The fantasy thundered on. He gripped her waist with his big hands and rolled her over, a guttural snarl sounding deep in his throat. He pinned her beneath his big body and thrust deep, driving her hard.
Unleashing his passion unleashed hers too, and sent her soaring.
When she regained her awareness, she was still clenching around the pulses of residual pleasure. Dazed, gasping for breath.
And still alone in her bed. Alone in her wrecked life. Aching for the loss of something she’d never even had.
What an idiot. Torturing herself with fantasies. She fought back the tears. She’d cried enough for a lifetime already.
Chapter
5
Marcus Worthington was in a killing mood.
Years of meticulous conditioning that Marcus had instilled into his younger brother, Faris, wiped away as if by a vicious computer virus.
All that Callahan bitch’s fault.
He would be glad when the woman was safely dead, though disappointment could drive Faris over the edge. Few people were aware of Faris’s unique abilities, and the tremendous risks involved. So far Marcus had always prevailed in a battle of wills. Still, it worried him.
The only thing that calmed Marcus when he was so agitated was puttering in his lab, playing with what Priscilla, his late father’s fourth and worst wife, was pleased to call his “toys.” She would learn soon how wrong she was about him. Just as his father had learned. The wife that had preceded Priscilla had learned as well. They all had, in the end.
But Priscilla would get a very special lesson.
Marcus teased the gelatinous mold of Dr. Driscoll’s hand out of the cast. His whimsical choice of livid, corpselike green coloring for the hand amused him, insofar as he could be amused in his current mental state. He adjusted the light to better admire the fingerprints. The loops, whorls and arches were so well reproduced, even the minute pattern of sweat glands on each ridge were duplicated.
Not perfectly, but well within the parameters of the sensor.
He pressed the hand against the Krell Systems Biolock Identipad Sensor. His own database was loaded with the same template as the Calix Research Laboratories, thanks to Caruso’s evil genius.
Negative. The machine beeped in protest. No match found.
It worked just as the Krell sales staff had promised that it would. Proof against fraud because of a complex, multi-system battery of “live and well” detection, a combination of ECG, pulse oximetry, temperature, electric resistance, and detection under the epidermis.
The Biolock Identipad wanted all five fingers, and moist, multilayered skin. It would settle for nothing else. Kudos to Krell. It was one of the most costly biometric systems on the market. Caruso himself had designed it. Marcus felt a twinge of regret that he’d been so quick to have the man killed. Craig had been useful. He’d been the one to recommend making a gummy hand with each mold, to test which image was the clearest. Marcus always followed his instructions to the letter.
But Craig had begun to play power games. Playing hide and seek with the mold of Priscilla’s hand. Talking about “full partnership.”
Marcus sprayed the inside of the negative mold with a light lubricant, and painted a thin coat of Caruso’s wizard’s brew of liquid gelatin inside it. He let it set, pressed his hand into the impression, let it bind, and slowly lifted it out. He repeated the process, taking exquisite care to match the print patterns, so as to fool the ultrasonic and electric field sensor features that tested for the print pattern in the underlying dermis. Fortunately, his and Driscoll’s hands were of similar size. The half-glove of gelatin was almost invisible.
He flexed his fingers, and pressed his hand to the Identipad.
Two seconds, and the monitor flashed. Match Found. Keith Driscoll, PhD, Laboratory Director, Calix Research Division. A photo of the chubby scientist appeared on the monitor screen, smiling broadly.
Marcus smiled back. Driscoll had the highest security clearance, surpassed only by Priscilla Worthington herself. This was well worth the trouble he’d gone to. He’d finally lured the older man up to his quarters, after months of flirting. Driscoll was a married father of three, but his preference for young men was well documented in certain circles. Marcus’s innate practicality forbade him from hiring someone else for the job. Why risk having some muscle-headed male prostitute botch this when he, Marcus, was sexually attractive enough to handle the job?
As it happened, he didn’t even have to go through with it. Not that it would have been a problem if he had. Driscoll’s middle-aged pudge did not repel him. Marcus’s sexuality was atypical. Power excited him. He was indifferent to the secondary details: youth, beauty, male, female.
Driscoll had drunk a martini spiked with Rophynol, and conveniently passed out. Marcus had taken multiple molds of the man’s hand at his leisure, bundled him into his car, and left him naked and senseless on his own front lawn.
Word was Driscoll’s wife had since taken the youngest two children back to Boston with her, and that the oldest one, studying at UCSF, would no longer speak to him. Driscoll had not looked Marcus in the eye since that night. He looked pale. Thinner. What had once been cheerful, rosy pudge was now sad, grayish sag.
Marcus studied Driscoll’s smiling face on the screen, enjoying the warm glow of pleasure that exercising power gave him.
A loud rap sounded upon the door. Marcus barely had time to toss the plastic cover over his project before the door burst open.
Priscilla marched in. She was thicker about the waist and ankles than she’d been ten years ago when she’d met Marcus’s father, Titus Worthington, owner and CEO of Calix Pharmaceuticals. Priscilla had been a researcher in one of Calix’s experimental labs. She’d dazzled the old man with her beauty, brains and forceful personality, but her face had hardened over the years. With her dark hair dragged into a bun and her white lab coat, she looked like a Gestapo prison warden.
She was shadowed by her hulking bodyguard, Maurice. She’d hired Maurice shortly after Titus’s death, and moved into her own residence as well. Priscilla was nobody’s fool.
Her eyes brushed over his various projects with unconcealed scorn. “Playing in the sandbox, are we, Marcus?”
Marcus’s hands clenched into fists, his nails digging into the delicate Driscoll glove. “Just fiddling with some new designs.”
She sniffed. “You’ve fiddled for years. You’re relatively intelligent, after all. With three PhD’s, don’t you think it’s time to stop fiddling and do something useful?”
Like plan your disgrace and ruin, perhaps? “I’m working on patenting some of them,” he said vaguely. Let her think he was a vacuous idiot. He no longer cared. Her days were numbered anyway.
“Where on earth is the domestic staff, Marcus?” she demanded. “This place is becoming a sty. The terms of Titus’s will gave you and Faris the right to reside at Worthington House for life, but remember that the place does not actually belong to you. And it never will.”
“I’m well aware of that,” Marcus said. He had, in fact, dismissed the staff months ago in preparation for the Blessed Event, which required utter privacy, to say nothing of the obtrusive presence of several armed professionals. He’d never dreamed it would drag out so long. He was tired of the dust and cobwebs himself. Another inconvenience to lay at Margaret Callahan’s door. Bitch.
“If the place falls to ruin, I will take legal action. And now, if you can drag your attention away from your toys, I have a real job for you.”
Marcus’s stomach tightened, but his smile simply widened. He’d always been good at masks. “Of course.”
“Dr. Driscoll will be leaving his post as lab director. He’s going back to Boston, for health reasons. His place will be taken by Dr. Seymour Haight, who is flying in from Baltimore tomorrow. His plane stops in Seattle for one night. The next day he’ll fly to San Francisco.”
Marcus nodded. Priscilla enjoyed humiliating him by giving him assignments more suited for a low-ranking soc
ial secretary. It was all she thought he was fit for. That, and holding Faris’s leash, of course.
“I want you to organize his welcome,” Priscilla went on. “Arrange for lab security to have his enrollment data entered into the system. Highest security clearance. And have Driscoll’s deleted immediately.”
“Of course.” He was glad he had avoided having sex with Driscoll after all. The event would have lost all its power, all its meaning.
“Arrange for housing, and a limo to pick him up at the airport.”
“I’ll need his flight info and contact numbers,” Marcus said.
Priscilla waved her hand vaguely. “Ask my staff. Melissa or Frederico should have the contact data. Tell them to arrange a dinner date for him with me that evening, too. The rooftop restaurant at the Halsey Crowne, that should be nice. Oh, yes, another thing. Where on earth is Faris? I haven’t seen him lurking about in weeks.”
“He’s mountain climbing in the north Cascades,” he said. “He loves climbing. It’s good for him. Keeps him emotionally balanced.”
“Climbing? Unsupervised?” Priscilla’s brows snapped together. “Titus and I only permitted Faris’s release from Creighton Hills on the strict condition that you would monitor him constantly!”
“Faris is under control,” Marcus soothed. “He’s taking his meds regularly. I talk to him several times a day on my cell phone.”
“I don’t care! Get him back here immediately! I cannot risk any embarrassing incidents, particularly not after Driscoll’s little scandal! The one useful function that you serve around here is to keep an eye on Faris. If you can’t even handle that much responsibility—”
“I’ll have him come home immediately,” Marcus assured her.
“Do that,” she said crisply. “I am leaving myself this week to spend a month in our lab in Frankfurt. I won’t have time to orient Dr. Haight myself, beyond our dinner date. Please do what you can.”
Such as that is, being the all-too-clear subtext.
“Of course,” Marcus murmured.
She swept out the door. Maurice’s hulking form shadowed her.
So much for Driscoll. Marcus peeled the glove off his hand and tossed the ragged, transparent scrap into the waste bin. He took the corpselike rubbery hand, grabbed a pair of scissors, and began cutting it into pieces, imagining that the hand was Priscilla’s. Heard shrieks in his mind with each snip of the blades. Chunk after chunk after chunk.
He was back almost to zero. Access to the holy of holies required the tandem cooperation of Priscilla Worthington and the lab director. Priscilla’s mold was still lost, and Seymour Haight was an unknown.
But Faris was in Seattle. Something had to be improvised, and quickly. There was no time left for the careful planning he’d done to obtain Driscoll’s mold. And Priscilla was leaving. It was now or never.
The obvious solution was to obtain a new mold, but seducing Priscilla was not an option. She loathed him, for one thing, and for another, even Marcus’s own practical attitude towards sexuality had its limits. Priscilla’s rabid security staff would not let poor Faris anywhere near her. And though she did indulge occasionally, Priscilla was far too intelligent and self-protective to be taken in by a hired gigolo.
Craig Caruso had managed it, though how he’d found the courage to have sex with that cast iron bitch, Marcus would never know. Perhaps the ten million dollars Marcus had promised had kept his dick hard enough to perform the task. Marcus shuddered at the thought.
His buyer had lost patience, after eight long months of waiting. The plan was falling apart before his eyes. Years of his life, millions of his own private money, invested in this perfect mating of profit and revenge. All blocked, because of Margaret Callahan.
He had to light a fire under Faris. He wanted this to end.
Sean’s truck was parked right in the middle of the driveway, leaving no room for Davy’s own vehicle. It wasn’t the first time. His youngest brother was careless and distracted. He also liked to make his presence felt. Usually Davy just blew it off with a philosophical sigh.
Tonight, his nerves on edge, it bugged the living shit out of him.
He parked up the street from his house and sat there for a while, staring through the trees at the lights from Mercer Island, rippling on the dark waters of Lake Washington. Struggling to pull himself together. It had been way too long since he’d gotten laid.
Humiliating, to reduce it to that, but he was a grim realist about the effects of protracted celibacy. Six months, not that he was counting, since Beth laid down the law. He’d liked Beth a lot, and appreciated the hell out of her fine qualities, but he hadn’t been up to buying her a ring.
He’d tried to make that point clear from the outset, but Beth hadn’t gotten it. Women never did. They insisted on taking it personally and getting their feelings hurt, every fucking time. He wished he could put the whole sex melodrama aside and focus on other things, but his body had other ideas. He hadn’t been able to strike a truce with it yet.
Then again, this wasn’t the prodding of generalized horniness. Steffi, the previous aerobics instructor at Women’s Wellness had been a honey-blonde with a body worthy of a centerfold spread, but she’d never inspired him to babble or grope. He’d casually considered having sex with Steffi—it had been clear that she was more than willing—but she was so damned bouncy. And her nasal voice had grated his nerves.
Steffi had left a while back to do a season of dinner theater on the coast. It had been weeks before he’d noticed she was gone.
But he’d noticed Margot, her replacement, instantly. Margot’s voice did not grate. It was low, rich and smoky, like fine Scotch. Margot glided, swayed, sauntered like a female panther. No bouncing.
He slammed out of his truck and stalked into the house. The open door swung in the breeze. Every light in Sean’s path towards the fridge had been flipped on and left burning. A murmur of voices from the back porch indicated that Miles, their protégé, student and future employee, was out there too, helping suck down Davy’s beer.
He slapped the porch door open. “The next time you pull a shit parking job like that in my driveway, I’m slashing all your tires.”
Sean froze in the act of lifting the bottle to his lips. “Shoot, Davy, that would be really counterproductive of you, being as how it would take that much longer for me to move my truck and park it according to your rigid specifications.”
“The delay would be worth it if I actually managed to make an impression in your thick skull, smart-ass.”
Miles put his beer down and got awkwardly to his feet. “Uh…should I, like, go? I’ll go take the bus, if this is a bad time—”
“Sit down, Miles,” Sean said. “This is business as usual.”
Miles dropped back into his chair and hunched down into his habitual vulture shape of which they were both trying to break him.
Sean studied his brother, a frown between his eyes. “You’ve got that puckered-butt, hollow-eyed look of a guy who hasn’t gotten laid in months. For God’s sake, grab a beer, and chill. We brought Chinese.”
“I already ate.”
“Where?” Sean demanded. “You haven’t gone out in ages.”
Davy let the screen door slam loudly as he grabbed a beer out of the fridge. As a rule, he didn’t rely on chemicals to change his state of consciousness. Fuck it. He put the beer back, grabbed a glass, and pulled out his emergency bottle of single malt.
Sean was still waiting for an answer to his question when Davy stretched out in one of his deck chairs. His eyebrows quirked when he saw the whiskey in Davy’s hand. “Mr. Pure, imbibing strong spirits? How depraved. So? Where did you eat? With who? Let’s have it.”
He inhaled, and braced himself. “Margot Vetter.”
Sean’s dimples came and went as he struggled not to grin. “Oh! Awesome. Guess we’re going to have to start calling before we drop by. It’s about time, man. I was starting to worry about—”
“Why didn’t you tell me about th
e stalker?”
Sean blinked. “From the tone of your voice, I take it you haven’t gotten lucky yet. Guess we can’t all be as slick as I am at seduction.”
“Focus,” Davy snarled. “Just answer the goddamn question.”
“I didn’t want to give you a chance to think it to death,” Sean said bluntly. “And I thought it would be a hell of a lot more effective if she asked you in person. Dewy eyes, long lashes going blinkety-blink? Full, trembling lips? Heaving bosom? And it was, wasn’t it?” He studied his brother, and repeated in a sharper tone. “Wasn’t it?”
Davy studied his brother over the rim of his glass. “Just how well do you know her, anyway?”
Sean’s tilted green eyes were unusually cool. He waited a very long time to reply. “You mean, have I put the moves on her?”
Davy waited to inhale. Seconds ticked by. Miles looked worried.
Sean stretched out his long legs and propped his boots up on the porch railing. “I tried, sure. Any straight guy with a pulse would try. Except for you, of course, but we all know that you’re, ah, special. She just wasn’t into me. It’s like when I got that crush on my high school French teacher. She just sort of pats me on the head while I pant and drool.” His shrug was elaborately casual. “I think it’s you she likes.”
Davy’s chest jerked in a convulsion that vaguely resembled laughter. “Hah. Not.”
“Really. I’ve seen her scoping you. God knows why a woman would prefer your charms to mine, but babes are unfathomable.”
“Stop busting my balls,” Davy growled. “What did she tell you?”
Sean heaved the heavy sigh he always affected when Davy refused to play along with his bullshit. “I ran into her in the parking lot the other day. She’d locked her keys into her car. She was crying.”
Davy was taken aback at the thought of Margot crying. “Her? Over car keys?”
Out of Control Page 6
