by Aja James
She’d only had this specific dessert once in an exclusive posh French restaurant when she was attending a conference at the Sorbonne.
And wow. Just wow.
The first bite had been better than sex. The second bite more euphoric than the multiple orgasms she achieved with her best friend the Rabbit Habit. And the third and last bite—she could only make the tiny piece of fudge last so long—had her begging for more.
That was what the man’s smell reminded her of.
Her internal temperature had already risen a couple of degrees by the time she’d noticed his cheekbones.
Ava tried to regroup by keeping her eyeballs strictly focused on the screen in front of her as a flight attendant in person and in video went through the safety instructions.
She was not the most natural when it came to interactions with powerfully attractive men. Irresistibly attractive, rather, if just his smell could make her break out in a heat rash.
With an IQ of over 200 (genius was above 140 and Einstein’s IQ was between 160 and 190, but who was counting), a PhD and MD in molecular genetics, another PhD in regenerative stem cell science and being one of the world’s foremost experts on these topics at the age of thirty, she should be able to handle a simple human interaction with aplomb.
But no, sadly not.
Not when her EQ was well below average and her social quotient was probably not even on the chart—as in, negative.
Thus, Ava tried to avoid embarrassing herself abominably by focusing her attention away from the glorious male sitting beside her before she caught wind of something even more threatening to her libido than his fragrance and his cheekbones.
And it was just his personal scent, she could tell, no artificial cologne on top to distort the perfect combination of molecules that wafted from his skin to her olfactory bulbs. Perhaps just a hint of soap, very light and wintry fresh.
Odor prints were influenced by diet, environment, health and genetics, she knew, and it was as if his smell was made specifically to elicit a force-of-nature response from her.
It would all be extremely fascinating had she not been preoccupied with hiding her now flaming hot cheeks from view.
“What would you like for first meal?”
“What?” Ava blurted, reeling from discovery number three:
His voice might be the most dangerous attraction of all.
The man gestured with a slim, long-fingered hand to the attendant who was bending over Ava with a menu of items.
Ava swiveled around to regard her.
How long had the model-esque stewardess been there? Probably a good while, since her smile seemed frozen in a grimace on her face.
Ava quickly chose the least healthy of all her options for lunch, snack and supper, because her motto was that healthy equaled tasteless, and why go through life eating tasteless food? Thus decided, she refocused on the TV screen.
It was blank.
Blank was good. Perhaps she could channel blankness into her mind.
Fourteen hours! She had to tame her libido for eight hundred and forty minutes! That was a lot of time to be simmering fruitlessly in unrequited lust.
Not for the first time Ava wished she wasn’t so hot-blooded. Maybe it was the Latin heritage. Though genetically speaking, she was one-fourth German, one-fourth Japanese, owing to her Brazilian mother, and one-fourth Scottish, one-fourth Welsh on her father’s side. One hundred percent American, born and raised in the Bronx of New York.
Maybe it was more nurture than nature.
Ever since she was a child she always felt like she didn’t quite fit in. She had the looks on the outside, but on the inside, her brain worked in unusual ways. She viewed the world in mathematical equations, chemical cocktails, symbols rather than words.
But that’s not to say she didn’t feel things. She felt rather too much. She avoided feeling whenever she could because emotions weren’t logical, and she very much preferred logic.
She could be downright volcanic when her emotions and feelings ran high. It wasn’t as if her hormones operated in overdrive 24/7 or even a small fraction of the time. In fact, she rarely had time to notice, let alone indulge, in physical attraction. But when she did feel those powerful bodily urges… well, she indulged.
But she’d never felt this magnitude of attraction.
Keeping her gaze unfocused and her eyeballs pointed forward, Ava dug into the giant hobo bag beneath the seat in front of her, pulled out her iPhone, stuck the buds into her ears and turned up the volume on her favorite playlist.
But no matter how hard she listened, all she heard was that voice.
It was what the ocean would sound like if it were male and awakening from a satisfying slumber after a night of mind-blowing sex.
*** *** *** ***
She was not what he expected.
Not that he knew what Professors or Doctors (or whatever one called someone with both PhD and MD as a suffix to their name) in molecular genetics looked like on average, if there was such a stereotype to begin with.
But he thought they might be…older.
Gray-haired with glasses and a wizened, wrinkled visage reflecting self-sacrifice (for how else would they have had the time to concentrate on their studies?) and solemnity (for what humor was there in such an analytical, methodological subject?).
For Ryu Takamura, who had been raised for the first ten years of his life in a whorehouse and abandoned thereafter at a Shinto shrine, formal education—hell—any education seemed foreign and antithetical to his own upbringing.
Perhaps this was why he always dressed and spoke with meticulous care.
To any observer, he appeared to be the immensely wealthy heir to a Japanese or Korean conglomerate, living a life of privilege and idleness with armies of servants to tend to his every need. His clothes were of the finest quality and tailored to fit his long, lean body to perfection. His wavy black hair was tousled just so, fuller on top and in the back and shaved closely on the sides to emphasize his aristocratic bone structure, all angles and points liked a laser-cut diamond.
He was so blindingly elegant, in fact, he could never have been mistaken for a real Asian heir. He represented what their alter egos might aspire to if they could ever look as resplendent as he. Rather like how K-dramas represented the ridiculously good-looking and wealthy on TV with actors who had undergone countless surgeries to mimic perfection.
If only they knew the truth. Ryu’s lips tipped at one corner in dark amusement.
He cast a surreptitious glance at the woman beside him.
She seemed determined to keep to herself and take up as little space as possible though she had plenty of it. She was—Ryu struggled to describe her—a study in contrasts.
Short. At just over five feet.
Round. At least where females were supposed to be round. She was extremely well-endowed in those areas, but relatively slim in others.
Dark velvety eyes like Bambi, full of innocence and ignorance.
Full, luscious lips like pillows, made for sin.
Ryu didn’t know whether her instant, palpable attraction to him was a good thing or a bad thing. Her body was still radiating an enormous amount of sexual tension and heat even as she tried to pretend normality and hide in her seat.
Ryu mentally shrugged. He’d deal with it later if he had to. Usually, such attraction came in handy.
And he hadn’t fed in weeks.
But for some reason, he didn’t feel like using her weakness against her. It didn’t seem fair.
He scoffed mentally. Then again, what did he care for fairness. It wasn’t as if the term had ever been liberally applied to himself.
Or applied at all, for that matter.
He closed his eyes and reclined his headrest to a more comfortable position, putting the luscious human morsel from his mind for the moment.
He had a mission to accomplish. Several actually.
First, he was following a trail the Russian mob boss left when he hightaile
d out of NYC after the expansion of the insidious fight club network had started stalling. The Chosen had eliminated one of the heads of the hydra recently, one of their own, in fact, but there were at least two others that they knew of still at large. Their sometime allies, the Pure Ones, had returned from their pursuit of Sergei Antonov with very few clues. But one of them pointed to the fact that Japan was Sergei’s next destination.
Second, he was to rendezvous with his ex-comrade Inanna and her Mate Gabriel within the fortnight. Being native to the land and familiar with the language, culture and history, having lived it himself over hundreds of years, he might be able to help them in their search for Inanna’s father, whose last and only proof of life was found in Japan, dating to a time Ryu was intimately familiar with.
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.
*** *** *** ***
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Thank you for reading Dark Longing. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
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Aja James