She wasn't aware of rising, but she gasped a breath into the kiss when their bodies came into heated contact. His hard and lean. Hers softer and curvier. Every cell in her body sighed. Sliding her arms around his neck, she tried to get even closer, her tongue licking his and her breasts crushed against the plane of his chest.
He ran his hands down her back, gripping her hips to hold her so tight not even a molecule of air could get between them. It was only Kaia and Bowen in the here and the now. A man and a woman.
A desperate hunger in her, she tore at his shirt.
Bowen didn't break the kiss, but he raised his hands between them and began to unbutton it. His knuckles brushed her breasts with every move until she couldn't take the excruciating sensation of fabric tugging over needy flesh. Wrenching back, she put her hands at the bottom of her cover-up and pulled it off.
"Fuck." Bowen halted with his shirt partly open, the pale brown of his skin exposed in a triangle against the white of his shirt.
He came at her the next moment, his mouth voracious and his hands possessive.
She was still trying to tear open his shirt, but his kiss was driving her mad and she couldn't focus.
When the mattress hit her back, Bowen's weight coming down on her, she wrapped her legs around him and ran her hands down his chest. The muscle trainers broke the smoothness of his skin, but she could feel the heated life of him and that was all that mattered.
He stroked her with a roughness that betrayed his own desperation, his mouth demanding kiss after kiss. Breathless, aching, she finally managed to undo the last two buttons on his shirt and shove it off. He helped her get rid of it. "Kaia. Siren. Mine." Harsh, hot breaths against her ear before he kissed his way down her throat, his hand plumping her breast.
Dipping his head without warning, he sucked her nipple into his mouth.
Kaia arched on a moan so deep it was nearly silent. Pulling at his hair, she said, "Bowen, I want skin." She pressed an openmouthed kiss to his shoulder, tasted salt from his swim. "Bowen." It was an order this time, imperious and wanting and on the edge of madness.
He kissed his way back to her mouth. "You are so fucking beautiful." A hard kiss before he pulled back just long enough to kick off his board shorts. His shoes were already long gone.
She entangled herself around him the instant he returned, this human who burned with life, his inner light so hot it scalded.
When he reached down to see if she was ready, she said, "Yes." Another kiss. "I want you."
Shuddering, he stroked her with his fingers regardless, that fierce concentration on his face that she'd already started to adore.
Her body was his, melting on his fingers. She orgasmed on a silent scream, her inner muscles clenching in hard pulses. She was yet humming from it, her blood as thick as lava, when he began to push into her. And the hum deep inside her began again, building and building with each rigid inch.
Their eyes met, held.
What passed between them was an unspoken and heartbreaking promise that resonated in the air, held them locked in time as they swam in a sea that belonged to them alone.
Chapter 30
Belief can move mountains. I never, not for a second, allowed myself to believe that I would fail in the peace negotiations. To start there is to not start at all. You must start with an absolute belief in success.
--From the private diaries of Adrian Kenner, peace negotiator, Territorial Wars (18th century)
BOWEN LAY ON his back with Kaia tucked up against him, his arm around her shoulders. The muscle trainers had to be irritating her skin but she seemed not to mind, and he couldn't make himself let her go.
Contentment turned his muscles heavy, his eyelids lowering. "I don't think I've ever felt this good." As if he'd had a Kaia-shaped hole inside him his entire life, and now, at last, here she was.
"Hmm." Kaia stroked his chest, stopping over his heart.
He waited for her to say something else, but she stayed silent after that lazy sound. Bowen played with her hair, draping the damp strands across his chest. And he thought of what she'd told him about losing both parents as a child.
Then he thought of the ticking clock in his head.
That was when he realized she was feeling the beat of his heart with her palm. Guilt was a metal claw around that mechanical organ, twisting and tearing.
Lifting his hand, he closed it gently over her wrist. "I'm sorry."
She snapped up her head, shoving her hair back from her face. "This wasn't your decision." Furious eyes. "It was mine."
God, she was magnificent. "Ours," he said. "It was ours."
A taut pause before she inclined her head and came back down against him.
He felt whole again. His body warm. Kaia's skin under his touch.
Sleep came softly, a warm, lazy wind.
* * *
*
HAVING woken in Kaia's bed after an hour when Dr. Kahananui tagged him to come in for another test, Bowen had forced himself to move--and after the test, he'd eaten dinner with Kaia, then made himself sleep in the clinic bed that monitored all his stats.
The doctor would need those stats prior to his surgery.
He'd slept fourteen hours, waking at ten--but the frustration of losing so much time was balanced out by his increased sense of stamina and strength.
An hour after waking, he took a seat in a surgical chair and permitted George to put his head in a vise. It was to stop him from moving it--even a fractional shift could cause catastrophic problems.
Minutes after that, Dr. Kahananui said, "This shouldn't hurt. Alert me by raising your hand at the first indication of trouble. Pain means something is wrong."
"Understood."
The surgical saw was far quieter than the horror show he'd been expecting. As for his hair, it turned out he already had a small--hidden--shaved patch where she'd injected him the first time. It was currently exposed courtesy of the glittery yellow and pink bobby pins that held the rest of his hair out of the way.
Cassius would bust a gut laughing at the idea of it; Bowen would have to share the details with his friend after he came through this. Because he would fucking come through this.
Belief can move mountains.
Words written by Adrian Kenner, a man who had turned the impossible into reality. Bowen had found a copy of his famous ancestor's diaries in the family archives when he was fifteen; he'd ended up reading every single page. Adrian Kenner had been a man of peace while Bowen was fighting for the survival of the human race, but in many ways, they were the same--each determined to forge a path through infinite darkness.
"George, the injector I prepared." Dr. Kahananui's cool voice.
Her assistant passed over the instrument.
Bo braced himself for it . . . but he felt nothing, exactly as the doctor had promised. Far quicker than he'd expected, she was sealing the bone back up using a small device she'd told him effectively "blended" the cut part of his skull with the rest.
He felt fine when released from the vise, but the doctor insisted he go to his room and lie down. "I need the readings," she said, "and this'll knock you out soon. Trust me." She glanced at George. "Can I leave you to tidy up? I'm going to escort Bowen to his room."
"Of course, Doctor."
"I'm not going to faint walking a few feet," Bo said after they'd exited the lab; he hadn't wanted to criticize the doctor's choice in front of her assistant.
Dr. Kahananui didn't say anything until they'd reached his room and he'd changed into a pair of sweatpants. "Lie down."
Having begun to feel a pounding at the back of his head, Bo did as directed. Dr. Kahananui worked at the data panel before looking up, and her dark brown eyes saw far too much. "She is loved." Quiet words that hit like a punch. "Deeply and by so many."
"You don't need to tell me that." He'd sensed it in the air around Kaia, seen the way her clanmates' faces lit up when she neared.
"But," Dr. Kahananui continued, "though she gives her love and affection freel
y, none of us have ever been able to reach the part of her she locked away as a child." The doctor began to move to the door. "If she honors you with that secret piece of herself, protect it like the treasure that it is."
"Why aren't you warning me off?" Bowen asked roughly.
"Kaia is like a sea storm. She'll pick her own path."
"Wait," he said as the doctor reached the door, but the word slurred and then there was only sweet nothingness colored by the rich aroma of coconut oil and the fleeting scent of a creamy tropical flower.
* * *
*
KAIA undid her apron. She was the last one in the kitchen, as she always liked to be; there was peace in having ten minutes to herself in her domain after the chaos of the dinner rush. That dinner was long over, her crew had put the leftovers in the cooler where night owls could access them, taken care of the dishes, and wiped down all the counters.
As was her tradition, Kaia had made a special dessert for this rotation of kitchen hands--a yogurt passion fruit cake, by their choice. They'd be rotating out of kitchen duty in another three days. After eating the cake down to the crumbs, they'd begged her to put in a good word with Seraphina to get them back on the kitchen roster as fast as possible.
"Someone has to scrub the toilets," she'd said, and received a round of groans.
"You don't," Scott, smart and patient and a sweet troublemaker, had pointed out. "How come?"
"Because I did my time with the toilet scrubber and in the laundry and with the window washing crew when I was your age." It was a rite of passage in the clan: to pull your own weight and at the same time, be shown that even the smallest of them had value. The clan's minnows could often be seen industriously "helping" at various tasks, mostly with toy tools created for just that purpose.
Now the children had all gone and she was alone except for Hex--who slept curled up in a pocket she'd sewn into this dress for him--but for the first time, she found no peace in lingering here. She'd blocked out what was happening in the lab while it was occurring, but Attie knew her well enough to have sent her a message when it was over: Successful, no complications. He's asleep, will probably stay that way into tomorrow.
Kaia had been able to breathe after that, had been able to pretend to be her normal self, but she wasn't and would never be again. "Just go," she said to herself, the whisper harsh.
Leaving the kitchen, she skirted the muted lighting of the atrium to make her way toward Atalina's lab and Bowen's room. The door to the lab was open, and when she peeked in, she saw George working at the computer as he so often did till late into the night hours.
Not interrupting, she padded her way to Bowen's room. Her breath came in shallow pants, her heart thundering. But she put her hand on the scanpad and the door whooshed open. And though Kaia hated hospitals, hated the machines and the sounds and the antiseptic cold of knowing life hung in the balance, she walked inside.
Chapter 31
Papa! Look! Lion! Grr, lion, grr!
--Kaia Luna (3) to her petrified father, Iosef
BOWEN WOKE TO a sense of warmth and softness all along one side of his body. He was groggy with the vestiges of a heavy sleep, but he knew Kaia's touch, her scent. Snuggling her closer with the arm he must've put around her in sleep, he felt her go suddenly motionless . . . and he realized the wet on his chest was from her tears.
About to turn to face her, he became aware of a far smaller source of warmth curled up on his breastbone. Cracking open his eyes, he saw Hex's peacefully sleeping form. So he turned his head instead, to look down at where Kaia lay with her head on his chest, her hair a dark waterfall over him.
His body told him he'd been asleep for hours, and when he glanced at one of the slumbering machines, he glimpsed the timecode: 5:57. He'd lost all of yesterday after the operation. More importantly, he'd lost time with Kaia.
"Tesoro mio," he said, the endearment falling off his tongue as if he'd been waiting a lifetime to say it to her. "Why are you crying?"
Fingers flexing on his chest, a shaky exhale, but she didn't speak. He stroked her hair, trying to think of what would drive his strong and fierce Kaia to tears.
"I hate hospitals," she said at last, the words a rasp.
Bowen pressed a kiss to the top of her hair, the strands luxuriantly soft under his lips. "Were you in one as a child?" Cassius had a hatred for hospitals, too, and the roots of his hate lay in the same incident that had ended with a dead telepath and a blood-soaked thirteen-year-old boy.
"Not as a patient." She took a deep breath, her fingers rising to gently stroke Hex's sleeping body. "My mother was a doctor who worked in struggling clinics all over the world, places that couldn't really pay and were often funded by charities."
He heard no fear or hate in those words, only a soul-deep sadness. "Did you ever go with her?"
"Our whole family traveled as a group." She placed her hand flat over his heart again. "The three Lunatics. From Africa to the Pacific to the Americas to the heart of Asia." Her lips curving against him. "When I was an infant, then a toddler, my father would keep me with him through the day and--after I outgrew the crib--I'd spend it splattering paint on canvases while he wrote lyrics or painted."
He could see her now, a bright-eyed child gleefully splashing in paint as the world changed around her. "Palm trees one day, giraffes the next?"
She laughed. "I met a lion once. He prowled out of the forest while I was toddling about outside after climbing out of the playpen when my poor father left me alone for one minute to use the outdoor toilet--from that point on, he started putting a leash on me and hooking the leash to something immovable if he had to step out to use the facilities."
Bo whistled. "Jesus, I wouldn't want to walk out of the john and see my daughter facing a lion."
"I had my hand fisted in the lion's mane and was kissing his face."
Bo choked. "Changeling?" he guessed.
"Alpha changeling." Kaia rose up on her elbow to look down at him, her gaze lit with an inner glow. "He'd come to check us out. We had permission to be in the area, but he wanted us aware that we were in lion territory."
"Yet he let a baby kiss his face." Bowen smiled at the image that formed in his mind, of a plump toddler clutching at the golden mane of a large, patient lion. "A good alpha, then."
"Yes. A very good alpha, I later found out. His pride is one of the most stable on the African continent." She brushed strands of hair off Bo's forehead. "When I grew a bit bigger, my mother would sometimes take me into work with her. Only when it was a small clinic and she was doing routine work. The people who came didn't mind--they used to bring along their own children and I'd play outside with them."
Running his hand over her back, Bo said, "What happened?"
And the light in her, it dimmed, flickered, faded. "My parents got sick and died," she said baldly. "And I began to hate hospitals."
A tiny scrabble of feet, Hex coming awake. After going to Kaia for a stroke, he ran down the bed and off along one of the legs.
"I'll need to open the door for him," Kaia murmured.
"After a second." Bowen wrapped his arms around her and held her close. "I'm going to get out of this place," he told her. "You won't have to watch me die."
"You have a powerful will, Bo." Her lips kissing his jaw. "But even your will can't change hard medical facts."
Bowen's hand fisted on her back. "Maybe not," he said, "but I don't plan to go without a fight." And if the result was to be oblivion, he'd leave Kaia with memories of joy; he wasn't a man who knew how to play, how to court a woman, but he'd figure it out because leaving her with only sorrow was fucking unacceptable. "You are the greatest gift of my life."
Kaia's breath broke before she pushed away from him and got off the bed. Scooping up her pet, she walked to the door, opened it. When she paused and looked back at him, it was with eyes so dark that he knew he was talking to both sides of her nature. "I don't know if I can." The words seemed torn out of her. "I don't know if I have
that much courage."
She had so much courage, he thought as the door closed behind her. She might have shut away a part of herself, but she loved with such generous warmth that it was a luminous light around her. He'd seen how the teenagers came to her for hugs, spotted how clanmates tugged her aside for advice or conversation, heard it in the steel of Dr. Kahananui's voice when she'd told him to treasure Kaia.
He hadn't needed the instruction; Bowen would do everything in his power to build memories so beautiful that even if it all went wrong, she couldn't look back in regret. They might only have a fragment of an instant in time, but he'd make that fragment extraordinary.
Chapter 32
"You have no romance in your soul! It's solid steel! I'm out!"
"Does your heart even beat? Is there a flesh-and-blood man under the stone?"
"Oh, look, you forgot Valentine's Day. This is my shocked face. Don't call me again."
"Why do you have to be so fucking sexy and so terrible at being a boyfriend? You should date the Alliance. She's the only thing you care about anyway."
--Compilation of words spoken by women to Bowen Knight
BOWEN LOOKED AT Dr. Kahananui after that morning's round of scans, the two of them in her lab. One of Kaia's kitchen hands--a heavily muscled blond kid named Jayson--had turned up with breakfast trays soon after Bowen entered the lab. He'd also brought a pitcher of coffee for Bo and a pot of what looked like herbal tea for the doctor. Bo poured refills for both himself and the doctor as they got ready to discuss the results. "So?"
"Progress is as per the computer model." She bit off a piece of toast but she wasn't paying attention to the food, her eyes on the large screen on the wall.
She stood staring at it.
Walking over with the drinks, Bo handed her the mug of tea and took a sip of his coffee. He tried to make sense of the scans on the screen, but the only thing he could say for certain was that the computer had created a facsimile of his brain in 3D. "Then why have you been scowling at this for the past ten minutes?"
She gulped down half the mug before setting it aside and finishing off her toast. "It's possible the compound might alter the effectiveness of the chip."