Heart of Danger

by Lisa Marie Rice

  If he had been capable of laughter just then, he’d have laughed because a blanket wasn’t going to do it. He wasn’t going to hurt her, but he was goddamned going to find out what had happened. How the fuck she’d caused him to lose control of his senses just then.

  And how the hell she’d managed to convince him that a woman who looked like her could feel desire for him. That was a crazy trick.

  Hypnosis made sense. He’d had an out-of-body experience for just a second, as if seeing himself outside himself. And he’d hypnotized himself into feeling she wanted him. What he’d felt was his own freaking desire, not hers. Those whispered words, there and gone, not a voice really but the faintest breath of a thought . . . so very attractive.

  It had seemed to come from her. Somehow she’d planted lies in his head, hallucinations, because no way was Catherine Young going to find him attractive.

  He was a man of iron self-control but he was hanging on to it by a thread. He wanted to smash something, hurl something across the room, break something. She’d been in his freaking head!

  She’d come here, found him against all the odds. Come with this harebrained story of Patient Number Nine, which he and Nick and Jon had half believed, so maybe the brainwashing had started right away. Then she insinuated herself into their community—what was that if not the work of an infiltrated agent? She worked for their enemy anyway—Arka.

  Arka dealt with some nasty shit. It was altogether possible she carried a canister of something—some new psychotropic drug that altered reality.

  He loomed over her. He often used his size to intimidate the enemy. He’d never done it with a woman but there was always a first time for everything. He leaned in close, resting the knuckles of his left hand on the side of the bed, staring her right in the eyes.

  In the light of the lamp her eyes were pure silver, reflecting light rather than absorbing it. She stared into his eyes, then looked away, silver darts that gleamed. Even without makeup her eyes were gorgeous—huge, with thick, dark lashes. That silver sheen so bright . . .

  Mac shook himself. Man, whatever she’d used on him, it was potent stuff. He’d never gone into a little fugue about the eye color of a suspect he was interrogating.

  “What did you just do to me?” His voice was low and deadly. He didn’t have to project that; he felt deadly in every cell of his body.

  He leaned over farther and rested the knuckles of his right hand on the other side of her hips, careful not to touch her anywhere. She was caged in by him now. He knew he filled her line of vision. She wouldn’t be seeing anything now but 240 pounds of strong, angry male bearing in on her.

  Her back was pressed tightly against the headboard and her heartbeat fluttered in the artery of her neck. She was breathing shallowly.

  She was scared. Good. Because she had access to a kind of weaponry he had no defense against. A weapon that could fell him as surely as a stun gun or a .50 cal.

  And she was bearing a deadly message—to go rescue Lucius. He, Nick and Jon were the protectors of their community. If they got killed because they walked into a trap, who would defend Stella, Bridget, Red, little Mac? All the rest of them?

  “Okay. You’re going to get one chance at this, because if I get the feeling at any time that you’re lying, I’m going to handcuff you, take you down to the infirmary and shoot you up with so much Lethe you’ll wake up in a week. And if you piss me off too much, you won’t wake up in a motel room. You’ll wake up in the snow, three miles from the nearest road. Nod if you understand me.”

  Her head jerked down, then up.

  “Nod if you believe me.”

  Her head jerked again.

  “Good.” She’d better believe him because he was speaking God’s honest truth. Mac was good at interrogation, at intimidation.

  But this was something entirely new. He wasn’t used to interrogating when he felt his entire existence was under threat.

  It wasn’t his life that was in jeopardy. He was used to life-threatening situations and was fully prepared to die in the line of duty. But this—this was something he didn’t understand and it scared the shit out of him. This was an annihilation of his entire being, everything that he was, yet leaving his body intact. “Now let’s start from the top because you’ve been lying to us since I grabbed your sorry ass out of that snowstorm.”

  “No,” she whispered. “I haven’t.”

  Shit. How could she look so beautiful, even now? Pale and scared of him.

  Mac was used to attractive women looking scared of him. He had scary looks, he always had. He’d had don’t fuck with me vibes all his life.

  Women saw what they wanted to see and in him they saw threat, and not in an attractive package. He could have worked around that if he’d been rich because the accoutrements of wealth were as powerful a draw as good looks. Fancy clothes, fancy cars, that groomed spa look . . . women responded to that powerfully.

  But even if he had the money, which he didn’t, he had spartan tastes. So what women saw was what they got. And what they saw was a guy who could keep it up for a good long while. If they closed their eyes they wouldn’t have to look at him.

  That’s what they got and that’s what they did.

  And fuck him if this woman wasn’t looking at him in an entirely new way.

  The fear was gone. He had no idea how that happened. But it was unmistakable. No fear. No dread. No disgust.

  Her eyes had turned soft. There was even some color back in her face.

  Fuck this.

  “Go over it again.” His jaw clenched so hard it was a miracle he wasn’t cracking teeth. And they didn’t have a dentist at Haven yet, though it didn’t matter. With all the money Jon was scamming, they could afford to send the residents down to the most expensive dentists in California. “Tell me again how you happened to be on the road up to us. It’s a disused road and there was a roadblock. It was snowing. You were crazy to try to make your way up there in the snow, in the dark. You knew something.”

  Her eyes widened. “I told you. Patient Nine was desperate to contact you. He told me I’d find you somewhere on that road up on Mount Blue. But I went up the wrong road, several wrong roads, had to backtrack and got caught in bad weather. Then my car died and you know the rest.”

  Shit. Lucius knew he’d spent his teens exploring the mine on Mount Blue. On one of the rare occasions when Mac got drunk, he told Lucius he was going to buy the abandoned mine when he retired and live there in isolation.

  He narrowed his eyes and put his face closer. This woman could be a world-class liar. But even the best liars in the world had tells. Tiny ones, but he was an observant man. He wasn’t going to let the slightest sign escape him.

  “You’re a doctor. You have a top-level job at a big research lab. And you want me to believe that you would drop everything and go on a wild-goose chase on the say-so of a man you yourself diagnosed as demented?”

  Her eyes searched his, making little silver darts like small bolts of lightning. “It’s the truth,” she whispered. “I told you the truth.”

  His jaw set. “No, you haven’t.”

  “Yes.” She drew up in a deep breath and looked like she was steeling herself for something. Finally. Maybe she was going to tell the truth. “Except for one thing. I lied about one thing.”

  All right. This was going somewhere. She was going to confess.

  He leaned down until his nose nearly touched hers. “Spit it out.”

  She didn’t flinch. “Patient Nine didn’t tap things out on a keyboard. And Patient Nine can’t talk. Not a single word.”

  Chapter Ten

  Orion Security Headquarters

  Alexandria, Virginia

  Clancy Flynn thumbed through the job offers, the fruit of his subtle campaign testing the market waters. He’d wanted to see what the market was like once a stable SL was available, and holy shit, the market was booming.

  He was going to make a fucking fortune.

  He leafed through the of
fers for bids. He’d discreetly let his primary clients know that there was a possibility he could do security jobs in half the time using a third of the personnel. Security was a crowded market, getting more crowded by the day. The world was a dangerous place, but it was filling up fast with former soldiers. Plenty of manpower, highly trained, well-armed, tough. A lot of companies were springing up, vying for work.

  Security cost money, though, and Flynn knew his corporations. Security was something corporations spent money on grudgingly. Shareholders didn’t like that item in the budgets because there was no return. By definition, security wasn’t an investment. Shareholders couldn’t get it into their greedy heads that security was the condition for investments. The thing that let them sit back, do no work, and rake in the money.

  Flynn had let word get out that he had a new technology that would allow him to bid for work cheaply. He chose the companies he contacted carefully. They wouldn’t be curious about the technology, all they cared about was the bottom line. Most of the work would be done far from the view of the suits in the boardrooms of corporate headquarters.

  They bit.

  He stared at the spreadsheet, which represented more money than he ever thought he’d see in his lifetime. They were listed there, like low-hanging fruit.

  A one-year contract for security for gas pipeline construction from the Tengiz Field in Kazakhstan to Baku in Azerbaijan, seven million dollars. A one-year contract for security for new Brazilian-owned oil wells in Iraq, ten million dollars. A one-year contract for timber operations on an Indonesian island known for Muslim terrorism, five million dollars.

  If SL had worked, he could have used teams of ten men on each job, tops: $100K per operator, three million dollars. It would have left him with a profit of nineteen million dollars. In one year. He would double that the year after, once it had proven its worth on the market.

  Lee had told him that he was sure they had the right formula. He had found something in Lucius Ward’s head that had been the key to the correct dosage. It would have been the very first time something in Lucius Ward’s head would have been useful to Flynn.

  Sanctimonious bastard.

  Ward had been tripping Flynn up his entire military career. Flynn had always outranked him because he knew how to play the Pentagon game, but Ward had been a slippery bastard, always outshining him. Fucking hero. And then setting up Ghost Ops. Fucker had placed himself completely outside the military command structure and had become untouchable.

  The Ghost Ops team had been damned effective and Ward had grown in power and prestige. And since Ward was such a canny son of a bitch, he’d picked up on what Flynn and Lee had been working on. Flynn had sent the orders under the secret code that was the only thing that could send Ghost Ops on a mission. A code emanating from the White House—from the Commander in Chief herself. Ward believed he had gone on a sanctioned op.

  It had been dangerous. If Ward had in any way questioned the op, he would have found out it didn’t come from his command structure and he would have tracked it back to Flynn. And if there was one thing Flynn knew, it was that Ward was a vindictive son of a bitch.

  Flynn could have kissed his life and his pension goodbye and would never have had a chance to enjoy his newfound wealth as an entrepreneur. If Ward had found out the orders came from him, Flynn would either be tits up in a grave or scrounging money for margaritas in a village in Costa Rica, constantly looking over his shoulder.

  But Ward had been about to blow the whistle and the op had been put together on the fly. They’d gained a year, a year in which SL should have come online and started making them rich.

  Fucking Lee. So fucking slow.

  Flynn was leaking money by the day. And the Africa fiasco had set them back for who knew how long?

  He went on the encrypted line not even God could hack and sent an email to Lee. It used a domain name guaranteed anonymous.

  To: One@noname.com

  From: Two@noname.com

  Speed things up. I’ve got clients waiting. You’ve burned through ten million dollars so far and I have nothing to show for it. Either I see progress soon or I’m pulling the money and going to Nova. I heard they’re working on neural enhancers. They might have more luck than you.

  Two

  He sat back, a grim smile on his face. That should stir Lee up. Put a fire under his skinny ass. Lee couldn’t get anything done with just the Arka research budget. Flynn’s money was key.

  Make the fucker squirm.

  Flynn sat back in his ten-thousand-dollar designer ergonomic chair and clipped the tip of a hundred-dollar Arturo Fuente using a five-hundred-dollar cigar clipper. He lit it with his antique Dunhill solid gold lighter he’d picked up in London for twenty thousand dollars. It had belonged to a former king, the Duke of Windsor, and it had made Clancy feel . . . powerful. He would hold it in his hand and know he could indulge himself with no problems whatsoever. These days, there were few appetites Flynn had to deny himself, all of them impossible on his military pension.

  So Lee was going to have to goddamn get going or Flynn was cutting off the teat Lee’d been sucking on.

  Mount Blue

  His eyes widened in surprise. Catherine understood very well Mac wasn’t often caught by surprise. She’d felt his vigilant nature under her hands, but even if she hadn’t, his body language was clear.

  He scowled at her. “He didn’t type? He can’t fucking talk at all? He told you how to find me, didn’t he? Or is all that a lie, too?”

  She searched his eyes. Deep brown except for those lighter striations of yellow.

  She closed her eyes but it didn’t help. His striking face seemed tattooed on the inside of her eyelids. Strong features, weather-beaten skin, a nose that had been broken several times, a firm mouth that never smiled. The scar rippling over the left-hand side of his face that looked as if it were a river of flesh flowing down him. The other scar like a memento in skin of pain.

  She saw his features but she saw so much more, not only through the projections of Patient Nine, who loved him like a son, but now through her own fingertips, her own skin speaking to her.

  There was violence there, yes. But also such goodness and loyalty. He had the fearlessness of a man unafraid to die. He wasn’t suicidal, by any means, but his head and his heart believed there were many things worse than death. Betrayal, treason, cruelty. They were worse than death for him and he’d die rather than be guilty of them.

  He was towering over her, trying to intimidate her, and if she hadn’t been what she was, if she hadn’t felt the core of him under her hands, she would definitely have been terrified. This man emanated danger and violence. He looked like he could snap her in half without breaking a sweat. He looked like he’d enjoy doing it.

  But that wasn’t what he was about and she knew it. Knew it deep in her bones, deep in her very cells.

  The intense ferocity he was directing at her was the color of fear. Not fear for himself but fear for the people he held dear, the people he clearly led and protected. Bridget’s feelings for this man had been so sharp and intense. He’d saved her from something. There had been bright gratitude, the jewel tones of admiration, threads of affection running through it. Almost love, though nothing like the love that had been in her for Red and for their little girl.

  Mac was their leader and he stood for them, was their bulwark against a world that had not been kind to them.

  It was fear for his people that had him narrowing his eyes, making his deep voice so rough and dark, had him leaning in so close.

  And because she knew him, knew the essence of him, Catherine narrowed her own eyes and snapped, “Back off.”

  His eyes flared, a deep frown between his black eyebrows. The frown was almost permanently etched into his face, which meant he frowned a lot.

  “What did you say?”

  “Back. Off.” Catherine waved him back.

  It was bad enough keeping her wits about her when she was exhausted and stressed. With
this man right in her face, it was almost impossible.

  Not to mention the fact that there was that annoying tug toward him. Almost a tropism, like a sunflower to the sun.

  Patient Nine’s love for him had rubbed off on her. And now that she’d seen him, been close enough to feel his heat, smell the clean smell of him, touch him . . . she was one step away from the precipice of falling for him herself. Firsthand, not secondhand. Mentally, she windmilled her arms because falling for this man, right now, would be a disaster of epic proportions.

  Still . . .

  He’s so attractive . . .

  The thought wafted through her mind once again, as it had before. Since when was she susceptible to beefcake? Beefcake was definitely not her style. Definitely a brains-over-brawn woman. The few men she’d dated had been the weedy type, made for lab coats hanging off narrow shoulders.

  This warrior who looked like something out of the mists of the dawn of time, this man somehow had a hold on her.

  . . . so attractive. . .

  Get a grip, she told herself sternly. And she did have a mission.

  He’d backed off. But lying in bed meant a huge disadvantage. She stood up facing him, gingerly testing the ground, remembering the moment when everyone’s emotions had overwhelmed her, remembering the moment her knees had weakened. She swallowed as she surreptitiously tried to find her balance.

  A large hand steadied her.

  God, he towered over her, watching her out of narrowed eyes, dark pupils reflecting a pinpoint of light from the bedside lamp.

  He let go of her arm, ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, lady. And you’re not leaving here until I understand what the hell is going on.”

  “Let’s sit down,” she murmured. Her legs felt weak but she managed to make her way to the table without betraying any physical weakness. She made it just in time before she would have collapsed.

  The weakness was devastating and a whiplash contrast to the powerful strength that coursed through her while touching this man. He infused her with . . . something. Extraordinary. In all her life, no one had ever given her something via her curse, her gift. It had all been one way, their emotions crowding into her, swirling inside her, overwhelming her. Never had she received something that could be considered a gift.