Deadly Game (GhostWalkers #5)(43)
Author: Christine Feehan

Mari opened her eyes, and his heart reacted with a peculiar leap. She had the darkest brown eyes, large and heavily fringed. He hadn’t noticed before because he had been too busy fixating on her mouth, but a man could get seriously lost in her eyes. He was in trouble and getting in deeper by the moment.

“Brett acts more like an animal than a man. He doesn’t care at all what I want or don’t want. It really doesn’t matter to him, other than that I cooperate with him. When I don’t, he’s furious. He wasn’t always like that. Not to say he didn’t have brutish behavior. I think he liked being strong and he picked fights, and none of us liked him all that much, but his behavior is even worse now.”

Ken took a deep breath and let it out. Jack and he had always had better than average eyesight, but now both of them could see not only at night, but at distances more like those an eagle could see than a man. They had assumed it was due to genetic enhancement of vision and hearing, simply increasing their own capabilities, but they could both see heat sources as well. They could change skin color and hold the outside temperature of their skin at a different temperature than their internal body heat, which negated anyone else’s ability to see their heat images. Did that mean Whitney had inserted animal DNA into each of them? Was that part of the reason he had been so adamant that Briony have Jack’s baby?

“What is it?” Mari turned her head to look him directly in the eye. Her fingertip traced the frown on his lips.

“Jack and I have always had dominant personalities,” Ken said. Whitney couldn’t have added animal DNA to our genetic code, could he, Jack? Is it possible he made us even more aggressive, knowing our history? “We’re both aggressive and neither has much backup in him. We had certain traits, both physical and mental, far before we volunteered for Whitney’s psychic program.”

Ken, there is every possibility. I didn’t want to consider it, but our vision is unlike human vision. And we’ve both become a little too much like shaggy bears growling in the woods. There was a hint of humor in Jack’s voice, and the hard knots in Ken’s belly relaxed a little. Even if the bastard did insert animal DNA, we’ve been living with it for a few years now and we haven’t eaten anybody.

He would have given us something difficult to control—something that would mix with jealousy and aggression and heighten those traits.

Probably.

Jack sounded complacent. He could be complacent. He had Briony tied to him, and she was pregnant with twins. She was totally committed to him. Jack was a handsome man with a physique any woman would be attracted to.

Mari, on the other hand, was sexually attracted because Whitney had paired them. He had the face of a monster, and his body was a patchwork quilt sewn rather haphazardly together. Mari wouldn’t want to be seen walking down the street with him, let alone dancing with him, if Whitney hadn’t intervened.

Jack had managed to escape the legacy of violence and jealousy and disgusting behavior their father had bequeathed to them, but Ken hadn’t. He knew he hadn’t, and Mari would sooner or later suffer for his baser traits if they were together.

Self-pity was a miserable and useless pastime. He refused to indulge himself.

Mari’s fingertips were feather-light on his face as she traced the pattern of his scars. “You’re so silly sometimes, Ken. You don’t see yourself as you really are at all.”

“How do you see me?” He wanted to sink his teeth into her finger, to draw it into the warmth of his mouth, but he kept himself absolutely still, not daring to really breathe, in case she stopped touching him.

“You’re extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary.”

His mouth curved into a semblance of a smile, the scar stretching tightly. It amazed him how that shiny skin could be so tight and not feel at all until it stretched, and then it could be painful. There didn’t seem to be a middle ground. “You’re doped up.”

“I know. I’m floating. But that doesn’t make it untrue. If you do have animal DNA, you seem to be able to handle it a lot better than any of the others.”

“You won’t be saying that when you’re asleep and I wake you up croaking like a frog and my tongue darts out and finds that perfect little tempting ear of yours.”

“Does my ear tempt you?” She tucked strands of hair behind her ear.

“Hell yes. Everything about you tempts me.”

Mari felt herself blushing. No man paid attention to her in quite the way he did. He made her feel almost shy, when she wasn’t a shy woman. Heat curled through her body, and when he was close to her, she could barely breathe. Her womb clenched, and in between her legs she grew hot and moist and throbbed eagerly, as if her body had a mind of its own. She was in over her head. She knew what to do in a combat situation, and she knew how to fight off a man’s unwanted attentions, but she had no clue how to entice Ken Norton into wanting her with the same feverish intensity with which she wanted him.

Swallowing hard, she changed the subject, deciding that safety was preferable when she didn’t have her wits about her. “Is Jack really with my sister?”

“Coward.” He trapped her hand against his lips and, this time, drew her finger seductively into the velvet heat of his mouth.

Her heart jumped and began to pound fast. He made the smallest of gestures seem so erotic. She’d had sex, hated it, and had made up her mind she would never willingly participate, yet with a simple pull of his mouth, her br**sts tingled and her muscles tightened in urgent need. “Yes, I am,” she agreed. “I don’t have a lot of experience.”

“I do.”

This time her stomach somersaulted. His voice was low, a whisper of sound that slid over her skin in a devil’s temptation. For a moment she couldn’t look away from his mouth and the way he tugged at her finger. Her br**sts reacted as if they could feel his lips and tongue and teeth sliding over creamy flesh, tugging at her ni**les until she ached and ached for him.

She loved to look at his face, the shape of it, the scars only calling attention to the perfection of his bone structure and the way his lips were sensually chiseled. She couldn’t help the fact that she was drawn to his wide shoulders and thickly muscled chest. She liked big-muscled arms and narrow hips. The man was built exactly the way she thought a man should be built.

Mari swallowed hard and tried not to feel the dance of his tongue or imagine the stroke of it along her skin. He was the most erotic man she’d ever encountered. Everything about him, including that edge of danger, appealed to her. “Tell me about Briony. I know Jack is being careful in case I’m a threat to her, but I need to hear about her. I’ve thought about her every day of my life and sort of built up a fantasy life for her. I need to know if she’s happy. Does she look like me? What’s she like as a person?”