stood a tight knot of women, each one eyeing him with greedy assessment. Nothing personal there, merely the desire for a hard body and expensive presents. He knew the type because they'd made up the bulk of his bed partners over the years. Faced with the choice between using a woman and letting one use him, he'd always opted for the latter. In the end, they cost as much as the hookers, but at least they had a choice.
It was all still empty. Shallow sensation, and nothing compared to the way Rachel could warm his body with just her smile. She knew him, talked to him. Liked him. Accepting one of the beers, he smiled back. "Can we get out of here? I need to cool off."
She glanced down at the motionless man on the mat with an exaggerated wince. "Sure. I don't think Dom'll mind."
Dom would be lucky to get that knee under him in the next hour, and Cruz couldn't stir an ounce of guilt as he stepped from the cage and swept up a towel. "Maybe outside?"
She folded her fingers around his. "I know a place."
Rachel pulled him through the crowd and down a back hall, which was thumping with music and lit with red light. The darker corners writhed with moans and flashes of bare skin, people who preferred a little privacy over the open main floor. To Cruz, even the shadows seemed criminally indiscreet, but he was starting to suspect most of Sector Four considered sex less fun behind closed doors.
"This way," she murmured, staring straight ahead until they reached the end of the hall--and a door that led out onto a set of pitted exterior stairs.
Cruz followed her up three flights and found himself on the roof of one of the tallest buildings in the sector. In the darkness, he could see twinkling lights for what seemed like miles in either direction. "Not a lot of original buildings in this quadrant, are there?"
"No." Rachel leaned against the low wall edging the roof. "When I used to look out toward the sectors when I was a kid, all I could think was how dark they were. Now it all seems so bright."
"They're a lot brighter than they used to be." He tossed the towel over his shoulder and leaned next to her, close enough to brush her arm with his own. "I used to see them from the air. They flew us in one weekend a month for classes inside the city, but only at night."
She looked up at him, her eyes brilliant in the moonlight. "Do you miss it?"
It wasn't the first time someone had asked him the question, but it was the first time he really thought about the answer. A lock of blonde hair slipped across her forehead, and he echoed a gesture he'd seen once, reaching up to tuck it behind her ear. The cook at the training base had always done that when his wife's hair escaped its braid, but Cruz had never understood why brushing it back made the man smile.
He got it now. An excuse to touch, affection, and the warmth that came from being trusted with something precious.
He gave her the same in return--the truth. "I don't know. Some of it. I miss flying. No chance anyone in the sectors will get the resources together to get a helicopter or plane off the ground in our lifetime."
"You never know." Her breath blew over his skin as she turned her face into his hand.
He knew. He knew it the way he did most things--because it fell within the parameters of knowledge necessary to complete certain mission objectives. He could recite the dangers each sector represented and list the tools and materials each required to obtain or build various weapons, but he didn't know how to contain the feeling of this woman's face cradled against his hand.
Unacceptable. He wasn't the only one whose pulse raced when she smiled. Bren had warned him of as much the first time he'd caught Cruz's gaze following Rachel across a room. The gang's tattoo artist had been circling, sizing up Rachel like a fortification he wasn't sure he could storm, but Cruz had crashed into the middle of the game before Ace made his move.
And now this. It felt like racing toward a target, knowing that stumbling could give your enemy the lead. Ace was the one with the experience wooing women. He wouldn't be thinking about mission objectives and weapons if he