Durance by Lyn Gala Page 0,34
go with pissing Coretta off.”
“Good choice,” Anita said. She ushered him out of the room and let the door fall closed behind. The second they were gone, Kavon pulled on the mental tether that tied him to his guide. Sometimes his bull would fight him for minutes or hours. When he was young, he'd had one notorious fight that had lasted for three weeks. But this time, the guide came immediately. And like before, he projected emotions on a level that Kavon had not experienced in the past.
Kavon closed his eyes and focused on building a bubble around them. He had no more than constructed the mental image before the bull created the shield.
Darren must have recognized the magic because he rolled his eyes. “Paranoid much?” he asked.
“Aren't you a little paranoid considering what we just fought?”
“Perhaps a little.” Darren held up a finger and thumb to show the relatively small size of any worry he might feel, but the bond revealed the truth. “Should I call Bennu?”
“No. He and Pochi appear to be patrolling the area, so I don't want to distract them,” Kavon said.
“Patrolling?”
“When I got angry with Assistant Director White, Pochi showed up, and I'm almost sure he was offering to blow the director up.”
“I assume you didn't take him up on the offer,” Darren said dryly.
“I’m fairly sure there’s a regulation against that.”
Darren snorted. “Probably. And the pieces of Assistant Director White would be hard to get out of your suit.”
The flippancy caught Kavon off guard, but Darren’s emotional pile felt more stressed than irreverent. While humor wasn’t Kavon’s primary form of dealing with stress, he’d lived with Darren long enough to understand his need to make jokes when he couldn’t deal with the hard reality. Kavon quickly retorted, “The dry cleaner on H Street does great work with bodily fluids.” Darren grinned, and Kavon held out his hand. They threaded their fingers together and Kavon leaned in and rested his forehead against the side of Darren's head. “Don't ever scare me like that again.”
“In my defense, I was trying to clear a path for us to retreat.”
“That didn't work well.”
“You don't say.” The stress of lifting his hand to touch Kavon was enough to make Darren’s arm shake.
Kavon stood. “Let me scoot you over so that I can lie next to you.” He got his arms under Darren's thighs and shoulders and pulled him closer to the edge of the bed before he walked around to the other side. “I am so sorry,” he whispered as he slid into the bed next to Darren.
“For what?” Darren projected a mildly alarmed confusion.
“I didn’t protect you.”
Again, Darren snorted. “No one could have stopped that monster. Pochi and Bennu together failed to do anything more than annoy it into leaving. He then said in a more wistful tone. “You know, I did hope that we would spend some quiet time together in bed on vacation, but I was envisioning us at home or maybe even in a five-star hotel. This? Not so much. I have seen the inside of this Djedi Center far too much.”
“I agree. I'm starting to think you have a crush on Anita,” Kavon teased even though the guilt was still devouring him alive.
“I kind of do,” Darren said in a conspiratorial whisper. “But she’s my best friend's girl, so I'm going to avoid hitting that.”
“If she ever heard you talk like that...” Kavon let his tone carry all the dire warnings about what she might choose to do to him.
“She’d skin me alive,” Darren finished for him. “I am fully aware. She may not be the sort of arrogant, pushy shaman that chased Les off the island, but she's made of steel.”
Kavon agreed with that assessment. He wondered what rank she had risen to in the Army, but it felt a little manipulative and intrusive to use a federal database to investigate one of his agent’s girlfriends. Kavon propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at his battered lover. “How bad does it hurt?”
“Not at all,” Darren said, and then he added, “unless I’m breathing or not breathing or doing anything except lying unconscious. I’m great when I’m unconscious.”
Kavon had never wanted Darren hurt, and right now, he didn’t even trust himself to speak because he wanted to scream at the unfairness of the universe, and that would not make Darren feel one ounce better. Kavon understood that he couldn’t be overprotective of Darren and interfere with his job. He got it.