Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(90)
She towered over her daddy, but she leaned, put her forehead to his, and said some stuff in a low voice that Kellen couldn’t hear. Didn’t want to. And that old coot had cried and cried.
Things were afoot. Rebellion glimmered like a too-hot summer on the surface of everything.
And when Angela set up her command center about one hour’s flight time outside of Denver, in a little town called Crested Butte, Kellen went with her. Pretty town in the summer, used to be crammed to the gills in winter, back when winter snowfall was predictable and ski trips were a thing. They found a unit low on the mountain and a wide strip of place to park the plane. Then they started hauling shit in. Cameras and support staff. Communications arrays and performance tech. Angela spent a whole day recording speeches in all sorts of languages for all kinds of eventualities.
Including one where she didn’t survive tomorrow’s inaugural ball.
Kellen didn’t think he was supposed to see that one. He probably shouldn’t have watched. But damn it, he’d been so sure so recently that folk he loved were gone, he couldn’t even wrap his mind around a world without her in it. So seeing that speech was a lot like watching a vid, a made-up what-if, a thing he knew could never happen. Would never happen.
A thing he personally would not allow to happen.
He aimed to be there, to protect her, no matter what. She wasn’t getting him into another psych helm. She wasn’t running off on him again.
’Course, when he mentioned that, there at the end of the day with hours left before dawn and her team wrapping up and moving out for the night, she just slung him a vixen grin. “Not happening. You can put that thought to bed.” She paused. “Now, may I? Put you to bed, I mean?”
“Didju just sling a flirt at me?” He wasn’t gonna tell her she sucked at innuendo. If he hadn’t been so clued in to her tone and movement, he might have missed her invitation completely.
In reply, she dropped her voice to velvet and rubbed it all over him. “I tried to. Did it hit anything like a sensitive spot?”
Only every single one. “I don’t know if you realized when you hired this place, but there is, right above where we’re standing, a loft sort of doohicky. And in that loft, there is a giant bed.”
Her dark eyes narrowed. “You need to go upstairs. Right now.”
“Yes’m. Lead on.”
She did, working a wiggle into her stair-climbing that made the going way too slow. Not that he didn’t enjoy every single sashay.
She’d crawled into some kind of slinky dress for her latest speech recording, but it didn’t take much to get that thing off. Wore her brand-new printed cowboy boots underneath, where the cameras wouldn’t be peeking and that he found mighty adorable. There was some discussion of cowgirls and haylofts and shit like that. Private discussion.
He kissed her mouth, and then all the rest of her.
They had to move the cat—who complained, jumped back up, and had to be removed a second time, and then flicked her tail and sulked over to a dresser, where she had a better view—but that bed was all he’d imagined it would be. Space enough to spread Angela’s body beneath his attention, to lavish and worship and take time over a thing. It was a coming-home kind of bed, a thank-you-kindly one as well. A please-stay-here-with-me-forever, though in fact those words scared him shitless, and he couldn’t force them out. He didn’t know, even after all they’d been through, what she’d say to that kind of declaration.
His love was a wild thing, a powerful thing, angelic and immortal and fully beyond his ken. But he didn’t want to waste the time tonight trying to figure her all out.
Tonight was about licking their wounds clean, about healing.
There was a time, back in the before, when they’d memorized each others’ bodies, every curve and valley, mountain and river. Tonight, they fitted the pieces of their map together till no spaces remained between parts. Fusion and perfect, a laser-cut puzzle put right.
It was okay that the big bed squeaked. It was okay that the cat watched creepily from her perch on the dresser. It was okay that winter roared just outside, and nothing tomorrow was promised.
They held.
Each other, the future, the past, all their hopes and dreams and words.
They held.
And then, long after and with their naked, sated limbs still tangled in sheets, she broke first.
Chapter 18
“My love, I need to tell you a thing,” Angela said. “And after, if you need to leave and never look back, that’s going to be okay. Just in case things don’t work out so well tomorrow, I want you to know the truth. Keeping this secret has been so very hard.”
She almost said so fucking hard, but the tone wasn’t right. It might have led to more frolicking, and she needed to get this truth out in the open. It was time.
“Aw, love,” Kellen said, pressing a kiss against her hair. “I ain’t leaving you. I aim to stick on you like glue all the rest of our lives.”
Did he realize he echoed his own words from long ago? From their last day together at Mustaqbal? Knowing him, yeah, he probably did. Boys with eidetic memories were such a pain in her ass.
“I thought I had a problem with that,” she confessed. “With forever. I thought, back on the submarine and lots of times before, that loving you was a weakness, my Achilles’ heel. I worried that if somebody wanted to get to me, to hurt me, they’d just hurt you instead, knowing that it would kill me.”