Shock Therapy, page 1
USA TODAY Bestselling Author
OLIVIA GATES
SHOCK THERAPY
Discover the first two books in the Dr. Calista St. James series:
STRONG MEDICINE
RADICAL CURE
First Kindle Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Olivia Gates
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to Amazon.com and purchase your copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
To Natashya Wilson. Thank you, always, for being my first line of defense, my go-to sounding board, and my biggest supporter. This one is certainly for you.
About the Author
USA Today Bestselling author Olivia Gates has published over twenty-five books in contemporary, action/adventure and paranormal romance. She currently writes exotic and passionate modern-day fairy tales for Harlequin Desire and dark and erotic paranormals set in complex new worlds for Harlequin Nocturne. She will also be soon publishing new series of paranormal adult and young adult romance and thrillers. She would love to hear from readers at oliviagates@gmail.com
Other books by Olivia Gates
Harlequin Desire
Throne of Judar
THE DESERT LORD’S BABY
THE DESERT LORD’S BRIDE
THE DESERT KING
The Castaldini Crown
THE ONCE AND FUTURE PRINCE
THE PRODIGAL PRINCE’S SEDUCTION
THE ILLEGITMATE KING
Man of the Month
BILLIONAIRE, M.D.
Summer for Scandal
IN TOO DEEP: “THE SHEIKH’S BARGAINED BRIDE”
Pride of Zohayd
TO TAME A SHEIKH
TO TEMPT A SHEIKH
TO TOUCH A SHEIKH
Billionaires and Babies
THE SARANTOS SECRET BABY
A SECRET BIRTHRIGHT
Harlequin Nocturne
MORTAL ENEMY, IMMORTAL LOVER
IMMORTAL, INSATIABLE, INDOMITABLE
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
ONE
I NEVER THOUGHT IT would end in a graveyard.
OK. So I always knew ‘it’ would end in some sort of graveyard, and most probably not something so manicured. But I wasn’t talking about life right now.
I was talking about Damian and me.
According to him, this was our end.
I leaned back against the oak where he’d told me to go no further, sought its abrasion to counteract his. I watched as a rising gibbous moon booed through stratus clouds, bathing him in the erratic phosphorescence of a celestial Morse code.
My reason receded, as he did in the distance. He’d told me to keep mine. First time he’d ever done that. He’d never turned his back on me either. No matter what I’d done to push him to it. He was doing it now. He’d had enough. He was walking away.
He walked away before, a jet of desperation babbled its way from my gut, its force a momentary prop. He always came back.
He said he wouldn’t this time. I believed him.
You believed him before. He never meant it.
But I’d heard, felt the unmeant times enough times to know the difference. This was for real.
Then run after him. Tackle him to the ground, drown him in your bond that transcends will and willfulness, show him just why he can’t walk away, won’t be able to stay away. A far more brainless and stubborn woman has tried the walk-away-and-stay-away routine before him, and failed. Time after time.
I didn’t run after him. I stood nerveless, mesmerized by the majesty of his form as he flowed away from me, straining for the soundless prowl that took him across the now-black grass.
Then he stopped. My heart followed.
And how stupid was that? I’d known he’d stop. Once he’d reached his destination. And he’d reached it. So that was it.
And I’d thought I could handle it. If there were echelons of self-deception, I must have attained their nirvana by now.
Sick electricity jolted from my teeth roots to my armpits, scouring their way down to where my feet felt they’d grown decaying roots into the death-infested earth. I squeezed my eyes on what felt like acid. It overflowed, corroded its way down my throat, my cheeks.
To think of the collective sigh issuing from our neighborhood’s females when they’d seen him suitcase-laden, seen his auto-chivalry handing me into the Mercedes whose origins I hadn’t asked about. They must be now thinking I’d-Kill-For-A-Look-From-Him Man was taking How-Come-She’s-with-Him Whatserface to some paradise that would be one once he treaded it
Wonder if it would cool their envy if they knew our only dates involved life-and-death crises and rehabilitating-the-devastated heart-wrenchers. And that this time he’d taken me to a graveyard.
He hadn’t even taken me. I‘d almost grown tentacles and stuck to him so I’d tag along. He didn’t want me here.
I’d never known where Mel had been buried. I’d never paid my respects. God, I almost never even thought about her. Apart from the sledgehammers of remembrance. At the weirdest of times. My happiest. In Damian’s arms, quivering with satisfaction, smug and secure. It was then I remembered her. The woman I’d overshadowed to the man she’d loved, the man I’d unwittingly taken from her, even while she’d still lived. The woman who was now dead, forgotten, or at best an avoided memory.
I stood there against a tree two hundred paces from her grave. From him. He’d made it clear. I came, I stayed the hell out of his way.
I did. I was nowhere near sturdy enough to weather a close-up of my lover pouring obsidian grief and guilt over his lover’s grave. The lover I’d killed.
OK again. So I hadn’t killed her. I’d only gotten her killed. Though, according to Damian, he had. His insisted he’d bought my life with hers, led her, and two of his men, in a suicide attack to save me from my own suicidal actions while attempting to save patients in Darfur. He’d almost died, too. He’d wanted to die rather than live with the self-loathing, had swatted away my attempts to save him when I’d been the reason he’d doomed the woman who loved him. I’d just disobeyed another order, saved him and he’d hated me, and himself, until all our barriers had come crashing down in Russia. We’d become lovers then.
No. We’d become intimate then, admitted to our lust and obsession. The lovers part had come after Colombia, when I’d admitted that this man who manipulated me and lied to me to protect me, who’d honed me into the weapon I was now, who’d whetted my cravings and cleaved into my heart, had endless layers to him. And I loved each one. Even the ones I hated. And the ones I’d never peel back.
A sudden gust of wind slapped me with a lock of my loose hair. The way Damian liked it. I reached a trembling hand to disentangle my sodden face from the suffocating strands, stopped, sniffed. What the…?
What was the aroma of mincemeat pie doing here?
Hours ago I’d walked into the house Damian had gotten us since Colombia and got soaked in it. No way could it still be hanging to me. Not after the hours-long soak in Damian. Or the extended shower afterwards. Had to be an illusion…
No. I was just wearing the jacket I’d been wearing then. So what did you call a scent that accessed such overpowering images of the chain reaction of events it had preceded? Déjà senti?
The sight of him, frozen in the private penance he hated me for insisting on witnessing, made me close my eyes, take refuge in reliving the oblivious interlude. I sank into the replay, saw our septuagenarian neighbor following me into our kitchen with yet another of the incredible recipes she’d been gifting us with since we’d moved in two months ago.
I was conveying my gratitude to her, mainly thankful that people like her still existed, when Damian appeared, disrupting my synapses. Fresh from our gym/rehabilitation center, the limp of his compound-fractured, healing femur disappearing by the hour, he was steaming from another rebuilding/retraining session, radiating virility and welcome. I whimpered as I got sandwiched between the fragrances of homecooking and maleness, felt the day’s depletion settling in my gut like a hollowing punch.
Damian gathered me into his haven and Lizzie, as she insisted we called her, sighed. “Such a stunning couple.”
I nestled into Damian’s enveloping warmth and vitality, smiled. So nice of her to include me in the description.
But what made us stand out, in her opinion, wasn’t the picture we made together, a Hercules-of-a-man and his angel-of-a-woman—her flowery description, not mine—but how we were there for each other while we overcame the injuries we’d sustained in our car crash. The detailed story of which had been another of Damian’s instant-o-fabrications. A justifiable one this time.
Telling the truth wasn’t an option here. Not that anyone would believe that our assorted fractures and lacerations had been an ultimate gift collected in
Then both Damian and I had died in the crash. Damian had had us reborn as Jordan and Laura.
He let go of me with a velvet nuzzle to take the pie from Lizzie, to seat us both at the kitchen table before busying himself with preparing Earl Grey, Lizzie’s and my favorite tea.
She gave me a volumes-speaking woman-to-woman glance. “You got yourself one fine, upstanding young man here, Laura dear.”
I blinked at the fake name. I’d had so many in the last five years I could have my own yellow pages.
Bet she’d never believe my ‘fine, upstanding young man’ was a black ops assassin so lethal, so convoluted, he’d single-handedly toppled dictatorships, picked his teeth with the world’s most deranged and dangerous terrorists.
I slumped down in my chair as Damian brought us steaming mugs then leaned me back into him, his hands that had crushed life out of brutes twice his size accessing agony points in my neck and shoulders, melting them away.
Lizzie sighed again. “It’s so lovely seeing you taking care of your delicate flower, Jordan.”
I sensed Damian’s smile. Delicate flower, indeed. The prototype for Global Crisis Alliance’s Combat Doctors Project, a Damian-molded commando and a genetic vigilante. Bet Lizzie would go catatonic if she knew just one of the things I’d done, the ways I’d used my medical knowledge to inflict pain and end lives.
We chatted in our usual ease, her calm and kindness a balm to my rawness. That was, until she told us her grandchildren talked about nothing but us since they’d been here two weeks ago and Damian extended an eager invitation for their return. The emptiness inside me tightened into a black hole. It wasn’t good seeing Damian around children. I didn’t second the invitation.
At last she drained the last of her tea and started getting up. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds to enjoy your meal.”
Damian’s hand transferred from my shoulder to hers, unnegotiable gentleness keeping her in place. “Stay with us, Lizzie. We love having you.”
It was still so weird hearing Damian referring to us as ‘we’. As if we were a couple long secure in our unity. We weren’t. I didn’t know what we were. A couple in any accepted sense, indicating stability and continuity, was something we, being what we were, couldn’t be. And then I didn’t even know what he was for real. I might never know for sure.
I probably wouldn’t.
I supposedly knew a lot. What mattered. But everything I knew, he’d told me. And he’d told me too many lies I no longer knew what was true and what wasn’t in what I thought I knew. He’d said he’d never lie to me again. Too many times. What made it tear-out-my-hair worthy was the way his lies were undetectable to me, whether they were straight out lies or multiple-choice evasions. What took the cake was the way he omitted the truth.
We were still mired in the fallout of his last omission.
He’d omitted to tell me that instead of destroying my mad-scientist ex’s research, he’d done the bidding of his Preemptive Anti Terrorist Squads’ bosses and saved it. He’d later decided it should be destroyed, but it had been too late. The world’s first hybrid biological/chemical warfare agent had already been in production. And my own team had been its first target practice. The road back from the insult it had dealt their minds and bodies before we’d pulled them back from death’s clutches was dark and winding and seemed at times dead-end.
But I’d taken his offer to start from scratch. On every level. The past had accumulated too much damage, too many dangers no future could stem from it. Everything had to be wiped clean. Everything had been.
We’d taken radical undercover measures. Now it was as if each member of my team had ceased existing since Colombia. There’d been no word from Damian’s team. I was sure worry for them was all that filled his mind. That, and me.
And here we were, with more manufactured identities, living in this tranquil neighborhood as we regrouped and recuperated.
I was finding it hard to exist in the daytime soap-opera surroundings after years in L.A.’s most chaotic ‘disinvested neighborhoods’. Damian didn’t seem to have any difficulty.
It amazed me how he fitted in anywhere. In the most brutal conditions of his field work as a PATS operative, in their ultra-modern privilege, in his mother’s fit-for-kings milieu. Now he seemed to have been born to this upper middle-class ease and predictability. God, which man was he?
I only knew he was the man I loved. It could be argued he was the man I was born to love. There’d certainly never been or would ever be someone else who fitted me, kept up, put up with me like he did. No one who’d ever made me feel or fear this way.
I sat there watching him as he charmed us, and wondered again. That his duplicitous, lethal self could house such sincerity and tenderness, which he poured over me, over the woman he said felt like the grandmother who’d been murdered by his father when he was two-years-old. Confusion didn’t seem to touch my emotions though. I couldn’t imagine not loving him anyway.
Telling myself the knot in my stomach was hunger I forked pie into my mouth. My salivary glands almost burst. I whimpered with enjoyment. “Oh, Lizzie—keep feeding me such treats and I’ll join weight watchers soon.”
She chuckled. “Nonsense. Jordan said you lost too much weight and you’re not putting on any back with the hours you keep at work. All the more reason to leave you now to relax.”
This time no coaxing convinced her to stay. Damian hurried to fetch the crate of malfunctioning appliances that she’d kept over the years in hope of fixing, and which he now had working better than ever, and walked her back to her house.
The moment they were out the door, exhaustion flattened me.
I didn’t know how I made it to our bedroom, or how long it was before he’d come back. All I knew was that I was face down on the bed, and he was straddling my thighs, working what had to be forbidden magic all over my back and buttocks.
He cascaded over me, essence and love, drenching my senses in cosseting and containment. God. I needed this. Him. Always. But now, when I was back from my waking nightmare, desperation jutted through the need, lacerating my restraint.
He knew, was the only one who ever did, everything I had brewing inside me. Even when I didn’t know it myself. He knew how to maximize on it, mine it to depletion then recreate it.
His hands glided over me, possessing me, possessing the ability to dissolve my shackles, release my potential, exposing me to his transfiguring appreciation. And he had me. Exposed, vulnerable, all-powerful. Savored and worshipped and devoured. He had me writhing, pleading. Then he rose and my eyes clung to the twin infernos of his, burned with his greed for my surrender, my pleasure. And he made me watch. His hand delving between my thighs, his fingers knowing just where and how, plunging and withdrawing, stroking, stoking. And he gave it to me, without any hint of a build-up. A sucker-punch of an orgasm.
His mouth milked mine for each last screech, his growls that of a predator bingeing on the last twitches of its prey. His fingers changed rhythm, defusing sensitized receptors that cried out to be left alone to recharge, infusing them with renewed desperation. He growled satisfaction at my resurrected hunger, tormented his way down my heaving body, came to lie where it all converged. “Open for me, mi vida. I’m hungry.”
His purr would have been enough to make me do a split. But his hunger… Overkill, as usual. Incoherent under the pressure mushrooming in my loins, I opened wide for him. Legs and heart and abandon.
He bent to my quivering flesh, swept me in a long lick that knocked my internal lights out before he fused his tongue and teeth there, looked me in my defocusing eyes—and smiled.
I could now say he could make me come with a smile.
My body gushed molten agony, heaved in detonation after detonation of satisfaction. He sucked every spasm out of me, in a tongue-thrusting kiss that went on and on, until he again had me climbing, clawing, crazed. Ready for him.
