The Science of Pleasure Read online

  He said nothing, making the point on his mind by suddenly thrusting two large fingers deep inside of her, his lips remaining at a distance from hers. He would show her no affection, she thought even as she struggled up onto the tips of her toes in reaction to the stimulation. He felt no affection for her. She was pretty sure he didn’t even like her. He was responding to a mating instinct, pure and simple. Regardless of what his mind might think of her, his biological imperatives were telling him she was an ideal mate.

  It was sort of a compliment, she supposed. It told her that she was somehow superior in genetic material. Physically, intellectually . . .

  Jena gasped as he thrust inside her again, wriggling his fingers in such a strange, thrilling undulation that she felt her whole body go weak and wet once again. That made his lips quirk up on one side. Perhaps a smile, perhaps an expression of superiority.

  His free hand came up to streak across her body suddenly, half-extended claws ripping through the silk of her blouse, shredding it until he could pull it down her arms enough to expose the front of her torso and effectively pinning her arms to her sides as he twisted the torn fabric together and held on to it. At that same instant she felt what those half-grown claws felt like inside of her body, scraping against her cervix in a way that made her whole body jolt with the amazing ratcheting sensation of another orgasm building rapidly up inside of her. She was gasping in uncontrollable bursts of breath as he lowered his lips to her ear.

  “With a Morphate female, we can smell her ripeness. She is aware of when she is prime for the making of a child. And the exchange of blood between mates during sex readies her reproductive cycle.”

  Jena would probably be the only woman on the planet who would find such information an absolute turn-on. It didn’t hurt that he was leaning his big, heavy body against her, rubbing himself against her like a cat might rub its owner.

  Then very abruptly he was away from her, flipping her front to back and stripping down the tattered remnants of her blouse. His hands raked over both of her hips, snapping the fragile garters easily and doing the same to her panties. He was able to spread her feet apart then, able to pull her hips out from the wall and into the cradle of his pelvis. Heated denim rubbed coarsely against her, as if he wanted to fuck her in spite of the impediment. Jena braced her palms against the wall, but a warning hand on her back prevented her from pushing away. Not that she was of a mind to. She was too overwhelmed by sensation, her head spinning as an unbelievable craving overcame her.

  He leaned his head forward, sniffing at the wound he had dressed, deep, intimidating growls punching out of him. He stripped away the bandage and this time gave in to the desire to lick her wounds. He couldn’t fuck her with the smell of another male seeping into her in even the smallest way. It made him angry that she had been hurt. It made him angrier that another male had dared to mark her first. He would remember that scent, though. As he washed it away with his tongue, it sank deep into his memory so he would know it the instant he came across it once more.

  Then he would rip the fucker to shreds.

  Oh, the dismemberment couldn’t kill him . . . but it would hurt. A lot. Death was an agonizing experience . . . even more so when you couldn’t actually die.

  But all of that was pushed aside as a deeper need overcame the Morphate male. The need to take her. His way. And immediately. He was beyond the point of recognizing the dangers of that prospect. The animal inside of him had chosen its mate and nothing was going to gainsay him. Besides, looking at her, all unkempt and naked, all curves and femininity and nothing there reminding him she was the buttoned up brilliance that had made him what he was, he just wanted to ease the pounding need inside himself.

  Kin ripped open his jeans, freeing his enormous cock, letting it fall against her curvy little ass, barely registering how massive it seemed to be in comparison to her petite backside. One hand reached for her hair, stripping it out of that neat ponytail and giving himself a mess of gold to grip on to. He fisted his hand into it and fit the crown of his penis to the entrance of her body. Driven purely by mating need, an overwhelming mating need, he began to thrust himself into her.

  Jena cried out almost immediately. It didn’t register on him that it wasn’t a good sort of sound. He continued to try to force himself in, the clawing urge to come inside of her blinding him to everything else. There was no describing or controlling the imperative that overcame him. Even he was shocked and overwhelmed by it. He had felt Morphate need before, but nothing like this. And the tightness of her closing around him seemed to make it more and more intense by the second. In the back of his brain the man that he was whispered fiercely of the things he understood about women and their needs, but for some reason he could not make any of it come into play. This was a fuck. The Morphate wanted a fuck. It demanded it single-mindedly.

  Jena was in pain. She couldn’t see the size of the erection being pushed inside of her, but she didn’t need to in order to understand that it was insanely out of proportion to her own body. It was a hell of a time for her to recall that there was a reason why Morphate males had required a specialized line of condoms in order to fit their exaggerated parts. It was a hell of a time for her to realize that he wasn’t even using one of those condoms.

  She didn’t realize that the Morphate inside of her had never, ever forgotten a condom.

  Instead, Kin couldn’t distract himself from the idea of spilling himself inside her. He couldn’t make himself fit inside her entirely, hard as he tried, so he had to be satisfied with a little over halfway and began to thrust in rapid succession into her.

  Jen stretched to suit him, albeit painfully. But after a while that discomfort became something distant and unimportant, even though it never actually went away. The surge of all that masculinity up against the back of her body, the repetitive jolting she took against the wall, somehow overcame his lack of attention to her body in other ways. The primal starkness of it made her breasts and chest go heavy and hot; she creamed over him and it eased him along. He hit her harder then, a fierce snarl of need and coming climax barking out of him. And suddenly he jerked her back by her shoulders, throwing her head against his collarbone, and ferociously bit down into her in the very spot he had marked on her earlier with his tongue.

  The agony was shocking and she screamed, but even as the fire of it burned through her she felt him starting to come in hard, savage bursts. The wildness of it touched on something that years of evolution couldn’t breed out of her, though she had never known it was there. She exploded into the rawest and most shocking orgasm of her life. She would have thought there could be no pleasure in any of this, but there it was, spiraling through her and all around her. And every single sound he made, every growl big or small, sent a sense of wicked satisfaction down into the deepest core of her body. She took him and let him take her, in every way her limited humanity allowed her to do.

  Kin could hardly decide which felt more glorious, the raging release inside of her or the heated delight of her blood sliding down his throat. Blood to him did not taste like blood had tasted when he had been human. Though there was that tang of salt and iron, there was a sweet, savory dimension to it that his human senses had been incapable of appreciating. And that was just the general bouquet of it. The special nuances that were Jenesis and Jenesis alone, nuances that no other woman would ever be able to duplicate, were unbelievable. It went through him like a potent liqueur, spreading warmth and languor in his chest, belly, and limbs.

  His mouth came away from her ravaged shoulder, his forehead falling forward against the wall as he tried to catch his breath. His cock was still hard, still inside her, wrung out from his orgasm but clearly he was already contemplating using her for another. He felt the wetness of his come oozing all around himself as it sought ways to overflow her tightly occupied body. She was slick with sweat from head to toe, only her skirt bunched up around her hips providing evidence that she had been fully clothed just minutes ago. He was support
ing a great deal of her weight, he realized. He turned his head a bit so he could see her face. Long, pretty blond lashes were resting against her cheeks, her eyes closed as she drew hard for breath. Her hands were against the wall, curled into fists.

  The sight of her, just the aspects of her face, the paleness of her skin, and the smell of her in a postcoital state made him want to do it again. And again. The desperation of the thought took him aback, even as he felt wet warmth against his chest and realized he had unthinkingly left the wound on her shoulder open and bleeding. Bleeding quite freely down her back and chest at that. Her blood was seeping into the matte white paint of the wall where her breast touched it.

  She went suddenly lax against him, and every protective instinct in his being raged violently to the surface.

  No! No, I won’t hurt you! Caring for you is my everything. It will be my everything!

  He could no more control the thought than he could the impulses that came next to cradle her back against his body, pulling himself free of her while he brought her shoulder up to his lips and the intense brush of his tongue over her weeping wounds. There was something inside of him that would not only clean the area free of immediate bacteria, but would seal it and protect it from further infection. It was a secondary system, really, meant to support the powerful healing capabilities of a Morphate mate. Had she been Morphate, the wound would already be well into the healing process.

  But she was not Morphate.

  The understanding rang through him like a shrill note. Because she was not Morphate, he would need to protect her even more carefully. She would need all the protection and attention he could muster. Nothing must happen to her.

  Nothing could happen to his mate.

  “Jenesis?” He breathed it softly against her cheek.

  “I’m fine,” she said so quietly he would have thought he’d imagined it had he not seen her lips move. But those lips were lacking their usual soft coral color, telling him she had lost a little too much blood for her system to handle. He had not taken much...

  . . . for a Morphate mating.

  “But you’re no Morphate woman,” he said under his breath as he scooped her up off her feet and carried her in to her bedroom.

  “I’m woman enough,” she pointed out with a mysterious little smile rippling over her pale lips.

  5

  Kincaid was at a loss. He didn’t know how to react to all of the things he should be acknowledging and reacting to. He was acting on autopilot, his Morphate self seeming to have a better idea of what was to be done in the situation at hand. He laid her down on the bed and immediately took his place beside her. His hands shaped their way over every inch of her, inspecting her for further damage. He tried to recall reactions to his bestial handling of her that he’d had no interest in earlier. Suddenly what had started out as a passing mating impulse had taken on a far deeper aspect to that stubborn creature living inside of his skin.

  Over the past seven years Kincaid had struggled with his animalistic self, trying to come to grips with it, trying to come to some sort of understanding. Just when he thought they had come to an agreement, that he would relish the beast’s power, strength, and immortality, and the beast would have to be content to work within his moral compass and self-control, the Morphate inside of him would go and do something like this.

  “See what your curiosity has gotten you?” he said starkly, even as he let careful hands run down the length of her milky white legs. Here was a woman who so rarely saw the light of day, who had no interest in tanning beds and other such vanities. She didn’t care if she was perfectly kempt or coifed. She was tasteful, wore pretty, delicate clothes, keeping in touch with the need to present herself professionally and elegantly. Just enough, but not beyond. Her legs were shaved, her pussy was not. She was not a woman behaving in expectation of a lover.

  Not that he had any right to call himself a lover.

  “This was hardly a lark to satisfy doctoral inquisitiveness,” she said with a sigh. “No scientist with proper ethics would use herself as part of an experiment. Nor would she make a sentient being like yourself feel like he was little more than a lab rat.” She reached out to touch her fingers against his hair. “I am not Eric Paulson.”

  Well, shit. That made Kin feel even worse.

  “How do you feel? Light-headed?” He wanted to bark at her, growl at her for her utter foolishness in giving him permission to treat her in such a disconnected and selfish manner. But it wasn’t Jena he was truly angry with. His reaction left him feeling quite confused, really. How had everything devolved into this situation so quickly? How had he woken from his bed and ended up in hers in what had to have been under an hour?

  That fucking animal inside him had wanted its way, no matter what, and he hadn’t been able to gainsay it. Now he was left to pick up the pieces and figure out what the hell to do with her. And on top of it, he was overwhelmed with a compulsive urge to treat her caringly, gently, and protectively. The beast whispered things in the back of his mind that made no sense to him, that he did not want to listen to.

  Goddamn it, he was in control here! He was the one who was going to manage his life. He had a specific goal as far as Dr. Jenesis DeBruehl was concerned, and nothing was going to change that!

  “Are you hurt . . . anywhere else?” he asked her in a rough bark of demand.

  “There’s no need to be polite, you know,” she said wearily.

  “I’m a big girl. I can make big girl choices. I can take their consequences.” She moved out of the shadow of his protective body and went to sit up, but he grabbed her by the arms and forced her back against the pillows.

  “And you are going to faint like a big girl, too, if you get up right now, Jena. You’ve lost a lot of blood. I can see it all over you. And I know you can feel it. Christ, you’re stubborn!”

  “Back at you,” she muttered. “I’m almost positive the gene strands you have are shared with wild primates and canids, which accounts for the tendency to express an Alpha hierarchy in your groups. But the way you act sometimes, I’d swear they shoved you full of bull and mule.”

  “What’s your excuse?” he shot back at her. “You are like a dog with a bone in that lab, day after day immersing yourself in every test and discovery you can wrangle. You’re trying to make up for what you let get by you in the past. You can’t do it, Jen. You can’t fix it. No matter how many Band-Aids you come up with.”

  “Screw you,” she spat irritably, her head spinning and her stomach lurching with queasiness. “I’m a fucking brilliant geneticist, Kincaid Gregory. If I spend enough time, I’ll figure out exactly what that prick did to you, and I’ll figure out how to fix the damage too!”

  Kin raised a brow at that.

  “So that’s what you’re aiming for? You want to change us back?” He sighed. “Jen, the Morphates of Dark Philly are only one of six different protocols Paulson created. Each building in the Phoenix Project had a different experiment going on, a different twist on the theme. He dumped his poison into us, no doubt looking for the best result out of the six. My brother is very different than I am. He is much more clearheaded, has far more control over his beast. Some of the others on the council . . . in Phoenix it’s more like a pride than a pack. They are more cat than dog. In L.A. they’re more like . . . I don’t know . . . insects. It’s more like they have a queen, rather than an Alpha. With all that variety, do you think you’re smart enough to figure it all out? To fix it all?”

  Jenesis turned her head to the side, tears threatening in her eyes as frustration burned through her soul. She had not realized the Morphates were so different from one another. How could she have? There was just so little known about them.

  “Then . . . even if I do figure out how to kill a Morphate, Kin, there’s no guarantee the process will work on all of them. That changes everything.” She ran her hands back through her hair in frustration. “It means I have to find the thing that made you all immortal and find a way to interrupt
the process. Without Paulson’s science and notes, that will be almost impossible.”

  “Then maybe we ought to be looking for Paulson,” he said darkly, giving her a deep, inspecting look. “But all of the cities and the Federated government have been doggedly trying to do that for seven years. We haven’t found so much as a single reliable clue to his whereabouts.”

  Jenesis looked at him suddenly, a bright light abruptly entering her eyes. It was very contradictory, to see her so pale and weak and yet suddenly so full of inner strength and determination.

  “That’s not true,” she said in firm words.

  It took a moment for Kincaid to catch up with her thoughts. But barely a moment. He’d been a cop for too long, had come up with the solutions to too many problems not to suddenly see what she was thinking.

  Yes, of course! Paulson had just about walked into this very building and handed him the key to finding him. He could use Jena as bait somehow.

  “He wants to know what you know just about as badly as we want to know what he knows. Paulson believes that you are going to be the key to figuring out how to kill Morphates.”

  “Why wouldn’t he? You certainly did.”

  “Yes,” Kin said with a frown. “I did. But it took me a long time to get you here. I needed money. To build a proper facility. If he wanted you, why not take you before this?”

  “He doesn’t want me. He wants the solution. And he’s clever enough to let you spend the money and manage the financial headache of supporting me while I am trying to discover it.”

  Kin’s laugh was short and wry, and obviously bitter.

  “I swear, I’m never going to get away from that motherfucker. He’s going to haunt my every step from now until the day I figure out how to die.”