Falcon (Kindred, #5)

THIRTEEN

THIRTEEN

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Once the door was closed again, Devon looked at him and could feel him retreat from their intimacy. Twining her legs around his hips again, she tried to maintain her grip on his hands when they receded from hers. But she didn’t succeed.

He took hold of her calves and freed himself from the circle of her legs to walk away from their passion.

“Zave,” she said, without sitting up or moving. “If this is what you want, you can’t hide from it forever. You can lock me up. You can send me away. You can banish me from your island. But I’m a part of this now. Whether I’m here in your house, staying with Brodie and Zara, or n***d in your bed, I’m not going to disappear. It doesn’t matter how many times you turn your back on me.”

This time when he twisted to look at her, it was as if he’d realized how the physical act of striding off and turning his back to her was emotionally draining for her, more than that, it hurt her. But she wasn’t going to let it discourage her, as she’d promised Bess and because she knew Zave was acting in learned behavior. He’d said it himself that he’d promised to never lose control again and it was that training that caused him to act this way with her, not because of his personal feelings as had just been demonstrated.

“Nothing good can come from this,” he said. “Even if I let it happen. Six weeks from now...” He trailed off.

She lifted to lean on her elbows. “Six weeks from now, what?”

“I take you to my bed and then... what?” he asked, turning his head toward the window. “We enjoy each other’s bodies, sate our desires, satisfy our fantasies and curiosities, and then what?”

She didn’t understand the question. Because this was just chemicals, electricity between two people, the kind of instinct that made one lover seek another out in a crowded bar or in a busy workplace. This was attraction. So as for what came next when they hadn’t even explored this, she didn’t know what he meant.

“Given that we haven’t slept together,” she said, sitting up on the edge of the table. “And that we haven’t had a full and open conversation.” She’d learned more about him from Bess, and that was hardly the basis of a deep, emotional connection. “We would need trust and communication before we could start to think about if this was ever going to be—”

“Communication,” he said, “has never been my strong suit.”

She shrugged. “We’ll adapt, if we need to, we’ll figure it out. You are flawed, but I’m far from perfect... I can’t bear to see you lock yourself up, Zave. I can’t bear it. How many hours do you spend alone? You have so much to give and you choose to withhold yourself from the people who care about you.

“I have to tell you what I know. I have to tell you what I heard those men saying to each other. I have to tell you about some of the things I went through for you to understand the context of when and where I heard these things. But I just can’t understand why you reject me, and that makes it difficult for me to open up.”

“You shouldn’t try to understand me,” he said.

“But I want to. I want to know what you do with all those hours you spend alone in the parts of the house you won’t let any other person see. I want to know how you can be so thoughtful and generous and still think of yourself as a monster. Your milkshake made me cry,” she said, and his attention snapped to her as she slunk off the table. “That’s right.” She smiled. “I felt like an i***t. But I just couldn’t figure out what I did to deserve it. Every time I tell you that I want something, you find a way to get it for me.”

She stopped and rested her fingers on his abs, which again, made him flinch, but she didn’t remove them. “Shy...”

Trying to peer into him, she couldn’t see through the shutters behind his eyes. “Why is it different when I tell you that I want you?”

“It’s the one thing I can’t give you,” he said. “Anything else in the world you want is yours. That one I’m just not capable of.”

“I think you’re capable of anything,” she said, because she would believe in him, even when he struggled to believe in himself. “I’m not naïve. I’m not the most beautiful woman in the world or the most sophisticated. I don’t have money or material possessions. I’m not cultured or worldly, and I’m sure not as smart as you. I don’t have anything to give you except my promise that I’m not going anywhere.”

While he scrutinized her features, she speculated on what could be going through his mind. Was he trying to think of a way to let her down gently? Was he trying not to laugh in her face? Whatever it was, he had enough practice at remaining deadpan and holding himself aloof, that she couldn’t begin to reach any conclusions.

“I know you’re not in my league,” she said. “I’m so far beneath you that I’m not surprised you won’t share your secrets with me. But I am loyal, and I’m sure you don’t deserve what you do to yourself. So, please, at least, accept me as a friend.”

Just when she expected him to walk away and leave her, she felt the tickle of his fingertips on her palm. When her focus shifted down, she saw him link his fingers between hers. It wasn’t an advance, but initiating physical contact of any kind was a major breakthrough for him, which was perhaps why their first kiss perplexed him so much. Maybe he hadn’t expected himself to be capable of that.

The real shock came when he began to move towards the door, the one she’d never been through. The one he, Brodie, and Zara emerged from whenever they came into this room. Through that door was a rectangular corridor.

Zave took her to the end and into a stairwell with a spiral staircase. Up they went and into another corridor. The next door they stopped at used fingerprint access. But that wasn’t all. It had a green keypad that required a number to be punched in, and it had a retinal scanner. The door also wasn’t wooden like the others; it was metal, painted to blend in with the décor.

He took her inside to a narrow foyer, and a second door stood before them, with equal levels of protection to the first. Either he was paranoid or dealing with some sensitive things. Her heart was pounding; she didn’t know where they were or what to expect. But when he flicked on a light, the first thing she was awed by was the size of the space they were in.

The large lab stretched out, it had a bank of computers to the right, and spread across the left and center were various work desks and drafting tables, each with their own angled light. Beyond this workspace was a glass wall. A section filled with components stood on one side, and on the other were power tools far too complex for her to understand.

Another glass wall stood on the other side of those sections, but the furthest space was so far away, she couldn’t decipher much of what was beyond it except what looked like more equipment.

“This is where I spend my time,” he said. “This is what I do.”

She couldn’t imagine what all of these things were for. On the work desks around them, there were various schematics, diagrams, sketches and drawings, some of which she couldn’t begin to decipher.

“There’s another level,” he said, looking to a door at the far right of their position. It stood at the end of a dark, narrow hall beyond the computer banks, and she wouldn’t have noticed it was there unless he’d fixated on it. “In fact there’s two, but this room is where most of the work is done. Below the lab floors, in the basement, I have a gym with a pool. That’s sealed off from the rest of the house. This whole section of the house is.”

“And that’s the only access?” she asked, speaking of the door they’d come through.

“The only one I’ll tell you about,” he said, and when he let her go to move forward, she tried to figure out if that was a joke or if it was one of those, ‘if I told you I’d have to kill you’ scenarios.

“This is your lab. How many people have—”

“No one.”

Going to a high draftsman stool at a drafting table, he sat down and pulled an angled light closer to the surface. His position faced the door, so she couldn’t see what was going on over the highest edge of the tabletop.

Everything here appeared functional and she saw nothing designed for comfort. “This is where you sleep?” she asked.

“I sleep in the tower, which is above us.”

A tower. His bedroom was in a tower. She wished she could see this building from the outside, to try and put together a picture of where it was she’d been living for weeks.

“Why did you bring me here?” Moving across the empty space, she stopped at the back of the table that was angled so high she could rest her chin on the crest. “It’s wonderful, it’s amazing. And I’m honored, but why?”

Picking up a pencil from a lip on the lower edge, he added something to the paper that she couldn’t see properly because the lamp was so close that the glare of the light blanked the image. With a crease between his brows, he drew a couple of lines, then brushed a hand over the paper before he put the pencil back down.

Then he looked at her. “You’re right that if you join the Kindred, we need trust. All of us need that.”

“So this is your way of showing that you trust me?” she asked. But he hadn’t done it for Zara, hadn’t even done it for Thad or Brodie.

“This is my way of showing you that I don’t consider you beneath me. But there can never be anything between us.” She didn’t understand that, and he must have read her confusion. “Could you be with a man who spends all his days here?”

Devon could see there were narrow, horizontal windows on the farthest back wall, past the equipment room she couldn’t make out well. The rest of the light came from florescent overheads. If this was where he spent all his time, he’d barely see the sun or smell the sea.

“Maybe.”

He didn’t believe her. “You would be with a man who would rather spend his time surrounded by electronic components, circuit boards, and wiring than be anywhere near you?”

“I don’t believe that’s true,” she said. “I think you’re trying to push me away. Just like you do with everybody else.” And like he’d already tried to do with her. “Who says we have to have anything more than friendship?”

“Didn’t you hear me downstairs? Have you forgotten what almost happened on that table? How many friends do you do that with?”

None. In fact, it had been a long time since she’d been with a man. After her last disastrous break-up, she’d begged off relationships and it had probably been more than a year before her a*******n since she’d been intimate with anyone.

Men had just never made sense to her. Except the most complex of all, this man in front of her, somehow seemed straightforward. Yes, his motivations, his personality were complex, but he wasn’t deceptive. His revelations downstairs, his outburst, they had opened her eyes. He wanted her. He was just afraid to let her in. Either because he thought he didn’t deserve the love or because he thought he would let her down.

“So it’s six weeks of s*x, isn’t that how long you said it would last?” she asked.

He had an answer for everything. “Kindred don’t screw other Kindred.”

That wasn’t true. “What about Raven and Zara? They screw, anyone who sees them together would know that.”

“That’s complicated,” he said. Something on his drawing caught his eye, and he picked up his pencil to make another adjustment. “They’re married.”

She loved that little crease between his brows, the sign of his concentration. His intent focus moved with the swipe of his pencil. What he didn’t understand was that although his drawings were technical, the sound of the graphite scraping across the textured surface of the pulp was arousing to her artist’s ear.

The artist in her was mesmerized by the sound. Her eyes drifted shut, imagining every time she’d held that kind of pencil in her hand and the pleasure she got from creating, watching an image come to life with every new stroke of her hand.

He’d put pencil to paper, paused to make a measurement, and brushed a fingertip down a line. Every sound was one she recognized as something that fired her soul. Her n*****s were strained to such tight peaks that they began to throb. He’d stirred her up downstairs, let her in to his private domain, and now he was teasing her with his scent and the sound of her greatest passion.

“You said I could have anything I wanted,” she murmured.

Still in the haze of her high, Devon slunk around the table and although he was still working, Devon rubbed a hand over his leg to his inner thigh. That was when the sound of pencil on paper stopped. But she was already breathing his earlobe in between her lips.

“Anything but that,” he said, picking her hand off his thigh to put it on the drafting table.

Devon kissed behind his ear and the side of his neck. She laid one arm across the back of his chair and rubbed her breasts against him. Not to stimulate him, but because it was her impulse to imprint herself on him, to try to mark him with her scent. Despite knowing it was pure fantasy, the notion he might belong to her was invigorating.

“You said anything.” Maybe it was because her eyes were closed and she was still ensconced in her own illusion, but she told the absolute truth. “I want you to make me come.”

The back of the stool twisted away from her reach, and she opened her eyes to find he’d discarded his pencil and turned the stool to face her so she was almost between his knees.

Devon expected rejection, she expected him to argue. Instead, he picked her hand off the drafting table, brought her knuckles to his lips, and kissed them once.

“I can work with that request, shy.”

Now it was her turn to crease her brows.

As if he anticipated the torrent of questions he’d just provoked, he stood up and led her from the room, cutting off any chance she had to bombard him. He took her all the way back downstairs to her own bedroom and she was lost by the time they got there, partly because she was distracted by what his end game might be. Could he be taking her to her bedroom to make love to her?

No. When they got there, he stopped at her door, opened it, and urged her inside. “Go to sleep, shy,” he said. “You’ve had enough excitement for one night.”

Not giving her a chance to ask questions or make another statement, he closed the door, leaving her alone in her bedroom. He was right about one thing, she’d had plenty of excitement. Her day had started with the gift of a milkshake that made her cry and ended with a peek into his inner sanctum.

He wasn’t going to make this easy. Zave had accused her of making him lose control, but he restrained himself more than he took credit for. Devon couldn’t chase after him; even if she tried, she’d get lost. If by some miracle, she got to his lab, she wouldn’t get through the door and pounding on it wouldn’t help when she now knew there was a double entry system.

So, in a stupor, she went through the motions of getting ready for bed and climbed beneath the covers. At first, sleep seemed elusive and then she realized, the sooner she gave into slumber, the sooner she’d be able to wake and discover what progress tomorrow would bring.