Karina Cooper - [Dark Mission 05]

by One for the Wicked

  Except her gaze snapped to his, clashed. Whatever she’d heard in his words, it crackled between them, an electric intensity that sucker-punched him in the gut.

  Before he could react—decide how—she looked away.

  One hand flourished at him, a dismissive wave as she reached across her worktable and retrieved a stack of paper. She pulled the first few off the pile, skimmed through them quickly. “Damn it,” she said again, sharper.

  He stood. “Doctor?”

  “It’s just junk.” Almost a snarl.

  She was cute when she puffed up. Like a kitten.

  Wait a damned minute. Cute? The hell she was.

  Focus. “So you don’t know what it is?”

  “I know what half of it is,” she said absently, glaring down at the paper. Shawn circled the table, leaned a hip against the edge.

  She didn’t seem to notice, chin lowered, brow furrowed.

  “Maybe you ought to get out of the lab,” he offered dryly.

  “I just came back from out.”

  The preoccupied way she dismissed the idea almost made him smile. That same tone came from May all the time.

  He didn’t have the luxury to appreciate the similarities. He needed her out. “I mean,” he clarified, “of the whole quad. When was the last time you had a change of scenery? A cup of coffee that didn’t come from a vending machine?”

  Now her gaze came up, eerily fog-touched. He expected her to have brown eyes, or maybe dark green. The shade of blue cut by gray seemed too direct; a frisson of surprise—of a strange sort of interest—skimmed through his system. “Mr. Lowe, are you asking me out to coffee?”

  If she were any other woman, it wouldn’t be coffee on his mind. The fact that it wasn’t coffee on his mind was something he deliberately ignored. He did not need to be considering her that way. At all. She was a tool. A means to an end.

  He forced himself to sound relaxed. Even friendly. “Coffee, sure. ‘Out’ is the relevant point. A walk around less”—what the hell would he call this?—“sterile environments might jog something loose for you.”

  She stared at him.

  When the silence stretched to uncomfortable levels, when he found himself studying the curve of her top lip and the way her heartbeat pulsed at the side of her slender throat, she dropped the papers onto the desk. “You’re a genius,” she said, spinning as she shrugged out of her lab coat. “Let’s go.”

  Getting out of the quad had been easy. Her silent bodyguard had followed her down the elevator, to the parking garage where her champagne-colored sports car waited in its designated slot.

  He’d whistled at it as she popped the locks, then looked stunned when she’d handed him the keys. He didn’t even ask why.

  Men and cars.

  Twenty minutes later, easing away from the sec-line checkpoint Kayleigh’s identification allowed them to sail through, she decided that there was only one problem with being trapped in a car with a man whose worn jeans inspired all the wrong thoughts.

  Notably, all the wrong thoughts now filling her head.

  Kayleigh allowed the silence to grow, her gaze on the city passing her window. The heaters hummed softly, filling the car with warmth to combat New Seattle’s autumn chill, and rain pattered against the windshield. As they moved deeper and deeper down the byway, the daylight took on a strange, counterfeit quality that—to her surprise—didn’t seem to trigger her ocular issues.

  Since that hallway moment shortly after her medical discharge, it’d been smooth sailing.

  Instead, as true sunlight faded away, the streetlights glanced through the car windows, slid over the interior and lit up parts of her ruggedly handsome security agent. A flash of his fingers, one wide shoulder clad in matte black, his face, the grim edge to his mouth.

  Shawn handled her car smoothly, large hands curving over the steering wheel like he held something precious. Aside from a brief moment when he’d folded into the seat and fumbled for the height adjustment, he drove her car like he owned it.

  Like he had a right to it.

  He still didn’t ask why he drove. She didn’t volunteer the details.

  “Are you thinking about your work again?”

  His dark voice filled the interior, smooth and dangerous. She shivered, suddenly aware that she wasn’t looking outside anymore.

  He’d caught her staring. Devouring, she admitted silently, and dropped her gaze to her hands, fisted around the straps of her purse.

  “Not . . .” Her throat dried. “Not exactly.”

  Her insides churned, a sudden ache low in her belly unfurling, heating.

  Bad move. Very bad.

  She knew the drill. Close quarters created a false sense of intimacy. Include the stress from her work, the additional pressure of doing something she’d already been forbidden to do, and she was a basket case of raw nerves.

  Kayleigh didn’t date. She didn’t sleep with many men because most of them were colleagues. Nice men, or at least brainy men who were great on the lab floor and about as exciting as hothouse tomato juice anywhere else.

  To say nothing of her job getting in the way.

  Headlights cut through the windshield, pooled into the car. One hand left the steering wheel. Touched her arm.

  It was gentle, and under the navy blazer she wore, it wasn’t as if she’d felt his skin, but her blood didn’t care. It surged through her body, circled around that small touch, and brought heat to her cheeks.

  “Are you all right, Dr. Lauderdale?”

  No. At the moment, she felt like the slumming child she’d once been accused of being.

  Because all she wanted to do was jump his body like a raw piece of meat.

  Her father would be horrified.

  “We should be arriving soon,” she blurted, a desperate attempt to focus.

  “Arriving where? I’ll have to get directions if I need to get off the byway.”

  “Oh.” Hadn’t she said? Kayleigh winced. Way to come across like a complete fool. “We’re going down to the industrial sector. There’s a place there, the old GeneCorp facility?”

  His eyebrows winged upward. “I know of it.”

  That didn’t surprise her. Everyone in the Mission probably knew of it, by now. “We’re headed there for some data.”

  “You think it’ll have the answer to your whatever it is?” As she watched, he reached to his hip, picked up his comm, and scanned it quickly. Checking in with his people?

  Probably. He was, after all, responsible for her safety. She tucked tendrils of her hair back behind her ear, gaze drifting again to the window. On the farthest lane, nothing but a guardrail and a sheer drop off the edge of the city met her gaze. The massive wall protecting the city from the ravaged world beyond it blocked everything else.

  “I hope so,” she murmured. Because if not, she was out of ideas.

  She didn’t want to think about work right now. Despite the distraction it posed from her entirely too attractive companion, it would only make her stomach hurt. Again. Still.

  “So,” she offered, drawing it out. The comm vanished into his pocket as he glanced at her. “Where are you from, Shawn?”

  It was another full minute before he answered, eyes back on the road. “Down here.”

  No details came, and it took her another moment before she slapped her forehead with one hand. “I’m so sorry. Orphanage, right? Missionaries all come from there.”

  His gaze flicked to her again, a glint of obsidian until another streetlamp set his brown irises with gold. “Something like that.”

  “And so I did it again.” Kayleigh’s hand lowered to cover her mouth. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to bring up bad memories. Or anything.”

  His mouth quirked. “Anyone ever tell you that you need to relax?”

  “Once,” she answered without thinking. “Right before he stuck his tongue in my mouth.” Not that she’d been complaining, at the time.

  “That great, huh?”

  Her brain caught up w
ith what she must sound like to him, a total stranger babysitting the director’s daughter. She cringed. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Try me,” he said, repeating his earlier offer and evoking all the same physical responses.

  She’d like to.

  Kayleigh looked away. “It’s . . . not important.”

  “Let me guess,” he said as he navigated across two lanes of thinning traffic. “Your boyfriend.”

  There was a word for it. The sound she made, torn between embarrassment and unstoppable humor, snorted. “He wasn’t exactly that.”

  “Lover?”

  “Once,” she confirmed again, squirming in her luxury seat. It was all she’d been allowed before getting caught.

  The disappointment in her father’s eyes, the anger and sorrow, had been enough for a lifetime. She’d focused on school after that, on her studies, her grades. Later, her work, and the occasional seemingly nice man whose eyes didn’t glaze over when she started talking about it.

  “Sounds like he wasn’t all that successful.”

  His voice curled into her skin, dug in nails that made her shiver.

  She gripped her purse tighter. “It was a long time ago,” she said, lifting her chin. “He got the job done.”

  For an eternal moment, silence reigned. Then, all at once, his laughter filled the car. Found all the secret places she very specifically hadn’t been thinking about and stripped her defenses away.

  She lusted after men who could laugh like this. Deep and solid, unabashed humor.

  Even if he laughed at her.

  “Why am I telling you this?” she groaned, looking away. “This is none of your business.”

  Except she knew why.

  Laughter muted to rich, deep-chested chuckles, Shawn didn’t reply.

  Her heart slammed against her chest as Kayleigh stared fixedly out the windshield.

  Chapter Four

  He hadn’t expected to laugh.

  Hadn’t expected the buttoned-up Dr. Lauderdale to actually confess to a virtual stranger to having a man who’d, Jesus, gotten the job done. He sure as hell hadn’t expected the sudden, aching knot formed under his solar plexus at the mental image of his oblivious captive letting a man past her professional armor. Into that lab coat she’d worn so easily topside.

  His humor drained away, leaving something else in its wake.

  What would she be like, stripped of her expensive designer clothes, her shell torn away by the hard hands of a man who wouldn’t be intimidated by the diamond-sharp intelligence in her fog blue eyes?

  His guts clenched. A fiery kernel of something harsh and hungry slid tendrils of heat through his chest. Under his skin.

  Would she moan his name? Or was she, as he suspected, a quieter lover? A woman who shuddered silently, sweat on her skin and her muscles clenched tight around—

  God damn it. He reined in the visuals so hard, his hands cramped around the steering wheel.

  It didn’t matter. In less time than it’d take to inject her with the syringe in his jacket pocket, she’d be his prisoner. Not his fantasy.

  Sure as hell not his lover.

  The comm in his pocket thrummed silently. Without taking his eyes off the road, he reached down, grabbed the device, and raised it to eye level. Jennifer’s directions glowed.

  Let her look for her data. We can use it. It’ll give us time to reconvene at the rendezvous point.

  Use it? A bunch of decades-old information?

  If he weren’t already betraying May, he might have ignored the opportunity. Shot her full of the sedative, hauled her off to let his team sweat the sudden and unannounced change in plans.

  Except the thought of his plan—a plan that didn’t involve laughing with Dr. Kayleigh Lauderdale, teasing her—still made cold sweat break out on his shoulders.

  Maybe if she found something, he’d hand it over to the woman he owed his life to. Maybe it’d soften the blow.

  “Turn here.” Her husky voice rubbed over his skin like something slick and expensive.

  He set his jaw. “I know where it is,” he assured her as he cut across the byway. Down this far, and he was practically home. Very little traffic made it down here by midday. Most would come later, when night fell and the clubs picked up the beat. Slummers from the mid-lows to the topside reaches. Drugs, drink, music, skin.

  A lot of skin.

  Did she dance?

  She smiled, a crooked thing that didn’t read as amusement so much as wryness. “I guess you did your homework.”

  Just enough to know the general details. Shawn navigated the sleek car through the dark streets, aware of how out of place the flashes of gold-shaded paint would be to anyone searching for an easy mark. The lights in the old industrial sector weren’t as regular as the better-maintained levels above the mid-lows, but there were enough to make him hyperaware of the siren song of topside money.

  At best, there’d be squatters in the district. At worst, any of the usual prowlers who called themselves a gang.

  The gun holstered under his jacket would only be useful if he saw them coming.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked as the closely nestled warehouses abruptly widened into a series of gritty, broken asphalt and abandoned gravel lots. Structures hunkered at the farthest edges, many framed by rusted fences or the remnants of cement walls.

  This district hadn’t seen use for at least twenty years. Maybe more. Hard to tell when the neglect set in.

  “Here,” she said suddenly, her pale hand flashing in the ambient light filtering from the city rising high above them.

  He followed her gesture, guided the car into one of the broken lots. The engine shut off. “Plan, Doctor?” he coaxed. “Or will we kick down the door, guns blazing?”

  Her surprising snort of amusement turned into throaty apology as she admitted, “I hadn’t considered that. Do you . . .” Her head turned, gaze aimed at the abandoned complex at the far end of the lot. “Do you think there are people inside?”

  The light loved Kayleigh Lauderdale. He couldn’t help the thought. It touched her profile, skimmed silver-blue across her skin, made paler by the ambient luminescence dusting the sector around them.

  The shape of her mouth, already full at her top lip and made all the more lush by the shadows in the car, pulled slightly to the side.

  Shawn got the impression that she was always thinking.

  Did she ever stop?

  He got the job done.

  He could do more than finish a job.

  Already half aware of her every breath, his dick stirred—something between anger and panic clutched his chest.

  She wasn’t a woman. She wasn’t a person. She was Kayleigh fucking Lauderdale, daughter of the man who’d murdered Shawn’s parents. Related to one of the most secret and atrocious crimes against humanity since the witch fires fifty years ago.

  She was . . . beautiful. Which made it all the worse, somehow.

  “Shawn?”

  His name on her lips sent another shaft of heat to his dick. Another fist around already too-sensitized flesh. He jolted in his own skin as those eyes turned back to him, luminously bright.

  This car was too small. Too cramped. The air between them turned warmer, and as he took a deep breath through his nose, it occurred to him that she smelled like something fresh and clean. Rain without the acid tinge; a storm without the filthy undercurrent of refuse and mold.

  Very carefully, Shawn peeled his fingers from around the steering wheel. Do not touch.

  “We should—”

  “Wait.” She shifted in her seat, facing him, arms folded over her midsection. It bunched her yellow silk blouse against her body. Was it soft? It’d have to be. As soft as the skin beneath.

  He watched, transfixed, as Kayleigh’s tongue slid over her lips. A groan knotted in his chest; he forced it down. Swallowed it back.

  “That boyfriend? The one that . . .”

  He couldn’t help himself. “That got the job done?”
/>
  Color slid into her cheeks. Shawn’s hands curled into fists, tension locking them by his thighs before he did something stupid. Something purely driven by the hormones he hadn’t expected to have to put a lock on.

  “His name was Mark,” she whispered, lashes lowering. Concealing the fiercely sharp glint in her eyes. “I was nineteen.”

  Why? Why did this matter? “Doctor—”

  “Not that it’s been that long since,” she added hastily, looking down at her knees. “It’s just that the men I date aren’t usually so . . . They don’t—”

  Oh, Jesus. Shawn stared at her as her mouth worked around the words he was suddenly desperately afraid of hearing.

  “This is not—” he began, and broke off when her face came up, her eyes bright in cheeks so red, they were nearly purple in the blue-tinged light.

  She raised a hand to pull tendrils from her face, absentmindedly self-conscious. “I don’t know you at all. But I’d really . . . I mean, I’m wondering. Will you . . . Can I test something on you?” He managed a hoarse note of inquiry. “Will you kiss me?”

  Kiss her. In this car. Her, a Lauderdale.

  He wanted to.

  “Fuck,” he breathed.

  She cringed, hands rising to cover her face. Embarrassment obvious, she blurted, “No, you’re right, it’s stupid, I don’t know what—”

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” Shawn didn’t even really give himself the order. He caught her wrists, pulled her hands from her face, jerked her half out of her seat. As her surprised sound filled the cramped interior of her car, he slid one hand around her nape, trapped her half sprawled between the two seats. Her hand braced on his thigh, so close to his suddenly aching dick, he could barely concentrate.

  Her eyes filled his vision. Bottomless, beautiful. So close, he could trace each individual lash framing her too-wide stare.

  Anticipation filled him. Why not? A taste of her. Just one. He deserved it. And it’d make his revenge all the sweeter.

  “You play chancy games with strange men, Dr. Lauderdale.” His lips skimmed hers as he spoke, his threat flaring her eyes even wider. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know,” she whispered. The fingers at his thigh tensed as he skimmed his own across her cheek. His thumb lingered at the corner of her mouth, so close to his. Her breath shuddered, peppering his skin with damp heat.