Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1)(93)

“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 f*ck? 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 motherf*cking 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 f*ck?

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.”