Virtually Hers (Super Soldier Spy #2)

Chapter One

Remote viewer. Supersoldier-spy. Sex maniac. Now that was some resume for a future job application when she retired from this crazy life.

Helen splashed cold water on her face. It didn’t help cool her down one bit.

That weird sensation was bothering her again, like invisible fingers, up and down her heated skin, barely brushing the surface of her body.

It moved like an electric current, giving little shocks of awareness whenever something came into contact with her skin too long.

It was as if her nerve endings were working overtime, overwhelming her senses with details that would normally be routine.

She wiped her face with a dry towel from the rack. Like this cloth. Its softness. The way it caressed like a...like a lover’s hands. Like that night.

The thought evoked memories that brought a hot flush through her body.

She thought of how she’d lain in bed, half-dreaming, half-coming out of an erotic dream, and feeling a hundred times more sensitive than she did now.

She’d called out his name and he’d appeared—like magic—in the cover of darkness, taking her by surprise, and unhinging the last shred of control she had.

His seduction and her capitulation were complete.

Dammit, dammit, dammit. Stop thinking about Hades. Stop thinking about his hands and lips.

“Okay, let’s be rational about this,” she said out loud, tossing the towel into the laundry basket. “You hadn’t had sex in months and months and then you took this drug that suppresses your body chemistry, and during the downtime, this sexy man seduced you and gave you the best...”

No, no, no, no, no, this was exactly what she was trying to avoid thinking. The stupid night was all about him having his way with her and she had willingly let him pleasure her any damn way he pleased.

Oh, she could give an excuse or two—that she’d been under the influence of the serum, that she wasn’t herself that night—but it all boiled down to the fact she hadn’t fought him at all. That she’d actually enjoyed being under his control. Every orgasm had left her wanting more.

“Arghhhhh!” Helen shrieked out in frustration, storming out of the bathroom. The memory of her orgasms was making her insides tighten with sensitive need.

What killed her was she still didn’t know who the hell her trainer was. She was in lust with a persona she’d created in a virtual reality program.

“How lame is that, Helen Roston?” she muttered.

He was too damn clever. She had been so excited to be the winning candidate for the experimental “Super Soldier Spy” program.

COS Command Center, the agency which had contracted her to win this project, had immediately prepared her for their version.

The first few months were easy for her since it was all physical challenges, training she’d already undergone as a candidate.

However, the next level involved virtual reality, something that tested her physical and mental stress levels.

When she was told she had control over what her trainer would look like in virtual reality, she’d thought it was the scientists and programmers testing her.

Her new trainer was going to be an avatar, a “personality” she herself imagined and created with a nano-digital program, because they didn’t want any contact between the two of them while they set and synced their brainwaves.

She had rubbed her hands in glee. She couldn’t resist the fun of putting together a dreamboat of a man for a personal trainer. And while she was at it, why not make him naked too? Heck, she hadn’t seen a gorgeous naked man in a long time, so here was a chance to indulge herself.

Helen wanted to smack herself now for swallowing the bait.

Looking back, she realized—too late—that he’d been studying her all along and looking for ways to get in under her radar.

He found one. How could he not, when every single thing she’d done for the last two years was probably there for him to look at, inspect and analyze?

She sat down at the desk and turned on the computer, leaning back in her chair as she watched the screen. What was he doing now? Had she gotten Jack Cummings’ location right?

She sighed. Virtual reality and remote viewing. Science and weird science, and she was the conduit. Her trainer, the virtual reality version, was supposed to be the monitor, someone to anchor her while she was remote viewing, making sure she didn’t stray too far into the ether.

She had a real-life monitor when she was in the CIA remote-viewing program, so she hadn’t questioned about working with a virtual monitor.

Trainer-monitor was a generic enough term that it’d escaped her notice, besides training her, he was also “preparing” her mind to respond to his will.

All in virtual reality, with their brainwaves synchronized.

Insidious bastard. Normal monitors use an image as a mind trigger, projecting it to the remote viewer to anchor them to the physical place.

However, her damn monitor wasn’t normal, not in the least. The experiment was done in virtual reality so her mind could project what she saw into her monitor’s mind; he would be able to see exactly what she was seeing and thus, there would be no secondhand reports.

She should have seen it coming. A normal trigger wouldn’t work because that was just a basic “knock on the door”.

Her mind had to be kept keenly aware of him while she was remote viewing.

A sexual trigger, on the other hand, was a whole new ball game.

The more aware she was of him, the more he was able to be “present” in her remote-viewing sessions, and oh, was he good at making her very aware of him with his sexual games and magic movement-inhibiting pills.

Helen gritted her teeth. Now, if it was possible it could get any worse, something had happened to her that she hadn’t imagined possible.

The serum, a bio-neuro blocker, created so the remote viewer could function without rest and under stress, had tricked her brain into overcompensating the chemical balance in her body during the downtime.

Simply put, whereas under the influence of the serum, she’d been unable to feel pain and stress, now that the drug had dissipated, she was extremely sensitive to touch and feelings.

Every sensation filled her with an overwhelming need that confused and even scared her.

Because she hadn’t slept throughout the whole mission, everyone had expected her to immediately rest up during her downtime, except that she couldn’t. It had felt like walking at the edge of a cliff. In the dark.

Until Hades surprised her with a late-night visit.

She hadn’t known it, but he’d understood.

Her body, injured and stressed out from the drug, and now bombarding her with too many neuro-signals, wasn’t going to relent until she gave in to an outlet.

It seemed that the antidote to an overload of neuro-blocker was excessive sensation that needed to be allayed.

Fighting it only made it worse. The edginess wasn’t going to go away by itself.

Helen pulled her hair up, one hand opening a desk drawer to get a scrunchie. Even the feel of her hair brushing against her skin was bothering her right now. It was definitely coming back.

She needed to concentrate on what she’d been thinking about instead of her body. Normally, she was a logical operative, able to connect unrelated things in many a puzzling situation. That ability had saved her ass many times. Her friends had called it intuition.

Whatever. Intuition or sixth sense, it was telling her now that it wasn’t just the after-effect of the serum.

Something had happened to her during the test mission when she’d gone off after the decoder.

Those few minutes, while running down the stairs, she’d experienced pain to the point of blinding her.

It was so bad she’d almost fallen down the stairs.

She licked her upper lip and frowned as she tried to ignore the temptation to do that again. She touched her fingers to her lips. He hadn’t kissed her that night, not on the lips. How would it feel—

Helen! Stop this!

She needed to focus. She had this theory about what happened—

But the memory of the feel of his mouth on her breasts kept intruding.

It was like tunnel vision, every part of her zeroing in on how it’d felt as his tongue tortured her nipples, his teeth nibbling the soft flesh around them.

It’d been incredibly erotic to just lie there in the dark, unable to fight the waves of pleasure that pulsed through her, unable to see the face of her lover, as his hands and mouth explored her, giving her what her body was craving.

Helen could hear her own breathing becoming agitated.

She shook her head, uselessly attempting to shut the images out, but it was difficult when her body appeared to be responding to the stimulus.

Her eyes widened at the sight of her nipples straining against her shirt.

Touching them with a fingertip, she gasped at their sensitivity. Pebble-hard.

She took in a long breath. Her cotton shirt scraped her skin gently as she exhaled loudly.

Just as before, the more she fought, the more her body and mind demanded release.

And because he’d planted that sexual trigger in her head, of course her brain was using thoughts of him to feed what her body was craving.

Sexual trigger. Chemistry. That and what happened at the stairwell. These were all somehow linked. If only she could stop getting distracted and overwhelmed by all these feelings...

Abruptly, she leaned forward and tapped at the keyboard, hooking into the COMCEN database and opening the program that had created the virtual reality avatar. She pulled up the original model she’d worked on, the one that became the avatar, and stared at him in all his naked glory.