A Storm of Pleasure (20 page)

Hungry for the holidays? Go out and get
THE BITE BEFORE CHRISTMAS,
Heidi Betts’s first book for Brava, available now…

C
onnor’s level of confidence where his younger siblings were concerned was quite a bit lower than his declaration made it sound.

Did he wish he had the power to influence Liam and Maeve’s attitudes and actions? Certainly.

Had he had any success in doing so thus far? Not even remotely. And nothing that had happened in recent memory made him think he ever would.

But sitting across from the lovely Jillian Parker—the events planner Angelina had sent to help keep his holiday from becoming a complete and abysmal failure—he suddenly felt the need to preen…or at least to act as though being the patriarch of his family carried
some
weight with his unruly brother and sister.

Angelina had told him Jillian was good at what she did. His longtime friend had apparently attended several events that Jillian’s company had organized, and had been quite impressed.

What Angelina
hadn’t
told him was that Jillian Parker was
hot
with a capital
H
and two
T
s.

From the moment Randall had opened the door and invited her in…from the moment he’d stepped out of the library and sniffed the air, he’d known she wouldn’t be just another random woman drifting in and out of his life. She smelled of peaches and cream and just hint of honey, all of which seeped into his pores and set his blood on fire.

It had been all he could do to walk calmly across the foyer to introduce himself. To take her hand instead of her mouth.

He
hadn’t
been able to resist slipping his middle and index fingers over the inside of her wrist, however, to feel her pulse. To feel the beat of her heart in the one, slim vein, and the heat of her life’s blood that called to his own.

Having her here, working in his home, was going to be an experience, that was for sure. And an exercise in self-control; something he’d always prided himself on…but now couldn’t be entirely certain of.

Her blond hair was swept up in a loose knot at the back of her head, a few wisps falling free to frame her heart-shaped face and dust the pulse at her neck. He could see the gentle throb on both sides, even with the short distance that separated them.

She had bright blue eyes surrounded by light lashes and a raspberry-tinted mouth that could only be described as infinitely kissable.

Since it was winter in Boston, she was dressed more warmly and demurely than he suspected was the norm. Charcoal slacks and a thick red sweater with a deep, wide cowl neckline covered her from shoulder to ankle, but he could very well imagine the luscious figure hidden beneath.

Professional on the outside, sexy as hell on the inside. A flush of intense arousal heated his skin at the thought, moving south at a rapid pace.

Even in stylish boots with a two-inch heel, the top of her head only reached his chin while standing. But though petite, her form was lush and curvaceous, and made him feel both protective and possessive. Unusual given their short acquaintance, but not something Connor was inclined to question at the moment.

Clicking the tip of her pen, Jillian crossed her legs and adjusted the pad on her lap, ready to take notes.

“
That
I can do,” she murmured, oblivious to the fact that he was nearly chewing nails on the other side of the desk, his mind having wandered hell and gone from worries about an ideal holiday celebration to stripping her of that soft sweater and exploring every inch of her soft, white skin.

Thankfully, the wide desk hid the proof of his distraction, but if he didn’t drag this out for a while, she and everyone he came in contact with in the next little while would know exactly what he was thinking of doing to his attractive new party planner.

“So tell me what it is you’re looking for in a holiday event. What would make your Christmas flawless with a capital
F
?”

Exhaling a deep breath, he rocked back and forth slightly in his cushioned black leather executive chair and did his best not to picture
her
beneath the tree on Christmas morning—naked and waiting for something that definitely started with a big, hard capitol F. And it wasn’t
flawless.

And be sure to look for
A DARKER SHADE OF DEAD
by Bianca D’Arc, coming next month!

“T
his blows.”

Dr. Sandra McCormick’s voice echoed around the morgue. Well, it wasn’t really a morgue. At least it hadn’t been. The large room had been a perfectly good laboratory until the senior team members had decided to perform tests on cadavers. Now it was a morgue.

The temperature had been dropped to near freezing and Sandra shivered in her lab coat. She’d donned her heaviest jacket under the lab coat she had borrowed from one of the men on the team who wore a much larger size, but it still wasn’t enough. She was cold, dammit.

Cold and miserable and all alone on night shift because she was low man on the totem pole. The science team had been together for a few months, working for the military on ways to improve combat performance. Specifically, they’d been trying to come up with substances that, when injected into people, would improve healing and endurance in living tissue. They were at the point now where they’d graduated from
in vitro
testing in Petri dishes to something a bit more exotic.

They weren’t ready to try
in vivo
testing on living animals or people. Instead, the senior scientists had decided to take this grotesque step, administering the experimental regenerative serum to dead tissue contained in a whole, deceased organism. Personally, she would’ve preferred to start with a dead animal of some kind, but only human cadavers would work for this experiment since the genetic manipulation they were attempting was coded specifically for human tissue. They didn’t want any cross-contamination with animals if they found a substance that actually worked.

As a result, she was stuck in a freezing cold lab in the middle of the night, watching a bunch of dead Marines. It was kind of sad, actually. Every one of these men had been cut down in their prime by either illness or injury. They had all been highly trained and honed specimens of manhood while they were alive. Some of them had been quite handsome, but their beauty had been lost to the pale coldness of death. They were here because they had no next of kin—only their beloved Corps—and their bodies had been donated to science.

The room was dimly lit. Sandra only needed the individual lights over each metal table on which the bodies rested to do her work. She’d holed up at a desk in the far corner of the giant lab space, entering the data she collected hourly for each body into a computer. Her fingers were already numb from the cold and it had only been three hours. Five more to go before the day shift would release her from this icy prison.

She heard a rustling sound in the distance as she blew on her fingers to try to warm them up. Her chair swiveled as she lifted her feet, placing them on the runners of the rolling office chair.

“That better not have been the sound of mice scampering around in here.”

Contrary to most medical researchers, Sandra had never really been comfortable with mice. Little furry rodents still made her jump and she shied away from any lab work that required her to deal with the critters.

The room was dimly lit. The only illumination came from the computer screen and desk light behind her and the single light over each table. The whole setup gave her the creeps.

Deciding to brave the walk to the bank of light switches on the far side of the room near the door, Sandra stood. If she had to sit here with a bunch of dead bodies all night, the least she could do was put on every light in the damned room. Why she’d ever thought the desk light would be enough, she didn’t know.

She’d gone on shift at midnight and was slated to take readings every hour until 8 a.m. when her day shift counterpart would relieve her. Scientific work sometimes required a person to work odd hours. Experiments didn’t know how to tell time. When they were running something in the lab, she usually got tapped for the late night hours. Normally she didn’t mind. The lab was usually a peaceful, comforting place.

But not now. Not when it had been turned into a morgue. Or maybe it was more like Dr. Frankenstein’s dungeon, only without the bug eyed servant named Igor. She’d definitely seen that old Mel Brooks movie one too many times in college. Thinking about some of the funnier lines from the comedy classic made her smile as she walked down the aisle of tables toward the door and the light switches.

“It’s alive…”
She did a quiet imitatiion of Gene Wilder from the scene where he’d given life to his monster as she walked, chuckling to herself.

One either side of her were slabs on which the cadavers rested. A breeze ruffled one of the sheets that had been pulled over the body on her right.

It must’ve been a breeze. The sheet couldn’t move on its own, right? She quickened her step, a creepy feeling shivering down her spine as the smile left her face.

A hand shot out of the dark and grabbed her wrist. She screamed. The fingers were cold. The flesh was gray. But the grip was strong. Too strong.

It pulled her in. Closer and closer to the body she’d checked only forty-five minutes before. He’d been dead at the time. Immobile. Now he was moving and—oh, God—his eyes were open and he was looking at her. His stare was lifeless as he drew her closer.

She did her best to break free but the dead man was just too strong. She beat against his fingers with her other hand. When that didn’t work, she tried pushing against his cold shoulder. Nothing seemed to help. She hit his face, his chest, anyplace she could reach, but he wouldn’t let go.

He drew her closer until she was leaning across him, her arm over his head. Then he opened his mouth…and bit her. She gasped as his teeth broke through her skin. Blood welled as the icy teeth sank deep. Dull eyes looked through her as the dead man chewed on her forearm.

She went crazy, struggling to break free. She must’ve twisted in the right way because after a moment, she felt herself moving more easily. The next second, she was free.

He sat up, following her progress. She heard noises all around the lab now, echoing off the shadowed walls. She looked around in a panic. Other bodies were rising all around the makeshift morgue.

“How in God’s name…?” She gasped, clutching her bleeding arm to her chest as six tall bodies slid off the laboratory tables to stand in the dim, chilled room. She was so scared, she nearly wet her pants. The fear gave her a spike of clarity. She had to get out of there.

She ran for the door. Hands grabbed at her lab coat. She stumbled but caught herself before she could fall to the cold floor. She let her arms slip backward so the oversized lab coat came off, held in those strong hands that had come at her out of the darkness. She had no idea what had gone wrong with the experiment but she wasn’t about to stick around to ask questions. These guys were huge. Big Marines who were easily twice her size. And they didn’t seem friendly. In fact, they kept grabbing at her.

If she could just get to the door. She ran, dodging and weaving around the tables and the reaching arms. They tried to grab the jacket she’d worn under the oversized lab coat, but they had a hard time getting hold of the slippery nylon fabric, thank goodness.

She crashed through the door, running for her life. She had to get help. She had to rouse the entire team. She had to get the MPs and the Marines and hell, the National Guard if she could, to stop these guys.

She turned to look over her shoulder just once as she ran into the fringe of trees on the heavily wooded outskirts of the base. What she saw chilled her to the bone. In the dark of the night, she could see the dim, yellow, rectangular glow of the open doorway. Outlined there were the hulking shapes of dead men. The dead Marines were following her path outdoors at a slow, steady, lurching pace.