Chapter 19

"Fuck me, Dr. Devereaux."

He'd never forget how those words sounded as they escaped her lips. He'd shared his dream, his ultimate fantasy, the one he'd jacked off to in the shower more times than he could count, and she'd given in and surrendered to him and his fantasy.

And it had been a thousand times better than anything his imagination had come up with. She'd managed to drift into subspace during their first time together. He'd never had that happen before with any woman. Not even the trained submissives at the Gilded Cuff were able to manage that.

He stared down at her, relishing how small and delicate she felt in his arms. So beautiful. He'd jumped on her like a rutting beast and hadn't even taken the time to enjoy exploring her.

We still have time for that. He would make sure of it. He had a thousand other fantasies he wanted to try out on her: tie her up, lick her folds until she cried out in pleasure

And yet it had taken a fossil-smuggling ring and the Russian mob to get his grad student into his bed.

He held Kenzie for another fifteen minutes, listening to her soft, shallow breaths. She was asleep now. Something fuzzy and indescribable turned over in his chest. A strange sense of contentment began to fill him. He hadn't felt like this since He closed his eyes, memories coming back, sharp and clear as the day they'd happened.

The firelight of the small campfire cast shadows against the tent. He sat between Fenn and Emery Lockwood, while Wes Thorne sat at the far end of their group. They laughed, holding sticks with gooey marshmallows over the small fire in front of their tent. There was joy. There was innocence.

This was the last night before his world changed, before his boyhood was ripped away, leaving him wounded inside and his throat raw from silent screams. Holding Kenzie now was like that final night before his childhood ended.

Grief was a funny thing. He'd spent twenty-five years mourning Fenn, thinking the men who'd kidnapped him had killed him when he was eight years old. But Fenn was alive. Fenn was okay. Yet the grief remained.

He had to stop mourning a ghost. Perhaps he was actually mourning the twenty-five years of a friendship he'd never gotten to have? Fenn's childhood was a loss that Royce was still coming to grips with, but the loss of his parents? That ran far deeper. When he'd lost Fenn, his parents had been his last refuge from the rest of the world. But then he'd lost them too, and he'd realized just how completely alone he was. That kind of grief could kill a man. But Kenzie not only eased the grief, she made it fade almost entirely. When he laughed with her, talked with her, shared his passion for fossils with her, it felt like they were partners in a way he was only just now starting to understand. She was a woman a man built a life with, and as much as he was convinced he wasn't the marrying kind, she was tempting him far more than he'd ever imagined anyone could.

Royce tightened his arms around her. He tried never to think of the past, especially those years when he'd spiraled close to the edge, trying to lose himself in sex, alcohol, fast cars, and loose women. But now he had everything to lose. Kenzie, their careers, maybe even their lives. Suddenly everything he'd thought didn't matter now mattered so much it scared the hell out of him.

Was this how Emery, Fenn, and Wes felt when they held their women in their arms? If it was, he would never give them any shit again about it. He might not love Kenzie, but he cared about her a hell of a lot, cared like crazy, and that was enough to make him pause and think.

He couldn't take her to Vadym's club, not when it would put her at so much risk. He'd been a fool to think he could take her there and keep her safe while he also tried to take out Vadym, but he hadn't wanted to leave her alone. He had to protect her at all costs. He could call Dimitri and get another sub for the club tomorrow night; that way Kenzie would stay at the hotel.

Carefully lifting her off him, he pulled the drain in the tub and then carried her out of the bath. He set her down on the floor and wrapped her in a fluffy white towel. She stirred and mumbled something he didn't quite hear.

"Time to get you into bed." He lifted her up again, loving how good she felt, how perfect she was. When he laid her down on the bed, she sighed and nuzzled her pillow. As much as he wanted to sleep next to her, skin to skin, he knew if he did he wouldn't be able to keep his hands off her.

He dug through her suitcase until he found an oversize red flannel shirt and another pair of black panties. He gave her shoulder a gentle shake. She blinked her eyes awake.

"Hey, Little Mac, help me get these on you. Then you can go back to sleep."

She sat up, a little dazed as she took the panties from him and slipped them on. Then she dropped the towel and pulled the shirt on. He turned his head away, not out of a sense of modesty, but for his own peace of mind. If he saw her breasts and her full hips, he might jump her all over again, and she needed rest. A lot of it. Opening up to him, going into subspace in their first encounter was still unbelievable.

Kenzie crawled between the covers of the massive king-size bed and drifted back to sleep. God, she was so damn trusting. He slipped on a pair pajama pants before he got under the covers and pulled her body toward him. She rolled over, her hair falling onto his chest. She smelled so good, like vanilla and a hint of flowers. No expensive cloying perfume from a bottle for his Little Mac. Just natural perfection.

He folded an arm behind his head and closed his eyes. That sense of peace was still there inside him. Being with Kenzie like this reminded him of his first dig in the Badlands.

He remembered standing amid the tall red-and-yellow rock formations, his boots crunching on cracked clay beds. The wind whistled across the stones, and the fierce sun bathed the world in blood-red and gold shades of color. He'd felt so at peace there. He could still close his eyes and feel the sandstone beneath his palms, smoothed by the wind and rain over thousands of years. The sun's heat was trapped within the earth, burning his fingers, and the scent of limestone was carried on the breeze that rustled through the tents of his fellow paleontologists.

The thin rock spires in the distance had been like unsteady obelisks in a haunted landscape. The land bore some of the most varied dinosaur fossils the world had ever seen. He remembered the rock wrens burrowing into holes in walls, and how he felt at home there in a way he couldn't explain. Perhaps it was because he was one of Earth's most recent creatures on a quest for some of Earth's most ancient.

Holding Kenzie in his arms now was just like that, an ancient quest for something he wasn't quite able to put a name on. A strange and wondrous connection was growing between the two of them, and it both scared the hell out of him and fascinated him.

I'm in deep shit.

What if he got too close? What if she died? What if they both fucked this up so bad that it destroyed their lives? He stroked a hand over her silky dark hair and sighed. It was going to be a long damn night.

In time he managed to drift into that place between awake and asleep, the place that held him helpless as he watched dreams play behind his eyelids.

He was on a plane, in a small but luxurious cabin peering out at the night and seeing the city below. The lights glittered like a thousand diamonds scattered across a swath of black velvet. Mist and fog crawled up from the edge of the sea, blurring the twinkle of city lights.

He held his breath, and his heart tightened in his chest as the runway came into view, the blinking signal lights whipping by too fast. The fog turned into a dark wind, coiling around the plane like a snake, choking it. Then the crash of metal and flash of fire engulfed everything in a deafening explosion.

The dream changed, the darkness softening to reveal a heavily wooded glen where emerald and amber points of light played upon the landscape of colors. The woods behind the Lockwood mansion. The lights, like errant will-o'-the-wisps, then became the flashlights of searchers. They shouted the names of two boys in the dark. Two boys who were lost. No, not loststolen.

With a sudden sense of terror, Royce gasped and bolted upright. For a second he couldn't remember where he was or who he was with until Kenzie stirred and spoke his name.

She sat up, combing her fingers through his hair. "Royce?"

He didn't respond. His heart was racing, and he felt dizzy. The nightmares always clung to him longer than he wished, while any good dreams slipped through his fingers like grains of sand. Royce leaned his head back against the black leather headboard.

"Royce, you're scaring me." Kenzie's use of his first name seemed to ground him. He looked her way, and in the dimly lit room he could see her wide brown eyes were on him.

"Sorry, Little Mac." He lifted his hand, brushing it through her dark hair. "Bad dreams. Really bad dreams."

She shifted closer to him, resting her head on his shoulder. "Sometimes it helps to talk about them."

He chuckled dryly. "You get bad dreams?"

"Of course. Everyone does."

Not like mine. Mine are nightmares.

She seemed to sense his disbelief and continued. "I get these dreams where I'm running from something or someone, and I can't move fast enough. It's like time slows down, but only for me. You're vulnerable. Powerless. Helpless. You feel like the end is coming, and all you can do is be a spectator to it." She shivered and burrowed closer into his side and raised her head.

He looked down at her. There was an intimacy to this far greater than sex, and it scared him, but at the same time he didn't want to pull away.

"I have two dreams," he finally said. "Though they often follow one after the other. It starts off in a plane, flying over Manhattan. I can see the city lights, and the fog comes off the sea, swallowing everything below the plane. I know what's coming, but there's nothing I can do. I watch the runway disappear, and then it all ends in a fiery crash." His body seemed to shift to panic mode again, his heart racing, but he kept talking.

"Most of the time I don't wake up. Then I'm trapped in the woods behind the Lockwood mansion. I see searchlights, hear people calling out, but I can't make a sound. It's like I feel like I was Emery or Fenn when they were taken."

Kenzie was quiet a long moment. "You dream about the Lockwood kidnapping?"

Dark emotion seized his throat and threatened to strangle him. He nodded.

"I don't know much about what happened. I was only three." One of her hands lay flat on his chest, and he placed his hand over hers, holding her palm to his skin, needing that connection. It seemed to give him the strength to continue.

"They were kidnapped when we were only eight years old. We were just kids. I spent days at the police headquarters talking to child psychologists, social workers, FBI profilers, and none of them could help. My parents were there through it all, though, keeping me sane." He paused, pain lodged in his throat, and he swallowed past the lump in his throat.

"Three months later, Emery was found, but not Fenn. We didn't know it at the time, but he was taken by one of his kidnappers to Colorado and raised as his son. Twenty-five fucking years." He closed his eyes, seeing flashes of his nightmare. The beams of the flashlights swept the dark forest but never spotted them. "It's like I went into the woods that night with them, and part of me, just like a part of them, never came back."

Kenzie's nails dug into his chest. "Royce, that's awful. I'm so sorry."

He squeezed her hand. "It is what it is. I have lived with that missing part of myself for so long I don't know how to feel any other way." He knew what he was saying probably didn't make any sense. "And just when I thought I might be past it all, my parents died in a plane crash. I was nineteen."

"I knew about the crash," Kenzie admitted, rubbing her cheek against his shoulder. The tightness in his chest that always came whenever he talked about his parents eased a little.

"They were my world." He whispered the confession, and much to his relief she didn't laugh.

"I feel like that way about my parents, even my brothers."

"I forgot about your brothers." He chuckled.

"Yeah," she giggled. "And they would so kick your ass for what you did." She leaned in and sat up a little to kiss his startled lips.

"Babe, I'm sure your brothers are tough, but I can handle them." He cupped her cheek, and the smile on her mouth wilted at the corners, like flowers in the late fall.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Royce, what we're doing It could ruin everything. It could end our careers."

He didn't blame her for worrying. He wasn't afraid of a lot of things, but losing his job at the university was a big one, and her career would be over before it even began.

"What do you want to do?" he asked. Whatever happened from this point on, it had to be her choice.

She bit her lip and gazed into his eyes. "I want thisI want you." She leaned into him, feathering her lips over his, relishing that she had this time to be with him, to have the right to kiss him whenever she wished without fear.

In that moment, she owned him in a way he hadn't thought possible. He kissed her back, cupping the back of her head and tasting her lips so sweetly that it brought tears to her eyes. She wanted him again, needed him in a way that was too strong for either of them to resist.