do you do?” he blurted, aware he’d been silent for too long.
“I’m a molecular geneticist. I work on curing cancer using the body’s own immune system.” Her eyes swung back to him. “We need to tell that doctor what they did to him. And I have scan results and information on the protocols—granted, they’re from two years ago. But after I go to the Feds, I’m sure they can get the most recent studies. There must be records—I mean, I’m assuming they didn’t stop. They gave him terrible diseases and—”
“The doctor knows what they did to him.”
Dr. Watkins—Sarah—blinked. “Does she know about the woman fighter, too?” When he didn’t reply, she prompted, “She said they’d done it to her as well.”
“The doctor knows everything.”
“Is there any chance Kraiten’s illicit program is doing that to anybody else, somewhere else?”
Murhder thought about what he’d seen when he’d tapped into that CEO’s mind. “The young was the last one he had left. He’s been trying to get more but has failed.”
The woman tilted her head. “You have the strangest way of saying things. And that accent of yours. It’s not French, it’s not … well, I know it’s not German. What part of Europe are you from? My fiancé was from Hamburg.”
Murhder stiffened in his chair. “Fiancé? You’re engaged?”
Sorrow suffused her face. “Was. He passed.”
The fact that he was relieved made him feel like a total asshole.
“I offer my sincerest condolences at your loss.” He eased the tension in his body. “May I inquire what happened?”
She sat back in the chair. Pivoted to the side again to check on the young. “Where did the couple go?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The man and the woman who were here with you?”
Footsteps sounded overhead and Murhder looked up. “I guess they are settling in for the night.”
“Oh.” She put her hand on the backpack and went to stand up. “I need to make that call and get those files to the FBI.”
That cannot happen, he thought.
Murhder reached out and put his hand on hers. Instantly, a bolt of electricity rode up his arm … and continued on to places that had not been awake in a very, very long time.
“The doctor isn’t done yet,” he pointed out as he shifted in his own seat. “Let’s hold on until she’s finished in case she needs to ask us anything.”
The woman retracted her hand. Rubbed it on her thigh. Clearly, she had felt the connection, too: Her arousal scent flared, and it was heavenly in his nose, an erotic combination of bergamot and ginseng.
He wanted more of it. He wanted it all over his naked skin, as he entered her sex and felt her claw into his back—
Murhder ducked one hand under the table and discreetly rearranged the sudden and very inappropriate erection that had punched his cock into the fly of his pants.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked.
Because I didn’t know the damn thing still worked, he thought.
“I’m sorry.” He pushed his heavy hair back. “It’s nothing.”
“God, don’t apologize.” She sat down again. “I could use a good joke, that’s all. This has been a rough couple of days.”
Even though there was so much more to worry about, he found himself needing to know what was under the baggy blue plastic suit she had on. What her hair would look like fanned out over his bare chest. How she would sound as he pleasured her.
Crazy, all of it.
Because she needed to go back to her world, without any memory of ever having met him.
First, however, he had to get those files she was talking about.
It was hard to pinpoint exactly when Sarah’s brain began to send out warning signals that all was not as it appeared—or exactly what tripped up her suspicions.
But as she leaned to the side for a third time, and looked down the hall to the front room, she knew something was way off. As she watched the doctor take a bog standard stethoscope out of an old-fashioned physician’s bag and place it on the young boy’s chest … as his blood pressure was taken with a proper juvenile cuff … as the woman in scrubs checked his pupils with a penlight and looked into his ears … none of it felt right.
The doctor and patient talked the whole time, their voices so quiet, Sarah couldn’t hear what they were saying. And she could not find fault with the attentiveness of the clinician. The woman was solely focused on the boy, her face grim, her body turned