Vasic gave Ivy a concise summary of the problem. He hated himself for savaging her so badly, but when she’d caressed him sweet and soft, her body open to his, he’d known he couldn’t betray her with a lie, couldn’t touch her on a false promise.
Now her jaw was set, her eyes red-rimmed but clear. “Together,” she said. “We will handle this together—if you shut me out, I’ll take a sledgehammer to the ice.” Her hands fisted on his T-shirt, tugged him down. “I mean it.”
No one had ever cared so passionately about him. “My fierce, courageous Ivy,” he said, slipping his hand from her hair to her nape. “Will you kiss me again?”
Her lashes fluttered, her cheeks coloring, but she drew her eyebrows together in a severe vee. “Don’t avoid the question.”
“Was it a question?” Moving his thumb over her skin, he said, “Anything you want, you can have. I have no defenses against you.”
Ivy’s throat moved as she swallowed. Remembering how her skin had felt under his lips that night when he’d indulged himself so selfishly, he bent down and tasted her. Cream and salt and Ivy. He wet the flesh, sucked, felt her pulse kick.
Her pleasure intensified his, the psychological dissonance no match for the power of it. The brain was an elastic organ, and his had begun to learn that emotion wasn’t the enemy. Especially when it brought with it such exquisite sensation.
“I want to explore every sensation with you,” he said, taking another taste before he raised his head. “I want to crush the softness of your naked body under mine, want to learn how to touch you so you’ll make tiny sounds of need, want to feel your fingers curling around my penis while I put my mouth on your nipples and suck.”
Vasic’s bluntly sexual statements made the place between Ivy’s thighs liquid, heat uncoiling slumberously through her veins. “I”—she coughed to clear her throat, her breath shallow—“I want to do that, too. All of it.”
He squeezed her nape. “Kiss me,” he repeated.
Ivy licked her lips, slid her hands up to his shoulders, and confessed. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Neither do I,” he responded, the glittering silver of his eyes on her mouth. “Arrows learn by repetition and practice until the basic skill is honed, at which point we begin to specialize.”
The words should’ve been dry, but they made her breasts swell, her nipples so plump and tight the lace of her bra became abrasive. Because he was talking about repetition and practice when it came to intimate contact. Kissing. Touching. Sex. Her lips parted and he lowered his head.
“Do it again, Ivy,” he murmured, his breath mingling with her own. “Repetition—”
“And practice,” she completed, and brushed her lips over his.
Again and again and again. It felt better each time. Especially since he was holding her so firmly against his body that her breasts were crushed against the hard muscle of his chest. Ivy inwardly cursed her sweater, her coat, even her bra.
Then Vasic said, “I think I understand the mechanics,” and gripping her jaw with his free hand, angled her head, and placed his mouth over hers.
Her lips had been parted to ask him something—she didn’t know what—and so the kiss began far more intimately than any of the others. And it only grew deeper from there. Vasic didn’t hold back. No, her Arrow did as thorough a job of investigating kissing as he did of any other operation, his touch confident as he changed the angle by minute degrees to find the perfect fit.
Then he did, and it felt
wonderful.
All hot and wet and delicious in a way she’d never imagined.
Making a needy, hungry sound, she wrapped her arms around his neck. The action made her nipples rasp against the lace of her bra, his hair raw silk in her grasp and his body a rigid wall that somehow fit perfectly against her own.
God, she liked kissing.
When Vasic broke contact, his forehead pressed against hers and his breath jagged, she caressed his cheek, kissed the clean-shaven smoothness of his jaw. Never had she felt so alive, so pleasured. But below that was a sexual hunger brutal in its ferocity, hard and dark . . . and then she knew. It wasn’t her desire she was sensing. It was his.
Body melting even further, she kissed his jaw again. “I’m picking up your desire. Do you mind?”
“No.” He kissed her again on the heels of that statement, one hand on her lower back, the other on the side of her neck.
Then he licked his tongue against hers.
Her brain exploded.
Ivy wasn’t sure she had a rational thought in the hot, tangled minutes after that. She copied his action, found it made him crush her even closer, the hard ridges of his body digging into the softness of her own. Hot, ragged breaths, voracious mouths, strong male hands on her skin . . . Ivy became a creature of pure sensation.
It was the blare of a siren on the street that jerked them to their senses. Staring at Vasic, Ivy found the breath to say, “I want to try everything on your list.” Only with her Arrow could she be this bold; only with him could she strip herself to the skin and feel utterly safe.
His hair a little tumbled from her touch, he took her hand. “We’ll begin after the reconnaissance.”
• • •
FIFTEEN
minutes later and Ivy’s heartbeat had calmed enough that she could take in the street around them. She couldn’t help but feel a teensy bit smug—the first time she could recall feeling the emotion—at the glances they attracted from other women
and
the occasional man. Vasic got what she thought of as the “sigh” look, the one that indicated a melting in the bones, while Ivy was the recipient of pure narrow-eyed envy and good-natured grins that said she’d done well.
Yes, she thought, she had. And Vasic’s looks had far less to do with that than the strong, loyal, courageous heart of the man hidden behind the Arrow.
Vasic wasn’t the only male in the party who drew attention. Rabbit didn’t like the leash he had to be on in the city, but he was well behaved, and when an elderly human lady stopped to gush over him, he took the praise as his due. Quite unlike the far larger male by Ivy’s side, one who noted everything but seemed affected by none of it.
Vasic’s battle readiness was a reminder that much as she wanted to pretend this was a date, as she’d read about in the novels she’d “accidentally” downloaded onto her reader back home, they were out here for a far bleaker reason.
Anchoring herself in the warmth of Vasic’s hand clasped around her own, Ivy began to listen with her empathic “ear.”
Tension dominated the air, understandable given what had happened in the neighboring street. Psy, human, changeling, the race didn’t matter; the emotion was the same. She hadn’t expected to find many changelings in such a compact city, but while they were a minority, there were enough. Of course, she was only guessing with her identification of them as changeling—but there was a wildness to their emotional scent that echoed that of Lucas Hunter.
“Do you know the species of changelings who live here?” she asked Vasic.
“Eagles are the apex predators.” Releasing her hand as a large group exited out of a restaurant right in front of them, he put his own on her lower back and angled his body to take the accidental shoulder hit of one.
“Sorry!” the human male called back, before carrying on.
Tucked against Vasic’s side, Ivy didn’t try to keep her smile from her face—even as an influx of dark emotion battered her senses. Dread, sweat-soaked terror . . . and below that the taste of rot, of infection. A businesswoman who passed them in a hurry of swift strides smelled so pungently of it that Ivy went to stop her.
Vasic caught Ivy’s hand.
Chapter 34
“IT’S A DEATH
sentence at present,” he said when she began to argue.
Confirming it when she could offer no cure, Ivy realized, would do nothing but rob the woman of hope. And hope, cried Ivy’s own bruised heart, was everything.
Tears in her throat, she turned back to continue walking and almost ran into an overalled man bearing the badge of a major comm company on his front pocket. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
A curt nod at her apology and he was gone, the infection in him, too. Again and again and again, she tasted the fetid miasma of it, until her stomach began to churn. Yet when she glanced into the PsyNet, she saw nothing . . . nothing but Vasic right beside her.
Oh God.
Understanding crashed into her with the force of a freight train.
“You and Abbot”—she half turned into Vasic’s body—“you’re no longer safe.” Arrows had been protected by default at the compound, the infection leery about approaching the heavy knot of high-Gradient empathic minds. Now, Vasic was open on multiple sides.
“Our shields are extensive. The infection has shown no signs of penetrating them.”
Ivy shook her head, her hand on his gauntlet. “What about the microscopic filaments? We can’t even see them!” It was horrifying to know that that ugliness could invade his brain, destroy what made him Vasic. “I need to tie my shields to yours.”
We’ll talk about this back at the apartment.
She brought up the subject again as soon as they walked out of the elevator door onto their floor. “You know I’m right.” Having already unclipped Rabbit’s leash, she dropped it onto the hallway table after Vasic entered the apartment first in order to clear it of threats.
“How can shields protect me if the infection comes in through the biofeedback link?” he asked.
She stared at his back, wide and strong. “You
knew
.”
“The infection is in the Net,” he said, striding over to check her bedroom, Rabbit trotting at his side. “That means we’re all vulnerable to breathing in the poison if we come too close to it.”
Yet he—the other Arrows—had all agreed to walk into an infection zone. And these men and women saw nothing heroic about themselves. “I can’t tell you how I know,” she whispered after he’d cleared his own bedroom, too, “but I
know
that linking my shield to yours will extend my immunity to you.” The knowledge was a rapid stream of visuals in her head, as if she was being sent a message by a mind at once innocent and vast.
It should’ve scared her, but there was absolutely no harm in the sender. No, it felt like the touch of a child . . . an oddly wise one. “Vasic,” she said when he didn’t respond. “Let me do this.”
Protect you this much at least,
she thought through the rain of tears inside her soul.
“My task is to shield you.” He folded his arms. “Not the other way around.”
Ivy wanted to shake him. Striding over until they stood toe-to-toe, she held the winter-frost gaze that had become the center of her existence. “You won’t be able to protect me if the infection burrows into your cerebral cortex and turns you into a madman.”
Vasic didn’t want Ivy near his mind, didn’t want to risk tainting her with the darkness that lived in him. However, he couldn’t refute her point—should he become infected, he could turn on her, snuff out the luminous candle of her life. “The others should also connect to their Es.” They might be separated, but he remained the leader of this unit.
“I’ve already telepathed Jaya.” Ivy stroked her hands down the sides of his jacket.
He hadn’t ever been touched as much. Raising one hand, he closed his fingers over the fragile bones of her wrist, holding her to him.
Not disputing his right to the contact, Ivy said, “We’ll talk to everyone else the instant the merge is complete.”
She closed her eyes, and ten heartbeats later, the flat black of his shielding became interwoven with the translucent color of hers. The increased visibility was anathema to an Arrow. Vasic would deal with it because hiding Ivy was impossible—and shouldn’t be done. Any attempt to suffocate the wild beauty of an E, of
his
E, was a crime he’d punish with lethal efficiency.
He’d been handling the curious and dangerous attention she drew since the instant they relocated. He hadn’t had to execute anyone yet, but he would the instant any individual posed a threat. He wasn’t a good man, but she was something exceptional. He would protect her . . . till the day he died.
Unacceptable,
said the grimly resolute core of him, his eyes on the gauntlet.
“Vasic?” Ivy’s fingers curled into her palm. “I can feel you.”
He could sense her as well, in a way that meant he’d be able to tell if she was hurt or in pain. “Good,” he said, and used the technology that was killing him to send out a message to the unit about merging shields, while Ivy got on the comm and did the same with the Es.
She’d just finished the final call when he remembered something she’d seen in a shop window just before an elderly woman had stopped to admire Rabbit. “We forgot to buy the pastries you wanted to try.”
Ivy blinked, laughed. “Next time.”
And he wanted there to be a next and a next and a next. Cupping her face, he kissed her smile into his mouth. Her gasp was startled, her nails digging into his chest through his T-shirt a tiny bite of sensation.
Ivy’s body rubbed against the hard ridge of his erection as she tried to become taller. It was, he thought with a surge of emotion in his heart that he couldn’t categorize, an impossible task. She was small and perfectly formed, her curves made for his hands. When she broke the kiss to go down flat on her feet, he waited to see what she’d do.