Cyborg Nation by Kaitlyn O'Connor (english readers TXT) 📗

left, trying to ignore the anticipation fluttering in her belly at his threat/promise.

She would’ve liked to have been able to convince herself that it was fear, not excitement, but she knew it wasn’t. She wished that she could dismiss everything he’d said as pure egotistical, male arrogance, but she knew better. She’d suspected right off, the moment she got a look at everything when she’d dressed Gabriel and Jerico’s wounds, that they were fully functional pleasure bots, even if they had ended up being sold to the military instead as soldiers.

And if only half of the things she’d heard about them was true he was neither lying nor exaggerating.

How bright was it that the men who’d created them had gathered together the combined wisdom and techniques of the best lovers, added data compiled from god only knew how many sexual research studies, and then designed the perfect body to deliver that sexual atom bomb, she thought indignantly? But then again, scientists had always been prone to view their work as an extension of themselves and suffered besides from a combination of egotism over their brains and a lack of common sense or imagination. And it still seemed utterly stupid to her that they’d marketed pleasure bots that were ten times better than any human lover could hope to be.

And she was trapped on a ship with three of them!

Shivering, she looked around and finally sat down on the bunk.

She was no prude—far from it, despite the fact that she had not really had a lot of opportunities for sexual experimentation. She might have had more if she hadn’t felt so driven to make her father proud of her, to live up to him and his reputation, that she’d not allowed herself to be distracted by her hormones. She’d been tempted a few times but the timing had never seemed right and nothing had ever come of it. She had actually gotten fairly deeply involved with a fellow medical student when she had been in college—been involved with Howard throughout most of their last two years of study, but then he had been as driven to succeed as she was … which meant that neither of them had had much time for an actual relationship. The truth was, she supposed, they hadn’t really been a lot more than a convenience to each other, a reliable fuck when they needed it, and they’d stopped being even that ‘close’ when the heat had gone out of the relationship—which was when they’d discovered they were interning at different hospitals.

She’d barely had a half dozen dates since and less than half of them had interested her enough to have sex.

She thought that probably explained, to a large extent, why she found her captors so attractive—aside from the fact that they were. No doubt it also explained why she was tempted even though she knew they hated her just because she human.

It was one thing to set out to have casual sex, though, and another matter entirely to set out to have sex with someone you knew held you in contempt, but was willing to fuck you anyway. She could have lived with indifferent. She had settled for indifferent. Except for Howard, who had at least seemed to like her when they’d begun their relationship, it had only been a matter of physical attraction with anyone else she’d been with—not extreme physical attraction, just interested enough that, given the right timing and circumstances, she’d had sex with them. And she thought that probably went both ways because afterward she hadn’t really cared whether she saw them again and they hadn’t seemed to be too put out when she wasn’t interested in round two.

Would it be any better when they finally got where ever it was they were going, she wondered? She doubted it. Except for the fact that she would not be trapped in a little space ship with three cyborgs that hadn’t had a piece of ass in a while and thought hers would do just fine, she couldn’t see that the future looked bright.

She would just have to keep to herself as much as possible, she decided. The clothing they’d given her to wear was pretty shapeless on her since it hardly touched her anywhere. That wasn’t going to tempt them.

It was going to be pretty damned hard to play least in sight, though, considering how small the ship was—to say nothing of the fact that there was only one bed and four people on board.

She had a bad feeling they hadn’t changed their sleep rotation on her account. She supposed she could ask them to, but that didn’t mean they would.

She just wouldn’t sleep on the bed, she decided. They couldn’t accuse her of trying to tempt them if she didn’t use the bed!

And she could claim the forward bathroom as hers, she decided. They all used the one off the sleeping quarters because this was where they kept their clothing.

It would probably be best, she decided, just to steer clear of the sleeping quarters altogether, though she hated giving it up because it was pretty much the only private area. If she spent all of her time in the cabin, though, they might begin to get the idea that she was just waiting for one of them, or all of them, to take her on. Of course, she ran much the same risk if she loitered within their view.

She wasn’t just going to lay down and take it, literally, though, not when every other word out of their mouths made it patently clear that they didn’t see her any differently than they viewed every other human, and that was with contempt and hate. It wasn’t that she didn’t agree with a good bit of it. Unfortunately, they were right about being superior, damn them! Their creators, stupid things that they were regardless of how brilliant they were as scientists, had gone out of their way to make their ‘creation’ a masterpiece and