by Tessa Adams
She was drying herself off when she heard Dylan stir in the other room. She turned in time to see him reach a hand across the bed to where he expected her to be. When he met nothing but sheet, he jerked up, much like she had before, his eyes searching the room until he found her leaning against the bathroom door.
“Come back to bed.” His voice was rusty, sexy, but the last thing she could stomach was another round in bed. The dream already had her feeling battered and vulnerable; letting Dylan, with his soft hands and sweet kisses, have a shot at her was emotional suicide. And she just wasn’t up for that this morning.
Last night, he had stripped her down to her bare essence, had taken everything from her. Her composure, her self-possession, her control. She’d told him things she’d never told anyone before. She felt naked in more ways than one, and didn’t like it.
“I want to get to the lab,” she said. “Get started.”
“Yeah, okay.” He ran a sleepy hand over his face. “Give me a second and I’ll take you.”
“I can find my way. You probably need to take a shower first. By yourself,” she continued, when his eyes lit up and he moved to join her. “Much as I enjoyed the last few hours, I assume you didn’t pay me three million dollars just to become your sex slave.” Her throat was tight, but she forced the words out. Did her damnedest to make them steady and unconcerned, despite the regret welling inside her. “I want to get to work.”
“Of course.” But he was across the room in a flash, ripping off her towel and tugging on her hand until she followed him back to bed. As soon as her butt hit the comforter, he was on her, rolling until she straddled him.
Her heart was racing, beating so hard that for a second she thought it might burst right out of her chest. She didn’t know if it was fear or renewed desire that was causing the reaction—probably a combination of both—but when Dylan raised his head to claim her mouth with his own, she couldn’t turn away. She wanted one more time with him, one more good memory to chase away the bad.
She leaned down, pressed closer as his tongue stroked inside, claiming her as completely as he had done with his body through the long, long night. She knew she should push him away, should climb off him, knowing that she needed to get some distance between them. But it felt so good to have his tongue stroking the roof of her mouth, tracing her lips from the inside, tangling with her own, that she stayed where she was and reveled in the heat working its way up her spine.
Her fingers crept up his chest, over his scars and the fantastic sapphire he never took off, to tangle in the long, black silk of his hair. Her body moved against his and he groaned, his cock hardening quickly despite the wicked, wonderful things they had done to each other through the night.
“Dylan,” she started to protest, began to push him away. Then he slipped inside her and all she could think of was more.
“Fuck, Phoebe,” he gasped as she closed around him. “You feel so good. I can’t stop. I can’t—”
“Don’t,” she panted, her body arching and quivering above him as his hips rose and lowered, rose and lowered, each movement making her just a little crazier. “Don’t stop.” She picked up the rhythm and began to ride him.
Leaning forward, she ground her mouth against his while he continued to drive into her with fire and power. Again and again she moved over him. Again and again his hips lifted to meet her own.
Inside her the heat exploded, spread through her, took her over until he was all she could taste, smell, hear. Until he was all she could think of.
The thought slammed her over the edge, into an orgasm so intense it made a mockery of the first dozen he had given her. Her hands curled in his hair, pulled hard as she nipped at his lips with sharp teeth.
He swore again, harsh words that were low and mean and sexy as hell. With each syllable he uttered, she felt the tension inside her building, growing, stretching taut. When he rolled so that he was on top, she wrapped her legs around his waist, arched up and opened herself to him. He leaned down, sank his teeth into her shoulder, and she screamed before raking her nails down his back.
His tongue shot out, laved the bite marks he’d made before he kissed his way across her chest to her other shoulder. “Do it again,” he muttered darkly, pounding into her so hard the headboard slammed repeatedly against the wall. “Do. It. Again.”
She did, clawing at his back like a wild thing. “Damn. Fuck. Holy hell,” he growled right before he bit her again. The second bite, deeper than the first but no less pleasurable, sent Phoebe careening over the edge of a higher, more dangerous peak. Sobbing as her body flew apart, she clutched him tightly. Held on as he found his own release and emptied himself into her, his cum filling her in several long, drawn-out pulses.
Phoebe waited, her face buried against his neck while she held him tight, as aftershocks of pleasure racked Dylan’s body. But as soon as his orgasm was done—as soon as he stopped shuddering in pleasure—she pushed him to the side and rolled off the bed.
“Hey, you keep trying to get away from me. Why?” he demanded, belatedly lunging for her.
She sidestepped his grab and headed back into the bathroom for another shower. “I’m going to get dressed. After Lana—” She cut herself off, started again. “After last night, I have some ideas I would like to start working on.”
“Really?” He bounded out of bed, met her in front of the long marble vanity as unself-conscious about his nudity as she was achingly aware of hers. “You’ve thought of something?”
“I don’t know yet.” She glanced in the mirror in an effort to avoid looking at Dylan, then winced at the bruises on her upper arms, the obvious bite marks on the curve of her shoulder. What have I done? she wondered, blindly stepping into the shower.
As the spray hit her, she was overwhelmingly conscious of the wetness on her thighs. Dylan had fucked her without a condom, had taken her with no thought of consequences or disease or their lack of commitment to each other. It pissed her off that he’d been so lax. Infuriated her that she had been just as careless, when she knew—better than most—the consequences of doing such a ridiculous thing.
“Can I join you?”
His voice, low and more than a little seductive, pulled her out of her self-flagellation. But when his words sank in, she shook her head emphatically. “No way. If I let you in here, it’ll end up being one more round of water aerobics. And we don’t have time for that right now. I want to check out the lab.”
“Are you serious?” His eyes swept over her wet, naked body in a look that said he was far from satisfied. “You won’t shower with me?”
“No, I won’t.” She nodded to the door. “Why don’t you use your own bathroom? I’m sure you’ve got one that’s even more ridiculously obscene than this one. You might as well put it to good use.”
“Come with me. I guarantee I’ll put it to good use.”
She kept the smile on her face through sheer strength of will. “I bet.” She paused, let the water run over her face and down her chest. “Now scram. Some of us don’t get paid to lounge around all day in the sun.”
“All right, fine.” He leaned into the shower, ignoring the water pounding down on him, and kissed her lightly. “Last one out of the shower makes breakfast.”
She squirted shower gel onto a green puff. “You’d better hurry, then. I’m almost done.”
He grinned, gave a little salute, then left, closing the bathroom door behind him. The second he was gone, Phoebe felt her facade crumble and tears begin pouring down her face.
What am I doing? she asked herself, sliding down the shower wall until she was sitting on the floor, water pounding at her from all directions. What the hell am I doing?
When she finally dragged herself out of the shower fifteen minutes later, she was still asking herself the same question.
Dylan looked up from where he was frying a dozen eggs to watch Phoebe saunter across the kitchen to the coffeepot. In her thread-bare jeans and black scoop-neck tee, she looked good. Bet
ter than good. Delicious. The way the old jeans hugged her ass was truly a thing of beauty.
Flipping the eggs, he let himself imagine what it would be like if she was his mate. It would be nice to come home to her every night, even if she wasn’t the type to have dinner waiting when he walked in the door, a glass of his favorite Scotch in her hand.
He almost snorted at the image, certain Phoebe would strangle him if she could hear what he was thinking. Besides, it wasn’t like that was the kind of life he wanted. If it was, he could snap his fingers and have a houseful of servants in a heartbeat.
But he’d never gone in for that, preferred the privacy that came with living alone to putting up with a houseful of people meant to make a king’s life easier. He’d lived with it when his parents and his brother were alive, but hadn’t liked it. That kind of bowing and scraping just didn’t appeal to him.
“So, how far away is the lab?” Phoebe asked before taking a long sip of steaming hot, black coffee. He shook his head as he watched her—the woman had to have taste buds of steel.
“About ten minutes.”
“Good. I want to head there ASAP.” She looked remote, armored—more like the scientist he’d first confronted in her lab than the woman he’d made love to for half the night.
“Okay.” He slid the eggs onto a platter and placed them on the table next to the plates of fresh fruit and toast he’d arranged earlier.
“I want to thank you—” His voice broke and he felt like a total pansy, but there was no help for it. He cleared his throat, tried again. “I want to thank you for your help with Lana yesterday.”
Her face softened, the grim line of her mouth easing up as she murmured, “I wish there was something more I could have done. This disease is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.”
“I know.” Though he’d done everything he could to banish the images from his mind, he couldn’t help seeing Lana lying in a pool of her own blood. Marta, seizing up, her body slamming into the bed again and again before she was paralyzed. Jake and Cyndee, Gavin and Kara, Sandra and Michael. Victor, Luis, Angela, Tom, Daniel. And those were just the clan members who had died in the last few months. There were more, so many more that he couldn’t see all their faces clearly, could no longer remember all their names.
While they’d been alive, he hadn’t known every victim of the disease personally, but he knew them now. Saw them in his sleep, and understood that he had failed them.
But what else was new? These days, failure was his middle name.
He pulled out of his reverie just in time to hear Phoebe say, “It’s strange, Dylan.”
“What’s strange?”
“Lupus isn’t the only disease I’ve studied. While I was in grad school, I worked on a couple of nervous-system diseases, as well as other autoimmune disorders.”
He nodded, because he already knew that. It had been one of factors that encouraged him to go after her for this job.
“Every disease has a fingerprint, something that makes it identifiable to a certain class or type. But from what I’ve seen and read, this one can’t be classified. It fits a bunch of really broad categories.”
“And that’s strange?”
“It is. Diseases of the immune system tend to have a broader spectrum—a longer reach, if you will—because when your immune system stops working, it leaves you open to a bunch of other diseases.”
She stopped long enough to dish some fruit onto her empty plate. “But this goes beyond that. From the research your own doctors have done, that’s not what’s happening here.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that this disease itself—whatever it is—has managed to mutate enough that is has taken on properties of several different classes of disease.”
“So where does that leave us?” he demanded. “Besides totally screwed.”
She popped a piece of pineapple into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully, her gaze focused on something only she could see. “I wish I knew, Dylan. I wish I knew.”
The rest of breakfast passed in a melancholy quiet, with Phoebe lost in her own thoughts while Dylan quietly fumed. How strange was it that they had spent the night locked in each other’s arms—doing things that were illegal in at least twenty-six states—yet now he could barely get her to look at him?
It pissed him off—not to mention what it did to his dragon, who was currently about as stable as a keg of dynamite with a lit fuse. The fact that he couldn’t stop looking at her when she was so obviously bent on ignoring him made the fuse burn faster.
He wasn’t sure what it was about Phoebe that fascinated him. Sure, she was beautiful, but he’d slept with many more beautiful women. Shifters were known for their beauty, after all, and most humans couldn’t compete. And, yes, her brain was a total turn-on, too—something about a woman that smart got him incredibly hard.
But it was more than that, more than any one thing he could put his finger on, though he studied her in an effort to do just that.
As she ate, studiously avoiding his gaze, he was fascinated by her lips. Once again, she wasn’t wearing lipstick, so there was no reason for them to look so inviting. But they were inviting, so much so that he had trouble keeping his burgeoning arousal under wraps.
She bit into a strawberry and a trickle of juice ran over her bottom lip and down her chin. He nearly groaned out loud, his gaze following her tongue as it darted over her lips and swept up the juice.
God, her mouth was sexy. So much about Phoebe was no-nonsense, crisp, almost stern, that the contradiction of that mouth—with its full, sensuous lips the same exact shade as her nipples—was obsession inducing. Not to mention the fact that it seriously undermined everything she was trying to do.
The press of her lips, meant to express displeasure, came across as sexy. The stern frown only emphasized her sex-kitten mouth, made him want to nip at it with sharp teeth. And when she spoke of medical matters, her lips moved so perfectly that he couldn’t help remembering what it was like to have them wrapped around his cock.
Phoebe shoved back from the table abruptly, almost as if she could read his thoughts. But that wasn’t possible—she wasn’t dragon, didn’t have the same gifts he did.
But still, something was wrong. She’d been stiff since he woke up that morning, and with each bite of food she’d grown more and more withdrawn.
“Are you okay?” he asked as she scraped food from her plate into the sink. He hadn’t stuck around for many morning-afters—certainly not in the last couple centuries or so—but he knew enough to realize that there was something very wrong with this one, something that had nothing to do with the death hanging over them like a particularly miserable specter.
“I’m fine.” She didn’t give him a chance to say more, just moved around him with a flippant tweak of those lips and a pat on his shoulder that should have reassured him, but only made him more suspicious. “I’m going to get my bag. Will you be ready to go in a couple of minutes?”
“Yeah, of course.” He carried his own plate to the sink. “Phoebe—”
“What?” She was already down the hall, her voice fading fast as she negotiated the twists and turns of his house.
He stormed after her. “What’s going on?”
“What do you mean?” She gave him an impersonal, slightly vacuous smile, one that looked so out of place with her fierce, intelligent eyes that he almost snorted in disgust.
“You’re being strange.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Dylan I have work to do, and so do you. Neither of us really has time for this.”
“We’ll make time.” She pulled her lower lip between her teeth, started to nibble, and he thought he might lose it completely, might come in his fucking jeans like a kid with his first Playboy. He didn’t like the feeling.
“Excuse me?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“I can see that. Unfortunately, I can’t think of anything I would like less at the m
oment. So either take me to the lab or point me in the right direction. I want to get to work.”
“You’ll get to work when I say you can.”
Her eyes narrowed dangerously, but he was too far gone to care. “Dylan, I think you’re suffering from a misapprehension here.”
“Really? And what is that?” He crooked an eyebrow, watched as her eyes went from cold to red-hot in the space of one breath.
“Just because we fucked last night doesn’t mean you have the right to tell me anything. I work when I want to work. I eat when I want to eat. You need to back off.”
“Or else?” When she didn’t answer, he grinned, tasting victory. “Don’t issue ultimatums if you don’t have something to back them up with, Phoebe. It’s the first rule of the jungle.”
“I thought we were in the desert.”
He shrugged carelessly. “It’s all the same.”
“This isn’t going to work.” She brushed past him, headed for her room. “I’ll return the money.”
The dragon broke free. With a roar, he grabbed Phoebe, whirled her around. Pressed her against the wall and towered over her, every muscle on red alert.
The small part of his brain that was still human warned him he was being an ass, but at the moment he couldn’t work up the control to care. She wasn’t walking away from him, not now. Maybe not ever. She might not be his mate, but she was his until he said otherwise.
“And where is it you think you’re going?”
“I think that’s obvious. Now get off me, Dylan. Your bullying doesn’t scare me.”
“Liar.” He lowered his head, nipped at her jaw. “You’re trembling.”
“I think you’re confusing anger with fear.”
“You think so?” He brought a hand up to cup her throat, felt her pulse hammering like a carpenter who was three days late. “I don’t.”
“Big surprise.” She bucked against him. “You can’t use brute force to get your way every time.”
