Hidden Embers

by Tessa Adams

  Oral ingestion, she wondered, making a note to herself. Was intestinal absorption even possible with this virus? And if it wasn’t, what the hell were they missing?

  The whole thing was perplexing, and a little frightening if she allowed herself to think of Phoebe contracting it—or Quinn. She wouldn’t wish this thing on her worst enemy, let alone people she cared about. She hadn’t been sure how to classify Quinn, even before their fight the night before, and she sure as hell didn’t know now, but she knew he didn’t fall into enemy territory.

  One touch from him turned her inside out, and the times she’d been with him had been more powerful than anything she’d ever experienced. And yet, it hadn’t been all about sex—at least not after the very first time. She enjoyed talking to him, listening to him, and when he’d been hurt, vulnerable, she’d wanted nothing more than to take care of him. She tried to tell herself the reaction stemmed from her medical training, but she’d never been very good at lying to herself. What she felt for Quinn—after two short days—had nothing to do with her being a doctor and everything to do with being a woman.

  It was annoying, infuriating. Confusing. While she didn’t mind the first two, she hated the hell out of the third. She’d gone into their one-night stand with her eyes wide-open—or at least as wide-open as they could be, considering the fact that she hadn’t had a clue Quinn was anything but a very sexy man when she’d seen him at the bar.

  Still, she’d done it for the sex. For the fun. For the one night of companionship. But now that they were working together, everything was complicated. She wasn’t supposed to think about him when he wasn’t with her. Or worry about how he was feeling when he extended himself too far. Or wonder whether she’d hurt his feelings with her display of temper.

  But she was thinking, wondering, and worrying. And it was driving her insane. On the surface he might be a good match for her—a brilliant doctor whose research was both solid and cutting edge, not to mention a handsome, sexy man who played her body like a maestro on his favorite instrument.

  But underneath it all, he was tormented by demons she couldn’t even imagine, a member of a community that thought nothing of draining him dry again and again and forcing her to watch. And he was very, very, very used to getting his own way. Whether it was with women or work or his relationships with the men around him, Quinn commanded respect—and obedience. She was okay with the first but the second sucked ass.

  Yet when she compared herself to him on those fronts, she had to admit he seemed better adjusted than she did. Though she’d put her own demons behind her a long time ago, she still had a hard time letting people get close to her and settling down. She admired the roots he had here and the importance of his role in the Dragonstar community, but the thought of staying in one place for longer than a few months gave her hives. She could not, absolutely could not, imagine building a place for herself here, or anywhere else for that matter. Not a solid place, like Quinn had. Not a place that mattered.

  As for the obedience thing, she could barely restrain a laugh. Her father had beat the hell out of her throughout her entire childhood in an effort to knock the willfulness out of her, as he had her mother. It hadn’t worked and she didn’t relish spending years of her life struggling with a dominant male animal for supremacy. She had better things to do with her time.

  Since she couldn’t remember one of those things at the moment, Jasmine did what she did best. She buried herself in her research until she couldn’t think of anything—or anyone—else.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Quinn strode down the clinic hallway, deliberately blocking out everything around him as he made a beeline for his office. He’d been at the clinic for more than eight hours, since he’d stopped in at six a.m. on his way to the lab. He’d planned to take care of his duties early in the morning, before anyone was around. But then the doctor who worked the first shift at the clinic had called in sick, and Quinn got stuck doing his rounds.

  Working an extra shift normally wouldn’t have bothered him, but today it was the last thing he wanted to do. He was dying to get to the lab—and Jasmine. He wanted to hear her thoughts on the virus, and he also just wanted to see her. To smooth things over from the night before. To listen to her snipe at him in that sexy voice of hers. To see her mischievous grin when she got the better of him and smell the tart sweetness that was so much a part of her.

  He wished she was with him now. Not because he needed anyone to hold his hand while he did his duty but because…He sighed. Just because. He really didn’t want to do this alone. Though he had friends who would be happy to step in, she was the one he wanted by his side when he completed this most unpleasant of tasks.

  Hell, he didn’t want to do it at all, but it couldn’t be put off anymore. It had been almost three full days since Michael had died, and he still hadn’t made arrangements for laying him to rest.

  Logan had asked him about it the night before, and Quinn had known, then, that he was being selfish. He hadn’t forgotten Michael’s death, or the arrangements—how could he when his brother’s loss was an ache inside him so large that he was almost swamped with despair? He’d been unable to face it. So he had left him in the cold, forbidding morgue for over two days now. He had failed to make arrangements for his funeral. He had failed Michael—in life and in death.

  It would stop now, today, even though the thought of looking at another funeral pyre was enough to make him sick. He’d already watched Cecily burn this year, and his brother Liam, and so many more of his friends and patients. Attending one more funeral, one more torch bearing, one more fire, was more than he could bear—especially when, this time, it would be Michael turning to ash.

  Born in fire, die in fire, reclaimed in fire. Never had it been a more bitter pill to swallow.

  As he neared his office, he became aware of the nurses and other clinic personnel staring at him, and he couldn’t help but read censure in their gazes. What kind of brother was he?

  What kind of brother concentrated on his own pain instead of taking care of the last needs of his baby brother?

  It wasn’t like he was inexperienced at this, after all. He’d arranged the funerals for his parents, for each of his other brothers, for Cecily. He’d never dropped the ball with them. How he could have done so now was completely beyond him.

  Furious with himself, he slammed his office door behind him and went straight to the file cabinet to get the forms necessary to release the body. Phoebe was the doctor on record, but he’d told her he would handle it.

  He glanced down at the desk and saw that the forms had been neatly filled in, Phoebe’s signature at the bottom of each one. She’d done it for him, after all. Had stayed here the night Michael had died and taken care of it, long after Quinn had fled like a coward, which he was very much afraid he was turning into.

  If the forms were done, the only thing left was deciding when and where the funeral would be held. Like he gave a shit. Picking up a pen, he jotted off a short obituary containing the highlights of Michael’s life, then wrote another note to the morgue supervisor, telling him when and where Michael’s body should be delivered.

  These instructions could just as easily have been given in person. He knew David was downstairs even now. But the lump in his throat made the idea of talking impossible, and if he had to listen to any more expressions of sympathy, he would probably lose it completely. He’d been overwhelmed when he’d first arrived back at the lab yesterday, with one person after another telling him how sorry they were about Michael. He’d wanted to scream, to roar, to lash out at them—to tell them that they were nowhere near as sorry as he was.

  He hadn’t, of course. He couldn’t—not when everyone was being so nice to him, tiptoeing around him like he was the one who had died instead of his youngest brother. But God, the pain and the anger had grown until he’d wanted to tell them all to go to hell. That they didn’t have a clue what he was feeling.

  Instead, he’d accepted their condolen
ces, and then he’d turned around and had sex with Jasmine on top of one of the lab tables. Because wasn’t that what you did less than forty-eight hours after your brother died?

  Goddamn this mating thing. Like he wasn’t already fucked up enough, this had to be thrown into the mix, too? Thinking was hard enough without Jasmine messing with his head.

  Miserable, aching, he laid his head down on the cool marble top of his desk and closed his eyes. He was tired, so tired. He wanted to say to hell with everything, to walk out into the desert and never come back.

  If it weren’t for Jasmine, he might actually do it.

  He laughed bitterly at the thought. Right, like he would actually do that now, when his clan needed him more than ever. He might like to pretend he’d walk out, but he knew he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. His duty was too important. There were too many people relying on him, too many responsibilities he couldn’t walk away from. But that only made him feel more trapped, and he didn’t think he could take one more thing going wrong.

  He thought back to the night before, to the way Jasmine had flown off the handle when he’d been trying to help her. He wanted to blame her—had spent most of the night doing just that—but what if it hadn’t been her fault? What if he’d really been the cause of the whole thing, as she asserted, and he’d just been too stupid to know it? These insecurities weren’t like him, but shit, his whole world was falling down around his ears, and it seemed pretty damn stupid to set himself up for more failure.

  Was it possible to walk away from a mate? He’d never seen it happen, not in the more than four hundred years of his existence, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. Jasmine wasn’t dragon, after all—maybe that meant she didn’t have the same ties to him that he had to her. God knew, she didn’t have any trouble driving away from him the night before, even as his body still hummed from the satisfaction she’d given him.

  Pushing away from the desk, he started to pace, barely aware that he was doing it. He couldn’t take one more loss, one more failure. Maybe he kept making the same mistake of caring for people who couldn’t be saved, but he wasn’t a masochist. Not by a long shot. In fact, he was ready to do just about anything to make the agony clawing at his insides stop.

  Leaving himself open to more pain, allowing Jasmine to hurt him and walk away, as she kept doing, seemed singularly stupid. Especially when one more loss would shatter him completely.

  No, whatever was going on between them had to stop. He didn’t have the emotional capacity to have a simple affair with her right now, and anything else was out of the question.

  His dragon snapped at the thought, but Quinn pushed it back, told himself that leaving Jasmine alone was the best thing he could do under the circumstances. The only thing he could do. She was human and transitory and more fearless and foolish than he could tolerate. Better to lose her now, before he’d ever really had her, than to lose her later when she’d become everything to him.

  No, things with Jasmine had to end, he told himself again, as he dropped Michael’s paperwork on his secretary’s desk. Linda would take care of it, make sure everything was perfect for Michael. Because while he knew the funeral was his responsibility, Quinn also knew that he couldn’t do any more. Not if he wanted to hold on to his last thread of sanity. Just as he knew, instinctively, that spending any more time with Jasmine would snap his control as easily as a hurricane did a tree branch.

  He couldn’t let that happen. Not now—he had too much work left to do.

  She knew the second he entered the lab, which drove her nuts because it meant on some level she was waiting and listening for him when normally her work made her oblivious to the world. Feeling foolish—and more than a little annoyed—Jasmine forced herself not to turn toward him when he gave a general, “Hello.”

  “Hi, Quinn,” Phoebe answered. “I was about to give up on you making it in today.”

  “Gerald called in sick—I stayed to cover the clinic.”

  Jasmine could feel the tension go through the room. “Sick?” Phoebe demanded, her voice tightening. “He doesn’t have—”

  “What he has is a hangover,” Quinn said dryly. “His brother’s bachelor party was last night.”

  “Oh, well. That’s good.”

  “Yeah, just peachy. I love it when one of my doctors gets so blitzed he can’t make it to work. It’s not like I had planned on doing anything today.”

  “Poor baby. It must be so hard to be in such high demand.” Phoebe’s voice was low and teasing.

  “Well, you should know. When’s the last time Dylan got a full night’s sleep?”

  Phoebe groaned. “Don’t even ask. Not since before that whole thing with the Wyvernmoons a couple months back. I swear he spends twenty out of every twenty-four hours trying to figure out how to end this.” She glanced at Quinn. “Kind of like you, only from a different angle.”

  “I hope he’s having better luck.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  “How about you?” he asked, and the only reason Jasmine knew he was talking to her was that his voice got about ten degrees cooler. “Do you have any brilliant ideas about this virus that Phoebe and I haven’t thought of?”

  “Not yet. But I’m not even halfway through your notes. They’re incredibly thorough, by the way.”

  “Is that a compliment I hear, or are my ears deceiving me?”

  She didn’t like his mocking tone, or the look in his eyes that was one shade away from obnoxious. She obviously wasn’t the only one who hadn’t gotten over the night before, but at least she was being civil about it.

  Then again, she had been the one to flip him off. Judging from the look on his face, that wasn’t something alpha he-man dragons took in stride.

  Not that she cared. The last thing she needed was a man hovering over her telling her what to do every second of every day. She’d gotten more than enough of that from her father when she was growing up, thank you very much. Never again would a man have that kind of control over her.

  “It’s a fact.” She kept her voice a shade warmer than his. Professional, she liked to call it. Though it was a far cry from the husky tone she’d used to whisper naughty words to him the day before in this very lab. Too bad, so sad. They both would have to get over it.

  “What’s your gut tell you, Jasmine?” Phoebe jumped in after a long look at both of them. “I know you’re too thorough of a researcher to really voice an opinion yet, but forget that for a second and just go with what you’ve got.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Oh, come on, enlighten us.” Quinn’s tone was even more mocking. “You’re the world-famous hematologist and infectious disease doctor. Surely you have an opinion on what you’re seeing.”

  Jasmine’s eyes narrowed even as she told herself not to rise to the bait. Quinn was in a mood, and was clearly happy to play games with her. She very definitely was not joining in.

  “My opinion is inconclusive at this point.”

  “Screw inconclusive!” he snarled. Before she could so much as blink, Quinn was across the room and in her face. “You think I give a shit about your policies and procedures when my people are dying? Tell me what the hell you think is going on. I promise, we won’t hold you to it.”

  “Quinn, she’s only been looking at the evidence for twenty-four hours. Cut her a little slack,” Phoebe cut in, putting a restraining hand on his arm.

  For a second, he was about to shake her off, but then he relented. With a grimace, he took two large steps back from Jasmine.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I guess I’m a little punchier than I thought. I was up most of the night.”

  “It’s okay. You’ve been through a lot. No one expects—” Phoebe broke off at the searing look Quinn sent Jasmine’s way. Jasmine’s eyes widened. She suddenly remembered what he’d told her in the hotel room that first night. She hadn’t actually forgotten it, but with all the work on the virus and all the commotion over her feelings for Quinn, she hadn’t given it m
uch thought. He was alone. Sad and suffering and desperate to connect to another person.

  God, she really was a bitch.

  She suddenly realized that Michael—the brother he’d said he’d lost—had been one of the dragons to die from this virus. She looked at Quinn and understood the desperation behind his kisses, the way he had tried to bury himself in her, in their pleasure, so he didn’t have to think about or feel anything else.

  He blamed himself for his brother’s death. God knew, he shouldn’t—his research showed just how long and hard he’d fought to find a cure—but Quinn was the kind of man who believed he was responsible for everyone around him. She already knew that his belief that he was failing his clan was killing him, but believing he failed Michael must be the last straw. For a man who kept such tight control over himself and his world, this had to be a nightmare.

  She wanted to say something to him, wanted to help ease his pain somehow. Before she could, Quinn crossed to his desk and started fiddling with his computer. Within seconds, he gave every appearance of being completely absorbed in work, but she knew he was as attuned to her as she was to him. She wondered if she’d been wrong the night before. Maybe he’d had some reason, besides wanting to be Mr. Macho, to insist on taking her to Phoebe’s house. Maybe she shouldn’t have fought him so hard. Maybe he had just been trying to protect her—and protect himself from losing someone else.

  The thought freaked her out, and her self-preservation instincts kicked into overdrive. She wasn’t that woman, she reminded herself frantically, the one who worried about why her man did what he did or how her words and actions affected him. She didn’t pull punches, didn’t try to fit into the boxes men tried to put her into.

  And yet, as she glanced over at Quinn, he looked so alone. So desperately, completely alone, despite the fact that Phoebe was perched beside him on the desk, filling him in on the discussion they’d had before he’d shown up.