TEMPTATION
ON ICE

Cherry Adair

CHAPTER ONE

Decommissioned Soviet Submarine Base #15
Arctic Ocean
90 00 N, 0 00 E

Invisible, Sebastian Tremayne and fellow T-FLAC operative Anatoly Cohen silently followed the three physicists, two male, one female, down the long, dimly lit corridor of Decommissioned Soviet Submarine Base #15.

The casual conversation of the targets wasn’t relevant and Sebastian tuned it out. Half of him prayed the woman wasn’t who he’d been told she was. The other half felt a surge of hope. The question was, what should he hope for? He looked at her and the question became instantly moot.

Her glossy chestnut hair was longer than it’d been the last time he’d seen her. But the color, even in the crappy lighting, was instantly recognizable. For a second he remembered the heavy, silken weight of it as he’d held her head in his palm and brought his mouth down on hers. Her hair had draped like a spill of satin over his fingers. Sebastian remembered the feel of her slender body pressed against him. He imagined he smelled the heady fragrance of night-blooming jasmine as the heat of her wrapped about him.

The smell of meat cooking on the grill outside, the sound of glasses clinking and people laughing, faded to nothing. For a few incredible minutes, standing there in a back hallway of his best friend’s house, holding his best friend’s fiancé, Sebastian had felt an aching yearning that had gone miles beyond sexual desire.

He walked a different hallway now. Cold, dim, and smelling of mold. This hallway was far more dangerous than being caught kissing another man’s woman. Turn around, sweetheart, he thought, angry with himself as well as with her. Let me see those big, beautiful lying brown eyes.

As if she’d heard him, the woman turned her head to answer one of the men, giving Sebastian a clear view of her profile.

Sebastian looked into the very much alive face of a dead woman.

His heart raced. Michaela Giese. Beautiful, vibrant Dr. Michaela Giese. Very much alive after being declared dead two years ago. He sucked in an inaudible breath, his heart manic with lo—lust. With unrequited hunger. Beating fast, because just looking at her turned him on like no other woman ever had, nor, he knew, ever would.

It took every ounce of fifteen years of T-FLAC training not to suck in a shocked breath, not to grab her, not to . . . Fuck—not to demand answers, right now.

They’d been right. She was here and responsible for building a nuclear bomb primed to detonate in mere hours. Set to melt the polar ice caps into a worldwide slushy margarita, flooding coastal cities, and within a short time, raising ocean levels. Fast.

Millions would die because of her actions. Because of her piss-poor choices. Unless ridiculous billions of dollars were paid to the terrorist she worked with by midnight.

Sebastian and Cohen were here to stop her.

The beautiful, breathing, lying, gut-yanking bitch was obviously ruthless enough to do it.

“That her?” Cohen whispered into his lip mic.

“Hell if I know.” Oh yeah. He needed some time to get used to her being back from the dead. Along with the pieces of him that had gone into that empty grave with her.

His fingers flexed at his sides as her glossy ponytail swayed against her slender back as she walked. It would feel like heavy silk against his skin. He knew . . . He shook his head, as if to clear away cobwebs. Get a grip, Tremayne; what do you really know about her?

Had she intentionally faked the plane crash to come and work with the terrorists? Jesus. Jesus. How long had that been going on? He hated to believe it, but the evidence was too hard to negate. The timing had been just too fucking convenient.

Two years ago she’d abruptly called off her engagement to his best friend, fellow operative Cole Summers, a month after their engagement party. No explanations. But there’d been plenty of suspicions, most of them tossed his way by Cole afterward. It had been a major blowout that Sebastian and Cole had eventually managed to overcome.

A few days later, the bits and pieces of her crashed Cessna had been found on the shores of the tiny island of Diomede in the middle of the fucking Bering Strait.

There’d been no body.

Speculation had run rife at T-FLAC HQ. As far as anyone knew, Michaela didn’t know anyone locally. She was an experienced pilot, but there were no signs of foul play. She’d simply . . . vanished. Drowned in the icy sea. Or so everyone had believed.

Her funeral had been a seminal moment in his life.

“Still with me, bud?” Cohen asked quietly in Sebastian’s headpiece.

“Yeah.”

The long, narrow cement corridor, painted half filthy white and half puke green, had a domed ceiling and metal-caged, bare lightbulbs. A track ran down the middle, indicating that during the Cold War heavy equipment had to be transported to and from the dock at sea level.

Even with just his face and hands bare, it was freeze-his-balls-off cold, and Tremayne was grateful for the protection of his LockOut suit worn beneath a thick, hand-knit gray sweater and charcoal jeans. The insulated boots with the no-sound tread developed by the science geeks at T-FLAC were doing a good job of saving him from frostbitten toes. If they stayed in this corridor much longer, though, the gloves and face mask were going to come out of their pockets. He wondered if he had ice crystals in his eyebrows. . . .

Michaela was similarly dressed in a bulky brown sweater and too-long black pants, rolled up several times to accommodate her walking. She looked like a little girl playing dress-up in her father’s clothes. But she wasn’t a child. Whose clothes was she wearing?

Sebastian felt a surge of unwelcome annoyance at the direction of his thoughts. Even though Cole was now happily married and father to a delightful little girl, Sebastian still felt guilty as hell coveting his friend’s fiancé.

Ex-fiancé.

Dead, miraculously alive ex-fiancé.

And that guilt and anger was without the added component of her contribution to this particular terrorist cell. Damn damn damn.

“Think they’re heading to the nuke?” Cohen speculated. “If that’s the case, we can be outta here in thirty minutes tops.”

“When has an op ever been that fucking easy?” Sebastian rubbed the back of his neck. He trusted that itch, and it told him there was plenty of shit and several fans before they teleported out, job accomplished.

Ahead, one of the scientists they were following pushed open a rusted metal door, which creaked ominously. Michaela and the other man followed him inside. “—just ask that you check my numbers,” the man in front said to Michaela.

“I’m sure there’s nothing to w—” The thick, insulated door closed.

“I’ll go see what’s up,” Cohen offered.

Sebastian leaned against the corridor wall to wait.

Would Michaela recognize him when she saw him again? Hell, would she even remember him? They’d met five times. Always with Cole and a group of friends. Every second of every one of those encounters was fresh in Sebastian’s mind. Hell. He’d better get his shit together before he confronted her. He was here to do a job. A job he’d volunteered for even though it was one he didn’t want.

Like it or not. He was a trained counterterrorist operative with a directive. Clear. Nonnegotiable. There was no wiggle room in his orders; personal feelings were not only unimportant, they were also forbidden.

A brush of air nearby indicated Cohen was back. “They’re splitting up until a meeting in an hour.”

“I’ll take care of her.” Sebastian’s heart did a triple axel. “Maybe the guys will lead you to the lab?”

“That’ll save time.”

A technopath, Anatoly Cohen’s power was the ability to control technology. They didn’t need to know how to shut the nuke down or how the damn thing was rigged; Cohen would use mind control to jam the signals and rewire the thing without ever touching it.

The door opened and Michaela preceded the men back into the corridor. She had several large black binders cradled in her arms. “I’ll look these over,” she told the older man with a nose like a strawberry and thinning gray hair pasted to his shiny scalp. “But I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.” The sound of her husky contralto went through Sebastian like the first rays of spring sunshine after a long, dark North Pole winter. Oblivious to his presence, Michaela was close enough to touch. The heady fragrance of jasmine was a ghost of his imagination. She’d lost weight. Too much weight. Her face was hollowed, her beautiful eyes shadowed and troubled.

“Please confirm my findings, Michaela. You know Tongpan.” The shudder shaking the man’s skinny frame had nothing to do with the Arctic air blowing through the corridor. Who was Tongpan? His name hadn’t been on any of the intel they’d received. Tremayne made a mental note to pass it on to HQ later.

The waiting fishing trawler had dropped anchor six miles away early that morning. In case things turned to shit inside the sub base. Sebastian didn’t anticipate trouble. The place was manned with geeks and low-level security people; the principals would control what was happening here from a remote—and safe—location.

“I’ll check and triple check. Again,” Michaela told the man soothingly. “I’m sure you have nothing to worry about. After all this time, you just need a few more hours of patience. Then all any of us can do is wait.”

“Dr. Gangjon will expect us to go with him when he leaves?” Sebastian heard an invisible question mark at the end of the sentence. Hope and fear painted a stark mask on the man’s horse-like features. The tall and painfully skinny guy’s puppy-dog eyes watched Michaela’s every move through bottle-thick glasses. Another sucker bites the dusk. Was he bitter? Hell no. She should just wear a goddamned warning sign on her chest: HEARTBREAKER!

About to turn the opposite direction down the passageway from her comrades, Michaela paused. “I sincerely hope you’re right, Dr. Ackart.” Her tone indicated she had no faith in his supposition whatsoever.

“Gonna catch up,” Cohen said softly into his lip mic. “Cover my ass. Hell—better connect in case we get split up.”

The thought had occurred to him. He reached out and closed his fingers around his partner’s upper arm. Sebastian’s ability to maintain invisibility would last another hour unless he once again made physical contact with Cohen to rejuice the power.

Sebastian had no powers of his own. Unlike Cohen, he wasn’t a wizard. He was more of a supernatural freak of nature. He had one power, and one power only. As a power chameleon, he could absorb powers from a wizard by direct physical contact. Transmogrifying was a handy tool in his T-FLAC grab bag, but it didn’t define him. Not enough to be part of T-FLAC’s paranormal unit anyway.

The transference of Cohen’s powers was an adrenaline spike that had Sebastian’s heart galloping pleasantly.

“Man, I’m getting the sucky end of this assignment,” Cohen said, clearly amused. “I get to go play mind fuck with a computer, while you get to fuck her.”

“Can’t do much about your short straw, man.” Sebastian forced a lightness to his tone he in no way felt. “Go,” he whispered into the mic and immediately felt the absence of the other man’s heat signature beside him as Cohen teleported after the two scientists.

For several moments Sebastian just stood there, icy air playing against his face as she walked away from him, her steps brisk.

His eyes burned and his chest hurt like hell. He’d been handpicked over psi guys because of Cole’s recommendation. Now that the persistent itch on his neck was increasing he had a damn good idea why.

The mission had started out simple. Get in, use any means necessary to prevent the nuke from detonating, then get the hell out. He’d had no idea that might include one-on-one time with the woman whose “death” had ripped his heart to shreds. Cole didn’t blame the breakup on Sebastian anymore, but he knew damn well that Tremayne would recognize her if she were indeed there. But there was a world of difference between “see if she’s there” and “do what you must if she is.”

With Michaela in the mix, this wasn’t just another ball game; this was the Super Bowl. Winner take all. And he was a piss-poor loser.

Why the fuck did it have to be you, Michaela?

CHAPTER TWO

Michaela removed the broom handle she’d used to bar the bathroom door. A necessary, if not lifesaving, measure she never forgot. There were twenty-five rusted showerheads on each of two cement walls, twenty-five urinals and washbasins on the third, and doorless toilets on the fourth. No doors, no curtains, no locks. It took the definition of no-frills to new heights—or depths. She wondered if the substation had always been this bleak or if the last troops had simply stripped it as they left.

Twenty minutes under a hot spray was one of the things she’d missed most since the kidnapping. Okay, she missed sex even more. But not enough to welcome the advances of anyone on base.

The bathroom stank of mold and desperation and was so cold she could see her breath. She pulled open the heavy metal door leading out into the corridor, carrying her kit bag and the broom handle, a thin towel wrapped around her wet hair.

As the only woman on base, taking precautions, especially when she was naked, was second nature. The security guys in particular were persistently horny and determined. She’d had several really bad moments over the past twenty-three months, so she was ever vigilant, and always prepared for the worst.

As a physicist on counterterrorist organization T-FLAC’s payroll, Michaela had quickly learned to adjust. Especially since it was clear there was absolutely no way to leave. Not alive. Dead meant she couldn’t sabotage the project. She had to stay alive and finish the end game.

So, while she hadn’t been sent on this op, she considered herself deep undercover. There was no one to report to, no one who knew where she was. No one who gave a flying frick if she lived or died. The only unshakable certainty she had was that what she did here would eventually count. With that she was satisfied.

As a nuclear physicist she was an experimentalist, into designing and constructing experiments that led to observation and tests of theoretical prediction. Even though she’d been kidnapped to work on the nuclear weapon, she’d never had any contact with, nor interest in, nuclear weaponry while working for the counterterrorist organization. She’d applied herself diligently, however, when she hadn’t been given multiple-choice.

There’d be the last-minute briefing in an hour. But Richard Ackart was wrong. Dr. Gangjon, Bingwen Ling, and Afanasei Popov had left the base in the wee hours that morning.

Tongpan could easily have teleported them out, but he never bothered to make it easy for anyone coming or going. They’d left, quickly and quietly, early that morning under their own steam. Michaela had watched the two-man submarines slip under the ink-black frozen waters and disappear into the darkness. They wouldn’t be back. It was one step up from rats deserting a sinking ship; in this case, the ship was going to blow up, and the rats not only knew it, they’d arranged it.

Gerald Malard, the British physicist, was somewhere about. She hadn’t seen him leaving with the others.

Those who were left behind were justifiably scared, not knowing what the next few hours would bring. Unfortunately, as both a realist and a pragmatist, Michaela knew damn well what was going to happen. Had already happened.

She, the other two kidnapped physicists, and the security people had been left behind. They were expendable. There was no reprieve.

She never knew how or when Tongpan, the head honcho, came or went. With his long, white, cotton-candy fine hair, deep-set black eyes, and propensity for violence, he scared the living crap out of her. As did Kang Gangjon, his frighteningly, deceptively handsome second in command. Even though the next few hours here would be her last, she was grateful not to have to see those two monsters again.

She’d go to the last meeting in a little while. She’d smile and make small talk, and then . . . she’d wait for the end.

The last meeting.

This, she thought with gallows humor, was a day for lasts.

The air in the corridor was Arctic cold despite the thick sweats she wore. Damn. They had money for all the high-tech crap in the world, but one decent pair of warm pants that fit? Nope. She tried picturing a hot tropical beach as she jogged back to her room, but the sound of her own teeth chattering spoilt the dim image. Even though there was no chance of her getting out of this alive, her favorite fantasy involved hot sand, warm surf, and scorching sex with the right guy.

And Michaela knew precisely who she’d fantasize about. Cole’s best friend, Sebastian Tremayne. With nearly blue-black hair, shoulders stacked out to there, and a smile that could knock a woman senseless at fifty paces, he’d earned a reputation at T-FLAC HQ for being a hotshot, not just in the field but in the sack as well. Not that she’d gotten to find out.

Her engagement to Cole had ended when she’d met the best man, Sebastian, at her engagement party. She’d seen him a few times before but hadn’t actually spoken to him, looked into those eyes, or felt her entire body come alive the way it did as he shook her hand and congratulated her on the upcoming wedding.

It had been a revelation. She’d suddenly realized that her relationship with Cole, while comfortable, was no more than friendship with fringe benefits. Cole didn’t rock her world.

Sebastian Tremayne had rocked her world. Just back from a long op in South America, they’d seen him everywhere those few weeks. In spite of herself, Sebastian had instantly and completely intrigued and captivated Michaela. Not just his dark brooding good looks. Not that single dimple in his right cheek. No, she’d loved the richness of his voice. The flash of humor that lit those piercing pale blue eyes. Blue eyes that had avoided hers when she’d glanced his way and caught him watching her through half-lidded eyes.

Meeting him had been bad timing. After she’d broken off the engagement, she’d gone for that fateful solo flight to clear her head. She’d never gotten to explain to him why she’d ditched Cole or how attracted she was to him—enough to change the course of her life if he was interested.

Since then, Tremayne had starred in all of her incredibly hot, breathless fantasies. His dimpled smile, the heat in his blue eyes, and the phantom touch of his skin against hers had kept her sane for 703 nights.

Michaela glanced at her watch and picked up a bit of speed. . . . Half an hour . . . She smiled. “Sebastian, here I come.”

She paused outside the reinforced metal door to her small cell of a room as the damp towel wrapped around her head slid to the floor. Bending down to pick it up, she was hit with a frigid blast of cold air and her entire body shuddered. Uneasy, she briskly towel-dried her shoulder-length hair, glancing up and down the dimly lit corridor until she was certain no one was lurking. Assured no one was lying in wait, she shoved open the heavy, reinforced door. No lock here, either.

The 75-watt, yellow hallway light spilled into black as the door swung open. She’d left the small lamp beside the bed on. Hell. The room was so small she’d have to go inside and close the door to reach the switch. Even the pale light from the corridor was better than nothing at all. Darkness had never bothered her before she’d been imprisoned in a hostile environment, against her will, three hundred meters beneath the ice pack.

Michaela swore under her breath. Everything was either pitch-dark or deeply shadowed beyond the meager cone of light. She couldn’t see a damn thing, but the hair on the back of her neck prickled a warning. Her instincts had saved her from rape and worse a dozen times since she’d been here. She wasn’t about to doubt herself now.

“Whoever the hell you are, show yourself.” She wanted to claim she was armed, that she had a 9 mm and would blow a freaking hole in his groin. But other than her handy-dandy, ever-present broom handle and her little kit bag, she was unarmed, and everyone on the base knew it.

The silence hummed.

She wasn’t foolish enough to believe the lightbulb had died. If her room was dark now, it was because someone wanted it that way. If that someone was inside, running back into the corridor would just mark her as prey. And stepping into the confined space with an adversary was just asking for trouble.

Damned if she did. Damned if she didn’t.

Either someone had finally found out what she had planned and was here to stop her or the tension of the impending countdown was too much and some idiot had decided he needed to nail her once and for all.

A surge of adrenaline sharpened her senses and reflexes. She dropped the towel and kit bag and tightened her fingers around the thick shaft of the broom handle as she shoved the door closed with her foot.

Now they were both trapped.

Instead of ramming the straight-backed, military-issue chair under the door handle as she usually did, Michaela wrapped her fingers around the cool metal, ready to use the piece of furniture as a weapon if necessary. Chair in one hand, stick in the other, she felt like a fricking lion tamer.

Even with her excellent hearing, she didn’t pick up so much as a shallow breath, but she was 99.9 percent positive she wasn’t alone. “You’ve got five seconds to get the hell out, no questions asked.” She inhaled deeply and centered her body weight, the way her instructor had taught her back in another life. “After that I’m going to break your dick in half.”

A muffled chuckle was followed by a quiet, “Shhh.” A large hand clamped over her mouth, shocking her into dropping the stick. Fricking hell. Assholes never learned. With her intensive T-FLAC training she figured she could handle any man on this base. Other than Gangjor or Tongpan, who were too evil to be mere men.

The minute the stranger touched her she dug her short nails into his hand. With a soft oath he pulled her hard against his chest. Six three or four. Rock-solid abs.

Who was it this time? Sergei? Too tall. Richard? Too solid.

Michaela managed to get her mouth open just enough to bite down hard. She tasted his blood. Good. A knock-down, drag-out fight would deplete the surplus adrenaline surging through her body. But a fight wasn’t what he wanted, and she was suddenly terrified he’d prevent her doing her last-minute sabotage to the nuclear device. Then everything she’d endured for two years would be in vain. She fought him like a wild woman. Teeth, nails, knees, and fists.

“Jesus, it’s m—”

She wasn’t in the mood for chatty. Wrapping her fingers around the base of his thumb, she wrenched it back, trying to break his hold. No go. She chopped at his thick wrist. That didn’t fricking work, either. Reaching over her head with both hands, Michaela grabbed the intruder in a headlock and attempted to throw him. Too centered. Dropping her hands, she shot a hard elbow into his gut, followed by a head butt backward, which made her see stars and elicited zero reaction from him.

She realized that the height difference had rendered the move useless—his face and throat were too damn high for her to reach that way. To be effective she needed to turn around and face him. The room was small, barely eight by six. The hard edge of the chair pressed against her knees, which meant the narrow bed was behind him. She couldn’t get enough leverage to hit him with the chair; he was holding her immobile. If she could get a good grip, she could use his own body as a fulcrum and—

His warm, damp breath caressed her shower-damp neck. “I’m letting go, Michaela. Don’t scream.”

As if. She nodded. Hard to ID him from the almost inaudible whisper so close to her ear. Not that she cared which of her captors or fellow scientists he was. Not at this late stage of the game.

As much as she’d been thinking about sex, or the lack thereof for the past two years due to being fricking kidnapped by these terrorists, being raped mere hours before her death was unacceptable in every way. Michaela knew to the second when her time was up, and now wasn’t when.

As much as she would’ve liked having hot, breathless sex one last time before she croaked, this wasn’t how she wanted it.

He removed his callused hand. Her mouth felt numb from the pressure, but her mind was going a mile a minute as she slowly reached for the door handle a foot away.

Strong fingers closed around her wrist. “Stay.” It was darker than a witch’s heart and he unerringly found her wrist? That was serious training. Having no idea who she was dealing with complicated things, and suddenly her heart pumped even harder. She’d worked beside these men for twenty-three months. She knew them. Had studied their strengths and weaknesses. She still couldn’t place the intruder.

“You imbecile,” she spat out, keeping her body moving in the cage of his arms, keeping her mind jumping with possible escape scenarios. “You’re jeopardizing the project because you want to get laid? Get the hell out before I emasculate you.”

He muttered something hot and low, then spun her around so fast it made her dizzy. Disoriented in the darkness, she managed to close her fingers on his forearms for balance, then dug her nails into—a wet suit? Protective clothing of some sort? Someone stupid enough to think he could escape by swimming away from the base?

Nobody would give a damn if she screamed her lungs out. Everyone in the decommissioned submarine base had more exciting things to deal with right now than her. Still, he might not like having sex with a shrill, shrieking woman.

Yeah? part of her brain mocked. A man without sex for two years and he’d give a rat’s ass if she were screaming like a banshee while he pumped into her? Not.

She opened her mouth to scream blue bloody murder anyway. If he was Gromyko or Ackart, he’d run. Neither man was this confrontational. If he was Ling, Popov, or Malard, he’d rape, then kill her. And if this was Gangjon returned, she’d be praying for a quick death. Michaela managed to release a high-pitched shriek. There was zero chance of anyone hearing her. The walls were three feet thick. The conference room they used was clear on the other side of the underwater complex.

His mouth closed down on hers with no warning, effectively shutting her up. Stealing her air and her ability to scream. Iron-strong arms wrapped around her body, lifting her off her feet. He backed across the room.

No, oh no, oh fricking no!

His arms were locked over hers, but she wriggled and kicked like a wild woman. Legs, knees, feet. Anything she could use to make contact.

She was too close to her objective to allow anyone to stop her now. Two years of her life would be wasted if this caveman did worse than rape her. He was strong enough, determined enough, to kill her.

Too soon. She jumped up against him, locking her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck. A lover’s position, but also one that could break his neck if she exerted just the right pressure here, and here—

He bit her lower lip. Michaela’s heart raced and her adrenaline shot off the charts as they fell awkwardly onto the narrow cot. The springs shrieked, and the metallic taste of blood caused her heart to thunder in her ears as she battered whatever she could reach with her fists and heels. Her back slammed painfully into the concrete wall beside the bed.

Despite being a lab rat for T-FLAC rather than a field operative, she’d enjoyed her combat training, and had maintained that same level of fitness. Especially in the last couple of years. She was fit and strong. He was stronger.

Attack.

Counterattack.

The guy’s powerful hips pressed down, trapping her crossed ankles at the small of his back. Not good. Oh, God. Really not good. Worse, she was straddling his groin. He was fully aroused as he rolled her under him, effectively pinning her body, her arms, and her legs.

“Stop. You’ll hurt yourself,” he said harshly against her ear in an achingly familiar voice that convinced her she was hallucinating. “Damn it, Michaela. It’s me. Sebastian Tremayne.”

CHAPTER THREE

Heat of a different kind flooded Michaela’s body, even though there was no fricking way he could possibly be who he claimed to be.

Sebastian Tremayne?

Impossible.

Not out in the godforsaken Arctic, under three hundred meters of ice. There wasn’t a snowball’s hope in hell for T-FLAC to know where to start looking for her. And no way they would’ve taken two years to extract her if they did.

While she’d been thinking about Tremayne a lot lately, and in positions much like this one, a fantasy wasn’t the same as a full-out physical manifestation, delicious as his body felt between her knees. Maybe she was having a psychotic break? “Liar!”

Had they watched her in her room at night? God! Had they seen—Furious, cheeks hot, chest heaving, Michaela aimed a punch to his face. Before it landed he grabbed her balled fist in his. His hand was enormous, enclosing her hand completely in the cage of his fingers.

“Engagement party,” he said flatly, gripping her wrists to hold her bucking body still, his hips and the hard ridge of his erection pressing harder against the cradle of her pelvis. “Bozeman. May seventeenth two years ago. You wore a strapless little red number. Made me deaf, blind, and stupid the second I laid eyes on you. And the afternoon of the barbeque . . .”

She stopped fighting. Oh, God. How could anyone here know about that life-changing night? The reaction had been mutual and directly responsible for her breaking off her engagement a month later. One look at the tall and brooding Tremayne with his intense pale blue eyes and unsmiling mouth and Michaela had instantly forgotten her brand-new fiancé, Cole Summers.

They’d been walking down the same back hallway at Cole’s house when Tremayne had said her name in that low, sexy rumble of his. He leaned in as the best man to give her a congratulatory kiss on the cheek, she’d turned her head at the last second, and they’d ended up kissing. What started out as an accidental brush of his mouth against hers had turned into an instant inferno that left them both breathing hard.

He’d braced his hands on either side of her head, his breath hot and heavy against her neck. “We can’t do this.”

Michaela had let her head drop against the wall, her heart beating so hard it threatened to burst out of her bra. “You going to say anything to Cole?”

She’d never seen a more forlorn look in her life than the one she saw flit through Sebastian’s eyes. “Nope. This never happened.”

“Good.” She pushed away from the wall and held out a hand. “Friends?”

All he’d done was nod in agreement before turning on his heel and walking quickly away from her down the hallway. But that was then, and this was now. Sebastian wasn’t some erotic figment of her imagination. He wasn’t off-limits. He was hard and real and his heart pounded just as fiercely as hers.

In the dark she freed one hand and, with rising wonder and unsteady fingers, traced the rough planes of his face. His strong nose, the roughness of his jaw, the long, almost imperceptible slash of a dimple in his right cheek thrilled her.

They’d never touched again after that night, yet she recognized the texture of his skin, knew the smell of him.

Her heartbeat went from fear-frantic to lust-induced, manic tom-tom in a tenth of a second. “Sebastian.” A frisson ran from her temple to her toes and the tight place inside her chest unfurled as she breathed his name. “Are you real?”

In response he plunged his fingers into her wet hair. Gripping her head in a hard palm, he took her mouth in a rough, carnal kiss that left nothing to the imagination. She knew precisely what he wanted because ever since that night, she’d been wanting it, too. She responded with equal passion, snaking her hand around to the back of his neck and holding him in place as she thoroughly enjoyed her first real-world kiss in way, way too long.

His mouth left hers, and she whimpered in protest. “Come back; I wasn’t done.”

“Patience is a virtue.” He nibbled her earlobe, making her shudder, then swirled his hot, wet tongue in her ear until she arched her neck with a thick moan. His mouth, tongue, and teeth made her forget where she was for just a little while. Made her forget where she was and what was about to transpire.

Sebastian shifted his head the few inches required to plunder her mouth again. She saw fireworks behind her closed lids as he dragged his firm mouth back and forth across hers before plunging his tongue back to duel with hers.

Dizzy with lust and longing, heart about to burst out of her chest, Michaela couldn’t—forgot to—draw a breath and ripped her lips from his to drag in lifesaving oxygen. “You’re t-torturing me—”

“Breathing is highly overrated.” With his free hand he gripped the hem of her sweatshirt and pulled away long enough to drag the garment over her head. Then his hot, avid mouth was back on hers before the chill of the room could compute in her muzzy brain.

Michaela surrendered to the kiss, stroking his face as he made love to her mouth. God, she wished the light was on so she could be sure this was real and not the usual graphic fantasy. Although God only knew her fantasies had been good, but never this good.

She stroked Sebastian’s lips with her tongue, and he bit her lower lip. Her heartbeat skittered and pulsed as his other hand slid under her tank top to cup her bare breast as he continued kissing her as if he were starving and she a feast.

Her heartbeat, already manic with the adrenaline spike, shot into the stratosphere like a rocket as he caught her nipple, rolling and pulling it between his fingers as he devoured her mouth with teeth and tongue. Tears stung her eyes, and a rush of pain/ pleasure hurt her heart—a reaction to being touched after so long without human contact. A visceral response to him. God. He was here. Like a hero out of some fantasy novel. The good guy sweeping in at the eleventh hour to save her.

She’d resigned herself to the inevitability of death.

He’d brought her life.

Love and unspeakable gratitude filled her chest to bursting.

His fingers bunched the thin top, gliding it sensuously up her back; then that, too, was discarded. Her nipples pinched tight at the brush of his hand. “I want to see you naked,” he murmured, trailing his lips down her arched throat.

Yes. God, yes. She needed to see as well as feel his hot, satin-smooth skin. Wanted to see the crisp hair on his chest, wanted to watch as his pale eyes lost focus with desire. “Light,” she demanded, her voice hoarse with urgency.

“Hmm.” He slid down her body, then surrounded her nipple with the wet heat of his mouth and clamped down on the hard bud lightly with his teeth. Her hips bucked off the bed with the intense pleasure shooting through her body. Bringing her knees up, she clamped them around his narrow hips as he nibbled delicately at her painfully aroused nipples. First one and then the other, and then back again.

She started tugging at his clothing. The shirt was relatively easy—just a matter of disengaging long enough to deal with buttons and sleeves, and dispersal. The LockOut he wore beneath it required him rolling off her to strip. While he peeled off the skintight protective clothing, Michaela yanked off her drawstring pants and panties, and lay back to wait for him.

“I can’t believe—Hmm.” Sebastian blanketed her body with his, cutting her off. The feel of him on top of her made Michaela want to freeze time and stay this way always. She couldn’t see him in the stygian darkness, but God, she felt every delicious battle-hard inch of him pressed against every sex-starved inch of her.

He kissed her deeply, lips and tongue avid until her mind disengaged and all she could do was feel, all the atoms within her gone wild in a fission chain reaction to his touch.

With surprise, she heard the rip of foil, then felt him shift as he rolled on a condom. “You thought to bring a rubber on an op? On a rescue missi—”

He pushed into her, his large body shaking with his attempt to control himself as he slid into her wet heat with ease.

Michaela instantly started to move her hips. His penis was huge. Long and thick and incredibly hard as he pushed up inside her.

“Don’t,” he managed to grit out, “move. Need . . . a minute.”

She was a nanosecond from the biggest orgasm of her life, and he told her not to move? A keening sound reverberated deep in her throat as she tightened her legs around his hips and dug her short nails into his shoulders.

His entire body shuddered as he tried to keep control. But it was too late. With a feral growl he thrust into her, hard and deep, unable to delay the inevitable. For either of them.

Clenching around him, Michaela came hard. Once. Twice. Three times in quick succession, every nerve on fire, every pore open and saturated with the feel of him on her, in her, until her entire body was as nothing more than light, air, and energy. Her muscles and nerves caught up in the nuclear explosion within her that torqued all her senses beyond bearing.

Silently Sebastian came, too. His face buried in her neck, his arms clamped around her body, his fingers gripping her ass. She’d have bruises there in an hour, but she didn’t give a damn. He cupped her to him so tightly, as if he never planned to let her go. The good news was it was a perfect fit. The bad news, that it had happened too fast, for both of them.

The darkness of the room was filled with the sound of their rough breathing. Their bodies were slick with sweat; their heartbeats syncopated and still pounding at a wild pace.

He started to pull out of her, but Michaela imprisoned him with her arms and legs. “Wait; not yet.” Reality would come knocking any minute, and after two miserable years, surely she was entitled to a few more moments of bliss.

Sebastian in her arms was infinitely better than Sebastian in her fantasies. Yes, it had been wild and almost desperate. Yes, it had been pretty damn fast. But she’d loved every sweaty, pulse-pounding second of it, and she’d been the one who hadn’t wanted to hold on for even one more minute. It was almost unbelievable—she’d gone from thinking about having hot, breathless sex with Sebastian to having incredibly hot and completely breathless sex with Sebastian.

Powerful and primal, he hadn’t “made love” to her. He’d mated with her.

Michaela wondered if he’d know the difference. She’d love to find out. Sebastian in primal mode was amazing. Sebastian making love would likely be mind-blowing.

Then, perhaps selfishly, she wondered if they could do it again before they both got back to the business of saving the world.

CHAPTER FOUR

Michaela slid an arm and shapely leg across his hip. The glide of her silky skin poured a rush of testosterone-fueled heat through every sensitized inch of Sebastian’s body. Catching her musky scent, his nostrils flared. The cheap soap from her recent shower smelled clean and fresh mixed with the natural fragrance of her skin. And far more seductive than a designer fragrance. The toothpaste she’d used reminded him of how she’d tasted as his body had pounded into her.

Fuckit!

For those minutes, as her body clenched around him, as her arms and legs had drawn him harder and more tightly against her clenching wet heat, Sebastian had forgotten his directive: Allow Cohen time to use his unique powers to disable the nuke; find out what Michaela knew and why she’d turned rogue. Get names, places, and dates.

Fuck her if necessary to allay any suspicions that he was aware she’d turned.

Then kill her.

He’d wanted to prove them wrong. The woman he’d known so briefly was incapable of pulling off a terrorist act so heinous.

But facts, supported by intel, proved he was a fool. A wrong fool who thought with his dick. She was the lead physicist on this project. She’d done “excellent work, and was to be commended.”

That was a direct quote from one of the messages Intel had intercepted, a report from a Dr. Ackart to a Dr. Gangjon. The son of a bitch had gone on at length, describing the skills of the admirable, indispensable Dr. Giese and her immeasurable contributions to the success of the project.

Fuckshitdamncrap.

There were a thousand things Sebastian had wanted to do to Michaela. Killing her hadn’t been—still wasn’t—on the list.

Bad enough the one with the bull’s-eye on her forehead was her, but he had serious misgivings when he’d insisted on coming on the op. Misgivings he’d kept hidden, because, fool that he was, he’d hoped . . .

He was a seasoned T-FLAC operative. Hope was not allowed to play a role in his professional life, and he didn’t have a life outside of the profession these days. T-FLAC operatives were trained to do whatever was needed, anywhere in the world, to get the job done. They took out tangos to make the world a safer place. Michaela’s work was jeopardizing that safety.

Sebastian was known as a disciplined man. He’d do what had to be done. He still had an erection. So what? He could still fire a weapon—dick be damned.

Still, killing a woman, any woman, in cold blood went against the grain. Killing this woman who’d been an integral part of his fantasy life for the past two years . . .

Stop whining and do your fucking job, Tremayne.

She’d been so damned smart and funny, quick to catch his silly jokes. She’d shared his sense of humor. . . .

Reality check. She was responsible for the arming of the nuclear bomb.

He wished he could see her. But he’d needed the element of surprise the darkness had afforded him. Now he regretted removing the lightbulb, because he wanted to see her naked. Wanted, damn it, just this once, to see each exquisite inch of the body he’d only dreamed about.

Fucking her was his job. That’s all it was. Yeah, right.

He’d followed her from the corridor to her room and, once he’d seen the towel and kit bag in her hand when she emerged, opted to search her room while she showered. A wise move as it happened, because seeing her wet and naked would possibly have changed the course of events irrevocably.

There’d been nothing incriminating in the small, neat space. But then he hadn’t expected there to be. Michaela was brilliant as well as clever. She’d leave no trace of her defection on the off chance the good guys ever searched the submarine base for clues.

She combed her fingers lightly through the mat of hair on his chest and brushed a kiss across his pec that shot like a bullet straight to his heart. “Are you sleeping?” she asked, then kissed him again.

“Just for a few minutes, then we can see if we can do that a little slower.” He kept the anger out of his voice with difficulty. “Shh. Close your eyes and rest with me for a bit.”

“I have to—Sure.” He felt the flutter of her long lashes against his skin as her muscles relaxed.

Damn it, Michaela—

For a year after her “death” he’d held her memory on a pedestal. A fucking high pedestal. She was everything he wanted but couldn’t have. The Holy Grail who had broken his best friend’s heart. For ninety days anyway. Cole had gotten over her betrayal and departure a hell of a lot faster than Sebastian.

Until intel showed she’d crashed her Cessna intentionally.

A year later, her defection had been proven by communiqués between the Chinese and Russian tangos indicating the terrorists were pleased with Dr. Michaela Giese’s progress.

He’d mourned her death for a fucking year. Then spent the next year wanting to kill her.

That’s why she’d broken off with Cole less than a month after their engagement. That’s why she’d fled without telling anyone. That’s why, without a fucking backward glance, she’d ripped out the hearts and souls of everyone who’d loved her. She sure as shit hadn’t cared about the mind-blowing kiss they’d shared. Hell, no. She’d probably forgotten that.

And taking a stroll barefoot down the hot coals of the past was no way to do his job. He had to maintain a calm exterior and this wasn’t the way to do it. Back to the matter at hand. Literally.

Sebastian trailed his fingers down the curve of her spine and up the swell of her ass. She shivered, shifting against him, her silky skin cool to the touch. Everything primal in him screamed to protect her, draw her naked body closer to his own. But his intellect, his training, gave him a swift round kick to the head.

She’s a tango. Don’t trust how you feel. Trust what you know.

“Cold?” If this was the right thing to do, then why the hell did just doing his job feel like a betrayal?

“No. Yes,” she said, nuzzling his chest as she shivered again. “It’s always cold here. But your body is as toasty-warm as an electric blanket. This is the warmest I’ve been in years—No, don’t move; I don’t need anything covering me but you.”

Damn it. She was a snuggler. Her breath was warm on his skin as she dropped small kisses wherever she could reach. In another time, another place, it would have been perfect. He would have reveled in the feeling of her curling up against him like a kitten. Now it was torture because he wasn’t wishing he knew what her creamy skin or tight heat felt like; he God damn well knew.

“How did you find me?”

Like it or resist it, her kisses and petting touches had already given him a cockstand. “Intel between the Russians and Chinese,” he said flatly, willing the erection away. Once was for king and country; twice was a whole other ball game. “Your name was mentioned.” Seven times. In glowing terms.

“How long ago?”

How long since he’d known she’d turned was really what she was asking. “Year.”

A few beats of silence echoed in the darkness as her finger traced a figure eight over his heart. “How’s Cole doing?”

“Married with a kid and another on the way,” he told her boldly, capturing her hand to keep it still so he could concentrate on something other than the feel of her. “I’m godfather to his daughter.”

“I’m glad he’s moved on.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.” She shook her head gently, and that silky chestnut hair teased his nipples. “I never wanted him to be unhappy.”

If that were truly the case, she’d be married to the poor bastard right now. Not turned rogue and about to unleash a nuclear bomb that would flood the world and plunge it back into the Dark Ages. He couldn’t help it; he had to say something.

“You not only ripped out his heart without anesthetic, you stomped on it for good measure when you walked out on m—him without explanation.” The memory snagged in his constricted throat. Cole, on the other hand, had moved on within months. Sebastian wished he could have fucking done the same.

She turned her face into his chest and replied, her voice subdued, “I didn’t have a choice.”

Yeah? How much did they pay you? “Everyone has choices, Michaela.”

“Not everyone.”

Sebastian wished this interlude were over. Her rubbing her body around his like a cat in heat wasn’t helping his resolve.

He gauged the time and realized that he needed to delay her at least another half hour to give Cohen time to disable the nuke. Their encounter had been too fast.

Cohen needed time. Especially if part of the nuke was Chinese and the other part Russian. Cohen could manipulate both, but he had to speak the language of the original components to get them to respond, which took time.

“They eventually found the wreckage.” Her heat suddenly became like a brand to his skin. No longer sensual, but caustic. He wanted to get off the bed. He wanted to be fully dressed, armed to the teeth. He wanted, God damn it, the light on and an ocean between them.

What he really fucking wanted was a frontal lobotomy so he could forget she’d ever existed.

“Everyone presumed you were lost at sea.” Except me. No. I was idiot enough to hold out hope that you were still alive. Picking up her hand, he kissed the center of her palm, and she sucked in a breath. “Cole and I went to your funeral, June twenty-eighth. Wasn’t a dry eye in the place.”

The two friends had gone to the crash site together. Been part of the search team. Her body hadn’t been found. In the end, they’d buried an empty coffin.

For the first time in his life, Sebastian had drunk himself into oblivion on returning home. His binge had lasted a week. The memory far longer.

She raised her head, and the heat of her gaze bore through him even in the absolute darkness that engulfed them. “How did you get here, Sebastian—teleportation?”

“Yeah.”

“You couldn’t do that on your own.”

She knew he wasn’t part of T-FLAC’s paranormal division. He had a power but not wizard-level powers.

She was working the angles. Trying to figure out how to take the money and run.

Not so fast, sweetheart. Without a submarine—and the one at the dock was decrepit and useless; they’d checked—the only way in or out was swim or teleport. Nobody would last ten seconds in the freezing Arctic Ocean without becoming an insta-Popsicle, not even with a full-body LockOut suit inside a dry dive suit. There wasn’t anyone who would aid her when this particular shit hit the fan of her making. No one.

She lifted her head in the darkness, her body tensing. “Cole?”

The question was a gun to Sebastian’s head. Shit. He knew she still had feelings for Cole no matter what she said. He was still a fucking idiot.

“Not the only wizard with T-FLAC. Anatoly Cohen teleported me in.”

She shifted so her chin was propped on her palm, which lay uncomfortably over Sebastian’s churning heart. “I have some things I have to do before we can leave.”

You won’t do either, Sebastian thought savagely, rolling over to cover her body and pin her where she lay. Not “do some things” nor leave.

Maybe, if he was very lucky, confirming her death for himself would eventually give him peace.

God, he hoped so, because living without her had been purgatory.

CHAPTER FIVE

She’d fantasized about being with Sebastian for so long she was afraid this was too good to be true. Michaela knew she only had a few more minutes to bask in the amazing postcoital glow of real sex with a very real Sebastian. A few more minutes to relish the lazy stroke of his hand caressing her skin, a few more minutes to listen to the steady beat of his heart beneath her cheek.

The others expected her. More important, she had a job to finish. No matter how much she wanted to pretend everything was normal, it wasn’t.

“How did they convince you to join them?” Sebastian asked, his voice noticeably cooler than moments before. “How long before you accepted Cole’s proposal did you decide you were going to screw him?”

For several erratic beats of her heart, Michaela couldn’t understand his questions. The sound of her pulse was roaring too loud in her ears. Lifting her head from the warmth of his broad chest, she tried to marshal her thoughts. Anger replaced the afterglow as his words dropped onto her heart like an anvil. “What?”

Damn it to hell. Where was the light so she could see his face? She sat up, her back against the icy-cold steel wall butted up to one side of the narrow bed.

“Let me get this straight,” Michaela said through clenched teeth. “Are you accusing me of turning?” Was her heart beating? She sure as hell couldn’t feel it as her temper rose. “Of signing up with a group of known tangos? Assisting them in their attempt to melt the polar ice cap to—Do you think I came here willingly, you stupid son of a bitch?” Pitch-dark or not, she was seeing red.

Tight fingers manacled her wrist as she struck out. Clearly his night vision was excellent, because she couldn’t see him at all. Tears of fury and hurt stung her eyes, and she curled her fingers against her palm hard enough to feel the bite of her short nails.

“Oh, I know so, sweetheart.”

“Screw you!” she said, stung. Angry. Hurt. “Don’t—” Call me endearments with so much disdain. She shook off the prison of his fingers. He took up the whole damn bed. To leave the room—hell, just to get to her clothes—she’d have to crawl over him.

Kicking him in the thigh, she snarled, “Get the hell out of my bed.” He sat up, but she could tell he was still blocking her way intentionally. She kicked him again and he grabbed her foot. His hands were hot and hard, and he didn’t let go no matter how much she fought him. Fine. She stopped struggling and remained perfectly still.

“Tell me you didn’t sign up for a fat paycheck.” How could he sound so . . . so callous, so uncaring? How could she have misread him so completely?

“I didn’t sign up for anything.” She took pride in the fact that while angry tears streamed warm and salty down her cheeks, they weren’t evident in her voice. “I took a short flight out of Bozeman to clear my head. The next thing I knew, I was here.”

“Except the Cessna was discovered on the rocky shores of Diomede in the middle of the fucking Bering Strait just a hop, skip, and jump from here! Explain that.”

Hurt started pushing aside anger, forming a large, unswallowable lump in her throat. She liked the anger better. “Tongpan,” she answered simply. “Please let me up. I’m running out of time, and I don’t owe you any expla—”

“Who or what is Tongpan?”

“What the hell do you mean, who or what is Tongpan? Don’t you know? Doesn’t HQ know? He’s the terrifying and powerful wizard responsible for kidnapping me mid-flight. The guy whose sick mind came up with this insane scheme. The guy that T-FLAC damn well should have known about ages ago. What the hell are they doing at HQ, playing tiddlywinks and taking naps?”

How was it possible that the organization that was so interconnected with the wizard world was unaware of the existence of the terrifying man who had forced her to participate in this nightmare, who’d not permitted her to take her own life rather than do what he wanted? She refused to dwell on the beatings, the starvation, the threats, and the torture endured to ensure her cooperation.

She thought grimly that if the light were on, Sebastian would see some of the scars on the skin he’d been stroking just moments before—the external scars, at least. She’d made good use of the self-hypnosis skills that T-FLAC’s instructors had drilled her in so rigorously; otherwise, she’d be at the mercy of night terrors for the rest of her life.

She’d endured all that and more until she’d figured out a way to reverse everything she and the other nuclear physicists had done in two years. When they’d locked her, freshly beaten and naked, in an empty, cold room filled with harsh light to keep her from sleeping, she’d mentally turned the blank walls into whiteboards. She focused on those walls and drew schematics and formulae for hours on end, until she’d found the perfect solution, an invisible Trojan horse she could drive right through the middle of their plans.

True, it lacked an exit plan—maybe it wasn’t perfect after all. But she was satisfied that she’d be able to defeat her captors. Then she’d been as docile and compliant as Tongpan and Gangjon wanted. It had been hard to convince them that her breakdown was genuine, and she felt that she deserved an Oscar. It would have to be posthumous, but still . . .

She felt the blast-furnace heat of his body as he shifted, still blocking her exit. His warmth didn’t in any way mitigate her bone-deep chill. She’d never be warm again.

“Never heard of this Tongpan.” Sebastian’s tone was dismissive, raising her blood pressure a few more points. Great—T-FLAC didn’t know about Tongpan, so Sebastian was prepared to write him off as insignificant. He deserved to be blown up, dammit. Then he could meet Tongpan in hell.

“Yeah? Well, I don’t give a flying crap one way or the other.” She couldn’t wrap her brain around the fact that Sebastian had made love to her. Not out of desire but to extract information. No wonder it had been fast. He wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. She suddenly wanted a shower, and for once, she wanted it to be cold. Just as ice-cold as her insides felt at the thought of him using her like any operative would use a tango to get what they wanted.

Her throat went tight. “Did you—” Come to extract me or neutralize me? was the question she was too damned chicken to ask. She didn’t want to know the answer. No, she knew the answer; she just didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want it to come from that face, in that voice.

Pressing her fist to the churning acid in her belly, Michaela faced the truth: He wasn’t here as her bodyguard, her rescuer. He’d been sent as her executioner.

No time to allow the devastating hurt to consume her. As a scientist, she was nothing if not pragmatic. “I have something imperative to attend to before you ki—”

A crackle preceded an announcement on the PA: “Dr. Giese, report to the mess hall immediately.”

“I have to go.”

“They can wait another five minutes. Tell me what happened.”

“Let me up.”

He shifted to allow her to get by him. She clambered ungracefully past him and stood beside the bed, shivering, fumbling for the lamp so she could get dressed. “I was kidnapped. I’ve been a prisoner here for two years. I may be a mental wizard, but I don’t have the luxury of just teleporting myself out of danger; I had no choice. I had to stay and deal with it.” She bent down to grab her panties from the floor. “I consider myself deep undercover, and you’re an asshole—”

The door handle jiggled seconds before the door burst open, spilling in a cone of light to illuminate her standing there bare-ass naked. “This day just gets frigging better and better,” she muttered.

“Dr. Giese? Are you all ri—Oh Lord. Sorry. Sorry.”

For several beats they stared at each other, before Ackart collected himself and shut the door with a thud, leaving her once again in the stygian darkness.

Oh my God. He’d seen Sebastian. Ackart couldn’t have missed him lying on the bed illuminated by the hallway lights. Larger than life and naked.

“Dr. Gangjon came through on the videoconference—he says you have five minutes to present yourself.” Ackart’s voice sounded muffled through the heavy door.

“Be right there.” Michaela raised her voice as she fumbled with her clothes. Not for the first time, she wished to hell she had a gun.

Hurry hurry hurry. If she ran like the hounds of hell were on her ass she could catch up with Ackart before he reached the others. Try to convince him not to tell anyone else about Sebastian. Using what method of persuasion? The man was afraid of his own shadow. He sure as hell wouldn’t want to piss off Tongpan or Gangjon. No. Ackart wouldn’t keep Sebastian’s presence a secret. Especially now when all they’d been working for was about to be unleashed on the world.

Damn it. “What did you do with the lightb—” It was placed in her hand. “About time.” She fumbled for the lamp.

“What’s that guy’s threat level?”

“Dr. Ackart was also kidnapped. He’s no threat. Unless he tells someone he saw you.”

“You’d better stop him before he does so.”

“Yeah. I’ll be right on it as soon as I’m dressed. Are you armed?” she demanded, trying to slide her legs into her jeans at the same time she was trying to find the threads for the bulb in the ancient lamp base.

“Right now? Just my penis and my good looks.”

Despite the seriousness of the situation, Michaela caught herself huffing out a laugh. “Funny.” She refused to be charmed by him. The misguided moron. “Hurry up and get dressed; I have to stall Ackart before he—” She clicked the light switch, flooding the tiny room with brilliance. She heard his sharp intake of breath, then glanced at the bed for a lingering look at Sebastian Tremayne naked. The bed was rumpled but empty.

Michaela did a double take, then turned 360 to search the entire room. “. . . tells . . . Where the hell did you go?”

“Right here.” Sebastian’s voice indicated he was a few feet in front of her. Seconds later, his warm breath ruffled the fine hair around her face. The smell of his skin made her dizzy with lust.

Wait a minute. . . . Frowning, she put out a hand and encountered a warm, hairy chest and satiny skin. “You can’t turn—”

“Invisible? No, I can only take a wizard’s imprint. Imprinted Cohen. As long as I can touch him I can chameleon his powers for a whi—What the hell is this?”

He grabbed her upper arm; his thumb traced the row of scars on her biceps. “And this?” A finger followed the raised marks left by Gangjon’s scoring a warning around her rib cage with his nails.

“Old news,” Michaela snapped.

“Who,” he demanded, his eyes feral, “did this to you?”

Just about anyone who felt the need for a punching bag. Just about anyone who tried to molest her or wanted to force her to work on something she abhorred. That about covered every man on base. She shook off Sebastian’s hand. “I have to get out there.”

“Here.” She felt movement, then saw black fabric seemingly floating mid-air. “Put this on.”

“Your LockOut? Won’t this make it harder for you to kill me later?” The fabric was impervious to bullets, knives, and other weapons. It was not, Michaela was sure, impervious to Tremayne’s accusations and erroneous suppositions.

He drew in a breath.

Frustrated, buddy? Aren’t we all?

“We need to talk.”

“Yeah?” She quickly kicked aside the jeans she’d been struggling one-handed to pull on and pulled the slightly loose material up over her freezing-cold legs and hips, immediately enveloped in the specially developed temperature-controlling material. It was made to be skintight and automatically contracted around her body; the difference in their sizes was a total nonissue. She muttered a quick blessing for the genius who’d pulled this one out of the hat. She finished dressing, wearing jeans and a sweater over the black LockOut. Scooping her hair back in an untidy ponytail, she secured it with one of the office-type rubber bands she kept in a tuna can by the door. “We’ll take a meeting,” she said sarcastically. “Have your girl call my girl and make an appointment.”

“Michaela—”

“No. You don’t get to say anything. We’re done here. I have to disable the nuke. I’ve done half the process; now I have to complete what I started. You can do whatever the hell you want to me when I’m done.”

“Would it help if I said—”

“No.”

“Better go after your weasel-faced friend before he tells everyone he saw you naked.”

“The salient point is that he didn’t see you. Naked or otherwise. Thank God.”

Sebastian took her wrist, startling her a little since she couldn’t see him. Tilting her watch so he could see it, he cursed under his breath. “Need to make physical contact with Cohen in the next sixteen minutes or I’ll materialize.”

He’d be hard to explain. “Great. Unlikely a communications device will function down here. I presume you took that into account and set up a rendezvous point and ETA? This place is twenty-five miles of crisscrossed tunnels carved into bedrock. Should take you six hours or so to search every room if you—”

Talking to the Invisible Man was damn irritating, and extremely disconcerting.

“Materialize. I want to see you.”

One minute he wasn’t there; then he was.

Michaela’s foolish, foolish heart went into joyous overdrive seeing his beloved face. Oh, God. It was amazing seeing him here, in the flesh. His dark, shaggy hair was too long. His face was more craggy. But his pale blue eyes were just as piercing, just as alive and filled with mystery, and the dimple was just as she remembered it. A tidal wave of emotion filled her chest to capacity. It hurt to look at him.

He unexpectedly took her face in his warm hands, and she jumped; her heart raced like a rabbit. “I really haven’t—”

“I couldn’t have killed you,” he whispered, kissing her temple, her cheek, brushing her mouth with his. “I would never hurt you.”

Too late.

CHAPTER SIX

Being locked under ice for almost two years had taught Michaela the value of patience. If she’d been in his position, presented with the same cold, hard facts, she would have assumed the same thing.

Pissed her off, but she got it.

Life, especially hers, was too short to waste on anger. “You could’ve at least asked me before getting naked in my bed,” she whispered as they hurried down the empty passageway to catch up with Ackart before heading to the communications room.

She had no idea what Sebastian was thinking as he walked with her. Two years of honing her listening skills allowed her to hear his small intake of breath. Being aware of nuances had saved, if not her skin, then her life on more occasions than she could count.

“This requires a longer conversation than we have time for right now,” he whispered back. He was practically on top of her. She shivered as a surge of warmth flooded her body.

You think? “Convenient.”

“Not so much,” he muttered dryly.

“I have to go in here.” Michaela indicated the door to the comm room. “Wait out here for me. I don’t want them to see or sense you.”

He grabbed her upper arm. “I don’t want you going anywhere alone.”

“What you want is of no interest to me, Tremayne. They’re expecting me. Let go.”

His look spoke volumes. Braver people than herself had quailed at that dark, narrow-eyed glare. Clearly he didn’t like her going in without him. Too bad. They’d both trained for situations where one had to watch a partner walk into danger.

“Time’s of the essence,” she said in a low, urgent whisper when his fingers tightened on her arm as if sheer brute force would prevent her from doing her job. “The longer I spend chatting out here, the less time I’ll have to do what has to be done so we can get the hell out of Dodge.”

After a second or two, he released her, leaving the brand of his fingers on her skin. “Watch your six.” He reached out and tucked a loose strand of her hair behind her ear in a gesture at odds with his hard expression.

Even though she’d have liked nothing more than to fall into his arms and forget this whole mess, Michaela stepped out of reach. “Stop thinking of me as a woman, Tremayne. I’m an operative with an urgent directive. One I cannot fail. Step aside.”

He shifted out of the line of sight. “Be c—”

Michaela sliced a hand across her throat indicating he shut up, then reached for the door handle. Nothing and no one could be allowed to distract her.

She turned her back on him and opened the heavy door, firmly closing it behind her.

“You’re late,” Gangjon informed her, clearly annoyed. Hollywood handsome, with ash-blonde hair combed back off an impossibly perfect face, his dark eyes were soulless as he looked out from the monitor. “Sit.”

Even though he was only present on-screen, she sat, Pavlovian-style, immediately, as if he were in the room.

Michaela had slipped into the vacant seat beside a red-faced Ackart and turned her attention to the flat screen on the far wall.

Sergei Gromyko gave her a distracted glance. He, too, had been kidnapped and brought on board for the project. In his late eighties, with thin gray hair and a prominent strawberry-like red nose, he’d admitted a week ago that he knew they were going to be killed as soon as their jobs here were done. He hadn’t seemed that bothered by it.

Gangjon looked down on the three of them, sitting there on their uncomfortable, metal, straight-backed chairs. Michaela hated the man with every fiber of her being. He was completely amoral, soulless, and ruthless. As he walked them through the last hours of what was expected of them, Michaela listened for any hint of what Kang Gangjon had planned.

As far as he and his cohorts knew, there was nothing anyone could do to disarm or disrupt the nuclear bomb they’d all spent two years building. None of them knew that Michaela had programmed a new default code into the fission-bomb triggers months ago.

Inputting a fifteen-part, alphanumeric password that only she knew would compromise the nuclear bomb. Even if she were to be prevented from going back in to finish the second half of the disabling process, it would prevent the apocalyptic explosion that would destroy the modern world. The resulting explosion fissle would still create a radioactive mess of slightly activated plutonium, which would then disrupt the surroundings made of lithium tritide and uranium. Disrupt them into little bitty radioactive pieces. But buried under miles of ice, they would have less impact.

And even less than that if she managed to finish what she’d started.

It was no surprise when she came to the conclusion that the vile-tempered, sadistic megalomaniac up on the video monitor had no plans for them at all. At least none that involved any of them being alive twenty-four hours from now.

“Sir,” Ackart murmured deferentially. “The sequence codes have almost all been programmed. Once the last code has been launched—How do we leave?”

“Let me worry about that, Doctor,” Gangjon told him. “Let me worry about that. Complete your jobs in the prescribed time, and as promised, you will be free to go back to your lives.” Yeah, as radioactive, cremated remains.

The monitor went black.

So this was it. Michaela’s heart raced, and her palms felt sweaty. Less than three hours to go.

“Lying sack of shit,” Ackart muttered as they filed out of the room. It was the most rebellious she’d ever seen him. “Let’s go up to the dock to see if they left us a submarine.”

They hadn’t, but Michaela was happy for him to go in the opposite direction of where she was going. “Excellent idea. Why don’t you go with him, Dr. Gromyko? I’ll go to the lab, then meet you out there.”

“If there is a submarine, it’ll only seat two,” Ackart said practically.

“Then don’t wait for me.” When Gromyko tried to argue, Michaela reached over to squeeze his frail arm covered in layer upon layer of clothing. “I’ll find a way out too; I promise.”

Ackart held out his hand. His fingers were shaking. “It’s been an honor working beside you, Dr. Giese—Michaela. Godspeed to you.”

Michaela watched the two men walk away. Anger made her cheeks hot. Sebastian stepped from the doorway that had concealed him when they were out of earshot.

Michaela indicated the direction of the lab and they fell into step. “Gangjon knew from the start they were going to leave us here to die.”

“There’s only that wreck of a sub out there. Doesn’t run. We checked.”

“I know. I’ve jogged on that damned dock twice a day for the past year to monitor security and watched the comings and goings of the principals. They use tadpole subs. Come on. Let’s do this. Think your pal, Cohen, will be capable of teleporting all of us?”

“ ’Course.”

She felt the weight of Sebastian’s hand on the small of her back before he started rubbing a circle with his thumb. Michaela wanted to be stoic enough to move out of reach, but the reality was, she craved the comfort of his touch. The caring human contact after being deprived of it for what felt like a lifetime.

“How much further?”

“About a hundred and fifty yards. There’ll be at least two security guys at the door. Maybe more now we’re so close to the end game.”

Michaela slowed her steps. She felt a foolish need to prepare him, even though she knew T-FLAC operatives were prepped no matter where or when. She’d been resigned to her own death, but the thought of losing Sebastian, so soon after being reunited, terrified her.

“How many on the base total?”

“There were thirty. Now? I’m not sure. I haven’t seen any of them since last night. They’re just as expendable as the others left behind, so I doubt Tongpan and the other head honchos took any of the guards out with them. They’re here—somewhere.” Michaela rubbed the goose bumps on her arms. Sebastian’s LockOut kept her body climate-controlled, but this chill was bone deep.

She paused for a moment and took a deliberate, slow-paced breath, a breathing technique she’d learned for situations of high stress when it was important to be centered and in control. She glanced at Sebastian. Solid, grim. There.

“Don’t underestimate them. They aren’t rent-a-cops. Apparently Dr. Gangjon brought them with him at the beginning of the project. They were combat-trained in Russia or China, practically from birth.”

“Worried I can’t hold my own?” Sebastian’s teasing voice faded slightly, and she turned to see him literally disappear, as he melted into the background.

He’d chameleoned against the dirty cream and green wall, duplicating the background exactly and blending in seamlessly.

“That’s freaking creepy, but very cool.” Even though his image was a very faint shimmering outline, she could still feel the comforting warmth of his large body beside her, and smell his musky scent.

“Isn’t it, though,” he murmured against her mouth as she turned her face up. His lips were hot, his tongue slick and cool as he slipped it into her mouth.

The kiss made her blood heat and her skin flush but by necessity was woefully brief.

Michaela wanted to melt into him. To absorb that warmth into bones she was sure would never be warm again. She’d known she’d die here. Alone and forgotten. And while she had every faith that Sebastian would attempt to extract them, Michaela wasn’t positive that would even be possible. They were fathoms beneath a mile-thick ceiling of solid ice. Hundreds of miles from land. Surrounded by icy ocean.

She had a bad feeling. A very bad feeling.

Sebastian had filled her in as they walked. The rest of the T-FLAC extraction team waited for the two men to teleport to a fishing boat at an undisclosed location.

The only way out was Sebastian’s partner, Cohen. If anything happened to him . . . Unless Michaela and Sebastian found the wizard within the next four hours and he could teleport them the hell out of Dodge, they’d die here.

No Cohen, no way out.

She felt the hair on her nape lift moments before Sebastian’s large, warm hand brushed against her chilled skin. “I’m not going to allow anything to stop you—”

“I know. Thank you. It helps having a bodyguard.” Nobody would see him. But they’d sure as hell see her, and if they suspected anything—had even a hint of what she planned to do—they’d kill her first and ask questions later. A full-body shudder rippled through her.

“Think of me as your personal Kevlar.” Sebastian’s fingers tightened around the back of her neck. Warm and solid. “Nobody will stop you. And no one, I mean no one, is going to hurt you.”

“From your lips . . .”

She wished she felt a tenth of Sebastian’s confidence. Up until now she’d been fine with her fate. It was a shitty, unfair fate, but it was the hand she’d been dealt. But Sebastian showing up had instantly changed all that. Suddenly she wanted more. Craved it with every cell in her body.

She wanted time to be loved. Time to share walks on a sunny fall afternoon through the colorful carpet of orange leaves with him. Time to share morning coffee and snuggle up under a blanket with him on Sunday mornings. Time to grow old together.

None of it was going to happen. She’d missed out on her chance when she’d been too confused by her own feelings to tell Sebastian exactly why she couldn’t marry Cole.

No, there hadn’t been a moment’s regret, until now.

“This is it. No guards, which is odd.” Michaela eyed the shimmering space she still hoped was Sebastian, then slid her key card through the security reader.

Usually two of Tongpan’s men were stationed outside the door. Their absence made her uneasy, but it made this considerably easier. No security other than a card access. Only a dozen crucial players were still on the base. No one expected sabotage at this juncture. They’d all been working too hard for this moment, for their promised release. A promise that would never be delivered; because in three hours, everyone left behind would be dead. No loose ends.

The lighting was brilliant, and she squinted as she always did as her eyes adjusted. For the past two years she’d spent twelve hours a day in this room. But the faint electrical hum of the machinery and the shadowless surgical brilliance of the overhead lighting didn’t feel in any way comforting or give off any warmth. It was cold. Endlessly and unforgivingly cold.

Sebastian shimmered back into a visible form beside her, and she had to keep herself from jumping back at his instant reappearance.

He snagged her upper arm. “How were you planning on getting out of here?” He narrowed his eyes, the planes of his face turning hard. “You weren’t, were you?”

She shrugged. “I was dead either way. If they discovered what I did, or I’d refused to do what they wanted, they’d have tortured me to death, no question about it. At least this way, I’d die knowing I’d managed to save a few million other people. Fair trade, wouldn’t you say? Although, I don’t know if Ackart and Gromyko see it that way.” She went to her usual workstation and turned on the monitor, settling into her chair for the thousandth, and maybe the last, time.

“Jesus, Michaela—”

“I was okay with it,” she told him. She threw him a brief smile, then gave all her attention to the glowing screen, checking and rechecking the numbers, comparing them to the codes in her head. A weapons lab in China had done the original design, but most of the construction and precautions had been implemented by Michaela and the rest of Tongpan’s team. “There wasn’t multiple-choice.”

“Well, while not multiple, we do have a choice. As soon as you take care of that, we locate Cohen, and we’re outta here. Do what you have to do. Can you talk me through it, or would talking me through your process be distracting?”

“Considering a degree in nuclear physics?” Her eyes sparkled as she rose to cross the room to a setup that looked like something out of a 1950s, science-fiction B movie. What the hell?

“Just call it latent curiosity,” Sebastian told her easily. Jesus, the equipment was as old and dilapidated-looking as everything else on the sub base. Damn place hadn’t been used in more than forty years. “Just curious how this is going to go down.”

“The fission-bomb triggers of most H-bombs are solid or hollow spheres of fissionable material—hollow in this case. See here?” She shoved hair out of her eyes as she indicated the silvery orb surrounded by wires running every which way. The weapon was shiny new. Top-of-the-line. Big.

Jesus.

He braced a hand on the console beside her and took a cautious look inside the belly of the beast.

“That’s Uranium-235 surrounded by a sphere of explosives. Delicate choreography is required in detonating the explosive, because it must explode perfectly symmetrically on all sides so that a perfectly spherical ingoing wave of explosive force momentarily compresses the fissionable sphere to a density at which the nuclear explosion occurs. If the explosion is not sufficiently symmetrical, the explosion becomes a ‘fissle,’ a failed nuclear explosion.”

“An excellent goal,” he muttered facetiously, watching her slender fingers working with the precision of a surgeon within the tangle of wires. “What’s next?”

“Cut the wires to the detonators to disable them on one side of the sphere of explosives. The explosion will be asymmetrical, and the bomb will become a fissle.” Michaela straightened, a satisfied look on her face. “Done. Nothing will reverse what I’ve done. We have two hours, thirty-seven minutes before they expect detonation.”

She didn’t tell Sebastian that the explosion, given what she’d done, would still be considerable. Not large enough to melt the polar ice cap but big enough to destroy the base and anyone in it. If he got them out, great. If not, well, he wouldn’t spend his last two hours worrying about being blown to hell.

“Good.” He took her hand. “Let’s find Cohen, and get the hel—”

Cohen strolled in. His gaze flickered from the computers to Michaela. “What the fuck is she doing here? And she’s wearing your LockOut?” the other man muttered, clearly incredulous. “Jesus, man.” Cohen caught Sebastian’s eye and raised a brow. “Good times, huh?”

Sebastian tugged Michaela behind him. She resisted, but he had brute strength and a deep, sinking, oh-shit feeling as he looked at his by-the-book partner. “She’s coming with us.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” His eyes glittered with fury. He clearly had a job to do, and now Sebastian had thrown a monkey wrench into their plans. Cohen raised his SIG Sauer, pointing straight at her forehead.

“Dr. Giese didn’t come to this facility willingly,” Sebastian informed him calmly, struggling to keep a wiggling, equally pissed Michaela behind him. “Nor was she a willing participant in this scheme.”

“Says who? Dr. Giese? Quit thinking with your dick, Tremayne. Ever considered Stockholm syndrome? Step aside. We have our orders and very little time to implement them.”

Sebastian stared Cohen down over the barrel of the loaded SIG. “Over my dead body.”

“Sebastian—,” Michaela whispered fiercely. He ignored her, his attention fixed on his partner.

“Whatever it takes.” Cohen’s finger squeezed the trigger.

The loud retort of a gunshot reverberated through the room.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Damn it! Michaela thought, freaked out. She was wearing Sebastian’s LockOut. He was a sitting fricking duck and could be hit anywhere.

One thing Michaela knew for sure: the bullet hadn’t gone through and through. She would be injured as well. It literally felt as though her heart had stopped beating as she managed to untangle herself and get in front of him. Using both hands as well as her eyes, she searched his chest for a large entry wound.

“Damn it, Tremayne. Don’t you dare have a fricking-fracking hole in y—”

He grabbed both hands in one of his and yanked her behind him again. That really pissed her off. Adding annoyance to sheer terror made her light-headed. She would have made a shitty field operative. “Give me a break, damn it. Stop throwing me around, Tremayn—”

The stench hit her before she managed to peer around Sebastian’s biceps. “What the—” Cohen was sprawled on the floor, assorted fluids seeping out of his body. There was a great deal of shockingly red blood where his head should’ve been. After several thundering heartbeats, her horrified gaze tracked upward as her brain computed the sequence of events. Someone had shot Sebastian’s partner before he managed to squeeze off that fatal shot. Relief flooded her, then was just as quickly dispelled, replaced by terror.

Popov, Ling, and Malard had come back! They were accompanied by six security guys who fanned out inside the door.

All three hundred sweaty pounds of Afanasei Popov alone could block the doorway. He’d struck her so hard for some perceived infraction a few months back that he’d knocked her out cold. His expression said he was ready to do worse. Michaela shuddered.

Popov shuffled aside to allow room for tiny Bin-gwen Ling, who stood barely five feet tall. He was a classic example of short-man syndrome—ready to rip your head off to show that he could do it, forever compensating in all the wrong ways. He, too, was a sick son of a bitch. Intolerant of the smallest perceived infraction, he was a sarcastic, neurotic sadist specializing in martial-arts torture techniques that caused immobilizing pain without leaving a mark.

Beside him stood Malard. The pretentious dickhead was usually unobtrusive except when he was being as mean and spiteful as the snake that he was. His thin lips were drawn back in a feral smile, exposing a full set of large, bad British teeth.

The three senior scientists were sadistic bastards, but it was the beefy Russian bodyguards who held automatics. Frick!

Every weapon remained leveled at Sebastian’s head. “Freeze,” Popov said briskly. “Hands above your head. You too, Dr. Giese.”

He’d watched too many American movies, Michaela thought, raising her hands as the men advanced farther into the room. Every fiber of her being was attuned to Sebastian as he subtly shifted his center of gravity.

Bad idea, bad, bad idea. Nine to one—All right, one and a quarter. Her training had been years ago, a formality when she’d joined T-FLAC. She was just one of many brainiacs. She hadn’t been proficient at hand-to-hand even back then. She might be fit and in shape, but not remotely strong enough to take down a determined-to-kill-her man with a gun and certainly not an expertly trained tango or three. She’d fought her best with Sebastian earlier and might as well have been a gnat buzzing around him for all the damage she’d done.

She scanned the room for a weapon of some kind. Everything was bolted down, part of, attached to something immovable or out of reach. Not a crowbar or Uzi to be had. Crap.

The men advanced into the room, forming a semicircle ten feet in front of them.

“Higher.” Popov pulled out a small black gun, adding it to the arsenal aimed at them. He waved the barrel at Sebastian’s raised arms, and he obligingly lifted them another quarter of an inch. “Who sent you? The U.S.? Rossiya?” That Tremayne might be Russian did not please Popov any more than the other choices. Probably less.

Nerves clearly on a hair trigger, and without removing his unblinking stare, Popov addressed Michaela when she shifted her feet. “Please not to move, Dr. Giese.” His accent thickened with his agitation. “Well?” he barked, almost unintelligible. “Are you military?” He paused as Ling tugged at his coat sleeve. “What is it?” Clearly annoyed at the interruption, Popov leaned over so the smaller man could whisper in his ear.

Popov’s bald head shot up, and his eyes narrowed to slits. “What?! He vozmozhno! Heyt! That cannot be. T—” With a start, he blinked behind the smudged lenses of his glasses. “FLAC . . .” Popov trailed off, his skin pasty white and pearly with sweat as Sebastian suddenly just . . . disappeared.

Thanks for the heads-up, honey.

He’d chameleoned. Any advantage Sebastian could come up with was better than this Mexican standoff. Michaela managed to look as startled and nervous as the bad guys as she backed out of the way to give Sebastian room to maneuver.

Invisible, Sebastian assured himself that Michaela was as far away as she could get. There was nothing for her to hide behind. He had to reassure himself that she was a trained professional and that she was wearing LockOut from neck to toe.

“Bloody hell!” The English guy with bad teeth backed up. “Another wizard for crapsake?!”

Not quite. But close enough.

“You should have shot him on sight,” the Chinese man—Ling—screamed, looking around wildly and waving his arms in front of his face as if to ward off a ghost.

Ghost Chameleon, Tremayne thought with satisfaction, advancing on the nearest security guard and ripping his weapon from his hand.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Three guards dropped to the cement floor in quick succession.

Pop.

Four down.

For an instant, fear rounded Ling’s eyes as Sebastian slammed him against the doorjamb with his fist. Ling staggered from the impact, looking around wildly, his face gray with fear. “Shoot him! Shoot him!” With each syllable his voice rose another octave. Sebastian punched him on the jaw, and the guy went down like a rock, crumpling across the doorway near Cohen.

Chaos ensued. For all his bulk, the fat guy moved fast, using the two remaining security guys and the Englishman as a barricade.

“He can’t get past us,” Popov shouted as Sebastian went for his weapon next. The fat guy wasn’t about to give it up without a fight and gripped the SIG in a meaty fist.

Sebastian couldn’t be seen, but he could be felt. He gave a swift deliberate kick that should have lodged Popov’s gonads somewhere around the region of his ears. As the huge tango gasped, Sebastian clamped his hand down, squeezing the sausage-like fingers hard around the weapon. He kept moving, dodging out of the way as the security men tried to grab him.

A bullet missed his head by a whistling inch, then slammed into the solid metal door behind him with a high-pitched screech, missing the still-unconscious Ling by a millimeter.

The more frenzied and confused, the more frightened the men became, the calmer and more centered Sebastian became. He lived for shit like this. Although having Michaela in the room, exposed as she was, didn’t make him happy.

A quick glance to assure himself she was okay got him a lucky punch to the shoulder from Ling, who’d come around and snuck up on him between the guards’ bodies. At Ling’s triumphant shriek, everyone turned. Now knowing approximately where Sebastian was, everyone converged on the spot and tried to grab him at the same time.

He was the piñata, Sebastian thought grimly, dropping to his knees and crawling between their legs to come up behind them as they uselessly swung their arms, hoping to make another lucky strike.

He squeezed off another shot, which was deflected as Popov ran into him, purely by happenstance, knocking him ass over elbow with his rotund body. Sebastian grabbed the front of Popov’s heavy parka, pulling him down with him. He managed to roll out of the way seconds before the Russian hit the floor with a thud.

Popov managed to pull the trigger of the SIG he still gripped in a meaty fist. A hoarse, surprised shout indicated that someone had sustained a hit. That was confirmed by a truncated cry and a crash as the Brit went backward, crashing into a nearby table. Not fatal, but it would slow the guy down some.

The Russian rolled to his knees, then staggered to his feet. A lucky guess and he kicked Sebastian on the upper thigh. Pain shot up Sebastian’s thigh, and his leg buckled.

As he went down, Popov grabbed him in a breath-stealing bear hug that expelled the breath in his lungs. “I have him! I have him!”

Behind him, Ling dug his fingers in the region of Sebastian’s liver and did something internally. Oily black spots flashed and swirled in his vision. Felt like his insides were being scooped out with a claw hammer.

CHAPTER EIGHT

From the side of the room, Michaela watched what looked like a surreal Marcel Marceau routine. Popov had his meaty arms wrapped around something and was struggling to keep his hold. A pantomime starring one huge man and his invisible foe. Ling stood close by, his eyes hard.

She’d seen that look of pure satisfaction on Ling’s face before— Oh, God. . . . Sebastian materialized in the middle of the mêlée, face contorted in agony.

Oh, shit, shit, shit. Michaela knew exactly how excruciating what Ling was doing felt. Bile rose up the back of her throat. Any moment now, Sebastian was going to black out from the intense pain radiating through him. Ling wouldn’t release the organ until Sebastian regained consciousness. Then Ling would do it again. Sick to her stomach, she observed his wrist twisting against Sebastian’s spine.

Face bleached of all color, Sebastian dropped to his knees, Ling, still squeezing, clearly enjoying himself.

“Excellent,” Popov boomed. “Hold him there and bring me the woman.” The security guy, a burly six-footer who’d almost cornered her in the shower more than once, sprinted toward her, grinning.

Unable to look away from Sebastian’s torture, she had the ridiculous belief that if she took her eyes away—even for a second—Ling would kill him. Swallowing bile, her heart manic as she tried to come up with something—anything to distract Ling—Michaela saw something small and black flying toward her face at the same time. Automatically throwing up her arm to ward it off, she had a split second to recognize the projectile.

A gun.

Sebastian had thrown it unerringly as he went down.

She caught the SIG in her nondominant hand, switched it, and fired all on a single breath. Training was automatic. Too bad accuracy hadn’t been her strong suit at target practice, but the guard was almost on top of her as she fired, and for once, his size was in her favor. Her ears rang and blood splattered her face as he went down. She didn’t wait. Holding the gun in both hands, she switched her depth perception as she looked across the room and fired at Ling, who was hunched like a fricking carrion-eating hyena over Sebastian’s writhing body.

The brilliant physicist’s head exploded with the force of a watermelon under a sledgehammer. Next, she turned the gun on Malard, who’d procured a weapon from one of the dead guards. He was clearly unfamiliar with the weapon—his expertise was more in the realm of weapons of mass destruction—and he was desperately fumbling with it. His mouth moved, but she couldn’t hear him. Her ears were still buzzing.

To trip the man as he ran past Sebastian’s prone position, he shot out his leg. Gerald Malard screamed and crashed to the floor beside him, the gun knocked out of his hand and skittering across the floor.

Still white-faced, Sebastian had enough strength to grip the scientist’s head and twist, breaking his neck. The room went silent, save for the rasp of their breathing and the ringing in their ears from the gunfire in the enclosed space. The air stank of gunpowder and blood, and the harsh light ensured that all the gory details were visible and inescapable. Sebastian had been in battle scenes before, but Michaela hadn’t, and he didn’t know how she’d handle it.

“You okay?” he asked, staggering to his feet, face contorted, pale eyes blazing like blue hellfire.

“Behind you.”

“Got it.” Sebastian spun around as Popov swung a chair at his head. He had to hand it to the son of a bitch; Popov wasn’t giving up. Not that it was going to do him any good. Fisting the leg of the metal chair, Sebastian yanked it out of Popov’s hand, then rammed the curved back into the Russian’s massive chest, driving him back.

“You can kill me,” Popov taunted. “But it does not affect what we built here.” He smirked, his face oily with sweat, his lab coat spattered with Ling’s blood. “In a matter of hours our demands will be met. We shall have our money and ruler and a new world order. Every major city will be destroyed, and we will be in control of all coastal ports.” His smile was pure evil.

“You will die with the knowledge that you have failed. Your countrymen will suffer and die by the millions, and everything you knew and loved will be destroyed. Your precious T-FLAC will show your photograph and you will forever be ridiculed. You’ll die in infamy!”

Michaela didn’t enlighten Popov. “Want this back?” she asked Sebastian, holding out the SIG, her attention still on Popov.

“Wanna do the honors?” Sebastian shoved the chair harder into the Russian’s corpulent belly.

She shuddered. “No, thanks.”

Popov was pressed against the wall. He stopped laughing and shifted gears, his voice changing from triumphant to reproachful. “You are like a daughter to me, Michaela. Did I not treat you well? Did I not give you tidbits from my own plate? Did I not protect you from the advances of Nickolas, Wilhelm, and the others?”

Being hand-fed disgusting cold leftovers from Popov’s plate and receiving occasional bruising beatings were not her idea of fun. “The only reason you couldn’t rape me was because you were too damn fat to crowd me in the shower stall and too slow to chase me like everyone else did, you sick son of a bitch. And you sure as hell didn’t mind using me as your punching bag— Hurry up and shoot him, Sebastian. I want to get out of here.” She turned on her heel, too repulsed to even look at Popov.

She heard the shot as she walked outside.

Sebastian joined her a moment later, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. He pressed her face into his chest, kissing her hair. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

She lifted her head. “How do you propose we do that?”

“We’ll figure it out. Together. Move it.”

Michaela grabbed the front of his gray sweater and reeled him in. “I’m not done with you, Tremayne.” She stood on her toes to brush her lips against his.

“I sure as hell am counting on it.” He crushed his mouth down on hers.

Breaking away, he took her hand. “Let’s go see what we can use as transportation.”

His fingers were warm and very solid between hers. They were going to die here today. They both knew that.

There was no way out of Decommissioned Soviet Submarine Base #15.

“I know where we can find a broom. Maybe we can fly out.”

“Too bad we’re not witches.” He stroked her cheek with his fingers. “Come on, sweetheart; let’s find a ride.”

There were no “rides.” Sebastian knew that Michaela knew he knew they were without a creek or a paddle.

The corridor was eerily empty, the only sound the compressed air being fed through the vents. “Exactly how long do we have?”

“Hour, six minutes.”

“There’s that Oh-ninety-four-class nuclear sub tied up at the dock,” Sebastian offered.

“You think we can take a forty-year-old sub and make it run?”

No. He knew it wasn’t operational, but with luck he’d be able to jury-rig the communicator he and Cohen had left up there to contact the ship for just this eventuality. The operatives on the trawler would send in a submersible and extract them. If the comm devices worked. That was a huge fucking if. “Don’t know unless we try.”

Hand in hand, they jogged through several miles of corridor until they reached the open expanse of the docks.

Neither mentioned the cold simply because it was so cold at sea level no words were necessary. The words would have crystallized instantly on leaving their lips.

“Damn.” Michaela slowed as she saw a body sprawled and surrounded by glossy red blood on the stained cement dock platform several yards away. “That’s Sergei over there. Why did they kill him? He wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Yeah,” Sebastian laughed, tightening his fingers in hers and starting to run. “He was. Look.” Two small two-man subs floated just above the waterline, all but hidden by the gray bulk of the behemoth cigar-shaped 094-class World War Two sub. Looked like a whale and her pups.

“Oh my God. Popov and Ling. Of course.” Her beautiful face filled with excitement. “Can we disable one? I don’t want any nasty surprises. I don’t know how many security guys were left behind. I’m not sure we got them all, but I’m sure I don’t want to see any of them ever again, especially in our rearview mirror.”

“Good plan.” Although he’d already considered the odds himself. “Yeah. Why don’t you get inside, out of the cold. It’ll take me a few minutes to figure out what goes where.”

He helped Michaela release the catch on the heavy hatch, and helped her board.

She reached over and flung her arms around his neck, kissing him hard and way too short before giving him a little shove. “Hurry.”

CHAPTER NINE

It was a damn good thing Michaela wasn’t claustrophobic. The interior of the 150-ton midget sub was about the size of a compact sports car. She didn’t want to think about how the sub had been maintained, if it had been maintained at all. Nor did she want to contemplate how stable the nuclear reactors powering the engines might or might not be.

She shot a quick glance at her watch. The base, and anything on or near it, would be nothing but vapor in less than ninety minutes. “Hurry the hell up, Sebastian. What the frick are you doing out there?”

There was just enough gray light coming through the open hatch to see by, and she perused the simple control panel while she waited, committing the schematic to memory. When he got back, Sebastian was going to want to leave immediately.

Ignoring the rank odor of sweat and stinky feet, she hit the “oxygen” switch. Powered by diesel, an overhead light came on, and the faint hiss of compressed air assured her they wouldn’t suffocate when the hatch closed. Next, she fiddled with the exhaust systems. Exhaled carbon dioxide, and the moisture from their breath, would pass through soda lime, a chemical “scrubber” to render the air breathable for a longer period of time. They had to put at least an hour between themselves and the base. Starting five minutes ago. Hurry, Sebastian!

The little sub was armed with a couple of torpedoes, mines, and timed explosive charges. When last had they been checked? Did they even function? Frick! She hoped like hell she and Sebastian wouldn’t need them.

Conveniently, there was an “on” button. After several tries it caught, the cabin lights flickered to life, the sonar screen lit up, and the gyroscope appeared to be working. She felt the vibration of the propeller shaft starting to turn.

So far, so good.

The interior heater came next. The cold water would freeze them in a matter of minutes without it.

Ping. Ping. Ping. The sound of bullets glancing off the sub’s thick metal hull brought Michaela’s head up. There was no way a bullet could get through the pressure-resistant hull, but she couldn’t say the same for Sebastian, who was out there sans LockOut.

“Outta the way. Coming through,” he yelled as his booted feet appeared in the rounded hatch opening above her head. “We’ve got company.” Slamming down the hatch, he gave the locking wheel a spin and practically fell into his seat.

A quick glance showed him everything was all systems go. “Good job.”

Michaela glanced out of the small view portal no larger than her hand. “She’s all yours, Captain. Haul ass. There’re at least a dozen guys running around up there like chickens with their heads cut off.”

“I noticed.” The sub started moving forward at a snail’s pace.

She adjusted the air vent to point away from her face. “Please tell me you disabled the other sub.”

“Wasn’t time. It’ll take them a while before they’re ready to give chase. It’ll give us a good head start.”

Go. Go. Go. “We need a few more feet clearance from the dock before we can submerge.” She observed how much room was between them and the mother ship through the thick glass of the observation window, and she wished she could see what, if anything, the other mini-sub was doing. Think positively, she told herself. Visualize them screaming in frustration because nothing works.

To control buoyancy, the submarine had ballast tanks and auxiliaries that would fill with water so she and Sebastian could dive. And air so they could surface. She checked the indicator showing the water level as it rose in the tanks. “Starting the fill.”

As the submarine dived, the ballast tanks flooded with water and the air vented until the sub’s overall density became greater than that of the surrounding water. The sub began to sink under the ink-black surface. Movable sets of short hydroplanes on the stern controlled the angle of the dive.

Ping. Ping. Ping.

“Speed it up, sweetheart. Before they pop a hole in this tin can.” Sebastian concentrated on the dive, aware of every breath Michaela took. God, he was proud of her. Despite what she’d endured for the last couple of years, she was calm and centered, and exactly who he needed beside him right now.

In a matter of hours . . .

First things first, however.

Bubbles, catching the meager light from above, rippled past the three small view portals as the little sub sank deeper and deeper. Eventually the bubbles disappeared in the darkness and there was nothing but blackness. Light didn’t penetrate very far in the ocean, and they’d navigate from here on out virtually blind.

Successfully getting out of the sub base was only a small part of the problem. Now they had to head for open water. The ice ceiling was up to thirty feet deep, with ice stalactites hanging down like inverted mountains, some a hundred feet deep or more.

“I found some navigation charts over there; if you give me the coordinates of the trawler, I’ll chart our course.”

When she’d quickly sorted through the nav charts, chosen one, and unrolled it, Sebastian reeled off the coordinates. Her lips moved and her eyes had the same slightly unfocused look they’d had when she was working out how to sabotage the bomb. Sebastian knew she was doing a hell of a lot of calculating, and he waited silently, enjoying the discovery of yet another skill in this remarkable woman.

Her head came up. “At our present speed of seventeen knots our ETA is seventy-one minutes. We’re in trouble.”

Sebastian put everything at full throttle. The sub vibrated with the force of the engines.

“Yeah. I know.” The sub had been designed to resist high pressure for deep-sea research rather than to outrace tangos or nuclear explosions. At least their human pursuers wouldn’t be able to move any faster than he and Michaela could. Sebastian put everything at full throttle and prayed that it wouldn’t just break down completely. The sub vibrated with the force of the engines.

They were down to thirty-some minutes before the nuke back at the base detonated. “They know approximately when we should check in and where we are. If they don’t hear from us by then they’ll send in the DSRV.” At her blank look he clarified: “Deep-Submergence Rescue Vehicle.”

For several minutes, there was nothing but the sound of the whoosh of compressed air and the steady ping of the sonar. The chance of the T-FLAC team finding them—even with knowledge of their starting point—was slim to none. The Arctic was six and a half times the size of the Mediterranean. They’d never be found.

Suddenly the sub bounced violently, then went into a downward spiral. The gyroscope and other instruments went crazy.

Torpedo.

“Shit. They’re right behind us.”

The ocean was a minefield of ice mountains that glowed eerily in the faint glow from their running lights as they dropped, diving at a steep angle impossible to sustain without landing splat on the ocean floor. “Pull up. Pull up!”

A direct hit would be disastrous, but the aftershocks rocking the tiny sub could be just as lethal. It took skill and nerves of steel to power the sub flat-out as it canted this way and that without rhyme or reason.

An enormous mass of ice floated over them, missing them, but causing a tsunami of wave action that had them fighting to hold on. Their sub wove up and over, between, and under the enormous chunks of lethal ice as they tumbled and drifted around it.

The other sub was right on Sebastian and Michaela’s tail, and gaining fast. A second torpedo streaked across their port side, missing them by several yards but spinning their sub like a top for a full minute. As soon as he was able to, Sebastian made a U-turn, ducking behind a long, narrow blade of ice.

Michaela, anticipating what he needed, powered down the lights.

Silence hummed and pinged as the other sub drifted by. They sat there until the ocean was once again pitch-black.

“They know where we are. They’ll be back.” Michaela’s voice was quiet and rock steady.

Sebastian identified the radio transponder, but communications had to wait. Alert the bad guys to their exact location too soon and they could kiss their asses good-bye. “Let’s see if we can find a more secure location to wait them out.”

With Michaela manipulating the intake of water, they sank deeper and deeper, their passage soundless. Icebergs that were merely tips above the water swelled to unnaturally enormous proportions below the water, forming an endless maze of smooth blue-green ice visible in the oncoming running lights.

He slowed to safely steer through the jutting points and eerie shapes of the frozen underwater mountain ranges.

Sebastian flipped on the exterior microphones. “Shit. Here they come again. Lights off. We need a safe—There.” Big black gaping holes stared out from the pale ice, sightless eye sockets in a frozen face. “See that black hole over there? Ice cave. Our home away from home.” He aimed the sub through the twists and turns, the space becoming tighter and more confined.

The deep rumbling of the other engine grew louder on the speakers. Michaela glanced out the portals, but there was nothing to see but black water and ghostly shadows. “They’re getting closer.”

A loud pop and swishing sound echoed in the confined space. “What the hell—” Sebastian didn’t have time to finish his thought before a projectile zoomed past them, just a few feet from their port side, and slammed into a wall of ice, exploding in a brilliant bubble of fiery orange and red that lit the surrounding ice like Fourth of July fireworks.

“Torpedo. They’ve got two more.”

He shoved the engine controls back on full throttle and zoomed through the ice maze before them. The sub shuddered as one fin nicked a high-rise-sized icicle plunging downward.

“Watch it!”

He banked hard to starboard. The sub hurtled forward into the darkness. Sebastian pointed to the dark holes scattered here and there in the ice. He saw an area that appeared deep enough. “We’re going in. Not moving, not breathing, is the name of the game. Hang tight.”

Michaela’s hands flew over the switches and dials, turning off everything but the most basic of life support while they waited.

The rumble of the engines following them grew louder. A strip of light pierced the darkness, slashing briefly across the cave, then winking out of existence. Gradually, the sound of the engines began to fade, then once again got louder as the other sub started to circle.

“Now what?”

Sebastian pushed the button on his watch, illuminating his face with a bluish glow. “Now? We wait.”

CHAPTER TEN

The dim green of the interior lights illuminated the soft curves of Michaela’s beautiful face as she turned to him. The sonar’s blip blip blip was in counterpoint to Sebastian’s heartbeat. God, she was exquisite. Everything about this woman drew him to her in ways he couldn’t explain even—especially—to himself.

Reaching out, he ran his fingers over the disheveled fall of her hair, dark in this lighting but thick and shiny and glorious against his fingers.

“We can’t sit here fore—”

“I wasn’t a tactile man until I met you. Now everything about you begs to be touched.”

“But how long—Oh!”

Placing his hands under her arms, and in one swift move, he hauled her onto his lap. She let out a little gasp of surprise, and he said roughly, “Who said we were just going to sit here?”

She came willingly, if not with some difficulty. The space was incredibly small and she had to navigate more gears and controls than in a car; still she murmured a fainthearted protest. “But the LockOu—”

“Shh,” he whispered low, nibbling a path up her arched throat. “Don’t move,” he cautioned as she wiggled, squirmed, and somehow managed to straddle him in the confined space. It took several moments of contortion, but she finally settled her spread thighs across his lap.

“Oh yeah.” His breath snagged in his lungs as she pressed down on his erection. “That works.”

“We work,” she whispered; her fingers combing through his hair electrified him, causing goose bumps to pebble his skin. Settling her sweet ass more deeply in his lap, she licked his lower lip, then bit down not so gently. “I fell in lust with you the moment we met,” she murmured, trailing her fingers around his ear. Her eyes were velvety brown, pupils huge in the subdued lighting.

Sebastian undid the complex fasteners that ran from under her left arm to her hip. “I was blown away when I got my first look at you. I felt like a fucking caveman. You in that dress? Jesus. I wanted to toss you over my shoulder and run like hell.”

Blood pounded a frantic beat in his ears as he peeled her out of the top half of the black LockOut like a luscious piece of fruit. Her breasts were pale in the dim green light. Love and lust tangled in his chest as he stroked the petal-soft skin. “From that moment, nothing else mattered. I wanted you more than I’ve wanted anything or anybody in my life. And when you died, Jesus, I died too.” His chest felt heavy at the memory, and his breath snagged in his throat.

“All around the timing sucked.” Michaela leaned back a little to allow him access to her nipple, then whimpered low in her throat as he sucked the hard bud between his teeth and into the hot cavern of his mouth.

“Where was I—?” Her soft voice wobbled a little, and her eyes were unfocused as she braced her hands on his shoulders as if anchoring herself. “Feeling guilty as hell to crave you so badly when I’d just promised to share the rest of my life with Cole—But . . . God, that feels amazing; don’t stop! I didn’t fall in love with you until I saw you were strong enough, honorable enough, not to take what I wanted to give you that night.”

“I’m weak enough to take what you’re offering me now.”

She smiled a siren’s smile. “Would that we could, but I’m . . . trussed . . . up—” He unerringly found the concealed opening between her legs. She was already dewy, her juices coating his fingers as he manually explored her sweet channel.

“Oh! The women’s LockOut suits don’t have that handy-dandy little feature!”

“Up,” he instructed, his dick about breaking in half under her ass. She lifted up the requisite two inches needed to get to his zipper. Reluctantly, he removed one hand from its happy place around her breast and unzipped his jeans. Free, he replaced his fingers, slipping his cock into the slick, wet heat of her.

He wanted to sing Hosannas. God, she felt good. Amazing. Perfect.

“Ahhh.” She started to move, slowly at first. Despite the confines of the sub, there was just enough room to move her hips, and she rocked back on him. Thank God the sub was only the size of a car and not actually one. At least they wouldn’t have any law officers knocking on their steamed-up windows.

“Yeah,” he panted as she picked up speed, her rhythm exquisite—right on the nose, perfection. “Exactly that.”

Lights cut through the darkness fifty yards from them. “Bad . . . guys . . . doing another drive-by.”

Yeah. He saw their running lights as they glided by in their third lap. He didn’t give a flying fuck. If he died now, he’d die happy.

“I was right.”

“About what?”

He groaned, his body shaking. “You are damn near perfect. The question is, can I make you a happy woman?”

Arms cradling his head, she laughed against his throat. “Blissfully.”

Still laughing, she joined him as they climaxed together. It wasn’t a huge blow-one’s-brains-out climax but rather a quiet thank you, Jesus, for the gift of this woman. Sebastian would remember this moment for the rest of his life.

However long that might be.

“Ready?” he asked as he started doing up the top half of her LockOut, pausing to press a lingering kiss to the rapid pulse at the base of her throat.

“I sincerely hope,” Michaela said grumpily as she helped him right her clothing, “that you have better staying power when we get home. These quickies are all well and good, but I’m looking forward to a leisurely bout of lovemaking that takes hours, not minutes.”

She all but fell back into her seat. Her hair was wild around her shoulders, and her eyes sparkled.

“Hours?” Hell’s bells. They were this close to a frigid, watery grave, and Sebastian felt as light and free and goddamned happy as he’d ever felt in his life. He cupped her warm cheek in a hand that smelled of her. She’d imprinted herself on him. Saturated his skin.

“You got it. Somewhere hot and dry? Desert? Mountain? Beach?”

“Surprise m—”

The next torpedo came out of nowhere. Parting the blackness of the water, it picked up a lacy wake as it bulleted straight for the enormous ledge of ice above their hiding place.

A chunk of ice the size of the Empire State Building broke away and dropped in slow mo in the water right above them. There was literally nowhere to go. They’d run out of time sooner than either of them had anticipated.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Micha—What the fuck?!”

This was unexpected but her worst nightmare. They were back—teleported to the brightly lit lab. Michaela shuddered.

Teleporting meant Tongpan was back too. They’d discovered what she’d done. . . .

The cold kept the bodies strewn about from stinking to high heaven, but it was a grisly sight. Dark puddles of congealed blood were frozen in a stop-frame around the bodies.

The countdown clock on the far wall clicked off the minutes—Six. Six miserly little minutes before Michaela and Sebastian and everything else blew to hell.

“You have sorely tested my patience, Dr. Giese.” The terrifying and sonorous voice sent shock waves down Michaela’s spine. Spinning around, she saw her worst nightmare. Times two.

Oh, frick it. Tongpan and Gangjon!

Her heartbeat went into manic overdrive, and her mouth went bone-dry. There was every possibility she was about to pee her pants in sheer, unadulterated terror. She moved closer to Sebastian for sanity and strength. He took her hand in a punishing grip.

Kang Gangjon was the scariest man Michaela had ever encountered—unless he was in the same room as Tongpan; then all bets were off. She couldn’t drag her gaze away from the wizard who stood beside the nuclear weapon’s disabled detonators.

Tongpan could’ve teleported them anywhere on Earth, but he’d obviously returned to the base to see how badly she’d screwed with his bomb for himself. And brought her back to the scene of the crime to . . . what? Force her to fix it? Never going to happen. Even if she wanted to, which she didn’t, that was now impossible.

There were worse things than death, and his black eyes telegraphed a clear, terrifying message impossible to ignore. A trickle of sweat ran down Michaela’s temple, and her palm felt slick with sweat in Sebastian’s hard grip.

“How dare—” his words resonated in the room, bouncing off the walls and floor loudly enough to hurt her ears—“you meddle with things which do not concern you?”

“That’s rhetorical, I’m sure.” She was surprised by how steady her voice was. By the fact that she could speak at all.

This whole near-death fricking experience thing was getting old. She’d been resigned to the hopelessness of the situation before Sebastian’s arrival. Had a glimmer of hope and now was once again aware of the clock counting down every precious last minute. Damn it. She wanted time. Time to love and be loved by Sebastian. Time to breathe fresh air and feel the sun on her skin. These bastards had stolen two years of her life and were determined to steal her future as well.

“Who’re these guys, sweetheart?” Sebastian asked conversationally, his fingers tightening painfully around hers. Under his breath, so low she almost didn’t hear him, and without moving his lips, he whispered, “Do not let go of my hand. No matter what.”

She was fine with that. “The shorter, unpleasant one on the left is Kang Gangjon. The tall one with the dandelion-fluff hair is Tong. . . .” Oh, God, that hurt like knives of fire.

The hair on Michaela’s body rose as an electrical field surrounded them. It hurt like hell. She bit off the whimper trembling on her lips and pointed at the wizard as zaps and sparks zipped across her skin. “He’s responsible for teleporting me out of my plane.”

“Is that a fact. Tsk, tsk.” Sebastian, Michaela in tow, strode toward the two men. It felt as though she were walking through razor blades as the electrical field ripped at her face and clothing. The slices burned and stung her exposed hands and face. Hot blood seeped from the wounds. Sebastian was worse off—he was unprotected by the LockOut that was saving her untold pain.

“Correct the error you made,” Gangjon snapped, clearly furious. His creepy-handsome face contorted, purple with rage. His usual smooth, unctuous voice was filled with venom. His Hollywood good looks masked evil personified. “Immediately.”

“Or what?” The disdain in Sebastian’s voice came through loud and clear. He kept walking. Out of the corner of her eye, Michaela saw his clothing literally shredding off his body. Cuts—deep cuts—covered his face and throat. His shirt and jeans were in tatters. Blood dripped down his cheeks from a hundred razor-fine lacerations. But still he kept walking.

Was he insane? Michaela tried to pull him back, but Sebastian kept moving forward, never flinching, until he was just three feet from Tongpan, staring him down.

Sebastian was only human. T-FLAC trained but human. Tongpan was a wizard with untold power. Sure, together she and Sebastian could have taken on the world, but not Tongpan.

She’d survived starvation, beatings, abuse, being shot at with bullets and torpedoes, and even an underwater ice avalanche. All told, a good run. But she was going to die right here in the lab when Tongpan fried her and Sebastian to crispy critters. Or the bomb exploded in a fissle of nuclear particles, whichever happened first.

Either way, they were dead.

Her gaze slid to the clock: four minutes and nine—

Eight.

Seven.

Six.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“What did you do?! Fix it. Fix it!” Tongpan roared. The sonic boom of his voice caused Michaela’s hair to blast back off her bleeding face. Her fingers clenched between Sebastian’s were ice-cold. Her entire body trembled.

Three minutes, thirty-one seconds.

Sebastian kept walking, his steps measured.

He ignored the dude on the left, his entire focus on Tongpan. The powerful wizard had . . .

Two minutes, forty-eight seconds before the nuke blew them all to hell.

One shot. That’s all I have, Sebastian thought grimly. One. Fucking. Shot.

His life. Michaela’s life. Their life together.

One minute, eighteen seconds.

One chance.

Tongpan raised both arms, boney fingers curved, a raptor’s talons closing in on its prey. The wizard’s long white hair billowed around his head and shoulders as his clothing swirled and rippled in an unseen wind, making him look taller and wider than he really was. Illusion, Sebastian knew. Smoke and mirrors, but damned effective.

Sebastian’s internal clock yelled for him to hurry.

One minutes, sixteen seconds.

Dragging Michaela with him, he charged Tongpan full tilt, free arm extended.

One minute, fourteen seconds.

Sebastian punched his closed fist into the middle of the wizard’s rock-solid chest.

His body was instantly engulfed in silver smoke and white-hot flames. Sebastian’s arm burned from fingertips to shoulder as he chameleoned Tongpan’s not-inconsiderable powers.

One minute.

It wasn’t working!

Sebastian’s last thought was, Oh, shit! Then everything went white.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“You didn’t see what I saw,” Michaela said lazily, swishing her bare feet in the clear, warm water. Sebastian enjoyed the sight of her slim, bare legs as she allowed yellow and blue tropical fish to swarm around her toes.

They were sitting, both bare-assed naked, on a sun-bleached wooden dock that stretched out into the crystal-clear, aquamarine water in an undisclosed tropical location.

Nearby, palm trees whispered in the ocean-scented breeze, and the sun picked up diamond-bright chips in the sugar-white sand of the nearby curve of beach.

T-FLAC had gifted them a week on the company’s private island, appropriately called Paradise. On the other side of an emerald-green mountain range was the organization’s training facility, but the north shore was completely, blissfully private. And completely off-limits except to Sebastian and Michaela for the week.

A small, well-equipped bungalow with a big bed and enough food to give them much-needed energy was all they wanted or needed.

“And what was that?” Sebastian stroked his fingers lazily up her warm, lightly tanned hip, the late afternoon sun having baked their cold bones all afternoon.

For the first time ever, he’d experienced severe motion sickness during the teleportation and transference of Tongpan’s powers. In fact, even after all this time, Sebastian still felt the faint hum of the wizard’s powers deep inside his body. He hoped to hell it would eventually go away and hadn’t mentioned the residual effect to anyone except Michaela.

Sebastian suspected he might end up in T-FLAC’s psi division after all. He’d cross that bridge when and if he had to.

He and Michaela had spent a week in T-FLAC’s Montana medical facility getting checked out before being flown on the company Bombardier Challenger to the island. The deep scratches on her skin caused by the wizard’s spell were completely gone. As were Sebastian’s own injuries. He had felt an overwhelming relief. Sebastian had more scars on his body than he cared to count. But he couldn’t bear anything to mar Michaela’s silky skin.

Crystals of powder-fine sand sprinkled across the slope of her shoulder sparkled in the afternoon sunlight, begging the brush of his lips. Her skin was hot, gritty, and tasted of salt.

“You fried Tongpan into a crispy wonton.” Michaela shuddered and, as Sebastian stroked a hand down her back, turned her head and shot him a delighted and feral grin. “His skin bubbled, and his eyes melted,” she said with relish.

Sebastian laughed. “Bloodthirsty wench.” With a tug, he pulled her onto her back on the warm wood dock, their feet still dangling in the water.

“You do know,” Michaela managed, pretending to ignore his busy hands, “usually the honeymoon comes after the wedding.”

“I know this is all back assward, but . . . marry me, Michaela. When I first saw you, you stole my breath. I haven’t caught it since.”

She stroked his cheeks. “Ditto.”

He kissed her navel, his hand gliding up the smooth skin on her inner thigh. “You stopped and started my heart.”

She wrapped her slender arms about his neck. “I couldn’t stop looking at you.”

“What about now?”

She gave him a lazy smile, eyes wicked. “I can’t stop touching you.”

“Works for me. I wanted you beyond reason two years ago. Now I have a million reasons to love you.” He lifted his head to look up at her. “We have a lot to talk about. . . .” Looking into her velvety eyes, he saw they were filled with love and promises. “We’ve never discussed kids, but I’d like four—”

Her eyebrows went up, and her eyes sparkled. “Two,” she said firmly, her fingers combing through his damp hair.

Ah, man. Did he know her, or what? Two was— “Perfect.” God, he loved this woman. “I want to grow old with you. What do you say?” Not giving her a chance to answer, he kissed her long and slowly, only letting her up for air when she shoved at his shoulder.

“Was there a question buried in there somewhere?”

Sebastian gathered her beneath him, the healing sun on his back and the woman he loved in his arms. With a shout of laughter, he rolled her off the dock. They landed with a splash in the sensually warm water. With a shriek Michaela took off, arms and legs slicing through the crystalline water as she swam to shore.

With lazy strokes, Sebastian tagged behind her, knowing she’d allow him to chase her until she caught him.