Page 8 of Darken
“I don’t want to lose you in the attempt. I know we just met, but now that we have, I feel the connection to you. I want the chance for it to grow. If he leaves us alone from here on out, I say let him be.”
“Fair enough.” Darken pushed a lock of her dark hair behind her ear and caressed her cheek with his fingers. “It’s uncanny how you look so much like the avatar they placed in my mind representing the woman who would be my genetic mate. You are who I fought for. The promise of you kept me clinging to life when I wished for death to end the pain and despair.”
“Layna told me they lied to you all,” Gina said. “They never set up the program to find your mates.”
“I know that now, but I didn’t learn of the designers’ betrayal until after the war ended. I was never coming back to Earth after I found out. Then I heard that cyborgs were finding their mates on Earth when Commander Dark called us to come back to Earth to help restore law and order.”
Gina turned her face and pressed the palm of his hand to her lips. “And I’m glad you did. Who knows how long Devlin would have left me tied up in that room? He was giving me time to change my mind. I was going to die first just to spite him.”
“You’ve known other cyborgs and their mates. You should have known I would come for you,” he admonished gently.
“I believed that, but as I lost track of time, I was worried you wouldn’t discover I was taken until it was too late. I hoped the Universe wouldn’t be that cruel.”
“Devlin White is lucky that didn’t happen; I would have left his compound in ashes after I killed him slowly.”
“Thank you for getting me out of there,” she told him, not wanting to dwell on the subject. “What do we do now? I have never been in a place as hot as this desert.”
“We will rest here until sunset and continue across the desert while it’s cool. I see well in the dark so I can guide us.” Darken handed her the bottle of water. “Drink as much as you can, and I will refill it, then I will drink, and you will rest.”
Gina drank down about a third of the bottle and returned it to Darken. He drank the rest, set the bottle down, and lifted her to sit beside him. Rummaging around in the pack, he pulled out a waterproof tarp and spread it on the ground in the shade of a tall tree. Putting the pack at the top for a pillow, he gestured to her to lie down.
“Okay, I just need to water a bush first.” She stood and looked around for a private spot. She picked a sheltered place a few meters away, pausing to look over the steep drop. “Whoa, how did we get up here?”
“I carried you.”
Gina frowned, shook her head slowly, and then squatted behind a bush to relieve herself. She wasn’t even going to ask as she came back to the pallet her cyborg had laid out for her. A nap seemed like a good idea just then.
She was still feeling out of sync, but as she walked back, she forgot about it. Seeing Darken silhouetted against the sun, looking at the desert, made her realize that he was even more gorgeous than the holovid she’d seen. Tall, dark, and handsome, he was definitely easy on the eyes.
A frisson of sexual awareness rushed through her, tempting her to walk behind him and wrap her arms around him. Realizing she wasn’t ready to follow through with what her body craved, she lowered herself to the pallet and made herself comfortable.
ChapterFive
Darken woke Gina up a few hours later, caressing her face with his fingers. He was lying on the pallet, facing her, propping his head against his hand. An ordinary man might have been bored or impatient that she’d slept so long with nothing to do but wait. Not Darken.
He’d waited decades to find his mate against the odds. Thousands of cyborgs were still waiting, and thousands more had given up hope. Yet his mate lay right beside him.
It wasn’t dark yet, but the sun was low in the sky, and the temperature had started to drop.
“Is it time to go?” she blinked sleepily.
“Yes, those ranchers will probably come back in the morning to see if we left. I don’t want to stir up trouble before I even get started.”
Gina nodded. “I agree. I feel better now.” She sat up slowly and rubbed her eyes.
Darken handed her the bottle of water and sat up, fishing a couple of meal bars from the pack while she drank. The emergency pack had ten of them to start. He wasn’t worried. Whether or not his CPU came back online, he knew he could find food when they ran out. The desert was actually teaming with wildlife. Darken felt confident he could find whatever they needed.
They walked for almost three hours as the temperature had dropped to near freezing. Darken stopped after dusk to take a tube holding a plastic blanket from the pack. He used one of the many knives he carried to cut a hole in the center and make a poncho for Gina.
“Let me know if you get too cold, and we’ll stop and make a fire,” he said, holding her at his side with an arm around her shoulders as they walked to share some of his body heat. …And because he wanted her close.
They each drank some of the water and continued for only a few minutes before Darken heard the soft footfalls of animals following them. Barely discernable for a human with normal hearing, his enhanced sensitivity easily heard them. He stopped suddenly and turned around.
Darken sucked in a breath as he counted a pack of eight wolves trailing them. More awed than afraid, he put Gina behind him. He studied wolves extensively while on Phantom decompressing after decades of war. He growled and pulled out two knives, one in each hand. He made other wolf sounds, spreading his arms wide, alternately growling and yipping.
He could kill them all with his side arm easily, or even his bare hands, but he didn’t want to kill beings whose name he carried. So, he warned them off instead by speaking their language. They halted at his show of strength and defiance. The wolves were not the apex predators in this desert; he was.
The pack backed off as Darken menaced them. He was glad he’d stored the wolf lore in his organic memory instead of only the CPU. Aside from his construction job on Phantom, he devoured hours of documentaries on wolves from the central archives. Scientists who had studied them had deciphered a kind of language from the sounds they made in various situations.
