Strangers of the Night Read online

  And they thought he was the stupid one.

  She smelled so fresh, so clean, that all he could do was close his eyes and breathe her in. He wanted to cover himself in her scent, to wash away the stink of this room. Of all the years...

  “Jed,” she said. Warning. “No touching.”

  He hadn’t meant to. The gentle pressure of his fingers against the inside of her elbow had been involuntary. He didn’t move them away. Staring into her eyes, Jed let his fingers trace a small circle on her bare skin.

  Her lips parted on a small sigh. She blinked rapidly. At the tiniest hint of her tongue pressed to her upper lip, another rush of electricity jolted through him. He was so hard now there’d be no way she could keep up the pretense of this exam long enough for him to hide it from whoever it was that got their jollies watching.

  She should move away from, he thought a little incoherently. She had to know what was happening. He should stop touching her, but he couldn’t make himself. Another infinitesimal stroke of his fingertips on her skin had her eyes going wide. Dark.

  Her smell changed from fresh air to something his brain told him was flowers, though it had been twenty years since he’d even seen a flower; the taste of her like golden honey, sweet syrup, flooded him through the continuing touch. Every muscle in him tensed, straining, though neither of them so much as moved more than the constant, steady motion of her hands as she made a show of checking his vitals.

  Pulse. Temperature. One-handed, not moving so he could keep his fingertips on the inside of her elbow, Samantha kept up a running commentary on what she was doing—for the benefit of the observing camera, maybe. Or for him. For herself, Jed thought irrationally as the steady drone of her voice cracked and dipped for a second before she recovered.

  He had never kissed a woman. Never made love. They’d started giving him porn when he hit adolescence—an outlet, they thought, so any pent-up desires could be dissolved. Preventing him from what, from violence? From yearning? It had worked, to a point, he thought now, but you couldn’t replace human touch with paper pages or digital images. You couldn’t replace making love to a woman with your own hand.

  He wanted to kiss Samantha. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to make her shiver and shake, not the way the women in those movies did, but from deep inside her core. For real. He wanted to hear her say his name while her body tightened around him...

  Samantha put her hand over his, her eyes closing. Her body tensed. She shook, but so briefly there could be no way anyone but Jed would notice. A small moan slipped out of her, covered up so fast by a cough as she turned her head that again, nobody but he could’ve possibly heard it.

  “You have to stop.” Her lips moved, in silence he understood, anyway.

  Ashamed, he let her go. Samantha took a step back, almost stumbling before she caught herself. Her eyes opened. Gaze focused. A flush had spread up her throat to paint her cheeks. With her back still to the camera, shielding him, she pulled the small cup of meds from her uniform pocket and made a show of dispensing them.

  “Take your vitamins,” Samantha said.

  They weren’t vitamins, but at least they weren’t hallucinogens or sedatives. He swallowed them with the bottled water she gave him from the small fridge next to the desk. By the time he had, he’d also managed to will his erection back down.

  “Careful, you’ve spilled,” she said calmly without looking away from his eyes, not so much as a glance at the small wet patch on the front of his pants.

  Still watching out for him, he thought. Doing what she could. His balls ached, but he didn’t dare even to shift in the chair.

  They shared a look, lingering as long as they dared. At least he imagined they did, but when she cut her gaze from his, Jed had to admit that perhaps all of this was in his head. Surely Samantha didn’t have any romantic feelings for him. How could she? He shouldn’t mistake kindness and a sense of duty for anything like affection. In fact, he should be ashamed of using his talent to inflict his lust on her.

  “Do you need anything?” she asked him.

  He needed lots of things, none of which she could give him. “No, thanks. Is it almost time for my session with Dr. Ransom?”

  “Yes. I...think so.” Again, her cheeks colored as she checked her watch. “Wow, yes it is. I lost track of time.”

  “The exam took longer today,” Jed said, watching her.

  Again, Samantha snagged his gaze with hers and didn’t look away. She smiled. “Yes. A little longer.”

  Behind her, the green light over the door clicked to red. She didn’t turn to look at it, but noticed him staring. She straightened, tucking the empty tin back into her pocket and patting it. She smoothed the fine tendrils of pale hair that had fallen over her forehead and cheeks. She cleared her throat and took another step back.

  “Everything’s fine, though,” she said.

  Jed smiled without much humor. “Isn’t it always?”

  “No,” Samantha said even as her mouth formed the word yes, adding, “Don’t forget to buzz if you need me.”

  I need you. I always need you. His answer, unspoken, could not possibly have reached her. His talents didn’t extend to projecting thoughts.

  Still, she nodded as though she’d heard him, but that was his own foolishness. His own desire. Without another word exchanged, Samantha left the room and the door locked behind her, and Jed forced himself to get out of the chair so nobody would think something was wrong.

  Chapter 10

  Leaving her shift in the light of day meant Samantha would be going home to blackout shades and a white-noise machine—but there’d be no easy sleep for her this morning. Not after that interminable five minutes in Jed’s room. Not with the memory of his touch lingering.

  A cold shower didn’t help. She tried it, of course, running the water as frigid as she could stand it until her teeth chattered and her nipples peaked to near-painful tightness—but getting out, drying off, every stroke of the towel’s soft fabric against her had Samantha’s nerves tingling. Now she lay naked in her bed, the covers tossed off to expose her to the chilly autumn air, her window open to let in the breeze, because after a night’s work in Wyrmwood she couldn’t bear to be closed in, not even inside her own apartment.

  Stretching, letting her naked skin shift on the sheets, she tried not to touch herself but gave up after a few minutes of halfhearted resistance. She’d been on fire since giving Jed his exam—the same one she gave him every shift. A quick check of his temperature, his pulse, his glands, the clarity of his eyes and little more than that. It was required, but useless, since the likelihood of anything being wrong with him that nobody hadn’t already noticed was so slim.

  It was not the first time she’d murmured to him about the world outside, completely in defiance of the rules. Nor the first time she’d lingered over the exam, if only because of the way he’d pushed himself into her touch the way a cat would, purring, butting at her hand for the barest scrap of affection. Nobody touched him unless they were examining him. She knew that much, not from anything she’d ever been told as a staff member, but from the reports she’d studied, provided by Vadim and the vast reference and research sources of the Crew.

  Nobody touched Jed to comfort him, not since childhood. Certainly never to arouse him, though she’d noticed about six months into her stint there that he’d begun reacting to her in that way. She’d never made a fuss about it, at first because she didn’t want to risk them pulling her off duty taking care of him, for fear there was any kind of connection between them. Later, to keep him from being embarrassed. Now, she noticed but never acknowledged it because she couldn’t admit to anyone, not even herself, how knowing that the simplest touch of her against him got him hard. How he looked at her, hungrier for that ten minutes they shared than he ever was for the trays of bland food they brought him.

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