When he’d finished, he stood perfectly still, analyzing the readout, his face carefully expressionless. After several moments, he moved away from her. She tensed, uncertain of what to expect. Had he seen that her brain implant was merely a control device rather than a fully operational CPU? Had he detected the organs she had that no cyborg would have been given? That her skeletal structure was titanium clad calcium, rather than pure titanium?
Her mind supplied her with a half dozen attack and counterattack scenarios while she waited tensely to see what he would do next, resisting the temptation to simply take matters into her own hands and launch the first assault.
What were the odds that he hadn’t detected the fact that she was human, not cyborg?
Was he still assimilating the differences and trying to decide what they meant?
She jumped when he returned once more with an extractor.
“I must remove your locators.”
Amaryllis stared at him blankly for several moments, trying to shift gears. “Locators?” she echoed.
“There are two. One here,” he said, touching her hip and sending a strange bolt of electricity through her. “The other is at the base of your skull.”
The remark was enough to jolt her back into real time. “Two?” she repeated, frowning while she slowly considered the possibilities. “One is a decoy?”
He stared at her a long moment and finally seemed to shrug. “Both are operational.”
“I don’t understand. I knew about one. Why would they imbed two different locators?”
He frowned as he placed a hand on her hip, drawing the flesh taut with his fingers as he aimed the laser he held in his other hand. Amaryllis gulped, bracing herself as the full ramifications of her deception assailed her. He wasn’t going to use anything to deaden the area.
If she were cyborg, she would be able to shut down the nerve endings in that area and close herself off from the pain.
“They expect us to behave as humans.”
“What?”
“Robotics, Inc.. Strange, don’t you think, that they maintain that we are no more than machines, and yet they behave with the expectation that we will react as a human would. Finding one locator, we would look no further.”
It was a good point, but one Amaryllis wasn’t terribly interested in at the moment.
Some of the tension left her as he moved away from her again. When he returned, he smoothed a gel substance over the area he would incise. The gel was cold. Amaryllis felt her nipples puckering in reaction.
The movement caught his gaze.
There was nothing remotely detached, or mechanical, in his eyes. His reaction was surprising, to say the least.
Her own reaction to the look in his eyes was almost as stunning. Heat surged through her. Her mouth went dry. She was still trying to gather enough moisture to swallow when he seemed to become aware of his surroundings once more. Briefly, their gazes met. Something flickered in his eyes and then vanished.
He’d opened her hip with the laser before she recovered enough to tense against the expectation of pain. There was no pain, however, and she realized he’d deadened the area after all.
Her heart thudded painfully in her chest as that sank in.
He proceeded to remove the locator and destroy it, however, as if nothing was amiss. When he’d closed the wound, he directed her to turn over. She did so reluctantly, wondering if he would strike while her back was turned.
His hand felt warm as it skated over her back, brushing her hair from her neck. She tensed, trying to ignore the tingles of warmth that spread through her. Again, he rubbed the cold gel into her skin. The smell of burning flesh stung at her nostrils as he made the incision and extracted the second locator. She made an abortive attempt to rise when she realized he’d closed the wound. He placed a hand on her back, silently commanding her to remain as she was. Reluctantly, she desisted.
Discomfort assailed her as he ministered to her wounds. It was not the discomfort of pain, however. She would almost have welcomed that as something to focus on at this point, for, lying face down on the gurney, her other senses sharpened and she was more acutely conscious of the strength and warmth of his hands, and the surprising gentleness of his touch even than before. Desperate to close her mind to the effect he was having on her senses, Amaryllis squeezed her eyes shut, only to discover that that made things even worse. Something tightened and fluttered in her belly, spreading warmth throughout her body. Her heart rate kicked up a few notches so that it was a struggle to try to regulate her breathing to anything even approaching normal.
He had to have noticed her distress.
She saw, once he’d finished and told her to sit up, that he was no more unfazed than she was. As unfamiliar as she was with the look of desire in a man’s eyes, as certain as she was that cyborgs would know nothing about human passion, what she saw when she finally nerved herself to meet his gaze was as unmistakable as her own erratic heartbeat and instantly recognizable because it reflected her own needs.
With an effort, she redirected her thoughts as he finished his examination, trying to decide whether he’d realized she was human and, if so, what the possible repercussions might be.
It was difficult, to say the least, with him standing so close, with the touch of his hands on her thighs as he examined the wounds there.
