Dark Embers (9 page)

Warning bells went off in the back of his head, but he ignored them. Then, because he knew he couldn’t do what he wanted with her, he settled for making things just a little more difficult—for both of them.

He wrapped his free hand around her waist and tugged until she was standing between the deep V of his open legs, so close that the outsides of her thighs were touching the inner part of his.

She was cool compared to him, but the differences in their body temperatures only made the contact feel better. More forbidden.

He’d spent the past few centuries having sex with every female dragon that would have him, all in search of a mate. There was something liberating—something infinitely arousing—in his attraction to this woman who was so very different from him.

This woman who so obviously was not meant for him.

He took a deep breath, and his chest brushed against her breasts. She started, tried to move back, but his hand was still wrapped around her lower back and he wasn’t ready for her to move away. Not by a long shot.

“Dylan.” Her breath was coming much too fast, her pupils dilating until they all but covered the bright blue of her irises. Her apricot skin had once again flushed a most becoming pink. And her nipples were poking through the thin cotton of her shirt. It took all his concentration to rip his eyes away.

“Phoebe.” His voice came out low and deep, sounding more like the dragon than he would have liked as he drew his gaze back to her face. But there was no help for it. She was delicious—every part of her sweetly desirable—and he wanted her. Even knowing she wasn’t the one for him, even knowing that it would complicate things unbearably if he had her, he couldn’t stop the burn.

Didn’t want to stop it.

Again her tongue darted out to lick her lips. Again he had to battle himself and his beast to keep from sucking the sweet, pink tip between his own lips.

“I need . . .”
What do I need?
Phoebe asked herself frantically. Besides to climb onto Dylan’s lap and take him inside her? The ache that had started when she first saw him exploded when his arm brushed against her breast, and now all she could think about was how it would feel to fuck Dylan MacLeod. For a woman who always put her work first, it was a troublesome—yet intensely exciting—feeling. She was so far gone that by the time he’d be buried inside of her, she might not even care that he was certifiably insane.

She blew a deep breath out through her mouth and tried to focus. Blood. She was drawing his blood so that she could show him, once and for all, that there were no abnormalities. That he and his people weren’t different, at least not on a biological level.

“I need to wrap this around your arm.” She held up the hot pink elastic band she used to isolate the blood flow in the area.

“Be my guest.” He held his arm out and it brushed against her breasts—her nipples—for the second time. A quick glance at his wolfish smile told her he’d done it on purpose and that he had no plans to apologize for it in the near future.

Her nipples tightened even more, though she would have sworn it was impossible just seconds before. They were so hard, so sensitive, that the stiff lace of her bra was fast becoming excruciating.

Gritting her teeth, she tried to ignore the sensations whipping through her. Tried harder to focus on the task at hand. But since that meant bending over his heavily muscled bicep, running her finger over the hot skin of his forearm as she looked for a vein, it was easier thought than done.

“Pump your fist for me.”

“Sure.” His long fingers curled oh so slowly inward, and for one insane moment, a picture flashed in her head of those same fingers curled around his cock while he slowly worked it up and down.

Her knees trembled until she locked them in place. Refusing to look at his face as he pumped his fist once, twice, she finally found the vein she was searching for beneath the heavy cords of muscle.

“It’ll only pinch for a second.” With effort, she kept her voice clinical.

“I’m not worried.”

Of course he wasn’t. She cleaned the area with an alcohol swab again, having forgotten that she’d already done it, until he smirked at her. Then slid the needle home.

It wasn’t as easy as she’d expected it to be—his muscles were rock hard, his skin thicker and harder to penetrate than she was used to.

We’re different. Different blood chemistry. Different
. His voice echoed in her head, but she cut it off. The whole concept was absolutely ridiculous.

Except she’d hit his vein—she knew she had—yet the blood wasn’t flowing. “Pump your fist again.”

He did as she told him, shifting on the stool as he did. Suddenly, his thighs weren’t just resting outside hers; they were all but hugging hers, and she was standing much too close to his zipper for comfort.

God, he was hot, the heat literally rolling off him in waves and swamping her. She could feel herself heating up from the inside, the cold that was so often a part of her dissolving under his onslaught of warmth. A trickle of sweat rolled down her back, then another, and still the blood didn’t flow.

“Maybe I missed the vein.” Was that her voice? Had that breathy, wild whimper really come from her throat?

“You didn’t miss it.” His voice was different, too—almost a growl—and it sent shivers down her spine that had absolutely nothing to do with her body temperature.

His cock hardened, pressed against her, and Phoebe knew she should move back. With any other man, she would have already kicked his ass twice over. But the feel of him—so hard and hot and ready against her—turned her on like nothing had in a very long while. She squirmed against him, not trying to get closer, not trying to get away. Just wanting to feel the friction as she brushed against his erection.

He groaned, a low, animalistic sound that made her nipples peak and her panties grow wet.
This is ridiculous
, the rational part of her brain told her.
Absolutely absurd, not to mention dangerous
.

Yet it feels so good
, the little voice in the back of her head answered. Why should she give it up?

Her libido, which had been slumbering for the past several months, was waking up with a vengeance. She wasn’t sure what it was about him that pulled at her, but something definitely did. She’d been around good-looking men before, albeit not this good-looking, but still, they’d never so much as garnered her interest. She’d always been more attracted to the brainy type—someone who could keep up with her in conversations.

Of course, Dylan was holding his own on that front, as well. Maybe that’s what she found so irresistibly attractive: not just the looks and brawn, but the obvious brains. Add in his cryptic statements, and she was suddenly afraid that the distance she normally maintained so effortlessly just might be a thing of the past.

Still, she was a doctor, and she currently had a needle in the man’s arm. How the hell could she have forgotten that?

Stepping back in an effort to get some kind of perspective, Phoebe glanced down at his arm. “I must have missed it—nothing’s coming.” She flicked the test tube with a shaky finger.

“I told you—we’re different.”

“You don’t bleed?”

“Of course we do.” His grin was distinctly provocative. And just that easily, blood began to gush up the needle and into the vial.

Silently, she filled the first tube and then the second, refusing to think about what had just happened. There’d be time enough to analyze his seeming ability to control his blood. Now, when she was still hot and wet for him, was not that time. By the time she’d slid the needle out and started to put gauze on the wound, the bleeding had stopped. His blood had fully clotted, sealing the wound and making it almost impossible to see.

A million questions ran through her mind, but she shoved them away. Then took the vials to the back of the lab, where she kept the microscopes. Pulling out a slide and a dropper, she made quick work of readying a sample.

She looked through the microscope, certain she would see exactly what she was expecting to see. Namely, round red blood cells floating in plasma, bouncing off each other, and the irregular white blood cells that should also make up the sample.

She was so sure of what she was seeing that it took a few seconds before she saw what was
actually
there. Even then, she couldn’t believe it. Pulling out the slide, she checked to make sure it hadn’t somehow been contaminated. Then she decided to start over again with a new slide. She checked everything carefully, from the dropper, to the slide, to the microscope, to the blood itself. When she was satisfied that all was as it should be, she slid it back under the microscope. And swore in frustration as she got the same results.

Although she might be looking at red and white blood cells, they were different from the ones she had in her own body, different from any she had ever seen in her subjects. If she didn’t know better, she would say that they were vaguely reptilian in nature—long and thin and flat, they were a strange yellow-orange color that made her doubt both her eyes and the microscope.

“Not what you were expecting?” Dylan murmured as he came up behind her.

“Not at all.” Turning, she pinned him with a glare that had made lesser men stammer like twelve-year-olds at their first dance, but he merely winked at her, a slow, sexy lowering of his left eye that almost succeeded in distracting her. Almost.

“Where, exactly, in New Mexico are you from?” she asked, her mind scanning through the possibilities. Maybe they were testing at White Plains again, or maybe the testing from years before had leaked into the water system or the ground and had slowly poisoned Dylan’s clan.

She looked back at the microscope. But nuclear radiation wasn’t enough to do this kind of damage, to cause this kind of mutation in a person’s bloodstream. She wasn’t a hematologist, but she’d looked at enough blood cells in her life to know that something was very, very wrong with the blood in Dylan’s body. If all of his clan members had blood like this, it was no wonder they were sick. Maybe she could get a friend to look at—

“I can practically see the wheels turning in that gigantic brain of yours, Phoebe. Let me stop you before you get too far. I’m not sick.”

“No offense, but you’re not the doctor here. You can’t know what I saw—”

“Of course I can. You saw cells very different from what you are used to. Dark where they should be light, and vice versa. Orange where they should be red, flat where they should be raised.” He quirked a brow. “How am I doing so far?”

Her mouth fell open as she stared at him, aghast. “So you knew you’d contracted the disease before you came here, even after you swore to me that you weren’t sick?”

“Once again, I’m not sick. I know what you saw because that’s what anyone who looks at our blood sees. If you looked at the blood of my clan members who actually did get sick, you would see something completely different.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do. You just don’t want to accept it.”

“That’s not true—”

“Of course it is, Phoebe.” He pushed against her, crowding her until her back was against the solid marble of the lab table and the front of her body was pressed against his rock-hard muscles from chest to thigh. “You wanted proof that what I said was true. You’re holding that proof, and still you don’t want to believe it. Still you
won’t
believe it.”

She shoved against him, refusing to be distracted by the heat between them. Making yet another slide, she peered through the microscope a third time. “There has to be some explanation.”

“There is.” He leaned back against the table next to her, his long legs stretched in front of him with his ankles crossed. “Maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe I’m just telling the truth.”

“How is that possible? Looking at this, I would say the blood came from a totally different species—someone who isn’t even human.” She ran her eyes over him from head to toe, trying not to linger on his heavily muscled chest or flat stomach. “And that’s obviously not the case.”

“Phoebe—” he started, but she cut him off with a raised hand.

“Three million dollars,” she said, her voice firm but her eyes wild. “Before we leave this lab today?”

“Absolutely.”

“And I’d get the chance to study you—and your people.”

His eyes darkened. “We’re not lab rats.”

“Of course you aren’t.” She was impatient now, dying to get started looking at the strange phenomena that made Dylan who he was. “But if you want me to be able to understand the irregularities of a disease, I first need to understand what is normal for you.” She glanced back at the microscope. “And, obviously, if what I’m seeing is true, I don’t have the first idea of what’s normal and what isn’t.

“If you expect me to be able to help you, I’ll need to change that. Quickly.”

CHAPTER SIX

H
e still couldn’t believe she was coming back with him. Dylan glanced across the plane’s small seating area at Phoebe, who was currently engrossed in whatever data she was looking at on her laptop. Every once in a while she would mutter to herself, then write something on the legal pad he quickly discovered went everywhere with her.