Chapter 4 #2
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.