Waking up I found my arm draped over the quiet rise and fall of his chest. He slept on his back, handsome face turned toward me, morning light drifting in and filtered through the gauzy white curtains. I stretched a little and smiled. My muscles were devoid of tension. Sleeping with him had been so easy. I don’t think I tossed and turned once.

Upon feeling my movement, Ethan cracked his eyes open a little and burrowed into me. God, he felt good. The contrast of his strong body against my soft one was absolute heaven. I snuggled as close as I could and buried my face in his neck, inhaling his masculine scent.

“Mornin’ Ms. Reed,” he groggily murmured.

“Hi, Mr. Cocker.”

He rolled us over so that he was on top of me, propped on his elbows, one index finger pushing my hair back so he could see my eyes better. I felt the welcome pressure of his erection against my inner thigh and opened my legs more. He exhaled a deep, closed-mouth moan as he slid his flattened palm down my ribcage, soft stomach and finally, slowly, over my pussy. He gazed down at me. I remained quiet as he buried his face in the nook of my shoulder and neck, his fingers opening my folds and finding what they wanted. I was excited and he could feel it.

He slipped a finger in me, one of his knees wedged under one of mine. The smooth, blunt tip of his shaft edged into me and Ethan rose up to kiss me briefly and watch my face as he pressed deeper. My back arched as my inner walls yielded to his size. Moaning softly, my eyes closed and I turned my head a little. He took the invitation and nibbled on my ear as he reached the farthest point inside me.

“I slept great,” he rasped. “You?”

A small amused laugh escaped me as my fingers found a soft home in his tousled nest. “I haven’t slept that well since I was little and had no problems.”

“Me too,” he smiled. “I can’t wait to show you my mansion.”

Laughing I teased him, “Can’t you just say house like a normal person?”

His eyes were hooded, voice deep as we talked while our hips moved and he slowly dove in and out of me. “It’s not just a house. It’s got all kinds of cool stuff. A bowling alley. Movie theater. Oh God, you feel so tight. Well, it’s really a screening room with three rows of stadium seating but same difference. And I have a secret office.”

I was trying to listen to him but his cock numbed my mind and woke up my body instead. Still, that secret office part captured my attention. “What do you mean?”

“Nobody knows where it is but me and the architect who designed it.”

“And the construction crew,” I smiled.

Ethan closed his eyes and groaned, pressing deep inside me. He kissed me and murmured, “I had them killed.”

We burst out laughing and that just made my pussy squeeze him in bursts, which turned us both on more.

We began to move in harmony, hands sliding down each other’s bodies. Ethan’s eyes darkened with insatiable hunger and I moaned as he thickened. This time everything was like a ballet dance, nothing hurried, everything smooth, him holding me and me completely trusting him. He drew the sweet, hot burn out from within me, bit by delicious bit. I whimpered. Every bit of me was his. He started to pant and met my eyes. “This is making love,” he whispered, then crushed my lips with his. We kissed as the orgasm ripped through us both simultaneously. I cried out and he started swearing under his breath like he couldn’t believe it either, how right this felt. Could it be that soulmates existed? Was it really not a myth?

* * *

“I was going to introduce you to the traditional Scottish breakfast, but since you wanted fun, Coro The Chocolate Cafe is where we had to go.”

He’d ordered melted chocolate and banana pancakes, and I was drooling over my chocolate pancakes only I’d chosen strawberries. “I have to take a picture of these,” I said, pulling out my phone and ignoring the string of notifications that wanted to distract me. They could wait. It was Sunday. And I was living in a dream I didn’t want to wake up from.

Ethan cut out a bite of his and fed it to me, “Taste this shit right here.”

With my mouth full of banana chocolate goodness I moaned, “Oh my God! It’s too good!”

“Right?” he muttered, digging in while I took my photo.

“Doesn’t do it justice.”

“Rarely does. My friend Ann told me about this place. I’ve never been but she’s right, it’s to die for.”

I looked at him, the camera hovering over the table before I remembered to set it down. “Oh?”

His eyes went dead and then came back to life as he realized, “You’re jealous!”

“Nope.”

“You are.”

“Is Ann an ex lover?”

He glanced to his coffee and shrugged. “Maybe.”

I picked up a strawberry, sucked the chocolate off it and threw it at his faded jeans jacket. We were both in casual summer wear even though it was a bit cloudy outside. In the U.K., June or no, you never knew what the weather would give you.

“Okay, yes, she and I had a thing for a while. But she’s married now. Happily. Doesn’t want me. I promise.”

“Whatever,” I muttered, taking a sip of my own coffee. “You’ve had lovers. So have I. It’s fine.”

“You’ve had lovers?” he asked me, looking shocked.

I just shook my head, leaving the bait untouched. “So what about this Scottish breakfast, the traditional one?”

In between bites, he explained, “Order it anywhere and it’s the same. Eggs any way you like them, one sausage link – which they call a banger. A ‘rasher’ of bacon, which is really just thinly sliced ham. Then you have sautéed mushrooms, a small broiled tomato, and baked beans. And black pudding.”

“Dessert?” I asked, forking a gooey tower of pancake and chocolate in my mouth.

“Sure,” he smiled. “It’s pig’s blood, fat, oats, barley and spices and you don’t want to know what it’s stuffed into. Alright, I’ll tell you. An intestine.”

I stopped chewing and stared at him.

He assumed pure innocence. “What? That doesn’t sound good?”

I shook my head, slowly chewing and trying to remember that I wasn’t eating what he just described.

“It sounds bad but it’s delicious.”

Swallowing so I could argue I said, “I will never eat that now.”

Ethan chuckled, leaned back in his chair, satisfied.

“Brock told me about your invention. Actually he told me there was one, but not exactly what it was.”

Ethan’s eyes flickered a little. “What did he say?”

“That you’d created some sort of iris identification process.”

“So what do you want to know?”

I could see he was guarded, and I felt it had something to do with my mentioning Brock’s name. “I was just wondering what it was. What is it with you and Brock?”

He ignored that part of the question and glanced to his coffee. “You ever see a movie or T.V. show where retinal scanning or iris recognition is used? They hold their eye up to a hologram or something, and it scans them, boom, now they’re allowed into the top secret room in a top secret facility?”

“Yes.”

He blinked up to me. “The problem with them…no. First let me explain that both are different. Retinal scanning is ocular-based biometric technology that uses unique patterns in a person’s retinal blood vessels. Iris recognition uses mathematical pattern-recognition techniques of your irises and the main difference is that one can be done from a distance.” He leaned forward and quietly said, “So the problem with both is that they didn’t safeguard against this possibility: what if the person was dead?”

I paused a beat. “Sorry?”

Ethan lit up with passion as he explained in a hushed voice, “Say you have the Pentagon. The White House. Fort Knox. Pick a place with the strongest protection that also has the most devious minds in the world wanting in. People like that aren’t like you and me. They’ll do anything. If they were to gouge out and remove someone’s eyeball, that iris or retina could still be used to access anywhere. I safeguarded against it.”

The server returned with more coffee and Ethan leaned back, his electric gaze staring out the window as he tried to act casual. I thanked the server and took a sip, but I was riveted. As soon as we were alone again, Ethan returned to me, his voice very quiet.

“I devised a way for the computer to know if that eye was attached to a living person or not. I did the same for fingerprints. They now identify whether or not blood is pumping through that finger when the pad is held to the scanner. And I took it one step further, because not everyone is going to kill someone to get at their eyeball, right? Not every one is going to cut off a hand and smuggle it in. Nope, they could instead force a living person to the scanner, open their eyelid and make them give their unique code to the computer’s interface, and boom, then they kill them. I taught the computer to differentiate if the person was under a normal amount of stress or under life-threatening levels of fear.”

“Wow!”

Ethan nodded, looking around before coming back to me. “Even when someone appears calm on the outside, you can’t hide terror from your heart rate, or from how your pupils dilate.” Ethan leaned back. “You know what I was missing though? Bet you can’t guess.”

“What if they were drugged?”

His face fell. “You just came up with that?”

“Yes. Am I right?”

He blinked at me and waved his finger in the air. “Just now! You just now thought of that?!”

On a self-conscious laugh I insisted, “Yes! Just now!”

He leaned in and hushed again. “It took me months for that to occur to me, Charlie! I’m serious, I woke up one night and thought, wait, what if they drugged them? I have to add in for that. So I went back and coded it, and this wasn’t easy. It took me almost two years to finish this thing. No, almost three if you count when I first had the idea.”

Enthralled I whispered, “That’s incredible. It’s like you invented the dead bolt of biology.”

He nodded and drank his coffee. “I was never great at biology but I love science fiction. Did you know that it’s a general belief we have cell phones because of Star Trek? Those little beam-me-up-Scottie things they had look just like flip phones.”

“I’m having breakfast with a geek,” I dryly muttered, mopping chocolate up with the last chunk of pancake.

“It’s not that there is a huge epidemic of eyes being poked out, or hands severed from their owner, but the people who were doing that were, as you can imagine, the worst sociopaths out there, and could do the most damage. If they’d go to such lengths, you don’t want them near you. Word spreads that you have that kind of technology and nobody will fuck with you.”

“Why were you whispering, then? Don’t you want it known?”

With eyes locked on a distant thought, Ethan pulled his wallet from his back pocket and tossed a Platinum credit card on the bill as the server presented it. As soon as the guy left Ethan quietly told me, “Because I don’t want anyone knowing I’m the one who invented and patented the technology. You never know who’s listening. They want to decode it. Which they could do if they had me.”

I glanced around the unfamiliar faces and found a man watching us. As we locked eyes he glanced quickly away. The hair rose on the back of my neck and I drank my coffee, wishing our server would hurry back.

“What do you want to do today?” Ethan asked.

Under my breath I said, “Let’s talk about it outside.”

Frowning he nodded and we sat in silence until the tab was settled.