But the look in her eyes worried him. Like she wanted to smile but wouldn’t let herself. The wind ruffled her dark curls. Her eyes were bright and clear as she waited patiently for him to speak.
He took her hand, that being as good a place to start as any. “Dani.”
She covered his battered knuckles with her other hand, assessing the new scrapes and slashes. The bands around his wrist from the night with the Manticore wakey-wand were now just bands of shiny pink. She traced them tenderly with her fingertip. The sensation went straight to his dick.
Not now. This was not what this conversation was about. Later for that.
“It’s incredible,” she murmured. “How fast you heal. I totally love that.”
“Dani,” he said roughly. “The last time I tried to say this you shut me down.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but he hurried on. “Let me finish. You thought I was too messed up. For what I said to be real, I mean.”
“Luke,” she said gently.
“I know you think you can’t trust what I say to stay true. But I—”
“I trust you,” she said.
He stopped, reeling. “Huh?”
“I trust you now,” she said again. “With my life. You’re as solid as a rock. Say anything and I’ll believe you. You always came through for me. Even when I didn’t trust you, you came through just the same. I think you’re awesome.”
His mind had gone blank. No words. All he could do was feel this wild new feeling inside him. Like the sun coming up, but inside his chest. Shining out of his face.
“Damn it,” he said. Confused, but in a good way. “Now I lost my thread.”
Dani lifted his battered knuckles, kissing any patches she could find of unscabbed skin. “Take your time,” she said softly. “I’m not going anywhere. We’ll find your thread together.”
“But…you saw Obsidian. You saw what’s hunting us. Can you deal with that?”
Her mouth twisted in a mischievous smile. “It’s a little late to ask me that,” she teased. “I’m on their hit list now whether I like it or not. They saw me, they’ve got me on video, they can probably even get samples of my DNA if they try. And so?”
“But…but your chance of having a normal life is gone.”
She shrugged. “My former normal life wasn’t all that freaking fabulous anyhow. I’m going to miss Millie, and my friends, and the good people I worked with. But I hope there’s some way for me not to leave them hanging, wondering where I disappeared to. I hate to do that to them. It’s cruel, and rude.”
“There isn’t a way,” Luke said. “Not until we take Obsidian out for good.”
“OK,” she agreed promptly. “So let’s do it.”
He blinked, and realized he was grinning. “Just like that.”
She shrugged. “Somebody’s got to.”
He laughed out loud. God, he loved this woman. This kickass, badass, gorgeous woman. “Wow,” he said. “Ambitious.”
“That’s me.” Her eyes were so direct. “Evildoers, watch out. They’re going down.”
He nodded. “OK. So, that’s the grand plan. But in the meantime, we need, you know. A life.”
“I’m looking forward to that. You’re fun. And hot. And incredibly fine. You know what? I can’t wait to get you alone. So I can totally blow your mind.”
“Oh, yeah,” he groaned under his breath. “Oh, please.”
“Preferably someplace where your family can’t hear us,” she added demurely.
“Uh…I’ll think of something.” Fast. He was already evaluating possible places.
But Dani wasn’t finished. “If I have to look over my shoulder for Obsidian goons for the rest of the foreseeable future, it better be with a sexy badass supersoldier who has my back. And heats up my bed.”
“Anytime,” he said distractedly. “You got it. I’ll do anything you want me to do. But I want to be more than that to you. I want to be your man. I want everything. I love you, Dani LaSalle.”
She laughed, but her eyes were wet. “You take everything so literally. Let me spell it out for you. I love you right back, Luke Ryan. I want to be your woman, your lover, your wife. I want the whole package. All of it. You and me. For as long as we get.”
There was nothing left to say now that couldn’t be said better by wild kissing.
So they got right to it.
If you liked In My Skin, keep reading for a peek at the first two Obsidian Files books, Right Through Me and My Next Breath, both available now!
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RIGHT THROUGH ME
Stranger, speak softly . . .
Biotech tycoon Noah Gallagher has a deadly secret: his clandestine training as a super-soldier gives him abilities that go far beyond human. Yet he’s very much a man. When Caro Bishop shows up at his Seattle headquarters with a dangerous secret agenda, his ordered life is thrown into chaos. Caro is a woman like no other—and her luminously sensual beauty cloaks a mystery he must solve.
Caro’s lying low, evading a false charge of murder. She means to clear her name, and she’ll do whatever it takes to survive—but seducing a man like Noah is more than she bargained for. His amber eyes have the strangest glow when he looks at her—she could swear he sees the secrets of her heart. The desire smoldering in Noah’s eyes awakens her own secret hunger, but Caro has to resist his magnetic pull. Anyone close to her becomes a target. The only right thing to do is run, far and fast, but Caro can’t outrun Noah’s ferocious intensity—or deny the searing passion that explodes between them.
Nothing else matters—until a vicious enemy bent on the ultimate revenge puts his murderous plan into play. Noah and Caro must battle for their lives . . . and their love . . .
Chapter 1
Someone just cut the lights. What the hell?
Noah Gallagher put down his pen and looked around, startled, as drums began to thump from the hidden sound system of the penthouse conference room. Some exotic instrument joined in, throbbing and wailing.
The door to the conference room opened to a shimmery jingling sound, then a flash of fluttering purple. Everyone at the table was staring and murmuring.
Oh, Christ. Not possible. Noah rose to his feet, but the belly dancer was already halfway through the door, her hands weaving in a hypnotic pattern. Wide, light-catching green eyes laughed at him brazenly as she shimmied straight toward him, leading with one pulsing hip.
Her eyes caught him . . . and held him.
The world narrowed down. Whatever he was going to say or do stopped. Words were gone. Air was gone. Air didn’t matter. Nothing moved while she moved.
She had commandeered all movement. With that smile. Those eyes.
He was sitting again, with no memory of deciding to do so. His mind had gone blank. The woman was like a walking, breathing stun code, personally keyed to him. He’d always wondered how it would feel to be one of the unlucky chosen few at Midlands who’d gotten stun and kill codes embedded in their minds. His own brain implants had been bad enough. Stun and kill codes were worse.
But this dancer wasn’t a goddamn stun code. She was just a random woman, shaking her stuff. When her act was done, he’d pull it together. Exert the fucking authority he was entitled to as the CEO of Angel Enterprises.
He had exactly until the music stopped to get control of himself.
Simple enough to figure out who’d dreamed up this unwanted birthday present. His younger sister Hannah lurked by the door. The wide-angle enhancement of his sight made it possible to see the gleam in Hannah’s eyes without looking away from the belly dancer for a single second.
Not that he could have looked away.
He saw his fiancée Simone’s fac
e with his peripheral vision. She’d chosen to sit at his side for this important meeting. It was painfully obvious from her tight, expectant smile that she was waiting for him to turn to her, to smile and laugh and make light of this stupid situation. Not just for her. For everyone in the room.
He couldn’t do it.
Try. Do an analog dive. Grab a hook. Concentrate.
A spotlight from somewhere gilded the dancer’s body, highlighting every perfect detail. Silver anklets that jingled over her small, bare feet. Golden toenails. Shapely legs flashed between purple veils that floated from a low-slung, glittering belt. The belt and top were swagged with shining chains and dangling beadwork. Still more chains, draped from an ornate headdress, dangled over her forehead and under her chin, creating a constant soft shimmer of sound.
High, full breasts quivered, lovingly presented in the spangle-studded velvet bra. She arched back, floating a purple veil edged with spangles high in the air above herself and swishing her thick fall of glossy black hair around. Had to be fake hair, falling to well below her ass. It brushed the curve of her hips. Fanned out as she twirled.
Everything he’d monitored in his peripheral vision was gone now. He no longer saw Hannah, or Simone, or anything else. His inner vision was too busy with the vivid fantasy of that woman straddling him. Imagining her bold, sensual smile as she swayed over him, teased him. Running her fingers through her hair, lifting it, tossing it. Coiling it around her waist like a slave rope.
He wanted to rip away all the filmy veils and all the goddamn beads and chains. See her bare-assed. Bare-breasted. Yeah.
The deep curve of her waist was perfectly shaped for his fingers to grip. The curves and hollows of her belly and her hips looked so soft. Touchable.
His hands shook with the urge to reach, stroke. Seize.
The rush of erotic images ramped up his advanced visual processor into screaming overdrive. Even with eyes shielded from eighty percent of the ambient light, even using a double layer of custom-designed shield specs, his AVP combat program was off and running, scrolling a thick column of data analysis past his inner eye.
And even that couldn’t distract him from her show. Not for one instant.
His heightened senses reached out, so greedy for more that he found himself actually taking off the back-up shield specs. He’d have popped out the contacts, too, but his AVP was already going nuts at the lower protection level. Combine that with adrenaline, and a huge blast of sexual arousal—fuck.
The light level in this room could zap him into a stress flashback if he didn’t protect his eyes. Not only that. The dark shield strength contact lenses hid the animal flash of amber luminosity caused by his visual implants. Outsiders couldn’t be allowed to see that. The room was packed with outsiders. He wanted them gone.
Especially Simone. Which made him a total asshole. He tried hard, really hard, to feel guilty. Not so much as a twinge. His conscious mind had been almost totally hijacked by the dancer.
He wanted to throw everyone else out and lock the door. Study that woman with his naked eyes, dancing under the spotlight. But only for him. He wanted to gulp in the whole data flow. It was being filtered out in real time and lost to him forever, and it drove him . . . fucking . . . nuts.
And he couldn’t do a thing. Not with an audience. His fists clenched in fury.
Heart racing, temperature spiking. Sweating profusely. No way to hide it. It was an AVP stress dump. A massive dose of fight-and-conquer energy, channeling straight into his dick, which strained desperately against his pants.
He struggled to grab onto the analog hooks that he’d established. His hooks were emergency mental shortcuts, activating an instant, deep withdrawal into the ice caves of his subconscious mind when the AVP got out of control. Best way he could devise to calm his stress reactions and stay on top of himself.
Not a hook to be had. Couldn’t find them, couldn’t feel them. Couldn’t use his highly developed power of visualization at all, after years of grueling practice. All gone.
He was fully occupied imagining that woman naked and writhing beneath him.
His intense reaction to this spectacle made no sense. He’d seen belly dancing before and been unmoved. He did not have complicated fantasies or fetishes. He didn’t even get the fun factor. He wasn’t known for his sense of humor. In fact, he had no imagination at all, unless you counted biotech engineering designs, or plotting ways to grow his business, or scheming to keep his chosen family alive, secret, and safe.
That demanding enterprise left no bandwidth for fun and games.
He wasn’t playful about sex, either. He was tireless, focused. Relentless in making sure that his partners were satisfied. To the point of exhaustion, even. Theirs, not his. They would tell him he was the hottest lover ever and then call him cold.
So? Noah didn’t do emotions. Cold was safer for everyone concerned.
Not that he could explain that to whoever happened to be in bed with him.
He couldn’t change his nature. He saw to it that his lovers had many orgasms to his one, to compensate for those mysterious intangibles. Whatever the fuck else they wanted from him, it just wasn’t there. He didn’t even know where to look for it.
The dancer’s arms lifted, swayed. He inhaled the scent of her dewy skin as she spun closer. Fresh, sweet, hot. Sun on the flowers. Rain on the grass. His mouth watered.
Since what happened at Midlands, his senses were sharper than normal by many orders of magnitude. He had ways to blunt the overload, but not this time. He was catching a full data load now, shields and all. Tripping out on her undulating hand movements.
He was reading her energy signature, right through the shield lenses. A cloud of hot, brilliant colors surrounded her. Her floating purple veils blended with trailing clouds of her body’s energy, to which his AVP overstimulated brain assigned all the colors of the spectrum and more besides. Colors not visible to anyone but him.
Along with it a strange sensation was growing. Tension, anticipation. Dread.
He was used to being alone in an insulated bubble. Other people’s drama raged outside that protective barrier and left him completely untouched. He needed it that way to stay in control. Maintaining isolation required constant effort and vigilance.
Now, suddenly, he wasn’t alone. The girl had danced through his force field. Invaded his inner space. It was messy and crowded in there now.
She took up room. Confused him with her colors, her scents. Her smile was so unforced and sensual. She was bonelessly flexible, yet still regal in her diaphanous veils.
It made him jittery to have someone so close. The intimacy felt awkward. Ticklish.
He felt hot, red. No control over his face. Stuck here, sitting among colleagues and family, right next to his fiancée. Any one of them could watch him watch her. At least the massive conference table concealed his colossal hard-on.
He had not felt this helpless since Midlands.
Her luminous green eyes met his and then flicked away, but the electric buzz of that split instant of intimacy jolted him to depths he’d never felt before.
He knew he’d never seen this woman before, and yet he recognized her.
* * * *
Caro narrowly missed slamming her hip into the table. For the third time.
Look away from the guy, for God’s sake. Get a grip. It’s just a dance.
But her gaze kept getting sucked back to Noah Gallagher, the birthday boy. Ultra-powerful CEO of the oh-so-myserious Angel Enterprises, cutting-edge biotech firm.
The man was gorgeous. Barrel chested. A dense slab of muscle. Short hair showed off the sharp planes and angles of his face, a wide, strong jaw. He wore shaded glasses, but he’d taken them off a few seconds into her dance. It was incredibly hard to stay focused on the music and remember her moves while being examined with such blazing intensity. It wiped her mind blank
. Made her lose the thread.
To say nothing of her physical balance.
Holy flipping wow. They said he was turning thirty-two today, but he seemed older, or maybe it was just his expression. Each time she twirled, she snagged a new yummy detail. The shape of his ears. Thick, straight dark brows. Sexy grooves framing a stern but still sensual mouth. Sharp cheekbones. His face was a taut mask of tension, as if he were suppressing strong emotion. But it was his eyes that really got to her.
His scorching laser focus made her temperature rise. She’d always been sensitive to the quality of a person’s energy. Noah Gallagher’s energy dominated the room. He looked like he’d tear you to pieces if you gave him any trouble, despite the elegant suit that sat just right on his huge shoulders. He didn’t laugh or look embarrassed like most men did when surprised by a belly dancer. He just sat there, with the charged stillness of a predator poised to spring. Radiating danger.
Her smile faltered as she shimmied and spun. Suddenly, she was hyper-conscious of the erotic allure of the dance. His silent, very male sexual energy made it feel deadly serious. As if they were alone, and she’d been summoned for a private, uninhibited performance designed to drive him crazy.
Oh my. What a stimulating scenario.
She was actually getting aroused. For the love of God. Rising panic began to shred the sensation. Enough of this ridiculous crap. She had to get out of here, and fast.
Finish the dance. You need the cash. He’s only a hot guy, not a celestial being. You’re freaking yourself out. Chill. Usually she spread the wealth, bestowing flirtatious smiles on everyone. Not tonight. They weren’t feeling it. Young men were usually always enthusiastic, and there were several of them here, but no one made a sound. Tension was thick in the air. No laughter, no snickering, no whistles.
Who cared. Her mind was fully occupied with the task of not gaping at Noah Gallagher’s godlike hotness. Being aware of every inch of skin she displayed to him.
Her gaze bounced across the blond woman who sat next to him. A little younger, but not a colleague or an assistant. They sat too close together for that. The woman’s mouth looked tight and miserable. Next to her sat a flushed, heavy older man who stared fixedly at Caro’s beaded bra, nostrils flared.
In My Skin (The Obsidian Files Book 3) Page 31