Dangerous

by Jacquelyn Frank

  Liam had to stop her.

  Any minute now, he definitely would.

  He groaned when her deft fingers flipped open his belt and unbuttoned his fly. His body clenched in violent anticipation of feeling her bare fingers wrapping around his shaft, stroking him until …

  “Devon,” he croaked as he caught her wrists and pulled her away from his zipper. “I can’t do this. You know I can’t,” he implored her.

  Damn it to hell, he was begging, he realized. And he was begging her to not do what he oh so desperately needed her to do. He was so hard he hurt, his entire body perspiring under the burn of his heat for her. He wanted her so badly he was seconds away from stripping away those sadistically sexy shorts and taking her right there against the door. God, what he wouldn’t do to be burying himself in her right that very instant.

  Liam was right, Devon thought as she looked up into the turmoil of his gaze. She shook her head as if coming out of a daze, and the implications of what was happening made full impact. She was in big trouble, she realized. She was living in the same house with a human male who danced across every sensual and sexual tripwire she owned. There was a resounding inevitability to what was happening between them. The impetus would carry their explosive chemistry to the farthest extreme, and it would be likely to happen one day very soon.

  The only problem was, she had a great deal of respect for Liam. A respect that grew the more she watched his behavior, listened to his people speak his praises, and witnessed his skills as a protector. She wasn’t like others of her kind. She couldn’t conceal herself from him if they were going to end up being intimate. Not when she knew all too well how he would feel if he learned certain truths at the last minute. He said he knew everything about Morphates, but did he really know everything? Morphates had hidden enough along the way to assure her that he probably didn’t. He would hate her, thinking her the liar and deceitful bitch that she honestly would have become at that point, if she didn’t make sure he truly knew what he was getting into.

  Panic-stricken and confused, Devon drew into herself, pulling her arms around her body in a brutally tight hug. She saw him watching her with concern and wariness as he neatened up the damage she’d done to his clothing. She almost laughed at how obvious his conflict was. He didn’t know what to do with her. He didn’t understand her reactions, but he wanted to ease her pain if he could because he feared he had somehow caused it. It was those deep-seated flashes of Liam Nash’s heart that strangled her with conflict.

  “Listen, sweetheart,” he said gruffly, “I don’t mean that I don’t want—”

  She cut him off, and when she spoke, it was as though she had a lash around her throat. “I understand. I honestly do,” she said, hoping the truth would override whatever else he saw in her face. “It was thoughtless of me to—”

  “Thoughtless of you?” He was incredulous. “Who in hell dragged who in here? Will you stop taking responsibility for everything, Devon? It’s not your job to make everything right, you know. Why do you do that?”

  He was wrong. It was her job to make things right. More than he could ever know. And to that end, she drew up a smile and patted him on the chest in comfort.

  “You’re right. I just meant that I know we have other things to do that are … that take precedence.” For some reason she couldn’t bring herself to say ‘more important.’ The sudden light of satisfaction flickering through his eyes told her he understood her omission. This time her smile was genuine as she watched the obvious stroke to his ego flush through him. She didn’t mind him knowing he was high on her list of importance, but she couldn’t help a little mischief to remind him how easily power shifted between them.

  Devon snuggled forward into him, her softer curves instantly settling fully against hard muscle until they were as good as glued together. It was so easy to imagine how the connection would translate should they both be naked. She sighed deeply, the sound of longing washing over them both. She ran her hands around his waist and up his back, her cheek pressed to his chest as she listened to the rise in the tempo of his strong heartbeat. As she breathed in a deep breath, his sunbaked masculine scent of sweat and surging arousal thrummed through her senses and into her blood.

  She allowed her fingers to explore him, roaming his back and coming over his ribs again to his chest. He made a repressed sound that combined pleasure and frustration into one.

  “Step back,” she instructed softly, the flats of her palms pushing gently but using no strength. He obeyed her quickly and she suppressed a giggle as she let him move away from her aching body. Her nipples were so hard they hurt, and she imagined he felt much the same, if not more, in a variety of places. Licking her lips at the thought, she let her gaze drift down the expanse of his gorgeous physique and stop at the noticeable ridge of his erection behind the fly he had forced her to abandon.

  She heard him curse richly and Devon knew he was watching her study him.

  “Another step,” she coaxed him in a sultry, expectation-laden voice.

  Again, he obeyed, though this step caused her hands to drop away from him entirely. Her gaze traveled with purposeful lethargy back up his body. Then, when she had met his glittering amber eyes and their ferocious hunger for her, she smiled softly.

  “Thanks.”

  She turned and opened the door, now that she had coaxed him out of the way. It was dirty pool, she knew, but it was worth it for the look on his face when she stood in the doorway and gestured gallantly for him to precede her into the hallway.

  “I believe you wanted to see some weapon prototypes? The armory is this way.”

  His expression of astonishment was too much to handle with perfect calm and a giggle escaped her. Liam narrowed his eyes on her with nothing less than murder in mind and she brushed the threatening expression off by tapping her foot with impatience and grinning boldly at his expense.

  “I thought you were anxious to see them,” she complained through her humor.

  What Liam wanted to do was grab the little tease and jerk her smart, sassy ass back in the prep room and teach her a thing or two about messing with him. But the fact of the matter was she was doing exactly what he had asked her to do. Calling it quits. Her extremely brief and relatively tame tease was a fair enough payback, considering what he’d just done to her. He’d lost all control and started something with her he shouldn’t have in a place that was damn inappropriate, not to mention inconsiderate. He gave the devil her due and took a step toward her, but hesitated to very visibly readjust himself, trying fruitlessly to find comfort for a hard-on he feared wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. He couldn’t help but grin when she burst into peals of laughter. As he passed her in the crowded doorway, though, he made sure to brush his front up against her front and it ended her amusement on a soft, inward gasp.

  He reached for her hand and pulled her to his side, touching her at the small of her back and guiding her toward the armory.

  When they reached the reinforced steel door, she punched in the code like lightning, her enhanced reflexes so second-nature to her that she probably didn’t realize what a giveaway it was. The door unlocked with a click and a hiss, telling him the room was temperature controlled. It would have to be. Mercury was very sensitive to temperature, another reason why bullets were a primitive delivery option.

  The door swung open to reveal a room much, much bigger than he had been expecting. As they crossed the threshold, Liam realized it was because there was a firing range included, as well as a large area of mats for working out with less lethal devices. It would be an excellent venue for training his people in the use of these weapons. The climate control would keep their body heat from affecting the mercury dangerously, allowing for safe practice. He could see the well at the rear of the firing range designed to catch mercury discharge and that there were drains in the floor for disposal. Certainly for safe disposal. She didn’t strike him as the type to endanger the environment with improper techniques.

  “Th
ere’s an exterior range as well, but that’s only for shooting water laden blanks. The liquid metal is lighter than water, so there is a difference in the weight, but it’s negligible, I find, when it comes to basic training in the field. However, weapons calibration should be done in this room.”

  Liam nodded mutely. He had seen no exterior firing range. Not in person and not on the plans. Granted, he had yet to walk over every inch of the estate, and there was a lot of acreage, but if that range was as state-of-the-art as the one inside, it needed an electrical source and he would have seen it on the wiring charts earlier.

  His eyes moved swiftly to the walls. The entranceway had the feel and look of a clean room. Her laboratory and medical background rang loud and clear in the precautions she’d taken. Mounted on the wall in Plexiglas cases, however, were the dark shapes of weaponry.

  “Earlier prototypes,” she explained, dismissively waving at both walls. There were three rows per wall of both strange and familiarly shaped weapon configurations. Some looked more like medical devices than weapons. He wondered why she kept the failures on display like this, even as he realized he had to be looking at years of work, going well beyond the time since he’d discovered the effects of mercury.

  “Damn,” he said with a hard swallow as he followed her lead into the deeper recesses of the vault, “I must have seriously pissed you off.”

  Devon stopped and looked at him with surprise. “Why would you say something like that?”

  He gave her a self-deprecating smile. “You were looking for this leverage for a long time,” he said, indicating her years of work, “and suddenly some grunt soldier from the secret service stumbles on the answer in a moment of desperation.”

  It was hard for her to think of him as ever being desperate, but she could easily imagine him in that life or death battle with a Morphate. Fighting a creature three times as strong as even his formidable strength, most likely with poisoned claws, not to mention gnashing fangs and killer instinct.

  “I read the report, Liam,” she said softly, reaching to lay her hand on his chest, needing to touch him as sudden chills worked their way across her flesh. “What you did was remarkable and heroic. I would never lessen that with something as petty as envy, or feeling somehow cheated of an opportunity I had more than enough time and resources to come up with over quite a few decades. And neither should you with this attitude of nonchalance.”

  Properly chastised, Liam fell silent and followed her quietly into a second chamber, this one also locked behind a steel door and requiring a retina scan, DNA sampling, and no less than a sixteen-digit pin.

  “I am the only one with access to the inner sanctum. I will give you the code to the exterior vault. However, when you wish to work with the weapons, you will need me to get them for you and to return them. This way I can check their status at all times and have a perfect account of all the prototypes.”

  The inner sanctum, as she had referred to it, was aptly named. This part of the vault was an enormous laboratory also in the style of a clean room: white and perfectly polished floors, lab tables that gleamed brilliantly, and more equipment than he could possibly expect to recognize. Liam wasn’t one for staring in wonder, but he did exactly that. Everything on the right-hand side of the door was dedicated to the lab, the refrigeration and storage units and all the analysis equipment.

  Everything on the left was sealed in steel containers of every size imaginable. Some stood free like lockers, others were lined up on shelves or wide tables. Each was numbered and labeled with laser etching and each one had its very own electronic keypad.

  She walked up the floor between the tables and shelves until she reached the box she was looking for. There were at least three dozen varying boxes in the room, and she walked up to only one as if she knew exactly what it and all the others held. It struck him then that with the safety guards she had in place, no one could enter or exit that lab without her being right beside them. No one else could work in that high-tech and highly specialized environment unless she was right in their pocket, watching over their shoulder or … was there even anyone else? When his team had gone over staffing and protection details, had there even been mention of laboratory personnel? Was that because they had already succeeded at their task or was it because they had never existed? Had every piece of this development process come straight from her hands?

  Of course it had, he realized. She would never trust anyone else with these kinds of secrets, and she most certainly would not put the responsibility onto anyone else’s shoulders. Both of those realizations settled heavily on the back of Liam’s neck and shoulders.

  He could imagine how it must feel for her.

  Liam was moving before he even knew why, crossing over to her in fast, hard strides. She was about to open the box and show him one of her undoubtedly gorgeous weapons and all he wanted was to stop her. He slammed his hand down on the lid of the container, the sound of the metal ringing in the echoing room, the lock automatically reengaging the instant it was closed. Devon turned with a surprised, questioning look in her eyes, and Liam really wished he had the answer she wanted. Instead he was working on instinct, an often good and sometimes bad thing. He looked into the clear jade of her eyes, the color bright in the overhead lighting.

  With a very gentle touch, he reached to catch her face in his hand, her chin cradled in the web between his thumb and forefinger as his fingers fanned out over her cheek. He could hear himself breathing too hard, but he was beyond regulating it.

  Then the gentle touch tightened to a point just shy of hurting her.

  “Are you going to tell me that you spent years locked away in this cold, sterile room all alone for day—no, wait, knowing you, it was for weeks at a time, right? Just for this?” He gestured back and around himself. “You spent this enormous block of your immortality a prisoner to this room for the sake of bringing … what did you call it … balance to the world of humans and Morphates?”

  He stepped much closer, towering over her, so tensed with rampant emotion that he fairly quivered with it.

  “You tell me, Devon, and don’t you dare fucking lie to me this time, or so help me God, you won’t like the consequences. You tell me why you did this.” The truth! Tell me why you buried yourself in this obsession. What drove you into these cold, windowless rooms, day after goddamn day, when you knew it was a path to being utterly ostracized, not to mention a certain death wish.”

  Liam was looking down into her eyes, his nose barely three inches from her own. As he poured those acidic words and emotions over her, it stripped open the old wounds until she was raw and shaking.

  “I d-didn’t lie to you,” she stammered, her hand instinctively pressing against him to hold him at bay. She could struggle with him and free herself, but that would get them nowhere. He was so clever, so much more astute than he first appeared. How many people would walk into a room and see it the way he was seeing it? See the truth?

  “I distinctly remember asking you over and over again why you chose to embark on this particular task. Omitting is as good as lying, sweetheart, and I refuse to hang my ass out for you if you are going to blow smoke up it!”

  “Liam, please, you don’t understand! I can’t—”

  “If you can’t, then I can’t.” He let go of her roughly and did a sharp about-face. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to risk my life and the lives of my crew on ‘I can’t’ when what you really mean is you won’t,” he threw back over his shoulder as he left the room.

  Devon moved, her preternatural speed bursting out as she overtook him in a mere heartbeat, slammed the outer vault door shut and spun the tumbler. She turned to face him, breathing hard not from exertion but from raw fury. It burned in her eyes and clenched tight in her fists and muscles.

  Liam had drawn up short in total surprise at what had to be the very first real display of her Morphate abilities. It was strange how it made him feel, seeing the stark, albeit brief, display of what she really was. It made him
realize that she had been hiding among humans for quite some time in order to have become so very good at blending in with them. At suppressing what ought to have come naturally for her.

  “What the hell is it you think you’re doing?” he growled, his hands fisting as he stalked up to her. “If you think you can trap me and try to coerce me into changing my mind, lady, you are looking for a frigid day in hell.”

  “Always so cocksure, aren’t you?” she hissed in retaliation. “Always so right!”

  “You bet your sweet ass I am!”

  “Well, let me tell you a few things you don’t know. A few things you’ve got very, very wrong, Mr. Nash,” she spat out, her flushed face and bottle green eyes radiating her incredible anger. He was not surprised. He’d stepped into that lab and within moments he’d realized that here was a woman who felt fury with an unquenchable passion. Just like she felt lust, he recalled all too vividly. He suppressed an involuntary shudder when he found himself contemplating what unquenchable lust of this magnitude would be like.

  Devon wasn’t even thinking any longer. She was only feeling. It was pain, rage, and frustration, renewed betrayal and old abandonment.

  “I had a family,” she rasped, her voice rough from emotion and shouting. “I had a life and they stole me away from it. Eric Paulson and his experimenters stole hundreds of us, from asylums, from workhouses, and right from the streets of the Dark Cities and anywhere else they thought no one would ever miss us. If you had the misfortune of crossing Paulson in the slightest way, say, perhaps, refusing his job offer once you finally realized what that job entailed, well, he couldn’t have you running off to report his unethical behavior now, could he? Did they tell you that in your little Morphate 101 classes at the Secret Service? Hmm?”