Escape (Project Vetus Book 1)

by Emmy Chandler

  “If this doesn’t start making sense soon, I’m going to seriously lose my shit,” Lilli whispers, her breath brushing my cheek in tantalizing little bursts of damp heat.

  I blink, forcing my thoughts to refocus. But that’s difficult, because I think the beast is right. Lilli said she wanted someone who would fight for her…

  “Dr. Brennan—she’s the scientist in charge of Project Vetus—”

  Lilli’s nose crinkles. “Vetus?”

  “It means ‘old.’” I lean in again, and rub my cheek along hers, unable to fight an impulse I don’t understand. “Probably because the genes we’ve been spliced with are from an ancient civilization.” I’m whispering now, stroking my face against her temple. Inhaling the scent of her hair.

  “Okay, so what did this doctor say?” She pushes me back firmly, until her gaze captures mine and holds it. My heart leaps at her cleverness. At the calm, subtle way she regains control and refocuses my attention while giving me hers, without escalating the intensity of this encounter. Or my urge to touch more of my skin to hers.

  I take a deep breath and pull my thoughts into order. Trying to give her the understanding she needs. “Brennan thinks we’re capable of pheromone production not possible in human beings. She tried to trigger that, but had no luck.”

  Lilli blinks at me. “You’re saying that somehow you’re producing those now? That I’m smelling some hormone you’re making?”

  “Not a hormone. A pheromone.” I lean in and rub my face along her other cheek, whispering into her ear as I…mark her. That’s what this is. What this feels like, anyway. Scent-marking. “Pheromones works outside the body. On other people. Or animals, as the case may be. Pheromones secreted by mother rabbits encourage their young to suckle.” I pull the collar of her tee over her shoulder and kiss my way down her neck and over the newly exposed flesh, pleased at the shiver that runs through her. At a swell of arousal in her scent.

  “In insects that live in colonies, nearly everything the workers do is driven by pheromones produced by a queen.” My left hand leaves the wall and slides slowly, carefully up from her waist, over the side swell of one beautiful breast, then back down. Then up again. I’m stroking her. Petting her. And each touch makes her heart beat harder. Her pulse thrum a little faster. “And pheromones from female silk moths—among many other animals—draw potential mates, sometimes from miles away.”

  “She told you all that?” Lilli’s voice is soft and wispy, the sounds nearly swallowed by the breath they ride on. “The scientist?”

  “No.” My tongue flicks out for a taste of her skin, on the point of her shoulder, and her gasp makes my cock twitch. “She doesn’t tell us much. I heard her explain it to a new guard.”

  “So, that’s what you think is happening? That your body is producing some kind of chemical that makes mine want to…sleep with you?”

  “That’s my guess.” I pull back far enough to pin her with a heated gaze. “Why? Is that what you want?”

  “Focus, Carson.” She shakes her head, as if she’s trying to wake herself up. “So, why do I smell so good to you, if I can’t produce this pheromone?”

  “I don’t know. My sense of smell is much sharper than it was before the procedure. Maybe I’m smelling normal human hormones.” Though I’m not sure that’s possible. “Or maybe you just truly smell good.”

  “And that’s enough to make you…” She glances down at my erection, and I fight the urge to press it against her, when the beast insists that she will be flattered by the demonstration of my desire for her.

  “It would seem that our bodies want us to…be together.”

  Lilliana snorts and pushes me back again. “You’re the one with a raging hard-on.”

  I glance pointedly at her nipples, poking through her shirt.

  “Okay, that’s because I’m cold!” she insists, and I decide not to mention the fact that I can scent her arousal. Which is how I know that she’s wet. That her body aches for me.

  That isn’t something I should know about a woman I just met, but the beast finds nothing odd in this intimate understanding, and my cock throbs, insisting I put the knowledge to good use.

  “I should go,” she murmurs.

  This is more posturing resistance, the beast insists, while Lilli seems to be having some kind of internal debate. She wants you to give her a reason to stay.

  “It’s about to rain,” I blurt out.

  She rolls her beautiful blue eyes. “How can you possibly know that?”

  “I can smell it.”

  “Seriously?” She’s frowning at me, and dimly lit by the flashlight across the room, the expression is exaggerated. Yet she still looks beautiful.

  As if on cue, a clap of thunder echoes from outside, and Lilliana jumps. “How did you do that?”

  I can’t resist a smile. “I didn’t make it happen. I can only smell it coming.”

  “Why does that sound so dirty?”

  I give her a wink. “Subtext and innuendo.”

  She laughs, and the sound echoes in my soul. I need to hear that sound again. Everything is right, if she’s laughing, because that means she’s happy. With me.

  “Stay the night. With the rain, no one will expect you back, and in the morning, I’ll take you to say goodbye.”

  She glances over my shoulder at the only window in the room, where the first drops are beginning to pelt the pane. “Why don’t we say I’ll stay until the storm passes, or until the sun comes up? Whichever’s first.”

  Warmth washes over me and my cock swells a little more. She’s trusting me to protect her through the night.

  This is as it should be. The beast is practically purring.

  “Okay, then, we should at least try to rest.” Lilliana glances over my shoulder, and when I realize she’s looking at the bed, I step back and let her go. She digs around in her bag until she comes up with what looks like a folded flat sheet. “But I’m not going to sleep with you.” Her face flushes again. “I mean, we should actually sleep. But I’m not going to have sex with you.” Her flush deepens. “Not that that’s what I was thinking about.”

  “Yes, it is.” I hold her gaze as I help her spread the sheet over the mattress, and she doesn’t bother to deny it.

  “Sorry I don’t have a blanket. Or pillows.”

  “Why would you?” I ask as I tuck the sheet beneath the mattress, on my side. “I’m not sure why you even have this.”

  “It was from a picnic. A friend took a few of us out to practice setting traps a couple of days ago, and I brought this so we wouldn’t have to sit in the dirt while we ate lunch. But then I forgot to put it back with the communal bedding, so…” Lilli shrugs.

  She wields a spear and traps her own game. This is a good mate, the beast informs me. As if I didn’t already—

  Wait, mate?

  The images that word brings to mind aren’t things I associate with the human concept of mating. Which is something animals do in the wild.

  Defend. Pleasure. Breed.

  Suddenly I smell phantom wood-fire and fresh leather. I taste thick, hardy broth and dry, dense bread. I feel warm, soft flesh. I hear a feminine moan, and—

  My cock throbs again. The beast’s rustic idea of happily ever after feels primitive, alongside the sleek high-rise apartment that was always the setting of my hypothetical future, before Rhodon. Yet the genetic memory feels…warm and comfortable. Intimate.

  I tuck in the bottom corner, and I can smell the scents of earth and grass clinging to it. And…tomato sauce. There’s a smear of it near the foot of the bed, where someone spilled, then tried to wipe the sheet clean.

  The real scents from Lilli’s picnic seem to merge with the beast’s mental description of mating in his culture, and the line between those two realities blurs. They’re compatible. In fact, they seem to coexist in the mental space where the beast keeps insisting Lilliana is mine to cherish and to protect. That her children will be my children, and that our futures will be intertwined,
whether that plays out in a sleek steel spire overlooking glittering green oceans or in this dusty red wilderness.

  “Ground rules.” She eyes me from across the mattress, and her words jar me back into this reality, where she doesn’t yet understand what’s happening between us. That her resistance is an expected step in an age-old dance, yet also a pointless struggle against the inevitable. That we belong together. “Since there’s only one bed, we’ll share. But our clothes stay on. Okay?”

  “Why are you asking for things you don’t want—” Clothing. “—and ignoring what you do want.” Which includes, but is not limited to my tongue sampling every square inch of her skin.

  “I…” Lilliana gives her head an exasperated shake. “Okay, regardless of what either of us wants, what’s going to happen is that we’re going to try to sleep.”

  “Try?” I arch one brow at her, and she rolls her eyes.

  “This is not a normal roommate kind of situation. I have no idea whether I’ll be able to sleep with a strange man curled up at my back.”

  My smile widens. “So, in this scenario, you see us spooning, and I’m the big spoon?”

  “Well, you are the bigger person. But there doesn’t have to be any spooning. And there certainly won’t be any…um…forking.”

  That takes me a second. Then laughter rumbles up from inside me, followed by that odd thrum resonating from deep in my throat. It’s a soft sound, like before. Only lower. Throatier. When Lilliana hears it, she bites her lip. Then the scent of her arousal floods the room. She presses her thighs together, and my cock throbs painfully in my pants.

  Holy shit, that sound—whatever it is—turns her on. The beast has a fucking mating call! And the scent of her arousal is almost more than I can take. I need to taste her. I need to dip my tongue into her and sample the source of this delicious scent. And while I’m down there—

  “Carson?” She frowns at me as if she has no idea what I’m thinking, even though her cheeks are flushed again. She’s trying to pretend that sound had no effect on her.

  Claim her. Show her what this could be.

  The beast is frustrated by her disregard for her body’s response to my mating call. He seems to think she should recognize her own physical reaction as meaningful, in some way. As remarkable. But if I can’t really understand that, how can she?

  Her head tilts to the right. “You’re with me on the part where we stay fully clothed, right?”

  “No,” I growl, surprised by the gravelly depth of the sound as much as by the word itself. “No, I am not.”

  9

  CARSON

  “What do you mean, no?” She’s glaring at me now, a thin thread of anger cutting through the scent of her arousal. “And what just happened to your voice?”

  “Nothing.” I take a deep breath and mentally shove the beast away from the controls. “I mean, no man wants to sleep in all his clothes, but I’m happy to serve as your big spoon, even fully dressed.”

  Her eyes narrow. “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Not in the slightest. I take my big spoon duties very seriously.” I sit on the edge of the bed and take off my shoes, and after a second, she does the same thing. The sinking of the mattress as she sits makes my cock swell even more. My body associates that sequence of sensations—the creak and jostle—with sex, and I want Lilli just as badly as the beast wants her.

  But I’m pretty sure that bad things have been done to my Lilliana, by bad people. She needs to know that I’m not like those people. That I will never let them near her again.

  “Carson? You okay?”

  I don’t realize I’m snarling until I notice that she’s backed away from the bed. From me. She looks nervous. She smells like fear.

  The sound I’m making is not human in nature.

  I choke it off. Never, in nearly two years of enduring Dr. Brennan’s tests, have I heard or made that sound. Not even during field testing of our abilities.

  “Yeah. Sorry. I was thinking about something unpleasant.” I was drowning in the need to literally pull the heads from every single person who’s ever touched her in an intimate way. With or without her consent. I can almost feel the visceral rip of flesh and pop of sinew beneath my hands. I can almost taste the blood…

  The beast believes that anyone worthy of Lilliana would still be with her. Which means that all of her former lovers were unfit to touch her and they deserve to die for the offense.

  Whoa.

  In human culture, the wholesale slaughter of your girlfriend’s exes would be considered psychotic. So I push that urge way, way down, hoping she didn’t see any of it on my face. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Come be my little spoon.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she sits on the edge of the bed again. Then she lies back, and I can hear her heart pounding as that sliver of fear feeds her excitement. Her reaction to the mixture of complementary emotions makes my pulse race.

  I lie on my right side, and she rolls to face me with her head resting on her folded left arm. “I…um.” She swallows, then she starts over. “I want to touch you.”

  My heart leaps into my throat, and I angle my hips back to keep from brushing her with my unrelenting erection, despite the beast’s insistence that she will be excited and honored by the size I’ve achieved for her pleasure. “By all means.”

  “I didn’t say I was going to touch you. I said I want to. But that’s not my fault. It’s you and your damn pheromones.”

  “Why does that urge bother you?”

  “Because I don’t want to want to touch you. I don’t like my body overruling my head, and I certainly don’t like your body overruling my head.”

  “No one’s overruling anything,” I assure her, as uneasiness swells in the pit of my stomach. I want her to feel safe and aroused in my presence, not scared and angry. “I won’t touch you, if you don’t want me to.”

  “But I do want you to.” She stares into my eyes from inches away, and I can see the conflict swimming in hers. “I just don’t want to want you to.”

  “I’m not sure what to do with that information,” I admit. It seems to cast a bit of a conflict in terms of consent.

  “Welcome to the club.” She rolls over, her lips drawn into a tight, unhappy line. “I wish we had pillows.”

  “Would you like to use my arm as a pillow? I don’t mind.”

  “No,” she snaps, and for a second, anger flares from her scent—the olfactory equivalent of sparks rising from a fresh log thrown on the fire. Then that flare fades, and the scent of her arousal surrounds us again, like a cloud of sweet perfume. Though I don’t think she’s aware of that.

  I couldn’t smell arousal before the procedure, could I?

  “Yes,” she whispers, and I can’t resist a smile, even though I understand that she’s trapped in a tug-of-war between her mind and her body, helpless while they volley. And that’s my fault.

  “Lilliana, I’m not trying to use pheromones against you. In fact, if I knew how to turn them off, I—”

  “Just shut up and give me your arm, if your pillow offer was for real,” she says. I chuckle as I slide my right arm beneath her cheek, so that her head rests on my bicep. “And it’s Lilli.”

  “Goodnight, Lilli.” We are never more vulnerable than when we sleep, and in this place—on this planet—danger could burst through the door any moment. I could be dangerous. Well, I am dangerous, but I could be dangerous to her. Yet she’s letting me touch her. She’s allowed me to put my body between hers and the only exit in this room, which means that whether she knows it consciously or not, she’s trusting me to protect her from anyone who enters, rather than fearing the possibility that I might not let her leave.

  I will not sleep. Not while she’s trusting me to protect her.

  Despite the stiff way she’s holding her body, preserving a sliver of space between us, even though there’s little room to spare on this narrow mattress, her scent indicates that she’s more comfortable with me than she’s letting
on. I want to pull her closer. I want to remove her clothes and cradle her against my chest, even if I’m not allowed to do anything more than that, all night long. And as I lie here, breathing in her scent, aching to bury my nose in her hair, that sound crawls up from my throat again. That mating sound the beast seems so proud of.

  Lilliana groans, and again the scent of her arousal blooms between us. “What is that noise you’re making?”

  “I have no idea.” The rumbling stops while I speak, but then it begins again. “I think my beast is feeling…cozy.” In which cozy is a euphemism for really, really horny.

  Her ribs expand with a deep breath. “Your…beast? Do I even want to know?”

  “There isn’t really a beast. That’s just how I’ve come to think of the foreign abilities, impulses, and…needs that came with the genes Brennan spliced into my DNA.”

  “But why call it a beast? Because they’re non-human genes?”

  “Because the things he wants—things that were evidently normal in his culture—feel wild in the context of human society. Even on a prison planet.”

  “What does he want?” Lilliana rolls over to face me again, her head still resting on my arm.

  “You.” I meet her gaze and hold it. “That sound seems to be about making you want me back.”

  “Making me want you, or your beast?”

  “Two sides of the same coin,” I explain. “And both sides want you. So…does it work? That sound?”

  “Why do I get the feeling you already know the answer?”

  I give her a heated smile, and the little hellcat sits up and smacks my shoulder, aiming an irritated look down at me. “Well, you’re lying here with your hard-on pressed against—”

  “Sorry. I’m trying to angle it—” I roll onto my back and look up at her, and that leaves my erection pointing straight up at the sky.

  “—and you smell like sex dipped in chocolate, dangled right in front of my face, and—”

  I laugh. “I’m not really sure what to do with that description, but thank you?”