Cyberevolution Book One: The Awakening: Fifty Shades of Dark Kaitlyn O'Connor by Kaitlyn O'Connor, Kimberly Zant, Marie Morin, Stacey St.James, Goldie McBride (18)

Instantly distracted from her discomfort, Clair gaped at him.  “You searched my mother’s house?” she demanded indignantly.

He gave her a sour look but didn’t respond.

“Maybe you just didn’t find it?”

Seth’s lips flattened.  “If there’d been anything here, we would’ve found it.”

He seemed so certain some of Clair’s confidence waned.  “So you meant to stay until my mother returned and ask her directly?”

“We didn’t intend to harm her if that’s what you’re thinking, but yes.  That was the plan … if Cole comes up empty at the company.”

She wasn’t certain she believed him.  She didn’t know what to think.  Everything about their behavior seemed a contradiction.  They wanted something very badly or they wouldn’t have broken into her mother’s house, wouldn’t have planned to waylay her for answers to whatever it was they wanted to know.  How could she trust that they had no intention of hurting her mother?

For that matter, how could she be certain they weren’t behind her mother’s death?

The thought had hardly formed in her mind when she realized how unlikely it was.  They’d clearly been waiting for her mother’s return, which not only meant they couldn’t have done it, but they couldn’t have known about it.  Which also meant that they couldn’t have been associated with the men who’d done it. 

She couldn’t be a hundred percent certain.  It was possible they’d simply made that part up when she’d surprised them, but they’d behaved as if they’d been expecting her mother.  She thought that she could at least trust that much.

It seemed as indisputable that they must be looking for the same thing the company had thought to find in the house.  The question was, why did they want it?   The company must fear her mother had something that could incriminate them somehow.

“Are you and Simon investigators?  Or something like that?”

The startled look Seth sent her seemed to answer that.  He shrugged.  “Something like that.”

“But you aren’t,” Clair said flatly.  “This—whatever it is—is personal.  Are you two in trouble with the police?  The company?”

“Something like that,” Seth responded dryly.

“Damn it!” Clair exclaimed.  “Why don’t you just tell me?  Maybe I can help.”

“We do not need your help,” Simon said coolly.

“Or want it,” Seth added.  “We’ve got problems enough without having to protect you.”

“Like I asked you to!” Clair snapped, but it brought home a revelation.  She had felt threatened by the company, did believe she was in danger, and she’d begun to have some hope that Seth and Simon would protect her—would help her.  “It just seems to me that we must all want the same thing.”

“Not hardly,” Seth muttered.

“You don’t want to know why my mother was killed?  Even if it has something to do with what you wanted to discover from her?”

 

 

The following is an extended excerpt from Kaitlyn O’Connor’s Cyborg Series.  Sample, pick your favorite ‘flavor’—they’ll stand alone—or buy all seven!

Cyberevolution Book Six:

Cyborg Nation

By

Kaitlyn O’Connor

 

 

( c ) copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, 2007

Cover Art by Jenny Dixon, 2012

New Concepts Publishing

Chapter One

Bronte Nichols’ thoughts were focused inwardly, as they so often were, as the lift settled and the doors opened.  There was a man standing in the cubicle, which was so unexpected it actually pierced Bronte’s abstraction.  She stared at him blankly, partly because she was surprised to see anyone at all so early in the morning and partly because, for some unfathomable reason, she discovered he was not completely in focus. 

Prompted by the instinctive urge to keep from being left behind, she leapt inside just as the doors began to close again.  Uneasiness washed over her even as she yielded to the impulse, effectively trapping herself inside with the stranger.  It wasn’t just that he was big—really big—a stranger, or even the fact that she so rarely met up with anyone at all when she arrived at work so early.

His stance seemed relaxed, unthreatening, and yet Bronte sensed that he had tensed when he’d seen her just as she had when she’d spotted him and there was something about that that set off alarm bells in her head.

After staring at him owl eyed for a moment, she finally remembered her manners, nodded politely in greeting, and turned to stare at the doors instead, or rather the level indicator.  She didn’t exactly see the screen displaying the levels the lift was passing.  In her mind’s eye, she was shifting through the vague impressions her eyes had recorded of the stranger.

She was certain he was a stranger to her.  In the first place, she never spoke to anyone aside from her staff members and the parents of her patients … and of course her patients.  In the second, as distracted as she generally was with her own thoughts, she still thought she would have noticed a man as large as the one behind her if she’d run across him in the medical center before.  He wasn’t just tall, he was big, muscular if the form fitting, one piece suit he was wearing was any indication, and she thought it probably was.  It looked like the uniform of the med center’s security guards, but there was something about him that, somehow, just didn’t seem to go with the uniform.

Not that she’d actually been able to make out much more than that about him—big, very tall, and dark hair.  His features had seemed pleasingly regular—but blurred so she wasn’t so certain she could trust that impression.  She was certain he had dark hair though it seemed it had been slicked tightly against his skull in a very odd sort of hair style—not the way the security guards generally wore their hair at all.  In fact mostly they just shaved their heads so that there was little more than stubble sprouting from their scalps and sometimes not even that.

Which brought her mind back to the subject that had engrossed her before the doors of the lift had opened.   “My glasses,” she muttered under her breath.  “Now what did I do with them?  I’m sure I had them when I left the apartment.  I distinctly recall that I had them.”

“On your head.”

The deep, resonant voice behind her startled her.  Not only had she not realized she’d been muttering aloud, but she’d become so engrossed in her conversation with herself she’d momentarily forgotten she was sharing the elevator.  Her lips parting with surprise, she whipped her head around at the sound of his voice, lifting a hand absently to her head as she did so.  Her fingers connected with something in her hair, dislodging whatever it was. 

As it fell, she and the stranger both bent instinctively to catch it… and butted heads.  The blow made Bronte’s knees buckle and she sat on the floor of the lift, one hand flying upward to massage the throbbing knot where their heads had connected.  “Oh!  I do beg your pardon!  Are you alright?”

His face came into focus as he leaned down, wrapped the fingers of one hand around her left upper arm, hauled her to her feet, and then shoved the glasses he’d managed to rescue onto her nose.  Briefly, his face came into sharp focus before blurring again when he moved too close for her eyes to focus with the aid of the glasses.  Bronte felt her face reddening as she gaped up at him and it sank slowly into her mind that he was quite the most handsome man she’d ever run in to, either literally or figuratively.

Not that she made a habit of running into strange men!  She had had a few accidents, however, and she grew an even brighter red until her skin was no doubt rivaling her dark auburn hair as she recalled her last embarrassing encounter with a man.

She’d rather liked Dr. Pool, too, or at least thought she might be interested in the man on a purely feminine level, but he’d been far more embarrassed by the collision than she was. He had made it a point to give her a wide berth after she’d mowed him down at the corner of the connecting corridors where they had their respective offices and she was fairly certain she’d blown yet another, rare, opportunity to find a soul mate … or at least a fuck buddy.

She became aware suddenly that the man, the stranger, was still gripping her arm, his gaze wandering over her speculatively.  “Do I know you?” she asked politely, certain that she couldn’t possibly have met him before.  But then, he was being very familiar, really, for someone who didn’t know her.

“Dr. Nichols?”

Bronte blinked.  Apparently he did know her.  “Yes?”

His frown deepened instead of clearing.  “B. A. Nichols?”

Understanding dawned.  Bronte chuckled, but she felt her blush rising again.  “My father was Bryan Alexander Nichols.  I’m Dr. Bronte Alexandra Nichols.”  She hesitated uncomfortably.  The plan had been that she would join her father in his practice once she’d completed her residency.  She had so been looking forward to it, too, getting to work beside a man of his reputation, getting the chance to actually get to know her father at last.  She certainly hadn’t had the opportunity when she was growing up.  After her mother had died when she’d been little more than an infant, her father had settled her with his sister and her brood, and she’d only gotten a handful of visits from her godlike father over the years.  “Uh … my father’s dead,” she added baldly.  “But I’ve taken over his practice.  Were you looking for a pediatrician?”

Her stomach seemed to drop at the realization that that must, indeed, be why he was in the medical center, though it seemed an odd time to be doing so.  Her first appointment wasn’t for hours yet.  Tamping her disappointment at the discovery that he was a potential patient, or at least must have one—a child—and therefore must be contracted, or at least involved with someone, Bronte glanced down at the hand that still gripped her arm and then noticed she’d attached her badge upside down when she’d put it on that morning.  No wonder he’d had trouble reading it!

She tugged at her arm as she reached to adjust the name badge.  Almost reluctantly, it seemed to her, he released his hold on her then reached past her and tapped the panel used to select levels.  The lift braked, stopped, and began to descend as rapidly as it had been rising.  The action reminded Bronte belatedly that she’d forgotten to key in the level she wanted.  She discovered when she turned to look at the panel, though, that the lift had already shot past her level. 

Her lips flattened in irritation as she reached to press her level.  She hadn’t just come early because she never slept well and was too restless to remain in her apartment any longer.  She’d intended to catch up on some of her paperwork—which was why she’d been so distracted to begin with.  Dread always filled her when she had to tackle the mounds of paperwork she allowed to build up while she attended the part of her job she actually enjoyed … interacting with her patients.  And then, too, she’d been worried that she’d misplaced her glasses … again.

She really ought to have her eyes fixed, ought to have done it already, but there never seemed to be time.  And actually, the prospect unnerved her, though she wouldn’t have admitted it under torture.  She was a physician herself, for god’s sake!  It didn’t look good that she was such a coward about facing medical procedures herself!

The lift settled and the doors opened. 

A man, dressed much as the one behind her, stepped into the lift.

Bronte tried not to stare, but he was much like the man behind her—very tall, built like a tank, and dressed in the skin tight uniform that left very little to the imagination and made it impossible for her not to notice as her gaze flickered over the broad chest and shoulders, bulging arms and well developed legs … and the almost obscene bulge at the apex of his thighs.  She shuffled over to give him room and then looked up as the sense of being loomed over swamped her, discovering that both men were looming over her because she was sandwiched between them and they were looking down at her.

“This is Dr. Nichols,” the first man said to the second, drawing Bronte’s gaze for a moment before she glanced at the man he was speaking to.

After trying to adjust her glasses and discovering that both men were too close to bring into focus, Bronte shoved her glasses onto the top of her head.  She was a bit stunned to discover when she had that the second man was as unusually attractive as the first, though they looked nothing alike beyond the fact that both were dark.  The new arrival, though, was not quite as dark.  Whereas the first man’s hair was as black as night, his eyebrows a thick, straight line above eyes a steel, almost eerie blue, the second man had hair of a slightly warmer shade, though still very nearly black.  She might have thought it black if not compared to the first man’s hair.  His brows were also dark and thick, but arched.  At the moment, one was lifted upward while the other had descended in a look she could only think was displeasure, even if not for the cool assessment in his emerald green eyes.   

“B. A. Nichols?” the second man asked, obviously no more pleased than the first man had been.

Bronte tried not to feel slighted, but she couldn’t prevent the resentment that swelled in her chest.  It was completely unfair to compare her unfavorably to her father.  He had had many years to build his reputation, after all!  Given time, she fully intended to live up to his name … but there was the rub.  It was a hard act to follow, and she’d been viewed under a microscope and compared unfavorably almost from the time she’d arrived in medical school.  “I am imminently qualified, I assure you!” she responded somewhat defensively.  “Although I have not had the years to build my reputation as my father did, I graduated at the top of my class and I have been practicing for several years now.”  She couldn’t help but notice they looked unconvinced.  “And, of course, I have the added advantage of having worked with a man of vast experience in the field.”

She felt a little uncomfortable about that claim, but it wasn’t exactly a lie … just a slight prevarication.  She had worked alongside experienced physicians while she was doing her residency and she had her father’s case studies, after all. 

The two men exchanged a long, speaking look above her head and seemed to come to a decision.  After a moment, they shifted slightly away from her, still crowding her personal space uncomfortably, but not quite as uncomfortably as before.

She dragged in a shaky breath, not realizing until that moment just how unnerved she’d been.

Not that she wasn’t still more than a little unnerved.

She felt overly warm, too.

Actually, now that she thought about it, she felt almost … dizzy, definitely jittery.  Distracted by that realization, she fell to analyzing her reaction.  It dawned on her after a very few moments that her chaotic response was on a purely feminine level and had very little, if anything, to do with any primal sense of threat.  Pheromones, she realized dimly as she inhaled and felt her body react to the chemical even though she wasn’t actually aware of the scent.  The combined testosterone of the two overpoweringly male strangers was enough to bring any self-respecting, red blooded female instantly into heat.

Rather pleased by the discovery that, despite her preoccupation with the sciences, she could indeed react like any other woman, Bronte flicked a tentative smile at the newcomer, who glanced down at her as the lift, at last, stopped at her level and the doors began to open.  She’d already tensed to step off when the opening doors revealed yet another man, dressed as the first two.

This one, however, was fair … and carrying a rather large piece of equipment that was heavy enough it made every considerable muscle in his upper body and arms bulge with effort.  Bronte was so mesmerized by the powerful display that she wasn’t aware that the man had crowded her into the back corner as he stepped into the lift with his load until she stepped on the feet of the man behind her and fell against him.  An arm came around her waist, molding her to every deliciously hard, sculpted inch of his body.  Embarrassed at her clumsiness but grateful that he hadn’t allowed her to fall when she’d lost her balance and fell against him, Bronte tipped her head back to smile at him apologetically.  “I am so sorry!  Excuse me!”

He met her gaze, his arm tightening around her.  A shiver chased down her spine, but she wasn’t certain if it was because the icy color of his eyes made him appear so cool and detached, or if there really was no warmth in his gaze.  Something long and hard rose against her buttocks, however, that completely disordered her mind.  “No problem,” he responded after a long moment of hesitation, his voice as cool and as lacking in inflection as his gaze. 

He didn’t let go of her at once.  In fact, he didn’t let go of her at all.  Bronte looked down at the arm clamped around her waist and then toward the doors of the lift just as they closed.  “Oh!” she exclaimed.  “This was my floor!”

The blond man, she discovered, was looking her over with the same detached interest the other two men had.  Groping for the glasses she’d shoved on top of her head, she winced as strands of her hair, tangled in the piece, parted company with her scalp as she dragged the glasses down to help her see him more clearly.  The face that came into view sent a jolt through her. 

It was hard and angular, purely masculine and yet so classically formed and appealing ‘beautiful’ was the first thought that popped in her mind.  Framed by long, beautiful blond hair that hung loosely well past his shoulders, ending just past the hard male breasts that still bulged from the thing he held, she was dimly aware that hair that luxuriant should have looked completely out of place on a man who looked so very, very … male, and yet it didn’t.  The glossy, wavy hair only seemed to emphasize his masculinity, to set off his god-like perfection to greatest advantage. 

What were the odds, she thought distractedly, of finding herself in a lift with three such exceptional specimens?  Astronomical, she decided, even though she couldn’t seem to focus her mind on running the calculations, because she hadn’t seen a single man in all her years that came close to even one of them.

“This is Dr. Nichols,” said the man behind her at just about the time Bronte managed to free her gaze from the sapphire-eyed blond god before her and glanced down at what he held. 

She frowned as she stared at the filing unit he held and a flicker of recognition dawned.  Instantly diverted, she looked the piece over more carefully.  It didn’t just look familiar.  It was familiar!  It was hers! 

Doubt instantly swept over her, though, as it occurred to her to wonder why in the world anyone would take her files from her office—the whole filing unit!  She frowned, wondering if she’d forgotten to pay her office rent and was being evicted … or if they’d simply decided to move her.  Indignation filled her at that thought. 

“This is B. A. Nichols?” the blond man questioned, tilting his head to study her curiously.  “The data banks listed a male.”

“Obviously not current,” the black haired man holding her commented.  He almost seemed to shrug.  “They are … inefficient.”

Bronte craned her neck to look up at the man.  “They?” she echoed, feeling the sting as a personal insult even though she had nothing to do with updating the data bank herself. 

He caught her face in the crook between his thumb and forefinger before she could look away, studying her face with that same unnerving intensity of before.  “She is obviously qualified, however, in her field else she would not be practicing medicine.”

Bronte stared up at him, fighting the mesmerizing effect he had upon her, realizing dimly that although his words seemed no more than a dispassionate appraisal of her skills as a physician, the look in his eyes, to say nothing of the brick hard erection digging into her backside, seemed to indicate his thoughts were not entirely on her credentials. 

“What’s going on here?” she managed to ask as it finally dawned on her that there were undercurrents besides those heated waves eddying through her at the nearness and rapt attention she held of all three men. 

Instead of answering her question, the man released his hold on her.  She stared up at him a moment longer and turned to look at the other two men.  She hadn’t imagined she held center stage.  The other two men were studying her with the same intensity.  Without any indication of discomfort at all, they held her gaze for several moments and then the three men exchanged a look very like the one the first two had exchanged before when the second man had gotten on the lift. 

“She is young.  Should we look for someone with more experience?”

Bronte frowned indignantly at the man with the dark, brown hair, torn between a feminine desire to maintain her youth and a professional desire to defend her experience.  “I am young,” she snapped.  “I was not only at the top of my class.  I was the youngest in my graduating class! And I took over my father’s practice nearly a year ago … besides my years in residence!  I am fully qualified!”

None of them looked as impressed as she felt like they should have, but then again it struck her that, of the three, she’d never seen anyone any better at hiding their thoughts behind such expressionless masks.  Aside from the faint frowns that flickered across their faces, that looked like a mixture of speculation and puzzlement, they gave nothing else away. 

They seemed to come to some sort of tacit agreement, though, as the lift halted once more and the doors opened.  Bronte’s gaze was drawn by the movement.  Surprise filled her when she discovered they were on the roof.  In the distance, the sky was just beginning to lighten with the promise that the sun would soon crest the horizon.

Closer to hand, though, blocking most of the view, sat a sleek black star cruiser, its hatch open and gangway extended like a tongue.  She’d barely registered the ship, which had no business at all on the roof of the med center since it was clearly not an ambulance, when a blast of light erupted, slamming into the roof inches from the lift opening.  The concussion of the blast stunned her, seemed to knock the breath from her lungs. 

It didn’t have the same effect, or even nearly that effect, on the three men.  The man still holding her yanked her off her feet and charged off the lift directly behind the other two.  Contrary to what she might have expected if she’d had her wits about her, the blond did not toss his burden aside.  Instead, he ran full tilt toward the gangway as if the thing weighed no more than a feather.  The brunette dragged a laser pistol from the holster strapped to his leg and returned fire as the man holding her charged past, also firing with his free hand as he raced toward the cruiser with her under one arm as if she was no more than a feather.  He wasn’t even winded when he’d raced up the gangway and deposited her none too gently into a seat. 

Stunned, expecting any moment to feel her body disintegrate along with the ship around her, Bronte’s gaze followed instinctively as the man raced to the control console, working the controls so quickly his hands were little more than a blur of movement even before he dropped into the seat beside the blond.  An explosion rocked the ship, effectively diverting Bronte.  Gripping the arms of the chair she’d been dropped into, her head swiveled of its own accord toward the deafening sound and the metallic pinging of flying metal.  She was just in time to see the brunette land flatfooted on the deck, slamming a hand against the control that lifted the gangway and sealed the hatch.  

Without comprehension, she stared at the now ragged uniform he wore, taking in the gashes along his arm and leg and the blackened, gaping flesh where lasers had torn into him.  There was little blood.  Lasers tended to seal the flesh and veins even as they burned through them.  What caught her attention and held it, though, was the gleaming metal, not bone, exposed by the wounds.

She was still staring at the metal, trying to wrap her mind around everything that had happened and the implications of seeing metal rather than charred bone, when the man stalked up to her, grasped the restraints she hadn’t had the wit to fasten and quickly fastened her in.  He’d barely done so when the craft shot from the roof like a launched missile, plastering her to the back of her seat. 

The man grabbed her seat back to keep from being pitched toward the rear of the ship.  The metal groaned, as if it was about to be ripped loose from its mooring, but, thankfully, held as he launched himself across the aisle and managed to land in the seat apparently reserved for him. 

That feat shocked her almost as much as everything that had gone before.  She couldn’t begin to guess how many G’s the ship was pulling in its almost vertical climb, but she knew it would take superhuman strength to combat it. 

Any man, no matter if he was built like a tank, as this one was, would have been plastered against the bulkhead at the rear of the cockpit.

The truth, despite the implications, was slow in coming simply because of the shock and her absolute unwillingness to accept what her senses told her. 

No wonder, she thought, feeling faint and cold with sudden terror, these men were such marvels of perfection, so perfectly wonderful and beautiful if every way.  They weren’t men at all!  They were rogue cyborgs … and she’d just spent the last fifteen minutes convincing them that they should kidnap her instead of looking for a doctor that was more experienced!

Chapter Two

Two concussions rocked the ship in rapid succession.  Bronte squeezed her eyes closed, praying the shields would hold, bartering with fate for all she worth.  Abruptly, the pull against her ceased.  For a handful of seconds, she felt weightless and then the artificial gravity kicked in sluggishly, either because the two men … cyborgs … manning the controls were too preoccupied with trying to outmaneuver the ship or ships trailing them and trying their best to blast them out of the sky, or because one of the military cruisers had managed to damage some of the controls. 

She knew that had to be who was firing on them … the military … or maybe the police … someone who was actually supposed to be on her side.  She couldn’t bring herself to root for them, however, not when she was going to be a piece of the debris if they succeeded in bringing down the cyborg craft. 

The stars visible in the forward facing screens above the pilots blurred.  Freed from the pull of the Earth’s gravity, Bronte groped for the glasses she habitually perched on top of her head when she wasn’t using them.  She found them dangling by one arm on the side of her head, tangled in her hair, which was the only reason, she realized, that she still had them.  She discovered, though, when she’d managed to disentangle the glasses from her hair and perch them on her nose that the stars were still blurred.  She couldn’t feel the pull she would have felt if she’d still been caught in the pull of Earth’s gravity, but she realized they’d jumped into hyper-drive. 

It boggled her mind.  It probably boggled the minds of those trailing them, as well.  This craft shouldn’t have had that capability. 

No human craft would have.

She wasn’t on a craft designed and built by humans, though.  If she hadn’t already guessed as much, the technology was enough to clinch the matter. 

And it still stunned her.  How, she wondered, could manmade machines develop technology beyond the capabilities of their creators?

But it had to have been them, unless they’d discovered alien technology.

The blurring of the stars lessened after a short time, the streaks shortening and finally disappearing altogether.  When it did, though, she saw that the millions of bright lights had dwindled to no more than a sprinkling of pinpoints of light and a vast amount of velvety darkness. 

The black haired giant tossed off his harness and stood.  As he turned in her direction she saw that he, too, had been wounded in the attempt.  A foot long gash crossed his chest from the upper slope of one pec almost to the point near his opposite hip where her head had been when he’d dashed to the ship with her.  Her belly clenched when she realized how closely she’d come to having her brains splattered all over him.  Then, too, despite her certainty that he had to be a machine, the wound looked so painful she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of empathetic pain in her belly. 

His face, she saw when she looked up at him as he approached her, was taut—not creased with pain, but the very fact that it was rigid seemed to indicate an inner struggle with pain.

He didn’t look at her.  Instead, he looked the man beside her over and nodded toward the back of the ship.  The wounds were really beyond her experience—she was no surgeon and besides that knew nothing about cyborgs beyond the fact that they were machines ‘clothed’ in human tissue.  Beyond that, they had kidnapped her and she had no idea what their intentions were toward her.  Still, her healer’s instincts rose to the forefront.  “I should attend your wounds,” she said a little shakily.

Both men turned to look at her and she found herself pinned by a pair of piercing, pale blue eyes and an equally penetrating pair of emerald green eyes. 

In fact, she sensed the blond, still at the control of the vessel, had also turned at the sound of her voice.

The one with black hair tilted his head at her, almost curiously, though she could not see it in his expression.  After a moment, he slid a look at the man still seated.  “It should be obvious to you now that our experience with the ‘tender mercies’ of humans have given us no reason to trust them.”

Bronte flinched inwardly.  As caught up as she was in her own life, as little as she noticed about the world outside her personal sphere, she knew very well that the cyborgs had gone rogue and the company that had manufactured them had recalled them for destruction … or at least attempted to.  It wasn’t general knowledge, though, because it was something the company had tried very hard to keep from the public.  The only reason she knew anything at all about it was because she had a colleague, a former classmate that she had maintained some friendly relations with, that had inadvertently let just enough classified information slip that she’d pieced the story together from the occasional news vids she managed to catch. 

She was, in fact, distressed that he had so blatantly pointed out that he was a cyborg.  She would have far preferred it if he’d maintained the illusion, or tried to, that she had been kidnapped by humans.  If he wasn’t worried about her having the knowledge it did not bode well for her. 

She felt the blood flee from her face in a rush that made her dizzy.  Swallowing with an effort against the knot of uneasiness that formed in her throat, she struggled to find her voice.  “You must have some use for me,” she managed to say, “if you risked … capture to take me.”

His gaze flickered over her face.  “But then, again, we are only machines, incapable of fear, pain … anxiety ….”  He paused for a long, long moment.  “Desire.”

A tide of warmth flooded through her at the single word, made significant both by the pause that went before and the deep, almost husky inflection of his voice.  Dismayed by her body’s instinctive reaction, Bronte said no more as he moved past her at last and the other cyborg removed his harnesses, rose, and followed him. 

When Bronte glanced toward the man at the controls of the ship, she saw that he was still studying her.  He met her gaze for a long moment and finally turned away.

Released, Bronte drew a shuddering breath into her burning lungs, unconscious of the fact, until that moment, that she’d been holding her breath.  She’d been dismissed, very coolly at that.  She sat staring at the view beyond the ship for some time, trying to marshal her scattered wits.  Why, she wondered, had they taken her when they appeared not only to have no use of her services, but no trust or liking for humans in general?

She frowned at that.  Liking, or disliking, were emotions.  He’d pointed out the obvious, that they were machines and had no ability to feel as their creators did.  And yet she wasn’t entirely comfortable with that conclusion.  Maybe it was just that they seemed so human-like that she expected them to behave like humans?  Then again, they had been designed to blend with humanity, to interact with them, because humans weren’t comfortable being around great, hulking, powerful machines that utilized artificial intelligence. 

Some of the older models, which had merely been humanoid in design, had been just plain scary.  The manufactures had discovered they were never going to fill every household with two or three if they looked so ‘threatening’, which was why they’d really gone overboard changing the whole look of the robot, not only making them appear so human-like that they blended seamlessly with the population, but making them feel human, as well, so that they’d found a whole new market for them as sex toys. 

As that thought congealed in her mind, Bronte wondered abruptly if these had been designed specifically as human sexual companions.  She couldn’t prevent either the blush or the heat that rose inside of her as it dawned on her that she was already well aware that they were anatomically correct … which seemed to support that theory.  And yet, if that was the case, why had they been built like … soldiers?  Maybe they—the company—had merely figured one design would do, at least in the sense of making them multi-purpose so that the model worked equally well for either job? 

That seemed likely.  Why go to the expense of building a dozen different models for different jobs when they could build one to do any job the customer might want?

Could they all be the same model, though, when they looked as distinctly different as three different, unrelated humans would look?

Why did that matter, she thought abruptly?

It didn’t because it had no bearing on her situation that she could see. 

They had a use for her.  They must.  There was no reason in the world for them to seek her out, and they obviously had, unless they did have some use for her.  She could understand a drive in them to destroy the people they knew were hell bent on destroying them.  They didn’t actually need anything more than a will to exist—and obviously they did have that—and a firm grasp on logic to realize that they must eliminate the threat to their existence in order to continue.  But she was no threat to them.  She was a doctor.  She had never worked for the company in any way, shape, or form. 

Besides, it would have been easy to kill her if that had been the objective.  They’d caught her completely by surprise.  One of them could have snapped her like a twig before she could have even gotten out a cry for help.

Without consciously coming to a decision, Bronte unfastened her safety harness and rose a little unsteadily.  The blond cyborg turned to look at her, but he neither said anything nor made any attempt to stop her as she headed from the cockpit in search of the injured cyborgs.  It wasn’t hard to find them.  The ship was designed as a short range ‘hopper’, or at least in the vein of those crafts that had no need for a good deal of space.  Beyond the main cabin/cockpit area, there was a small food preparation/eating area, a bathroom, or ‘head’, and beyond that only a single cabin.  Bronte froze in the doorway once the hatch/door had opened.

Both men were stark naked and she’d never in her life seen that much naked male flesh.  Prod her mind though she would to accept ‘cyborg’, her brain refused to give the lie to what her eyes saw.  The one with black hair turned to stare at her.  The other one glanced at her, but he was intent on cutting the charred flesh from the other man’s wound.  Blood dripped from his hands, effectively distracting Bronte.  Her belly clenched. 

“What are you doing?” she gasped, surging forward.

“The laser cauterizes as it cuts,” the patient, or ‘victim’ said through clenched teeth.  “The flesh cannot mend together as is.”

Bronte didn’t realize she’d grabbed the hand of the cyborg cutting until his hand stilled beneath hers.  “You can’t just … filet his entire chest and torso!  He’ll lose too much blood … especially at the rate you’re going.  To say nothing of the fact that it’ll leave a horrible scar!  What did you use to deaden it?  What do you have to close the wound with?

“You,” she said to the brunette, “move.  You,” she added, grasping the other man’s hand, “sit down before you fall down and break something.”

Neither man moved and Bronte quickly discovered she couldn’t budge either one so much as a hair.  Finally, the dark man nodded.  He sank heavily onto the bunk when the brunette moved away, placing the scalpel he held in Bronte’s outstretched, demanding, hand.  “I need antiseptic, something to deaden the area, something to close the wound, and sterile gauze,” she said absently.

The brunette got up.  Her conscience smote her.  He was wounded, too, but then she didn’t know where anything was and she needed to close the chest wound as quickly as possible to stop the bleeding.  The brunette returned after a few moments, settling her bag of medical instruments—her bag—on the bunk beside them.  Her files and now her bag, too?  Had they taken everything from her office?  She flicked a censorious glance at him, but she was relieved, too.  She knew she would find everything she needed inside.

“You need only to cut the dead flesh and close the wound,” the man she was working on said, his voice harsh.  She didn’t doubt pain had a lot to do with the roughness.  She flicked a glance at him as she moved between his thighs and bent over to examine the upper area of the wound.  “Maybe you actually like pain, but I don’t like inflicting it.  I’ll feel better if I deaden the area, and I’ll certainly feel better making sure it isn’t likely to get infected,” she added as she disinfected her hands with the solution she unearthed from her bag.

To her surprise, his lips curled in the faintest of smiles.  Amusement gleamed in his eyes.  It disappeared so quickly, though, she wondered if she’d only imagined it.  “I am a machine,” he growled.

“Meaning you feel no pain?”

He neither denied it nor admitted it.

“Liar,” she said softly and then felt a chilling rush at her unthinking remark, wondering if it would anger him.  “What’s your name?” she added quickly to change the direction of his thoughts.

“Why would you think a machine would have a name … beyond its function … cyborg?”

Bronte sucked her lower lip into her mouth uneasily, but she felt a pang of empathy, too.  She had gone into medicine as much because she felt a need to soothe the hurt and heal the sick as to impress the father she had admired so much, but there were times when she thought it was a mistake, that she was not cut out for this business of trying to heal.  She felt the pain of others too deeply, and her instincts told her, whatever he had begun life as, he hurt, deeply, because his existence as a living, breathing, thinking being had been denied by his creators. 

Her hand was shaking as she finished trimming and cleansing the wound along his breast.  Lifting a hand, she brushed the beads of sweat from her brow and the hair that had clung to the dampness.  After trying unsuccessfully to hold the wound closed and use the instrument to seal the flesh together, she reached down to catch his hands and had him press the wound closed.  “I’m not your enemy,” she said quietly.

“You are human,” he pointed out.

She paused, staring at him in dismay.  “So I cannot be anything else?”

His gaze flickered over her as she stood between his thighs, leaning over him.  His gaze lingered on her breasts for a long moment.  The faint smile curled his lips again.  “I am a superior model … designed to kill quickly and efficiently.  But I was programmed to be a pleasure bot, as well.  If you have a need …?”

Hot color flashed in Bronte’s cheeks.  A chaotic flood of anger, fear, and—loath though she was to admit it—desire went through her.

She dragged her gaze from his.  Her back had begun to burn from bending over to reach his wound.  Pointedly ignoring the evidence that he had certainly not lied about being well equipped to function as a sex droid, she dropped to her knees and focused on the wound slashing across his torso.  It was a shame to see such perfection marred by such a vicious wound.  It was bound to make a terrible scar no matter how carefully she closed it.

“It will not make an unsightly scar.  The nanos will mend it well enough.”

Bronte bit her lip, realizing she’d spoken her thoughts aloud.  It was a very bad habit she’d developed—talking to herself.

“I am called Gabriel,” he murmured as she finished trimming the last of the scorched flesh away and used the gauze to carefully wipe as much of the blood from his belly as she could, trying not to notice the warmth of his skin beneath her fingers or the way he tensed infinitesimally at her touch.  She glanced up at him in surprise.  A faint frown drew her brows together as she pondered the familiarity of the name.  Finally, she smiled.  “From the ancient mythology of demons and angels.  They were … heavenly beings of such beauty mankind was stuck with awe to look upon them.  It suits you.”

He did something then that stunned her.  He blushed.

He rose so abruptly when she’d finished sealing the wound he nearly bowled her over.  She caught herself, watching as he strode across the room and touched a panel.  A door slid open and she glimpsed the fixtures of a bathroom before the door closed behind him.  Dragging her gaze back to the man who still needed attending, she rose to her feet, pressing her hand to the small of her back to relieve the strain.  “If you could just lie down?”

He complied, stretching out full length on the bunk.  Oddly enough, he looked bigger lying down than he had before, far more imposing, possibly because he seemed to take up the entire bunk?  Suppressing the quiver that went through her without examining it too closely, she settled the bag of instruments beside the bunk and took his injured arm, struggling to lift it.  He lifted it for her.  Perching her buttocks on the edge of the mattress, she caught his arm and settled it across her lap.  It was less of a strain on her shoulders and back to work seated, but she found she was almost more conscious of the man than she had been when she’d knelt in front of Gabriel. 

Even thinking the name sent an unwelcome tingle of warmth through her.  Added to her keen awareness of the man on the bunk, the warmth of his hip seeping through her clothing and into her buttocks, the warmth and weight of his arm across her lap, she discovered she had to force herself to concentrate on her task.  When she’d cleaned the angry red flesh that surrounded his wound and coated it liberally with a topical anesthetic, she glanced at his face to discover he was studying her.  “I suppose it would be too much to ask why you took me?” she asked hesitantly.

His dark brows drew together thoughtfully.  “We were not ordered not to do so.”

Bronte waited.  When he didn’t seem inclined to say more, she lifted her brows questioningly.  “Well, why?”

“That should be obvious.”

Bronte’s lips flattened with a touch of irritation.  “To you, maybe,” she responded tartly.  “It isn’t at all obvious to me.  You didn’t even want me to attend your wounds!”

“We did not ask.”

Bronte stared at him with more than a little irritation.  He didn’t appear to be deliberately baiting her, but he was nonetheless.  Getting answers out of him was like pulling teeth.  It occurred to her after a moment, though, that what he’d left unsaid seemed to imply that they had wanted her to.  They just hadn’t asked.  “You wanted to, but you were afra … didn’t want to ask?”

His dark brows rose.  “It did not occur to us to ask because it did not occur to us that you would be willing  … and you are not trained as a surgeon, in any case.”

Bronte pursed her lips as she glanced down at his arm.  “I am trained as a surgeon,” she disputed, “minor surgery, anyway.  You were looking at my father’s records, if you recall, not mine.  At least … you suggested as much.”

“I say … or do not.”

Confused, Bronte’s brows knitted as she focused on closing the wound.  She looked up at him questioningly when she had finished.  “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

“I have not the facility for tact or subtlety or diplomacy.  I was sold as a soldier and had no need for that.  I do not suggest.  I say, or do not.”

It still took Bronte several moments to understand because, she realized wryly, she was too distracted by his nearness to think straight. “So … you were not … uh … you didn’t ….”  She broke off abruptly, horrified that she’d felt the impulse to know if he had been programmed for sex as Gabriel had.  She cleared her throat as she bent his arm and settled it across his chest.  “You didn’t tell me your name,” she said to change the subject as she shifted down the bunk to examine the wound on his thigh. 

“You did not ask.”

Bronte let out an irritated huff of breath, deciding she didn’t care what his damned name was.  She didn’t think for a moment that he was so literal minded that he could not grasp the subtle meanings of any conversation.  He was being deliberately provoking.  She just didn’t know why.

It was a good deal more awkward, she discovered, to attend his thigh from a sitting position.  She had to twist sideways to cleanse the area with the antiseptic.  Before she could rise, however, he lifted the leg as he had his arm, dropping his thigh across her lap.  Blood instantly flooded her cheeks as she found herself between his splayed thighs.  Even as she opened her mouth to object, however, he hooked his leg around her, dragging her closer until there was no ignoring his anatomy whether she looked directly at it or not.  His testicles were nestled snuggly against her hip.

His penis shifted with his repositioning of his body, landing against the thigh she needed to attend.  She stared at the soft lump of flesh that settled against his leg when he shifted, completely unaware that she was staring, that she’d gone as perfectly still as if she’d been frozen in place. 

“A little higher and I would have lost more flesh than I liked.”

The comment brought Bronte out of her trance, dragging her gaze upward to his face automatically.  He stared back at her, his handsome face completely devoid of expression, and yet she had the sense that he was amusing himself at her expense, waiting for her reaction.  Unconsciously moistening her dry lips, she dragged her gaze from his and looked down.  With as much professional unconcern as she could manage, she moved his penis to lie across his testicles.  The moment she let go of it, it flopped on his thigh again.  This time, however, it was not soft … not fully erect either, but certainly noticeably firmer and fuller than before … and longer.

Resisting the urge to either touch it again or glance at his face, she decided to ignore it and focused on her task, desperate to finish as quickly as possible. 

Gabriel emerged from the bathroom as she finished bathing the man’s flesh with the anesthetic.  He was wet.  Water dripped from his hair and trickled down across his bare chest.  With a will of its own, her gaze encompassed his glistening body from the black hair slicked along his shoulders and upper chest to his bare feet.  It took an effort to pry her gaze from him and even more of a struggle to tamp the shivery awareness that made her feel overly warm at the weight of his gaze on her. 

She was a physician, she mentally berated herself!  Nudity, no matter how fine the specimens, no matter how blatantly male, should not have the effect of completely addling her wits!

He crossed the cabin after a moment, pressing a panel on the wall opposite the bath that opened to reveal a locker.  Relieved to see he was dressing, Bronte turned her attention to the wound and carefully clipped the burned flesh away from healthy flesh.  As with Gabriel’s chest wound, she discovered she couldn’t hold the flesh together and manipulate her instrument at the same time.  Apparently seeing her dilemma, Gabriel approached, knelt beside the bunk, and held the wound closed while she sealed it. 

Releasing a sigh of relief when she’d finished, she glanced at Gabriel as she brushed her hair from her forehead with the back of one hand.

He was still bare-chested, she discovered with a start.  He rose even as she glanced at him, turned on his heel, and departed, giving her a good view of his tight buttocks, which the thing he was wearing left completely exposed.  She didn’t know what it was, but it was certainly not under-shorts!

Her patient caught her attention as he sat up.  Still trapped by his leg, Bronte’s eyes widened as the movement brought his chest directly into her line of vision.  She tipped her head back to look up at him just as his hands settled on either side of her head, entrapping her thoroughly for his perusal, which he took his time with. 

“It is a very great shame that you are human,” he said finally.

“Why?” Bronte asked, her voice little more than a breathy whisper.

Something flickered in the depths of his deep, jewel green eyes.  Instead of answering, he released his hold on her.  Dropping his hands to her hips, he lifted her up and set her away from him and then rose and went into the facilities. 

Bronte stared at the closed door for several moments after he’d disappeared and finally got up shakily.  With the mindlessness of long practice, she gathered the things she’d used and returned them to her bag, more shaken than she could ever recall being in her life. 

They’d taken her and she still had no clue why.  She should have been shaking with terror, she mused, not thoroughly rattled by an inopportune surge of raging hormones and animal lust. 

She was afraid, deep down scared, but that had certainly not prevented a physical response and her body clearly had no discrimination.  They were cyborgs!  Not even real flesh and blood men!

She glanced at her hands at that, staring at the blood that belied that thought. 

They bled.  They felt pain.  Whatever they’d tried to make her believe, despite the fact that they’d managed to control it and move and behave as if they were completely unhurt, she knew better. 

They hadn’t simply interacted with her, responded stiltedly in a facsimile of human behavior.  They’d been toying with her, verbally sparring, provoking her to see how she would react. 

They were not simply machines.  She didn’t know what they were.  She didn’t know how it had come about, but they had evolved well beyond machines with AI and clever programming.  They were thinking beings! Sentient life forms!

Chapter Three

Escape was the single thought running through Bronte’s mind as she left the cabin.  Even as she stepped out, however, she could see the other two cyborgs at the helm of the small craft.

There was no escape!

There wasn’t even a place where she could be alone to fall apart where they couldn’t witness her weakness and analyze it, and probably record it for the others. 

There were others, she knew.  She had no idea how many others.  The company certainly hadn’t published the figures and even if they had, they would very likely have lied. 

She stopped, surveying the mid-section of the vessel.  If she only had a little space, a little time to herself to come to grips with the hopelessness of her situation ….

Her gaze lit on the door of the facilities in mid-ship.  She made a bee line for it before she had even fully registered that she had found a temporary haven.  She needed to wash up after attending them anyway.

There was another bath … room, fully equipped, assuming they had need for it and she supposed they must if they had two bathrooms … or maybe not.  They might have stolen the ship and refitted it.  Should she assume they were fully functional pseudo-biological entities?

Why the hell not!  They were functioning completely on their own as far as she could tell.  They had obviously planned and executed the mission to grab her … in the teeth of opposition, which they had expected and been prepared for.  They had risked their lives to grab her … or rather her father, but the very fact that they had simply adjusted the original plan without missing a beat was proof positive of evolved, more human-like thinking.  AI certainly allowed for adjustments in the face of error or miscalculation.  That was what it had been designed for, but even with it the bots had never been able to function with this level of efficiency. 

More accurately, they had required a considerable amount of time to adjust. Depending upon what they had to adjust for, it could take a minute or hours. Unlike human decision making, which involved almost as much ‘hopefulness’ as facts, the computer with the AI unit could not be satisfied with ‘almost’ or ‘close’ or ‘best three out of five’.  They could not function without absolutes, would stop for however long it took for them to carefully and methodically reevaluate the situation. 

Gabriel had come to a decision as soon as he had fully grasped that she was a doctor, just as her father had been, same specialty, same training and education, just not as much experience.  From what she could tell, the other two had arrived at the same conclusion in roughly the same amount of time.  Dr. Bryan Alexander Nichols was no longer among the living and not an option, so they had taken her instead.

Why did they want her?  Actually, she didn’t suppose they did.  They had not seemed particularly happy about having to take her instead of her father. 

But why would they have any need for a pediatrician?

There was only one reason they would, of course, but it was nonsensical.  Even if she did accept that they had somehow evolved into sentient beings—and she still hadn’t completely accepted that notion—they had begun ‘life’ as machines.  Reproduction was beyond them, beyond any of them.  The simplest organisms could reproduce.  The most complex could, but nature was the determining factor in procreation.  Mankind, as advanced as they were, could not start with nothing and make something. 

The company certainly wouldn’t have any rhyme or reason to give the cyborgs reproductive organs, artificial or otherwise.  Functioning sex organs in the sense of recreation certainly—that had been a huge boon to the industry—but nothing beyond that. 

She didn’t think they had made a mistake and taken a pediatrician when they had needed some other specialist.

For that matter, it seemed odd that they would think they would need any kind of doctor.  As Gabriel had pointed out, they had nanos for repair, and the nanos were programmed to repair whatever the problem might be, mechanical or biological in nature.  Sure, she supposed there would be instances like the one she had helped with, but she thought they would’ve managed well enough without her.

She just hadn’t been able to resist sticking her nose in because she suffered from a conviction that she had to help if anyone was hurt or sick.

Trying to reason through it when she had nothing to go on made her head hurt.  It seemed evident anyway that they meant her no harm … beyond taking her against her will, that is. 

She realized, though, that she was struggling with it because she needed the reassurance.  If she could convince herself they had a purpose for her that didn’t involve ending her life, she would feel better, less frightened even though she was in a situation she could neither control or escape from. 

She wasn’t going to be able to do that, though, unless they decided to tell her something.  After washing her face and hands for a good five minutes, she finally realized it wasn’t helping to soothe her and shut off the tap.  Turning, she stared at the bathing unit speculatively for several moments and finally dragged her clothing off.

Water spouted from the thing, startling the hell out of her.  She stood gaping at it for several moments before she finally nerved herself to get in.  It was so cold it knocked the breath out of her.  She grabbed frantically at the knobs, trying to turn the thing off, and discovered hot water.  She scalded herself before she finally managed to figure out how to adjust the knobs to get both cold and hot at the same time. 

“God,” she muttered.  “This ship must be a real dinosaur!”

No one except colonists on more primitive worlds used water to bathe in anymore!

It felt good, though, she decided once she finally had the water adjusted.  In fact, it felt better than just good.  The hot water seemed to reach right down inside of her and warm the deep chill that had engulfed her.  She stayed far longer than she should have, but it took all she could do to turn off the water. 

She stood dripping for a while, trying to find a button that would activate the drying cycle.  She was shivering by the time she finally gave up and got out of the bathing unit.  Noticing a locker built into the wall, she decided to check for the possibility of clean clothing.  Instead, she found large sheets of some sort of fluffy material.  Shivering, she wrapped it around herself and, after surveying the options, settled on the toilet. 

She thought she might have been happier if they had thrown her into a small cell and locked the door.  Maybe she would have felt confined, at least after a while, but she would also feel safe locked away from them. 

She had been sitting with her face in her hands long enough her feet and legs and buttocks had become numb from sitting when there was a rap on the door that startled the hell out of her. 

“There is food,” said a disembodied voice from the other side of the door.

“Thank you!” Bronte responded automatically and then felt embarrassed and silly.

She wasn’t hungry.  Her stomach was tied into knots.  Even if she had been, she didn’t think she could face sitting down to a meal with the three giant cyborgs.

Assuming, of course, they ate. 

Maybe they had only prepared food for her?

She didn’t care.  She wasn’t hungry and she wasn’t coming out until she was good and ready.  Realizing she was dry, she put her clothes back on, wondering if she was going to have to wear her uniform for the rest of her life and how much time that might translate into.  When she was dressed, she wrapped the damp cloth around herself again.  Damp or not, it gave her some added warmth, made her feel more shielded somehow. 

After looking around, she finally decided to sit on the floor awhile and when she grew tired of that, she lay down on her side and curled up into a tight little ball.  She lay listening to the sounds outside at first, a little surprised that they seemed to actually carry on conversations—not that she could make out what they were saying, but it sounded like it must be a conversation.  She could hear first one voice and then another.  She heard them passing back and forth by the room where she was holed up.  A few times, she heard footsteps approach the door, pause for a few moments and then go away again.

She dozed off.  She had no idea how long she’d been locked in the bathroom, but after a while the shaking stopped and she grew warm and relaxed. 

The noise that woke her made her shoot to her feet in alarm, but it was only a deep seated, instinctual reaction to threat.  It didn’t do anything for her equilibrium or even awaken her mind enough to really function.  Opening wide, burning eyes, she stared at the hole where the door had been as the blond haired cyborg casually set the door he’d just ripped from the hinges to one side, stepped inside with her and caught hold of her before she could even consider trying to elude him.  She staggered drunkenly as he hauled her out of the bathroom.  He caught her against his chest and then bent and scooped her into his arms. 

“Wha …?” she managed as he added dizziness to her already teetering world when he swiveled around with her and strode purposefully … she didn’t know where he was going.  Only that he seemed in a great hurry to get there.  “Whas gon …?  Where …?”

“To bed.”

Bronte’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head at that.  “Bed?”

He settled her on the bunk where she’d treated the others’ injuries earlier.  She fought a short round with him over her cloth, but it was a losing battle from the start even if she hadn’t still been too disoriented to be able to defend herself.  When he’d taken it from her, though, he rolled her across the bed, dragged the tucked blanket from beneath her, and then rearranged her on the bed and tossed the blanket over her.  She caught hold of it with both hands, snatching it up to her nose and peering at him over it.  He settled his hands on either side of her, leaning his weight on them as he stared down at her.  “You will sleep here when you need to rest.”

Bronte blinked at him, more because her eyes were still stinging from being so abruptly wakened than because she didn’t understand the order.  It wasn’t precisely delivered as an order, but his tone didn’t encourage argument.  He studied her a moment longer and finally settled a hip on the bed beside her.  Grasping the edge of the blanket, he pried it from her fingers and settled it across her shoulders. 

“You are in no danger,” he said quietly.  “You do not need to hide in the facilities … and, as you see, it would make no difference if any one of us wished to go after you.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Bronte demanded shakily.

He tilted his head at her.  “Yes.”

“Well, it doesn’t!” she said forthrightly.

He frowned faintly.  “What would make you feel better?”

“Going home.”

He stared at her for a long moment.  Finally, his lips curled up in amusement.  “Besides that.”

Bronte thought it over.  “What are you going to do with me?”

“Nothing.”

She frowned at him.  “Then why did you take me?”

“Orders.”

“Orders?  Like … military, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Bronte studied him with some irritation.  “Can you, maybe, string a few words together so that we could exchange information a little more efficiently?”

This time his lips merely twitched, but she could see a distinct gleam of amusement in his eyes.  “I will try.”

“Do you have a name?”

One corner of his mouth tipped up this time.  “Yes.”

She waited for a long moment.  When he said nothing else, she let out an irritated huff and turned on her side, presenting him with her back.  She felt the bed shift as he rose.  A moment later, she felt warmth as he leaned over her.  “Gideon,” he said in little more than a whisper near her ear. 

She whirled her head to see what he was up to as she felt him lean over her.  She met him almost nose to nose as spoke next to her ear.  For several heartbeats, they merely stared at one another.  He seemed as disconcerted as she was, but he made no attempt to draw back.  Instead, his gaze wandered over her face.  Finally, he straightened.  “You do not need to be afraid, Bronte.  No harm is intended toward you, and none will come to you … not at our hands.”

Bronte sent him a scared look.  “Whose?”

He shook his head.  “I cannot speak for your own people.  Only mine.”

She thought that over.  “You’re talking about the militia trying to blow up the ship?” 

“It is unlikely we will run afoul of more this far out, but, yes.  If they spot us they will try to blow us up.”

He’d nearly reached the door before she thought of another question.  “Where are we going?”

“The Cyborg Nation.”

Bronte sat up in the bed and stared at him in horror.  Nation?  “Why are you taking me there?”

He tilted his head curiously.  “That should be obvious—to attend our young.”

Bronte was certain that she was thoroughly awake by the time Gideon left, but, although her mind was busy going back over what he had told her for a good while after his departure, she drifted to sleep again eventually.  She had just reached deep sleep when she was jostled awake first by the feel of two arms shoved beneath her and then, when she’d been deposited nearer the bulkhead, the coldness of the sheets above and below her.  Shivering, she tried to move back to the spot she’d already warmed.  Even as she rolled toward it however, the outside of the bed dipped.  The dipping gave her roll more momentum than she’d calculated on.  Instead of landing on the floor, however, she came up against something as big and solid as the wall … except a lot warmer. 

Disoriented, she sat up and looked around groggily.  The man who’d just climbed into bed beside her pushed her down on the pillows again.  “Go back to sleep.”

“Ok,” Bronte mumbled and rolled onto her side, planting her butt next to the warmth in the bed.  The little space left for her, however, was the patch of ice next to the wall, for he took up most of the bunk. 

He stiffened when she wiggled her ass up next to his warmth, but after a moment he rolled onto his side facing her.  “You are cold?”

Bronte nodded instead of answering, but he apparently took that as a yes.  Shifting closer, he draped an arm over her waist and dragged her toward him until she was nestled snugly against him.  His warmth immediately began to filter through her entire back.  Dimly, she realized she shouldn’t be snuggling so cozily, but she was cold and he was warm and that was all that mattered to her at the moment. 

Her front side stayed cold despite the furnace at her back, though, and after a few moments, she struggled until she managed to roll over and burrowed as close to the source of heat as she could get with her arms pinned tightly to her chest.  He stiffened all over again when she nuzzled her cold face against his warmth.  After a few moments, though, he merely leaned away long enough to pry her arms away from her so that her elbows weren’t digging into him, arranged her to suit his own comfort and curled around her again.  As hard as the surface was that she found herself flattened against, it radiated heat, and the moment she thawed enough for her muscles to relax, she went under again.

Her last thoughts and impressions before she had gone to sleep stirred her awake some time later, wandering randomly through her mind at first and spawning bizarre dreams and then not so strange but a good deal more disturbing dreams.  The faces of the cyborgs swam in and out of these half-waking dreams, first one and then another.  She jolted awake just as Gideon’s face zoomed in to her mind’s eye in an extreme close up.

Sucking in a sharp breath, she opened her eyes, and then blinked to try to focus the blurry image looming over her.

Gideon, his face propped on one hand, was staring down at her intently, his long, blond hair tousled from sleep, his deep, dark blue eyes narrowed.  Bronte stared back at him blankly while her mind wrestled with the dream she’d just had, trying to disentangle dream from reality.

His hand, the one not supporting his cheek, which she discovered had been resting on her hip, settled on her cheek.  The pad of his thumb stroked along her lower lip, making it tingle and itch. 

And then he stuck his thumb in her mouth.

Quicker than thought, she chomped down on the digit with her teeth.

Sucking in a sharp breath, he snatched his abused member from her mouth, scraping it on the sharp edge of her teeth still digging into it.

Horror at her insane impulse to bite him washed through Bronte even before the pain she’d inflicted translated into a furious frown on his face.  Instinctively expecting retaliation, Bronte threw her arms up to shelter herself.  

He caught her wrists, pried her arms away from her face and shoved her arms over her head.  She resisted every inch of the way for all the good it did.  When he’d crossed her wrists over her head, he locked them in place with one hand, the tight curl of his thumb and forefinger almost completely encircling both wrists.  She stared up at him warily when he shifted the weight of his chest over her to pin her body in place, staring down at her through narrowed eyes. 

“I’m sorry!” she said on a choked breath, choked because the weight of his chest pressed down on her belly and lower chest too heavily for her to drag in more than a shallow breath.

He didn’t look appeased.  She saw why when he brought his injured thumb into her view as he examined it.  She’d drawn blood.  His eyes were glittering when he shifted his attention from his thumb to her face again. 

A twinge of rebelliousness had sparked to life, along with guilt, as she had studied his thumb.  She hadn’t invited him to stick his damned thumb in her mouth after all!  But the spark winked out at the look of intent on his face.

It dawned on her as she stared up at him in wide eyed wariness that he was contemplating retribution.  “It was an accident,” she added quickly as his gaze moved from her face to the neck of her uniform. 

The comment brought his gaze back to hers.  “You accidentally bit me?”

She reddened at his tone of disbelief.  “Miscalculated?” she tried.  “It was a muscle spasm.”

He caught at the neck of her uniform and yanked at the meshed closure, opening the thing from neck to waist.  She sucked in a shocked breath.  With deliberation, he caught the edge of her stretchy undergarment and yanked that down, too.  Her breast popped free of restraint, the dark aureole instantly puckering at the cool air and making her nipple stand erect.  Her eyes widened as his head descended.  Gritting her teeth, she yanked at her arms and rocked, trying to elude the mouth descending purposefully toward her breast.

Squeezing her breast with his hand, he extended his tongue and licked the skin all the way around her distended nipple.  It knocked the breath out of her as if he’d punched her in the stomach.  She tensed all over with distrust, still expecting pain for pain, unable to manage a clear train of thought, but certain he was only trying to lull her into a false sense of security.  Puckering his lips, he closed them over the tip, plucking at her nipple with no more than his lips until it became so engorged with blood that it began to throb.

She was shaking all over when he lifted his head, but she almost sighed with relief.

It was short lived.  Releasing his grip on her breast, he settled his hand on her face again, used his thumb to pry her jaws apart and slipped his thumb inside her mouth.  She stared at him, wondering what he expected, or wanted, her to do.  She wasn’t stupid enough to even try to bite him again, however. 

She hadn’t actually meant to bite him to start with.  It had just been one of those insane impulses that sometimes hit her out of the blue, a brain malfunction that inevitably led to disaster when the random impulses hit her.

After staring at her a long moment, as if daring her to bite him, he lowered his head again.  Bronte bucked against him uselessly when she saw his intent, but it only helped him, lifting her breast to his mouth as he opened it.  She flinched as his mouth opened over the nearly painfully sensitive bud, cutting her gaze down at him in horrified fascination as he started sucking on her.  Her belly clenched and then everything else inside of her.  Needing to swallow, she closed her mouth around his thumb and did.

A wave of heat flowed through her.  The epicenter seemed to be her sex.  It tightened again as he flicked the tip of his tongue across the surface of her nipple, this time producing both warmth and moisture.

Her eyelids slipped shut of their own accord.  The moment they did, her entire being seemed to focus on the heat of his mouth and the gentle, steady tugging that spread tingles of awareness throughout her body, raising her temperature.  And each time he sucked, her sex seemed to echo the pleasurable tug, tightening with the same rhythm.

She swallowed around his thumb again.  Again the sensation echoed in her sex.  The walls of her channel wept moisture, clenched tightly around the nothing it had to hold on to but seemed to want.  The slow seduction of his mouth and tongue as he alternately suckled and then teased her sensitive nipple with the tip of his tongue enthralled her. After a few moments, Bronte completely lost touch with any reality except the building heat inside of her.  She had no idea when she began to suck enthusiastically on his thumb in counter to the wildly seductive pull of his mouth on her breast, but disappointment filled her when he withdrew it and then compounded the insult by lifting his mouth from her breast.

It took an effort of will to lift her eyelids and look at him as she felt his gaze on her face.  His eyes, she saw, were so dark she could see no more than a thin ring of deep blue around his pupils.  His breath was almost as ragged as hers.  “Do not bite me again,” he said after a long moment.  “You may think I feel no pain.  I do.”

Her brain had ceased to function.  He’d released her, pushed himself off of her, and rolled off the bunk, getting to his feet before the meaning sank in.  She was still staring blankly at his back, though, wondering what had happened, as he strode across the cabin and disappeared into the facilities.    

A chill went through her.  She shivered, looked down at her bare breast and finally adjusted the undergarment and snatched her uniform together.  Shivering as the heat dissipated from her skin, she pushed herself upright and fumbled at the closure of her uniform.  Her hands were shaking so badly, though, that she had to realign the edges twice before she managed to smooth the closure. 

She looked at Gideon sharply when he left the bathroom, but he turned and left the cabin without glancing in her direction.  He’d bathed and changed, she saw.  His blond hair, combed neatly now, was slicked to his head, darkened almost to black by the water.  

The following is an extended excerpt from Kaitlyn O’Connor’s Cyborg Series.  Sample, pick your favorite ‘flavor’—they’ll stand alone—or buy all seven!

Cyberevolution Book Seven:

Rules of Engagement

 

By

 

Kaitlyn O’Connor

 

 

( C ) Copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor

Cover Art by Jenny Dixon

ISBN 978-1-60394-786-2

New Concepts Publishing

Lake Park, GA 31636

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author's imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

Chapter One

Police work could be tedious, especially on stake outs, but this went beyond the pale.  Zoe realized she was well past bored, also beyond uneasy.  She’d always been a nervous space traveler, and that was when she was traveling coach on a commercial line.  If anyone had ever asked her if there was any circumstance that would make her consider traveling solo, and well beyond the frontier, she would’ve told them to be sure and send her for a psyche evaluation if she announced such a thing.

“What the hell am I doing out here?” she muttered to herself for the umpteenth time.

“You are searching for your sister, who was kidnapped by rogue cyborgs,” the computer responded promptly.

Zoe glared at the console.  “Half-sister,” she muttered after a significant pause while she tried to decide if responding to the computer constituted space dementia. 

“You are searching for your half-sister, who ….”

“Shut up!” Zoe said irritably.  She drummed her fingers on the console for a few minutes.  “How far are we from the nearest habitable planet?”

Silence greeted the question.

Zoe rolled her eyes.  The computer, naturally, was equipped with AI.  Unfortunately, even with artificial intelligence, it tended to take everything literally.  If being alone for so long didn’t tip her over the edge, she thought the damned computer was going to drive her insane. “Computer respond!” she snapped.

“The last habitable planet surveyed is seventy two hours, thirty three minutes, ten seconds earth standard time, from the current position of the Evening Star 9120, traveling at full hyper-drive.  Folding would reduce the estimated time to reach the habitable planet to twenty hours, five minutes, thirty seven seconds.   In the event of damage to the Evening Star 9120, it would be necessary to re-calculate the time required to reach the habitable planet according to the drive status.”

Zoe narrowed her eyes.  Unfortunately, the computer hadn’t been programmed to react to a glare.   “Didn’t I tell you that I wanted you to survey everything and search for anything even remotely habitable?”

“I was ordered to survey worlds we passed close enough to that it was possible to utilize long range sensors.”

“And?” Zoe demanded, holding onto her patience with an effort.

“The last habitable planet ….”

“What about around us?  In front of us?”

“Would you like for me to do that now?”

“Now would be a good time, yes,” Zoe snapped, infuriated to discover, after nearly three months of traveling, no less, that the damned computer had interpreted her command to mean only the bodies they passed.  If she hadn’t known better, she would’ve suspected the thing was deliberately trying to thwart her efforts to find Bronte.  Slumping in the pilot’s seat, she resumed drumming her fingers on the console, trying to bring her irritation under control.  It was singularly pointless to rail at the computer, although a rousing good argument right about now might help to blow off some of her steam. 

She missed her partner, and that was saying something because he rarely had more than two words to say to her—‘let’s go’ and ‘want donuts?’.

Truthfully she supposed she didn’t miss him nearly as much as she missed the life she’d flushed down the toilet to come on this wild goose chase. 

She didn’t even know Bronte.  She didn’t understand why she’d felt this compulsion to throw everything away that she’d worked so hard for and go after her. 

She’d always meant to meet her half sister—at some point. 

She’d told herself that for years anyway, almost ever since she’d discovered her biological father—the randy two-timing bastard—had been contracted and already expecting a child when he’d been pumping her mother. 

Well, not quite that long, she supposed.  She’d been eight years old before she had actually discovered her background, not that it had required any sleuthing on her part.  Her mother had gone ballistic when the old bastard’s woman had died and she’d discovered he still didn’t mean to contract with her.  She’d spilled the whole tale then, and Zoe had discovered that, not only did she have a name and face to put with ‘father’, but she had a sister, too, one that was only a few months older than she was.

By the time she’d gotten into her teens, she’d been too resentful over the fact that her father refused to acknowledge her to look kindly upon the ‘accepted’ one.  At the same time, she’d yearned to get to know her.  She’d spent her entire childhood wishing she had a sibling, desperately in need of a playmate and friend that would be there when no one else was. 

There’d been no chance of that, though.  Her father had taken care to keep his two families separate.  The closest she’d come to meeting her sister was a chance glimpse now and then while she was growing up.  She’d lost track of Bronte completely for years, until she’d shown up to take over the old man’s practice.

That shouldn’t have bothered her, but it did.  It was completely logical and understandable that Bronte, who’d studied to be a doctor, would step in their father’s shoes, and yet it had resurrected all the old feelings of having been shunted aside, the feelings of unworthiness. 

She’d let those feelings keep her away, and now she’d missed her chance to get to know her sister.

She pushed those thoughts aside.  She wasn’t going to just accept defeat. 

It had been a blow when she’d been called in to investigate the abduction and discovered it was Bronte that had been taken.  The rogue bastards had taken her with them, though.  She didn’t know why, but she knew damned well there wouldn’t have been any reason to take Bronte if they’d meant to kill her. 

She was alive—somewhere. 

If it had been anyone but Bronte, she would’ve accepted that it was a closed case, impossible to bring to a satisfactory conclusion.  Officially, she’d done just that, closed it on orders from her superiors.  On a personal level, it sure as hell hadn’t been a closed matter, however, and when she’d found out about the reward the company was offering for information leading to the stronghold of the rogue cyborgs, she’d taken leave from the force, sold everything she had to come up with the money she needed to pursue the case ….

And here she was in the middle of no fucking where, running out of patience because she could see she wasn’t going to crack this case and find her sister. 

In a matter of a few weeks, the company she’d leased the Evening Star from was going to report it stolen, and that was the least of her worries.  She’d taken two month’s leave, and she’d been gone for three already—no job.  She’d sold everything she owned to finance her jaunt—which meant she was flat broke because failure also meant she wasn’t going to get a dime of the reward money she thought she’d get to put her life back together.

“Shit!” she growled, surging out of her seat and prowling the small cockpit area of the Evening Star.  “They’ve got to be out here somewhere!  They need basically the same things we do, damn it to hell!  It isn’t like they could just live on a rock!”

Ok, so technically, they weren’t ‘alive’ to begin with, but they’d been designed and manufactured by humans and she knew from studying the information on the ‘borgs that they had been constructed from almost as much biological material as inorganic and that meant, as far as she could see, that they needed a lot of the same things to sustain them.  She’d seen the vids of the abduction.  There was no deterioration of the skin or flesh that sheathed their titanium chassis.  She might not be a scientist, but it didn’t take that to figure out that the organic materials would’ve been damaged if they’d been living under conditions detrimental to humans.

That comforted her because she knew it meant Bronte had a better chance of staying alive until she could rescue her.  It also limited the options insofar as where the rogues were holed up.

She still didn’t quite get that. 

She wasn’t buying the story the company had spun on it. 

She’d watched the security vids and she damned sure didn’t see anything, beyond the kidnapping itself, that pointed to ‘crazed’.  They’d planned and executed a virtually flawless abduction. 

She wasn’t buying the ‘wrong place, wrong time’ scenario.  Bronte had been clueless.  They could’ve gotten in and out and she would never have tumbled to what they were doing. 

It didn’t escape her that they took Bronte after the alarm had been tripped and the private security force had arrived on the scene.  Maybe they’d taken her as a hostage, thinking that would stop them from trying to shoot them down, but not only did something like that require logical thinking, but they also hadn’t made any attempt to utilize her as a hostage, hadn’t tried to contact the ships firing on them at all. 

They hadn’t used her as a shield when they were fleeing across the roof either.  They’d been protecting her from fire. 

She stopped pacing when she reached a view port, staring out into the vast ocean of space.  She didn’t believe it was wishful thinking to interpret the abduction as she had, although she was aware that she wasn’t as completely subjective as she needed to be.  There were just too many things that pointed to a predetermined abduction to dismiss it.

The cyborgs had hit the med center with the intention of taking ‘a’ doctor, if not Bronte in particular.  They’d gone straight to her offices, emptied it, and taken her, as well.  They hadn’t even attempted to access any of the other offices.  There was nothing even remotely random about it, regardless of what those assholes at the company said to the contrary.

The question was, why?  Why Bronte?  Why a doctor at all when they were nothing but machines?  Why hadn’t they hit the company and made off with records regarding their construction?  Why not carry off a tech from the company if they thought they needed something?   

“I have determined that there is a sixty percent probability that there is a habitable star system just beyond range of my sensors,” the computer announced abruptly, breaking into Zoe’s thoughts. 

* * * *

“I have been thinking,” Kameron announced abruptly.

Damien, who had been perusing the communications from their home world, lifted his head and turned to stare at Kameron blankly, his dark brows drawn together in a frown of puzzlement as he scanned his memory for any indication that Kameron had been speaking to him before, any clue of what Kameron might have been thinking about. 

He drew a blank.  He could not recall that Kameron had said anything at all to him for several day cycles and the last communication had been regarding the length of time they had until they were relieved of sentry duty and would be allowed to return home.  He was fairly certain that they had finished that conversation.

“I have been reviewing the available females,” Kameron continued before Damien could respond, “and I have decided that I will court Dalia.  She has only two males in her household.”   

“Reuel’s woman?” Damien responded doubtfully.

Kameron glared at him.  “The law says she can take four.  Reuel cannot object.”

“He will remove your head from your shoulders,” Damien disputed.  “Why else do you think Dalia has only two partners?  She is beautiful, and a hunter besides being a proven breeder.”

“By law, he cannot object,” Kameron retorted, his face taking on a belligerent expression.

Damien stared at Kameron while he considered the situation.  After a few moments, a memory surfaced.  It flickered at the edges of his consciousness for a few moments more before it emerged completely.  “Is she not the hunter who nearly killed you when we were on Rialto?”

Kameron’s swarthy complexion took on a reddish hue.  His frown deepened.  “She did not even come close to terminating me,” he said stiffly.

“You came away from that battle with two holes in you and a broken arm,” Damien reminded him.  

“Exactly!” Kameron agreed.  “Nothing life threatening.  She terminated the two who were with me.  I escaped while she was occupied with them.”

Damien nodded, then frowned again.  “Do you think she will recall that she battled you in the past?”

Kameron shrugged.  “If she does, it is certain to make a good impression upon her that she did not succeed in terminating me.  There are not many who have faced her in battle and walked away from it.”

Damien considered that and finally nodded again.  “A female would not respect a male she could best in a fight.  It says that in the mating manual.  ‘Females will only agree to breed with strong males’.”

A look of uneasiness flickered across Kameron’s features.  “There must be more to it than that.”

Damien shrugged.  “It also says that you must be ‘attractive’ to the female and find ‘favor’.”

Kameron pursed his lips.  “What do you suppose they meant by that?”

“That is the ‘courtship’ part,” Damien responded, nodding decisively.

Kameron glared at him.  “I have accessed the manual, as well,” he retorted testily.  “It seemed to me that the female must find the male attractive, first, before she will even allow courtship.  How is one to determine that?”

Damien stared at him blankly for several moments, considering it, and then shrugged.  “I am not certain.”  He reviewed the file for anything that might explain it.  “I must suppose that a male can only determine that if the female allows him to court her.”

Kameron shoved to his feet and began to prowl the bridge restlessly.  “It also says that a female will study the male with interest if she finds him attractive,” he growled.  “I have not noted that any of the females study the cyborgs with interest, have you?  They are far too busy studying the hunters.  How did the others get a female?  That is what I would like to know!”

“Gideon CS46721 and his men, Jerico CS98300, and Gabriel CS61167 have contracted with a human female.”

Kameron jolted to a halt and swiveled around to stare at Damien, his jaw sliding to half mast.  “A human female?” he echoed after a prolonged moment of disbelieving silence. 

“It is in the news dispatches,” Damien said.

Kameron surged to the console and shoved Damien out of the way.  “Where?” he demanded.

Damien glared at him when he’d gotten to his feet again, but finally shrugged.  “They were in route to our world.  It was the group that was sent on the mission to extract a doctor.”

Kameron flicked a distracted glare at him.  “Cyborgs,” he muttered.  “Why would a human female accept Cyborgs when even the Cyborg females favor the hunters?”

Damien shrugged, although Kameron wasn’t looking at him.  “Mayhap they forced her to sign the contracts?” he guessed.

Kameron turned to glare at him.  “It says right here that she accepted them!” he said, stabbing a finger at the vid screen.  “She was assured that she would be protected if they had used coercion to get her to agree, and she accepted them.  She even claimed affection for them!”

Shoving to his feet, Kameron began to pace again.  “They are not more handsome than I,” he muttered under his breath.  “I am a series 45.  I cannot believe that they would have evolved faster than I, so it cannot be that they have a better understanding of the courtship process.”

“Gideon CS46721 has yellow hair,” Damien pointed out.  “Mayhap the female found that appealing?”

Kameron halted, staring at Damien for several moments while he accessed his memory banks.  Finally, he shook his head.  “Jerico CS98300 and Gabriel CS61167 are dark haired as we are.  It cannot be that.  There are as many of dark hair who have a female as there are who are fair.”

Damien frowned, reluctant to give up his theory, particularly when it soothed his own smarting ego to consider that the fact that he hadn’t managed to catch the interest of a female might have to do with coloring.  In fact, the more he thought about it, the more certain he was that it must be something like that.  Physically, aside from coloring—and of course a variation in facial features depending upon their genetic donors—there wasn’t a great deal of difference in any of the cyborgs.  They had been designed to be physically appealing since the company had wanted to insure versatility in their end use, but it was considered most likely that they would be sold to the government to be used for soldiers—which, in point of fact, they had been.  That being the case, they had been designed to be physically intimidating, ranging in height from six foot two to six foot five inches and heavily muscled. 

They were all prime physical specimens.  All documentation pointed to that conclusion, so there should not be any reason why one cyborg would be more appealing than another to the female—unless it had to do with the coloring. 

“I am certain it must have been the yellow hair,” he informed Kameron.  “They work as a team.  Gideon took point—secured the female—and then she accepted them all because they were a squad and she saw the logic of contracting with the squad since she would have been required to accept at least two.”

“It was not the yellow hair!” Kameron growled.  “And human females have no logic, so she would not merely have accepted because it was the logical thing to do!”

Damien planted his fists on his hips in a belligerent stance.  “What is your theory then?” he demanded.

Kameron eyed the antagonistic stance Damien had taken.  “I do not have a theory … yet.  I am still collating the data,” he snarled.

“If you do not have a theory of your own,” Damien said in a low, menacing voice, “then why have you dismissed mine?”

“Because it is not logical!”

“Emotions are not logical!” Damien shot back at him.

“Attraction is not an emotion!  It is a physical and chemical reaction between a male and female that denotes compatibility in breeding on an unconscious level!  In other words, instinct—because the human is an animal and animals are instinctually drawn to certain attributes that they subconsciously wish to pass to their off-spring!  It states that clearly in the manual!”

“Ah ha!” Damien shot back at him triumphantly.  “As you say—physical!  And, physically, we are all much the same except for a variation in the color of the hair and eyes!”

Kameron studied his companion through narrowed eyes.  “My face is not the same as yours.  In that respect we are as different from one another as the humans are.  And I must say, my gene donor was undoubtedly far more handsome than yours!”

“There is nothing wrong with my face!” Damien snarled.  “It is as symmetrical as yours!”

“Except the nose,” Kameron muttered, dismissing the argument and turning to pace again.

Damien lifted a hand to examine his nose self-consciously since there was no reflective surface nearby to check it.  “What is wrong with my nose?”

Kameron shrugged.  “Aside from the fact it is nearly a millimeter too long for your features to be completely symmetrical?  Nothing.  Mine, on the other hand, is precisely the right length, besides being aquiline, which is considered both noble and aristocratic by humans.”

Damien dropped his hand and glared at Kameron.

“Your mouth is not entirely symmetrical either.”

Damien ground his teeth together.  “I suppose your mouth is also aristocratic?” he said in a credible attempt at sarcasm, although it seemed to pass right over Kameron’s head.

“No.  It is considered sensual.”

“By whom?” Damien growled.

“It is in the manual—the part where it describes the more desirable traits in a mate.”

“Since you do not have a mate any more than I, then I will assume that your comprehension of the data is far below one hundred percent.”

“Are you suggesting that my processors are faulty?” Kameron demanded in a low, dangerous growl.

Damien smirked at him.  “I do not think that I suggested any such thing.”  He ducked the fist Kameron swung at him and landed a quick jab to Kameron’s perfect—no sensual—lips in retaliation, marring their perfection nicely.  They’d just grabbed each other around the throat when the sensor alarm went off.

Both men froze, for a handful of seconds certain that they’d inadvertently slammed into something while they were tussling. 

“Proximity breach,” the computer intoned.  “Buoy number 8-7-0.”

Kameron and Damien both shot a quick glance at the console before they looked at one another again.

“A craft?  Out here?”

“Replacement crew?” Damien hazarded a guess.

Chapter Two

“The replacement crew is not due for another six weeks,” Kameron retorted, releasing his hold on Damien as Damien released him and lurched toward his station. 

“Outer quadrant,” Damien verified when he’d located the buoy on his star chart.  “Not one of ours … unless ….”

“Not one of ours,” Kameron confirmed grimly.  “There have been no authorized flights in that vicinity.”

“Switching to buoy sensors.  It is a small craft—private, not military.”

“Scout drone?”

“Negative.  The sensors are picking up a life-form.”

“Fuck!” Kameron snarled.  “How did it get so close without tripping any of the other buoys?  You are certain it is not a drone?”

“Out of range now,” Damien responded.  “It is moving too fast—heading our way.  There was no more than a nanosecond that the sensor read it, but I am certain there is a life-form aboard.”

Kameron frowned.  “It would not be someone lost—not this far out.  Arm the missiles.  It can only be human and that cannot be good news.  Where there is one ….”

Before he could finish the thought another buoy signaled a proximity alert.  The two men exchanged grim looks.  “Protocol?” Damien asked.

“Disable or destroy if they cross the dead zone.  Get a lock on it.  I am tracking a half dozen crafts ‘ghosting’ the lead.”  He worked his console.  “Cloaking shields up.  Let us try to get around behind them.” 

“Charlie, brava, alpha,” Damien said into the communicator, “this is tango, tango, beta.  We have company.  About a half dozen guests.  Acknowledge.”

“Mark,” Kameron responded. 

Damien glanced down at the clock on his console.  “ETA the new position?”

“We will be in position before they can respond.”

“Should we hold?”

Kameron shook his head.  “Protocol is specific.  If they cross that line we engage.  Picking up four more ghosts.”

Damien’s lips tightened.  “We will have a war on our hands now.”

Kameron nodded.  “Even if we manage to take them all out, they will have our vector.  Their last known position will have them at our doorstep.  Weapons hot.  Locking on targets.”

“Tango, tango, beta this is Charlie, brava, alpha.  Confirm.”

Damien glanced at Kameron, one dark brow lifted.  “At least a round dozen now.  Whoever their scout is, he is good.  He has led them right to us.  One of ours?”

Damien shook his head.  “Reprogrammed?  I do not think that.  There are none who know our position who would allow themselves to be taken alive.”  He returned his attention to his communicator.  “Charlie, brava, alpha—confirm a dozen guests.  Set to engage.”

“Locked on targets,” Kameron announced.  “They will cross the line in ten, nine, eight ….”

“Kameron?” Damien said in a strange voice.  “I am picking up something on the scout.”

“ … three, two, one …. missile away!”

“It is a female.”

Kameron’s head snapped around so fast he felt a twinge of whiplash.  “Fuck!” he snarled, leaping to his feet and racing down the length of the craft to the particle transporter.  “Give me five seconds after I hit the deck and snatch me back!”

* * * *

Zoe felt a ripple with her sixth sense, the prickle of the fine hairs on the back of her neck.  Even as she jolted out of her seat and whirled to face the threat, however, a powerful pair of arms locked around her, tightening and slamming her against what felt like a block wall.  Her reaction was instinctive and instantaneous, and even so she had only just managed to lift her foot from the deck, aiming her knee at his groin, when she blacked out.  Consciousness returned with a disorienting wave of dizziness, partly, she thought, because she was in motion even as she regained consciousness and the motion had nothing to do with her own steam.  The man who’d grabbed her, she dimly realized, was running with her.

A jolt traveled all the way up her spine as the man carrying her paused long enough to abruptly plant her in a seat and then leapt away.  “Strap in!” he barked at her as he dropped into a forward seat.  “Reacquiring targets.”

Zoe gaped at the man, struggling to ‘reacquire’ her senses.  Her training had deserted her, however.  Even with a conscious push to penetrate the shock that had enveloped her, all she could seem to do was to stare around herself, dumbfounded, trying to grasp that the craft she was in wasn’t the same one she’d been in five seconds ago.

The two huge men with long black hair would’ve been a dead giveaway even if not for the fact that the vessel she now found herself in was barebones and clearly military in nature. 

Abruptly the word target rang through mind.  “Target?” she managed to get out in a croaking whisper.

The second man, the one who hadn’t grabbed her, whipped a penetrating glance in her direction.  His straight black brows snapped together over the bridge of his nose.  “Strap in!”

Zoe gaped at him.  By the time resentment managed to filter through her stunned surprise, he’d returned his attention to his console and missed the dagger glare she sent him.  She shot to her feet as her mind, slowly chewing on the clue ‘target’, finally arrived at a dismaying conclusion.  “Holy shit!  Don’t you dare …!”

A brief flare of light in the darkness of space made her break off. 

“That was my ship!” she gasped in disbelief, her life flashing before her eyes.  “Oh my god!  You’ve blown up my ship!  And it was a lease!  What the hell were you thinking?”

She discovered that neither man had done more than glance in her direction and her shocked anger gave way to pure rage.  “You bastards!  Do you have any idea how fucking much that thing cost?”

“Acquiring new targets.”

“Bogey heading our way.  I think they locked on us when I dropped the shields to transport you.”

The man nearest her, the one who’d snatched her off her ship, shot a hand out, grabbed her wrist and jerked.  She sprawled across his lap.  “Evasive maneuvers!”

Zoe wasn’t certain what she would’ve done if she’d had a chance to react to his highhandedness.  Before she could even fully assimilate the fact that she was sprawled across his lap, however, the craft shot into motion so fast the artificial gravity didn’t have the chance to compensate and she was plastered against him.  His hand, roughly the size of a dinner plate, was planted firmly in the middle of her back, and she suspected that was the only reason she wasn’t flattened against the back wall of the bridge. 

The moment the drag against her subsided, she began struggling to free herself from his grasp.  The hand in the middle of her back disappeared.  Before she could congratulate herself on winning her freedom, however, the same hand clamped around her waist to hold her as he surged to his feet.  He planted her in the seat she’d so lately vacated, grabbed the harnesses and quickly strapped her in.  “Stay!” he ordered, pointing a thick finger at her nose.

He’d dropped into his seat again before her shock wore off sufficiently to react. 

She glared at his profile.  “Just what the hell is going on here?” she demanded.  “If this is some sort of military ….”

She broke off as she glanced out the view port again and saw several more flashes of light and a considerable amount of floating debris—too much, she thought, for her small craft alone.   What sort of military exercise would use live rounds?  Actual ships?  This far beyond the frontier?

Slowly, it filtered into her mind that what she was watching was not a mock fight, but a deadly earnest one.  Dragging her gaze from the battle, she studied the two men for the first time, really looked at them.  The easy answers that her mind had slipped into her subconscious to account for her situation crumbled to dust.  Their hair wasn’t long because they’d been on some remote outpost too long to get a haircut.  Their hair was half way down their backs and didn’t look as if it had ever been shorn into a military cut—not in years, certainly. 

They weren’t running around in their skivvies because they were stuck out here in the middle of nowhere and didn’t have to worry about uniforms.  They weren’t wearing skivvies at all.  She didn’t know what to call what they were wearing, but it barely covered their privates.  She could see bare skin all the way up to the cord that secured the thing around their waists. 

She could almost feel the cogs in her brain click, click, clicking as she dragged her gaze from the two men and looked around the craft again, realizing abruptly that it was not a craft that had been built for the military but rather a private craft that had been modified for military use.  Fear formed a hard knot in her belly for the first time since she’d been snatched from her craft, almost completely ousting the shock that had dulled her senses before.

“Oh my fucking god!  Cyborgs!”

Both men flicked a hard glare in her direction.  It was enough to galvanize her.  Not enough to provide her with a lick of sense, unfortunately.  Instinct took over.  Her brain formed only one thought—escape.  She clawed at her restraints, managing to rip free of them before either cyborg realized she’d lost her mind.  She didn’t manage much more than that.  Before she’d done more than leap to her feet, the bully that had abducted her surged out of his seat and grabbed her.  Her instincts kicked in again but less effectively this time.  She bucked and kicked and slung her arms wildly, to no avail.  He’d snatched her off her feet, making most of her efforts completely ineffectual.  He shoved her into the seat again.  After a brief struggle, he managed to catch her flying fists and straddled her lap to hold her in place.  Gasping for breath, she glared at him furiously, more infuriated by the fact that he wasn’t even breathing hard when she felt like she was going to pass out from her own efforts. 

“Woman!  You will get us all killed!” he snarled.

Before Zoe could think of a suitable retort, the ship lurched, pitching him backwards off of her.  Unfortunately, he still had hold of her wrists and when he hit the deck, she landed hard enough on top of him to knock the breath out of her.  It took the fight out of her long enough he managed to get them both up, shove her into her seat again, and grab the restraints.  This time, however, he knotted them around her instead of using the buckles to fasten the harness.

He stood as soon as he’d finished tying her to her seat and managed to take one step toward his own seat before something slammed into the craft hard enough it sent him flying backwards.  He hit the rear wall of the bridge hard enough he left a full body impression in the metal.  Zoe was still gaping at the dents in the wall when he staggered past her, dropped into his seat and dragged his own safety harness on. 

Chaos had erupted around her in the few seconds that had ticked past like the slow beat of a metronome instead of real time.  Time bent.  It seemed to take forever to drag her gaze from the dents in the rear wall and turn to stare at the man who’d made them.  As her gaze lit on him, however, she saw that he seemed to be moving at twice normal speed while she was trapped at half speed.  She stared at him without comprehension for many moments before she turned her head with an effort and studied the other man—cyborg.  His movements were a blur of speed, as well.

“We are hit.”

“Leaking O2.”

“Seal the rear hatch.”

“Can we make it home?”

“Negative.”

“Jump?”

“Not that far.”

Both men turned to stare at her for a long moment. 

“C980?” her abductor asked.

The one with the straight, black brows shrugged.  “We will know in a moment.”

The blackout caught her unaware.  It flickered through her mind that they’d folded.  She was shaken back into conscious.  It took her several moments to realize that it wasn’t someone shaking her.  The entire ship was shimmying so hard it felt as if it was going to shake her bones to powder.  She opened her eyes, briefly, then closed them again when she discovered she was being shaken so violently she couldn’t focus her eyes.  A wave of nausea followed the brief attempt to see what was going on.  Tendrils of fear crept through her awareness as her brain slowly tried to determine what was happening.  Piecing together the conversation she’d heard between the cyborgs just before she blacked out with the frenzied rattling of the ship around them, she realized they were caught in the pull of gravity of a planet.  Her personal experience with space flight wasn’t vast, but she’d been out enough times to know that the entry didn’t even come close to being routine. 

Then, too, one of them had said they were hit.  Obviously it wasn’t anything minor.

Which was worse?  Imploding in space?  Or being splattered on some ball of dirt light years from home?  Not that she had a choice in the matter.  Apparently, they thought the odds were better in trying to land the crippled craft.

They were cyborgs.  They would behave according to logic, wouldn’t they?

That thought almost cheered her until she listened to the few clipped words they exchanged.

“We are coming in hot.”

“The thrusters?”

“Non responsive.”

“Fuck!”

Zoe jumped at the expletive, her eyes popping open of their own accord at the fury threading the single word in time for her to see her abductor throw off his safety hardness and stagger past her.  Dropping to the deck, he caught hold of a recessed latch and then paused, lifting his head to stare at the other cyborg.  “Damien, is there pressure in the lower hatch?”

“Affirmative,” Damien responded after a brief pause.

Wrenching the hatch open, the cyborg dropped from sight.  She heard noises below, which her mind deciphered as the cyborg battling his way to whatever controls he’d gone to repair. 

Then again, maybe not. 

The hammering ceased after a few moments.  “Try again!”

The voice was muffled by distance, the scream of the air streaming past the hull, and the teeth jarring rattles of everything around them.  Zoe’s heart slammed against her ribcage and tried to beat its way out of her chest as the ship bucked abruptly.  It was followed by a loud crash below and a good deal more cursing.  When the cyborg reappeared in the hatch, blood was running down his forehead from a wound at the edge of his hairline.  Zoe stared blankly at the bright red trail, wondering a little wildly if she’d been wrong and they weren’t cyborgs after all. 

He barely glanced at her as he staggered past her again and resumed his seat.  “What have we got?”

“Seventy five percent.”

“Can we set it down in one piece?”

The cyborg he’d called Damien shrugged.  “I calculate the odds at roughly 87.3 percent.”

“In our favor?”

“Affirmative.”

“Any maneuverability?”

“Not much.”

“Then there is not much point in trying to find an ideal landing spot.” 

Zoe jumped when the cyborg abruptly leaned in her direction, then discovered that he’d reached behind her.  Twisting her head, she saw he’d brought up a topical map on the vid screen behind her.  “At our current trajectory we are looking at jungle and mountains,” he muttered.  “Three degrees would give us a plateau.”

He leaned away again, lifting his arm.  Zoe was just about to drag in a breath of relief when he caught the knot of her restraints in one hand.  The muscles along his arm bunched as he tugged at it.  Apparently satisfied, he withdrew his hand and returned his attention to his console. 

“Charlie, bravo, alpha this is tango, tango, beta.  We have depleted our weaponry, dispatched five unwelcome guests, sustained damage to the vessel.  We are setting down on C980. Out.”

Zoe squeezed her eyes closed, wondering how they could be so damned calm about the fact that they were about to crash. 

But then they were cyborgs, she reminded herself.

She realized after a moment that they didn’t sound calm at all.  They sounded like professionals, holding their emotions in check to do their job.  Emotion threaded the words regardless and that thoroughly confused her.  Were they men?  Or machines?

“Kameron—give me a reading.”

She opened her eyes again to stare at Kameron—her abductor—realizing abruptly that he’d snatched her from her craft mere moments before they’d blown it up. 

Why would do that if they were cyborgs?

Didn’t that defy logic? 

She must have been close, too close, but why blow up her ship and not blow her up with it?

And who the hell were the other ‘guests’?

* * * *

Every muscle in Zoe’s body clenched reflexively as the ship slammed into the ground.  The scream of metal against rock filled her ears deafeningly.  Terror clawed at her mind as the craft continued to slide and visions of dropping off the side of the plateau filled her mind.  Her heart and breath were so labored with fright by the time the ship finally ceased to skid along the rock that she felt as if she would pass out or throw up.

She felt like doing both.  Blackness swarmed around her as she struggled with her frantic heartbeat and ragged breaths, trying to bring both under control.  She felt a tug at her restraints.  The sound of tearing cut through her drumming heartbeats in her ears and then she felt hands pulling at her, lifting her.  Faint and completely disoriented, she wasn’t certain if it was the tug of unconsciousness that prevented her from seeing or her heavy eyelids, but all her mind registered with the effort to force her eyelids up was darkness and a dizzying kaleidoscope of images.

Were they on the dark side of the planet, she wondered as she rested her cheek against the hard surface she was cradled against?

She clutched at him instinctively to catch herself as she was lowered, releasing her grip on the shoulder she’d caught only when she felt a soft, yielding surface beneath her back. 

“I can’t see,” she murmured, trying to keep the thread of panic from her voice.

“The ship is damaged.  In any case, they may have followed us when we jumped.”

Zoe frowned as she felt his hands moving over her, but his touch was impersonal as he tested her arms and legs and ran his hands lightly over her body and she realized he was checking her for injury.  “They who?”

He was silent for so long she thought he wouldn’t answer.  “Those who came with you.”

“But … nobody came with me!” she objected indignantly.  “I came alone.”

“You expect me to believe your lies when we are here because our hull was breached by a missile launched from one the ships following you?”

His voice was grim, accusing.  It roused a strengthening surge of anger.  She shoved his hands away and sat up.  “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you believe!  Who the hell are you?”

“I am Kameron CS45001.”

Zoe stared at the darkness where his face was, trying to penetrate it, struggling with the fear that instantly knotted her stomach at his confirmation of her worst fears.  “A cyborg!”

“Yes.”

Despite her fear, her mind instantly leapt to Bronte at his confirmation.  “Where the hell is my sister, you son-of-a-bitch?”

Chapter Three

Stunned surprise suspended all thought processes for a handful of moments while Kameron stared at her.  “Your sister?” he echoed blankly.

“Bronte!  Don’t you dare try to tell me you don’t know, damn it!  I know you cyborgs took her!”

Kameron sat back on his heels and studied the woman.  His night vision was not sufficient for him to study her as he would have liked to, but it was certainly adequate enough to read her expressions.  Unless she was very good at subterfuge, both her surprise at his accusation and her anger were genuine.  “You are Doctor Bronte’s sister?” he asked in a voice he hardly recognized as his own, scarcely aware, if it came to that, that he’d spoken the question aloud since her announcement had thrown him into complete chaos.

“Kameron!  We have trouble!  Is the woman injured?”

“Not that I can determine,” Kameron said slowly, rising to his feet.  “Company?”

“Affirmative.  It will not take them long to locate us.”

He studied the woman a moment longer and finally turned on his heel and followed Damien from the cabin. 

Zoe felt her jaw drop in disbelief as she heard their departure.  From the noises emanating from the front of the ship, it sounded as if they were trashing what was left of the craft and it occurred to her that they were grabbing whatever they could quickly lay hand to.

It also occurred to her, forcefully, that they had no intention of taking her with them.  If they had, they wouldn’t have left her, would they?

Rolling off the bunk, she found her way to the door of the cabin by waving her arms in front of her until she encountered the wall and then feeling along it until she found the opening.  She didn’t know how they could see a damned thing.  She couldn’t see anything but deeper shadows within shadows.  She could only follow their movements by the noise they were making.   “I demand that you take me to my sister!”

One of the cyborgs stopped.  The other continued as if she hadn’t spoken.  She could tell by the cessation of half the noise.  Somehow, she knew it was Kameron who had ignored her and Damien who’d stopped, and that he was staring at her.   “Who is her sister?”

“She says that she is Bronte’s sister.”

“I am Bronte’s sister!” she snapped indignantly.

“Gideon’s Bronte?  The human female doctor?”

“What do you mean, Gideon’s Bronte?  Is that the one that took her?”

“Come,” Kameron said, ignoring the question.  Before Zoe could decide whether he had included her in that command, Damien dispelled the notion. 

“We are leaving her?”

“She will slow us down.  Her people will come for her.”

In her haste to follow them as they opened a hatch and exited the craft, Zoe tripped over something lying in the floor and nearly sprawled out.  Cussing under her breath, she hobbled after them, discovering once she’d reached the gang plank they’d lowered that it was actually a good bit lighter outside than inside the vessel—not surprising since the craft was like a cave and it wasn’t completely dark outside. 

“You are not leaving me!” she said when she’d paused in the hatchway to get her bearings.

Damien threw a glance at her over his shoulder, but Kameron didn’t even slow up.   It was Kameron who responded, however.  “Your people are coming.  Stay with the vessel.  They will find you.”

Zoe trotted down the gang plank.  “I don’t know or care who’s coming, damn it!  I’ve spent three months wandering around bumfuck nowhere and every dime I have—had to my name to find my sister, and I’m not going back without her!”

Kameron stopped so abruptly and whirled to face her that she damned near plowed into him.  There was just enough light to see that he was thoroughly pissed off and damned scary looking.  “She is not here … and she would not return with you if you found her.  She has contracted with Gideon, Jerico, and Gabriel.  She is their woman now.”

Zoe gaped at him.  Slowly, angry disbelief usurped her shocked dismay.  “You expect me to believe she willingly contracted with … with a pack of cyborgs?  Well, I don’t!” she said forthrightly.  “I want to see her—talk to her.”

Kameron hunched his shoulders and lowered his face until he was staring at her almost nose to nose.  “Humans lie.  Cyborgs do not.  Stay here,” he snarled through gritted teeth.

Zoe stared uneasily at his back as he turned and stalked off again.  She glanced back at the wrecked craft, scanned the sky, and then turned to stare at the cyborgs once more.  It scared the hell out of her to think of following them, but she’d risked everything to find Bronte.  She wasn’t going to give up now, not when she’d found cyborgs who knew where she was.  Briefly, she considered allowing them to think they’d left her and then shadowing them, but she was very much afraid they would know if she tried and beyond that, she wasn’t too keen about being completely alone on an alien world.  She trotted behind them at a jog, trying to catch up. 

They halted abruptly—not to allow her to catch up to them, but to survey the drop from the edge of the plateau. 

She stopped, studying their rigid profiles.  Obviously demanding wasn’t going to get her anywhere.  “I want to go with you.”

Both of them turned to stare at her. 

“Please?” she asked in her best, most ingratiating tone, bestowing her most helpless, pleading look upon them.

The two cyborgs stared at her for a long moment and then glanced at one another.  Some silent communication obviously passed between them.

“She will get us killed,” Kameron said grimly.

“I won’t!  I swear I won’t do anything to slow you down or … or … anything.”

Kameron studied her suspiciously.  She could tell he wasn’t buying the helpless female routine.

Damien looked more susceptible.  She smiled at him encouragingly.  “I’m a cop.  I know how to use a weapon.  I can handle myself.  I could be an asset.” 

Kameron’s expression was clearly disbelieving.  “Fine,” he capitulated.  Grabbing her abruptly, he jerked her to him and pushed his face into hers.  “But I will warn you, human, if you slow us down, or try to give away our position, I will leave you … and I will make certain that you do not follow.”

Zoe gulped.  “It hadn’t occurred to me to try anything like that,” she lied.

“If it had not, you would not have assured us that you would not,” he growled.

In spite of all she could do, Zoe felt her face heat.  It was a dead giveaway, and she knew it, but she was nothing if not persistent and there was nothing to be done once one started down the road of lies but staunchly defend them.  “You were the one that said it,” she reminded him.  “After I’ve come all this way to find my sister, I’m certainly not going to screw up my chances by helping whoever that is trying to catch you.”

His lips were still flattened in a thin line of disbelief as he straightened away from her, but he let it drop. 

“We will climb down here.”

Zoe stared at him and inched a little closer to the drop off.  “You have got to be fucking kidding me!”

“She cannot make this climb.  I will carry her.”

Zoe had been on the point of flicking a smile of appreciation in Damien’s direction, but the last comment dried the smile on her lips.  She stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. 

“I will carry her.  You will guard our backs,” Kameron said decisively.

Before she could even think of an objection to such an insane plan, he grasped her wrists and bound them together with something he’d been carrying.  She was still reeling with shocked disbelief when he leaned down to hook her arms around his neck, settling her on his back.  It was instinct, not thought, that made her coil her legs around his waist as he straightened.  “Now, wait just a minute ….”

Her throat closed as tightly as if someone had wrapped their fingers around it and squeezed as he crouched and went over the side.  She tightened her arms and legs around him, struggling to breathe past the terror that constricted her lungs.  She made the mistake of glancing down, once, and thereafter kept her face burrowed tightly against the back of his head.

“You cannot fall,” he said after a time.  “This is why I bound your wrists.”

She nodded instead of pointing out that she’d damned well fall if he did, and what’s more, she would be on the bottom when they landed.

Not that that would make a hell of a lot of difference to her, but she supposed it might cushion his fall somewhat.  “I hope you can see better than I can,” she commented shakily when she finally nerved herself to open her eyes a slit.

“I can.”

Strangely enough that didn’t particularly comfort her.  “I don’t suppose they gave you mountain goat DNA while they were at it?” she asked after a while, trying for a touch of graveyard humor.

He stiffened slightly.  “No.”

“It was a joke.”

“I have no sense of humor.  I am a cyborg.”

“Right.  I almost fucking forgot that.”

He was silent for several moments.  “Did you?”

She was on the point of informing him that climbing down the side of a cliff with a woman hanging from his neck wasn’t the sort of thing human men did—even if they were insane and as strong as a bull—but there was a note of something in his voice that gave her pause.  “You don’t … act like I’d think a cyborg would,” she said tentatively, realizing the moment she said it that it was true.

He startled her by catching the hint of doubt in her voice.  “I am a machine with artificial intelligence.  You are simply unfamiliar with my kind.”

That was certainly true, in more ways than one.  She hadn’t ever encountered a cyborg before.  She’d seen pictures of them, studied the schematics, but she’d never interacted with one.

And she’d been interacting with this one from the moment he’d grabbed her off of her ship and transported her onto his. 

Talking to him, moreover, was nothing in the world like talking to the computer on her ship.  Maybe it was just that he had far superior and more sophisticated programming?

Relief flooded her when she realized they’d reached the ground—thought they had.  It was so dark by now, she could see very little but he’d stopped and she had the sense that his feet were planted firmly on the ground.  He verified her guess by crouching down and uncurling her legs from his waist.  “Why is the company so deter ….”  She broke off as it dawned on her abruptly that the ‘unwelcome guests’ they’d spoken of had to be company ships.  The sneaking bastards!  They’d set her up!  Offered her a reward, given her all the information they had, and planted a damned tracking device on her!  Either they’d hoped she would succeed where they’d failed, or the bastards had been dangling her as bait!

“To destroy us?” Kameron finished her sentence for her.

“It’s the company that’s following us, isn’t it?”

He caught her wrists, untying them, but she sensed that he was studying her face and wondered if he could see as well as it seemed he could.  “Most likely,” he said finally instead of accusing her again of having led the pack to them.  “If we do not move fast, we will find out.”

Releasing her hands, he turned and moved away.  Zoe was so busy trying to work the circulation back into hands that moments passed before she realized the sounds he was making were diminishing rapidly.  She lifted her head then, trying to scan the area around her in the darkness. The effort was futile.  She couldn’t penetrate the darkness, couldn’t discern much of anything but darker patches in the blackness, which could have been something solid and might been nothing more than a shadow.  A mixture of fear and anger welled inside her as the realization hit her that she couldn’t hear Kameron’s movements at all anymore. 

The first thought that struck her was that he’d tricked her.  He’d pretended to capitulate to her demand to go with them and taken her down the mountain and abandoned her.  Before that suspicion could become a certainty, however, she realized Damien had been climbing down behind them—mostly because she heard him. 

Relief flickered through her.  She had one more chance to latch onto a cyborg to prevent herself from being left alone in the dark, unfamiliar terrain. 

She was so intent on listening to Damien’s descent that a shockwave rippled through her when a hand abruptly clamped onto her wrist. 

“You said that you would keep up.”

Zoe’s throat closed with painful relief when she recognized Kameron’s voice.   From out of nowhere tears stung her eyes and nose.  She swallowed convulsively several times to kill the urge, embarrassed that the impulse had struck her at all and vaguely angry because it had and she knew it was because she was more afraid than she’d allowed herself to think.  “I was waiting for Damien,” she muttered.  “We’re not waiting for him?”

“He has no need.”

And she did?  Of course she did.  It irritated her that he knew that.  She wanted to inform him, again, that she could take care of herself, but she decided to refrain when it occurred to her that he might take her up on that. 

Instead, she followed him the best she could, chaffing at her helplessness in the situation.  After she’d tripped and plowed into him the second or third time, he stopped abruptly.  “You are making too much noise.”

His voice sounded neutral, but she suspected there was an accusation in there.  “Sorry,” she said stiffly.  “I’ll try to be more careful.  It’s so dark I can’t see worth a shit.”

She jumped when his hand touched her face.

“You cannot see at all.”

There didn’t seem to be much point in trying to deny it, but she sure as hell saw no point in admitting it either. 

“We will make better time if I carry you.  You are too small to keep up.”

She eyed him resentfully even though she knew it was nothing but the truth.  As long as his legs were she would’ve had a hard time keeping up with him if she hadn’t been blind.  It still rankled to find herself slotted in the ‘helpless, useless female’ file when she’d worked so hard for years to gain the respect of her fellow officers on the force.  If she had to point out that she wasn’t either, though, she might as well save her breath. 

Taking her silence as acquiescence, he guided her hand to his shoulder and crouched down expectantly.  Uttering a long suffering sigh, she placed her other palm on his back and felt her way up to his shoulder for a grip.  Leaning in to him, she leapt up on his back.  He hooked his arms beneath her thighs to help support her as she wrapped her legs around him and then he straightened. 

She hadn’t counted on her heightened awareness of him once she was perched on his back, mostly, she supposed, because she had been in a constant state of shock, fear, and total chaos since the moment he’d grabbed her on her ship.  She hadn’t been in any state to cope with the barrage, much less to focus on any one thing.  Enveloped in darkness, she couldn’t un-focus her attention from him.

She certainly hadn’t thought of it as a caress at the time, but her palm tingled from the feel of his flesh beneath her hand as she’d settled it on his bare back and searched for his shoulder by feel.  His skin had felt like—warm silky—smooth and soft to the touch.  At the same time, the muscles beneath it had rippled at her touch, had felt as hard as granite.  His long hair, which tickled her face, was as silky, she suspected far softer to the touch than her own.

He smelled—wonderful.  She was lightheaded from trying to drag his elusive, tantalizing scent into her lungs to identify it before she even realized what she was doing.  Beneath the barrage of foreign scents that clung to his skin, though—of soap, the leather of his chair, the faint tang of synthetic materials that made up every surface within the craft that he’d brushed against—she detected the faint, musky scent of the man himself, the smell that was as uniquely his as his fingerprints.  Like wispy tendrils of mist it meandered through her system as she sucked it in and finally coiled low in her belly and began to radiate a warming glow through her. 

She shifted uncomfortably against him, trying to throw off the effects of it, but that only made it worse, made her abruptly conscious of the triangle of her femininity pressed intimately against him—her breasts and her sex.  Her nipples stood erect at the slight movement, forming hard little points that dug into his back.  Worse, the warmth in her belly seemed to be flowing outward from her sex, the heat condensing into moisture.

She wasn’t certain if her sex just seemed to grow hotter and more moist or if it was only that she abruptly became acutely self-conscious about it, but once her focus shifted to her cleft she couldn’t get her mind off of it.

She hoped to god it didn’t feel as hot and wet to him as it felt to her!

“Be still!” he growled when she shifted again.

She subsided, realizing there was no way she could hold on to him and put any distance at all between them.  She debated demanding he put her down, but was reluctant to do that for fear he’d notice why she wanted him to, or ask why.  

Giving in to the inevitable, she relaxed against him, shifting her arms for a more comfortable hold and trying to think about something else, anything else. 

It occurred to her abruptly that her mind, and everything else, was screaming ‘man’ when he wasn’t a man at all.  Why was she aroused—and there was no denying that—when she might just as well have been plastered against the hood of a car?  A cleansing unit?  A computer, for god sake!

Because he didn’t feel like a machine. 

She hadn’t adequately considered what she was up against, she realized.  In spite of everything, while she’d been collecting information to help her find Bronte, in the back of her mind she’d thought ‘machine run amok’.  She knew from reading up on it that they were not metal men as the old androids were.  Basically, they were human droids.  Internally, they were all machine—a titanium alloy chassis that made them like a walking, talking forklift, a processor for a brain that meant they could carry around and process more data, faster, than the most brilliant genius.  Externally, they were all human, but even that ‘weakness’ had been offset by nanotechnology.  Similar to the human immune system, they carried nanobots, except that their ‘immune’ system repaired damage to both their organic and inorganic physiology many times faster than antibodies. 

She’d still expected them to sound like her onboard computer, smell like synthetics, feel like a machine, and move with the awkward jerkiness of the old androids.

The fact that none of that was the case had totally thrown her for a loop. 

The rationalization cooled her wayward libido.  It didn’t get rid of it completely.  She still felt the discomfort of unappeased arousal, but she could dismiss that.  After all, she reasoned, it had been a while since she’d had sex.  It was understandable that she would react as she had to what appeared to be a very virile male. 

That thought led her to the company and she wondered abruptly why they’d mass produced something so lifelike as the cyborgs to begin with.  Playing at being gods, she wondered?  Was there any logical reason for them to have developed the cyborgs as they had?  Or had they done it just because they could?  Money was undoubtedly the main motivating factor, but she suspected egotism had figured into it.  Quite possibly, it had even been cheaper to produce them with so much organics.  They could grow that, after all, in their labs—all of the biological materials they’d used in the making of them. 

She didn’t buy their hype about making them so human-like to make people accept them more easily and be more comfortable around them.  She supposed it did, but she didn’t think that had been their motive. 

On the other hand, she knew a lot of them had ended up in bordellos for both men and women. 

She wished that thought hadn’t popped into her mind, because the moment it did, she also remembered that they’d been designed and programmed to be pleasure bots because it was easier and cheaper to mass produce them for any situation than to be design specific. 

Kameron was not only anatomically correct, he’d been programmed as a pleasure bot at the same time he’d been programmed as a soldier.

The heat and wetness was back in her coochie faster than she could gather spit into her suddenly dry mouth.  She shivered as the cool night air caressed her overly warm skin.

“You are cold?”

Not hardly.  “I’m fine,” she lied.

“You shivered,” he persisted, a note in voice that told her he wasn’t swallowing the lie.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, drop it!” she muttered irritably.

He stiffened at the anger in her voice, but she didn’t care.  She wasn’t about to tell him a damned thing, especially since it didn’t seem as if he’d noticed.

She discovered she didn’t like him being angry with her.

She told herself that was completely understandable, given her situation.

She almost believed it.

“It’s just … fatigue.”

Some of the stiffness eased from his shoulders.  “I am carrying you,” he pointed out.

“I’m human,” she snapped irritably.  “So sue me!  I’m weaker than you.  There!  Happy now that I’ve admitted it?  Feel better?”

“You did not need to admit it,” he said after a few moments.

“Because you knew it already,” Zoe said testily.  “Arrogant asshole.”

“I am not arrogant.”

“And I’m not horn … uh … human,” she finished weakly, mentally cursing herself for her temper. 

“Horn?”

Well, shit!  “It was a slip of the tongue.”

“Because you had intended to say something else,” he responded coolly.  It didn’t take him long to sort through his memory banks.  On the other hand, maybe he had noticed the signs of arousal.  “Horny?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snow White & the Seven Hunks

By

Kimberly Zant

( c ) copyright by Kimberly Zant, July 2009

Cover Art by Jenny Dixon, March 2015

ISBN 978-1-60394-885-2

New Concepts Publishing

Lake Park, GA 31636

www.newconceptspublishing.com

This is a work of fiction.  All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact.  Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

Chapter One

“Blackmail is such an ugly word!  And it’s completely untrue, besides.  I’m giving you the option of helping me out and repaying me at the same time.”

The alternative being criminal charges, I thought, feeling stomach churning fear as I stared with horrified fascination at the woman’s smug expression and glittering eyes—Glenda—the wicked witch of the west.  With an effort, I dragged my gaze from her and glanced at my sister to see how she’d taken the ‘offer’. 

Her chin and lower lip were trembling.  I didn’t know whether I most wanted to smack her for dragging me in to her mess or cuddle her—she was my older sister, but I’d fought most of her battles for her over the years until it was pretty much second nature and that helpless look of hers rarely failed to arouse a sense of protectiveness in me.  The angelic damsel in distress look she’d cultivated over the years that had such a devastating effect on the male of the species, however, was completely ineffectual on the female—unless said female happened to be a lesbian.  I slid a hopeful glance at the wicked witch again.

No such luck!  She wasn’t completely unmoved.  Her lips had flattened in an expression of disgust and the look in her eyes was patently disbelieving. 

I released a dejected sigh.

The shit fairy had attended my birth and sprinkled fairy manure over me, cursing me forever afterward to get the shit end of the stick in any given situation.  Brandy, my sister, had often accused me of having optical-rectum-itis, but how I could have any other outlook was beyond me.  It never failed.  If I had a half a dozen options, I unerringly chose the absolute worst.  If I bought something, it was broken when I got home.  If it was under warranty, it broke the day after the warranty expired.  If I got into a line—any line—that line stopped moving.   There didn’t seem to be any aspect in my life that was unaffected by the ‘shit curse’. 

Nearing thirty-three, I’d optimistically entered a half dozen relationships since high school and every one had ended in disaster—the level of the disaster changed, depending upon just how smitten I was with the object of my affections, but they’d all ended badly, regardless.  I’d become a man hater after the last bastard had wiped me out and walked off with everything I owned, not that that was anything I could say in public because then I would have to explain that I was still heterosexual, I just wanted another option. 

The worst part of my current situation was that I couldn’t even claim complete innocence.  I’d helped my sister get the damned job in the first place and I was guilty by association even if I hadn’t been related to her.  Glenda didn’t believe me when I’d tried, and as much as it made me want to do something violent, in all honesty I couldn’t really blame her.  I knew I looked guilty. 

It occurred to me that my life might have been completely different if Brandy had had a convenient accident sometime after birth.  Maybe the shit curse would’ve followed her to the grave and left me alone, but that was just wishful thinking, I knew.  I was stuck with it, just like I was stuck with her as a sister—the bane of my existence from the time I was old enough to realize even parents could be conned into believing their most beautiful duckling was as wonderful as she appeared—not terribly bright but as sweet as the day was long.

Ha!  I hadn’t instigated the hair-pulling contests that had punctuated our teen years together—actually a good bit of our childhood before that.  But did they believe me?  No!  And Glenda wasn’t buying it either.

Well, at least this once I wasn’t catching the entire blame, even though I shouldn’t have caught any of it!

How was I supposed to know my lame brain of a sister would decide to ‘borrow’ money from the boss?  I admit, I’d wondered where she got the damned money for that luxury trip to Vegas, but—what could I say?—I was an idiot when it came to Brandy.  I’d bought her lie hook, line, and sinker—she’d won it on a scratch off! 

Did I feel stupid, now, for having spent two solid weeks trying to convince her to invest her ‘winnings’ instead of blowing it in Vegas?

Hell yes!

For a moment as I stared at her, the image danced in my head of curling my fingers around her slender throat and choking the life out of her.  Could I plead temporary insanity, I wondered?  How many years would it be before I could get out? 

I calculated the minimum and decided, as rotten as life was, I didn’t particularly want free room and board until I was sixty. 

“Ok.  You convinced us.  We’ll do it!” I said quickly, before I could change my mind.  “I just want to say, for the record here, that it was her!  I didn’t have anything to do with it, and I sure as hell didn’t get any of the money!”

Brandy dropped the ‘innocent as the driven snow’ and ‘delicate angel’ pose so quickly, Dr. Jekyll would’ve been amazed at the swift transformation.  “You bitch!  I can’t believe you’re blaming all this on me!”

“Ladies!  Ladies!” Glenda snapped harshly.  “I know you don’t want me to send for security!”

Boy was I relieved!  I was beginning to think I was going to have to defend myself and Brandy could go from angel to psycho in eight seconds or less! 

“Do you agree to the terms, too?” Glenda asked Brandy.

Brandy glared at her belligerently.  “And what if I don’t?”

“I’ll call the cops and tell them you embezzled my money,” Glenda said coolly.

I could tell Brandy was wondering if she could get away with leaping over the desk and choking the life out of Glenda, but she finally subsided.  “If I agree to this, I want something legal saying that you won’t file any kind of legal charges related to your accusation or any lawsuit in the future for any kind of damages.”

I gaped at Brandy, dismayed that my brain had been on holiday and I hadn’t thought about that!  “Me, too!”

A look of satisfaction, respect, and irritation flitted across Glenda’s features.  “I’ll have my attorney work that up.  In the meantime, you two can report to the set.  My partner wants to check out the wardrobe and give you both a screen test.”

I gaped at her, trying to sort this in my mind.  It didn’t sound at all like the explanation she’d given us before we’d agreed to her demands.

“What do you mean, set?” Brandy demanded immediately.  “You said it was going to be a reality thing filmed in a house—hidden cameras and all that!  You’re saying now that I’m supposed to prance around naked and spread my legs in front of a damned filming crew?”

I really liked the way Brandy switched from ‘we’ to ‘I’, but I wanted to know so I just kept my mouth shut.

Glenda looked at her sourly.  “It’s still a set, moron!” she said through gritted teeth. 

Bad move!  I could tell Glenda wasn’t accustomed to confronting gorillas in lamb suits or she would’ve known better than to provoke Brandy by suggesting she was an idiot just because that was the façade she preferred. 

Ok, so she wasn’t the brightest light bulb in the pack.  She knew it, but she didn’t really mind it when people thought it was cute.  It was the tone and that particular word that aroused her hostility faster than greased lightning.  She came to her feet.  “Call me moron again, bitch, and you can add assault and battery to the charges, because I’m going to stomp a mud puddle in your ass!”

Glenda eyed her somewhat warily, but she wasn’t too bright either.  “Oh, I’m pretty sure the charges I already have against you will be sufficient.”

Brandy thought that over, apparently decided it was close enough to an apology and sat back down. 

As I said ….

“Now that we have that settled,” Glenda said, smiling thinly, “if you two will come with me, we’ll take a ride out to the set we’ve leased and the director can do a screen test.”

The dread I felt building inside me as the three of us trooped outside, climbed into Glenda’s broom, a gas guzzling SUV, and drove out to the ‘set’ was more closely akin to a trip to the dentist to get teeth chiseled out of my jawbone than anything else I could think of.  Dread was a feeling I was intimately acquainted with.  Any hint of unpleasantness was enough to spark it and it built until the object of my fears was finally surmounted—which often took a long time since I was also a procrastinator and tended to avoid unpleasantness when I could as long as I could.

Brandy either had more spine than I did, or, which I suspected, she just thrived on disharmony and chaos.  I might have been prejudiced, but there was no getting around the fact that she created a ruckus whenever life got too dull for her, resurrecting old battles if she couldn’t think of fodder for a new one. 

I’d dragged my feet on the way out and ended up in the backseat while Brandy perched in the front.  This added to my distress since the ride was a fairly lengthy one and I had a real problem with motion sickness.  Glenda looked me over with disapproval when we got out of the car, but I ignored her, struggling with the nausea as I looked the place over. 

There was nothing really ‘threatening’ that I could see about the outside of the house beyond the fact that it was situated a goodly distance from any other house, having been erected in a rural setting.  It was actually rather quaint to my mind since it was an old house built in the Victorian style and I’d always been rather fond of the girly frill of that particular style.

“Creepy,” Brandy said with a shudder after she’d looked it over.  “It reminds me of that house from the horror movie about a psycho.”

Thank you, Brandy!

“It’s been completely restored,” Glenda said coolly.  “It’s quite comfortable.  It was chosen for its atmosphere.”

“Cow dung?” Brandy asked sweetly.  “How far are we from a shopping center?”

“There won’t be a lot of time for shopping excursions while we’re filming,” Glenda said pointedly, leading the way through the flower-covered arch over the front gate and up the walkway to the wrap-around front porch. 

The pastoral scene of peaceful bygone days vanished as soon as we stepped into the wide hallway that bisected the lower floor of the house.  Ladders, wires, and young men cluttered the hallway, making it a hazard.  The flocked, floral wall paper, sconces and gleaming hardwood floor certainly seemed in keeping with the antiquity of the house, but it was hard to get the feel of stepping back in time with all the dangling wires. 

“Where’s Gabe?” Glenda asked, drawing my attention to the man perched on the top of the ladder.

“Upstairs in the playroom,” the man responded slowly, examining me and Brandy with curiosity—mostly Brandy.

Brandy, I discovered was more than curious.  He was attractive enough to bring her femininity to the fore and she’d adopted the ‘I don’t know you’re there, but notice my beautiful breasts’ pose.

Glenda immediately retraced her steps to the stairs.  I followed her uncertainly since she hadn’t commanded us to stay put, wondering uneasily what the ‘playroom’ was all about.  I didn’t believe for a moment that it was a child’s room. 

“This way, Brandy,” Glenda said briskly when she discovered Brandy was still preening for the young man on the ladder and not behind her as she’d assumed. 

Pretending she’d been fascinated by the work, and not the three young men trying to do it, Brandy sashayed to the stairs and managed a credible model’s walk up the steps to the second floor.  The sway of her hips and the bounce of her boobs kept the young men in the foyer mesmerized until she disappeared from their view.

I’d been huffing slightly with imminent panic attack, but it hit me as Brandy joined us on the upper landing that she was in her element.  Brandy was always convinced she was being watched.  Some people might mistake that for paranoia, but I’d long since figured out what it really was—a desire to be watched and the certainty that she held center stage where ever she went.

I had to admit she usually did.  I would’ve liked to put it down to bountiful breasts and I was sure that was a big part of it, but the plain fact was that Brandy was a man magnet—or maybe like an incubus?  She seemed to suck their intelligence when she walked by.  They tended to forget what they were doing and where they were going.  I’d lost count of the number of men I’d seen walk into walls or fall over something when she strolled past them. 

The young man downstairs fell off the ladder. 

I knew when I heard the crash that Brandy had struck again. 

The other two had been equally mesmerized.  The mishap wasn’t followed by exclamations or male laughter and ribbing—because the other two were too enthralled to realize the third member had fallen.

Glenda dashed back to the railing.  “Did you break anything?”

“I’m fine.  I just slipped off the ladder.”

“I meant equipment!” Glenda snapped.  “That stuff’s expensive.”

“We’re just putting up the cables,” the young man responded, his voice equally taut with annoyance.

Brandy preened, knowing the mishap was because they were watching her.  I struggled with the embarrassment I felt for the men, who were probably too shaken to feel it for themselves.

Apparently satisfied but still annoyed, Glenda turned and stalked down the upper hallway to the end and tapped on the door. 

“What is it now?” a deep male voice growled from inside the room.  We heard a light, brisk tread and the door was snatched open.  A grizzly bear filled the portal, his shaggy black hair a wild tangle, his dark brows almost meeting above the bridge of his aquiline nose, and his hard mouth a thin line of displeasure. 

Surprise flickered across his face when he met Glenda in the doorway, but he didn’t look a lot more pleased to discover it was Glenda.

I liked him better already if he disliked Glenda as much as I did.

“I brought the … women over for a wardrobe fitting.”

Interest flickered in his eyes.  He pushed past Glenda and looked me and Brandy over.  A faint frown creased his brows.  “I thought you were getting a couple of college girls?  These two look a little old.”

I felt my jaw go slack with surprise and dawning outrage.  Brandy didn’t take nearly as long to warm up as I did. 

“Excuse you?” she demanded indignantly.

Glenda and the man I assumed was Gabe both glared at her. 

“You two go in that room behind you and try on something from the wardrobe while I talk to the director.”

Wondering who was going to win the battle of wills, I shrugged and opened the door.  My money was on Gabe and I was feeling better by the moment—until it occurred to me to wonder if Brandy and I were going to end up in jail. 

Brandy stalked into the room behind me and slammed the door.  “Can you believe that bastard!” she snarled.

I shrugged.  “He was surprised,” I said pointedly.  “He was expecting college girls.”

“I don’t look a day over twenty-five!” Brandy informed me in a challenging voice.

She looked thirty-six to me, but then I knew she was and she had the maturity of a twenty-year-old.  I supposed in that sense, she averaged to about twenty five and if I figured in her IQ ….  I wasn’t about to point any of that out, however, when she was clearly spoiling for a fight.  “Look at the good side—if he wins the argument, we don’t have to do this.”

The comment sucked some of the wind from Brandy’s sails.  She settled to thinking that over while I crossed the room to the rack of clothing and pulled a ‘costume’ out to examine it.  Discovering it was nothing but a black thong, a pair of thigh high stockings, and a bra with most of the cup missing, I looked around for the rest of the outfit. 

“Brandy?” I said uneasily when I’d searched half the rack and didn’t find anything but lingerie.

“Yes, but what happens to our deal with the bitch if he decides he doesn’t want us?” Brandy demanded, unwilling to be completely distracted from the fight she’d been building up to.

“Uh … I guess we’ll have to try to throw ourselves on her mercy and work it out some other way,” I said distractedly.  “There’s nothing here but lingerie—and even half of that’s missing.”

“It’s a porn, stupid!” Brandy snapped.  “Could you just focus?”

Resentment flickered through me, but I was too horrified by the wardrobe to feel it as I might have otherwise.  “Yes, but ….  My god!  This stuff is indecent!”

“Really?”

She sounded intrigued.  Joining me at the rack, she pulled first one and then another out to study it, giggling and blushing with rising excitement.  “My god!  We can’t run around in this!”

She sounded a lot more enthusiastic about it than I was.  I looked around for another rack, certain this was just part of the wardrobe.  I didn’t want my sister to see me in this stuff!  I sure as hell couldn’t picture myself strolling around a house full of men in it.

Especially college jocks!

They’d laugh!

“Ohh!  I like this one, Nicole.  I’m going to try this on!”

I gaped at Brandy. 

“You aren’t serious?” I asked, appalled.

She gave me a look and then preened.  “She said try something on.  I’ll bet when he sees me in this he’ll change his tune!”

God!  I wished I had her conceit … uh … self-confidence!  Then again, I supposed if I looked like her I would have.  “I think I’d rather do time.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Brandy snapped.  “God!  It’s just sex, Nicole!  And if the guys I’ve already seen are anything to go by, it won’t be a hardship!  When was the last time you got laid by anybody that looked that good?”

Never?

Actually, that wasn’t true.  I had a penchant for ‘pretty’.  If I couldn’t get pretty, I just did without.  I’d done without a lot!  “I don’t know,” I mumbled.  “A year, maybe?”

“Right!”

I glared at her.  Ok, so maybe I hadn’t been with anyone in quite a while that looked that good, but as good looking as that guy Gabe was, he was also scary big and I doubted he was going to be one of the ‘hunks’.  I hadn’t actually gotten much of a look at the three men downstairs.  I had the impression that they were easy on the eyes, and well built, but I thought they probably weren’t on the menu either. 

Brandy was busy shucking her clothes, I discovered.  Turning my back on her, I picked the outfit that seemed to have the most fabric and reluctantly shed my own clothes, glad I hadn’t listened to Brandy and gotten a haircut.  It might not look that great for someone my age to have hair as long as mine was, but I decided it was about to come in handy.  I always wore it back so that it wasn’t in my way, but it fell nearly halfway down my buttocks and I was about to play Lady Godiva!  Fuck Snow White!

Brandy squealed when the door abruptly opened.  “We’re not ready yet!”

Gabe and Glenda came in anyway. 

I was in the process of pulling on the black thong that went with the corset I’d selected.  I jackknifed upright and threw a wide-eyed, wary look toward the door, feeling my face begin to flash like a neon sign when I met Gabe’s gaze. 

“Here, Nicole!  Lace me up!” Brandy commanded, nudging me and thankfully distracting me. 

Trying to ignore the two standing at the door studying us, feeling a lot more inclined to strangle Brandy than help her, I focused on tightening her laces.  “That’s too loose,” she complained when I got to the bottom.

“That’s as tight as it goes!” I snapped.

“Oh!  Well, they’ll have to get me a smaller one!  This is downright baggy at the waist!”

Leaving her to preen, I turned my back to the two at the door, grabbed my own corset and slipped the straps over my arms.  When I wrapped it around my waist, I discovered the damned thing didn’t actually have a bra cup! 

“Let me give you a hand with that.”

The deep male voice directly at my shoulder sent a jolt through me.  I flicked a startled look up and behind my shoulder and discovered him looming over me.  “I can get it!”

He hadn’t waited for an invitation, however.  By the time I found my tongue, he’d grabbed the sides of the back and was working the hooks through the eyes.  His touch almost seemed impersonal and I relaxed fractionally, telling myself it was no different than when I’d helped Brandy.

It was of course—to me—but I couldn’t tell he was getting worked up about it. 

He turned me around by my shoulders to have a look when he’d finished, nudging my chin with his index finger.  “How old are you?”

My heart did a little two-step.  “Thirty-six,” I lied after flicking a quick look at Brandy. 

“She’s thirty-two,” the wicked witch immediately disputed.  “Her sister’s thirty-six.  I think we could tack ten on that, though, and people would go for it.  You see what I mean, though?   This could really broaden our viewers.  We could pull in the cougars by billing them as forty something, the BDSM crowd with the playroom, and everybody else with the straight stuff.  They look good enough, I think, to appeal to a wide age group—and they’re both ordinary enough to get the realism you wanted—girl next door and that sort of thing.  Nicole, here, will be perfect for the bondage.  She’s a total submissive.”

I sent her an indignant look.  Sure, I resembled that remark.  I’d been a doormat most of my life, but, put that way, she made it sound as if I actually enjoyed being picked on!

Gabe studied me thoughtfully and reached to grasp the hair I’d very carefully covered myself with, tossing it behind my back.  I winced, but I hesitated to slap his hands.

I thought about it, but I didn’t do it. 

“Turn around—half turn.  Stop!  Turn.  Stop.  Turn.”  He transferred his attention to Brandy after a few moments, to my relief.  “And they’re both willing?”

Not!  I glanced at Brandy, waiting for her to assert ourselves, but discovered she was still smarting from the wicked witch’s comments and pouting. 

“She looks more like a model or a starlet,” Gabe murmured.

Brandy preened, turning to give him a good view of all of her angles.  I glared at my toes. 

“Pretty girl next door,” Glenda agreed.  “But she plays the helpless blond bimbo so well it’s almost believable—will be to male viewers, I’m sure.  They’ll go for that doe-eyed shit.”

Gabe almost seemed to shrug.  “We agreed to go with the title Snow White and the Seven Hunks, though.  That’s what we’ve been advertising.  I think we should just settle on one.”

My stomach went weightless with hopefulness.  Pick Brandy!  Pick Brandy!

“I think Nicole would fit better all the way around.”

Fuck!  Fuck!  Fuck!

“So we’ll re-title it Snow White, Rose Red, and the Seven Hunks!  Or Snow White, the ugly ducking, and the Seven Hunks—or we could divide it into two shows.  They’re into me deep.  I’m not in favor of letting either one of them off the hook!  Of course, if you’re just dead set against it, I could call the cops and have their asses hauled to jail, but it seems a waste when you weren’t happy with any of the giggly school girls I brought in and none of the aspiring actresses.” 

Chapter Two

Gabe rubbed his neck, grimacing.  “I’ll go back over the script,” he said finally, “and make some adjustments.”

Script?

Brandy frowned.  “I thought this was supposed to be a reality thing?”

“Real reality is boring,” Gabe said wryly.  “The trick is to bring together a cast that has a potential for sparks and put them in situations that will generate those sparks.”

He might get more bang than he bargained for with Brandy, I thought wryly, wondering if Glenda had mentioned that Brandy had a lit-tle problem with her temper.