Then she pushed away and looked down the hall.
Patrick McCallister was standing in the darkened doorway of his room, looking back at her. His black shirt was unbuttoned halfway, as if he’d stopped in the middle of the task, and he looked deliciously, warmly rumpled. Like someone awakened from a vivid, sensual dream.
“She’s all right,” Bryn said. “Sleeping. ”
“I suppose we all should be,” he said again. But he didn’t go in. He just kept watching her.
She walked to her door, passed it, and kept moving toward him.
He stepped back to let her inside, and for the first second they just…looked at each other. Then Bryn reached over, swung the door shut firmly, and said, “You look tired. ”
“Aren’t you?”
“Yes. ” She pulled in a deep breath. “And…no. Not particularly. I thought maybe we could…continue what we started earlier tonight. In your office. ”
He didn’t speak, but the incendiary look in his eyes answered for him. She reached out and drew her fingers gently down the exposed skin of his chest until she hit cloth and button, and began to undo the rest.
It was as if she’d unlatched a cage, and the tiger leaped out. Her reactions were by no means slow—faster, if anything, with the addition of the helpful nanites—but she wasn’t prepared when he lunged forward and pushed her against the door, then put his hands on either side of her head. He got kissing-close…but their lips didn’t meet. “I want this,” he said, and there was a rich, focused intensity in the words that made her shiver. “I want this very, very badly, Bryn. So don’t start this if you don’t. Just tell me no, and I’ll back off. You can go. And everything can be as it was yesterday. ”
It was as much a warning as an invitation, she thought. And there was definitely something different about him now; Patrick was such a careful, controlled man, and seeing him trembling on the edge of letting go was like standing in front of an oncoming hurricane.
It was exhilarating and frightening.
“I need to know something first,” she said. “Don’t you care?”
“Care about what?” He took in a deep breath, as if he was savoring the smell of her skin.
“About me being dead. ” There, she’d said it, and it surprised him, but only a little.
And it didn’t drive him away as she’d expected it would.
“You’re not dead, Bryn. ”
“I’m not alive, either. I’m…stuck. ”
“Oh, you’re alive,” he said. “Your heart beats. Your skin’s warm. You feel things. ” For proof of that, he touched a fingertip to the notch of her breastbone and traced the hard outline of it, the hollows around it. “In no way do I think of you as dead. ”
“I need a shot to stay this way. ”
“And I need to eat and drink and sleep. Even then, every day I come a little closer to the end of my life. And you don’t. Which of us is dying, exactly?”
“You saw me,” she said. “You saw me with a bag over my head. I was dead. How can you—”
He put that single finger over her lips, stilling them. “That’s not what I remember,” he said. “I remember you turning on the water. ” She blinked, because that made no sense, no matter how she ran it through her head; her confusion must have shown, because he smiled. “W
hen you woke up in the room at Pharmadene, and I left you there to think about things, what did you do?”
“I—”
“You went to the bathroom and turned on the tap, and put a cup in place to catch the drops. You timed the drops to pulse beats. You made a water clock so you could keep track of the time,” he said. “It was brilliant. You’d been murdered. Revived. I’d just told you I might let you rot. And that’s what you did. You took control of your own existence in the only way you could. ”
“I really don’t understand why that’s a turn-on, Patrick. ”
“I like women who take control,” he said, and his lips came close again, but didn’t touch. “I also like women who know when to give it up. Do you trust me?”
Did she? Did she really? Suddenly, there were so many sensations and emotions in her body that she couldn’t sort anything out. It was all just…overwhelming.
“Say something,” he said. It came out as a bare, raw whisper.