Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1) (35 page)

She went down the stairs and headed toward the lights, smells and murmur of conversation coming out of the dining room. Noah, Hannah, Zade and Sisko were seated at a table covered with foil takeaway platters heaped with fragrant Mexican food.

It was always a fresh zing to her senses, seeing Noah after having looked away for any length of time, even a minute. Every sensual, starkly chiseled, larger-than-life detail of him. He seemed bigger, denser, brighter than everything around him.

He reached out and clasped her hand, tugging until she moved around the table to sit next to him.

“Thank God you’re here.” Zade said. “Noah wouldn’t let us start without you. We’ve been sitting here, snorting flavored steam.”

“Should have gone right ahead,” she said.

“She’s here, so stop whining,” Noah squeezed her hand under the table. His hand was so big and strong and warm. Her own tingled deliciously in it.

The food was very good, but she couldn’t eat very much of it, or follow the conversation. Considerable good-natured teasing was directed at Noah, but he ignored it, eating his tacos deftly with one hand while clasping her thigh under the table with the other. The contact made every luscious detail of their recent lovemaking run through her mind again, over and over, making her breathless and muddled.

Eventually, the conversation turned to her pepper spray, which sat displayed on the kitchen bar along with the other items that had been in her coat pockets. Plus her wig, her mouth thing, the tile from the Delaunay. Not her phone, though. That had been in the hidden pocket way down in the seam.

“Where’s my coat?” she asked.

Everyone abruptly stopped talking. Noah answered. “Down in the garage, sealed in a garbage bag. You don’t need it anymore. You have new stuff.”

“I’ll decide for myself about my own things.” She tugged her hand out of his grip and left the kitchen, heading down the staircase to the garage.

She untied the plastic bag that sat next to the trash bag and fished the filthy thing out. It was bloody and trashed, but she’d made it herself, and she was still attached to it.

She turned it inside out and slid her fingers into the small hidden pocket she’d sewn into the lining, and pulled out her phone. There was a smidgen of battery power left, so she checked the log. Six unanswered calls and a voice message, all from Gareth.

She accessed the voice mail as she went back up the stairs. Gareth’s recorded voice was so high and thin, she barely recognized it.

“Caro, I don’t know what you’re mixed up in, but a gang of thugs just assaulted me in my home! They wanted your address, and I’m so sorry, but I gave it to them. So look, if you’re there, run, and if you’re not there, don’t ever go back. And Caro, I hate to say this because I really like you, but just stay away from me, OK? Like, forever. Your problems are too big for me to deal with. Have a nice life. If you can.”

The message ended. Her coat thumped to the floor at her feet.

Noah joined her, in a few swift strides. “I didn’t see the phone,” he said.

“Hidden pocket,” she said.

“Turn it off,” Noah said. “Your sig just went nuts. What happened?”

“Gareth. My boss at Bounce.” She struggled to catch her breath. “Mark’s guys found him. Roughed him up. Gareth gave them my address. That was how they found me. He called to warn me. Left a voicemail.”

He held out his hand for the phone. “Let me hear it.”

His eyes were fiercely thoughtful as he listened to the message. Beard stubble shadowed his jaw, his chin.

“It’s happening again,” Caro said. “Tim, then Bea, now Gareth. You and your family are next. I thought Gareth would be safe. I walked into his agency right off the street and asked him for a job. He had no past connection to me. He never knew my real name. No one but you knows my name! How the
hell
did they connect him to me?”

Noah pried open her phone, pulled out the battery and tossed it onto the table. “Did you do artwork for Gareth? At Bounce?”

“Of course,” she said. “But not as a designer. Nothing that I took credit for. Not even using a fake name. Let alone my legal name.”

“But you did do design work for him,” he said. “Credited or not.”

“Well, yeah. It was a costume shop. I built costumes, made masks.”

“Were those featured online?”

“Of course. Theater or dance productions are all over social media.”

He shrugged. “So he saw your stuff online.”

“But I never got credited. I made sure of that. I’m not stupid!”

“Mark would recognize your style if he’d seen your work even once,” Noah said. “So would I.”

She bit her lip. “Gareth took a chance on me. Now he’s paying for it.”

“He’ll be OK,” Noah said. “They have no reason to hurt him now. According to the message, he gave them what they wanted. Now those men are dead, and Mark has me to think about. He won’t bother Gareth.” He stroked Caro’s hair. “But I didn’t want for us to discuss this now. You need rest.”

“Rest,” she repeated. “Right, Noah. A soul-sucking psycho maniac is searching high and low for everyone my life has ever touched so that he can punish the whole world with an army of lethal mutant freaks, and I’m supposed to
rest.
”

Noah shrugged. “Well, for what it’s worth, we’re lethal mutant freaks, too. The good kind.” His arm went around her shoulders, squeezing gently. “We’ll work on this after you’ve had twelve hours of sleep.” He turned back toward the dining room. “Everyone else, clear out of here,” he called.

“Except for me, to stand guard and man the monitors,” Sisko called back. “Right. Lucky me.”

Caro headed up the stairs. Noah followed her. Inside the bedroom, he flicked on a light just like those in his house. Dim lighting, as soft as firelight.

He pulled a lens case out of his pocket, removed his lenses, and turned that gorgeous, unearthly flash of amber in his eyes directly upon her.

The probing sensation was unbearable. “Quit it, Noah.”

“I’m just looking at your sig,” he said. “You’re so fucking beautiful without those damn lenses. It’s wild.”

Wild.
That word anchored her. After a moment, she could breathe deeply again and gaze right back at that uncanny luminosity. Wildness. It spoke of full moons, huge spaces, sweeping winds. A timber wolf running through snow.

And power. Strength, from deep within.

He made her feel it. It grounded her, straightened her back up, sent a rush of energy through her whole body.

Noah sensed the shift in her, and heat crackled and leaped between them instantly. His raw sexual sorcery was so potent. She couldn’t get enough.

She kicked off the shoes, the socks. Peeled the tight sweater off her head, and tossed her hair back. Shimmied out of the jeans and stood there in only bra and panties.

“Come here,” she said.

He came closer. “I’m yours for the taking,” he said. “Anytime, anywhere.”

“Good,” she whispered as he approached. “Right now, then. Right here.”

“Nice lingerie,” he said. “Take it off.”

“You do it.”

Her words were cut off by his hungry kiss.

They only stopped long enough for him to rip off his sweatshirt. He pressed her against him, unclasping the bra, tossing it away, clearly enjoying the way the tips of her breasts rubbed against his broad, scarred chest. He hooked his thumbs into her panties, nudging her back until she ran into the bed and sat down on it, bouncing.

He crouched by the bed to peel the panties off her ankles, then knelt between her knees and pressed hot, demanding kisses against her inner thigh, caressing her knees with his warm hands. The contact left a shimmering glow that spread out, everywhere.

“I want to go down on you.” He stroked the seam of her labia, just a slow, tender swipe with his thumb, up and down. That teasing contact and the aching hum of tension between them made silky wetness pool inside her. Her body’s instinctive demand.

Noah’s fingers slipped inside her and emerged gleaming, slick and hot. He made a low growling sound of pure satisfaction and sucked on them hungrily.

“So sweet,” he muttered. “You taste amazing.”

He put his mouth to her, his lips and tongue lavishly caressing every tender fold, lapping them, loving them.

And all she could do was give into it, lost and incoherent with the exquisite erotic sensations. Every part of her opening wider with every pulsing surge.

Chapter 26

Noah was deep into his analog dive. It was one of his favorites; a moonlit rock climb high in the Cascades, an old standby that chilled him fast. He could do it driving, during martial arts, while conducting business. Even when working on engineering designs.

It kept the restless, twitchy, damaged part of his brain too occupied to mess him up while he had an actual, real-world job to do. He’d even used this dive during sex on a few occasions, to keep from coming too fast. But that was pre-Caro.

Everything was different with Caro. Like night and day.

Every detail of the actual climb was burned into his memory. Every instant of the muscle popping, finger-bleeding effort as he crawled up under the last steep overhang. The physical, real-world climb was dangerous even for him, and he only undertook the real thing when no one could see him free-climbing it. Doing things that should be physically impossible attracted unwanted attention. His feet dangled over the empty abyss, wavering and jerking with each lurch upward.

Suddenly, freezing rain was pelting down on him. Out of nowhere.

What the
fuck?
This was his own goddamn analog. Like always, he’d gone with cool, sharp moonlight. A clear, empty sky. He had not visualized sleet into it.

Imbed.

Fuck. Imbeds were floating triggers for stress flashbacks. They sometimes drifted up from his subconscious mind and appeared in an analog dive without warning. He didn’t know what provoked them. Not only stress. Fallout from long-ago brain damage was his best guess as to their origin. Always scary. Always painful.

Cerebral implants and brain stim, the gifts that kept on giving.

It had been stupid to analog dive within twenty-four hours of pitched combat. Stupid, too, doing it while touching her. Contact with Caro flooded him with hormones, and affected his judgment. His heart and mind raced and his dick throbbed, still more than half hard even after a long bout of desperate sex. He was in a state of constant wonder and astonishment.

That was why he dove in the first place. To force himself out of this oversexed mindset. He needed to focus with laser-beam intensity to find a way to keep her safe from Mark forever.

He gently disentangled himself from her embrace, retaining his mental connection to the compromised analog. It hurt him to break physical contact with her. Every nanosecond that he wasn’t touching her was a nanosecond wasted.

He lay down naked on the floor. The contact cooled his hot skin as he dragged himself back into the mental rock climb, grimly resolute. He was going to beat this, damn it.

An icy imaginary wind blasted around him again. Night vision and infrared revealed every crack in the rock, each dangling root, scrap of lichen and creeping insect. He remembered it all. The images were in his long-term memory. Catalogued, indexed and available for instant recall whenever he needed them.

His brain had been forged into a motherfucking monster of a learning machine. He’d spent a lot of time pondering whether it was a curse or a tool. In the end, he’d given up trying to decide. It just was. Shut up and deal with it.

The analog was out of control. Ice pounded his face, made the stones slippery and his fingers stiff. His naked body convulsed on the floor, shuddering in reaction.

The analog was hijacked. He couldn’t alter it. He could only stop the dive and admit defeat—but if he did that, the analog was burned for good. Which sucked.

He tried to wrestle the imagery back to his chosen template. A few more feet, and he’d scramble to the summit and see the white-topped mountain range. The satisfaction he’d feel was the point of the exercise. The endorphin rush, that bright zing of positive reinforcement, was the reward for his concentration.
Every muscle quivered with effort as he stretched . . . almost reached it . . .
yes!

Crack.
A jutting rock broke off. Then the overhang. He fell, with a shower of shale and dirt, sliding, and barely caught himself on a lip of stone. He hung there, shock reverberating through fingers and arms, shoulders stretched past the point of pain. Wind shrieked. The handholds were gone. The face of the rock had changed.

No way up. No way down. Bolts of lighting stabbed the mountain. Missing him. Not by much.

A climbing rope thudded against his shoulder. He peered up, squinting through the darkness and the rain to see who held it. A tall man. Narrowed eyes stared quizzically down at him. A flat mouth. Dark beard scruff.

Asa?

He jolted back to the bedroom, with a jolt of adrenaline that goosed his AVP to combat level. Asa, imbedded in his deepest, oldest analog? What the
fuck?

He got to his feet, knees rubbery. The combat program data scrolled madly inside of his eyes as he pulled on jeans and a shirt. He left Caro sleeping, padding silently out of the bedroom on his bare feet.

Sisko looked up as he came down the stairs. He’d arranged the security monitors in a half-circle on the big coffee table, and was sprawled on the couch, feet on the table, tapping away at a laptop poised on his knees.

“Hey,” Sisko said. “What, you don’t trust me to stand guard anymore?”

“Can’t rest,” Noah muttered. “Tried to dive. Got ass-kicked by an imbed.”

“Should have known better than to dive right after combat, dude,” Sisko said absently. “You taught me that yourself. Did you fry your analog?”

Noah waved that away. “Never mind. What are you up to?”

“Researching your brother, among other things,” Sisko said. “Interesting guy. Got a lot going on.”

“Yeah? Illegal?”

“Some of it must be. He specializes in deepnet data mining, like I told you the other day. Auctions off targeted data. Makes flaming crap-tons of money. And plenty of enemies.”