Chapter 3 #2
Jenesis cleared her throat and tried to take a step back from him.
She couldn’t focus clearly when he was leaning up against her, oozing all that masculinity all over her.
She needed to gather her professionalism back up.
She needed to remember to approach him in a completely clinical manner.
“If you want me to do my job effectively, I have to maintain a clinical distance.”
“Fuck your clinical distance,” he told her in no uncertain terms. “Your clinical distances have done you no favors, Jenny. Hasn’t that been proved?”
“Don’t call me J-Jenny,” she stammered.
“What? I’m not good enough to know you that well?” he demanded of her, his hands closing tightly around her arms. The only thing he didn’t do was to give her a good shake. But somehow she felt it was only through a tremendous act of self-control that he did not.
Jenesis pushed a hand hard against his chest, an act of resistance in gesture only because they both knew she didn’t have the strength to fight him off for real.
They had already had one tussle that had proved that.
But this act, just like the earlier slap, grabbed the attention of the civilized man inside of him.
“I don’t like anyone to call me Jenny,” she bit out between tightly clenched teeth. “Do you want me to tell you the story about the uncle who called me Jenny and liked to touch me a little too lovingly when I was a kid, or will you give me the common courtesy of respecting my wishes?”
The remark, so full of acid and so cutting, made Kincaid go quite still. He didn’t let her go, didn’t allow her distance; he couldn’t control himself to that degree in that moment, it seemed. But she had his full attention.
“So not Jenny,” he said. “Are you opposed to Jen? Or am I supposed to call you Doctor, like a well-behaved lab rat should?”
Jenesis imagined this had been part of Paulson’s protocols during the Phoenix Project.
It wouldn’t have surprised her if the maniac had reduced his human specimens to numbers.
She glanced through the glass to the rows of rats in the next room.
Each was numbered quite carefully. But invariably someone working with them would get attached enough to one or two of them and give them nicknames.
It always happened that way. Personalizing the animals was just part of human nature, even though they knew the rodents were not likely to have very long lives.
Kincaid Gregory’s need to call her by a more personal name, however, seemed to be more seated in the need to strip her of her power and title of “doctor.” Honestly, who could blame him?
The last doctors he had come across, no doubt, had been …
“Jenesis or Jena. Not Gina … Jen-ah.”
There was something to that well-practiced distinction. But just the same, Kincaid saw it as a form of progress. Maybe even a form of advantage. But he didn’t know to whom the advantage was. He didn’t want to examine his own motivations too closely.
“I should make you continue to call me Mr. Gregory,” he said, his smirk at her dirty look the closest thing she figured she would ever get to having Kincaid Gregory lighten up. She decided she would take what she could get. “But Kincaid or Kin works. Just don’t call me Rat Number One.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” she told him, this time succeeding when she tried to step away from him.
Perhaps he didn’t realize it consciously, but personalizing her with a mutually agreed upon nickname gave her an altered status in his subconscious.
It was enough to give her the right to a little bit of distance.
But she made no mistake about it. Kincaid Gregory had claimed dominance over her, and he would find a way to prove it if he could.
She was starting to see the base characteristics of what he was up close, rather than reading about those traits from a distance.
She might have wondered if this whole project was a matter of biting off more than she could chew, but she felt it was more than fair that she be made to face the ramifications of her work up close and uncomfortably.
Besides, what better way of understanding what had happened than by putting it all under scrutiny?
She couldn’t truly understand a creature if all she was going to do was study it behind the safety fences and glass of the zoo designed to keep her safe from it.
She needed to work with the Morphates. To watch them eat, sleep, breed, and interact in all manners natural to them.
And most importantly, she needed to see how their humanity had survived in them.
Nick and Amara Gregory, the Alphas of Dark Manhattan, seemed as normal and civilized as a human could be.
They were intellectual and practical and well-spoken whenever they made public appearances or spoke for the needs of their breed.
But here was Nick Gregory’s very own brother, and while he was also intelligent, he was clearly not so able to manage his baser side. He certainly made very few public appearances. That was why she had not been able to place his face when she’d first seen him.
“I was wondering …” she began awkwardly, not knowing what would set him off next.
“Morning, folks.”
The lab tech sauntered into the room, hitting the lights as he went, for the first time making Jenesis realize she had been maneuvering with only sunlight from the outer windows to light her way.
Considering the vastness of the lab, that was highly insufficient.
But Kincaid Gregory had had her so flustered from the start that she hadn’t even thought about it.
“There’s bloodwork to be analyzed,” she said, gesturing to the tubes and their colored stoppers that spoke for themselves as to which tests would be wanted.
“Sure, Dr. DeBruehl.” He clapped his hands together, rubbing them eagerly. “Let’s get this show under way, eh?”
His eagerness made her smile. His name tag said, TAD UNDERWOOD, SENIOR PHLEBOTOMIST. That meant he was going to be in charge of her phlebotomy lab.
“Thank you, Mr. Underwood,” she said with a smile.
But her smile faded instantly when an aggressive sound rolled out of the Morphate who was suddenly standing up against her once more.
Her entire back half was plastered with muscle and heat and the implied aggression that came with it.
Jena’s heart leaped up into her throat, her whole body going hot and cold all at once.
The sensation was too overwhelming to sort out and the moment too dangerous to waste time thinking too deeply about anything.
Tad went instantly stiff at the aggressive sound, but a moment later he lowered his head and eyes, bending his neck and completely submitting to the other male in the room much the way a wolf in a pack would show submission to its leader.
The action fascinated her, as did the way Kincaid significantly relaxed behind her, although he was still preening with dominance.
In a heartbeat she had learned that Tad was Morphate and she had just learned something about Morphate social structure.
If it truly was akin to the ways wolves behaved, then that meant Tad knew who his leader was.
But the interaction had gone a step beyond that.
Of course Tad would know who his leader was.
They all would. The only reason for Kincaid to feel he needed to set Tad down with a sharp reminder would be if he was marking new territory.
Or more specifically, warning a male away from a female he had claimed for himself.
Jenesis’s face burned with embarrassment and anger.
She reached behind herself and grabbed hold of Kincaid’s shirt along the button line, using all of her strength to jerk him forward in her wake.
He was so surprised to be manhandled in such a way that he stumbled along obediently.
She had no doubt that he was surprised. For the past seven years he’d probably had people, Morphates, bowing and scraping at his significant dominance.
He’d probably gotten used to no one countermanding him in any way.
She yanked him into her office at the center of the labs, slamming the door shut so hard that she might have shattered the glass in it if not for the metal reinforcement running through it.
Then she turned on him.
“You listen to me, Kincaid Gregory,” she railed. “I’m going to have a hard enough time earning the respect of the people in this lab on my own merits. I don’t need your Morphate posturing and whatever the hell that was supposed to be undermining my authority here!”
“This is a ninety percent Morphate-populated lab, Dr. DeBruehl,” he said with an almost wickedly mischievous smile.
“They know who you are, what you’ve done to help them become what they never asked to be.
There’s only one way they’ll ever respect you, and that’s if a stronger Morphate than they are tells them to. ”
“I don’t believe that,” she argued hotly.
“By your theory, you’re all no better than animals following instinctual demands.
But in just a half hour in your company I can tell you that you are better than that!
Like all humans, you have tendencies to be savage and the ability to be civilized.
You are the one in charge of which you choose to indulge in from one moment to the next! ”
“How interesting that you’re so sure of that after less than a few hours in Morphate company,” he said dangerously.
Next thing she knew he had hold of her beneath an arm and was hauling her up against the door.
He slapped a button near the lock as he did this and all of the glass windows around them clouded over, going completely opaque with smart glass technology and blocking the arriving technicians from seeing into the room.
They were instantly closed away. Jenesis was neatly cut off from everyone.
As thick as the glass was, she doubted anyone would even hear her scream.
Not that it mattered. With the pecking order being what it was, she doubted anyone would dare to challenge this Morphate male.
She doubted any of them gave a damn what happened to her.
His blue eyes, so remarkably pretty and yet so bitingly cold, fixed on to hers and he gnashed his as yet fangless teeth at her, growling menacingly in her face.
“Fuck you too!” she blurted out, unable to hold her tongue or her temper any longer.
She wasn’t going to get a damn thing done in an environment where she was going to be everybody’s scapegoat and whipping boy.
She might feel guilty and have regrets, but she was going to make amends her way, not his.
Her surprising show of backbone brought him up short. No, more than that. It turned him on. As much as it impressed him, it excited him. A lot of things about her, he realized, excited him.
He wanted the realization to revolt him. He wanted the logical human she kept insisting still existed inside of him to find her offensive and insulting. Instead, she kept sinking into him with these claws of inexplicable attraction.
Purely physical, he told himself hastily. She was attractive, smelled good, and appealed to the beast inside of him with her smooth skin and gorgeous blond hair. He wanted to fuck her, he acknowledged. But he wanted to fuck a lot of women. It came with the Morphate genes.
“Hmm,” he rumbled in her face. “I can take that as an invitation.”
That speculation made Jenesis catch her breath. He’d made no further overt moves on her, but her brain immediately started to recall his earlier blatant actions. And those recollections came with uncontrollable responses.
But despite all his threats and all the privacy and opportunity he had given himself, Kincaid suddenly pushed away from her, pulled her out of the way of the door, and yanked it open.
The minute he did so, the smart glass went clear because it needed a continuous connection to maintain the current that excited the particles within it and made it go opaque.
He strode out of the door like a dark storm menacing the sky.
The lab was still only lightly populated, but as she watched him leave she saw each person he passed react.
She immediately could tell who was Morphate and who was human.
The distinction fascinated her, even as she dropped into her desk chair and tried to figure out how to catch her breath.
And how she was going to spend the next several years in head-to-head combat with Kincaid Gregory.