The Science of Pleasure Read online

Jenesis wouldn’t be half so afraid, she supposed, if she wasn’t already anticipating the fact that she would rather cut her own heart out than give that maniac one iota of her research ever again. That meant that somewhere in her future all she had waiting for her was the other side of Paulson’s ultimatum.

  Join or die.

  She took a deep breath, gathering herself together as she picked herself up off her heels. She shook the tears out of her eyes, lifting her chin. So be it. She would deal with that when the time came. If the time ever came. So far no conventional method short of the intense equivalent radiation dump of a radical bomb had proved capable of killing Morphate cells. As it was, they had been forced to develop a special chamber in the lab to dispose of blood specimens. On the positive side, they didn’t have to refrigerate Morphate blood. It never separated into serum and cells under normal conditions. It took a centrifuge, whereas human cells immediately began to break apart when taken out of the body. It had changed the protocol for preserving blood specimens completely.

  Meaning there was no need for protocol. No need for preservatives. No need for any of it.

  Moving to her kitchen, she pulled open the fridge door and looked for something to calm her nerves. The sight of almost completely empty shelves reminded her just where her priorities had been for these past few weeks.

  She looked at the clock. It was nearly 3 A.M. Everything was closed. There would be no delivery services, no stores would be open, and she sure as hell was not setting foot outside of her door until daylight.

  She tried not to give in to the urge to cry as she closed the refrigerator and looked around the room for something . . . anything . . . to help steady her nerves.

  And there, written across the whiteboard she’d pinned above the countertop, was Kincaid Gregory’s phone number. She’d written it there after she’d grown tired of looking for it every time she’d needed to call him to report the progress of the day. For some reason, she had always felt better making the call from her apartment instead of the lab. Frankly, whenever she heard his voice while she was in the lab, her skin went damp with a sensory memory of what his rough, dominant hands had felt like on her skin and his heated proposals had felt like against her ear. He had infected her like some kind of virus that day.

  So maybe that was why she stumbled over to the phone and dialed his number.

  He picked up instantly. He didn’t even sound as if he were sleeping.

  “Gregory.”

  “Kin? I . . . it’s Jena.”

  Silence. Then . . .

  “What happened?”

  Somehow, he knew. The understanding made her whole body go weak with relief, and she had to drag herself onto the bar stool next to the counter to keep from ending up on the floor again.

  “I was . . . I just needed someone to talk to,” she hedged. Now that she was on the phone with him she was suddenly unsure of her actions. Kincaid Gregory was no friend of hers. He wasn’t any kind of source of solace. Why was she turning to him?

  Because he was Alpha. He was the leader and the strength of the strongest of people. If anyone could keep her safe, it would be he.

  “Someone threatened me,” she whispered into the phone.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Kin didn’t bother with the elevator. He powered up the stairs at a feverish, thunderous pace. It didn’t matter that she lived on the thirtieth floor and he had been on the fifth. He took twenty-five flights without a thought, his mind flooded with an interior growl, a rage of demands and instinctual responses he couldn’t even try to soothe or sort out. He understood nothing but the realization that she had been so frightened by whatever threat she’d faced that she had turned to him, a creature she so clearly went out of her way to avoid. He knew that was his own fault, that he had given her cause to fear and avoid him.

  By the time he reached her door he was covered in a sheen of sweat and was drawing hard for breath. He was Morphate, incredibly strong and fast by nature of his breed, but he was still affected by aerobics as anyone else would be under extreme duress.

  When he knocked on the door, he knew she was right there, waiting. And still she stopped to look through the peephole, the sound of her breath reaching his keen ears. Had he not been hearing his own heart so loudly, he might have been able to hear hers, quick and flighty and fearful. When she opened the door it was only a crack, a moment to double-check it was him. Foolishness, really. Her weight against the door could not stop him from powering through it once she opened it. But this wasn’t about judging her safety tactics. Not at the moment. He laid his hand on the door and looked into the single wary cocoa-colored eye peeking through that crack in the door.

  “Let me in, Jen,” he said as quietly and gently as he could manage.

  She did. She let the door fall open as she took several quick steps backward toward the living room.

  Scylla and Charybdis. She looked like Ulysses must have looked when he had to decide between those two horrible monsters, trying to figure out which would be the lesser evil.

  He was her lesser evil in this particular situation apparently. So what could possibly be worse than him, he wondered. He shut the door behind him, looking carefully at her as he stepped a little closer to her. His eyes had already tracked over the entire apartment and assessed it for threats. There was nothing there but the two of them.

  And a chasm full of emotional flotsam.

  And the smell of blood.

  Blood.

  It drifted into his senses like the teasing aroma of fresh-baked waffles coaxing him awake on a Sunday morning. It was her blood, he knew, because its makeup was so original and distinct to her. It bore the essence of what he knew her to be.

  “You’re injured?”

  Her hand reflexively went to her shoulder. So, he thought, she’d suffered more than just a verbal threat.

  “How did you . . . ?”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  She seemed startled by the information. Jena looked at her shoulder, struggled to see over it. He took the opportunity to close the distance she had put between them. He took her between his hands, not taking her startlement as a personal insult. He turned her so her back was to him and saw the white of her lab coat stained red on her shoulder. There, in a semicircular pattern, were four tears with the taint of an odor to them. The mark of another male. A Morphate male.

  He reached for the lapels of the coat and drew it back over her shoulders. She quietly allowed him to do so. He exposed the deep punctures in her shoulder. Without the weight of her coat on her, they began to bleed heavily into the fabric of her sleeveless silk blouse.

  “He wounded you with his claws,” he told her, his fingers pulling at the edge of her blouse to expose her damaged skin. It was strange how the sight of it made him feel. It was more than the idea that someone under his protection had been hurt, and by a subordinate Morphate no less. His reaction was something he couldn’t acknowledge consciously just then.

  “He said . . .” She swallowed loudly. “I didn’t even realize he was a Morphate. My God,” she rasped. “That makes what he was even worse.” She turned around to look at him, her fragile state of mind evident in her eyes. “I think he was sent to me by Eric Paulson.”

  That name . . . that goddamn name. There was no describing the hatred it inspired in him. But he took a breath and tried to move past that instinctive reaction. There was time for that later.

  “Let me take care of these,” he said steadily, taking her arm to lead her into the bathroom, hoping she had some kind of first-aid kit. Maybe he could find some cotton to shove up his nose and block off that amazing, wondrous smell....

  “He wants to learn how to kill you,” she pressed, feeling that he didn’t understand the urgency of the situation because he wasn’t reacting the way she was expecting him to react.

  “I figured he would, Jen,” he said as he turned on the lights in the bathroom. “And not just him. Everyone wants to know how to kill us.”

/>   “Then why press to discover it yourself? Isn’t it best to leave it alone? That lab is full of hundreds of people, hundreds of witnesses you can’t control forever, Kincaid. They will all take what they learn here with them. Information will be leaked everywhere.”

  “Perhaps.” He found the first-aid kit and used the meager supplies to dress the wicked puncture marks. It was hard not to give in to the urge to bend his head and lick his tongue over those painful marks. Instinct was demanding he do so on two levels. First, he wanted to wash away the taint of the other male on her. Second, he craved the taste of her on his tongue in a way that almost blinded him.

  Instead, he used gauze and conventional methods. He didn’t know how he managed it, but he did. Even so, as he taped up each puncture, his anger began to boil higher. Paulson had made this threat for several reasons. Trying to manipulate Jenesis was only one of them. The more important message was being sent to Kincaid. It was Paulson’s way of telling him that all of his precautions, all of his power, and all of his security meant nothing. It was his way of telling Kincaid that he was still nothing but a lab rat within his reach, and that Kin was never going to be free. He would live and die at Paulson’s whim.

  Seven years later, he still remembered the feeling of being under that man’s utter control, of knowing there was nothing he could do to get away. He remembered the devices in his body that had kept him in line; the measures that had been used to keep him tame. The white walls. The gray sweats. The tests, the drugs, and the constant measuring of his every body function . . . the monitoring of his every physical or emotional reaction to something. That had been his life for weeks before Paulson had changed his strongest and healthiest specimens into Morphates in a mass genetic experiment.

  Kincaid hadn’t realized Jenesis had turned around to look at him. He didn’t realize the expression on his face was radiating his every thought, his every fear. She saw his emotions in the widening pupillary reaction that made the crisp blue of his eyes little more than an accentuating rim.

  “What is it?” she asked him in a whisper, her hand reaching to touch his bare chest. Her belief that he’d been wide awake when she had called him had been wrong. Clearly he had been asleep. He hadn’t even stopped to dress himself properly before running to her side. He’d thrown on jeans and nothing else, leaving his feet as bare as his torso, his short, spiky hair sticking out in haphazard directions.

  “Nothing,” he said with a shake of his head.

  They both knew he was lying. But he wasn’t going to tell anyone about the things that haunted him. All of the things that haunted him.

  Including the way she smelled.

  She was wearing her golden hair in a ponytail, the end of which was stained red where it had touched her bleeding wound. He reached out for the tail, pulling it forward over her shoulder, drawing it up to his nose where he could smell the floral richness of her shampoo, the hairspray she had used to tame it, the perfume on her own hands that had been transferred to it as she had absently stroked her hands over her hair throughout the day.

  And, yes . . . blood.

  His eyes closed as it invaded him, called to him, begged for a deep, instinctual reaction from him. Kincaid took a deep breath, gritting his teeth as he looked down at her.

  “If I were human,” he said, “I would be more considerate of how you are feeling right now. I would consider your injured state. I would take a great deal of care with you.”

  “But you’re not human,” she said breathlessly. “So what does a Morphate do in this situation?”

  “He protects you. Fiercely. Savagely, if need be.” He pulled on her ponytail, drawing her closer, breathing a strangely relieved breath when she rested against his body. “And he reacts to his needs. Selfishly, it seems. Because I haven’t been able to rid my mind and senses of you since the first day I met you. You irritate everything inside of me. I shouldn’t even care that you’re hurt by the man you once colluded with to hurt me.”

  She didn’t argue the point. She was tired of defending herself. He could see that, even as he knew the wording was unfair and perhaps designed to piss her off. He needed her to get pissed off . . . he needed something to get in his way. Anything. Because as it stood, he was plowing a path that was incredibly dangerous. Especially for her.

  “A Morphate male smells the blood on you and lets it call to him. Lets himself seek it out,” he continued as he bent his head until his lips were touching the outer shell of her ear and the strands of her hair were filtering through his fingers. “Send me away, Jenesis, before I drink you to exhaustion. But not before I fuck you to within an inch of your life.”

  He watched her oh so carefully, wanting her to look horrified and offended, wanting her to throw herself away from him and accuse him of being the bastard that he was. Why wouldn’t she? How could she possibly understand the Morphate drive that was motivating him? Surely she would envision the damage he could do to her fragile human self if he were to be given his head.

  But she did none of that. Instead, she leaned into him just a little farther, touched her nose to the back of his jaw, and took in a deep breath. Took in the smell of him.

  That was all he needed.

  Kincaid grabbed her by both arms and propelled them both out of the too-small bathroom that he could barely move in. He burst into the living room with a mere pair of strides and found the nearest wall to slam her up against. He was too rough; he could tell by the breath that kicked out of her. But he ignored the sound as he buried his face deep against her neck and simply smelled of her. Her and the blood inside of her that he wanted so damn badly. But that was just the beginning of it all. Not the be all and end all of it. There were so many delicious things about her that he had wanted since he’d first laid eyes on her, always in antithesis to what his brain tried to lecture.

  “Is this another experiment for you?” he wanted to know on a deep, dangerous growl. “Another curiosity you must satisfy no matter how perilous it might be for you?”

  Jen was breathing hard, a world of excitement shuddering through her from blood to bones. She had never felt anything like this primal mixture of fear and excitement.

  “Is there a measure of curiosity involved? I’d be a liar if I said no. There is always curiosity between new lovers. Isn’t satisfying those curiosities so much of what motivates us all?”

  “I am not motivated by curiosity,” he reminded her, yanking her up tight against his mouth as he opened it on the fragile skin of her shoulder. “I want to eat you. In every way possible.” He let his tongue splash across her in a long swipe, first in one direction and then the next.

  An X to mark the spot.

  “Oh, my God, you just made me wet,” she gasped as she dropped her head back against the wall.

  He had, indeed. Suddenly the aroma of her excitement was drifting into his senses. And just as suddenly he wanted to drink her in a completely different way. The stimulus of the thought had his claws and fangs lengthening into readiness. The whole of his mouth ached with the craving. Before he knew it, his hands were dragging at her skirt, pulling it up around her hips, exposing her as he moved back just enough to see her.

  “Oh, Christ on a goddamn cross,” he swore heavily. She wore garters. Straight and professional, neat and beautiful on the outside, but hiding something blessedly naughty underneath it all. Pristine white garters to match the sweet white panties she wore. A goddamn virgin sacrifice the way a man would want to have one. “Bad, bad girl, Dr. DeBruehl.”

  “T-they’re practical f-for a tall woman. Pantyhose never fit right.”

  “Bullshit. Own it, Jen. You like the way it feels. Every so often in the middle of all that science in your day you stop and remember you’re wearing these sexy little things. You remind yourself that you’re a woman underneath it all.”

  “A practical woman,” she allowed with a mischievous smile. That gorgeous little smile of trouble made him suddenly weak in the knees. He let them bend and collapse, kneeling at
her feet, his knees braced on the outsides of her ankles as his hands coasted down her hips and onto her thighs. How had he missed the fact that she had the most amazing legs? Pretty pale skin was everywhere, as well as the smell of her, which had intensified with the relocation of his nose. He leaned forward, burying his face directly against the silky white fabric covering her mound. He exhaled hard through the fabric, sending his hot breath against her. He felt the quiver of response that shuddered through her thighs. Her hands came to his head, her nails blindly plowing through the short edges of his hair. The sensation sent nerve impulses down through his body, making his cock ache as it shuddered through the thickness of his erection.

  Jenesis felt his fingers hook through the wet crotch of her panties and he pulled them down her legs as far as the garters would allow him to. His fingers were shockingly burying themselves in her pubic hair and the folds of her labia the very next instant. He pulled her forward onto the open mouth and tongue he had waiting for her. She cried out as her long-dormant sex drive was called to attention by the swipe of his tongue over her clit. There was no seeking. No hunting. He knew exactly where to find it and wasted no time making use of it.

  And all the while she knew he was thrusting that tongue against her through long, beautiful fangs. It hardly took anything at all for her to launch into a fast, fierce little orgasm. She came into his mouth with a startled cry, the sensation ripping through her almost painfully dazzling. Tears sprang up into her eyes and she quickly tried to blink them away. He wouldn’t understand. He wasn’t there to be understanding. Nor would he care that she hadn’t been touched since her boyfriend had walked out on her in the wake of her fall from grace seven years ago.

  He was there for one thing only. And that was fine with her.

  Oh so fine with her.

  She couldn’t know what the creaminess of her response on his tongue was doing to him. He couldn’t have even explained it. The Morphate inside of him wasn’t interested in anything but reflexive need.

  He surged up to his full height, towering over her as she drew rapidly for breath. His fingers were still toying with her sex, making her squirm up onto the tips of her toes as she became overstimulated in the wake of that unexpected orgasm. He was breathing in deep, growling gusts against her face, forcing her to smell herself all over him even as he stared down into her eyes.