by Marie Harte
How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised by anything that happens in life.
–Marcus Aurelius
Chapter One
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DR. CHARLOTTE SINCLARE needed a vacation from her vacation. Preferably one involving satin sheets at her back, dark hair in her fingers, and muscled thighs between her legs.
She parked her car in the space at Spectrum Labs marked with her name, still gripping the steering wheel to shove the torrid fantasy away. It was the hundredth time she’d managed the feat—today alone.
“Shit,” she whispered while weathering another slam of shuddering arousal. Frustration, confusion, and rage slammed right after, a trio of lead-infused bricks. Between the blows, she managed three words. “What. The. Hell?”
What the hell, indeed. She was a scientist, for God’s sake. There wasn’t a biological mystery on this planet—and perhaps a few others—she couldn’t unravel with a notebook, a microscope, and a few days of deductive testing. At least that was the hubris she believed into until two weeks ago, when her twenty-four year old body hijacked the wiring of an eighteen year-old guy, complete with the thousand-horsepower libido entailed by the honor.
Honor?
Riiiight.
Because there was so much “honor” in the vision her mind locked onto now.
Him. Again. His dark head bent to one of her nipples. His shoulders flexed, muscles bulging, as he surged his body deeper inside hers. His lips, suckling at her collar bone before he bit hard at her shoulder.
She moaned. Closed her eyes. And out loud, desperately rasped, “Harder.”
Her pussy tingled as her senses spun, filled with the fantasy of spreading herself wider for him.
She was so hot. So needy.
So terrified.
Who the hell was he? No face. Only a form consuming every minute of her dreams—and now most of her waking thoughts, too.
“Faster.” Her nipples started to ache. Her inner thighs started to burn. She begged for it all to stop but her dark god of sex simply increased the cadence of his cock, pumping into her with greater demand, swelling and filling every inch of her…
“Oh, God. Yes.” A sob rattled beneath the words. She hated herself for it. This wasn’t who she was. Dr. Charlotte Sinclare never needed people, let alone men, for anything. Needing led to trusting. Trusting led to opening. Opening led to exposure.
And exposure led to pain.
Too much pain.
“You’ve got to control this.” She thought the sob was bad? This trembling excuse for a voice made her want to vomit—if she wasn’t so concerned about the activity in other parts of her body. In her mind, he was still burnished, naked, and rippled with muscle as he drove into her again and again. She ground her crotch against the seat while envisioning her heels against his back, urging him to invade her deeper.
Still not enough.
Harder. Faster. Please, please. Fuck me. Fuck—
“Stop it!”
She managed to obey—for a whole second. Then another. Wow, progress. With a shaky hand, she finger-combed her pixie cut. The black strands already felt as shaggy as a pony, despite the trim she’d gotten before leaving for Tahiti five days ago. After braving another peek at herself in the rear view mirror, groaning at the circles that now rivaled her eyes for dark blue saturation, she fell back against the seat and rubbed at the headache, seemingly constant now, in her forehead. The mini migraine was just the beginning of the strange revolt her body had mounted on her fourteen days ago. Subtle scents now made her sick. Elevator music carried the decibels of a rock concert. Even her favorite foods turned her stomach. She had a whole new appreciation for how vulnerable a peeled grape must feel. Now to find someone who’d take mercy and just grind her up into a nice Cabernet…
She should have laughed at that. She let another dry sob emerge, instead. All right, she studied the human senses as her life’s work. That didn’t mean she longed to be a slave to hers.
That was before the issue of her sex drive.
Strike that. Her sex obsession.
Especially with the dark, relentless god who’d set up a permanent outpost in her thoughts.
Exaggeration? With every fiber of her being, she wished not. Dammit, she wasn’t even a dark and meaty kind of girl. Strings-free surfer boys were more her style. Like she even had a “style.” Since high school, when Aunt Marie had finally realized Charlotte wouldn’t ever become the Gypsy to her Mama Rose, Charlotte hadn’t let a day go by without donning her lab coat and escaping into the worlds she saw in her microscope slides—becoming the difference in the world Mom and Dad had told her she could be since her twelfth birthday, when they’d given her that first real science kit.
When they’d been ripped from her a year and a half later, she clung tighter to that dream. She’d been given the chance to save the world, perhaps a little and maybe a lot, from the cellular level up. Who the hell had time for dinner, movies, and small talk?
To be fair, her fantasy lover didn’t seem the conversational type, either. Right to business, this one—with erotic escapades taking over her mind more often than the dolphin shows down the freeway at Sea World. She twisted her hands harder around the steering wheel as another flooded in. Though she managed to keep her fingers free from her panties, it was too late to avoid leaning forward…and brushing one of her breasts with the back of her hand. She moaned as her nipple punched against the lace of her bra, then forced herself to remember where she was. Most importantly, what she was supposed to be doing.
“Get your crap together, Sinclare.” She finished with a determined huff before clipping her ID badge to her belt.
The rain slowed as she stepped out of her Audi. A few rays of sunshine poked through the drizzle, and she shielded her eyes from the brilliant light. The perfect San Diego weather gods couldn’t bear letting a single gray day slip past their watch, normally one of her favorite reasons for living here. Today, the sun provided a huger incentive to hurry into the building.
“Thank shit you’re here!”
She only jumped a little at Aimee’s frantic pounce. It was on the expectations grid from the moment she’d received her assistant’s panicked phone call in Papeete, about eighteen hours ago. The fifty follow-up texts, tracking every inch of her progress home, provided extra insight to the state she’d find the woman in now—though she admitted that none of Aimee’s caffeine highs touched the chaos of her energy right now. Little hairs had broken free from the woman’s normally tidy ponytail. Was she actually wringing her hands?
Though confusion continued to win in the centrifuge of Charlotte’s mind, the world instantly felt more right. Lounging on the beach half a world away, all she’d done was count the hours until the return flight home. For the first time in days, she summoned a serene smile and meant it. “Easy, Pinkie Pie.” It also felt wonderful to reference the drama-loving cartoon character to whom everyone compared Aims. “Find your center. Good girl.” Too bad her mutinous body wouldn’t allow her to take the same advice.
Aimee shook her head while watching Charlotte swipe her badge to the security pad separating the lobby and the building’s research area. “I still can’t believe all this. I’m so sorry for pulling you off your first vacation in years. In Tahiti.”
“You mean the vacation all of you forced me to take in the first place?”
“Didn’t mean I had the right to call you home from it. But Char, this is an emergency.”
As if Charlotte needed a reminder. Stress popped off the woman with the urgency of a cicada mating call—or so she thought—which didn’t mean a damn thing right now. She had no idea how accurate her gauge ran on anything right now. She was always the level-headed one on the team, able to look at a situation’s facts over emotions, a strength she’d cultivated with pride after the grief over Mom and Dad nearly gouged her heart out of her chest. Needless to say, the loss of that security was rapidly turning from irritating into terrifying.
The biochemi
cal joke on her senses was not funny anymore.
Aimee’s footfall on the tiles sounded like stone hammers in the Coliseum as they walked past the cafeteria and the sterile labs, all totally empty. Where was everyone? Had she scared them all off? Wasn’t like they could be blamed. Two weeks ago, she’d made Aimee throw out her desk plant because of the smell, complained about Jimmy’s iPod music though he was listening through ear buds, thrown up her plain bagel breakfast—and told nobody about her constantly quivering pussy. That had taken care of the morning that day. By two o’clock the same afternoon, she received an email from Sam, who pulled rank on her only the second time in her two years at Spectrum. In the message were all the details for her trip to Tahiti, along with a direct order to get her ass out of the lab and into a beach chair. Reluctantly, she’d agreed. Maybe a vacation really was what she needed. Maybe she’d get really lucky and find the man who, by that point, plagued her imagination and her body without mercy.
Instead, she’d come home with a tiny tan, a lot of dumb souvenirs, a shitload of bewilderment—and no dark god.
No ease-up on the bafflement as they walked deeper into the building. The place was like a ghost town. No laughter filtering from offices. No taps at keyboards. No footsteps except her sandals and Aimee’s requisite high heels. So what the hell with the fire drill? Where was the “beyond bizarre situation” Aims had referenced during their phone call? She’d almost expected to find an army in white Hazmat suits tending to zombies, aliens or both. The only eerie element was Aimee herself, looking like a simple breeze would throw her off.
“Aims?”
“Huh?”
“Where’s the emergency?”
“Errrrr…”
She yanked Aimee’s elbow, stopping them both. “Okay, true confessions time. I’m damn glad to be back early. Happy? I’m not happy to have paid an outrageous flight change fee, only to watch you jump around like a sick ostrich. So what the hell’s going on?”
Aimee winced. “The better question might be who the hell’s going on.”
“Excuse me?”
Aimee squared her shoulders. “Yeah, that does say it better.”
“Still completely lost over here.”
“I’m trying! It’s just hard. We—we have no idea how he got in, okay?”
“He who?”
“It happened so fast,” Aims rambled on. “The man must be part ninja. There we were, just having lunch in the lounge yesterday. The building was secure. Sam checked it himself. One minute we were all loading up on the salad bar and the next, he was in the doorway.” She looked up again, her eyes now huge and round and intense. “And I mean in the doorway. I couldn’t see the hallway from around him. He’s—” To Charlotte’s shock, the woman stammered into a significant pause. Then blushed. “I mean, wow.”
Charlotte shook her head. If the graveyard silence of the building wasn’t weird enough, Aimee’s timidity sealed the deal. A speck of reality had to be lingering somewhere around here. “Okay, back to earth now. Does this giant piece of ‘wow’ have a name? And did he say what the hell he wanted?”
In a switch as stunning as any other today, Aimee’s expression switched from brewing storm to calm lake. “You, honey. He wants you.”
“Excuse the hell out of me?”
“He refuses to talk to anyone else. He also said he’s not leaving until he sees you.”
She didn’t bother asking if Aims was joking. She’d just jumped through too many hoops to get back here to doubt the woman was mixing true brew. “Are you telling me some strange man got in here, past a state-of-the-art security system, and did…what? Held you all up with salad tongs and demanded to know where I was?”
Aimee’s face darkened. “Last time I checked, they weren’t making handguns into salad tongs.”
“Wait. What?” Her amusement one-eightied into fury. “He pulled a gun on all of you? Where is this asswipe? I can’t believe this.”
The anger amped her pulse—and her breaths. Not a good thing. As her lungs kicked into higher gear, so did her scent receptors. The little shits had been her worst enemies for fourteen days but now declared all-out war on her body. Holy hell, something suddenly smelled good around here. Ocean wind and candle smoke. Caramel, cocoa, and chocolate-infused coffee. Musk, sweat, sex. All the sinful smells she loved. All the deepest needs of her body.
Her nipples returned to diamond hardness. Her sex clamped, squeezing moisture into her intimate folds. The sensitive nerves blossomed and plumped…then throbbed and ached. She fell against the wall, the world turning fuzzy as she prayed Aimee bought the pretense she’d succumbed to rage, not raw arousal. The ruse seemed to work. Aimee’s new Zen-ness continued as she raised a hand and knocked three times on the door in front of them.
Charlotte’s office door.
She frowned again, though couldn’t confirm if Aimee registered the look—and wasn’t sure it mattered, anyway. The next second, half her cognition was stripped. She’d made the mistake of taking another breath, letting more of that heavenly scent into her senses. As the smell invaded her like sexual tear gas, a furious—and beautiful—baritone thundered from the opposite side of the portal.
“Goddammit, Charlotte. What are you waiting for?”
Somehow, she managed a baffled stare at Aimee. “What…the…”
Aimee lifted a sardonic smile. “That would be your friend. Mr. Asswipe.”
Her stomach had already confirmed that truth. Everything churned with anxiety, anger, curiosity and fear, adding to the physical chaos she fought while letting herself into the office that had been her second home for the last two years.
New definition. The room in which a bomb had been detonated.
The devastation was so complete, Charlotte forgot about the owner of that hard, dark summons. Nothing existed except the shock and grief of staring at the last two years of her life, now inexplicably exploded.
Thousands of notes and files were strewn across the floor, the desk, and the work table. Her computer was on and opened to a document she’d encrypted three ways. Even her prized Ansel Adams prints had been taken off the wall and laid in the corner, stacked neatly against each other.
“What the—”
Her sob took the place of the final word. She’d asked fate to crush the peeled grape of her composure and it complied in full. Trying to breathe down her horror was a huge mistake, instead delivering the sonic boom of that scent again.
“Shit.” The force of the aroma was a thousand times worse—and better—in here. Her mind and body were called by it from the inside out, like the allure had been carved straight from her DNA. Charlotte shuddered, trying to fight the impact but conceding a miserable loss. Her hands fell to her thighs and scraped their way toward her needy core, though another anguished cry fell from her. Satisfying the ache in her clit wouldn’t feed the need that throbbed in the reaches of her womb.
She needed the source of that smell. Deep inside her body.
She needed him.
Behind her, someone slammed the lock on the door.
“Charlotte.”
The syllables left him in a snarl, matching their animal energy on the air. Answering instincts prowled to life in her nervous system, quickening her breath, pumping more blood into her sex. She stopped her hands. Clenched them into fists. Bunched them against her stomach, fighting the primal pull with every ounce of strength she could still gather.
What the hell was this? There was no logic to fall back on, no scientific explanation to be summoned. She was more lost by the second—and more afraid. The only “science” that seemed to fit here was the stuff preceding “fiction.” Was that really the case? Had some alien body snatcher invaded her—and him?
Oh God, yes. Him.
His voice told her so much now. It was raw, desperate, deep—and dripping with the same erotic hunger plaguing her. She knew that once she turned to him, she’d see it all on his face, too. Oh hell, yes…
“No.” She stumbled back. He
r foot landed on some of the scattered papers, making her fall to her ass. She didn’t let that stop her from pumping her feet to skitter further away from him.
“Charlotte.”
It was deeper than before and full of twice the command—emanating from the mouth that hadn’t changed in the three years since she’d last seen it. As always, his lips were sinfully lush, even in his trademark scowl. The jaw in which it was centered hadn’t softened at all, his strong chin jutting, cheekbones taut under the heavy stubble on his lightly-tanned skin. The hard angles continued up to his temples, which bracketed a pair of eyes filled with molten copper fire that heated her from head to toe as soon as her gaze met his.
Hell. The heat in his eyes…
Okay, that part was new. And the way his shoulders now seemed the length of a football field, covered in moguls of muscle…that was new, too. And damn, had his legs always resembled twin tree trunks, even encased in those loose black workout pants, easily lifting him past six and a half feet? She didn’t remember him being so tall, either.
The differences unsettled her as much as seeing him again. Correction, being locked in a room with him—and now pinned in place by the force of his stare alone.
Kaden Tiernan. The soldier who’d cold-shouldered his way to a lifetime’s worth of her disdain. The bastard who also happened to have thick, dark chestnut hair and a body twined with power. And now that voice and those eyes…
No. No.
It all fit. He fit.
She fought the truth even as her body forced it on her.
Her mystery lover now had a face—belonging to a man she’d never wanted to see again.
“No. This is a joke.” She shoved back, playing slip-and-slide with her research papers again. Kaden made no move to help her. That was just fine. He clearly remembered their mutual loathing, too. That was good. Very good. Right?
