She sighed as she rolled away from him. “I don’t know.”
“Of course you do.” He pulled her to him, staring down at her, wearing that eternal grin of his. “It is written all over your beautiful face. You’re filled to the brim with worry.”
“I know. But I can’t imagine why.” It was a lie. She knew exactly why.
As if he’d plucked the very reason for her morose mood from her brain, Click nodded and said, “It’s our new recruit.”
Rose pursed her lips, made unhappier by Click’s choice of words. “For the last time, you ninny native, he is our employer, not a crew member. He has hired us for a job, not joined the crew.”
Click’s smile said he knew he had the better of her, yet again. “Whatever it pleases my captain to believe, I too shall believe.”
“Damn right you will.”
“Then it’s our employer that vexes you.”
Rose was tempted to lie, but it was no use. Somehow, the gorgeous Tahitian could read her like an open shipping log. How he knew her so well, she had no idea. She tried her best to maintain a professional detachment from him, when not in the throes of passion of course, but she supposed one’s professional life was bound to leak onto one’s personal life when one shared a cabin with one’s cabin boy.
A cabin and a bed.
“Yes,” she confessed. “He vexes me.”
“I don’t see why.” Click dropped himself on the mattress beside her. “I like him.”
Rose snorted. “You like everyone.”
“True. But I also like how he likes our Guppy.”
This simple truth made Rose smile. Rose didn’t just like how Atom treated their youngest crew member, she loved it. Gabriella deserved someone as dashing and handsome as Atom. He treated her with such tenderness it made Rose’s heart ache just to watch him watching Gabriella.
“Me too,” Rose said, the hint of a smile surfacing. It didn’t last long. “Even so, we know next to nothing about him.”
Click shrugged. “What’s there to know? He’s a nice young man.”
Rose’s concern wasn’t Atom’s manners, which were extraordinary considering he had spent so long on his own. Her worry lay in the lad’s mysterious life. For starters, he wasn’t all man. Not all human, anyway. Beneath what appeared to be flesh and bone, Atom Loquacious was half made of clockworks. No one could be sure that even the parts that weren’t mechanical were entirely organic. Not even Atom himself knew for certain.
Aside from his right arm, which was an obvious construction of bright metal gears and pistons, the strange nature of Atom’s composition was well hidden. He looked and acted the very picture of a human male. Yet, just beneath all of that charm and grace, there ticked a heart of clockworks. If Rose hadn’t heard it ticking away herself, she would have never believed it possible.
Only two others aboard the Widow knew the truth about Atom. Dot, the ship’s medic, and Jayne, the ship’s tinker. Both women swore themselves to secrecy, allowing Atom to maintain a certain level of discretion about his condition. Since their discovery, he’d kept the fact to himself, leaving Rose to wonder if he ever planned on sharing it with her crew. But most of all, she wondered when he was going to tell Gabriella. He had asked the captain’s advice about revealing his nature to the young girl, and Rose told him to be honest. After all, brutal honesty was the one thing she treasured the most about Click, and just one of many things she never received from Bill.
The sound of Click’s voice overpowered her worry, pulling her from her drifting thoughts. “It’s not just him.”
Rose narrowed her eyes at her lover, wondering if he had once again read her mind with his strange native ways. “What do you mean?”
“It’s our mission.”
She looked to the ceiling, seeking a higher power’s assistance with her confusing companion. “It’s not a mission. It’s work. And yes, I’m worried about it. What I can’t understand is why no one else is.”
“Why worry? It’s an honorable task you have taken up on our behalf.”
“It’s a pointless task. For all we know, the doctor is dead. Do you really expect us to find him? After half the country has searched for him?”
Click’s smile grew wider, telling her that yes, he expected that very thing.
Rose huffed in frustration as she turned away from him again. “You’re hopelessly optimistic.”
“And you are ceaselessly beautiful.” Click nestled his body against hers, his every hard angle melding into her soft curves. While kissing and licking her shoulders and neck, he brought his hard cock to her heat, slipping it between her thighs, rubbing it against her puss, teasing her sex with his rigid desire.
Rose groaned as he cupped her breasts.
He kneaded them between his hot palms as he worked his sex against hers, pushing and prodding but never entering her hold.
“Stop teasing,” Rose commanded.
“Yes, my captain.” Click pushed himself into her with his usual ease.
His strokes were light and gentle, just enough to pleasure her without sending her into screams of ecstasy. This had been his habit the past few days, and Rose worried their little tryst on the island weighed on his mind. She wondered if she would ever see his wild side again. Perhaps when this was all done, and they were both without worry once more, she would seek out a truly deserted island for a week’s vacation with nothing but Click to satisfy her every need.
Continuing to kiss her neck, he plunged her depths as she pushed back to meet him stroke for stroke. It was going to take forever to climax like this, which might have been his goal all along. Trying to speed things along, she touched herself, running her fingers over her clit as he fucked her from behind. Rose reached lower, to feel his cock moving in her puss. When she reached even lower, to grab his balls, Click grunted in surprise.
“You like that?” she asked.
He whispered in a growl, “I love everything you do, my captain. I love your hot hands on my body, your wet mouth against mine, your velvet sex wrapped ’bout my cock. I love it when you give yourself to me completely.”
Click lowered his hand to her pussy, stroking her clit as she fondled his heavy sac. Rose groaned while he worked a thick digit alongside his own cock, then another, fingering her puss even as he fucked her. The feeling was exquisite, the added girth stretching her, filling her to a delightful degree. She released his balls, grabbing her own breasts instead.
“Yes, Click,” she said as she pulled at her nipples. “That’s amazing. Don’t stop.”
Click lifted his lips from her neck long enough to say, “Never, my captain. I will never stop pleasing you.”
Despite her pleasure, Rose made the mistake of glancing at the clock on her desk. She groaned again, this time from regret. Click was trying to please her, and as usual she didn’t have the time. Yet as he slid another finger deep beside his hardened desire, with a mutual gasp from each of them, she knew she had to make time. It was the most profound lesson she took away from that cursed island. She would always make time for his affections.
Because she could never know if it would be the last time.
Chapter 2
Breaking the Fast
In which we prepare for the road ahead
Atom never took breakfast with the crew. He had explained to Rose that,