“You took my baby apart. You’re going to break it if you haven’t already.” She shifted beneath him, her body language exuding belligerence. And hotness.
“I haven’t undone anything that can’t be fixed.” Her wriggling distracted him, and his little wolf surged. They both pretended it hadn’t. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I saw no evidence of that.” Her gaze cut to the scanner on the table, but her leg curled around his calf. “Do you know how much those vacuum tubes cost? You tossed one aside like it was a free AOL disk.”
“I understand from your file you’re good with tech, but I’m not an idiot. I have a degree from MIT,” he argued, a little stung. “Think of the vacuum tubes you could buy with fifty thousand dollars.”
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” She sighed, her breath warm on his face, her crotch warm against his crotch. Damn, he had to put a stop to this, but she felt so good. And she wasn’t fighting him anymore. And she smelled willing.
“You should get up,” she said, her hands gripping her restraints. Muscles bunched in her arms as she tugged lightly.
“Are you going to be good?”
“Are you?” she asked, licking her lips.
Oh, she wanted him to make a move. He could tell, and he was too much a wolf to pass up the chance. He dipped his head and their eyes met. He gave her a minute to anticipate the kiss before he pressed his lips to hers.
Ah, sweetness! She opened for him almost immediately. Their tongues met and tangled. He nipped, tasted, and his hands went from holding her head down to caressing her skin. Before long, they were both panting, and her thighs gripped his body in an entirely different way than before. The scent of her desire made his hips twitch, and when his pelvis rubbed against hers, she moaned.
His clothes started to itch and bind. Not because he was shifting but because he was crazy to be naked and pressed against her. Pressed into her. Steam only a shifter could sense flowed from her pores, so thick he could swim in it.
She was willing. He was able. He reached for her breast and...
She turned her face aside. “No,” she said. “That’s enough.”
“That’s all you wanted?” he asked. He knew better. She wanted him. Her body pulsed against his; her feet rubbed up and down his legs.
“That’s all you’re getting,” she corrected. “I realize I’m at your mercy and I let you kiss me, which might seem like a yes, but I’m saying no. No, no and no. Now let me up so I can put my scanner back together.”
With a hiss of pain, he rolled off her and closed her robe.
“Thanks.” She snapped her legs closed like a wolf trap and blushed.
“Welcome.” He stood and adjusted his jeans, hoping his erection subsided soon. He was never at his most intelligent when his boner was doing his thinking for him, which was obvious, considering he’d nearly screwed Miranda Mellons—and his assignment.
She watched him, her eyes round. He hoped she liked the view. He’d be willing to give her the panorama if she asked.
“You’ll have to untie me,” she said, licking her lips nervously.
“Just a sec.” Sniffing his way around the room, he located the taser and locked it inside her hard suitcase, along with her cell. Then he unplugged the phone. He didn’t smell a gun.
“What are you doing?”
“Saving myself some pain,” he answered. “If you run, I’ll be forced to tie you up again and play with your...machine.” Then he leaned across the bed and unfastened her hands.
She shot up like a spring. For a minute he thought she was going to attack him. Instead, she hastened to her gamma wave scanner and started muttering to herself, wiggling wires and stroking it like a metal pet.
Might be nice to have her stroke him that way. Maybe now that her hands were untied, they could...
But she was lost in the tech. He recognized the zone; he entered it himself on occasion. It was fascinating to watch her, her robe hiked up her strong, pale thighs, her fingers slim and nimble and seemingly possessed by magical powers. Usually magic fingers only existed after the hand had been severed from the person.
Suddenly her concentration, and his concentration on her, was broken by a rumble in her tummy. “Did you actually bring me a ham sandwich?” she asked.
“And free booze.” He handed the sandwich to her along with champagne in a plastic hotel cup. She ate as she worked, careful to keep all crumbs out of the vicinity of the scanner. In ten more minutes, she had reassembled the machine and plugged it in.
“All right.” She dusted her hands and sipped her second glass of champagne. She was so businesslike, their make-out session might as well never have occurred. “I want to see the money first.”
He pulled a wad of bills out of the side of the champagne bucket. “Here’s some of it.”
She thumbed through the money, silently counting.
He waited until she was finished before adding, “I need you to sign a nondisclosure agreement.” It was in a folder taped to the bottom of the serving tray.
She put the money in one of her many satchels. “Nondisclosure about what?”
“About your technology and about what I’m going to tell you after you show me how the scanner works.”
“I think you’re the one who needs to sign a nondisclosure.” She tossed the pickle from her sandwich into the trash with an angry flick. “How do I know you and Mr. Fritz—if that’s who you really work for—aren’t going to steal my ideas?”
“Oh, we are,” he said, “but we hope we get you along with them.”
Boy, did he ever hope he got her along with them.
~*~
Miranda considered her options. A large and virile man had trapped her in a soundproof room, and he wanted her to sign a nondisclosure agreement about keeping her own technology a secret. He also wanted to screw her brains out, if she was any judge of male behavior.
What was wrong with this picture?
She accepted the packet of documents with a frown and leaned on the television counter. After attempting to decipher the legalese—words were not her forte—she glanced up from the documents and, unfortunately, into a mirror.
“Holy hell!” Her hair had frizzed out as big as a lampshade, and her gnarly robe exposed her personal assets to anyone who cared to look, namely Lupin. And he’d looked, all right. She’d been so deep in salvaging the atrocities he’d committed on her precious scanner she hadn’t spared a thought for her state of undress.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “I read over the documents. They’re pretty standard aside from the technology stuff. We all sign them at some point.”
She wondered who “we” was—the amateur inventors Mr. Fritz ripped off or the imaginary “we” in Lupin’s brain? Though what her gamma scanner was worth to anyone besides an alien hunter, she had no idea.
“It’s not the documents.” She clutched her robe at her neck. “I need to get dressed.”
“If you insist.” He shot her a wolfish leer. “I like the robe. Easy on, easy off.”
His words were smutty, but he made no move to follow up. All talk.
“Pervert.” She dragged some clothing out of a satchel.
“Beg to differ. Technically a pervert is somebody who gets off on unnatural things, and there’s nothing unnatural about admiring a beautiful female form.”
Her, beautiful? She rolled her eyes. He must still be hoping to get laid. “Uh-huh. I’m going to the bathroom.”
He followed and leaned against the jamb, blocking her from shutting him out. “Don’t lock the door, or I’ll break the doorknob off. And I need to warn you. If you don’t cooperate with me, Mr. Fritz wants to convince you himself, and he’s nowhere near as nice as I am.”
“You’re not nice,” she said, and slammed the door on his foot.
He gave an almost canine yelp, and she locked the door with great satisfaction.
“Two minutes,” he said. She yanked on a pair of shorts, khaki of course, and wriggled into a bra
. Her nipples, she noticed, felt unusually sensitive. No surprise—she’d gotten very aroused when he’d had her pinned to the bed.
Shit, she’d forgotten about that when she’d been repairing her scanner. How humiliating! She’d kissed a near-perfect stranger while tied up in a bed—and she’d loved it. It gave her a zing to know he’d been highly aroused, too, so at least she wasn’t alone in her weird horniness. Miranda was no stranger to sex, but this was neither the time nor the place.
She had a job to do, dammit. Lupin, his hotness, and his insistence she explain her scanner were interfering. She needed to find out why her tech had gone haywire so she could locate the ET before the other Dreamers broadened their search to Vegas. Nobody had contacted her cell phone yet, but it wouldn’t be long. They’d need her to fetch coffee for the team or something stupid like that.
“You have ten more seconds,” he called, “before I open the door.”
Whatever. Hotel doors were strong. Regardless, she pulled her green T-shirt over her head and reached for the knob.
And froze because, though she’d locked it, it was turning anyway. It gave a metallic pop before falling to the floor. Lupin jerked the door open, the other half of the knob in his hand.
He smirked. “Warned you.”
“You destroyed hotel property.” Good Lord, the man was strong. Or the hotel was cheap. She grabbed a brush, struggling with the madness that was her hair. “You’d better tell Mr. Fritz I don’t have to pay for that.”
“You’re the one with fifty grand, not me.” He put the half knob on the counter and watched her detangle her hair and braid it. Did the man ever blink?
He’d confirmed that they planned to steal her machine, but he’d said it so casually, she hadn’t believed it. Plus, that line about hoping to get her along with the scanner...how could she take that seriously? “What are you getting paid to harass me about my technology?”
“Not that much.” He gestured toward the main part of the hotel room. “Shall we?” Only he didn’t step out of the way and she had to brush against him to get past.
Unless she was mistaken, the man still had an erection. Christ! Knowing he was thinking about sex made her think about sex. How was she supposed to concentrate?
He didn’t make it easy. He stood way too close when she showed him how to calibrate the unit, and his questions, his hot breath on her neck, sent shivers down her spine. When she tested his science with geek speak, he confirmed he knew his tech and even knew something about gamma, theta, mu and other brain waves.
God, techie men were hot. Especially ones who kissed like Lupin.
She finished calibrating the scanner and re-tuned it to a two-mile radius. Again, the scanner indicated high and low gamma waves were present, concentrated in the area that would be the Dunvegas hotel and casino. “So you see,” she finished, “either you broke my machine or everyone in Dunvegas is asleep. But I don’t think this is Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”
“It’s not broken.” He, blessedly, moved out of her space. “Where’d you put the handheld?”
She gave it to him and he clicked it on. “We’ve examined these before, but they didn’t work like yours,” he observed. “You rebuilt these yourself?”
“I did indeed,” she said with pride. “Nobody knows yet. My organization is a little...competitive. It’s my discovery, and this was the field test.” She didn’t tell Lupin she hoped her test was going to result in first contact between an ET and the civilian population of the Earth. He didn’t believe, and she wasn’t about to explain about her dad and his teachings and the Dream Team and twenty-nine years of obsession, all leading up to the radio signals she’d picked up thirty-six hours ago from Area 51.
“Impressive.” He flipped open the battery pack of the handheld. “How much range?”
“The big one, several miles. Little one, a couple feet. But the damned thing has got to be broken.” She thumped the top of the main unit, fiddled with some dials. How could she have been so wrong about the settings and filters? Years of investment and study, down the stupid, expensive vacuum tubes. The whole chart should be blank except for sleepers and the blip of the ET, if it was in range. “Gimme that handheld.”
She pointed it at herself. Sure enough, it registered blank. Baseline. Human. Gamma normal.
Slowly, she turned it on Lupin, who grinned.
It registered full gamma. The tomato red alert glimmered on his very white teeth.
“I won’t be phoning home, sweetheart.” He took the scanner out of her suddenly nerveless hands. “Like I said, I was born here. As were all the other people on your screen.”
“You’re all...” She gulped. “Extraterrestrials? Among us?”
“We’re as Earthly as you, and we call ourselves paranormals. But you can call me a werewolf.” He leaned a little closer. “Just as long as you call me.”
~*~
It was always fun to introduce a female para-virgin to the idea that the world wasn’t what she thought it was.
First, she’d argue.
Then she’d want him to prove it—to change.
Then she’d look for hidden candid camera devices. Well, at least Miranda Mellons looked for hidden camera devices, eyeing first his wolf form, and then the room, in a very suspicious manner.
If she handled that without him having to call in a healer to chill her out, it meant she accepted, and she’d want to know about everyone. Everywhere. Everything about paranormals. Certainly Miranda followed that part of the pattern, asking him questions that had never occurred to him, and he was the one who could turn into a wolf.
Sometimes, and with some women, he could nudge her curiosity about paranormals into curiosity about sex with paranormals, but not until she signed the magically binding nondisclosure agreement.
He was looking forward to the curiosity about sex part with Miranda. She was already attracted to him, and who knows where her eagerness to learn might take them? If things went as Mr. Fritz hoped, she’d be around for a while, and he found himself very happy about the prospect of some extended time with Ms. Miranda Mellons.
But the scanner technology was a liability. He understood enough to manipulate the work she’s done but not enough to develop it. Electroencephalography had not been part of his studies at MIT.
He handed her the pen. “We have to be able to trust you before I can tell you anything else,” he said, his voice still husky after the transformation of his vocal cords from man to wolf to man again. Her hands had felt so good in his ruff, on his ears, when she’d caressed him in wolf form. He’d allowed himself a hearty sniff of her crotch.
Right before she smacked him on the snout.
However, she was more intelligent than most humans. “Is this pen enchanted?” she asked as she held it poised over the dotted line.
Should he tell the truth or the whole truth? “It’s just a Sharpie.”
It was the parchment that was enchanted.
She dropped her hand and began to write.
“Wait.” He put his hand on hers. Her skin was silky, warm, and he had to force himself not to stroke his way up her arm. “The parchment is charmed. When you sign it, it’s binding. You won’t be able to clue in anyone who doesn’t know about the paranormal world, and you won’t be able to use your technology to reveal us without the consent of the wizard who created the spell.”
“Can I still use my technology to hunt for ETs?” she asked.
“There are no aliens,” he said. She pouted. “This whole time, your Dream Team has been hunting paranormals, only they didn’t realize it. PMS apparently keeps an eye on your group and others like it. We’re the blips on your gamma wave radar.”
“I still think there’s life on other planets. Maybe paranormals came from other planets.” She glanced up at him, her mossy brown eyes hopeful, but he just shook his head no.
With a sigh, she put the pen to the paper but lifted it again, hesitant. “What if I don’t sign?”
“A wizard will wip
e your memory of this experience and your technology. We can’t afford for humans to control the Big Reveal,” he said. He really hoped she didn’t go that route, because it would wipe her memory of him, too. “When we’re ready, we’ll be in charge of it, not scrambling in reaction. Otherwise, can you imagine the chaos?”
She shook her head. “I guess I understand that.”
She seemed so sad, it made him want to howl. “Of course you do.”
With a dejected slump, she finished signing and clipped the pen on the outside of the document folder. “I guess I have no choice.”
He’d never initiated a para-virgin and had her respond like this. Sure, they weren’t always thrilled, but the poor woman seemed like he’d crushed her life’s dreams. Which he had. What was he supposed to do now?
ParaPleasures was in full swing downstairs. Surely there was something there that would cheer her up. “Do you want to meet a vampire? Try some magical chocolates? We’ve even got succubi and incubi on the premises for ParaPleasures. And all sorts of things. Electronic things.” He waggled his eyebrows, but she didn’t smile.
“No thanks,” she said. “I need to get back to Alamo and start looking for a real job. I can’t accept my stipend from the Dream Team now that I know the truth.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” he said. “It’s the beginning. Your machine is an incredible innovation. PMS is really anxious about it.” Maybe he needed to call the healer after all. Miranda even smelled sad.
“I don’t have PMS.” She shrugged. “I’m depressed.”
“PMS is a company called Paranormal and Magical Security. I’m on retainer.”
“All my life,” she said with a hitch in her voice, “I believed. I believed in the existence of extraterrestrials and the knowledge we’d gain as a race once we connected with our stellar ancestors. Instead, I find out we’ve been chasing fairies. Fairies! Do you think the government has your people imprisoned in Area 51?”
Welcome to Dunvegas Page 15