Apparently Sterling called Caleb “Superman” and Michael “Batman.” Tonight the two had officially knighted Sterling “Spider-Man,” which, Lara decided, seemed fitting, since apparently, pre-Becca, he’d done insanely ridiculous, highly dangerous things on a regular basis. She spent most of the next half hour after the food was cleared laughing at the outrageous Sterling stories, her back to Damion’s chest, his hand resting on her stomach.
“My fondest memory,” Michael said, from down the table, across from her, and next to Chale, “was when Sterling threw Damion across the conference table.”
“Hate that I missed that,” Chale said, directly across from Lara.
“Me too,” Houston agreed from beside Chale.
Lara eyed Damion. “I guess you pissed him off?”
“He was delusional that day,” Damion said, and held up his mug of beer toward Sterling. “Right Ster?”
Sterling lifted his mug in reply. “That’s just how I say ‘I love you,’ man.”
“Right,” Damion said. “I say it right back with just as much feeling.”
Caleb, who sat directly next to Lara, looked up from the deep conversation he was having with Kelly, a frown on his face that had Lara wondering if she was imagining a few sparks between the Renegade’s leader and the doctor. “I seem to remember Michael and me having to hold you two back, you were feeling so much love.”
Glancing at Damion, Lara reached up and touched his jaw, where a light, sexy stubble had started to protest its morning clean shave. “Sounds like an interesting story.”
“He was feeling protective of Becca,” Damion said, “and he wrongfully assumed I wasn’t.” He leaned in close to her ear. “GTECHs are protective of their Lifebonds.”
Lara turned in his arms to face him, their eyes locking in the dim light, the awareness between them electric and instant. “I’m a GTECH too. Don’t forget that.”
“Houston, we have a problem!” Houston held up an empty pitcher. “We need beer, or we’re never going to get drunk. It’s your turn to buy, Damion.” Like they could get drunk even if they tried, but they all seemed to enjoy pretending otherwise.
Damion leaned in and kissed Lara. “You think you can handle another Sprite?” he asked, referring to her drink of the night.
“You’d be surprised what I can handle.” There was a hidden meaning to the words, and she saw it register hotly in Damion’s black eyes. Eyes that could no longer hide behind the human hazel color they had once been. Yet there were still so many secrets between them, so many things that could, and would, rip them apart.
“You can show me later,” he finally said, his hand still on her leg, even as he shifted to push his chair back from the table.
Lara shoved aside the worries threatening to steal the happiness of her night out and eyed Houston. “Houston, we have a problem?” she asked. “Is Houston really your name?”
“Nah,” Houston said. “Damion likes Houston, so I go by Houston, and heck, I’m from Houston. Nothing wrong with a tribute to the homeland.”
“What’s your real name?” she asked.
Damion’s hand tightened on her leg ever so slightly, but the tension that rolled off him was a sudden white water crash that had Lara turning toward him.
“Pain in my ass is what I call him,” Chale said, nudging Houston. “You think Damion might need that empty pitcher to get the beer or what?”
Damion cast Chale a tense look of what Lara would label appreciation, before he turned and headed toward the bar.
“I’m sorry, man,” Houston was mumbling to Chale when Lara turned back to the table.
“Sorry for what?” she asked Houston, who eyed Chale with an appeal. Lara’s attention rocketed to Chale. “Talk to me. What did I just miss, and why is Damion upset?”
Chale, looking uncharacteristically uncomfortable, hesitated.
“Chale, damn it,” she ground out. “Talk to me.”
“I’m not talking,” he said finally. “But you should. Talk to Damion.”
She didn’t need nudging, and these days, she didn’t have a lot of time to waste. Lara stood up and went after Damion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Tension crawled down Damion’s spine and back up again as he weaved a path through the crowd and set the pitcher on the bar. He didn’t want Lara to know about his brother. Hell, these days he tried not to even think about Tommy because when he did, he could drive himself insane.
“Refill,” he said to the bartender—Moe’s brother, Mack—a tall, muscled dude who looked more Renegade than bartender, and who’d come to Sunrise as family to one of the Wardens, once a captive in the sex camps. They couldn’t drag the guy anywhere near the war zone though, despite what his sister had been through, and no one knew why.
Mack saluted. “Coming up.”
Damion gave a nod and pressed both palms on the bar, letting his head fall forward between his shoulders, and telling himself to calm down. Instead, a flash of Tommy’s young face flickered in his mind, spiking his blood pressure to the moon. Holy hell, now he was the one having flashbacks. It was too damn long ago, well over a decade since Tommy’s death, for him to still be this raw.
He shoved off the bar and toward the back of the joint, weaving through yet more people, and heading down a narrow hallway that ended with a turn to the left for men and one to the right for women. He walked left, and once out of sight, leaned against the wall, pressing his face in his hand.
“Damion.”
The soft, familiar voice came seconds before the smell of sweet coconut and woman filled his senses, before Lara was there, wrapping her arms around him. “Talk to me.” She urged gently. “What’s Houston’s real name, and why is it a problem?”
His heart exploded in his ears. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“It has something to do with what you said to me back at the cabin, doesn’t it?” she pressed. “When you said you were good at taking the blame for things?”
His heart was back in his chest, and with it a firestorm of emotion erupted. He grabbed Lara, pulled her into the restroom, shut the door, locked it, and then leaned against the wall with her pulled into his arms. “Yes. It has something to do with what I said back in the cabin. Houston’s name is Tommy, and Tommy is the name of my dead brother.”
She let out a breath, her fingers splaying over his chest. “Oh God, Damion. I’m sorry.”
“He was sixteen, and my parents had grounded him for talking on the phone after bedtime. It was Saturday night, and our parents were at a movie. I stopped by to check on Tommy, who convinced me to take him to the fast food joint his girlfriend worked at.” He pressed his forehead to hers, unable to look at her as he finished. Their breath mingled, and her fingers gently brushed his cheek then rested there. He forced himself to continue. “There was a box truck and a red light the driver didn’t bother to stop for.”
Lara gasped and pulled back. “No. Tell me no.”
He nodded, because he couldn’t speak, trying to swallow the emotion that had lodged where his heart had been a few minutes before. “He was a lot like Chale. Always joking around. My brother gave me hell for my bad driving all the way to the hospital. I thought that had to mean he’d make it, but…”
“Oh God, Damion.” She pressed her lips to his, kissed his jaw, his cheek, her fingers sliding over his face. “It wasn’t your fault. I can see—I can feel—you think it was, but it wasn’t.”
He dropped his arms from her and stared up at the concrete ceiling. “That’s not what my mother and my brother thought.”
She wrapped her arms around him. “They blamed you.”
“Yeah,” he said, tilting his head down to look at her, not even trying to wipe away the pain he knew had to be in his expression. “They blamed me.”
“And your father?”
“Died of cancer five years ago,” he said. “And I think my mother and my brother cursed him all the way to his grave f
or standing up for me. He’d wanted me to run Megatech, and that only made things worse. That’s why I joined the army and got the hell out of Dodge. I thought he and my mother would be better when I was gone.”
“But they weren’t, were they?”
“No, they weren’t.”
“I’ve read about couples splitting after the loss of a child,” she said. “There is an inherent need to place blame as a way to deal with pain. Now I know why you said you were good at taking the blame. You tried to make everyone happy. You left everything behind, trying to make everyone happy. That makes you a very, very special person that I feel honored to know.”
He pulled her to him and slid his fingers into her hair. “I can’t lose you,” he said and kissed her, a passionate, desperate kiss. “I won’t lose you.” His hands started to travel, the need to touch her, to feel her, to know she was here, and she wasn’t going anywhere, driving him wild.
“Damion,” she whispered into his mouth, a moment before their tongues touched again, before the heat between them boiled to downright molten. Her hands slid under his T-shirt, over his chest, his back.
He palmed her breasts through the thin material of her dress. “I love you in this dress,” he murmured, and turned her so that her back was against the wall, his fingers tugging up the hem of the dress, curving along the soft skin of her backside.
“I’ll have to wear it more often,” she panted, as he lifted her leg to his waist, stroking the tiny strip of her thong and then using his other hand to slide the silk at the V of her body away and stroke the wet heat. “I really need to be inside you right now.”
Someone knocked on the door. “Go away!” they both said at once, and then laughed, their voices laced with passion.
“I really need you inside me too,” she said tightly, reaching for the zipper of his fatigues.
Damion finished the task, pulling his cock from his pants and shoving her panties aside, urgency driving him. This wasn’t about sex. It was about how much he needed this woman. It was about a bond they hadn’t completed, that they were trying to replace with fire and desire.
She grabbed his shoulders as he penetrated her, her lashes fluttering, her fingers digging into his flesh, her breath coming in heavy pants. She looked so damn sexy, so incredibly sexy. He pressed into her, the wet heat of her surrounded him, blasting him a heavy dose of pleasure. She bit her lip, her gaze capturing his, passion burning from her stare, the connection between them expanding, consuming the room, consuming the very air filling their lungs.
Damion sunk deep inside her, sliding his hand to her face, the other around her backside. “You belong here with me,” he told her, kissing her before she could object, before she said something that defied his claim. She tasted sweet, like honey, smelled like heaven, and felt like a hot, tight ride to ecstasy. He moved inside her. She arched into him, setting off a slow rhythm of movement that quickly turned to a frenzied rush of their bodies sliding together, of kisses, touches, and wild abandon where time disappeared.
“Damion,” Lara gasped a moment before she buried her face in his neck, her body tensing before she spasmed around him, milked him, claiming his release as she had already claimed him the moment he’d laid eyes on her.
They melted into one another, panting into completion and then resting their foreheads together. “Tonight, Lara. Tonight, we do the blood exchange.”
She leaned back. “No. We can’t.”
“We can.”
She shook her head and pushed away from him. He let her leg fall and reluctantly eased their bodies apart. She quickly slid away from him, grabbing a towel and righting her dress, then standing there without turning. “I know you think you have to do this. I know you think you’ll be to blame if anything happens to me, but…”
He turned her to face him. “No. It’s not like that.”
“It is like that.”
“God, no.” He pulled her close. “I’m pretty sure I’m falling in love with you, and before you say it’s too soon, you should know that’s the first time in my thirty-four years I’ve ever said the word ‘love’ to a woman, so it’s not something I say lightly. Hell. I didn’t want to ever feel this for a woman. I did my best to never let it happen. But it is happening—maybe it already has. All I know is you matter in a huge way to me, Lara, and I don’t plan to lose you before I ever find out what that really means.” His gaze swept the restroom. “And damn it, I would never have wanted the first time I said something like this to you to be in a restroom. This is definitely not my Prince Charming moment, but I’ll make this part up to you. I’m not exactly used to these kinds of confessions.”
“Damion,” she whispered. “You don’t even—”
“Know you?” he asked and didn’t wait for an answer. “I know you. I don’t give a flying flip about your past. I also know you’re afraid you’ll regain your memories with the bond, and then we’ll hate each other, but that isn’t going to happen.” His voice softened. “We decide our future. We do, not the past, not Powell, or anyone else. Most importantly, we need to make sure we have a future. That means we have to complete the blood bond.”
Her bottom lip trembled. “I stopped caring about the past when I learned what Powell did to me. You know that. You know that’s why I confessed everything I knew about him and Serenity. And I’m pretty sure I already love you too. I don’t know if I’ve ever said that to anyone else, because I don’t remember anyone else, but I know what I feel, and clear to my soul I know I’ve never felt for anyone what I feel for you.”
Relief washed over him, relief and so much more. Damion scooped her into his arms. “You think you love me?” he asked, scared shitless of her saying yes and scared shitless he’d misunderstood and she’d say no.
“Well,” she said, her fingers brushing his jaw in a way that was fast becoming familiar and endearing. “You enrage me, arouse me, and make me laugh. I frequently want to kiss you. I more frequently want to undress you, proven by our highly inappropriate restroom encounter. Sometimes I even want to kill you. Not literally anymore, of course. So yeah, I’m pretty sure you’ve done the love number on me, Damion Browne, which is exactly why I won’t put you at risk.”
“I won’t let you die, damn it,” he said fiercely, the protectiveness in him expanding, threatening to take on a life of its own.
“I don’t intend to die,” she assured him. “I intend to find Powell and my medical records. You just reminded me of why I can’t give up, which I almost did today. I have to find him, and I will.” She pressed her lips to his, clearly trying to distract him, then said, “Take me to your bed and give me the good-caveman-you’re-mine routine. I’m surprised how much I like it. While you’re at it, make love to me, Damion.”
“I’ll take you to our bed,” he said, drawing her toward the door. “However, this conversation isn’t over.”
“So you keep telling me and then proving.”
He pulled the restroom door open to have a handwritten piece of paper fly to the floor that read, “Out of Order.” He and Lara looked at it and then each other, before bursting into laughter. And as Damion led her through the restaurant, he sensed no embarrassment in her over their little encounter, clearly made public. There was simply an understanding of their connection, and their need to find privacy.
Damion had every intention of showing Lara just how well he could make love to her. Maybe—just maybe—in the heat of passion, he’d convince her to complete the blood bond despite how much the life-and-death bond had him shaking inside. One screw up, and she’d be dead right along with him. If they didn’t complete the bond tonight, one way or another, they were going to be. Because if there was anything that revisiting Tommy’s death had done for him tonight, it was to remind him how easily someone you loved could be lost.
Logan kissed Jenna and then set her back from him. He grabbed one of his kitchen chairs and moved it away from the table. He sat her down in it and then retrieved a pair of mil
itary-grade handcuffs made for the GTECHs from the slim black box on his bar. He dangled them in the air. “Hands behind the chair,” he ordered.
She laughed nervously and motioned to her slim, prim and proper, black dress. “Shouldn’t I get undressed first or something?” Her gaze swept his slacks and button-down. “And you too?”
“Hands behind your chair,” he repeated in a soft, lethal voice. Tonight wasn’t about sex, though she thought it was. Tonight was about control and manipulation. His control, his manipulation of all the parties involved in Bar-1, to ensure he came out on top.
Her bottom lip quivered, telling him of her nervousness, but she did as he said. He had no doubt she would. Logan walked behind her and secured her hands. A moment later, he stood above her, staring down at her.
“Now what are you going to do with me, my mad scientist?” she purred seductively, but that hint of nervousness still teased the note, as if she sensed all was not right.
“It’s not what he’s going to do to you that you should worry about,” Sabrina murmured to his left. Logan turned to find her in the doorway, holding a long knife, and hot as red fire in a tight leather pantsuit that would bring a man—this man, specifically—to his knees.
“Logan?” Jenna asked, panic sliding into her voice.
Sabrina licked the end of the blade. “Logan won’t help you, honey. I do, however, have a mad idea he might enjoy watching.” She strolled to Logan’s side and wrapped herself around him. “You’re going to enjoy this, now aren’t you, baby?”
He didn’t reply. Any enjoyment Sabrina gave him always came with baggage he wanted removed, and he had a bad feeling that wasn’t going to happen. His gut said that Sabrina would be the last Serenity-bred GTECH standing—the only one who hadn’t been brainwashed, and the only one who wasn’t about to die from a stroke. The only one who hadn’t been exposed to Bar-1.