by Lynne Silver
He frowned at the ground. “I need to cool down. Let’s go to the pool.”
“Okay,” she said, agreeing, though slightly annoyed by his behavior. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind. One minute he was foisting her off on Chase and the next he was physically demanding private time. What was his deal? He had the home court advantage growing up on this campus and knowing about the whole genetic match breeding thing. One would think he’d be pumped his turn had finally arrived. Instead his angst had her emotions bouncing like a yo-yo and she wanted to know why.
Though, to be fair, it wasn’t as if she was the picture of sanity when it came to him. Her body panted after his while her mind rationally knew she wasn’t ready to commit her life to a man she’d known less than forty-eight hours. And yet, she’d gone twenty-seven years without ever feeling this kind of connection with another human. That had to play a factor.
Shep had asked her to stay for two weeks. She could do that. Besides, they had a close connection to the kidnapping and she could use them as a source, something even Pulitzer Derrick couldn’t do. Speaking of…she had to call Derrick tomorrow and her boss to let them know she’d be using vacation days.
Night closed in on them as they strolled in the muggy summer air and an owl hooted off in the distance, accompanied by a chorus of crickets. The night remained muggy. Here and there fireflies announced their presence with bright-green flashes of light.
“Ooh, fireflies,” she said. “They’re hard to spot in my neighborhood. It’s too urban and well lit at night. Now it is officially summer. Did you used to catch them and put them in jars as a kid?”
He smiled almost wistfully. “Of course. But we were so poor, we actually tried to fill our jars to use as a lantern.”
She turned to better see his face. “Why were you poor? I thought you grew up here? Doesn’t your dad live on campus?”
“Yeah, he does,” he admitted. “But I didn’t grow up with him. I lived with my mom somewhere else.” Something about his hard expression translated, so she let the topic drop.
Within minutes she smelled the chlorine and saw the illuminated turquoise glow of an Olympic-size pool. Adam toed off his sneakers and dropped into the deep end, clothes and all. She shivered as a few stray water drops splashed onto her ankles and slid down to her feet. His dark head resurfaced and shook water in every direction.
“Come in. The water feels great,” he said.
“I have no suit.” She made her way carefully to the edge of the pool and sat with her feet dangling in the water. She hid a smile at his pointed look that reminded her there was no need for modest swimsuits when he’d already seen the goods.
Adam swam a few lazy laps the width of the pool while she glanced around the compound, trying to make sense of the buildings hidden in shadows.
“Do families live in those homes?” she called to Adam when his head surfaced for more than a few seconds. He didn’t respond and instead dove deep under water. She craned her neck to watch him, but lost track until a strong hand gripped her ankle and gave a gentle tug. A look of delicious intent blazed in his eye.
“Get in.”
“No!”
“Can you swim?”
“Yes, but I don’t…”
He yanked hard and her mouth filled with water as she tried to tell him she didn’t want to swim, at least not without a suit. All her reasons for sitting dry poolside surfaced as she came up sputtering for air. Her large t-shirt rode up, exposing her stomach and borrowed shorts. She used her elbows to hold it down while she swam to shallow water furiously. Adam swam in small circles inches away from her, a boyish grin on his face.
“I decided to stop fighting it,” he said. “I want to swim with you and feel you in the water.”
She stood chest-high in water and glared at him. “I wish you’d thought of that before dunking me. What will I wear tomorrow? I’m wearing borrowed clothes as it is.”
He shrugged, swam even closer and stood in front of her. His warm breath tickled her cheek. “We’ll figure something out,” he whispered.
And then his lips covered hers and she forgot all about wet clothing. His lips slanted over hers gently, and then with more pressure. His tongue probed and she opened her mouth to let him in. She moaned as her tongue rubbed his and wrapped her arms around his neck. When the hem of her t-shirt floated up to the surface, he took immediate advantage with his hands, branding her as he cradled the undersides of her bare breasts and thumbed her nipples. A whorl of sensations enveloped her, the cool pool water, the warm night air and mostly the muscled wall of man holding her firmly against him.
She threaded her fingers through his wet hair and pulled him closer to deepen the kiss. The rest of the world disappeared and shrunk to the two of them. Two bodies tightly entwined, desperately lapping and nibbling at each other’s mouths. His hands slid around her back and under her shirt. He pulled her tight against him. Rather than acting as a barrier, her wet t-shirt rubbed and teased her hardened nipples against his bare chest. Evidence of his arousal pushed through his loose, nylon gym shorts and abraded her core.
Her desire rose and whirled through her, firing pistons and tingling body parts that had lain dormant for too long. She’d never been this hot during a kiss, but then, this was no mere kiss. She wanted to wrap herself around him and lick him from head to toe and back up again with one big pause in the middle. The kiss was inevitable as sunrise and just as fiery. She undulated her hips against his hardness. He grunted and began backing them up toward the steps in the shallow end of the pool.
He’d heard of fireworks during kisses, but he’d always relegated that as a myth belonging to romance novels and Disney movies. But as Adam rubbed his tongue in Loren’s mouth and arched his raging hard-on against her soaked panties, he believed. Bells rang and lights flashed. He kept kissing her. Had to, really. Kissing her and getting her to the pool steps so he could get her damn shorts off and his cock inside her was as necessary as his next breath. More maybe. Even the back of his head pounded with need. No wait, his head did pound.
He gave her one last voracious kiss and reluctantly pulled his head back only to get it smashed forward again. What the hell? He turned and saw a Nerf football and tennis ball floating in the water beside him. Hoots of laughter and catcalls penetrated his lust-induced, hazy hearing. Man, he must have been way wrapped up in kissing Loren to have missed Chase and Gavin along with a few other voyeurs standing around the pool. Gavin must have thrown the balls. He had excellent aim and was a long-range sharpshooter.
Dammit, he hadn’t meant to kiss her again. He hadn’t meant to do a lot of things, but as his match, Loren had one heck of a hold over him that made him lose control and do new things. Like smile. Dunking her in the pool had been a surprise too. She made him want to play and laugh. One minute he’d been swimming to cool off, but her trim, smooth legs and bare feet in the water had proven too hard to resist. He’d needed to touch, so he had. He definitely hadn’t planned on kissing her, but once she came up for air and her ridiculous t-shirt floated up revealing her flat stomach, he’d been a goner.
He looked down at her to see her shaking herself back to full awareness. She looked stunned that her legs were wrapped around his hips tight as a vise. He wrapped his arms around her tightly and shielded her from curious eyes. Her breasts in a wet t-shirt were a treat for him alone.
“Perhaps that’s their not-so-subtle way of telling us to get a room,” she said, her voice muffled as she hid her face from view by burrowing into his shoulder.
The audience of his friends and comrades reminded him like nothing else that he had no business kissing Loren yet again. The men hooting and grinning at the side of the pool were his world and he owed them a hell of a lot better than what would come if he completed the matched breeding with Loren. He didn’t need nine months to demonstrate that defective blood ran through his veins. He didn’t deserve the beautiful woman huddled between his knees and it would be far kinder to rebuff her now than a
year from now or whenever she gave birth to his child and saw for herself her mistake.
According to his mother, the DNA matching was simply a catalyst. It didn’t mean true love, and he had no business acting as if it did. Far better to separate from Loren now than open himself to a world of hurt when the newness of the match faded. Sure there were examples of matched couples still living in honeymoon bliss after years, but he could think of examples to the contrary. Look at Loren’s father. He’d left his match. And Ryan. His wife had betrayed him so publicly, it was a wonder she hadn’t been tarred and feathered in the middle of the campus.
“Come on. Let’s go get you out of those wet clothes.” As soon as the sentence left his mouth, he scowled. Dry. He meant get her into dry clothes. Not out of her wet ones.
Loren glanced at him, a smile teased at the corner of her lips. “I think I’ll take dry pajamas, thanks.”
He set her away from him and pushed her down onto a low step so she’d be shielded by the dark water. He marched up the steps and hoped to hell his hard-on wasn’t too obvious through his gym shorts. Towels were kept in a large Rubbermaid trunk near the steps and he reached in and grabbed a stack, immediately wrapping one tightly around his waist. He made his way back down the steps to wrap one around Loren’s shoulders. Then he found and met Gavin’s curious stare. “Can you take Loren back to her room?”
Loren’s hurt look had to be ignored. He focused on Gavin and tried to reassure him with his forced serene gaze he wouldn’t be attacking him again for touching his woman. He stood on the pool’s top step, barely feeling the warm water lapping over his feet and watched Gavin lead Loren back to the residences. Every instinct in him screamed to follow, but he swallowed hard and suppressed it.
“That’s it, huh?”
He turned to look at Chase, who watched him with narrowed eyes. “What do you mean?”
“You’re screwing with her mind,” Chase said. “I don’t like it.”
He started to retort that it was none of Chase’s damn business, but remembered Loren was Chase’s sister and had every right to interfere. Family ties mattered at this military base. Blood lines and relationships were everything, which was why he was doing one of the hardest things he’d ever done in fighting his instinct and pushing Loren away. He nodded in silence at Chase and offered no apologies.
Chase stepped closer and looked as though he were going to throw an arm around his shoulder, but thought better of it and retreated a step. “She may be my sister, but you’ve been my friend and like a brother to me for fifteen years. I know you think you’ve got your reasons for rejecting the match, but think hard, man. A near-perfect match is the holy grail around here.”
“Don’t you have someplace else to be?” Adam asked. He couldn’t go into his reasons for refusing Loren and the match, because no one else knew the reason for his refusal, his little brother, was still alive.
“Nothing is more important to me than family. I overheard Shep crowing about how high on the scale you two are. Are you sure you’re ready to give that up?”
“I have to.”
“So be it,” Chase said. “Your loss, because my sister is a prize and won’t stay single long.”
Adam walked slowly back to his apartment where he didn’t even bother drying off before grabbing the box of his mother’s letters from the dresser and flopped on his bed.
Dear Billy,
Adam smiled a little at the endearment. No one called his father Billy. Except, apparently, his mother. He shifted in his wet towel and bent his head again over the box of never-mailed letters from his mother to his father. Mom had shoved the box in his hands when he left home to go find his father. He hadn’t read them in a long time, but Loren’s appearance on campus brought his parents’ doomed match to the front of his brain.
Adam punched a boy in day care today. The teacher called and I had to leave work to pick him up early. I miss you. Not only because my pay was docked for missing work. That’s the life of a single mom. I miss you when Adam does such a boy thing and I can’t relate. He needs his daddy. And I need my husband.
Diane
Chapter Six
“Commander Shepard?” Loren knocked again on the office door first thing in the morning.
“Come in,” a gruff voice called.
She pushed her way inside the office and gave a quick social smile to the commander hunched over a stack of documents on his desk. No hum or buzz emitted from the dormant computer.
“What can I do for you, Loren?”
“I want to go home.”
Shep looked up in surprise. “Already? I thought you had more grit than that. You gave it less than forty-eight hours.”
“I don’t mean permanently,” she said, fingering her borrowed clothes. “I meant for an hour or two to pick up my clothes and some toiletries. Maybe stop by work and grab my laptop. I hadn’t really planned on taking time off.” She tried to inflect some annoyance in her tone that Shepard had more or less kidnapped her when he’d thrown her in a room with Adam and introduced her to her brother, knowing how hard it would be for her to leave.
“Well then. That would be fine. I’ll call for an escort. Did you want to leave now, or do you have a few minutes to talk?”
“I can talk.”
“How is it going?”
“Um fine,” she said, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. Commander Shepard didn’t seem like the coffee klatch, schmoozing kind of guy. What was he really asking? She’d hoped to make this a quick visit with the commander and then look for a phone she was allowed to use to call her boss and let him know she was taking some time off.
“Did you and Adam have sexual relations last night?”
Her jaw dropped.
“Other than your tryst in the grass on the west side of Residence Hall B?”
“Uh…” She struggled for composure, feeling the flames lick at her cheeks. “How…? I…”
“You’re about to ask why it’s any of my business, but I’ll remind you that Adam gave up all rights to personal privacy when he signed his contract at age eighteen.”
“He’s thirty now. Surely he’s earned a little freedom. Besides, I’ve signed nothing.”
The commander folded his arms across his chest and looked smug. “You never signed anything, but your father did.”
“He did?” Her lips compressed into a tight line and she felt hot despite the cold air-conditioning in the office. “I don’t understand. What was my father’s connection to the Program?”
He ignored her question. “Ms. Stanton, have you ever noticed anything different about yourself?” Shepard asked.
“Different, how?”
“About your body or your mind? In school could you run faster than the other kids? Did you finish tests first and get perfect scores?” He sat forward and braced his forearms on his thighs.
She thought about his question. “Well yeah, but I worked hard.”
“Did you?” Shepard raised an eyebrow.
Fury shot through her. “Hell yes, I busted my bu—” She stopped as she remembered that school and sports had come easy to her. Maybe too easy. She sat still for a moment, recalling a day in third grade phys ed class when she’d purposely limited the number of chin-ups she could do. The other kids seemed to struggle with more than three or four, so Loren had stopped at five, though she could have gone for a lot more. She didn’t want to be labeled a freak. It was hard enough being the tallest girl and the one who could even beat the sixth-grade boys in a running race.
She looked up at Shepard. “What’s wrong with me?” A modicum of hysteria danced on her words. Oh my God, I’m the Bionic Woman.
“Nothing’s wrong with you. You’re fine. Better than fine, actually,” Shepard added. “Loren, you are one of us. I spent last night going through the medical archives, and I suspect your mother’s and father’s records were tampered with. They were the genetic perfect match. Not Chase’s mother and your father.”
“I don’t understand.�
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“It means you’re one of us. What do you know about how we manipulate genetics and DNA?”
She racked her brain and came up short. “Uhh, nothing more than all the news articles reported. Are you sure I’m part of this? My father was a journalist and my mom a housewife.”
Again he ignored her direct question. “In 1953 two scientists, Watson and Crick, played around with human DNA and learned about the double helix. You may remember the film from your eighth-grade biology class.”
Loren shook her head but remained silent. Science had never been her thing. Biology class had been spent reading a novel tucked into her textbook.
“Around the same time, Watson and Crick conducted their research, the National Institutes of Health started their own genetics program. They wanted to see if the human body could be improved upon. Their goal was to eradicate diseases such as cancer and heart disease. They failed in that endeavor but stumbled upon something bigger. They discovered that when certain DNA chains combine with other specific chains, interesting things happened, and the offspring of particular combinations produced amazing children. The Department of Defense recognized the potential in that right away and enlisted volunteers.”
“Wait a second.” Loren held up her hand and shook her head. “What do you mean volunteers? To do what? Conduct tests on babies?” Her mind whirled at the information she’d heard. “Are you telling me that the United States government found women willing to sleep with strangers and then give any resulting babies up to the military? Did I get that correct?” The articles mentioned nothing about that. People would’ve gone ballistic.
Commander Shepard laughed. It was not comforting. “Well, my predecessors certainly wanted to go that route, but I can tell by your expression, it would have met with resistance.”
She snorted. “You think?”
“They were clever. As you probably know, the DOD and NIH formed a new branch of the military and called it The Program for DNA Manipulation and Eradication of Disease. They recruited military men to join a new, top-secret agency. Remember it was the height of the Cold War, and soldiers were more than willing to play their part against the Russians. They believed they would be training with new, dangerous biological weapons. Only single men were brought on board as it was reputed to be a dangerous job. Several single female secretaries were hired to help with office work. Everyone lived in barracks on a gated property.”