Cassandra blinked in amazement. “You’re sure these marks aren’t tattoos and the three women—maybe even the GTECHs—are in on his together—trying to get attention?”
“That was my first thought too, but there’s no ink, and we’ve attempted surgical removal unsuccessfully. The mark regenerates immediately.”
“Wow,” she said, blown away. “Just wow.”
“You can say that again,” Kelly agreed. “One thing about this job—it’s never boring.”
That was an understatement. “Aside from the immunity to the camouflage—what kinds of effects are these marks having on these women?”
“In the women, some specific blood work changes that appear to be nonmalignant. None in the GTECHs involved. Interestingly enough though, the couples are quite attached to one another, and the men quite protective of the women. Now—is that because of the marks? I don’t know. Obviously, these couples were having sex, so they were already attracted to one another. Did the marks occur because of a deeper emotional bond, or did the deeper emotional bond occur because of the marks? I have yet to answer those questions. But, needless to say, we’d prefer to avoid further incidents until we know more. The men weren’t happy when I handed out condoms en masse to the troops. Not needing a condom was a bit of cold comfort for being made sterile by the GTECH injections.”
“You can’t be sure they’ll take precautions though,” Cassandra objected. “What about the dangers to the general population? What if this tattoo marking comes with dangers we don’t know about yet?”
“Two hundred GTECH soldiers and who knows how many sexual partners, yet only three women have been marked. Laboratory studies are inconclusive, but we’ve run test after test, and we’ve found nothing environmental, no set of stimuli, that re-creates that mark. And believe me, we’ve tried thousands of combinations. The odds of this mark spreading across the general population, even with unprotected sex, are next to zero. Even lower if at least a portion of the men actually use the condoms.” She eyed her watch. “The weekly department-heads meeting starts in an hour. It’s always… interesting. Why don’t we grab some coffee, and I’ll brief you before heading in that direction. Bring your files, and I can answer any questions.” The suggestion of coffee sent her thoughts darting to Michael and his words. I’ll ask again. Disconcertedly, Cassandra shook off the memory and cleared her throat, not used to being this distracted unless it was with her work. “Yes. Okay.” She pushed off the lab stool and reached for her files as they headed toward the door.
“You know,” Kelly said, mischief creeping back into her voice as they headed toward the door. “I’ve seen many a woman drool over Michael, but I’ve never seen Michael look at anyone the way he looked at you by that elevator.”
The out-of-the-blue comment took Cassandra off guard, and she cut Kelly a sideways glance. “What look?” she asked, with a delicate snort. “The man was all emotionless steel.”
“Oh, he had a look,” she said. “How does it feel to be wanted by ‘The Dark One’?”
“The Dark One?” Cassandra asked, shaking her head at the strange name.
“That’s what everyone here calls him. You know—because he’s all dark and intimidating.” She laughed. “They’re afraid he’ll kill them if they look at him the wrong way.”
Cassandra gaped. “Kill them?”
Kelly chuckled. “I’m kidding, or mostly kidding. The stories of Michael are darn near legend, though half of them are probably not even true. The whole lethal-in-battle and lethal-in-bed kind of typical soldier talk. They say he’s different than the other GTECHs.” Before Cassandra could ask how, Kelly wiggled an eyebrow and added, “He’s certainly got that tall, dark, and sexy thing going on, doesn’t he?”
Cassandra shook her head. “Oh no. You aren’t luring me into saying he’s sexy. I’m here to do a job, not drool over the soldiers.” Though silently, Cassandra wasn’t sure “sexy” even began to describe Michael’s appeal.
“You don’t have to admit it,” Kelly said. “I saw the look on your face, too, at that elevator.” She grinned. “Just use a condom.”
Heat rushed to Cassandra’s cheeks. She didn’t need a condom! Or a soldier to fret over, especially a man who apparently had plenty of other women to do it for her. No way. She was not having sex with Michael.
***
Late that evening, Cassandra sat at her simple steel desk in her still barren office—now her home away from her not-so-comfortable home—trying to focus on the GTECH file and failing. She grimaced, giving in to the temptation driving her to distraction, and punched in Michael’s name. He was thirty-four, five years older than she was. Of course, who knew how the GTECH serum would affect his aging process. She could turn into an old lady, and he’d never age a day. She didn’t like that thought much and moved on. He was from California and… holy moly. His family owned Taylor Industries, one of the largest weapons manufacturers in the world.
She sat back in her chair. There was no way his being here was a coincidence. Her father, of course, had to know. She’d bet her weight in chocolate that Michael was here because her father believed he could be useful in the future, if not already. Cassandra sat up, keyed again. Sure enough, Michael had been the only soldier pulled from his Special Ops unit and brought to Groom Lake. Her father was nothing, if not strategic. He’d wanted something from Michael beyond his battlefield skills. He wanted that connection to Taylor Industries.
“What are you up to, Father?” she whispered. “And why do I know it’s not a good idea?” Frowning, she stared at the computer screen. And what made someone like Michael, who had to be filthy rich, join the military? Family trouble was the usual answer. She’d seen it plenty of times. Cassandra tabbed down the computer screen, reading the details of how Michael’s father had died in a small plane crash in Saudi Arabia when Michael was twenty-one. She checked the record. That happened a year after he’d entered the Special Forces. Michael had been on a mission and didn’t hear about the death until after the funeral. His mother now ran Taylor Industries. So even after his father died, Michael had stayed in the army, which meant he wanted nothing to do with the family business. Or his mother didn’t want him involved.
“How’s my favorite daughter doing?”
Cassandra all but jumped out of her skin at the sound of her father’s voice, finding him standing in the doorway, a smile on his face, looking sharp as always in his well-decorated uniform, his gray hair trimmed neatly.
“I’m your only daughter,” she reminded him, wishing he’d share that smile with the staff at Groom Lake who feared him far more than they should. “And that joke is older than you, Father.” She had no idea why she felt like a kid who’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
“The old ones are the good ones,” he said. “Remember that.” In tip-top shape and looking far younger than his fifty-five years, he lent truth to that statement.
“I don’t have to,” she said. “You remind me often.”
He studied her with a critical eye. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”
“I’m a workaholic, like my father,” she said.
“And if your mother were alive,” he said, “she’d hang us both up by our toes.”
Even two years after her mother’s car accident, the reference to her passing made Cassandra’s chest tighten uncomfortably. “As my psychology mentor, she’d be as nuts as I am over the incomplete evaluations done on the GTECHs.”
“I have no doubt,” he said. “But before you dive in and try to conquer a year of what you see as our deficiencies, I want you to focus on a specific list of ten soldiers of special interest to me.”
“What kind of special interest?”
He shut the door. “They’ve all tested positive to a certain gene we’re calling X2. We have animals in the lab also testing positive that are showing aggressive tendencies we need to be certain don’t translate into our GTECH population. We need to rerun all baseline evaluations and whatever extra testing y
ou deem necessary, then ongoing evaluation.” He fixed her in a silvery stare. “The animals and the soldiers seem to be showing the gene growth somewhere in the twelve to fifteen months post-injection range.”
Cassandra ground her teeth. The fact that he, and the government, had withheld the experimental compound of the immunizations from the soldiers was completely despicable. But she’d stated all her objections to how the GTECHs had been created before taking this job. Heard all the vows that the GTECHs were created by accident, when they—meaning the army, though she translated that to her father—were simply protecting them from a biological threat. Considering her father was all about protecting his country at all cost, and though he meant well, often went too far by her standard, she wasn’t completely sure she believed that claim. She suspected she’d hear the soldiers voice the same concerns once she earned their trust, which she fully intended to do. In fact, it was her objections to how the GTECHs were created, and then how little emotional support they’d received regarding that creation—rather than her father’s urging—that had finalized her acceptance. Her father wanted her for the job for her skill and the family loyalty her mother had often given him. But like her mother, who had often worked by her father’s side, Cassandra wanted to help the soldiers he employed. So, like her mother, and out of character to her true self, she did what most people did around her father and bit her tongue.
“Let’s have a father-daughter breakfast in the morning,” he ordered rather than asked. Her father didn’t know how to operate outside of giving orders, even when he simply wanted father-daughter time.
Knowing this, and seeing it as his form of affection, Cassandra smiled. She didn’t always approve of her father’s ways, but she loved him deeply. “I’d like that.”
“I’ll pick you up at seven,” he said, giving her a nod before disappearing out the door, and leaving her with a sense of unidentifiable dread that lingered for the next hour.
Finally, tired and ready for food, she exited the building and headed to her car, only to be greeted by a perfectly flat, perfectly defeating, tire. “Great,” she mumbled, setting her files inside on the backseat and then pulling the tight knot at the back of her hair free to release the ever-growing tension there. She glanced around, looking for the resource never in short supply on a military base—a soldier or two or three, who could be easily convinced to lend a helping hand.
Suddenly, her hair lifted around her neck, a soft breeze picking up momentary speed with a raw masculine scent touching its depths. A second later, Michael appeared before her, as big and broad and devastatingly “sexy” as he had been this morning.
“You really should come with a warning alarm of some sort,” she said, fist balled at her chest to calm her pounding heart.
“So I hear,” he said, his too-blue eyes flickering with a hint of unreadable emotion before he glanced at her tire. “Looks like you need help.”
There was something overwhelming—perhaps decadent even—about this man that had her struggling to remember how to form a proper sentence. “I… yes, please.” Cassandra brushed a lock of blonde hair from her eyes and glanced at the elevator, then him. “Was that you this morning holding the elevator for me?”
He kneeled down to inspect her tire. “Yeah,” he said, tossing her an amused look over his truly spectacular shoulder hugged by a nice, tight black tee. “But apparently, strange men and elevators don’t work for you.”
Cassandra felt her cheeks flush. “I had a call,” she said. The look he gave her said he wasn’t buying it, so she added, “Okay fine. I’m not beyond admitting I was a little intimidated. You wind-walked without any visible wind. I didn’t know that was possible.”
He pushed to his feet and ignored her comment. “You’ve got a screw the size of a rocket launcher in that tire. It’ll have to be replaced.”
Cassandra wasn’t letting him off that easy. “Can everyone wind-walk without any visible wind?”
“I can,” he said, his lids half-veiled now, his jaw a bit more tense. “I don’t pretend to speak for anyone else.”
Kelly’s words played in Cassandra’s head. The stories of Michael are darn near legend. “You’re the only one who can do it, aren’t you? That’s why people talk about you. Because you’re different and it scares them.”
He stepped closer to her, so close she could feel the heat of his body, so close she had to tilt her chin to look him in the eyes. They flickered and then turned solid black. “Do I scare you, Cassandra?”
Oh yeah. He scared her all right, but not for the reasons he assumed. This man reached inside her and demanded a feminine response she wasn’t prepared to give him. In fact, standing there, looking into his eyes—she didn’t care if they were black or blue—they spoke to her in a soul-deep way that told her far more than she thought he knew. He was showing her the GTECH, and instinctively, she knew he needed her to see the man. “I’ll make you a deal, Michael Taylor,” she said. “I’ll be scared of you when you give me a reason to be. But just so you know, being all broody and showing me how well you can shift your eye color isn’t doing the job.”
Surprise flickered across his handsome features, and for a moment she almost thought he might smile. She wanted to see that smile, for reasons she couldn’t explain, and hung on to a thin string waiting for it, until the moment was gone. Until he said, “Let me take you to dinner. I promise to work on being scarier while we eat. And for added effect, I’ll replace your tire when we get back.”
Warnings played in her head at the invitation. He had a slew of females. She didn’t date soldiers. Her father wouldn’t approve. But still, she found herself looking forward to the challenge of enticing that elusive smile. She playfully replied, “I’m up for the challenge if you are.”
Those black eyes shifted back to blue fire, filled with enough heat to make her knees weak. “I guess we’ll see about that.” He fished his keys from his black fatigue pants. “I’m parked over in the corner.”
“What?” she teased. “We have to drive? We don’t get to wind-walk to dinner? Superman used to fly Lois all over the place.”
“While I’m never against a little comic book fantasy,” he assured, “I’m no Superman, believe me, and you’re not Lois—not unless you’re looking for a near-death experience. It’s dangerous for humans. Sometimes even fatal.”
“Oh,” she said, surprised, walking with him toward a row of cars. “That’s limiting. I thought you could just pop in and rescue someone and be done with it.”
“Gives me an excuse to keep Carrie,” he said, stopping next to a classic black Mustang.
“You named your car Carrie?” she asked, surprised yet again by this man. He was far more human than people made him out to be.
“She’s the friend who has never failed me,” he said, pulling the passenger door open and waving her forward.
“She’s also a psycho demon character from a Stephen King novel,” she reminded him. “Not sure that’s a friend I want to have.”
“You won’t say that after you ride in her,” he promised.
All too aware of his warm stare, Cassandra slid into the car, sinking into the soft leather surrounding her, a moment before he shut her inside. The friend who has never failed me. Someone had not only failed Michael in the past, they’d hurt him doing it. And that hurt was a part of how he defined who, and what, he was. Maybe it even made him as lethal as everyone seemed to believe him to be. Maybe she should be afraid of him. So why wasn’t she opening the car door and getting out?
Besides, how could one little dinner date be dangerous?
Chapter 2
Michael walked into the Kuwait City Fish Market off Arabian Gulf Boulevard in street clothes—casual jeans, a black T-shirt, and shades covering his eyes. It was two weeks after meeting Cassandra, and he was on a mission, but in one hell of a foul mood, never something that boded well for his enemies. After four casual dates that had somehow not ended up in bed, despite a damn near primal need to strip her
naked and have his way with her, Michael had sworn off seeing her again. And not because he wanted to. He wanted that woman like he had never wanted anything. She was full of life and intelligent, like his mother had once been before his father had shredded every bit of soul she possessed. And as his mother often said—Michael was nothing, if not the spawn of his father, a man who knew way more about death than he did about life.
The foul scent of the dead fish flared in his nostrils, made worse by the heat radiating beneath the canvas roof that covered the displays, reminding Michael he had a little of that death to deal today. He hated the smell of dead fish almost as much as he hated the smell of blood, but sources said Raj Mustafad came here every Friday to buy his fish, which meant Michael had to endure the stench. Raj was their link to an Iranian terrorist group which was hell-bent and on their way to the annihilation of Israel by biological attack.
Michael knew the instant Raj walked into the market, having memorized his photos. Three tables of stinking fish separated them, which Michael quickly remedied, fading into the wind and reappearing beside Raj, not giving a crap about witnesses. Not in Kuwait City where people were afraid to speak their names for fear of being stoned to death in the streets.
He grabbed Raj by his long robe and flung him onto the center of one of the tables of fish, the slimy bodies smashing beneath him and flopping off the table. He pointed a gun at the man’s head and spoke in Arabic. “Where are the canisters?”
Screams sounded behind him, as the fish market cleared. Shouts called out for the military forces nearby. The wind shifted, and Michael didn’t have to look to know Caleb and Adam Rain, identical twins, stood behind him, covering his back. He trusted Caleb completely, but Adam, not at all. Adam was a loose cannon developing a God Complex who Michael might one day have to kill to spare Caleb the pain of doing it himself. He suspected that was why Powell kept him paired with the two brothers. Because he knew Michael wouldn’t hesitate to kill Adam no matter how much he respected Caleb. But for now, the two brothers made an impermeable shield, and Michael had a job to do.