by Cherry Adair
“Mom’s home from Outer Mongolia.” Steve Pool, their twenty-three-year-old climatologist, shot her a smile as he rose. “Coffee’s fresh. Want me to get you some?”
“Please,” she said with feeling as she walked across the room, greeting everyone as she went. She removed her gloves and coat, tucking the gloves inside a pocket before hanging the coat over the high back of the only empty chair.
She looked from face to face. “Well?”
“Let us put it this way, boss,” Joanna, an atmospheric scientist and temporary head of the Foundation’s think tank, began with barely restrained excitement. “We’ve gone from hopeful, but skeptical,” she said, “to guardedly optimistic.”
Joanna was forty-three, to Serena’s thirty-three. But she looked considerably older than that. Her short, no-nonsense hair was prematurely graying, her skin had seen too many drastic climate changes without moisturizer, and she didn’t seem to give a damn about what she wore beyond its functionality for a particular task.
She’d had a tragically brief marriage, only four years. Twelve-year-old Casey was in an English boarding school. Over the years, he’d come to various job sites on his school holidays and Joanna’s demeanor instantly changed. She clearly adored her only child.
Serena felt a twinge of envy. Not that she was in any hurry to listen to her biological clock, but there were only so many times she’d be able to hit the snooze button.
Serena liked Joanna a great deal. She might be brisk and standoffish when it came to her work, but she had a wicked, dry sense of humor, and a way of speaking her mind that didn’t ruffle feathers. The Foundation, and Serena, were damned lucky and grateful that Joanna had been willing and qualified to step into Henry’s shoes after his sudden stroke.
Joanna sounded excited—well, as excited as Joanna ever sounded—but Serena noticed the other woman’s eyes were shadowed. She looked as though she’d lost weight in the two weeks since Serena had last seen her. She knew Joanna had refused to take the one-week vacation that the others took every month. Instead, she opted to bank her vacation days for those times when Casey had a school holiday.
Her excitement explained why Joanna hadn’t wanted to leave the project right now. Things were starting to click together. Serena shot a glance at Sal Pedskya. He and his team had successfully sequenced the complete rice genome last year, something that could be used to improve the quality and size of crops. They were now working frantically to apply what they knew to wheat. They were making incredible scientific breakthroughs.
Sixty-year-old Sal grinned, exposing three missing teeth in his broad, flat face. He’d forgotten his bridge again. “This damn thing is going to work, Serena,” he said in his nasally Russian accent. He shoved up the sleeves of his ancient khaki sweater. He had another one just like it. His wife, who’d died of cancer twenty years ago, had knitted them for him. He wore one every day, and carried her picture in his wallet. “Damn thing it is going to work.”
Her heart leapt. She’d always been sure it would. A giant “heating blanket” that would heat the ground, melt the permafrost, and turn frozen tundra into crop-producing farmland. My God. They were going to actually do this amazing thing. It could eventually eradicate world hunger.
She resisted jumping up and down with excitement. “What about a power source?” she asked Stuart Menzies, their electrical engineer. He was in his late seventies, a stick of a man with a shock of creamy white-blond hair and almost invisible eyebrows over deeply-set rheumy brown eyes. Stuart survived on not much more than coffee, canned tuna, and some weird, thick green drink that he consumed three times a day and which smelled like cow manure and looked worse. Absentminded, totally brilliant, and Serena made sure she never stood upwind of him for at least an hour after he’d consumed his liquid “supplement.”
“Working on it,” he said, not looking up as he scribbled schematics on the pad propped on his bent knees. He had both feet braced on the coffee table, one shoe embedded in his slice of Joanna’s chocolate cake.
“How close? Denny?” She glanced at Dennis Cole, a fifty-something, giant bear of a man with shaggy dark hair and soulful eyes. Which, when not focused on his work, were usually watching Joanna.
Denny shook his head. Ian had “stolen” Denny from NASA’s jet propulsion lab the year before he died. “I’m working on it as well.”
Disappointed, Serena leaned back in her seat. “Too bad we can’t just plug it in.”
“Plug what in?” Duncan Edge asked, strolling into the room.
Duncan wanted to ignore this resurgence of the attraction he’d felt for her for years. But it was proving to be damn well impossible. Couldn’t do it. Worse, it seemed to be more powerful, more compelling each time he saw her. Which was precisely the fucking reason he’d gone out of his way not to encounter Serena whenever humanly possible.
His self-control was such that he could want her with an urgency that shocked him, yet he could remain motionless as he watched her move to the door with a fluid grace, despite her bulky clothing. He couldn’t, however, control the fantasy playing out behind his cool gaze. Christ, Duncan thought, reluctantly amused at his own insanity, if Serena had a clue how she turned his body into rock-hard knots, he’d never hear the end of it.
“What are you doing here?” Serena whispered, cheeks flushed with temper as she slammed the bedroom door behind her. She’d wasted no time grabbing her coat and pushing him out into the hall before teleporting them to her room on the third floor.
She’d missed the interior of the room by a good three feet, and they’d ended up outside in the refrigerated corridor. Fury’s aim had always been a bit off when teleporting.
“Still directionally challenged, I see,” he said quietly. She shoved open the door and marched inside.
He followed her in.
“And why are we whispering?” he whispered back, going for amusement because the alternative was to grab hold of her and kiss away her annoyance. And maybe not stop for a week or two. Now that he knew she had about five thousand freckles sprinkled all over her creamy body, he’d like to peel off her clothes and kiss each one.
“Because if I wasn’t whispering I’d be screaming. Damn it, Duncan,” she said in her normal, albeit annoyed tone. “Joanna and I don’t do magic in front of the others.”
Apparently he annoyed her whether she was dressed or naked. He much preferred her naked. In fact, the image of her pale, gloriously freckled body was permanently engraved into his synapses. And if he’d ever had the faint hope that she was a woman he could forget, that illusion was long gone after he’d seen her naked. His greedy eyes took in her flushed cheeks, and the rapid rise and fall of her breasts beneath the coat she’d thrown on when she’d hauled him out of the meeting downstairs.
“They didn’t seem that surprised that I’d flown in. With the wind howling outside it would have been hard to hear a chopper landing anyway. I think they were more interested in who I am rather than how I got here.”
“Lying to them wouldn’t have been necessary if you hadn’t showed up unannounced. And as soon as you leave I’ll go downstairs and correct their obvious assumptions that you’re a boyfriend.”
“Not a boy. No.”
He shot out a flattened hand onto a nearby framed print before her temper got the better of her. Her pretty lips tightened when she realized that he was hanging on to the picture to prevent it from going flying.
She shook her head, clearly mentally counting to ten as she took off her parka. “Now I’m sorry I sent those Halves back to you,” she told him ungraciously, tossing the apricot-colored coat onto a nearby brown sofa. The kind of oversized, overstuffed furniture that was great to snuggle in on a cold winter’s night with a cold beer and a hot woman, Duncan thought, glancing around. All the comforts of home. She was planning on being here for a while.
The room wasn’t that large—perhaps twenty by thirty, but it was furnished comfortably with well-worn furniture and decorated in warm browns and a variety
of shades of her favorite color, orange. There was nothing luxurious about it.
Clearly she used the space to both entertain and sleep. Duncan could just see the corner of a bed behind a japanned screen. He cast her a glance, dragging his mind away from the image of Serena spread across that coyly hidden bed, her amazing hair fanned out around her. One of his stronger powers was the ability to call fire, but nothing he could produce could possibly match the fire of her hair.
“I hate to ask,” he said, enjoying the way her hips, snugged into skintight ski pants, swayed as she paced. “Why?”
“Because now you’re like a damn salesman with his foot in the door. I can’t seem to get rid of you. What do you want, Duncan?”
She was wearing a close-fitting orangey-red sweater that should have clashed with her hair but didn’t. It had a row of tiny gold buttons down the front. The top three were undone, and he could count the hard thuds of her pulse at the base of her pale throat.
He unzipped his heavy black parka. Nice and warm in here. With her. “We were going to see Henry today, remember?” He removed his coat, tossing it on top of hers. Both coats slid to the floor in a heap.
Glancing around he noticed that pretty much every flat surface in the room was covered with framed pictures, most of them of groups of children grinning from ear to ear. But one picture in particular caught his eye. This one was of Henry, a man he guessed from his vibrant red hair as Serena’s father, and Ian Campbell on a fishing trip.
“I gave you the name and address of the hospital.” Her lips tightened. Shoving up the sleeves of her sweater, she gave him a wide berth to reach a chair. “Fly free.”
He’d take a bet that she wouldn’t sit down. She was too agitated. The temptation to reach over and wrap her in his arms was almost overwhelming. Almost. He resisted.
“Aren’t you even going to offer me a cup of coffee?”
“You won’t be here long enough to drink it,” she told him firmly as she stood there glaring at him. “Ah, geez, don’t sit d—Damn it, Duncan! Why are you suddenly so in my face? We haven’t seen each other in years—Do not put those filthy boots on my coffee table!”
Resting his arms along the back cushions of the plush sofa, he crossed his ankles on the scarred trunk. “What are you doing up here?”
“Trying to get rid of you.”
“Not up here in your quarters. Up here near the damned Arctic Circle, Serena.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t get the memo that I had to run Foundation projects through you. Must have got lost in the mail. I’ll lodge a complaint with the Postal Service. Thanks for the heads up. Bye.”
“Know what’s an inch away on any local map?”
“Man’s inch or woman’s inch?”
“The Russians are trying to pump oil out of the ground. They’re pretty inept, and it’s taking awhile, there are a lot of people very interested in what they’re trying to do and the progress they may or may not be making.”
“And I care about this—why?”
“Because there’s a faction of Russian tangos, called the—What?”
She was scowling at him. “A faction of Russian dancers is interested in oil exploration?”
“Not dancers. Terrorists. The group called Red Mantis is extremely interested, and just waiting to gobble up whoever gets in its way.”
“Send all those people a memo. Better send that one registered—sounds too important to chance it getting lost, too. I’m not interested in oil. And by the way, there are also gold and diamonds an ‘inch away on the map.’ I’m not interested in those, either.”
“What are you interested in then? Why do you have a mechanical engineer, a jet propulsion engineer, a Nobel Prize–winning microbiologist, a climatologist, and God only knows who else, gathered out here in the middle of nowhere Gofuckistan? If it’s not oil you’re after, what the hell is it?”
“Food for millions of starving people. Crops.”
Duncan raised his pencil-scarred brow. “In the permafrost?”
“Yes.”
He stared at her. “Yes?”
“That’s a complete answer.”
“Not to me it isn’t.” He dropped his feet to the floor and sat forward, elbows on his knees. “The security in this place sucks. Whatever you people are doing here will eventually arouse the suspicion of the local equivalent of the Mafia.”
“Been there, done that. After they helped themselves to my generators I agreed to pay both the Dolgopruadnanskaya and the Solntsevskaya to leave us alone.”
“Jesus, Serena—”
“Foreign companies here pay up to twenty percent of their profits to the Russian Mafia,” she cut him off. “That’s the price of doing business in Russia. Ignoring shakedown threats would’ve just invited something worse than them swiping my generators. I need to get back downstairs. Tell Henry I’ll be there tonight to visit him.”
“You people need to close shop, and get the hell out of this place,” he told her, not mincing words. “It’s too damn volatile and dangerous for civilians.”
“You people?” Her hair seemed to crackle with electricity. He simply looked at her. Glaring eyes at ten paces. An orange silk pillow jettisoned off the sofa and flew across the room, and a framed painting vibrated against the brick wall.
“What business is it of yours, Duncan?” she said through her teeth as she stood, feet spread in a fighter’s stance, fist stuck in the side pocket of her black ski pants. “What damn right do you have to follow me here and disrupt my life’s work?”
For some reason that got a rise out of him. “The Campbell Foundation was your husband’s life work.”
“And mine,” she told him quietly. “I care that people all over the world are starving to death when they shouldn’t have to. I care. And I can make a difference. Go away, Duncan.”
“Why did you marry him?” He walked toward her, feeling agitated and primitive enough to toss her over his shoulder and carry her behind the screen to that bed hidden back there. He wanted to fill his hands with her breasts, and feast on her mouth. He wasn’t going to do either. But if he didn’t at least touch her soon he was going to explode.
Her lashes flickered, but other than that she didn’t move, although he was still walking toward her. She’d never backed down as long as he’d known her. “I know you well enough to know you didn’t marry him for his money.”
He was close enough now to count the golden freckles across her nose, and count the rapid beats of her heart visible at the base of her throat. He wanted to put his mouth there and feel her vibrancy on his tongue. “But he was almost fifty years your senior. Old enough to be your grandfather.”
“I loved him.”
“As a parental figure.”
“I loved him as a wife. Not that my marriage has anything to do with you. And news flash. You don’t know me at all.”
He was now close enough to inhale the faint hint of jasmine-scented soap on her skin. Duncan’s mouth watered. “We’ve known each other for almost twenty plus years,” he drawled, picking up a long strand of her hair, which lay across her shoulder like a skein of copper silk.
“Wh—” She narrowed her eyes as she looked up at him. “What are you doing?” A world of awareness filled that question.
Yeah. What the hell was he doing? “Seeing if your hair is as hot as it looks.” It wasn’t. It was smooth and cool to the touch and curled around his fingers as he savored the texture. Touching her fried his judgment and made the endorphins flood his brain. She tried to move out of reach. But she wasn’t trying too hard, and she only moved a foot, still well within touching distance.
“Don’t be ridiculous. The only time my hair was hot was when you set it on fire. Let go.”
Duncan curved his palm around her stubborn jaw in a light, possessive grip. He traced her lips with his thumb. “Why do we always seem to strike sparks off one another, hmm?” If his synapses were short-circuiting, it was only fair to do the same to hers.
Her pupils dil
ated. “I don’t want to get water on this area rug. I just got it.”
He laughed, drawing her closer by sliding his hand down her throat and around to her nape. “Don’t rain on my parade, Fury.” He felt her warm, coffee-scented breath on his mouth. “I’m just going to kiss you.”
She tilted her face and whispered hoarsely, “Bad idea.”
“God. Don’t I know it.”
The sensation of Duncan’s hard fingers closing gently on the back of her neck was as shocking as a sudden jolt of pure electricity. Euphoria made her head swim, and she had to grab his upper arms as her knees buckled. She closed her eyes as he drew her into his arms. The heat of his body was like a furnace against her. He was big and solid and smelled of icy air and—Duncan. A fragrance that was unique to him, and one she could easily recognize blindfolded.
“I…”
His firm lips touched hers, effectively stopping even that half-hearted-sort-of protest. She’d always wondered—God—always—if the adult Duncan would taste as intoxicating as the teenage boy who’d given her her first real kiss. She’d shuddered under his mouth then. But that had been nothing like this.
This was—devastating. Consuming. More darkly sensual than anything she could have imagined. Her lips clung to his as an electrical thrill zinged along her nerve endings like the tail of a Roman candle.
The tip of his tongue, warm and slick, traced the seam of her lips until they parted. She felt rather than heard the deep sound he made as her mouth opened for his exploration. The taste and feel of him filled Serena’s senses, making the blood pulsing rapidly through her body feel like thick, warm honey. His tongue stroked hers at the same time he caressed the tender skin on the back of her neck with the callused pad of his thumb. As rough as a cat’s tongue, the sensation made chills race up and down her back.
He kept up a slow, mesmerizing rhythm with his mouth on hers and his fingers stroking her skin. The combination made her body come alive, and her nerves jump.