Cipher (22 page)

Sera, by contrast, wasn’t a mystery at all. She brought out toast and sausage and managed to take everyone’s requests without actually looking at Julio once. Her studious disregard had passed casual a few months ago, but Julio remained oblivious to the way Sera avoided him.

He was less oblivious to her ass, which he seemed plenty willing to appreciate, and that was one emotion Kat was heartily glad she wasn’t being forced to share.

Next to Julio, Miguel just looked tense. Since his telepathy was every bit as strong as her empathy, she didn’t blame him. Kat caught his gaze and lifted her eyebrows, a quiet question they’d asked one another a thousand times.
Too much noise?

His lips pressed together in a line, an expression that almost managed to look like a smile even though it wasn’t. Then he nodded and dropped his gaze to the table.

“Are you headed out of town soon, Patrick?” Andrew asked.

“After I eat, probably.” Patrick leaned his elbows on the table, and Kat found herself staring at the way his tattoos moved when his forearms flexed. “Alec called me after he talked to you. The Conclave’s moving a little slow in agreeing to officially hire me, but Alec asked me to get started anyway.”

Andrew gestured across the table with his mostly empty juice glass. “You should take Anna with you. She was planning on running down a few leads.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Anna interjected. “He works alone. Don’t you, Patrick?”

His jaw clenched. “Not always. Two heads can think smarter than one, right?”

“That depends on the heads.”

Julio looked up, one eyebrow arched. “Did I miss something?”

“No,” Anna said quickly. Then she shrugged. “It’s fine. The job’s important. We can pool our resources, get it done.”

No one disagreed, and the conversation shifted, turned to discussion of plans and tactics. Julio and Andrew had responsibilities in New Orleans—responsibilities she’d already kept them from. Psychics weren’t a wolf concern, not when the bulk of the threat had been neutralized. Patrick and Anna chased down crazy supernaturals professionally.

In the hour before dawn, Kat had stared at the ceiling and wondered if resolution was important enough to press the issue. To insist that Patrick let her go with him. But Andrew would follow. Even in sleep, his arm had curled around her, hand splayed possessively across her hip. They’d barely moved past kissing in the days since she’d removed him from her shields, but the physical seemed inconsequential in the quiet moments. When none of the pain mattered, because he looked at her like she was the person who made him glad he was alive.

Andrew would follow her. He’d rip out those places that had been remade with an alpha’s need to protect his people, and focus all of that protection on her. He’d neglect duty, neglect himself and everyone in the world, and it might kill the man he’d become.

He would follow her, she knew it in her bones, and that made it worth staying.

Under the table, she reached for his hand and twined her fingers with his, the soft intimacy a thousand times more arousing than the wildest empathy-induced orgasm.

Let Anna and Patrick chase her past. She was chasing her future.

The paper shredder made a very satisfying sound.

Seated on Andrew’s couch, Kat watched it turn one page at a time into tiny strips of paper with black spots that seemed entirely innocuous. There were easier ways to destroy files, of course, but she’d made Andrew stop by Jackson’s office so she could abscond with the shredder.

It was cathartic, reducing a cult’s scheme for world domination into bits of paper spaghetti.

Andrew eyed the growing pile of shredded paper apprehensively. “Are you sure we don’t need a copy? Some sort of list…?”

“Ben made me a script.” She picked up the page that listed the psychics who needed to be eliminated and stared at Callum’s name for a moment. Then she fitted it into the shredder and watched it vanish. “I can use it on the corrupted files I pulled off the zip disk if I ever need to recreate the lists.”

“So it’s better than encrypted.” Andrew nodded. “That’s smart.”

“Ben’s smart,” she agreed. Opening the next file revealed a smiling picture of her own face, twelve or thirteen at the most. Ben’s color laser printer had recreated the vivid colors of what must have been a surprisingly high-resolution scan a decade ago. Her eyes were so blue. So young. “This is what my mother saw,” she whispered, tracing the boundary of the photo. “This is when she lost it.”

Andrew stroked a hand over her hair. “She probably had reservations already, but that… Yeah, that would do it.”

“This is why she told me about imprinting when I was too young to even understand it.” She moved her finger until it passed over the neat list of her uses. Controlling people. The one thing she’d never wanted to do, because she knew in her gut how horrible it could be to have someone else’s emotions guiding your choices. “My powers were out of control when I was a teenager. Puberty sucked. It wouldn’t have been so hard to break me. Remake me.”

“Hey.” He turned her face to his with a gentle hand on her chin. “She made sure that didn’t happen.”

“I know.” His eyes were as green as hers were blue. The colors of an oversaturated summer day, endless skies and perfect grass. The file slipped to the floor, and she raised her hand to touch his cheek, to feel his beard under her fingertips. “She protected me, even when she was crazy. Even when she was lost.”

“That’s right. We destroyed their experiment, and we’re going to find the rest of them too. Shut it all down, forever.”

They were supposed to be going slowly. Taking a step back from grinding their way to orgasm, or empathy-fueled blowjobs. But his beard scratched her fingers, and every touch seemed so important, now that she was feeling them with her body instead of her mind.

Rubbing her cheek against his palm, she let out a shaky sigh. “I feel like I shouldn’t be shy. We’ve practically had sex already.”

He kissed her cheek and spoke, his breath blowing over her skin. “Not like this, we haven’t.”

If her heart pounded any harder, people would hear it on the street below. “Are we about to have sex?”

“Don’t know.” His voice deepened. “Do you want to?”

A helpless laugh escaped her. “I’ve wanted to since about the time I discovered my sex drive. I was a late bloomer.”

“Mm-hmm, and there’d be no harm in waiting a little longer, either. It all depends on you, Kat. What you need.”

Kat closed her eyes. Breathed in the scent of him. “I want you to be in control this time. Just for a bit, because I’ve never—” She took another breath and imagined dragging in courage with the oxygen. “All the stuff I said to you in the hotel, about my emotions being hardwired…it’s not wrong. It was the wrong reason for what was going on, but it’s not wrong. I don’t know if I can keep everything together the first time I have sex with someone I love.”

His breath hitched, and he dropped one hand to her shoulder. Pulled her closer. “I don’t think anyone can.” His mouth descended on hers, coaxing and desperate all at once.

It was Andrew, and her, and her empathy was locked down tight enough to survive the psychic version of a nuclear bomb and she still lost the ability to think when his lips parted over hers. Her brain lurched drunkenly between sensations, thrilling at his kiss and reveling in his touch, and then she managed to get herself into his lap, and
that
was the best yet.

He settled her carefully against his erection and broke the kiss to blow out a shaky breath. “Bedroom. If I’m in control, I’m doing it right.”

Freedom from responsibility might have its perks. She kissed his jaw, then higher, moving toward his ear. “If you’re in control, you have to get us there. I’m busy.”

He rose but swayed. “How busy? Because if you’re going to do that…”

Kat laughed and hid her face against his neck. “You could set me down and make me walk, you know. I’m not tiny. Not even with Zola chasing me around her dojo ten hours a week.”

His hands tightened on her thighs, held her closer. “You’re perfect.”

There could be no doubts that he meant it, not when the words caught in his throat and came out so rough they sounded like his beard felt, rasping and scratchy enough to send heat spiraling through her. “I believe you.”

He headed toward the bedroom, a low laugh rumbling out of his chest. “You sound surprised.”

“Do you really want to talk about cultural pressures and female body image right now?”

“No.” He laid her on the bed and straightened, reaching for his shirt. “No, I really don’t.”

Fabric hit the floor, and Kat decided that Andrew needed to be naked. Constantly, or at least until she burned through every fantasy she could come up with.

Most of them involved her being naked too, so she dug her fingers into the hem of her T-shirt and yanked it up. The bed dipped, and his hands joined hers in guiding the garment over her head.

Shirtless. Shirtless was progress. She ignored his pants and her bra and wrapped her hands around his ridiculously solid biceps so she could tug him back to the mattress with her. “I don’t know where to touch first. I want everything.”

“We can take our time, hit on everything at least once.”

Touching him thrilled her. She spread her fingers wide against his chest, and it felt so good. Just touch, so simple, so laughably mundane. He could bend steel and she could kill with her mind, and she was drunk on the simplest brush of skin against skin.

“No empathy, right?” Andrew asked, his breath stirring the hair at her temple. “You’re getting giddy.”

“Because it’s you.” Easing her hand to the side, she savored the feel of him under her fingertips until her thumb found his nipple.

He sucked in a breath and slid his fingers into her hair to cup her head. “It’s me.”

Kat lifted herself up onto her elbow and pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “Have you thought about this? What you’d do if you had me in your bed?”

He considered it with too much gravity to be believed. “About every fifth heartbeat or so, I think.”

A few inches up, and her mouth hovered over his ear. “If you tell me one of your fantasies, I’ll tell you one of mine.”

“Do I get points deducted if mine includes costumes?”

“Depends on what kind. No metal bikinis.”

“Damn it.” He smiled—a joyous expression edged with heat. “Princess Leia’s hot.”

“Perv.” And because joking with him,
laughing
with him, was the hottest thing of all, she closed her teeth on his earlobe and moaned.

Andrew rolled her, pinned her hands and body to the bed. “We have to go slow.”

Gentle as he was, the fingers around her wrists were strong and unyielding. She liked the weight of his body, the thrill of being on the receiving end of his focused intensity. “I thought we
were
going slow. For us. We’re redefining glacial, here.”

“Not quite.” He eased his hands down her arms, all the way down her sides. “Trust me. Once we get going, it’ll be anything but glacial.”

“I was talking speed, not temperature.” Her nipples ached enough to make her bra uncomfortable, the wrong kind of friction when she wanted his hands, or his mouth. “You are really hot.”

He answered with a hoarse noise of encouragement as he slipped one hand beneath her and unhooked her bra with a quick motion. A practiced move, and relief swelled at the fact that it wasn’t her first time, that his confidence and intensity could be sexy instead of blindly intimidating.

Andrew slid the lacy fabric free and tossed it behind him, but when he bent low again, he touched his lips to her collarbone, her shoulder. The middle of her chest.

Too
slow. Kat clutched at his short hair and groaned. “I’m not a virgin. We can go slower the second time? Or the fifth?”

His mouth skimmed her breast as he raised his head to meet her eyes. “You’re not a virgin,” he agreed as his cheeks reddened. “But this isn’t—I’m not—”

“A tiny man?” she guessed, trying to keep from smiling. He was stammering. “Andrew, I’ve seen you with an erection. I didn’t faint. I’m pretty sure it will all work out, anatomically speaking.”

He didn’t share her amusement. “I just don’t want to hurt you,” he whispered.

That subtly, the power shifted again. Maybe it would always be like that between them, a seesaw of give and take, Andrew’s desperate need to minimize the danger to her body against her equally powerful need to protect his mind and heart. They could hurt each other, destroy each other, so easily—so
accidentally
—

They could. But they wouldn’t. For the first time, she was sure. Kat lifted her hands and cupped his face. Gave him the power, because right now she had plenty to spare. “Then we’ll go as slow as you want to. Until I’m whimpering and begging and ready to kill you for how bad I need you inside me.”

His eyes darkened, but he smiled again. “The death threats are sexy.” Then he kissed her, slow and deep.

And endless. Not that he couldn’t kiss, oh
hell
, could he kiss, but the sheer sensuality of his tongue teasing against hers had her twisting restlessly long before he decided to move on.

To her neck, next, which had her arching her head back in a silent plea that he granted with a soft nip. He must have liked the way she whimpered, because he did it again and again, until her breaths rasped in and out and she wondered if it was possible to go insane from too much physical pleasure.

Then he moved to her ear. Licks. Nips. He kissed her until she whispered his name, then switched to the other side and started all over, working his way down her throat with a concentration that made her consider snatching the power back and taking him.

But he needed this. Needed every moan he coaxed out of her, needed the pleasure that made her skin flushed and sensitive. Needed her to be ready for him, as if she wasn’t already aching and wet, embarrassingly aroused and ready to beg in earnest.

She did, when his beard scratched across her breasts, his mouth hot and open on her chest. “Andrew…oh, my
God
, please—” She caught his hair, tried to tug his mouth to her nipple, babbling helpless pleas that she’d have to deny later.