Chapter 5
Nick dozed off in spite of himself. Considering all he’d been through that day (though he doubted it was the same day), it was to be expected.
There was also the factor of the warm, very sweetly curved woman who had turned her back to his chest and was spooned up against him, her bottom snuggled tightly into the lee of his hips and her ankles clinging around his.
It had been a long time since he had lain like this with a woman.
He’d been so damned busy lately; he had hardly had time to catch the quick, occasional screw with Lydia in the apartment three doors down from his.
She was fun, casual, and had nice tits, and didn’t expect anything more than a good orgasm from him.
That had suited him just fine. Overtime and undercover work had made everything else unfeasible.
Far be it from him to start something he couldn’t invest the proper time to.
It wouldn’t have been fair to a woman if he had.
But everything was so different now. Not just being turn out of his life so harshly, either.
As far as he was concerned, this was just a temporary glitch.
He’d had undercover work go deadly wrong before and was alive to tell the tales, and while this was obviously much, much worse than the worst-case scenario, he still believed there had to be a way out.
He was beginning to think his captors had handed it to him on a silver platter.
What if he could figure out how to call up all this new natural weaponry on command?
What else was involved in this anyway? Strength?
Was he stronger than before? He certainly felt physically more powerful.
However, he also felt he had traded it for some mental stability.
Every so often a surge of primal instinct would overrun him.
He was finding it was usually somehow connected to thoughts associated with the female lying asleep beside him.
Whatever logic or reasonable social norms his brain was used to, he knew it had all been thrust aside and there was now a single irrefutable fact.
Amara was his mate. For now, forever. Instinct drove the knowledge into him.
It didn’t care that he knew next to nothing about her.
It didn’t feel fazed in the least by her status as a stranger.
There could be a thousand things wrong with her to make her incompatible with the man Nick was.
But she was the perfect mate for the beast he had become.
She smelled like divinity to him, the aroma of her a constant depth of allure.
Now it was deeply imbedded with his, and that pleased his new beast to no end.
He smelled their sex on them, as well as the blood they had both shed, but more crucial than that was the understanding that they had both changed on some kind of chemical pheromone level.
This essential alteration was what marked her as his, just as it marked him as hers.
Somehow, he realized, the rest would have to follow this forcefully laid path.
He expected to feel a bit panicked by the noose this created around him, and by the implications that made him suddenly responsible for someone other than himself for the first time in a long time.
However, it just wouldn’t come. In fact, he was feeling quite the opposite.
He felt eager to keep her close and protected, even relishing the idea of fending off others who might try to take her from him.
He would prove himself worthy of his choice. He had no doubt about that.
Nick felt a streak of possessive need rushing dizzily through him, and before he realized it, he was stroking a proprietary hand along the length of her body until he was clutching her full breast in the seat of his palm and leaving bruising fingerprints in his wake.
It wasn’t until he smelled fresh blood that he realized his talons had extended back out, pricking her delicate flesh.
He would remember that. These possessive thoughts seemed to trigger their appearance.
Meanwhile, he felt badly for scratching her again, so he turned her gently onto her back and bent to lick a tender tongue over the wounds.
The flavor of her blood was intensely narcotic, not to mention how it felt to nuzzle himself all around her breast. He began to grow hard again, but he warned himself that this time nothing would come of it.
She was exhausted, her pale skin showing dark circles beneath her eyes.
He wanted to lick her there as well, all of a sudden, so he did.
The instinct was quite strong, as if he believed he could heal her with the action of his stroking tongue.
The truth was, the wounds at his neck and on her breast had healed far more rapidly than the shallower ones elsewhere on their bodies.
He suspected their saliva might now carry some kind of healing salve that helped to close the wounds they created.
Perhaps all wounds. This, he realized, could be extremely useful to know.
Nick would never have admitted it to Amara, but these drastic changes terrified him.
It was clear the scientists of the Phoenix Project had no sense of ethics or moral rectitude, their practices shoddy and even bordering on demented.
That people like that were behind what was happening to their bodies made him fear for the stability of it all.
It was already very obvious they had unleashed something within both of them that had probably been bred out of their species through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, lending a hand to becoming a so-called civilized species.
Were they really purposely trying to make vampires?
If so, to what end? Immortality? And it was also clear that these savages inside of them could be put aside.
Could be hidden away. Perhaps even controlled.
Maybe the intensity and violence of need they’d, experienced was because they were “new” or because of the trauma of the changes in their bodies… .
They would never know enough, he supposed.
He hadn’t said anything to Amara, but he realized that if they weren’t exactly what these people were looking for, the odds were frighteningly in favor of them being discarded and destroyed in favor of the next batch of guinea pigs.
He hoped to God they were at least close to what they were looking for.
It could buy him the time he needed to get them out of this place.
At the very least, he had to try. In the final analysis, all roads led to a bad end for them.
And it wasn’t just Amara he was worried about. He had seen the children’s center. When he’d first been captured, he’d been given a mocking, gloating tour by some maniac in a white coat named Dr. Paulson who’d shown him the building housing what had to easily be five hundred children.
“Orphanages. Gangs. You’d be surprised how often our society discards its young like trash,” Paulson said, tsking his tongue and shaking his head. “We are hoping to improve these types of human flaws by bringing out the best in our instincts.”
“Mrs. Rockwell’s third-grade class wasn’t full of orphans,” Nick spat at the other man.
Paulson was tall, elegant, and pretty much everything a handsome, brilliant middle-age doctor should appear to be, but Nick could see the feverish existence of a damaged, fanatical mind behind those deceptive blue eyes.
“Well, they are now. Their parents gave up looking for them.”
“Because their bus was found at the bottom of the fastest running river in the States! With only ten miles to the ocean outlet, they knew there was no hope of recovering their bodies!”
“But you didn’t give up, now did you, Agent Gregory? Seems you cared more about them than those who spawned them. I think that will make you an excellent volunteer for our Project.”
Nick closed his eyes and found himself squeezing hold of the warm female.
She made a responsive sound and it was almost enough to make him put aside worrying about how much trouble they were really in.
When she wriggled a bit against his awakening cock, he squeezed his eyes shut tighter and tried to think of something other than how tight and how eagerly hot she had felt as she had surrounded him earlier.
He was amazed he remembered any of the details.
At the time, he had just been about the possession, the thrust, and the climax.
Just the same, it had also all been about the woman.
The smell of her, the glorious flavor of her …
both with and without the depth of her blood.
God, he still craved that depth, he realized.
Not with the reviling hunger that had forced him to take from her, just as it had forced her to take from him, but there was no denying the desire and appeal of it that still lived within him.
However, it was no more powerful than the desire he had just then to know the flavor of her pussy.
Now, in the stillness of his human self, he realized just how much he desired to know her in normal physical ways.
Was it even possible? Would that savage inside overtake him once he became heavily aroused by her?
He was going to find out soon enough, he realized grimly. The more he thought of having her, the more his body demanded follow-through. Letting her sleep was no longer an option, though he cursed himself for the inconsiderate selfishness this beating need forced on him, and would now force on her.
Oh yes, the beast was rousing, he understood.
The question was, would Nick be able to exert any control?
At the moment, despite the demand pounding insistently through him, he didn’t feel blinded or overrun in any way.
He was pulsing fully hard along her hip, his erection rubbing against her already in absent request, but he was determined to maintain his civilization this time.