He fell silent. She didn’t know if he was sleeping or not, but his hold didn’t loosen and she found she couldn’t maintain either her anger or her tension. Slowly but surely it seeped away. The desire he’d aroused in her didn’t.
He was warm. He breathed. His body was hard, but in the sense of well honed muscle and tissue, not cold metal.
He felt good.
He felt damned good.
He’s a machine, she mentally screamed at herself!
Why the hell had they made them so real? Stupid, conceited, megalomaniacs! What was it about humans and their preoccupation with perfection anyway? Why create something so perfect it was better than the real thing? Because they liked to think they could do a better job than nature? Hell, that wasn’t all that damned hard! Look at her! A freak of nature if there ever was one. She should never have been born at all, much less survived outside her mother’s womb.
She should be glad he’d pushed that particular button and summoned her personal demons. It was enough to remind her to keep her distance in every way possible.
If she could just keep reminding herself of that, she might get through this.
Chapter Six
Amaryllis didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry that Dante hadn’t pursued the matter. On one level, she harbored a good deal of regret. She couldn’t recall ever having been so quickly, or thoroughly, aroused that she’d become lost in it. She was sorry it had ended without the promised fulfillment, especially since the incident seemed to have left her body in a ready state that showed no signs of going away and only added to the tension she was already feeling about her situation.
On another level, she realized that she’d been spared a step that she would never have been able to retrieve. If Dante had possessed her, given her the pleasure his touch promised, she feared she would’ve been addicted to his touch in a way that she would never be able to free herself from.
She didn’t want to be tied to him in any way. She couldn’t afford to be. Her life might well depend upon escape and she couldn’t afford to be torn by conflicting desires.
The cyborgs, if they discovered she was not one of them, would almost certainly perceive her as a threat to their plans, whatever those were. They might decide to simply keep her, in which case she would never be allowed to see her family again. Or they might decide that it would be better all the way around to kill her.
One thing about the situation plagued her.
Why had he decided to help her? Why hadn’t he simply turned her over when he realized that she was human?
She would’ve felt better if she’d known that.
She would’ve felt even better if she could’ve put some distance between the two of them.
Her situation didn’t truly allow that. She managed distance of a sort, though, by refusing thereafter to share the bunk with Dante. She slept when he was gone. When he returned to the cabin, she occupied herself with her thoughts or her workouts. There wasn’t a great deal that she could do for hours on end, confined to the one, small cabin, but it was sparsely furnished.
She needed to keep fit. More than that, she needed something to work off her excess energy. It was far better to exhaust her body in staying fit than to simply stare at the walls and allow her imagination to take her places she didn’t want to go.
Dante didn’t try to interfere, or even try to converse with her after that first night. If he hadn’t been a cyborg, she would have been inclined to think he was brooding over the fact that she so assiduously avoided any sort of physical contact with him. He often watched her instead of sleeping. She made it a point never to look directly at him, but she could feel his gaze.
If he hadn’t been a cyborg, she might have been inclined to think that the ‘lesson’ he’d given her to show her that he was well aware that she found him attractive, whatever her prejudices, had backfired and caught him, too.
That would require an admission on her part that she wasn’t ready to concede, however.
He behaved very much like a human, but she knew he’d been programmed to do so. Even the sexual aspects of his behavior, although it had taken her by surprise, didn’t really change anything. For all she knew, he might have been designed to be a pleasure droid. Most of the cyborgs had been designed as soldiers. Before she’d met Dante, she’d thought they all were, but that didn’t mean that they were. She could’ve been wrong.
She had an uneasy feeling that she hadn’t been, but she resolutely refused to acknowledge it. She tried very hard not to think about it at all, but with indifferent success. She’d experienced an awakening on that first night they spent together. Each time she felt his brooding gaze upon her, it was like a touch and her body warmed and images rose in her mind that made her body vibrate with anticipation. Each time she failed to keep her own gaze from straying to him, she felt heat begin to rise inside of her, felt her pulse begin to beat a little faster.
After weeks in space, confined in so small an area, she’d almost begun to hope she would be discovered. She supposed that accounted for her carelessness.
Or perhaps it was only that Dante had made her so aware of her femininity that she’d become preoccupied with the distant ache that found no surcease.
She’d stayed far longer beneath the pounding water of the shower than she should have, caressing her own aching body with her soapy hands until the discomfort grew to be too much to bear. For someone who’d spent most of her life trying to divorce herself from her body, it seemed doubly difficult to find this new awareness of it that she couldn’t chase away no matter how hard she tried. Finally, she’d turned to washing her hair. She’d just rinsed the soap from it when she finally sensed a presence nearby.
Her heart leapt into her throat as the realization sank in that she’d been vaguely aware of the sensation of being watched even before she’d begun to wash her hair, too preoccupied with the ache between her legs and the uncomfortable tenderness of her breasts to consciously acknowledge it, but aware in some distant corner of her mind.
Her instincts had atrophied from boredom and disuse.
She had to force her frantic mind to function, consciously call her training to her aid.
