I shivered and then nodded. “You were close to fully mapped. The others were still in progress, but the memoriam didn’t want to let me go. I worried what it would mean if you were fully integrated.”
“I think I know what it means,” he mused. It means this connection between us. Between our nanites. It’s unexpected, but I don’t regret it.
Studying him, I let out a little sigh. “I kind of love it. It let me find you…”
“It let me see you,” he whispered. “I thought I was losing my mind. That I was in so much pain, I was clinging to you as a last resort. And if you were the last thing I saw before I died, I could live with that.”
My heart ached with every admission. “I didn’t understand it at first. All I knew was I wanted to know you were both okay. I wanted to see you both so badly, and then you were there.”
“You were a dream come true…right up until we found out that you were on your way to surrender yourself.” His expression turned fierce. “You will never do that again. Not for me.”
I sighed. “I had a plan,” I told him.
“I don’t care. If Dirk doesn’t put you over his knee and spank you, I will.”
I burst out laughing at the ferocity of his threat, then kissed him. “I love you.” Every time the words slipped free, they seemed almost too small to encompass the feeling I had for him. “I would rather be with you anywhere than have you there alone without us.”
He groaned and rolled onto his back, pulling me to curl against him. Movement in the corner brought my head up, and I met Dirk’s quiet gaze.
“Didn’t take you for a peeper, mate,” Hatch teased him as he folded an arm beneath his head and kept one arm around me. Neither of us had bothered to dress.
“Like you haven’t watched when you had the chance,” Dirk told him dryly with only a faint smile. “Though you shouldn’t act like you didn’t know I was here.”
I frowned. “You were…”
“Here the whole time,” he murmured, his smile softening. “Thinking, and then you two tumbled in here unaware of anything. I would have left, but I wanted to stay.” There was just the barest element of apology in his voice.
I held out a hand to him, and he took the invitation with a sigh as he dropped to sit on my other side, and then he pressed his lips to my shoulder.
Sinking down between them, I let out my own long sigh and then said, “Tell me not to do it, and I won’t.”
“You don’t want to do it,” Hatch said quietly. “You don’t need us to tell you.”
Relief seemed to leach the tension right from Dirk’s muscles as he slid a hand down my bare thigh. “You don’t?”
“No,” I admitted. “But…”
“But you need to understand all the options, weigh the possibilities,” Hatch finished for me, and gave me a small smug smile. “I don’t need the nanites to know that, and if the big guy over there was thinking instead of reacting, he’d know it, too.”
“Yeah, fuck you, Hatch,” Dirk said without any heat. “I also know how her mind works, and how much she loves to fix things for others because she holds herself accountable for the ills of the world.”
“Eh, I blame her upbringing. They raised this upstanding, creative, dedicated scientist, with a strong core of ethics and a devotion to duty. She’s damn near perfect, so we kind of have to accept that it means we won’t always get our way.”
“She’s also lying right there, rather naked, and if you two want to bond over discussing my flaws, I’ll leave you to it.” I made a move to sit up and found myself rolled beneath Dirk with Hatch lying on his side, head propped on his hand. “Or not.”
Dirk chuckled. “You know the rules when you’re in my bed.”
“I’m not in your bed,” I reminded him. “This isn’t the room we slept in.”
“What’s mine is his,” Hatch told me with a slow smile. “So his rules apply, and do tell more. She doesn’t let me make the rules all that often.”
I groaned. This was not a conversation I ever expected to have. “You’ve never asked for rules, you’ve always just been a man in the hot pursuit of pleasure.”
“True,” he agreed, and then traced a finger down my arm as Dirk studied me. The tension in his expression was gone. “Doesn’t mean I don’t support the captain.”
A whole body shiver went through me as another image popped in my head of being pinned between the pair of him, and Hatch’s smile took on a devilish hint.
“Yeah, I thought you liked the idea.”
Dirk chuckled, then gave me a kiss. “When we’re more secure, we can indulge your curiosity.”
I was more disappointed than relieved, even if the option had both intrigued me and made me nervous at the same time.
“Get dressed,” Dirk told me softly, before giving me another slow kiss that had me arching up to meet him, arms wrapped around his neck. I felt more than heard Hatch’s groan. The image of Dirk kissing me turned him on almost as much as the sensation of his mouth moving on mine did me. The overlay of twining emotions staggered me.
I wasn’t sure I would ever get used to that, but I was half-drunk on the feeling of it when Dirk lifted his head and shot a look from me to Hatch then back.
“You don’t feel me kissing her, right?”
“Not exactly,” Hatch muttered. “Fucking turns me on to feel how she does when she is though.” With a laugh, he clapped Dirk on the shoulder. “It’s fine for me, I like being teased back into a hard-on twenty minutes after I came in her. I could definitely get used to it.”
Dirk rolled his eyes as Hatch walked away with a swagger. I tracked him as he gathered up our clothes. He left mine on the bed and then carried his into the bathroom, giving us a small amount of privacy.
“I have an idea,” I whispered to him. At his raised brows, I added, “You won’t like it.”
He tilted his head back, affection and exasperation at war in his expression. “I hate it already, but I’ll hear you out. Shower first… You both smell like sex, and we’ll get nothing done if all I want to do is make you smell like me.”
The shower helped, as did the fresh tea waiting for me when we rejoined the others. As drafty and damp as the old keep was, and nothing like the compound in New Zealand, I found myself reluctant to plan our exodus because no matter what we did, we had to deal with Smtihson and the Blossom Foundry.
“He won’t give up,” I said with a glance toward Dirk and then Hatch. Neither disagreed with me. “And I can’t see myself agreeing to what might be a death sentence for all of us.” Because they would never let me go alone.
I suspected Dirk wouldn’t let me go at all, and if he fought me on it, the others would too, even if they all said they wanted to ‘support’ me. They’d supported me quite enough already.
“But there is still work to be done here,” I admitted, because this was important. “It could take the rest of my life to do the work, maybe another life beyond mine, but I could get it started.”
“I’ll help,” Oz told me. “You know I will.”