A blast of cold air hit her from overhead. She basked in the air conditioning.I appreciate everything now.The metal cities of Earth had never been so appealing. Now they hung like jewels in her memory: so utilitarian, so bland, but most of all so very, very safe.
The ship settled just outside Axone’s orbit and both she and Stryker got up to look back out the window.
A storm covered half the planet and even from space, it looked nightmarish. They stood in silence, side by side, staring at the thing that they had survived.
“She was a shrieker, Norah.” Stryker reached over and grabbed her hand. She threaded her fingers through his. “There was nothing we could do.”
Norah shook the curls that began to coil around her face. “I wish we could have saved someone. I wish I wasn’t the only survivor,” she whispered, heartbroken. “So many minds, so many wonderful people. Robert…”
“We can go back once the storm ends.”
“I don’t want to go back,” Norah admitted her cowardice. “I want to see my family.” She didn’t know why, exactly, but a deep need within her wanted to embrace her parents. The mother and father she hadn’t seen in over a decade. She shook her head and gripped the Cyborg’s hand. “I never want to go back. I never want to see this planet again. I want nothing to do with it or the monsters that reside on its surface. I don’t know why that makes me feel horrible...maybe I’m a horrible, selfish person but I can’t go back...because if I do...”
“You’ll see a goose kissing a moose?”
Norah jerked and pulled back. “You’re horrible. I can’t believe you would say that.”Down by the bay, where the banshees roam, they killed my staff, it wasn’t slow, and when they did, no one stayed down, have you ever seen a tail, the size of a whale, attached to a snake. She shook herself out of a half-trace, immediately glad the Cyborg couldn’t read her thoughts.
Stryker smirked down at her. “There’s nothing wrong with sharing your thoughts with me, no matter how bad they make you feel. I don’t want to go back either, I only landed for you and I’m willing to admit that–I only cared about saving you.”
She was pulled into a heated chest, hard and wonderful and strong where she felt weak.
“We’re terrible.”
“No, babe, we’re honest”
Norah buried her head into the Cyborg’s chest and breathed him in.I love you.It was in her throat, on the tip of her tongue, and she didn’t trust herself to say. She smacked her tongue against the roof her mouth. “I want to go back down there and kill every shrieker on the planet.”
“I’m sure you do. I know the feeling.” He stepped away from her, taking his heat with him. “But we’re not going to. I need to get back to my ship and report in and before that, we’re going to clean up and rest.” Stryker looked up and away from her to study the bridge. “My mission isn’t over until I know you’re safe.”
“Are you always such a perfectionist?” She shivered under his scrutiny.
“Always.”
Chapter Sixteen:
***
She followed Stryker back to the medbay, her arm wrapped around his waist as he kept her under the warmth of his embrace. Norah was not willing to let go of the one thing in her life that stabilized the chaos around her.
Norah sucked up the heat he emitted as if she were starved to the very core of her soul.
She was never one to get attached to anything but her goals, but somehow she had become attached to the Cyborg that held her like she was the most precious thing in the universe. She couldn’t imagine a life where they were apart, her need for him only grew now that they were out of danger.
Attachment felt like weakness, a break in her career and her plans for the future, but when she looked at Stryker, all she saw was this strong man who epitomized everything she had sought in her life.
Norah didn’t deserve the hero she clutched but she couldn’t let him go.
Her nose wrinkled when they entered the medlab where she stripped to her panties and crawled into a surgical pod.
Stryker stood by her side as she typed in the procedures that needed to be done and before long she had several IV’s attached to her arm as her body was soaked head to toe in medical sprays that leveled out her vitamin deficiencies and killed any external bacteria or parasites that she might have picked up.
He then pricked her arm and took some of her blood and shot it into himself, again.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”So, so wrong.
His eyes went unfocused, staring through her and not at her as he did whatever it was he did with her blood.
“I want to make sure,” he blinked and was back in his own head. “If my nanocells encounter anything peculiar, I can run my own diagnostics on it. Cyborgs can’t get sick,” he finished.
