Almost Real Read online

  Almost Real

  Charlotte Stein

  When Margot signs on to pose as one half of a married couple for the cloning company she works for, she doesn’t expect her partner to interest her in the slightest. It’s just a job—albeit one that comes with a fake marriage. To an undeniably sexy fake husband.

  Sergei is an immense stone fortress, cold and calm and—worst of all—so compelling Margot can hardly stand it. She’s supposed to be protecting and maintaining the labs, but all she can think about is unearthing the man beneath the controlled façade and wrapping herself around him.

  Even if the man she uncovers is far more than she ever bargained for.

  A Romantica® sci-fi/futuristic erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave

  Almost Real

  Charlotte Stein

  Chapter One

  She wasn’t expecting him to kiss her. Somehow she’d imagined this whole pretend marriage would be enacted without kissing, though she realized how silly that assumption was now. They had to kiss, for the wedding photos. Everything had to look real, and what sort of couple wouldn’t have a picture of that?

  A fake one, she thought as he leaned down and pressed his lips to hers. Just the lips and nothing more. No tongue, no hint of wetness or heat. His mouth felt cool and dry, like a piece of paper, and as soon as the camera caught the moment he pulled away. He switched off, all the expression leaving his face in a way that disturbed her a little.

  He seemed to struggle with smiling, as though he wasn’t really used to it. His default was that blank, pale-eyed stare, as hard as stone and twice as eerie. And when he was called on to change it, his mouth sort of trembled. He had to strain and strain to make it happen, and she could tell the cameraman was less than happy with the result.

  He kept asking for more, and Sergei kept giving him less. It’s supposed to be the greatest day of your lives, he said, but even she found that absurd. She was wearing a wedding dress that had no back, her uniform on underneath it. They’d only met three hours prior at an Endocon facility, and the most contact they’d had since then was a handshake and a faux kiss.

  They hadn’t even really spoken. She wasn’t even sure how to speak to Sergei, if she was honest. He’d done nothing but stare straight ahead on the ride over to the facility, those odd pale eyes of his as flat and still as wind-smoothed stone. And when she’d asked him what sort of work he’d done before this assignment, he’d responded with monosyllables and mostly silence.

  He was still all monosyllables and mostly silence now, despite the rings on their fingers and the paper kiss and the pretend marriage license.

  Not that it mattered. What did they really need to talk about? Everything was laid out in the contract, complete with a backstory they’d both memorized. If he were tested, she knew Sergei would respond with flawless precision. He was trained to be flawlessly precise. He was a machine, and really nothing more was required.

  Lots of couples didn’t like each other. If someone happened to come to this house in the woods and see them eating dinner together in frigid silence, it wouldn’t look that strange. It would look like they’d had an argument—though she suspected an argument with Sergei would end up with more than a spoiled meal.

  He could probably put someone in a grave with one look. When he got in and out of the Jeep, the whole thing bounced. His head grazed its ceiling and his shoulders could have comfortably carried a city bus—and he had the test scores to back up the size too. In her experience, many of the company’s grunts were big but without skill.

  Not so with Sergei. He had a ninety-seven percent clear rate. His shooting accuracy was almost as good as hers, and hand to hand he was pretty much unequalled. She’d looked for the person above him, and quickly realized the page ended there. And though she’d dealt with big men before, that thought was somewhat unsettling, in light of everything else today. That paper kiss lingered on her lips. His silence was a looming presence.

  What lurked behind the exterior? She couldn’t get a read, and that was the real crux of the matter. It didn’t matter if he didn’t talk. It didn’t matter that he was extremely physically capable and built like a brick shithouse. But it mattered that she couldn’t get underneath, to see what made him tick.

  Any attempts were repelled by a steel wall, ten inches thick. She spent the drive watching for changes in his body language or expression. Was he nervous about this assignment? Did it bother him in any way? It didn’t seem to, but then that was the answer to everything with someone like him.

  It didn’t seem to.

  You could have wondered if he was in pain after stabbing him in the shoulder, and gotten the same result. His face never changed, his gestures never gave anything away. He didn’t even have anything to say when they pulled up to the house, despite several things that immediately caught her attention. They more than got her attention.

  They jumped right out at her, waving their arms and shouting what the fuck.

  But he didn’t react. He gave the woods around the place a single measured glance before making his way up to the front door. No word about the spare, strange darkness of the trees, or the unsettling mist that seemed to creep between them. Nothing about the smell of something burning, as though the whole place had recently suffered through a nuclear winter.

  Hell, maybe it had—though you wouldn’t know it from watching Sergei. He was currently swiping his thumb over the keypad by the door, apparently oblivious to the strange atmosphere. He didn’t even seem that aware of the house, despite its size and sleekness and any other number of things she couldn’t quite get over.

  She’d always heard that lab protection details came with tiny, conventional homes, designed to blend in. But this was a vast and very modern building, gilded all over with solar paneling and surrounded by a deck that must have been designed by an artist. It reminded her of things she’d last seen in a book about Scandinavian architecture, all symmetrical staircases and strange upper levels and wood the color of caramels.

  She was almost afraid to walk on such an expensive structure, in case it sensed she’d spent the previous week living in a sleep locker. Her last shower had come out of a can, for God’s sake. She wasn’t worthy or ready for all this—and that was before she’d seen the insides. Oh man, the insides.

  They’d spared no expense. The floors were a glossy hardwood, gleaming in the low lights. When she pressed buttons in the kitchen, drawers slid soundlessly out and calm voices asked if she’d like to try rehydrated sushi—though she couldn’t give it an answer. She didn’t know what her answer should be. She’d never even seen a rehydration unit before, or eaten one of those little cubes that turned into real food. Her meals usually consisted of three slices of ham and a bar of choconot, so this was something of a culture shock.

  And it got worse.

  Everything flowed into a living room so large she could have stood at one end and struggled to see the other. It had a fireplace, a real fireplace, and the television above wasn’t the ordinary kind. She could see the holographic projector mounted above the screen, and sure enough when she turned it on Horny Housewives appeared in front of her to act out this week’s drama.

  It was kind of incredible.

  But also a little bit odd. No security detail required this level of luxury. They were here to protect the labs below from seditionists and anti-cloning threats, not get massages from roboto-beds or music piped directly into their earpieces. They couldn’t defend clones with rehydrated food stuffs. So what was the score here?

  Did Sergei have some pull she didn’t know about?

  She suspected so, but of course couldn’t ask and find out for sure. It would seem small and shallow, when he was busy checking the security sentry guns over entry points and measuring distan
ces between X and Y with his massive strides. Really, she should have been doing the same thing. She didn’t even know why she wasn’t, until she brought up the main task they needed to do together.

  “Want to check out the control room?” she asked, and was met with the kind of silence that could freeze blood. He didn’t even turn around—just kept on testing the window frames at the end of the hallway. It took him two of the most awkward minutes of her life to even acknowledge her presence, and it didn’t feel good when he finally did.

  “Whatever,” he said, at which point she understood why she’d marveled over talking kitchens instead of dealing with him. Dealing with him was going to be hard. It was going to take a lot of effort. And it was going to involve a lot of doing things on her own, because asking him made her feel like this.

  Sort of queasy, she thought, though in the end she was glad she got to see the control room first, while alone. This was going to be her lair, and her lair needed setting up exactly how she liked it. She wanted the wall monitors set to certain things, and in a certain order. Her main console was one of the new intuitive models that practically moved before you touched it, so she needed to dial that back a bit. Soon, those tendrils of electric-blue were slithering around at her command, perfectly attuned to her fingertips and her movements.

  But there was another reason why the solitude pleased her. A stranger reason that she couldn’t quite accept at first. She shrugged it off as she worked, sure she was just being silly. She didn’t really want to use this time to watch him over the monitors. She wasn’t the least bit interested…until she was.

  She looked up one too many times and suddenly she was just staring and staring at that tombstone face, caught by the concealed camera at the end of the hall. The angle was strange but you could still make out the slant of his firm jaw…not to mention other things that you couldn’t miss. Those insane shoulders practically filled up the entire shot. He almost had to turn sideways to walk back down toward the stairs, though that wasn’t really the thing that caught her attention.

  No, no. It was the way he glanced up at the concealed camera, just before he reached the exit. As though he knew, she thought, that she was watching.

  And wanted to make sure she knew he knew too.

  * * * * *

  She spent most of the first day in her lair behind the hallway wall, making sure the systems were up and running. Nearly everything was automated—from processing through to development and finally delivery—but there were still things that needed handling. She had to check core temperatures, and make sure mechanical arms and delivery systems were all working smoothly. Some things needed extensive reprogramming; others needed minor glitches fixed.

  It was tedious work, but she soon found herself engrossed all the same. There was just something about maintaining a lab that always drew her in, though she tried not to consider the reason for this too deeply. She didn’t spend too long looking at those rows and rows of glass-encased bodies, like a million sleeping beauties. And if she did, she certainly wasn’t searching for anything in particular.

  She wouldn’t find one with black hair and liquid eyes, so it didn’t matter. The work mattered. The work was what interested her. The little details that made everything just right, from ensuring they got enough sustenance to checking their oxygen levels. Sometimes, she thought, it was kind of like being their doctor.

  But that was just another thought that she pushed away quickly.

  They weren’t people, for God’s sake. She wasn’t caring for them. She just worked and worked and worked because she enjoyed it—or at least, she enjoyed it until she realized seventeen thousand hours had gone by with her hunched over the console like a crazy obsessive.

  Her back actually cracked when she finally moved. Her arms didn’t want to unbend. She had to stand and jiggle around for about five minutes before everything started working properly, and even then she still had problems. The little finger on her right hand had seized into a hook shape, and no amount of rubbing would make it straighten. Nor would the rubbing ease the ache—the one that began at her knuckles and ended somewhere around her elbows.

  Twenty-four, and arthritis was clearly on the horizon. In fact, a lot of things were probably on the horizon if she carried on like this. She was already pale—two weeks in that gray room and she’d be transparent. She felt like a zombie as she stumbled down the hall and into the kitchen, and it was only when she got there that she remembered one very sobering fact.

  She wasn’t the only person in this place.

  The iron wall was here too.

  He had his back to her, and she was glad of that. It gave her the chance to run right back up the steps—though once she had she wasn’t sure why she’d done it. There was no need to be intimidated. Technically speaking, he was there to protect her too. He wasn’t going to suddenly smash her with his massive fists, and even if he tried she knew how to take care of herself.

  No, no…it was something else.

  She just couldn’t go in there when he was already making his dinner. It felt like an intrusion…as if she’d wandered into someone else’s home without knowing it. This place belonged to her as much as it did to him, but even after she’d gone back to the entranceway she couldn’t quite make that wash.

  He looked so self-contained. There he was chopping things and frying things and using all the fancy tools in the kitchen. She wasn’t sure how she could be a part of that, or even if she was supposed to be. Did they have to take their meals together, at the table? Would it matter if they didn’t?

  She wasn’t really certain, and that was the problem. The contracts and backstories said a lot about the front they were meant to present, but nothing about the day-to-day details. How did you go about pretending to be married?

  You probably had to talk at least, her mind whispered, but that still seemed completely off the table. She could tell he knew she was there, but he didn’t acknowledge her. He just carried on making his meal in his own enormous force field of silence, until she found herself backing away again.

  She had to back away again. That force field was getting close to burning her alive. She could still feel its heat and heft once she’d sunk into the living room couch, though the cushions afforded her some protection. And putting the TV on helped too. Now she had her own little bubble, separate from his and completely contained.

  They didn’t have to talk, they didn’t have to interact. She could just be in the living room, pretending to pay attention to programs she hated, while he ate whatever delicious thing he was cooking. Then they’d switch. Yes, yes—then they’d switch. He could sit on the couch and she could go into the kitchen, without any awkward nonsense getting in the way or ruining her day.

  It was a perfect plan.

  An organized system.

  “You hungry?”

  She jerked at the sound of his voice, and not just because of its rarity. There was also the way the words rumbled out of him, like some ancient god suddenly deciding to speak. He hit such a low note she almost felt it, and probably would have if he’d said more. But as it was he barely separated the you from the hungry, so both drawled out of him as one.

  Yungry.

  He invented new words, to accommodate his hatred of speaking.

  “Oh, well…” she started, then stopped short. He meant are you hungry for this thing I have made. Not are you hungry in some general, inquiring-after-her-health sort of way. He even had a second plate in his hand, just to clue her in.

  He’d fixed it for her.

  He’d fixed spaghetti for her.

  And oh man, it looked great too. He’d obviously made the sauce from scratch, and the smell was divine. She couldn’t have said no if she wanted to, and she definitely didn’t want to. She wanted to sit at the table and eat with him, the way he’d obviously intended—and after a moment’s hesitation she did. She sat as close to him as she could stand, arms almost touching but oh not quite, not quite, and tried to eat with the same quiet
dignity he was exhibiting.

  It proved close to impossible, however. The first forkful almost made her moan, and the second garnered no better reaction. She hadn’t a clue what he put into the sauce, but it didn’t taste like any she’d ever had before. And the bread…had he made it himself? It seemed like he had, but once she’d tasted it she was even more uncertain than she’d been prior.

  He didn’t seem the type to knead dough and bake loaves and produce this heavenly final product. He seemed like the type to bench press cars while chugging power drinks he barely knew how to blend, so bread making had to be out of the question. Surely it was out of the question.

  Even if she suspected that it wasn’t out of the question at all. In fact, the more she ate, the worse she felt for even thinking such a thing in the first place. He was a big guy, sure. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t cook. He probably had all kinds of hidden depths beneath that surly exterior. Maybe he liked to crochet too, in his spare time.

  Though she doubted she’d ever find out for sure. She couldn’t even bring herself to ask him about the meal, despite the sudden burning urge to. The words were practically scalding the back of her throat, but no matter how painful it became she couldn’t force them out. All she had to do was sneak a glance at him, and they turned to dust and blew away.

  For obvious reasons.

  He was just so…daunting. He even ate in a grimly determined manner—to the point where it actually became fascinating. She found herself watching him almost against her will, as he ploughed through his plate as if he didn’t have any taste buds. After all, their lack was the only reasonable explanation for his behavior. No one with a functioning tongue could have eaten this particular meal without savoring it.

  But he did.

  She couldn’t even tell if the stuff touched the insides of his mouth. He just shoveled and shoveled it in until the plate was clean, then stood and took it to the dishwasher. And as she watched, partially paralyzed, he took her plate to the dishwasher too. He took everything to the dishwasher, and cleared the table, and wiped down the countertops. No talking about it. No negotiation as to whose job it was. He just did everything without question or complaint.