Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(91)

“That’s a hard word, kill.” He stroked her back, inscribing it with fire.

“But it’s the right word,” she said. She desperately wanted to leave it at that. To let him keep on stroking her skin, and then she’d pull him into her arms and they’d make love for a full day straight, like goddamn rattlesnakes. But that plan was like all her other plans, a goal to aim for, not reality to live. And all based on lies.

“Nah, you’re stronger than you know, princess,” he said.

“Maybe. At least, I think you might be right.” Unable to stop herself, she wrapped her arms around his body, fit her palms against the ripple of muscles on his back, and drew in a deep breath. He smelled like fresh-showered man, no cologne or clinging scents. Just him. For half a moment, she held him completely in her embrace, and she actually did feel strong. Strong enough to tell him the truth. “At the pile in the desert, when we didn’t know yet who’d survived, when we thought the worst, you were still going. Hell, I was still going. We were still living, functioning, even if the worst had happened. Somehow the world itself didn’t end.”

He didn’t say anything to that, but she knew she was right.

“The tragic thing, and the secret thing,” she went on, “is I didn’t always know that. I didn’t always know that losing the thing most precious to me would not, in fact, end me.” She paused, gathering up courage as if it were armor. And it was, sort of, but cold. “Kellen, what did Vallejo tell you that made you so sad in the submarine?”

He loosed a long breath that eddied in her hair. “He said the consortium wanted you to get yourself hitched to Daniel because they had run your genomes and thought you two would produce some kind of superkid. It struck me that was just the sort of thing an evil person might hold over your head, to keep you down and to make you miserable for a long, long time. Got to say, it pissed me off some.”

Close. Real close, Vallejo. Maybe you really are a supergenius madman. Observant at the least.

She thanked the old man silently for not saying the rest. For letting her do it herself. “Except it wasn’t Daniel’s genome I hitched mine to.”

His hand on her back went still. His breath stopped.

“You were…” His voice like dust.

“Um, yes,” she said. “I knew before you left Mustaqbal, but I didn’t know how to tell you. I mean, we weren’t safe. You said it yourself, there’s no cure for nineteen. At least technology was on our side, sort of. Zeke said I could bank the fetus until I, quote, got my shit together, unquote.” She had been such a mess, and so alone. For a long time after Kellen had left, she just hadn’t been able to function. But he didn’t need to know that. Not now.

“That snotfucker,” Kellen murmured.

“Agreed, knowing what I know now. At the time, he had all the answers, though. Of course, he never intended for me to come back and retrieve the fetus. What he intended was exactly the thing I did. I married Daniel. I promised to put my super girl genome to work, and we tried. A lot. For a long time. But we never got along on, you know, a personal level—in private, he was the asshole no one ever realized, and cruel besides. I offered to get it over with, in a lab, like civilized people. He, ah, didn’t like that idea. Despite his threats, I left him two years ago.”

“Right about the time you got the mech?”

“Do you remember every single thing that has ever come out of my mouth?”

“Purt’ near.”

The accent was really horrible. He hadn’t done anything to fix it in all these years. She kind of loved it. Okay, real hard loved it.

“So anyhow,” she went on, “Zeke bought mech-Daniel to keep my defection from getting back to the consortium. He swore he was trying to protect me from them, said they would be really angry if they found out I ditched Daniel and put a snag in their horrible Bene Gesserit–type breeding program.”

He took his time digesting her confessions, and Angela’s body tightened, coiled. Damn. She put her brain training on it, worked the tension out, soothed herself, slowed her breath, thought about where she was and who she was with and what they’d just done together. This was why she’d chosen now, when they were both sunk in such deep postcoital bliss they’d be too lethargic to move. When he would be too sated to grab his pants and run the fuck away, as fast as humanly possible.

She knew Kellen. After all these years, she knew him. He tended his people, his critters, and he would never forgive her for, even temporarily, giving up their child. He wouldn’t accept as atonement all the messages she’d sent him over the years, unanswered, all the times she’d tried to get in touch. Her own sense of justice was honed to a fine point, but his was at least as sharp.

She lay there, naked, holding on tight, waiting for the cut.

After the longest time, he said, “So where’s she now, our girl?”

A shiver skidded down her spine, but he petted it away. “How did you know it was a girl?”

“Science,” he said. “Statistically, when folks fuck as much as we did, they more often conceive female offspring.”

“That’s…” Well, it was intensely sexy that he knew the factoid, and it almost distracted her from the guilt soup she was stirring, from finishing out her confession.

Because this would be a great time to stop. She could leave it right there. He didn’t seem to hate her yet. Not irrevocably. But if he knew the rest of it, he would. He was good, at the core. How could he not loathe what she was?