Cyborg Nation by Kaitlyn O'Connor (e novels to read TXT) 📕

the cubby hole at the bottom of the clothing locker, and it was a miserably tight fit besides, but she managed to get in to it.

Closing the door behind her was even harder. Persistence paid off, though. Cramped as she was, she had no difficulty retaining body heat. Despite the shock and fright that had her shivering, she began to grow warm fairly quickly. She couldn’t hear the fracas from inside the locker—not nearly as well anyway—but she counted that as a good thing, covering her ears with her hands for good measure. The moment she did that, it completely drowned out everything except her heart beat, which was pounding like tribal war drums.

She was too scared at first to even consider what had happened with anything approaching cognitive thought. She couldn’t get the violent images out of her mind, though. Over and over, like a damaged vid that kept hitting a bad spot and replaying everything before, her mind vividly recreated Jerico’s fist slamming into Gabriel’s face, Gabriel flying backwards across the dining table, Jerico flying backwards across the room and the expression on Gideon’s face that promised even more fist slinging. Closing her eyes only seemed to make it worse, though how that could be the case when she was trapped in the dark already she couldn’t imagine.

She’d thought for certain she’d enraged Jerico by being so snippy and sarcastic. Well, she supposed she had. She shuddered. She wasn’t sure if it was the violence itself or the horror she felt that men that big were strong enough to sling each other around that had her shaking like a leaf. Both, she decided.

It wasn’t as if she had never seen violence. She’d seen the end results of it many times when she’d interned. She’d seen a lot of actual violence, but as a spectator staring at news clips or entertainment vids, not real life right on top of her violence.

The door of the locker opened abruptly. Bronte squeezed her eyes more tightly shut. After a moment though, when the door didn’t close again, she opened one eye a crack to see what was going on.

Gideon was crouched on the floor, studying her. Bronte stared back at him with a mixture of embarrassment, distrust, and fear. Jerico and Gabriel joined him, peering at her with expressions she found impossible to interpret.

All three men were breathing deeply from exertion, their hair wild and their faces battered and bleeding. After staring at her for several moments, the three exchanged accusing glares.

“Do not even think about it,” Gideon said in a low, warning growl when Jerico and Gabriel bristled at one another. The two men turned to glare at him, but they subsided.

“Soldiers get rowdy when they have been too long from action,” Gideon offered.

Bronte stared at him. Apparently he recalled that they had seen ‘action’ only the day before when both Jerico and Gabriel had been shot escaping with her. “It was a long flight to Earth,” he added uncomfortably.

He blew out a breath of irritation and turned to glare at the two in question. “Go and clean up the mess and repair the damage to the mid-section.”

Neither man looked terribly pleased by the order, but they shot to their feet, saluted, and left. “Are you hurt?”

Bronte thought that over, but the only injuries she could claim were self-inflicted when she was trying to get away from the fight. When he asked, she felt twinges, bruising from slamming into everything in her path in her mad dash to reach safety. “No,” she said finally instead of pointing out that that was because she’d had enough sense of self-preservation to get as far away from the battle as fast as she could. If she’d been caught in the crossfire they could’ve knocked her head clean off her shoulders, or landed on her and crushed her.

“Can you get out?”

She couldn’t prevent a blush as his gaze assessed the space she’d crammed herself into. The question, though, was did she want to? And could he make her get out if she didn’t want to?

He took the locker apart shelve by shelf. She wasn’t certain if the shelves had been designed to be removable, but he removed them anyway. When he’d removed the shelves, he reached in, grabbed her by her upper arms and hauled her out.

Chapter Five

Bronte had to lock her knees to keep from falling when he set her on her feet. She winced as she straightened, every muscle and joint in her body protesting from being cramped up so long.

Apparently he saw the wince. He moved his hands over her, carefully checking bones and joints for breakage, she supposed. Just as she was lulled by the gentleness of his touch, he grabbed the front of the suit and ripped it open from neck to crotch. Bronte sucked in a sharp breath of surprise, too stunned even to protest as he casually stripped the suit off of her. By the time she’d caught her breath, she discovered that he was still examining her, her flesh now instead of the bones, though why he thought he needed to when he could see at a glance that she wasn’t bleeding was beyond her. A frown drew his brows together as he examined the long bruises on her forearms and those on her shins from her dive into her hiding place.

“Get dressed,” he said finally and moved away.

Relieved, Bronte bent to grab the suit puddled around her ankles and pulled it up, shoving her arms into the sleeves. She was still trying to align the mesh on the front closure when his hand closed around her wrist. Without a word, he dragged her toward the bunk. She tripped over the pant legs as they reached the bunk, sprawling across his lap as he sat down and tugged her toward him.

She nearly impaled herself on the scalpel he held in his hand. Fortunately, he could move fast. He dropped it before she could fall on it.