by Marie Harte
One look at Charlotte’s face revealed the exact same conflict in her thoughts—only worse. Uncertainty was once more a thick sheen in her eyes. She screwed her fingers around the sleeve of the sweatshirt and bunched her knuckles against her mouth, looking so small, scared and alone.
Kade pulled her against his chest, now roaring with protectiveness. “Hey. You’re not alone in this. We’re all here to help, and we’re not going anywhere.”
“Word to the ball clot on that one.”
Charlotte’s burst of a laugh felt magnificent against his heart. “Ball clot? Do you know how painful something like that would—”
“Can we not go there?” Kade interjected. “Please?”
Wick stood again. As he strode across the room, his mien was all business once again. “The man may be a ball clot but he’s also right. We’re all here, Charlotte. We know the pressure of all this shit hasn’t been easy on you. Kade may be the one communicating it best on our behalf, but we’re grateful. So whatever you need, it’s our command.”
Kaden felt Charlotte stiffen a little. She pulled away enough for him to see her tentative glance, first up at him then over to Wick. “I hope you mean that.”
“Why?”
“Because I really need to get back on board the Sparta.”
Chapter Seven
‡
CHARLOTTE DOROTHY TIERNAN.
The letters blazed out at her from the fake “temporary ID” in her hand, used on a gate guard who’d congratulated her and Kade on their decision to “just go do it in Vegas” then splurge on a “honeymoon” later. The ruse had worked—so why did she still feel so bizarre about it?
“Because everything’s been this way since you came back from Tahiti?” she groused under her breath, tacking on a furtive glance around the bay on the Sparta which had been her second home for the three most life-changing weeks of her life. Too bad she hadn’t known it at the time. She would’ve found a secret spot on the bulkhead to sign as commemoration or something. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. Dr. Charlotte Dorothy Sinclare. Hearts for a frame, just for fun.
She giggled.
Then sobered.
Who the hell was she kidding? Seemed to be only herself, for being stupid enough to treasure the lights of happiness in Kaden’s eyes when he’d gazed at the ID before handing it to her. Or pressing deeper into his hold, so tight and possessive, while he’d accepted the gate guard’s salutations. Or letting her stomach flip from the warmth in his voice when taking her hand in the parking lot as he bade, Come on, Mrs. Tiernan; let’s go change the world.
An aching sigh slipped out. The line had been one of the most painful jabs of his sarcasm ever—but she’d adored the sound of it so much, she hadn’t bothered to correct him. Now, she almost wished she would have. Ordered by the man to stay put in the lab while he and Wick checked the route to the pump room, she was left with little else to focus on…except memories like that.
Come on, Mrs. Tiernan.
She peered through a tank, filled with water but no fish, to the corner where Kade had stood so many times, watching over the room. Equally as frequent were the opportunities she’d stolen to gaze at him through the water, taking full advantage of the chance to imagine her hands roaming that huge, muscled body…
Let’s go change the world.
She walked between the counters and research tables, stacked with diagnostic equipment now clean and covered, still remembering the fastest route across the room—and how many times she’d taken it on her way to the MP who turned her insides to mush even when he greeted her with nothing but a scowl. Even long after their mutual decision about being as compatible as a shark and a dolphin. Even after all the occasions she’d wondered what it would feel like to let a shark consume her…
She sure as hell knew now.
And never wanted a day to go by without the beautiful violence again.
“Don’t, Charlotte.” She whispered it from gnashed teeth. “Just don’t.” She shoved the ID into her back pocket before jabbing the hair off her face. Neither the actions nor the order prevented a rush of mutinous heat from climbing into her head and parking itself at the backs of her eyes. “Dammit!” She rushed for the nearest sink and cranked the side marked C. After several douses with the frigid water, she snatched hard at the paper towels. “Pull your crap together,” she dictated again. “You think he wants to walk back in here and find you sniveling after he pulled God-knows-what kind of strings to get you here?”
She patted her face and took a long breath. Her personal dress-down had helped. As long as she kept her thoughts free of Kade’s body, voice, kisses, caresses, smile, humor, courage, creativity, and tenacity, she’d be just fine.
“Easy-peasy,” she muttered grimly.
“Still not having an easy time of it…Lottie?”
She spun around at the voice, so familiar yet creepy, that had issued the statement. A relieved laugh instantly followed. “Sam. Wow. What’re you doing here?” On a Sunday night after ten o’clock? On a ship you shouldn’t be allowed on anymore? And…looking like a demon-possessed version of yourself?
Whoa. She struggled to dismiss the impression but couldn’t. All the guy lacked were totally black pupils to complete the transformation of her boss, normally more wholesome than a loaf of white bread wrapped in a handsome Asian package—now looking like that bread had gotten exposed to something dark and nasty. His cheekbones practically broke free from his skin, jutting over a jaw centered by the strange half-grin on his lips.
What the hell?
“Uh…Sam?” she asked again. “Wh-what’s wrong?”
One side of his lips kicked up. “I don’t understand the question, sweetie. Nothing’s wrong. As a matter of fact, nothing could be better.” He took a quiet step forward. Gut-deep instinct made Charlotte correspond with a step back. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time.”
Her heartbeat doubled. Not in a good way. The words sounded like seduction but she knew way better. She’d ogled men over drinks with the man. Listened to many of his tales of unrequited love over Trystan before. So what was going on?
“What are you talking about, Sam? Seriously, are you okay?”
He shrugged. Normally, the move made him look even more like a cross between Opie Taylor and Jackie Chan. Now, the action was a violent slice of motion. “Like I said, couldn’t be better. Though I’m thinking this might be an ideal opportunity to clear the air about a few things.” He angled both hands into the pockets of his black leather jacket. He wore a black turtleneck beneath it, along with black denim pants and biker boots. Like his demeanor, the ensemble didn’t fit at all. Sam was colored shirts and goofy ties, not bad-guy goth.
“Excuse the hell out of me?” She used one of their favorite expressions from work, hoping to snap things back to normal. A nervous laugh fell out after it—then died. “Sam?”
“Ah.” He nodded. Again, the movement was harsh. “Let’s start there.”
“Start there…where?”
“My name,” he snapped. “It’s not Sam.” With every word, he grew more agitated. “The damn word makes my skin crawl. And if anyone ever tells me to ‘play it again,’ I’ll drive a knife into their throat.”
Charlotte gulped. Dear God, she believed he’d do exactly that.
Something was wrong here. Very wrong.
“Okay. So, what is your name?”
“It’s Sang Ki. But in my land, you’d call me Yun Sang Ki.”
He paused, purposely letting the words cling to the air. It didn’t take Charlotte to realize why. “Whoa,” she murmured.
“You recognize it, don’t you?”
“I do.” She narrowed her gaze. “And that doesn’t surprise you.”
“Not in the least.”
“You conducted your own studies in pheromone behavior, at the same time we did. Only we couldn’t share notes…”
Her mouth couldn’t form itself around the conclusion. Sam—Yun—took care
of the task for her. “Because I was researching for North Korea…my homeland?”
Her heart slammed so hard against her ribs, she was certain the bones made indents. This wasn’t good. Not at all. Too many of the pieces still didn’t fit but she was positive that once they did, she wouldn’t like the end result any better than the chaos.
“Right,” she finally managed. “Yeah, that’s…right.” A glance back up showed his scrutiny more unrelenting than ever, veins popping along his neck to match the vicious crags of his face. Who are you and what the hell have you done with my sweet Sam? “You were like Kim Jong-Il’s Harry Potter. A ‘science wizard’ who was going to revolutionize how your country looked at warfare. Everyone was a little stunned when it leaked that you were working on pheromone research. We all thought it was a joke, probably code speak for some scary new nuclear warhead.”
“It wasn’t a joke.” Every word was a new exercise in seething for the man. After muttering several words in Korean she took to be profanity, he snarled, “It wasn’t a joke!” He approached her again, this time in a lunge. Charlotte, now flat against a storage locker, braced for impact—but when only six inches separated them, Yun reared back like an animal held by a leash. “No jokes here, sweetie. Now I have you and your adorable MP to help me prove it.”
Sweetie. Drenched in his new vitriol, the word was a joke, officially scattering the puzzle even more. But Charlotte’s desire to snap it together? Nonexistent, thanks to his next words. Nothing good could come of any situation in which Kaden was referred to as “adorable”—but until his adorable-ness could get his ass back in here, she ordered her thoughts to stay cohesive. And her skin to keep her nerves contained.
“You’ve lost me again, my friend.” She had no idea if the last part was true. She was lost, all right—but was her “friend” even in that stranger’s body anymore?
The question didn’t go unanswered for long. The bitterness seeping deeper through his tone told Charlotte everything she needed to know. “Oh, you’ve been lost for a while, Charlotte.” The snarl was less painful to take than the derisive glance it came with. “While you, Aimee, and your cute little friends were here pledging sororities and taking notes on the fucking habits of fish, I was in a state-of-the-art laboratory in Pyongyang, manipulating nuclear power in ways even your science fiction filmmakers couldn’t imagine. The ear of the Great Leader himself was mine, anytime I needed or wanted it. My research was important. I mattered.” He jabbed his thumb into his chest with each emphasis. “The Emperor wanted more effective ways of vanquishing our enemies, something cleaner and more elegant than bombs and warheads. I delivered that for him” He flattened his hand, smoothing it down until he cupped his crotch. “There’s no deadlier way to get at a man than through his cock, little Lottie.”
Charlotte was so stunned, her gaze fell along with his hand. “S-Sam—”
“My name isn’t Sam!”
She wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of an apology. “What the hell? You—you’re—”
“Hard as a rock? Oh, yes. And you definitely are the reason, Charlotte—though not in the way your silly mind concludes.” He shook his head as if refusing to buy a cow. “You’ve merely been the means to my end, sweetie. The lube to my orgasm. Finally, my completion is almost near. I’ve waited so long. Sacrificed so much. Pretended for so long, ever since the moment I opened that hatch on the submarine, changing things forever…”
Charlotte’s knees threatened to liquefy. “Whoa. Hold on. S-submarine? Are—you—” She faltered, struggling to connect the logic. Forget puzzle pieces. Her brain felt like an imploding window, broken into shards of disbelief. “Are you telling me you were aboard that sub? You were the one who let the SEALs aboard that night?”
Yun rocked on his heels. “I’ll bet those pigs in Pyongyang had second thoughts about stuffing me away as a boat doctor when learning their ‘cracked cuckoo’ scientist had jumped to the west along with a few hundred nuclear rods.”
“Holy shit.” Thank God she’d been too nervous to eat dinner. Her wrenching stomach brought up nothing but acid and air. It was painful but at least she wasn’t puking on the man’s shoes to make matters worse.
They got worse, anyway.
“They’ll all have ample opportunity to grovel now,” Yun sneered. “And I have you to thank for it, Charlotte. The timing on your little research trip on this bucket couldn’t have made things easier for me. All I had to do was pay off a few of the maintenance boys to let me come aboard and plant the rods into the proper tank pumps, and you were off and running to bear the fruit of everything I’d worked so hard to seed before the Great Leader died. After that, it was just a matter of keeping you close, a need amply filled by the beautiful Trystan Brown and his generous check-writing skills.”
Charlotte blinked hard. Disdain underlined his words again. She’d always been so touched by “Sam’s” devotion to Trystan. “But you practically love him.”
“No more than he loves being mooned over.” He rolled his eyes. “In case you haven’t noticed, darling, I can moon with the best of them.”
“Yeah,” Charlotte muttered, once more feeling like the world as she knew it had been bounced between the gods as some insane celestial plaything. “You certainly can.”
“Trystan was all too happy to indulge my dreams about opening Spectrum, thinking he was the awesome benefactor of a pretty boy from Korea who’d ‘courageously’ defected for America. And me? I designed the place with only one goal in mind—that it be the perfect shiny bauble to make you oooo and ahhhh in all the right places, Charlotte.”
Her stomach twisted again. She winced but instantly recognized that the pain was more physical. Regret and shame rammed each other in her soul. How many times had she called Aunt Marie a shallow glory chaser, refusing to go along with the woman’s compulsion for show business sparkle? Only she’d fallen prey to the same glitter in geek scientist style. She’d let Yun blind her with Spectrum’s expensive equipment and beautiful facilities—for God’s sake, they had a salad bar in the cafeteria and a gym with a rock climbing wall—and skated along, happy and clueless, in his pretty little snow globe.
“Congratulations,” she rasped through her shock. “The scheme worked.”
“Certainly did. Imagine that.” Yun flashed a grin that held remnants of Sam, slicing deeper fissures into Charlotte’s heart. “After that, I simply kept you close through the years, watching you very, very carefully. And when you finally started showing the signs of the pheromone bond…” His eyes slid shut and he burst into a laugh. “Oh God, Charlotte, you made me the happiest man on the planet.”
Confusion broke in. “But you were as irritated with me as the others. You bought me a ticket to Tahiti. Forced me to go on that trip—”
“Because I had to be sure you were suffering a true pheromone frenzy, sweetie, not some other imbalance.”
Charlotte grimaced. “Frenzy isn’t the first word I’d use to describe it.” Torture fit better. Sheer hell was a good one, too.
He rolled his eyes. “Fine. Fill in the blank with your preference, doctor. It still turned out to be the most valuable decision I made. When Tiernan barged into the lab that day, hunting like a possessed man for you…well, one look at him and I knew. All the years waiting for my theories to bear out as truth had finally been worth it. Now it’s come full circle. We can all have the ending we fully deserve.”
It was surely the moment that brought the man’s final mental crack. Yun actually leaned and attempted a kumbaya moment, trying to hug her. He only got a few inches. Charlotte growled and jabbed a shove at him. “Not on your ‘deserved’ list, asshole.”
She enjoyed the retaliation for two seconds. A pained cry ripped up her throat as Yun gripped her upper arm and yanked so hard, her head snapped back. “Oh, Charlotte.” His voice dripped with condescension—and an undertone so wicked, her blood chilled. “Why so feisty? Of everyone in the world, I expected you to understand all this the most. You appreci
ate, don’t you…how important you and Kaden have become to the advancement of global science? How you two are my most prized pieces of evidence for those pricks in Pyongyang? How the three of us are going to show them what a real ‘modern’ war looks like?”
“Pyongyang.” The inner window shattered into more confusion. And dread. “What’re you talking about? What do Kade and I have to do with—”
Yun cut her short with a vicious snarl. “Do you truly not get this? Do you not see what you’ve done to him, Charlotte? Your squid officer man, big bad Kaden Tiernan, can barely go a day without you. His is the new face of the vanquished enemy, a warrior brought low by his own body. He’s pathetic. He’s beautiful!”
He seized her other arm, forcing her to take in his twisted, triumphant stare. As punishing as his hold was, Charlotte fought to wrench free. “You’re insane. This is insane.”
“No, sweetie.” He grinned like a man about to tear into a thick steak, with her as the unlucky meat. “This is history. Kaden’s just the first. The perfect soldier, controlled by his need for just one thing. The man will fight anything, kill anyone for you—”
“That’s right, asshole. And I won’t hesitate to start with you.”
Charlotte had been stitching her composure together with desperation. The threads dissolved beneath the double whammy of Kade’s incensed baritone, along with the thick stench of his fury. But as soon as she allowed herself a sliver of relief, Yun incinerated it—with terror. “Kaden!” she screamed. “He has a—”
“Shut up.” Yun’s bark seared one of her ears. He jabbed the barrel of his pistol into the other ear.
She was able to see Kade in full now. Had he flinched at all? His stance, bold and brave and broad, hardly moved from where he’d stomped into the room then froze. A gust from the passageway blew his hair across the copper of his glare and the cliffs of his cheeks. From head to toe, he was every woman’s dream of breathtaking rage.