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

gently. “You don’t understand. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but I care about you and Gideon and Gabriel.”

He looked surprised and then pleased. “Because we are bonded by contract? I found it in the wreckage. Gideon said that we must if possible else we would not have the file for official recording and the council might decide to dispute it.”

She frowned. “I wouldn’t have contracted to begin with if I hadn’t already felt bound to you three by affection,” she tried again.

He looked stunned, almost spilled the last of the soup down her neck. “You feel affection?”

Bronte thrust the cup away. “Yes.”

He thought that over. “It was something we did?”

She couldn’t help but chuckle. “A lot things.”

“How does this feel?” he asked curiously.

Bronte felt her smile slip. She sighed. “Maybe you’ll feel it one day, too, and then you’ll know.”

He nodded, looked for several moments as if he would question her further and then instead helped her to settle on the ground again and went to eat. Bronte stared at nothing, focused on trying to quash the hurt. It didn’t matter how many times she told herself that she was searching for something that wasn’t in their make-up, she still expected to find it. She still believed, or maybe just hoped, that it was there, that it just needed to be coaxed forth and nurtured.

She had to accept, though, that it wasn’t and probably never would be, that they just weren’t capable of feeling any sort of fondness at all. Could that void really matter, though, if she came to love them? Wouldn’t it be enough to have a life with them and know they were devoted to that life? To share passion? The passion alone was more than she’d ever expected to find in a relationship. They would be faithful, she thought, and industrious. Every relationship was flawed in some way and people still managed to make them work—at least for a while.

There was always the incompatibility clause if she discovered she was too miserable to live with it, she reflected morosely.

It was going to be a struggle to try to adjust in a lot of ways, she realized. She couldn’t help but find a lot of their confusion funny, but Gabriel had made it clear that, even while he didn’t fully grasp what there was about it that she found amusing, he knew why she thought it was funny. She didn’t want to hurt them by constantly pointing out failings they were already aware of and sensitive about.

It was going to be hard dealing with their idea of resolving disputes for that matter, but she’d already grown far more accustomed to it than she would’ve thought she could. And Gabriel had promised that they would rotate their shifts, which should make things more peaceful even if she did feel guilty about them sacrificing their companionship to be her companion.

And then there was the problem of getting used to living with three different men when she wasn’t used to living with even one. Even if they were in and out, she would still have to deal with that.

Typically, she’d jumped before she’d really thought everything through, she realized in dismay. She’d been so caught up in the passion they shared, though, and so bowled over by their ruthless determination to have her, and so focused on her own need to be needed, she had barely even considered the practical side of such a relationship. Beyond acknowledging that she was in a position where she would have to chose mates among them and the wisdom of having protection, she hadn’t even considered the mundane but absolutely essential economics of the arrangement—which Gabriel had thoughtfully pointed out.

Under the circumstances, it was impossible to ignore the fact that her decision had been almost purely emotional. She’d known that, physically, she found them tremendously appealing, and also on an intellectual level. She’d also known she was drawn to them because they seemed to need her in a way they weren’t even conscious of.

She’d accepted that she was fond of them.

But when she’d risked reopening her wounds, and thus death, she hadn’t been thinking about anything but protecting them. She hadn’t thought about what it might do to her if one of them fell on her. She hadn’t thought about anything beyond her fear that she would get one of them killed.

She was afraid that meant she’d become a little more than just fond of them.

Chapter Eighteen

It took a good bit of arguing to convince the men, or more specifically, Gideon, because he was always the one who made the final decision, that she needed to try to get up and move around if she was ever going to get her strength back. It didn’t help that it hurt so much even to try that Bronte wasn’t that keen on doing it herself and or that trying to move around was complicated by a broken leg. On one level, Bronte knew what recuperation was like—the physician’s viewpoint—but she’d never had any major illness or injury in her life and it was totally different from the patient’s viewpoint, she discovered. She knew everything she should do. She just didn’t want to and had to struggle to make herself do what she needed to.

She was out of depth beyond that. She didn’t treat major problems even as a physician. She monitored her patients’ health, treated minor injuries and illnesses, but everything beyond that went to a specialist in the necessary field, and besides that, she wasn’t familiar at all with nanos and had no idea what they might be doing to her. They had never been approved for human use except under extreme, life-threatening situations and even then the physicians ruled out every other possibility first.

Part of it was a fear on the physicians’ part that it would render them obsolete—so they weren’t enthusiastic about using them at all and had in fact gone to great lengths to make certain using the