Jonah & Aubrey's Story (Uoria Mates IV Book 8) Page 6

  "Please," she murmured, running her hand up his thigh toward the erection that she was craving. “I want to feel you inside me.”

  Jonah growled in his throat, but put his hand over hers to stop its progress in the middle of his thigh.

  "No," he whispered, "Not yet."

  Dizzying tension was building through her belly, thighs, and pelvis, and Aubrey found herself struggling to control her breath. She closed her eyes, wanting both to prolong the feeling and to let herself give it over completely. Jonah continued to nurture her, bringing his fingertip back up to stroke her clit again and send shivers through her body.

  Jonah lifted the hand from his thigh and drew it up until it cupped his surging erection. As soon as she felt the velvety, engorged hardness against her palm, she felt a mind-shattering orgasm crash over her. Jonah continued to stroke her as her body contracted and released in a series of tremors that tore screams from her chest.

  Jonah’s hand left her body and in an instant, he was stretched over her. His cock plunged into her to meet the spasms of her climax with deep, hard strokes, pushing her over the edge of another wave of her climax. She opened her eyes as she came back down out of the delirium and he rolled his hips in a rhythm that was both passionate and tender, intense and soulful. She moaned and writhed beneath him as he made love to her. His eyes never left hers as he moved within her with strength and control that contrasted with the abandon that she was feeling. Aubrey ran her hands indulgently along his back, reveling in the feeling of his muscles shifting and tensing beneath his skin, and the sweat creating delicious slickness.

  Aubrey lifted her head to kiss him and felt Jonah's pace quicken. He moved at a fast, even rhythm until his mouth pulled away from hers to let deep sounds pour from his throat. A moment later she felt him drive into her with a final hard thrust and growl as he began to pulse. She could sense him spilling into her and her heart swelled. When the pulses eased and his body relaxed, Jonah rested down onto her and tucked his head against her chest.

  She was beginning to fall asleep when she felt Jonah lift his head to look at her. Aubrey opened her eyes to look down at him.

  “And by the way,” he said. “I was the one who threw myself at you.”

  He kissed the center of her chest and laid his head down again, not seeming to care about being jostled by her laughter.

  Chapter Nine

  Cecilia looked less than pleased to see Aubrey and Jonah when they arrived at the library the next day, but she didn’t argue with them when Aubrey showed her identification card. Jonah struggled to withhold a laugh as they walked through the door and back into the stacks.

  “I have the feeling that she doesn’t like you very much,” he said as Aubrey sat down at the same table as she had before and tucked into the same book.

  She glanced up at him with a smirk on her sweet lips.

  “And I have a feeling you’re right. Did you bring one of the bottles with you?” she asked.

  Jonah nodded and sat on the chair next to her, pulling his bag into his lap so that he could take the bottle from it. He had wrapped it in one of the towels from the bathroom to conceal it, feeling strangely protective of the bottle and the mystery that it held. There had to be a reason why dozens of these empty bottles were hidden in the examination rooms in the old medical ward, and he felt the compulsion to guard it from those who might not want that reason uncovered.

  He placed the bottle on the table in front of her and tucked the towel back into the bag. When he looked up, Aubrey was staring at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  She tilted her head and continued to stare at him.

  “Are you alright being back here?” she finally asked. “After what happened last night?”

  He had been trying not to think about their escape, but he was thankful that she cared enough to ask him. At the same time, he wondered how she could seem so calm, so unfazed by the conflict.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “They aren’t going to want to be seen. The last thing that Ryan wants is for anybody to know what he’s been doing. As long as other people are here, we’re safe. Are you alright?”

  Aubrey looked to the side as if she was thinking through the question and trying to decide how to respond. He wished that he hadn’t asked her. Every time that he thought about them he felt like he was staying tied to that basement and giving Ryan more of the control that he was so determined to take back. Suddenly Aubrey’s eyes widened and her mouth opened slightly. She looked at Jonah and then swept the bottle off of the surface of the table into her hand. She scrutinized the label and then looked up at him again, her smile full now.

  “I know what this is,” she said. “I remember it.”

  “You do?” Jonah asked, his heart leaping slightly in his chest. “You’ve seen it before?”

  “I haven’t just seen it,” she said. “I’ve used it. When I was working with Ryan, this was the one chemical that I had never used before. I remember that for the first few days that I worked with him he had me doing simple little processes with basic compounds and ingredients that didn’t seem like they had any purpose. It felt like I was just combining different things and then putting them aside. I had done more interesting things in my high school chemistry class. But he never let me clean them up or get rid of the products of the combinations, and then I realized that he was actually collecting them and taking them somewhere with him. Every few days he would change the processes that I was doing so that I was making a few different products. I had been his assistant for a couple of weeks before he brought me a bottle of this and containers with materials in them that he wouldn’t tell me what they were. I don’t think it even occurred to him that I would figure out that they were combinations of the products that I had made over the first days with him.”

  “Did you ever find out what you were making?” Jonah asked.

  “Starlight.”

  Jonah felt a shiver move over his skin at the word.

  “Starlight?” he asked.

  Aubrey nodded.

  “I was making artificial starlight. He never explained why or what he was going to use it for, but every day, he brought me another bottle of this chemical. The bottles looked newer than this, but still pretty old, like they had been in storage for a lot of years.”

  “Maybe that’s why we haven’t been able to find out anything about it,” Jonah said. “Is Izalux even produced anymore?”

  Aubrey shook her head.

  “I don’t think that it is,” she said. “I’ve gone through these books and done some research online, and all I’ve found about it is that listings for when it was first formulated. It was apparently patented, but the person who formulated it never presented any formal work to the scientific community and it never hit the larger market. It stopped being produced a few years after it was formulated.”

  “When was that?” Jonah asked.

  “More than a hundred years,” Aubrey said.

  The words burst in Jonah’s mind. One hundred years. What could that mean?

  “Do you know who formulated it?” Jonah asked.

  Aubrey shook her head.

  “Nobody does apparently,” she said. “The company that took out the patent was only known as Orion. It never recorded the name of any individual within it or the purpose behind the company other than developing this particular chemical. Since then, the company hasn’t done anything else and it doesn’t seem to be active anymore.”

  “Why would they design such a complex and potentially powerful chemical if they had no intention of it actually being used for anything?” Jonah asked.

  Aubrey shrugged.

  “Maybe they didn’t realize how strong it was going to be, or they had plans for it, but it didn’t turn out the way that they thought, or didn’t do what they thought it was going to do.”

  “Then how did Ryan get his hands on it?”

  Aubrey shook his head.

  “By now both of us are fully aware that Ryan is capable
of things that are beyond explanation.”

  Jonah looked at the stack of books that was sitting on the table. Even though they had figured out what the chemical was and how Ryan used it, there were still questions.

  “I think that we should bring some of these books back to the house with us,” Jonah said. “The longer that we’re here, the more suspicion that we’ll cause. I’d rather nobody start following behind us and trying to find out what we’re researching.”

  Aubrey nodded.

  “You’re probably right. We can check these out with Cecilia.”

  Jonah gathered as many of the books as he could up into his arms and followed her out to Cecilia’s desk, the thought of artificial starlight tumbling through his mind.

  Chapter Ten

  “Hi, Honey,” Nana said as Aubrey walked into the kitchen.

  Aubrey dropped her bag to the floor and massaged her shoulder, relieved to have the weight off of it, then sat in one of the chairs at the small table that her grandmother had put in the kitchen when Aubrey was a child.

  “Hi, Nana.” She drew in a breath of the rich, savory smell that was filling the kitchen. “That smells good. What is it?”

  “Lasagna,” Nana said. “I thought that everybody might like something a little different for dinner. They seem to be ready for more variety. I just hope that they like it.”

  “I’m sure they’ll love it,” Aubrey said. “You make the best lasagna in the world. Besides, they’ve loved everything that you’ve made for them. After two weeks of mostly soups and stews, though, I think that they’ll enjoy something more substantial.”

  “I don’t know what they were eating when they were in that horrible place, and I didn’t want to make them sick.”

  Aubrey dug her fingers back through her hair and then let them drop weakly back to the table, feeling too tired to do much else.

  “I know,” she said. “And I know that they appreciate it.”

  Nana turned away from the pot on the stove to look at her. Her eyes narrowed with concern.

  “You look awful,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m just exhausted,” she said. “The project at the lab has ramped up so I’m getting there early every morning, staying late every evening, and then spending hours with Jonah doing research.”

  “Have you found out anything else?” Nana asked.

  Aubrey sighed and leaned back in her chair.

  “No. We were so excited when we found the Izalux bottles and I remembered what they were used for, but we just hit a wall after that. No matter where I look, I can’t find anything that’s useful. It’s like the company produced a whole bunch of the stuff, shut down, and that’s it. Nothing else. No explanation for how it was developed, why it was developed, or why they stopped developing it. Especially no explanation for how Ryan got his hands on it, or why in the living hell he was having me work on the base for making artificial starlight.”

  “And still no sightings of Ryan? No idea where he is?”

  “Apparently, he just disappeared.”

  “Well, I doubt that,” Nana said. “Where is Jonah?”

  Aubrey gestured over her shoulder.

  “He hasn’t slept well the last few nights so he went upstairs to get a shower and try to get a nap before supper and yet some more research. I hate seeing what this is doing to him. It’s like every day that he keeps working, he’s losing a little bit of his soul.”

  “What do you know about Jonah?” Nana asked.

  She had filled a small bowl with the thick, rich sauce that she had made for the lasagna and brought it over to Aubrey with a plate of crusty buttered bread.

  “What do you mean?” Aubrey asked.

  She glanced up at her grandmother as she tore off a chunk of the bread and dipped it in the sauce. The taste reminded her of her childhood and brought soothing warm to her belly.

  “Well, he knows about your family. He knows about your work at the University. He’s met me. He’s even living here. What do you know about him?”

  It felt like a strangely invasive question and Aubrey wasn’t sure how to answer it. She took another piece of the bread and swirled it through the sauce, watching as butter melted off to create ribbons of pale yellow in the warm red pool.

  “I know that he only just recently returned to Earth after being on Uoria. He came back here to keep digging into this situation with Ryan and has been hiding in the University basement to protect the people who were rescued from the facility.”

  “Are you sure that that’s why he came back to Earth?” Nana asked.

  “What are you asking?”

  “There was an article in the newspaper a few weeks ago about a wedding for a young woman who worked in the University named Samira.”

  “I’ve heard the name,” Aubrey said. “I’ve never met her, though. What does that have to do with Jonah, though?”

  “The article mentioned the novelty of the fact that the majority of the bridal party and many of the guests were originally from Uoria, and among them were people from Earth who were participants in an exchange program from the University.”

  Aubrey nodded.

  “Yeah. That program just got started a little more than a year ago. An artist, a writer, a professor, and a couple of scientists went there to educate the Denynso about human life on Earth, and to bring back information about them in an effort to promote closer relationships between the two species.”

  “So, is Jonah one of the people who traveled from the University to be a part of the program?”

  Aubrey wasn’t sure how to respond. It wasn’t something that she had thought about until that moment. From the way that Jonah had talked about Uoria, it seemed that he had spent far more than just one year there, and he didn’t seem to know enough about the Denynso to seem like he had spent that much time with them. After a few moments of silence, Nana stood from the table and walked out of the kitchen. She returned with a blue-bound book in her hands. She sat back in the chair opposite Aubrey and slid the book across the surface of the table toward her.

  “Here,” she said. “I want you to have this.”

  “What is it?” Aubrey asked, picking the book up.

  The cover had no title and the long blue ribbon that hung as a marker between the pages was frayed and faded at the end.

  “Just read it,” Nana said. “I think that you might find it interesting.

  Aubrey looked into her grandmother’s eyes but didn’t find any answers to her questions. She stood, put her bag over her shoulder, and started toward the stairs with the book held to her chest.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jonah was standing on the balcony, enjoying the warm breeze on his face as he stared out over the lushness of the green trees beyond the mansion’s back lawn. Every few moments there was a flicker of light as a firefly shot through the sky. He heard the bedroom door close inside the room and he turned to see Aubrey.

  “Hey,” she said. “I thought that you were going to lie down for a little while.”

  “I tried,” he said. “I just couldn’t get my brain to quiet down.”

  “I can understand that,” Aubrey said.

  He noticed the book that she was holding and gestured at it.

  “What’s that?” he asked. “Did you bring that home from the library?”

  Aubrey looked down at the book and then back up at him.

  “Oh. No. Nana just gave this to me. She told that I might find it interesting.”

  “What’s it about?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Aubrey’s voice sounded strange and the expression on her face looked like she wasn’t fully there in the moment with him. He took a few steps toward her.

  “Is everything alright?” he asked. “Did something happen at work?”

  Aubrey shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “No, everything’s fine. It’s just…” she hesitated and looked back at the door to
the bedroom and then back at him. “It’s just that Nana was acting really odd just now. I went in to see her in the kitchen and she started asking me all sorts of questions about you and how much I know about you.”

  “Why would she do that?” Jonah asked.

  He felt a prickle of nervousness on the back of his neck. Something had struck him as unusual about Nana the first moment that he met her, nothing intimidating or off-putting, just unusual. Now she was asking questions about him and it was making him anxious.

  “I’m not sure,” Aubrey said. She placed her bag on the bench in front of her vanity and looked down at the book in her hands again. “She was trying to find out how long you’ve been on Uoria and why you came back to Earth.”

  “I told you that I’m here because of what Ryan’s doing.”

  “I know that,” she said. “And that’s what I told her.”

  “She doesn’t believe me?”

  “I don’t think it’s that. I don’t know. She just gave me this book and told me that I should read it.”

  “Then let’s have a look.”

  Jonah perched on the window seat and gestured for her to come sit beside him. Aubrey complied, but when she sat down on the pastel pink and green cushion, she hesitated. Her hand was rested on the closed cover of the book and she was staring down at it as if she wasn’t sure that she wanted to open it.

  “Do you want me to open it?” Jonah asked.

  Aubrey hesitated for another second and then nodded. Jonah took the book carefully from her lap and held it in one hand. He took the cover in the other and opened it. As soon as he saw the title written across the cover page in stark black script, he wished that he had never touched the book. He struggled to control his breath, not wanting the panic to be obvious to Aubrey, but he felt like the world was beginning to crash down around him.

  “Silenced Voices: The Story of Nyx 23,” she murmured. “Why would she give me this? I learned all about this mission when I was in school.”

  She slid the book out of Jonah’s hands and started flipping through the pages. Suddenly she stopped and pointed to one of the pages.