Leaving them tangled around her thighs, he squeezed one cheek with a blatantly possessive touch, then dipped his hand between her legs. “You’re liquid.” Crushed rocks and sexual heat, that was his voice.
Ivy’s answer required no thought. “Because it’s you.”
Movement behind her, the back of his hand brushing her buttocks. The sound of a zipper. Fabric being pushed down. And then he was gripping her hips to tilt her farther forward as he pushed into her with relentless focus. Making incoherent sounds of need, she was hardly aware of the world altering between sand and the wall and back over and over. Every cell in her body was focused on Vasic, on feeling the thick intrusion of him stretching her flesh.
This position permitted nothing else.
He slammed home to her body’s convulsive rippling, stroked out, thrust in. Again and again and again. It was harder and faster than he’d ever before ridden her, his fingers bruising in their grip. When he rasped out her name, she knew it came from between gritted teeth.
“Yes,” she said, afraid he was going to stop, to slow down. “Yes, yes, yes, yes—” Her words ended in a hoarse scream as he increased the speed of his possession, his testicles slapping against her with every thrust.
It made her mindless, her fingernails trying to dig into the wall. The orgasm caught her unaware, demolishing her into a million shards of unbridled ecstasy. But it didn’t hurt, felt wonderful, because Vasic never let her go, even when his own orgasm turned his body to living stone, his seed pulsing wet inside her, the intimacy absolute.
? ? ?
THEY came to lying on the floor, Ivy on top of Vasic. Her panties were tangled around one of her ankles, her bra twisted. Vasic wasn’t in much better shape. Running her foot over his leg, she found her way blocked by jeans he’d never actually fully taken off. She glanced down, laughed a silly, delirious laugh. “You’re still wearing your boots.”
Chest heaving as if he’d just run a long-distance race, he didn’t answer except to stroke his hand down to splay over her buttocks. Feeling lethargic and pleasured and adored, she looked up at his face to see his lashes shading his cheeks, his gauntleted arm above his head.
She flicked out her tongue over the flat disk of his nipple, licked up the salt and sex of him. When she bit at his pectoral muscle a little, he squeezed her where he held her but didn’t otherwise protest. Finding a new vein of energy on the realization she finally had him at her mercy, Ivy managed to kick off her panties and unhook her bra.
Then, rubbing her naked body over his, she began to kiss her way down his chest. Only when she reached the bottom of his ridged abdomen did he react—to twine his fingers in her hair. She hesitated, glanced up. His eyes remained closed, the tension in him a quiet hum, nothing urgent.
Returning to her pleasurable task, she licked along his hip bone, pushing up on her forearms to admire the V shape created low on his body by some very nice muscles. She didn’t know what they were called, but she’d already decided it was one of her favorite parts of his body.
To be fair, she licked the other side, too.
His hand tugged at her hair in reaction. The tug came again when she curled her fingers around his penis, which was already semihard again. Fascinated by the differences in their bodies, in the way he responded to her touch, she rested her cheek against the hair-roughened skin of his thigh and stroked him, testing to see what he liked, what made his breathing alter, his hand flex in her hair.
And found her own legs getting restless, the place between her thighs slick with renewed wetness. When he hauled her up and flipped their positions, she didn’t argue. Taking a second to get rid of his boots and remaining clothing, he sank into her pleasure-swollen flesh, his forearms braced on either side of her head and her arms around his neck.
They kissed; said soft, intimate words; rocked together. The orgasm was quieter but the intimacy no less potent. Mine, she said, mind to mind. You are mine. Every breath, every scar, every perfection, every flaw, every light, every darkness. It’s part of you, and it’s mine.
Vasic shuddered and collapsed onto her. The man I was, the man I am, the man I will be, the man I want to be, they all belong to you. Always.
Despite the visceral power of their vow, Vasic’s mind remained separate from hers on the psychic plane. Ivy’s chest ached, but it wasn’t from hurt. She knew what he was doing, her Arrow. He tried so hard, but he couldn’t stop protecting her . . . especially against the consequences of his possible death.
No, she said silently, no. But it was getting harder and harder to forget the lethal countdown to a highly risky surgery. Then, in a vicious reminder, Vasic’s gauntlet malfunctioned again a half hour later. A cool blue laser shot out, scored the same wall Vasic had repaired after the attack by Ming’s men.
The feedback from the laser caused a minor overload, but he was worried only about her, wanted her away from him. “The weapons capability might spontaneously reinitialize again. I could hurt you.”
Ivy wasn’t about to budge. Swallowing her tears, she sat him down on the bed and, using the advanced first aid kit Aden had quietly dropped off three days ago, took care of the burns on his arm and rib cage. “Mine,” she whispered again, pressing her lips to the thin-skin bandage that protected the healing skin.
His hand stroked through her hair. “Ivy.”
Refusing to look up, her hold on her emotions fragile, she said, “It’s time we hunted down Samuel Rain.”
? ? ?
VASIC took her to Haven, but the engineer refused to see them. According to Clara, he’d been shut up inside his room for days. “He accepts food through the slot he sawed into the bottom of his door”—the manager pointed out the mangled hole—“but will reply to no one.”
Wanting to scream, Ivy disobeyed Clara’s orders and banged on the door. “Samuel!” she yelled, slamming her fists against the barrier. “Open this right now! Samuel!”
“Stop, Ivy.” Vasic enclosed her in his embrace.
Angry and infuriated, she kicked at the door, her words directed at Samuel Rain. “I will make your life unbearable if—” She couldn’t complete the threat, couldn’t acknowledge the fear. Trembling, she held on to Vasic’s strength, unable to imagine a world where he didn’t exist.
A kiss to her temple. “Shh.” His heart pumped steady and powerful in his chest; the idea it might stop was one her brain just couldn’t process.
After leaving Haven, they went to see the surgeon—who told them that the chance of Vasic surviving the surgery was eight to ten percent.
“One in ten,” Ivy said afterward. “It’s not so bad if we put it like that. One in ten.” She repeated that over and over to herself, cupping the meager shield it provided around the flickering candle of hope in her heart. Never would she let that candle go out. Never.
? ? ?
THE infection continued to hurtle across the Net in the ensuing days, decimating a huge swathe of the psychic plane and leaving thousands of people in comas. Jaya and the other medical empaths figured out a treatment of sorts five days after that beautiful, horrible afternoon of love and despair when Vasic and Ivy had crossed Samuel Rain off as an option. The treatment succeeded in bringing a small number of the infected back to consciousness and to reason.
“The disease is simply dormant in the patients we’ve been able to wake,” Jaya told her one night as they sat on Ivy’s bed, dark circles under her friend’s eyes. “It’s not a cure, and we can’t know how long the Band-Aid will hold.” A defeated slump of her shoulders. “I’m so tired, Ivy,” she said, a sob in her voice. “You are, too, even if you smile through it. Your clothes are starting to hang off you.”
Ivy couldn’t dispute Jaya’s assessment, not with her body feeling as if it had been beaten. Hugging her teary friend close, she stroked her hand down Jaya’s hair. “We’re all on the edge of exhaustion, even the Arrows.”
That wasn’t the only problem.