Act of Command: An Immortal Ops World Novel (PSI-Ops / Immortal Ops Book 4) (3 page)

Alice shook her head, offering a scolding look. “Phone.
Remember
it. Text me if you need me. If you get a hinky vibe from him or anything, text. If you’re bored, text. If you decide to do him, take video. I so want to know and see! I’m kinky like that.”

Mae laughed. “Got it. If I do anything, text.”

“You got it, sister! Now, let’s get you over to the Union.”

Mae nodded. It was now or never. She started for the door, and Alice whistled, drawing her attention. When she turned, she found Alice holding her cell phone, smirking. “Off to a great start so far. At least you remembered panties, though I’m guessing this Corbin guy would have preferred you didn’t.”

Mae was almost out of the door when she remembered she’d not put on the lipstick Alice had suggested. “I’m coming. Right behind you!”

She hurried to the bathroom, rifled through her friend’s makeup drawer and found a lipstick she remembered getting with Alice when a popular company had done a tribute line to Marilyn Monroe. Setting her phone on the counter, Mae applied the lipstick and then dabbed most off, unsure how she felt about having something so bright and so red on her lips.

“Mae, come on!” called Alice.
 

She doubled-checked her hair and dress before walking as quickly as she could in heels back towards the front door. Alice was there, grinning. “See. Told ya you’d look hot in red.”

Mae blushed. “Let’s go.”

Alice held the main door open to the building and Mae exited, the cool evening air making her shiver as she did. She took a few steps and then stopped, butterflies overwhelming her stomach. This was a bad idea. She wasn’t the best in social situations, and she didn’t really know anything about Corbin other than her mother thought they’d be perfect together. Her mother had also thought it was a good idea to try to get Mae to play an organized sport when she was younger only to realize Mae seemed to have two left feet.

“Never mind,” she said, trying to make a break for it and head back into the building.

Alice blocked her path. “Sister, you’re going. If he’s not a creeper and he’s hot, you’re getting laid. The time has come.”

A giggle erupted from Mae at the sight of her friend body-blocking the door. “You’re scary when sex is involved.”

“Trust me, Mae. I have this feeling that this is going to work out for you in the end,” said Alice, stepping forward a small bit, but not enough for Mae to get past her with ease and back into the building. Alice was scrappy for sure.

“Okay, but if he’s a mouth-breather, I’m out,”

“Well, yeah! No one wants to hang on a date with a mouth-breather. Remember that one date I had. The one who couldn’t stop sniffling. I swear he was hooked on cocaine or something.” Alice took Mae’s hand in hers. “I’ll walk you to the Union.”

“You’re only offering to escort me because you know I’ll bolt and bail on tonight,” said Mae, knowing her friend well.

“Hell yeah.”

Mae was about to comment more when she turned, her attention pulled to the side of the common area. Off in the distance was a man who looked oddly out of place surrounded by the frat boys all around him—all of them wearing shorts and polo shirts.

The man walking through them was tall with a head of long blond hair that was tied back. He wasn’t wearing the douchebag get up. “Who is that?”

Alice eased up alongside her. “The blond hunk?”

“Yes.”

“Tell your vagina to stand down. I think he’s probably a new professor or something. Not your blind date. But if I’m wrong, you are so doing that.”

“Oh yes. For sure,” said Mae, still staring in the direction of the hot guy. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him. “Can I just skip the date and go out with that guy instead? I bet he’d be great in bed.”

“Earth to formerly-sexually-repressed-girl,” said Alice, waving a hand in Mae’s face. “Pod people took you, didn’t they? Where is my virgin?”

“She’s lusting after some random guy,” responded Mae before facing forward.

Alice stared harder in the direction of the man. “I can’t believe I’m going to encourage your strange obsession with a sculpture, but that guy looks a lot like your Greek god statue with the lion.”

Mae gasped, realizing her friend was right. The man did look like her sculpture.

“Think he’s hung the same?” asked Alice, ruining the moment.

“Alice, really.”

“What? Legit question.”

Mae groaned. “I need to go back to the apartment. Before you think it’s to bail, I forgot deodorant and the blond is making me so hot that I noticed.”

“Totally hopeless. Let’s get your pits covered and then we need to get you to your date.”

Chapter Two

Captain Corbin Jones held a bouquet of wildflowers in one hand and his phone in the other. He was behind on paperwork and trying to walk and scan read at the same time. The documents had been sitting in his inbox for nearly a week as it was. He didn’t have time to go on a blind date, and he certainly had no inclination to be on one. Blind dates were for men who couldn’t get a woman. Not for him. He could land any woman he wanted. He’d been considered quite a catch throughout his lifetime and had gone through certain periods when he paid more attention to his sex life—the last big burst being in the 1920s. He was still fond of jazz and gin. A perfect pairing. Sure, his pick-up lines needed work as they were somewhat antiquated, but he could blend when need be and he got by. The roaring twenties weren’t that long ago, were they?

He nearly tripped as he thought about how long ago his last dating high period was. He blinked. “Your last rush coincided with the advent of sliced bread.”

He cringed, hoping his teammates didn’t figure that tidbit out. They’d never let him hear the end of it. It wouldn’t matter that he’d not had the time to date. He’d told his mother as much. That was of no importance to her, who, even at his age, still managed to scare him. She may be in London, thousands of miles away from him, but that was no matter—the woman could still make him listen as if he were but a boy, rather than the leader of his own special operatives team and hundreds of years old. She had that effect on a lot of men, so he didn’t take it to heart. His father was a proud lion-shifter and alpha in his own right, but next to his mother, his father was merely a cuddly teddy bear. She came from a long line of lion shifters herself, but lacked the ability to shift forms, as was often the case with female shifters. That didn’t stop her from putting the fear of the gods into those around her.

There was simply no way out of the blind date. At least, not unless a crisis at work came about. It seemed wrong to hope for one, but secretly he did. So far, it was just a mass of paperwork that he was behind on. Nothing pressing enough to convince his mother he didn’t need to be fixed up—again. Not one of her past attempts had stuck. He’d only fucked a couple of them. His mother’s taste in women she thought would work for him was that poor, to say the very least.

He sighed, his thumb scrolling down the document on his phone display. It was a briefing of another Paranormal Security and Intelligence (PSI) mission. It was not one his team had been on, but rather one with intel in connection to a group of very bad men Corbin’s team had recently begun tracking. Lately it seemed everything tied back to the Corporation.

He really and truly was starting to hate them.

He glanced up to be sure he wasn’t about to walk into anything and then continued reading. He felt out of place on the university grounds. He was far too old to be there, but then again, he was far too old for most everything—including his date. Looking at him, none would guess he was more than thirty at most. A perk of being immortal. As a lion-shifter he had heightened senses and drew upon them as he walked while reading, using them to smell and listen for anything that may be in his path.

All he could smell was the group of young men gathered off to one side of the common area, tossing around a football. He snorted in derision, failing to see what the American version had to do with feet, apart from a designated kicker coming out at what seemed random to him. His preference was definitely for European football—at least it required the actual use of one’s feet coming into contact with the ball.
 

Most called him British as he was born and bred in England, but the truth was, he was English. He had neither the time nor inclination to explain the difference to his American friends. And he was pretty sure that, outside of England, the rest of the United Kingdom spent far too much time with their sheep.

Corbin paused in reading the report and opened the screen holding a map of the campus. He glanced up, long enough to see he was indeed headed in the right direction, and then stopped as a scent caught his attention. Honey, cinnamon and vanilla filled his head, making his cat shove upwards, towards the surface. He had to take a deep breath and focus to keep from doing something incredibly foolish, like partially shifting forms in public where anyone could see him. Clutching the flowers tighter, he felt some of the stems give under the pressure of his hand. He turned, trying to find the source of the smell. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that the owner was female. There were so many women walking on the campus that he couldn’t zero in on the owner of the scent. He just knew that it was from the other direction—not the way he was headed.

Not his date for the evening.

Mae Bertelot, the daughter of one of his mother’s friends, was his dinner date. When his mother had pushed for him to agree to the date, he’d tried to point out the extreme age difference between himself and the young woman. She was, from his mother’s accounts, a fifth-year senior, studying fine arts. By his guesstimate that put her around the age of twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. He hoped. Anything younger and he’d spend the evening feeling like the sleazebag he was shaping up to be. Those men who trolled bars looking to pick up younger women always set his teeth on edge. His mother was doing her best to lump him in the mix.

He sighed.

Colette Corbin meant well. She always did.
 

Hence, him walking on a campus, with flowers, dressed for an evening out, while he really just wanted to be catching up on paperwork. He wasn’t a monk. Far from it. He liked sex. What red-blooded male didn’t? He was just too busy to bother with all the things associated with it—the wining, the dining, the romance aspect. And he wasn’t much into women who charged, who didn’t require those necessities.

He caught sight of another group of young men, this one gathered near a bench, talking and carrying on, seeming to have fun. They were all dressed in snug-fitting polo shirts with baggy shorts and leather slip-on shoes. Corbin paused and glanced down at himself. Was he dressed wrong to go on a date with a woman who was still at university? His fellow teammates liked to joke that Corbin reminded them of an underwear model. Frankly, he didn’t see it.

Did women prefer men who looked like that? If so, he was certainly out of his element. The designer button-down, long-sleeved shirt he wore had trimmed cuffs that, when rolled, showed a checked pattern, setting off the blue of the shirt. He’d paired it with charcoal-gray chinos. The black loafers he wore retailed for around five hundred dollars per foot and didn’t look anything like what the young men on campus were wearing.

Corbin’s long blond hair was fastened at the nape of his neck with a leather band, and while he was normally clean-shaven, he’d taken to wearing a close-cut beard. It was several shades darker than his hair.

He looked nothing like the men here.

Because they are boys
, he thought, calming somewhat.
You’re a man.

As a group of women approached, he chanced a glance at them, noting they were dressed as casually, if not more so, than the boys. He sighed. Yes, he was certainly a man who did not belong there. How his mother could even begin to think he would have anything in common with a woman so young was beyond him.

The smell that had caught his attention before hit him again, this time stronger. There was no way he could ignore it. He looked in the direction it was coming from and froze. The single most beautiful creature he’d ever laid eyes upon was there, off in the distance, but not too far that his preternatural eyes could not pick up on every detail of her. Her sable-colored hair was piled high upon her head and fell loosely in long, semi-waves down her back. Eyes so dark a brown they reminded him of fine chocolates, hid partially behind black-framed glasses. Never before had he thought he had a thing for a woman in glasses, but seeing her fast changed his mind.
 

She wasn’t dressed as the others around her. She wore a long, light yellow, flowing dress that somehow managed to hug every curve she had. And did she ever have curves! They were glorious. His cock responded at once, hardening as his cat made an attempt to surface. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t draw in air. Couldn’t do anything beyond stare as the goddess made her way in his direction. The dress had a slit in the side, gifting him a view of her long, creamy, pale legs. As she neared, his gaze drew up her slowly, memorizing her shape, the soft, sultry sway of her hips and her breasts. Her full lips had red lipstick on them, and while he wasn’t usually a fan of lipstick, he had to admit the color was stunning on her.

There was an elegance about the tall beauty that set her apart from the woman near her, though the other woman wasn’t anything a man would call unattractive. Quite the opposite. With her red hair, pale skin and bright blue eyes, she was very attractive, but the brunette was stunning. Possibly the most attractive woman he’d ever seen in all his years.

He wanted to stop heading in the direction where he’d been told to meet Mae and go to the brunette instead. As wrong as it sounded, his cock didn’t care. It wanted the woman in the yellow dress. Wanted to know what it felt like to sink into her, and he wanted to know what those bespectacled eyes would look like as she reached culmination.

He nearly did the unthinkable. He almost went to the woman, to hell with the blind date his mother had arranged. Had his phone not begun to buzz at that moment, indicating a call was coming in, he might very well have abandoned his date for the evening.