Part Thirteen
The house was almost making Lincoln uneasy. It was too big, too ornate, too much of a reminder that he didn't fit into it quite right. Michael didn't fit, either, but Lincoln had known ever since the two of them were kids that Michael was smart enough to mold himself and pass for whatever he wanted to be. If that made him happy, then Lincoln wished him all of the success in the world. In the meantime, he felt as though he was about to jump right out of his own skin.
Staying in one place for more than a few moments at a time was impossible, so Lincoln paced the halls even as he knew that he should be getting whatever rest that he could and that he was recreating the pacing that he had often done in his tiny cell or during the single hour of yard time afforded to him at Fox River. He could not shake the feeling that that one grim cage was being exchanged for one with nicer drapes, and that the bars would come slamming down to reveal themselves the moment that he tried to slip out the door. The Panama plan that he and Michael had by mutual agreement decided to abandon had never seemed sweeter.
It was a selfish thought, probably, but Lincoln did not mind. He wasn't a hero, and he didn't want to save the world. That wasn't a thought that kept him up at night. Neither was Michael, though Lincoln suspected that Michael did not sleep nearly as easily over it. Lincoln wanted to protect his kid and he wanted his life back, in that order. He took the brief flashes of better instinct that rose up in him now and again for what they were.
It was fitting, Lincoln thought with a certain dark humor, that as he was thinking of heroes he should meet their beautiful blonde antithesis wandering the same hallways. Jane was every bit as much of an insomniac as Lincoln himself.
She had taken off the jacket, leaving her only in her slacks and a silk blouse the color of a dove's breast. She had loosened a few of the buttons, as well, so that she was exposing the smooth line of her clavicle, the first creamy hint of her cleavage. Jane's hair was pulled back from her face, and in cleaning herself up earlier she had missed a dot of blood beneath her left ear.
Jane smiled when she saw him. "You've been down this hallway three times," she told him in a lilting voice that sounded nearly nothing like the Jane that he had grown accustomed to. "The house isn't that big."
"It's big enough," Lincoln said. He rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. "Even before I was framed for murder, this would be pretty damned big."
Jane tilted her head to one side, stared at him intently for a moment, and then gave a single, decisive nod. "Don't pretend it's about the house," she said. She walked past him and into a part of the house that Lincoln had not yet been. He assumed that people who stayed here quasi-regularly slept there.
Lincoln had not been intending to do anything other than let Jane continue her nocturnal wanderings down any hall that she chose unfollowed, until she said that. "What are you talking about?" he asked as he rounded after her.
Jane halted, looked Lincoln in the eye. Lincoln wanted, more than anything, to finally see Jane with that composure of hers rattled, with the blood high in her cheeks and her eyes dilated and dark. Anger. Passion. Either would work.
"I've known Aldo for a very long time," Jane told him. "You and your brother are not as different from him as you'd like to think. I know what he looks like when he's worried about one of his kids. You have the same look."
Lincoln had spent most of his adult life working so that he would only truly be known to a handful of people. Abruptly discovering that the ranks included at least one other was the last thing that he needed on the eve of a plan whose greatest chance of working was if God actually existed. He leaned back onto his heels and said in a gruff voice, "Doesn't take a genius to see that I'd be worried about my kid right now." LJ was asleep, or at least had said that that was where he was going. With the way that this house resembled a maze, Lincoln might well find him walking down some other hallway next.
"Aldo worried that he had only sealed your fates by leaving, too," Jane continued. She was a beautiful woman, but Lincoln swore that her insistence upon staying with the subject of Aldo Burrows was doing more to cool his ardor than a bucket of ice water. "That you and Michael would still turn out like him."
"Lucky for him, I'm an underachiever," Lincoln snapped, even though the idea that LJ might use his short foray as a drug dealer as a way to become just like his old man had kept him up on more than a few nights. "Look, Jane, I'm willing to work with my old man if that's what it will take to clear my name and end this. That doesn't mean that I want to go all Dr. Phil about him."
Jane actually looked disappointed for a few seconds. It occurred to Lincoln that he had seen more of the normal span of human emotion from her in the past ten minutes than he had in the previous day and a half. Jane when she was working and Jane when she was at rest were becoming different enough to seem like a pair of entirely different women.
"You should try to get some sleep," Jane told Lincoln when she had finished making the transformation back into the sleek, professional cog in her machine. It was a change that was not flattering on her, now that Lincoln had seen the difference. "Bad things tend to happen when people's focus slips."
Lincoln snorted and scrubbed his hand across the back of his neck. "Jane, I would sleep if I could," he told her. His eyes were burning with fatigue even as his body refused to do anything other than keep moving. That was what happened when you expected danger to leap out from around every corner. Lincoln knew the response well. "If it were only a matter of concentrating, then there wouldn't be half as many people hooked on that sleeping pill shit. And you're not exactly resting easy yourself, out here talking to me."
"I've had periodic insomnia for years," Jane said simply. "It comes with the territory." Lincoln was not certain if she meant the things that she had done while she was collecting her paychecks from the Company, or when she was already a part of this amorphous agency that was meant to fight it. No more than a second went by before he decided that he preferred not to know. "I've found that company can help, however, if that company is appropriately stimulating."
Jane fixed Lincoln with a long, slow once-over that ran from the crown of his head down to the shoes on his feet, the clear and cool gray of her eyes doing nothing to hide that the look in them was hungry. Her tongue came out for the briefest of seconds to touch at the split that Lincoln had put into her lower lip. Her mouth still looked pink and full because of it. Lincoln did not think that he had ever received a more clear invitation from a woman in his life. His pulse began to rise immediately.
"I'd hate to leave you lonely," Lincoln said, knowing that it sounded cheesy and grinning all the same. Blame Fox River; his skills were rusty.
Jane inclined her head slightly down the hallway where she had been going when Lincoln had come across her. "The room where I stay when I'm here is this way," she said, and turned to go without waiting to see if Lincoln would follow her.
He did, of course, his pulse already rising, his eyes fixed upon the curves of Jane's ass as she strode in front of him. She glanced back once as she drew them to a halt in front of an anonymous door, her smile knowing and suggestive. Lincoln wanted to push her back against that door then and there.
As it was, he barely waited for Jane to open it, much less long enough to glance around in order to get a lay of the land and ensure that it was not filled with men carrying guns and mean expressions before he stepped forward, cupped Jane's face in his hands, and brought his mouth down hard onto hers.
Jane made a muffled sound of surprise and was swift to open her mouth to him, scrabbling her hands across his chest until she was able to get a grip on his shirt. She dragged him closer. Lincoln was happy to be pulled. He pulled Jane's hair loose from its clip so that it could spill free around her shoulders, needing to feel its cornsilk texture through his fingers. Lincoln shushed Jane's noise of protest by kissing her hard, again, scarcely leaving enough time for each of them to draw a breath before he was doing it once more. He cupped Jane's ass with both hands so that he could lift her up and against him. He had been getting hard ever since he had touched his mouth to hers. Lincoln knew that Jane could feel it in the way that her hands clenched even more tightly through the front of his shirt.
"Wait," Jane panted against Lincoln's mouth before she pushed him back a step. "Wait." She began to hurriedly work at the buttons of her blouse, her composure broken for the first time since Lincoln had known her. Her fingers were shaking, and she was missing more buttons than she was managing to unfasten. It was all that Lincoln could do not to solve the problem by simply ripping the clothing off of her, and clichés be damned. Instead, he focused on the buttons of his own shirt, drawing it off and throwing it to the side before Jane had even managed to unbutton her blouse down to her navel. There was lace on her bra.
"Oh," Jane said as she paused for a moment and took in Lincoln's half-clothed form, her fingers stilling on the buttons. Prison food, prison risks, and then being forced on the run immediately afterwards didn't leave a whole lot of room for a person to grow fat and lazy. Lincoln grinned at her again.
"Come here," he growled before he put his hands around Jane's waist. He was able to lift her up as if she weighed nothing at all. Jane obliged by wrapping hers legs around his waist immediately, grinding her hips down just so, all the while her mouth found the side of his neck. Jane's tongue flicked over Lincoln's pulse point and made the hands that were holding her up twitch, before she bit down and made Lincoln gasp.
"Jesus!" he exploded. He swore that he heard Jane giggle, but it was a sound so patently unlike her that he could not be sure.
With Jane still wrapping her long legs around him, a burden that he did not mind at all, Lincoln walked the both of them over to the bed. Jane maintained her grip on him even as he dropped her down to the mattress hard enough to make the springs creak, so that he was pulled down on top of her as she fell. She made short work of his surprised 'oof' by finding his cock through the front of his pants and dragging a lower sound from his mouth to replace it. He had achieved his goal of seeing Jane with her eyes dilated and her lips full and parted.
"You have on too many clothes," Jane said to him. Her golden hair was fanned out around her head; the irony made Lincoln grin. She sat up and, leaving Lincoln to take care of that problem for himself, had within seconds dealt with the remaining buttons on her blouse and shrugged it off before she went to work on her bra. Her breasts were well-shaped, skin the color of ivory and cream, and of the perfect size for Lincoln to cup into the palms of his hands. She gasped when she felt the callus on Lincoln's thumb move across her nipple.
"Come here," Lincoln said again in a low voice that was beyond his control and barely sounded like himself, wrapping his arm around the small of Jane's back so that he could hold her against him and kiss her again. Her neck tasted like salt and, Lincoln imagined, adrenaline. The taste continued as he worked his way down and to her breasts. He broke away from her only long enough to tug his pants off before he returned.
"Please tell me that you have a condom," Lincoln said in that low and rasping voice. Sex had been a fairly low priority once they had all escaped from Fox River, even as so much time spent in the company of men exclusively seemed to have hardwired Lincoln to notice every female form that came within ten yards of him.
"I'm on protection," Jane told him. "So as long as you're healthy…?"
"As a horse," was all that Lincoln said before he shifted them both more fully onto the bed, knelt between Jane's thighs, and entered her. She made a mewling sound as she shifted her hips to meet him; Lincoln's senses were filled, after three years of exclusively male company, with the scent and feel of woman. Her eyes when she did look at him were dazed, the pupils huge and dark. For the most part she kept them closed and her head thrown back. Face flushed, composure broken, everything that Lincoln had vowed that he was going to get. Jane made no sound when she came, only dipped her head so that the sweaty strands of her hair hid her face and then grit her teeth to swallow back whatever cry she might have made. Lincoln thrust up and into her, approaching his own orgasm, while she continued to draw those impenetrable designs up and down his back. She bit the side of his neck mere seconds before Lincoln orgasmed himself, and he hissed as he sank down on top of her.
"Goddamn," Lincoln said, and touched at the side of his neck. He stared down at Jane in disbelief. "The Company hires vampires, or what?"
Jane grinned at him, flushed and sated. She still looked brighter and more human than she had at any point previous to that. Jane began to trace idle patterns up and down Lincoln's bicep. "The Company hires whoever will be useful to them." A darkness entered Jane's voice for the first time since she had invited Lincoln into her room, and she ceased her invisible doodling. She shivered abruptly and then said, "I'm cold." The two of them had not made it beneath the bedcovers.
Lincoln was already starting to feel drowsy, but he swung his legs over the side of the bed in preparation to leave all the same. "Hell of an insomnia cure, Jane," he told her as he watched her nude form wriggle beneath the blanket and make herself comfortable.
She looked up, watched him for a moment, and then flicked the covers back so that Lincoln could join her beneath the blankets if he wished. The sleek, lean lines of her body were revealed to him again as he did so. It was enough to make Lincoln wonder how long his period of satiety was going to last. "No use in finding another room," she told him. "You can share mine if you'd like."
Lincoln had had sex with a great many women; the ones that he had actually stayed around in order to sleep with afterwards made up a much smaller pool. Jane did not look as if she extended the invitation on a regular basis, either. Her body language was stiff as Lincoln eased himself down into the bed beside her and drew the blankets back across them both. Jane's skin was still flushed and warm, her hair darkened with sweat around her temples. It was still several shades lighter than Veronica's had been. Lincoln still could not stop himself from reaching out and dragging the loose strands through his fingers. Jane stiffened in alarm at the sudden movement, then began to relax into the touch.
"Nice place," Lincoln said as he took a look about Jane's room. It looked like something that he would expect from a nicely appointed hotel, much like the rest of the house. If Jane kept any signs of herself within the room, then she was hiding them well. The only proof that a person stayed her was a small crucifix on a golden chain, tossed down onto the table beside the bed.
Jane noticed him looking and said slowly, "I don't strike you as the sort of woman who would be religious."
"Not really." Thinking that he must have offended her, Lincoln put his arm around her shoulder and rubbed at her bicep. His hand felt natural there; he could feel Jane relaxing against his chest.
"After the things that I've done, it's comforting to believe in grace." While Lincoln was pondering that, she went on. "I have a house. In Portland. It looks more like me." Jane was relaxing more with every moment that she had time to get used to the presence of Lincoln in her bed. "I'd like to show you what the bed there looks like when this is over. If you'd like."
Lincoln gave the strands of hair that he was playing with a gentle tug. "I'd like."
"Good." Jane had not assumed her warrior's armor again quite yet. She laid her head down on his chest, continuing to watch him for a few moments before she closed her eyes. Lincoln kept playing with her hair until he succumbed to sleep himself.
End Part Thirteen