Dark Abyss by Kaitlyn O'Connor (top fiction books of all time txt) 📗

her mouth. Almost the instant she sucked on it, her mouth filled with a salty, fishy taste and she dashed to the trash and spat it out.

Maybe she could soak it before she cooked it and remove some of the salt? She really hated to just chuck the lot and start over from scratch! It had so much potential! It thrived in seawater contaminated soil. The plants were hardy and prolific producers.

The meat was nutritious. It had everything but an appealing taste.

Deciding to mull over it a while, she raked out the casserole she’d cooked, cleaned the kitchen, and found something more edible to nibble on, heading back to her media center. Instead of looking up more possibilities for her veggies, though, she went back to researching Atlantis and eventually found an article written by a man who claimed to have traveled extensively through the territory and lived among the natives, whom he pointed out didn’t like to be called mutants by outsiders since they knew very well that land dwellers considered it a derogatory term. They might, and frequently did, refer to themselves as mutants, but outsiders shouldn’t unless they just wanted to piss them off—which he didn’t recommend since they tended to be twice as strong as a ‘normal’ human being and were accustomed to settling disputes physically if the mood struck them.

That was unsettling, but at least it explained why they always gave her evil looks when she used the word! Of course, it would’ve been more helpful to know this sort of thing before rather than after an encounter!

The territories, according to the author, were vastly more civilized now than they had been even a decade earlier, but it was still a bit more like the ‘wild west’ of the late 1800’s than ‘air-breathers’ were accustomed to—which was a derogatory term they used for land dwellers.

Anna gaped at that, recalling all too well that Simon was in the habit of referring to her as an ‘air breather’. That ass! Of all the damned nerve to insult her and everybody else and then call her a bigot! Of course she hadn’t actually felt insulted because she hadn’t realized that was what he’d intended, but that was beside the point! No wonder he’d been so nasty to her! He just disliked land dwellers in general and went around with a damned chip on his shoulder! How unfair was that?

The anger didn’t last. It flared and died, leaving her tired and blue. She didn’t know why she’d spent most of her day trying to find out what she could about Atlantis.

It wasn’t as if it mattered. She was never going to go there again. From what she could see they disliked ‘air-breathers’ as heartily as land dwellers despised mutants. And she was her father’s daughter, as Simon had pointed out so nastily. They figured they had even more reason to dislike her.

Simon certainly did. She didn’t know why she cared about his opinion anyway!

If she’d had any damned sense she would’ve focused on trying to find another sponsor and someplace to live. She couldn’t just stay where she was and bury her head in the sand. She couldn’t pretend her father wasn’t a murderer or that working for him didn’t taint her and everything she did.

She didn’t understand why Simon couldn’t see that what her father had done went against everything she believed in and everything she was working for. She wanted to save people! She wanted to make their lives better!

Trying to push it from her mind, she checked her doors and windows to make sure everything was locked up and went to prepare herself for bed. She was exhausted.

If she hadn’t done anything more useful with her day anyway than reading about Atlantis, she thought glumly, she would’ve been better off trying to catch up on her sleep.

Settling at last, she stretched the kinks from her muscles and closed her eyes, beginning her sleep chant. She learned long ago that her mind was too often too active, no matter how tired she got, to allow her to sleep without help. The sleep chant helped, gave her something boring and repetitive to focus on until she could drop off.

Eventually, it worked and she dozed off. She woke to sheer terror as something heavy settled on top of her, pressing the breath from her lungs. A hand was clamped over her mouth. A mouth brushed her ear and then his heated breath on a whisper of sound.

“It’s Caleb.”

The chaos her mind had erupted into prevented instant recognition but even as he eased his hand from her mouth her heart stopped hammering with fear and took up a happier cadence. “What …?”

He clamped his hand over her mouth again. “We’re sweeping your house for bugs. Don’t talk.”

Bugs? She didn’t have bugs, damn it! Ok, so a few garden bugs, but why in the hell would they be sweeping up her bugs? And who was ‘we’? Certainly not Caleb!

The big lug was crushing her lungs!

He moved his hand again. She sucked in a breath to ask him what was going on, but he apparently decided on a more interesting way to keep her quiet. He planted his mouth firmly over hers. As disoriented as she already was, it took her mind a few heartbeats to shift gears, but the moment pleasure registered, she instantly forgot everything else. As if hours hadn’t passed since he’d kissed her, her body leapt almost instantaneously to the same level of drunken euphoria where they’d left off. She struggled to free her arms from the coverlet binding her and clutch him more tightly.

He broke the kiss, lifting his head to stare down at her questioningly, his breath puffing raggedly against her