by Aja James
Third, the New England vampire queen, Jade Cicada, whom he served as one of her most fearsome warriors, had gotten wind of some nasty development in which humans were experimenting with vampires, even gaining traction with some genetic engineering and splicing of human and Dark DNA together. The next step was cloning.
If they were not stopped, vampires, or some concoction of virtually immortal creatures, might soon be mass produced in test tubes.
Why anyone would want such an event was one question. What the world would look like overrun by bloodsuckers was another.
As a vampire himself who often saw the ugliest, darkest, filthiest parts of his Kind, Ryu would rather not contemplate such a possibility.
And if he had any downtime in the middle of saving the world and doing a favor for friends, why, he might just pursue his one personal vendetta that was long overdue.
He did relish multi-tasking.
The white noise of the airplane engine receded into the background as his ears adjusted to the sound, enough that he noticed the restless squirming in the seat beside him.
Ryu raised his right eyelid a fraction and saw that his erstwhile companion was struggling to get the lower portion of her seat lifted to elevate her legs. It was stuck.
“May I?” Ryu murmured, offering his aid.
But she had ear buds in and did not hear him, continuing to alternately push the seat buttons in the electronic panel by her arm and bend down to pull at the leg rest.
He reached across the narrow divider that separated their seats to get her attention just as she suddenly whipped upright and turned in his direction.
Rather than touching her shoulder as he’d intended, his fingers brushed her cheek and mouth. His palm cradled the left side of her face for a heartbeat.
But it was long enough to tilt the world on its axis.
*** *** *** ***
Ava’s breath froze in her lungs even as her heart pumped like a jack hammer. She stared owl-eyed and motionless into hypnotic dark brown eyes, so dark the pupils and irises were all but indistinguishable.
He held her gaze and slowly, nonchalantly pulled back his hand, leaving a trail of sparks along her skin where his fingertips grazed. A corner of his mouth tilted, whether in amusement or derision she couldn’t tell.
She did not see that hand fist so tightly on his thigh the knuckles turned white.
“Apologies,” he said. She assumed he referred to the accidental touch that set her veins on fire. “Allow me to help you.”
What? Was he going to help her relieve the dark desires that were melting her into a gelatinous mass of wantonness?
Keeping his gaze locked on hers, he gestured to the leg rest. Ava’s eyeballs were the only things that moved as they rolled to the right and down.
Oh that.
Before she provided a response, and perhaps it was better that he didn’t wait, because he would have waited a very long time, he elongated his torso by half standing, reached over the partition and smoothly removed the laptop bag that she had unwittingly jammed between the extended foot rest and the inner corner of her sleep capsule.
“May I?” he asked rather unnecessarily, since she hadn’t yet drawn breath or found her voice, and pressed the recline key so that her seat finally adjusted into a comfortable position.
Involuntarily, Ava heaved a contented sigh. Finally, her lungs were functioning again. Now that she had the opportunity to look him full in the face, she decided he wasn’t as irresistible as she first thought.
Mouse, was the first impression that flitted nonsensically through her mind.
Large black, spiky lashed, double-lidded eyes that tilted ever so slightly at the corners. Thick but immaculately groomed brows that swept over them like eagle’s wings. A nose that was straight, thin and a tad overly long. Small ears that stuck slightly out from his face, reminding her of elves. It was the nose and obsidian eyes that made her think of rodents.
But as her eyes wandered further, her nervousness came back full force. Sculpted lips with the upper protruding just slightly over the lower. Narrow, angular face with a razor-sharp chin. Long, elegant neck and prominent Adam’s apple. A hint of collar bone just above his form-fitting cashmere sweater.
Taken in parts, he had some individually stunning features, especially his eyes. But together, it was… magic. The more one looked, the more one wanted to keep looking.
Ava recalled the first time she discovered inorganic chemical compounds, how just the right amount of hydrogen and oxygen created water, that life-giving fluid. But the same two elements combined in different proportions created hydrogen peroxide, which was highly unstable and could be used in explosives to do harm.
This man’s features created an alchemy of beauty that mesmerized her. Maybe he looked quite unexceptional to others (though she doubted it), he looked to her…
Like a horse, an Arabian stallion, was her revised impression that eclipsed the first, quickly followed irrelevantly by—wonder if he’s hung like one.
“Pardon?” he asked quietly while one brow arched ever so slightly at the corner.
Ava slapped a hand over her mouth.
Had she actually said that out loud? Another one of her lifelong struggles was the short circuit between her brain, her social filter (which didn’t really exist) and her mouth.
Ava hastily removed her ear buds. Maybe if she could hear herself talk she wouldn’t say such humiliating things.
“Horses. Magnificent animals. I’ve always wanted to ride them.”
No, actually, hearing herself have diarrhea of the mouth only deepened the mortification, if her flaming cheeks were anything to judge by.
A muscle twitched beneath his right eye, and Ava winced.
It was going to be a very long plane ride.
“This is yours, I believe,” he said, handing her the all-but-forgotten laptop case.
She did not trust herself to speak again so soon after the last obnoxious verbal fart and took back the case without touching him. She tried to look away and end this painfully embarrassing encounter, but was stopped by his next words.
“Genomics Technology Incorporated. Do you work there?”
All she heard was the echoing resonance of that deep, dark chocolate voice of his, the rumbling richness vibrating through her like the chords of a bass guitar.
“Yes,” she managed to reply, though she wasn’t sure what the question was. But as long as he was the one asking…
“I mean no.” She shook her head to clear it. Come on! A 200+ IQ was better than this. Get it together, woman!
“I don’t work there, but I’m traveling to Tokyo to participate in a joint research project funded by GTI with the University of Tokyo and Harvard Medical School. I’m currently an adjunct Professor at Harvard and this is my specialty.” Finally, a coherent, sensible sentence!
He paused a beat before responding. “Sounds… fascinating.”
Ava physically felt her heart fall.
This was usually where men of her acquaintance, especially those who did not share her field of expertise and passion for genomics, rapidly lost interest in conversing with her. Her double-D bosom, waspish waist and super-sized peach of a backside only got her so far with the opposite sex. Most men weren’t interested in the meeting of minds as well as bodies. She looked down and tried to turn away again.
“Ryu Takamura at your service,” he said, drawing her eyes back to his. “It seems only polite to introduce myself since we’ll be sleeping together for the next fourteen hours.”
There went Ava’s ability to breathe again.
“Next to each other, I mean,” he corrected with a disarming smile, “slip of the tongue.”
Surely he didn’t intend for all those dangerously arousing double entendres to be dangling in the crackling air between them. Ava licked her lips and chose the safest response from amongst the many rejoinders that bubbled above her lust-filled haze.
“Ava Monroe. Nice to meet you.”
&nbs
p; He half-smiled a greeting but didn’t offer his hand to shake, though she hardly noticed, entranced as she was by the beautiful tilt of his lips. In an out-of-body moment, she saw herself regard him intently like a mongoose with a cobra, so captivated was she by his penetrating gaze. Distantly, she wondered whether she was the prey or the predator.
“Genomics Technology…” his voice trailed off as he narrowed his eyes in thought. “Weren’t they in the news recently over a controversy about experimentation with gene splicing using animals of different species? Not that it hasn’t been done before for medical research purposes, but I read that their experiments pushed the envelope a bit too far, potentially into the realm of comic books and science fiction.”
And just like that, the fog of lust abruptly lifted from Ava’s head. Nothing engaged her brain faster than a discussion on her favorite topic.
“It is kind of X-men-ish, isn’t it?” she agreed readily, “but it’s really not that controversial from a scientific exploration point of view, though there will be religious naysayers whenever we try to help evolution along, and there will also be fiction writers with overactive imaginations that blow it out of proportion to fuel sensationalism. But fundamentally, it’s about finding the right combination of genes that could cure or prevent debilitating diseases.”
“You don’t believe that ‘survival of the fittest’ should be allowed to play out in its natural course?” he questioned, and she didn’t think she imagined the interested glint in his eyes.
He enjoyed sparring on this topic as much as she.
“As a geneticist, I do believe in the fundamental tenets of Darwinism, but as a friend, daughter, and doctor, I cannot believe that people dying of cancer and suffering from Lupus and struggling with diabetes should be left to their own devices while their lives are naturally selected out of existence. As human beings, we are both rational and highly irrational. Even when our minds grasp certain logic, our hearts often fight against it.”
He said nothing for a moment, simply regarding her with those mesmerizing eyes.
“Sorry,” she said, slightly abashed. “I get on my soap box sometimes. People often judge cutting-edge medical research without knowing all the facts. And the hyperbolic stories about the advancements we’re making do just as much harm as good.”
He considered her for a moment longer. Then, “It’s good to be passionate about something,” he said quietly. “Life would be endlessly dull without it, don’t you agree?”
The word “passionate” had her mind in the gutter again as images of naked bodies entwined in the sweaty aftermath of a marathon of lovemaking flashed vividly in her mind.
Their naked bodies. Hers and his.
“Uh…”
And with her mind in the gutter, her ability to articulate also disintegrated.
“Nice to meet you, Ava,” he finally reciprocated her greeting and settled back into his seat.
Ava blinked when he severed their visual connection by closing his eyes. Belatedly, she noticed the flight attendant beside her holding a hot towel between a pair of tongs. She took the towel and slapped it none too gently over her mug, heaving a sigh of frustration.
That man was dangerous for her equilibrium. And she had eight hundred minutes more of this same torture to look forward to.
*** *** *** ***
Stallion…wonder if he’s hung like one.
Of all the words they’d just exchanged, that was the one phrase Ryu’s mind decided to gnaw on.
She hadn’t meant for him to hear her muttering beneath her breath, that much was clear by the way her face went beet red in the space of a millisecond when he indicated that she’d spoken out loud.
She was a colorful female, Dr. Monroe. He’d watched her turn several different shades of pink and red beneath her caramel latte complexion in less than an hour. Very expressive too, an open book that sometimes read itself in socially awkward outbursts even though any observer could decipher her meaning quite easily just by looking at her.
And soft. Silky soft.
The hand that touched her face flexed involuntarily on Ryu’s leg, still retaining the feel of her skin in its fingertips.
How inconvenient that her attraction to him was not merely one-way. He did not like mixing business with pleasure.
Not that he’d ever had real pleasure in his long existence.
His closest comrade in the Chosen, Devlin Sinclair, believed that the three greatest pleasures in life were raw sex, good food and the hunt. As the Hunter of the New England Hive, Devlin indulged his appetite for each of the three on a regular basis.
Ryu could attest that he derived a certain satisfaction from the hunt. He took pride in having never lost a target. Nothing could stop him from completing his mission. Food, on the other hand, was for survival. Some vampires reveled in the bloodsucking part of keeping themselves alive; Ryu was not one of them.
Then there was sex, but there was no pleasure. To enjoy sex, one would have to relinquish control, and that was something Ryu would never voluntarily do. Sex was a weapon at his disposal like any other. As a Ninja in his human life, he used it well to obtain coveted intel. As the Assassin in Jade Cicada’s Chosen guard, he kept it sharpened in his arsenal, but used it sparingly, only when absolutely necessary.
Truth be told, he disdained sharing any part of himself with others, including his body. Having had a prostitute for a mother and having been thrown to the wolves, so to speak, at a tender age tended to dampen one’s personal interest in the act. And in the years of his ruthless training as a Ninja, he was taught to submerge and deny desires, of the body, mind and heart.
To desire was to want. To want was to expose oneself to weakness. Weakness that could be used to bring endless pain and torment. And it all began with pleasure.
Pleasure was addictive. Pleasure spawned desire.
Ryu felt deep in his bones that Ava Monroe was pleasure incarnate. She should wear a sign that said: “This way lies folly. Trespass at your own risk.”
She was dangerous to his peace of mind. He could not afford to be distracted by her.
Not when he might need to end her life.
Chapter Two
“Purpose of your visit, miss?”
Ava blinked groggily at the customs officer in the booth before her. The dainty Japanese woman had just asked a question, hadn’t she?
“Miss?”
Oh right. Purpose. Visit.
“Research,” Ava answered in a scratchy voice. She cleared her throat and tried again, “Scientific research with the University of Tokyo.”
The officer asked a few more questions and had Ava look into a camera perched on the window ledge of the booth, and Ava went through the motions barely registering what she was doing.
She was still recovering from the effects of the motion sickness pills she took to knock herself out on the transpacific flight. She’d taken one more than usual even though just one could lay her flat for hours because she wanted to make doubly sure she wouldn’t embarrass herself further in front of Ryu Takamura.
Lookie there, despite the dense fog in her cranium, she remembered his name perfectly. The mere thought of the man cut through her drug-induced haze like samurai swords.
Ava shook herself mentally.
Enough. She was an intelligent adult. A bit sex deprived in recent months (okay, more like a couple of years), it was true, and she’d decided not to pack her trusty Rabbit Habit because she was only bringing a carryon bag and had the foresight to avoid the smirks on TSA agents’ faces when her luggage went through the X-ray scanner.
The point being—she was more than a gelatinous mass of unrequited lust. She told herself very firmly to stop thinking about the delicious-smelling, tantalizing-sounding, mesmerizing…
Enough!
But even as her conscious mind focused on finding the exit, a Currency Exchange and taxi signs, a traitorous portion wondered whether he had already left before her or whether he was still in the lines behind her.
She didn’t recall much of the flight and disembarkment. It was all she could do to gather her belongings and put one foot in front of the other.
Passing inspection, Ava walked with her carryon roller-bag, hobo secured on top and laptop brief slung over one shoulder toward the airport exit in wonderment.
She was really here. In Japan.
Even her mental analogies (samurai swords indeed!) were getting influenced by her surroundings. She’d never been to Asia before, having cringed at the long flight in a confined space over fathoms-deep water. Her three greatest fears all rolled into one.
But now that her feet were firmly and safely planted on solid ground half way around the world, she intended to enjoy her trip to the fullest. Work was sure to be exciting as it always was, but she’d make sure to take some time out to explore the city. Maybe take the shinkansen to Nagoya and Kyoto over the weekends. She’d booked four weeks for her visit for this very purpose, as the project would only take three.
Ava finished exchanging a couple hundred USD for Japanese Yen and walked past the airport terminal sliding doors toward the taxi line by the curb, a giant map of Tokyo City grasped in her hand. She paused at the edge of the walkway to close her eyes and inhale the crisp, spring air, warmed comfortably by a radiant sun in a cloudless blue sky.
And almost fell backwards on her ass when the split stream blast from a speeding motorcycle and rider whipped her hair across her face and tore the map from her hand.
As Ava regained her balance, the motorcycle abruptly stopped a few yards away. The rider in head-to-toe black leather, boots and helmet turned his head back and raised the almost opaque black visor with a gloved hand.
Dark-chocolate-fudge-Arabian-stallion.
Ava’s living wet dream met her gaze and raised two fingers in a brief salute, dropped the visor and sped away on what must have been the fastest, awesomest racing machine she’d ever seen.
She sighed with frustrated longing and just a dash of worshipfulness. Could any man possibly be that gorgeous, that magnetic?
Apparently Ryu Takamura could.
Ava possessed a few fetish fantasies for what turned her on, and a hot guy on a racing motorcycle was in her top three. Make that, hot guy in form-fitting black leather on a racing motorcycle. She wouldn’t have pegged him for a motorcyclist given what he’d been wearing when they were on the flight together; he looked like he was dressed for a Board meeting. He must have changed into something more comfortable while she’d been passed out in a pill-induced stupor.