by Anne Marsh
Dropping his head, he rested his cheek against the soft skin of her throat where the pulse beat hard. God, she loved their games as much as he did, and that knowledge sent arousal pounding through his body. As if he needed the assist. He’d been hard since he stepped into her lab—her territory—and now all he wanted was her. The raw intimacy of losing himself in her body and mind.
She didn’t move, but that meant she wasn’t moving away, either.
Maybe, she was tired of all the fighting. Maybe, like him, she wanted this moment of quiet.
He pressed his lips to her skin, and she jumped. Inhaled sharply and then just stepped into him. Gave him her weight, her head tipping back so she could search his face for something he didn’t know he had to say.
“Do it some more,” she said, and he carefully wrapped his arms around her waist. Just holding her and losing himself in the sweet heat of her body and the even sweeter taste of her. One hand tangled gently in her hair, erasing the knot of tension in back of her neck while his thumb drew small circles on her smooth stomach through the thin lab coat and soft cashmere of her top.
“Whatever you want, baby,” he whispered hoarsely, the sweet catch of her breath turning him inside out. She smelled so right. Felt so right.
The ding of the timer broke the dreamy stillness. He let her go before she could respond. Sliding him a look he couldn’t interpret, she stepped away, retrieving her slide and pulling the microscope toward her.
When she bent to look into the narrow eyepiece of the microscope, she frowned, and he wanted to kiss away the sexy little furrow in her brow. If she was allowed to age normally, she’d have a delightful little crease there by the time she was ready to be a grandmother. She wouldn’t age while they were bonded, however, and he didn’t know if she’d welcome the perpetual youth. Or curse him for it.
She straightened. “Look.”
When he looked down the microscope’s eyepiece, he liked the idea that he was touching what she’d touched. Unfortunately, that sexy little transfer didn’t include any useful knowledge. Whatever she saw on the slide, it was still Greek to him.
“DNA tells us what eye color, hair color, height a person will have—all the physical characteristics.” She gestured toward her face. “You look at my DNA, and you don’t have to look at me to know that I have brown hair, brown eyes. That DNA is packaged into the twenty-three chromosome pairs we get when we’re conceived. Every human has his or her very own recipe.”
“It’s like a cookbook.” He looked at her.
“Yeah. An enormous one. DNA testing can determine your race and your ancestry. We’re all walking, talking family trees.”
Walking over to the printer, she picked up the printout. She knew that the printout looked dry and dull to the untrained eye, a simple string of letters. But none of it was meaningless, not to her. The patterns sang to her, called her. She was hunting for a very special snippet of DNA, and today could be the day she hit pay dirt.
“I get it. You want to tell me who my parents are.”
“Not really.” She flicked through the long ribbon of paper, her eyes scanning the dense text. “The direct paternal line isn’t what I’m after. I want the mother’s. Mitochondrial DNA tracks the maternal line, traces our ancestry back to a mitochondrial Eve. I’m looking for distant matrilinear relatives. Women who share a common ancestor would also share certain mtDNA sequences. I type them, and the same sequences should be highlighted.”
“Just the women?”
She smiled slowly. “Yeah. Just the women. Mitochondrial DNA is a female thing, Zer. It passes down through the matrilineal lines only. It turns out we’re all related. There are approximately thirty known maternal lineages.” Deftly, she plucked the tube from the centrifuge. “So some of us are just more closely related than others, but I believe I’ve found a new haplogroup.”
“What does that mean?” Her eyes watched him, that wrinkle between them deepening. So he kissed her, hard and fast, kissing away the doubt, the little pucker of a frown.
“Many of those maternal lineages and haplotypes are continent-specific. It means,” she said with a satisfied smile, the pieces of the puzzle finally falling into place, “that your soul mates share a common maternal ancestor. They’re related, and I can spot the markers in their DNA and find them that way. I can identify your soul mates by their DNA.”
She would run her own bloodwork and DNA again. This time, she wouldn’t be distracted by the red herring of the paranormal gene. She had Genecore’s mystery samples, and should could get fresh samples from Mischka Baran. The paranormal gene was a great big blinking neon sign if you knew what to look for. And she did. It would take someone else months and months of study to find the marker. But she’d been researching the genomes for years and would make progress much more quickly.
She wasn’t kidding herself. This wasn’t the fairy-tale happily-ever-after she’d been hoping for. She’d been looking for aunties and uncles, a grandparent or two. Instead, she’d found the bogeyman. In researching her own bloodline, her own genetic inheritance, she’d found a startling surprise. “We’re connected.”
“I know.”
“Not like that—not this bond of yours. We’re connected on a genetic level.” It pained her to admit it, but there was no getting around the facts. “You knew this,” she accused.
“No, I did not.” Those large hands of his examined a tray of glass tubes. “I did not expect you to examine my bloodline.”
She shrugged. “It’s what I do. Get me more samples, so I can confirm. I need samples from all of you.”
“We are not guinea pigs, but I will see what I can do.” This was an outcome he sure as hell hadn’t foreseen.
“You can identify the soul mates.”
“No. Maybe.” She hunched her shoulders beneath the white lab coat. “It’s not that simple. I can give you the gene pool. I can tell you if someone is a likely match or not. Somehow,” she argued, “your DNA got spread around down here. Hypothesize,” she ordered. “How could that have happened?”
He wanted to give her a fairy tale. Make it sound romantic. But it wasn’t. “Dominions occasionally came down to Earth.” For fucking and fighting. Yeah. There wasn’t a whole lot of romance going on there. More like shore leave for a bunch of heavenly berserkers.
From the look on her face, she’d drawn the appropriate conclusions. “Reproductive activity.” She made it sound like a disease, but, hey, she’d just found out she was the love child of a Dominion slumming with a human woman. He could understand her distaste. “Was that expected?”
“No. Most times, there was no offspring.”
Tapping a finger against her teeth, she nodded slowly. “Infertile unions. Typically. But not always. That’s just lovely, Zer.” She paused, thinking. “But there had to have been more than a few isolated incidents. This kind of genetic change—you find it in a community. People who lived together, in close proximity, for centuries. Long enough for their DNA to reflect that proximity.”
He grimaced. “Clearly, not impossible.” The ethics of those couplings were strangely disturbing. How could the salvation of his brothers’ souls be tied up with the shore leave R & R of their forebears?
“You can tell who the soul mates are by looking at their DNA,” Zer repeated.
“I could. I think.” She paused, then threw down the gauntlet. “But I won’t. I won’t give you my research, Zer.”
“Why not?” His voice was hard and implacable, all leader now. “I need that information, Nessa. When I gave you the lab, I thought you would work for me. Now, you want to hold out on me?”
“I can’t do it.” Her voice got real quiet, real fast.
“You won’t.” He wondered what was going through her head. He supposed he could have pushed his way in, found out for himself. It was what he should do. Instead, he slapped a hand down on the table beside her, rattling all the damn glassware with a shimmy-and-shake of epic proportions. He didn’t want to threaten her.
But he
would.
This was too damn important. He couldn’t afford emotions.
“All right. I won’t.” She lifted her head and glared at him. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to do with this information, Zer, but I can hazard a pretty good guess. Tell me you’re not going to go haring off after these women. Tell me you’re not intending to drag them back here and pair them off with your brothers.”
“You don’t know these women,” he pointed out. “You don’t owe them anything.”
“No,” she agreed. “I don’t. But I still think they should have a choice. You may be a barbarian, Zer, but I’d like to think I have a few manners. And some ethics.”
“It’s not a question of choosing.” Hell. He ran a hand over his head. “At least, not yet. Those women aren’t safe, Nessa. Don’t you think they deserve a chance to live? Because, I can assure you, Cuthah isn’t going to play nice. He knew you were looking for this information. If he doesn’t get it from you, he’ll find someone else to put two and two together.”
“Good luck to him,” she said confidently. “I’m the best. He can try, but I can assure you, it will be a cold day in hell before he finds himself another researcher who can do this for him.”
“Can you guarantee that there were no leaks in your lab?” He drove his point home ruthlessly. “That no one planted a bug in your software? Never looked over your shoulder while you were working? Hell, you had an office full of notes on the thirteenth tribe before I met you. You were that close, Nessa, and he’s going to know that, sooner or later. Why the hell do you think he came after you?”
“I know why he came after me,” she snapped. “The real question is: Why did you?”
Zer was no poet. No, he was large and bold, all warrior and very, very male. Maybe, just maybe, he could see her for both the researcher and the woman. Clearly, he wasn’t threatened by either. He didn’t need to prove he was as smart as she. And he sure as hell didn’t have anything to prove in bed. He prowled toward her with hungry eyes.
“Let’s examine this question of yours.” His large, hot hands wrapped around her waist, lifting her effortlessly onto the lab table. “Why did I come after you?” He grinned wolfishly. “Your name was on that list, of course, but the minute I saw you ... all prim and proper and buttoned-up. You were obviously brilliant, but so much more, too.”
Distantly, she realized she was melting into him, her fingers curling into the heavy leather of his coat. His mouth covered hers, one hand sliding up to cup her neck, tracing an erotic pattern on the sensitive skin of her throat. His other hand deliberately flicked open the buttons of the lab coat and pushed down her top.
“This pleases me,” he whispered hoarsely. “Very much.”
“Good,” she moaned, leaning deeper into his touch.
“Sooner or later, you’re going to give me what I want,” he growled. “Don’t underestimate me, Nessie.”
Lowering his head, he resumed his hot, heady exploration of her neck. Talented fingers stroking delicately down the exposed curves of her breasts. The soft kiss of his knuckles gliding across her sensitive skin teased her with wicked promise.
When he tongued her nipples, pleasure exploded through her.
Her hands clutched his shoulders. To hell with keeping still. He’d promised to deliver on all her fantasies, so, closing her eyes, she let her hands explore. Slid them down that powerful back, ignoring the obvious bulge of weaponry. His ass was a work of art.
“You’re beautiful,” he growled as he pushed down her lounge pants. “I like you better in a skirt. You were wearing one when I found you. You challenged me,” he growled. “Then, when you picked me at the club, you really threw down the gauntlet, baby. You know what happens when you push a predator?”
She was too busy sliding her hands around to the front of him, sliding open the buttons on his leather pants and wrapping her hands around the thick, hot length of him. “Right. Predators. It’s just simple anthropology, isn’t it?”
God, it was hard to think with the delicious haze of lust rolling over her. Screw thinking. She could do that later. Much later. Instead, she slid a hand down him. Smooth. Hard. His husky groan was music to her ears.
Challenge a predator, and he needed to dominate. His teeth closing gently over her earlobe sent a bright thrill of sensation shooting through her, so, wrapping her arms around him, she urged him down onto the table.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Snapping on the latex gloves, Nessa pulled material for a dish card. The glassware was still hot from the sterilizer, so she was good to go.
For the past week, she’d worked her ass off in the lab. And when she hadn’t been working, she’d settled for staring out the wall of plate glass looking down onto a small courtyard. Right now, the pink glow of the early morning came through the glass, lighting up the rows of tables and workstations. Computer fans beat out a steady hum as the processors did their thing.
Two weeks ago, she’d have named the place paradise. Now? Well, she’d acquired a partner, a heartache, and the equivalent of a biological time bomb. Since she really couldn’t stare out the window all day, she settled for rolling her chair over to a lab table loaded with glass beakers.
Zer hadn’t stinted on the equipment. Somewhere, somehow, he’d ordered an entire lab picked up and delivered right to her doorstep. She had enough glassware to equip a small country and high-tech equipment that was so cutting-edge, there were probably entire governments who’d never heard of it. And would likely kill to obtain it.
And all the effort had paid off, hadn’t it? She could identify the genetic marker in her DNA that identified the soul mates. Yeah. Confetti and champagne all ’round. Of course, she hadn’t shared that little tidbit with Zer yet.
Right on cue, the door to her state-of-the-art laboratory opened quietly, and damned if it wasn’t her nemesis. Zer had brought coffee and some sort of Danish to sweeten her up. She’d known he was smart. She took the paper cup he offered because she was smart, too, and there was no point in turning down good coffee.
“You got built-in radar?” she asked. Right now, she’d believe anything was possible.
“You find something for me today?” He set his cup down on the table and looked her over. Yeah. This wasn’t an accidental visit. None of them were.
“Maybe,” she admitted, because she could tell him that much. He needed to know that much. He just didn’t have to have the deets. “I’ve been going through the microbial DNA sequences.” Again. Because she couldn’t afford to be wrong about this. There was way too much at stake. “I can identify the start and end of the gene sequence. Alpha and omega.” She shrugged and waited for him to make the connection.
“The software routines.” He ran a hand over his head, and damned if he didn’t look interested. “Your computer analysis of our DNA strands.”
“Code,” she agreed, and she sighed. “I’ve spent this week processing millions of records and sequences, searching for a particular pattern.” A pattern she’d predicted. If there were anomalies in the gene model, she’d intended to find them. One by one, she’d coaxed the fragile DNA strands onto glass slides, scanned them with a microscope, and uploaded the results into a database. The freezers lining the lab wall came with a backup power gen and bank-worthy alarm systems. Locked inside those stainless-steel doors was raw material for decades of research. Genetic gold. So, she’d had no illusions. She’d known he’d be watching.
What had surprised her, though, was tracking the shift in the genome from the purely human to the paranormal.
You wanted to build a human body, the instructions were out there on the Internet. She was piggybacking on generations of scientists who’d picked apart the human genome and cataloged its idiosyncrasies.
Human genomes made humans who they were.
Twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, with the last pair dictating boy or a girl; the others had always fascinated her more. Some things were more fundamental—more unique—than gender could ever
be. The genomes were a living record of everything her species had done and accomplished in the evolutionary picture of things. Genes that had been there since the first human breathed and stood upright. Genes that reflected all the turns humans had taken on the evolutionary path.
If she was right, one of those turns had happened three thousand years ago, when the Dominions had Fallen from the Heavens. Some of her kind had acquired a new gene. A gene marking them as potential mates for the Fallen.
“What did you find?” His dark eyes examined her face, but he stayed out of her head, which she appreciated.
“We’ve tracked the migration of the human race from one continent to another. We can tell you how different races of people evolved, by examining their genes. I can trace the soul mates the same way.”
There was a long pause, and then he swore colorfully. “You’re sure of this?”
“Yes.” She took a sip of her coffee, not surprised that it was perfect. He knew precisely what she liked. “I’ve been looking at mitochondrial DNA as it passes from mother to daughter. I can trace a maternal lineage from one woman to the next. What might have been a harmless genetic mutation once upon a time”—if they were talking fairy tales—“is now a neon soul-mate-here sign. A daughter inherits the genetic marker from her mother and then passes it along to her own daughters.”
“Does that make your mother a soul mate?”
He was quick. “It makes her a likely candidate. If I’d had a sister, she would have been another likely candidate. It’s not a guarantee, though. Just like not all brown-haired mothers have brown-haired daughters, not all women with the soul-mate marker pass that gene down to their own daughters.”
Except the mutation seemed to be regional. The change would have originated with a small group of women—her thirteenth tribe. The lost tribe of Israel.
“So, what’s the connection?” He raked a hand through his hair. “You and Mischka are not closely related, if at all.”
“We can both trace our ancestry to the lost tribe. As the tribe dispersed and the women moved, the genetic marker moved with them, disappearing into the general population. Have that particular marker in your DNA, that X-chromosome mutation, and you’re related to the women who were originally born near the Jordan River and lived there in the same community. Mischka and I share a common ancestor; people who lived in the same geographic region often share certain genetic patterns. Not all of them will have the same genetic patterns, but enough will. We can trace the outward migration of that group, look for that common allele.”
