Karina Cooper - [Dark Mission 05]

by One for the Wicked

  His cock hardened to near-pain. Even before he’d kissed her.

  “I could be dangerous,” he warned her softly.

  Her nostrils flared as she inhaled. “I know.”

  Annoyance bit hard; infected the heat of his arousal with something fierce. Aggressive.

  His fingers tightened on her nape.

  “For a woman whose boyfriends don’t satisfy her,” he growled, “you claim to know a lot.”

  Kayleigh flinched, but he didn’t give her the chance to back out now. She wanted a case study? He’d give her one.

  He was the most dangerous thing she’d ever meet.

  A sharp tug, and his mouth seized hers in a kiss that he didn’t bother to start gentle. The instant her mouth touched his own, warm and soft, that spark of aggression intensified. Burned a path from lips to chest to dick, curled claws into his brain and ripped out everything that wasn’t about her mouth, her skin under his fingers.

  Her hand beside his crotch.

  She gasped into his mouth as he tilted her head forcefully, swept his tongue between her parted lips to taste her. To coax her tongue against his, slide flesh to flesh and hear her muffled whimper as he drew back.

  Pride flicked through him.

  Her mouth, parted and damp from his kiss, gleamed as she stared in hazy bemusement. One of her hands braced against the dashboard, white-knuckled with effort, while the other still propped half her weight against his thigh. If she was uncomfortable in her half-sprawled position between the seats, he didn’t see it.

  All he saw was her flushed face, heard her panting breath as she struggled to slow it.

  The pulse beneath his thumb hammered rapidly. Telling detail.

  She swallowed hard, throat moving with the effort. “That . . . I, um . . .”

  A smile tugged at his mouth. Predatory as hell. “Need more study, Doctor?”

  She blinked. “No. No, I think I’m . . . good.”

  “Get what you need?”

  He read the answer, watched the lie fill her features moments before she took a sharp breath and said quickly, “Yes, everything. Thank you.”

  His smile deepened. “Liar.”

  “I am n— Oh!”

  Quicker than she could react, Shawn slid his hands under her arms, fingers spanning the delicate cage of her ribs, and hauled her across the rest of the gap.

  This was not happening. This was completely not happening. Kayleigh froze as her knees came down on either side of Shawn’s hips, as the steering wheel gouged into her back and forced her pelvis against his.

  Long fingers spanned her waist under her jacket, burned through the silk of her blouse like it wasn’t there.

  Her lips tingled with the memory of the kiss that had already rocked her down to her obviously deranged soul. She couldn’t take any more. Not without breaking every pact with herself she’d made over the years.

  She flattened both hands against his chest—tried not to thrill as the contours of well-defined muscles flexed beneath her palms. “I’m good,” she said, somehow managing stern. “Scientific inquiry well and truly settled.” Her face burned with embarrassment.

  And not just embarrassment.

  “Is it?” His hands left her waist. A small relief torn away as they skimmed up her arms, over the sides of her neck, to ease into the loose knot of her hair. He tugged gently.

  She resisted. “Shawn, this isn’t—”

  His eyes sparked, a strange mix of humor and implacable resolve. “Relax,” he murmured.

  Oh, God. The word melted like chocolate in her belly, intent pooling between her legs. The same legs cradling his hips.

  The ridge of his erection, hard proof of his own reaction to her, only weakened her resolve further.

  He wanted her. He couldn’t hide it.

  Kayleigh loved being wanted.

  The fingers in her hair pulled harder. Her spine bent. His eyes filled her vision, nearly black in the dim light, until her lips brushed against his. Hesitated.

  Shawn didn’t wait.

  She groaned as he pulled her face to his, as his lips nudged hers open for another deep, openmouthed kiss. Lips, tongue; he employed everything he had, turned Kayleigh’s mind into a melted pool of immoral need, desperate craving. His whiskers, too rough to ever belong to any of those nice men, rasped against her sensitive skin, sending jolting little bolts of pleasure through her body.

  He held her head like she was the most precious thing in the world, but he pulled her tight to his body as if she were nothing more than a nameless woman on the prowl. Hungry, wanting.

  She wanted.

  She shouldn’t, but as he feasted at her lips, as his teeth nipped at her top lip and sent sparks through her vision, her mind, she groaned her surrender and tunneled her fingers into his hair. The ends tickled her skin, long enough to grasp, to hold him still as she tilted her head just so and deepened the kiss to something vulgar, something unrestrained and demanding.

  She didn’t know. Didn’t care about anything except that he made a rough sound in his chest, let go of her head to grab her hips and pull her tight against his erection, nestled so squarely against the hot place between her legs.

  More sparks. More need.

  Rough and dangerous and more than illicit.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered against his lips.

  “Keep begging for help,” he replied hoarsely, his voice as sensual as a rough hand between her legs.

  Nice boys didn’t do that. The nice men she’d sworn to date, the men she’d chosen to please her father, didn’t pull her shirt from her waistband in a car parked in an abandoned lot. They didn’t splay a callused hand across her ribs, hot and hard, or lift it to palm her breast, squeeze her sensitized, aching flesh over the beige lace of her bra.

  Her head fell back as raw sensation swept under her skin. Sweat bloomed beneath her jacket, sent conflicting shocks of hot and cold in a trail of gooseflesh.

  His hand left her breast, two fingers easing into her waistband. “I want to see you come.”

  Her eyes flew open. “What? No!”

  “Let me get the job done.” Shawn’s expression, ruthless in the dark, didn’t soften. Didn’t alter from the merciless intent of his fingers as they unsnapped her slacks. The zipper, delicate as it was, all but unzipped itself as the fabric pulled.

  One hand fisted in the back of her jacket, pulled her shirt tight to her chest. Held her still. His hand slid between her splayed legs. One finger drew a thick line down the center of her matching lace panties, and her muscles clenched.

  Her back hit the steering wheel. The dashboard shuddered. “Shawn, please.”

  “Jesus, you’re already wet.” The mutter wrapped around every nerve center in her brain and squeezed. Mortification warred with fierce pleasure; she arched back against the wheel as he traced her flesh, as his fingertips skated over damp fabric and sent shock waves through her.

  She was shameless. And she was so damned close already.

  As his palm covered her, as he held her still against the wheel and ignored her short, sharp, panting gasps for mercy, Kayleigh’s body tightened. Writhed.

  Fingers tight against her lace-covered flesh, his palm pressed up, ground against the aching bead of her clit.

  She cried out as her orgasm swamped her, as the tension in her body uncoiled on a rush of wild sensation; wicked gratification shot into the stratosphere as her elbow hit the steering wheel.

  The short, sharp burst of the car horn echoed across the empty lot.

  Shawn’s sudden gust of laughter was all she heard as he freed his hand from her slacks, caught her arm, and removed it from the steering wheel.

  Shaking, gasping for breath, she didn’t struggle as he pulled her away from the wheel. Tucked her against his chest, one hand flat on her back, the other smoothing her hair.

  Reality curled in around the sound of his heartbeat.

  Oh, my God.

  It was true. All it took was a hard-eyed man and a dark corner
to get her begging for it.

  Her father had never said it, never even hinted, but he must have thought it. His disappointment, his watchfulness had all been to save her from this. Hadn’t she promised herself?

  Obviously, Kayleigh didn’t know how to be the woman she wanted to be.

  Never again.

  All right. That was the dumbest thing Shawn could have done.

  The doctor pushed away from him, color hectic in her cheeks as she scrambled off his lap and into the passenger seat. The air was thick with the smell of her, musky with arousal, and it was taking everything he had not to finish what she’d—what he had started.

  His balls ached with the need to take her, to bury himself in all that wet heat he knew he’d find between her legs. She was damned sweet. Eager for it.

  And embarrassed as hell.

  She didn’t know the half of it.

  “One job done,” he made himself say, breaking the silence with forced levity.

  Her laugh was strained. “Thanks.” As if the single word could make it any less awkward. “Um.” Her hand stilled at the door latch. “Shawn, if you could avoid telling anyone . . . ?”

  No threat of that one. He nodded. “Okay.”

  Relief filled her still-pink features. Her eyes, cleared of the fog of arousal, darted to the window. “Listen, if you want to stay out here—”

  “You’re not going in alone,” he cut in, and pushed open the driver’s side door. Unfolding his body from the car hurt like a son of a bitch, his aching cock demanding retribution for the hell he was putting himself through, but the slap of early autumn cold helped.

  She stepped out of the car, adjusted her clothing with abashed care.

  Idiot. Out of the hundreds of scenarios he’d ever played in his head, seducing Laurence Lauderdale’s daughter had never once crossed his mind.

  He was supposed to hate her. Hate her whole family.

  He wasn’t supposed to fuck them. Or think about fucking them, at least not in any literal way. So what did he do first chance he got?

  Forget that she’s the enemy.

  He raked a hand through his hair as she turned to the building. “I guess, after you,” she said.

  Maybe if he was lucky, damned lucky, the place would be filled with angry squatters looking for a fight.

  He needed to lose some steam.

  Chapter Five

  The place was empty. Not only of people, but of anything Kayleigh had hoped to find.

  Ten minutes on the remains of a computer in the main lab told her everything she needed to know. It wasn’t here.

  She stared at the bank of monitors painting the interior of the abandoned facility with an eerie, sickly blue. Four of the six computer screens had long since blown out, and the neat hole in the frame of one—exactly the size of a bullet—gave evidence to at least one reason why. Shawn had pointed out the signs of a fight.

  Fortunately, the power source and at least some of the drives remained intact.

  Not that it helped.

  It wasn’t here. The answer she looked for—the solution she desperately needed—wasn’t in the system.

  Common sense suggested that she’d prepared for this possibility.

  Her stomach burned, splashing acid up into the back of her throat as her eyes skated over the corrupted batch of characters scrolling across one of the three remaining screens. Her fingers bit into the desk, sending spasms of pain up her hands that barely registered.

  She didn’t know how to prepare for despair.

  Somewhere beyond the reach of the flashlight she’d brought with her—the sturdy base standing up on its end at her elbow and pointed at the ceiling—something clanged dimly. The old GeneCorp facility had been making noises since they’d stepped inside, strange clangs and clinks and the occasional metal groan. After the first few turned out to be nothing, Kayleigh had stopped paying attention. She’d barely noticed when Shawn had made his excuses to look around.

  Everything she was, every sense she possessed, had been pinned on this. This one chance. Her final effort.

  A failure.

  “Lauderdales don’t fail,” she muttered. The ulcer in her stomach echoed the sentiment, sizzling in mingled reprimand and dismay. One hand fisted against it as she straightened from the table, but it didn’t help.

  Stress was doing its level best to eat a hole through her stomach lining while she gallivanted around, flailing in the dark.

  Assaulting strange men in her own car.

  She bit back a groan, covering her face with both hands.

  Kayleigh worked hard. She worked very hard. Nobody could ever say that Director Laurence Lauderdale’s daughter didn’t put in her hours. Being placed in charge of her father’s Salem Project had ensured she’d never do anything but work again. Was it any surprise she was losing her mind?

  Her eyes closed in exhausted disappointment. She was running out of time. Out of energy.

  Her father’s lab rested on her shoulders.

  Her lab, really.

  She’d had high hopes for the project. High hopes for her mother’s legacy.

  But the body count . . . the stress. It was eating at her. Breaking her down in a way she found laughably similar to the physical degeneration affecting the Salem subjects.

  The cosmic imperative had a sense of humor.

  She needed a break. She’d been so desperate, hoped so badly to find it—the sequence itself, even a clue about it—that she’d disobeyed her father.

  Why had she thought that information about Parker’s syringe could be found here?

  Turned out her dad was right. “Next trick?” she murmured, her voice echoing eerily in the dark.

  She was out of ideas. Done. Months of banging her head against the riddle of the broken DNA sequence had taken its toll. She had nothing left.

  Laurence Lauderdale’s daughter was a big, fat disappointment. The end of his life’s work . . . of her late mother’s entire world.

  A slummer with more success in the bedroom—a car, she corrected herself, bitter—than with saving lives.

  Tears burned through her too-dry eyes, a crust earned from staring too long at incandescent screens. As another faint groan echoed from the settling interior, she forced her fingers to unclench, reached for the switch that would power down the computers and once more leave the facility in abandoned shadow.

  The echoes didn’t fade.

  Her fingers stilled. She tilted her head, a slow frown pulling at her brow, her mouth, as her vision began to shudder. Another sign of ocular deterioration?

  “Shawn?” The flashlight next to her purse jiggled, causing the shadows and reflections to dip and sway.

  A deafening clap of thunder tore through the dark.

  The monitors shattered one by one.

  Kayleigh jerked away from the bank of old computers, tripping over her own feet as her knees wobbled out from underneath her. Her heart launched into her throat; glass sprayed in an arc, and she threw up her arms over her face as shrapnel glittered wildly. The sound of it tinkling to the old facility floor drowned beneath an ominous, howling rumble.

  The world shifted.

  Her body folded. Partly the fault of the floor as it rippled underneath her like something alive, and partly raw, stark terror. Kayleigh wrapped her arms over her exposed head. Every cell in her body gave over to a nightmarish blend of memory, of experience too recent to have to suffer again so soon.

  Fire. Screaming.

  Walls shaking.

  Not again.

  Her teeth gritted so hard, both joints in her jaw cracked, but she couldn’t stop. Couldn’t do anything but hold her breath and wait for the ground to stop rocking, the walls to stop groaning.

  The ceiling to come down.

  Just as in the Mission quad only three short weeks ago. Chaos, all over again.

  A sob tore from her throat.

  “Get up!” Shawn’s gritty order caught on a grunt as something crashed to the floor beside her. Tinny ech
oes ricocheted in her ears, over her exposed nerves. Hard, desperate fingers curled around her forearm and yanked her to her feet. “Fucking move!”

  The flashlight hit the floor and cracked. Overhead, the wiring detonated in an explosion of sparks. Bulbs burst from the power surge she could all but feel as the charge ripped through GeneCorp’s remains. In a half second of pure terror, she glimpsed the glint of brown eyes, a flash of dusky skin, and bared, gritted teeth before everything went dark around her.

  This time, it wasn’t her own body throwing her senses into disarray. It wasn’t stress or fear or insomnia-induced. The world was literally falling apart around her.

  The fingers biting into her arm dragged her in an unknown direction, though God only knew how Shawn could navigate as the shriek of metal on metal ripped through the lab. “What’s happening?” she screamed, unable to keep a pleading note from infecting her frightened demand.

  The world juddered; one flat shoe snagged on something metal and sharp. Something gave—her skin or the snag—pain lanced through her leg and she cried out, only to inhale sharply, choking, as the hand at her arm flattened over her chest. His body shifted, another arm curved around her waist.

  “Hold on!”

  She didn’t get to ask to what. Didn’t have to guess. His arm tightened, and all of a sudden, her feet left the floor, her weight suspended in the grip of a man who had come from nowhere. She had no choice but to trust him to navigate them both through hell.

  Another shudder jarred the walls in ways solid metal walls should never have moved. The whole facility rang like a gong, as if a giant hammer slammed against the outside. Dust billowed, turning nominally difficult vision to near impossibility. Her nose rebelled, eyes watering, but she clung to Shawn’s broad shoulders, fingers hooked in his shirt, and struggled not to scream as something cracked, groaning, and collapsed nearby.

  The rumble stopped.

  Just as quickly, so did he.

  For a long moment, only the staggered echo of settling debris filled the tomblike silence.

  Shaking, trying hard not to let the sound of her own terror fill the gap, Kayleigh buried her face against his shoulder.