his mug in reply. “That’s just how I say ‘I love you,’ man.”

“Right,” Damion said. “I say it right back with just as much feeling.”

Caleb, who sat directly next to Lara, looked up from the deep conversation he was having with Kelly, a frown on his face that had Lara wondering if she was imagining a few sparks between the Renegade’s leader and the doctor. “I seem to remember Michael and me having to hold you two back, you were feeling so much love.”

Glancing at Damion, Lara reached up and touched his jaw, where a light, sexy stubble had started to protest its morning clean shave. “Sounds like an interesting story.”

“He was feeling protective of Becca,” Damion said, “and he wrongfully assumed I wasn’t.” He leaned in close to her ear. “GTECHs are protective of their Lifebonds.”

Lara turned in his arms to face him, their eyes locking in the dim light, the awareness between them electric and instant. “I’m a GTECH too. Don’t forget that.”

“Houston, we have a problem!” Houston held up an empty pitcher. “We need beer, or we’re never going to get drunk. It’s your turn to buy, Damion.” Like they could get drunk even if they tried, but they all seemed to enjoy pretending otherwise.

Damion leaned in and kissed Lara. “You think you can handle another Sprite?” he asked, referring to her drink of the night.

“You’d be surprised what I can handle.” There was a hidden meaning to the words, and she saw it register hotly in Damion’s black eyes. Eyes that could no longer hide behind the human hazel color they had once been. Yet there were still so many secrets between them, so many things that could, and would, rip them apart.

“You can show me later,” he finally said, his hand still on her leg, even as he shifted to push his chair back from the table.

Lara shoved aside the worries threatening to steal the happiness of her night out and eyed Houston. “Houston, we have a problem?” she asked. “Is Houston really your name?”

“Nah,” Houston said. “Damion likes Houston, so I go by Houston, and heck, I’m from Houston. Nothing wrong with a tribute to the homeland.”

“What’s your real name?” she asked.

Damion’s hand tightened on her leg ever so slightly, but the tension that rolled off him was a sudden white water crash that had Lara turning toward him.

“Pain in my ass is what I call him,” Chale said, nudging Houston. “You think Damion might need that empty pitcher to get the beer or what?”

Damion cast Chale a tense look of what Lara would label appreciation, before he turned and headed toward the bar.

“I’m sorry, man,” Houston was mumbling to Chale when Lara turned back to the table.

“Sorry for what?” she asked Houston, who eyed Chale with an appeal. Lara’s attention rocketed to Chale. “Talk to me. What did I just miss, and why is Damion upset?”

Chale, looking uncharacteristically uncomfortable, hesitated.

“Chale, damn it,” she ground out. “Talk to me.”

“I’m not talking,” he said finally. “But you should. Talk to Damion.”

She didn’t need nudging, and these days, she didn’t have a lot of time to waste. Lara stood up and went after Damion.

Tension crawled down Damion’s spine and back up again as he weaved a path through the crowd and set the pitcher on the bar. He didn’t want Lara to know about his brother. Hell, these days he tried not to even think about Tommy because when he did, he could drive himself insane.

“Refill,” he said to the bartender—Moe’s brother, Mack—a tall, muscled dude who looked more Renegade than bartender, and who’d come to Sunrise as family to one of the Wardens, once a captive in the sex camps. They couldn’t drag the guy anywhere near the war zone though, despite what his sister had been through, and no one knew why.

Mack saluted. “Coming up.”

Damion gave a nod and pressed both palms on the bar, letting his head fall forward between his shoulders, and telling himself to calm down. Instead, a flash of Tommy’s young face flickered in his mind, spiking his blood pressure to the moon. Holy hell, now he was the one having flashbacks. It was too damn long ago, well over a decade since Tommy’s death, for him to still be this raw.

He shoved off the bar and toward the back of the joint, weaving through yet more people, and heading down a narrow hallway that ended with a turn to the left for men and one to the right for women. He walked left, and once out of sight, leaned against the wall, pressing his face in his hand.

“Damion.”

The soft, familiar voice came seconds before the smell of sweet coconut and woman filled his senses, before Lara was there, wrapping her arms around him. “Talk to me.” She urged gently. “What’s Houston’s real name, and why is it a problem?”

His heart exploded in his ears. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“It has something to do with what you said to me back at the cabin, doesn’t it?” she pressed. “When you said you were good at taking the blame for things?”

His heart was back in his chest, and with it a firestorm of emotion erupted. He grabbed Lara, pulled her into the restroom, shut the door, locked it, and then leaned against the wall with her pulled into his arms. “Yes. It has something to do with what I said back in the cabin. Houston’s name is Tommy, and Tommy is the name of my dead brother.”

She let out a breath, her fingers splaying over his chest. “Oh God, Damion. I’m sorry.”

“He was sixteen, and my parents had grounded him for talking on the phone after bedtime. It was Saturday night, and our parents were at a movie. I stopped by to check on Tommy, who convinced me to take him to the fast food joint his girlfriend worked at.” He pressed his forehead to hers, unable to look at her as he finished. Their breath mingled, and her fingers gently brushed his cheek then rested there. He forced himself to continue. “There was a box truck and a red light the driver didn’t bother to stop for.”

Lara gasped and pulled back. “No. Tell me no.”

He nodded, because he couldn’t speak, trying to swallow the emotion that had lodged where his heart had been a few minutes before. “He was a lot like Chale. Always joking around. My brother gave me hell for my bad driving all the way to the hospital. I thought that had to mean he’d make it, but…”

“Oh God, Damion.” She pressed her lips to his, kissed his jaw, his cheek, her fingers sliding over his face. “It wasn’t your fault. I can see—I can
feel
—you think it was, but it wasn’t.”

He dropped his arms from her and stared up at the concrete ceiling. “That’s not what my mother and my brother thought.”

She wrapped her arms around him. “They blamed you.”

“Yeah,” he said, tilting his head down to look at her, not even trying to wipe away the pain he knew had to be in his expression. “They blamed me.”

“And your father?”

“Died of cancer five years ago,” he said. “And I think my mother and my brother cursed him all the way to his grave for standing up for me. He’d wanted me to run Megatech, and that only made things worse. That’s why I joined the army and got the hell out of Dodge. I thought he and my mother would be better when I was gone.”

“But they weren’t, were they?”

“No, they weren’t.”

“I’ve read about couples splitting after the loss of a child,” she said. “There is an inherent need to place blame as a way to deal with pain. Now I know why you said you were good at taking the blame. You tried to make everyone happy. You left everything behind, trying to make everyone happy. That makes you a very, very special person that I feel honored to know.”

He pulled her to him and slid his fingers into her hair. “I can’t lose you,” he said and kissed her, a passionate, desperate kiss. “I won’t lose you.” His hands started to travel, the need to touch her, to feel her, to know she was here, and she wasn’t going anywhere, driving him wild.

“Damion,” she whispered into his mouth, a moment before their tongues touched again, before the heat between them boiled to downright molten. Her hands slid under his T-shirt, over his chest, his back.

He palmed her breasts through the thin material of her dress. “I love you in this dress,” he murmured, and turned her so that her back was against the wall, his fingers tugging up the hem of the dress, curving along the soft skin of her backside.

“I’ll have to wear it more often,” she panted, as he lifted her leg to his waist, stroking the tiny strip of her thong and then using his other hand to slide the silk at the V of her body away and stroke the wet heat. “I really need to be inside you right now.”

Someone knocked on the door. “Go away!” they both said at once, and then laughed, their voices laced with passion.

“I really need you inside me too,” she said tightly, reaching for the zipper of his fatigues.

Damion finished the task, pulling his cock from his pants and shoving her panties aside, urgency driving him. This wasn’t about sex. It was about how much he needed this woman. It was about a bond they hadn’t completed, that they were trying to replace with fire and desire.

She grabbed his shoulders as he penetrated her, her lashes fluttering, her fingers digging into his flesh, her breath coming in heavy pants. She looked so damn sexy, so incredibly sexy. He pressed into her, the wet heat of her surrounded him, blasting him a heavy dose of pleasure. She bit her lip, her gaze capturing his, passion burning from her stare, the connection between them expanding, consuming the room, consuming the very air filling their lungs.