Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(28)

“You know what?” he said, maybe with a testy edge and definitely not looking at her. “It’s okay if you don’t believe me or don’t agree with my methods, but I do care how Azul matures. I care about that a lot. She’s already got three strikes against a healthy development: she was born too wee, bottle-fed by folks not her own kind, and she’s got no herd. ’Bout the least I can do for her now is raise her up right so she knows exactly what she is and has no delusions of grandeur.”

“We’re talking about Azul?” Angela followed at a distance while he herded all the animals into a long pen nearer the barn.

He wasn’t looking right at her and took the opportunity to scowl hard. “’Course we are. What’d you think…aw, damn it, don’t you even get on psychoanalyzing me. I ain’t your fucking what-if social experiment.”

Kellen shut the gate and turned to her, hooking his thumbs in his belt loops. Else what the hell was he supposed to do with those hands?

Muscle memory had some ideas. He drew his fingers up to fists. Tension corded his arms.

“Discussing the animal. Right.” She burned a look up at him. “So, oh expert in animal behavior, what happens if I let Azul get close to me? What happens if I pet her beautiful head or stroke her flank?”

She had to know what her voice did to him. She wrapped it around him on purpose, binding him with it, like a word witch.

He took a deep breath, let it out. “Best not. She’ll get to thinking it’s okay for a critter like her to invade your personal space.”

“What if it is?” Soft, her words, and bedroom low.

“I don’t know what subtext you’re laying on here, but what I do know is—”

“Kellen.”

Why’d she have to say his name? And in a voice like that?

“What if it’s okay for you to invade my personal space?” she went on. “What if I want it sort of desperately? What if I’ve thought of it since we spoke on the telepresence?” She floated one hand toward him and got within a breath of touching his forearm before she drew it back.

Since their holoconference. Since he’d told her who killed her husband. This wasn’t the time to be laying her out on a bed in his mind. Shame burned through desire, turning it to bitter ash.

“You best go on wanting, then,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t resort to pouting or guilt. She’d grown past that, apparently. Her mouth hardened. “This wasn’t the reunion I expected.”

“Better than the one I didn’t expect at all,” he said. “Why’d you come out here?”

“I wanted to see you.” She moistened timorous lips, and he couldn’t help wondering if the tremble was part of her act. “I missed you.”

He near tore the belt loops off his jeans. God Almighty, this woman.

He pinched his eyes shut, but man, it hurt. “You been widowed what, a week? Ain’t it a bit soon to try and lay me down?”

When he opened his eyes, she was glaring back at him. Hands in fists. One eyebrow up. Uh-oh. “What I endured wasn’t a marriage. Besides, salacious banter didn’t seem to bother you at the gala.”

Confusion cooled his ardor a bit, and his humiliation. “What?”

“The messages? The poem?”

He repeated, “What?”

She threw her hands up and half turned, muttering under her breath in a language he didn’t know. Not that it mattered. She could curse fluently in at least twenty.

“Fit our tongues?” she snapped. “Wordsworth? In the dark?”

Worth Dark Words. He remembered her code, of course he did. Scratched on the inside of her smartglove, a secret message, like they’d sent when they were kids and playing at spies in the Mustaqbal Institute. But what did that have to do with…

Daylight broke upon his brain. “Is that what you meant? Somehow I guessed you were aiming for the sadder end of the poem. You know, the part where we’re old and bitter and blind to the wonders of the natural world and everythin’s gone to steaming shit.”

“I am not old. Or bitter. Or…”

More sublingual cursing. He wished he’d installed a translator app on his com. Whatever she was saying sounded just filthy.

She was right about one thing, though: this cadence worked for them. The bickering, the sparring. They’d done this plenty back when, and although it had always led to electric pile-driving sex then, he was a grown-up now. He could resist.

Plus, he had forgotten how sweet it felt all on its own, getting her riled up like this. He’d forgotten how her eyebrows swooped down in the middle but flared up in points on the outside, like demon wings. So fierce. And secret, known only to the people closest to her. He’d never seen her face set in anything other than perfect placidity on those vidcasts. As if fury were beneath her.

Kellen knew better. He knew her better.

She stood there spitting fire, and he shook his head in defeated admiration.

“How can you be so hands-off and stick-up-your-ass today when the night before last, you were laying out lines at me like a goddamned dealer?” she fumed.

“I got no idea what you’re talking about, but you sure do work up a fine lather.”

“I’m talking about you responding to my secret code. You sent me messages. During the gala the night before last.”