Hicks slammed his fist into the thick leather punching bag in the training room, growling in frustration when it burst open and the sand inside poured out at his feet. He needed to find a way to work out his frustration.

Someone let out a low whistle behind him, and he spun around, fists clenched and ready for a fight. Diggs leaned against the lockers, his arms crossed and a smug expression on his face. “Get in a fight with the punching bags?”

Hicks glanced over at the three other bags he’d busted earlier. “Yeah, they wouldn’t stop smiling at me.”

Diggs’s grin grew wider. “Man, she’s got you wrapped around her finger. Can’t say I blame you. That is one hot woman.”

Hicks saw red.

“Don’t test me right now, brother. I won’t be responsible for the consequences.” Why couldn’t he stop thinking about Whitney? He’d had his opportunity to unload her on someone else, but dammit, the thought of her with another man made his blood boil.

“You’re talking like I’d regret doing a little rematch with you.” Diggs straightened from the lockers and tilted his neck from side to side. “I don’t think I’d come out on the losing end.”

Hicks smacked his fist into his open palm, eagerness fueling his action. He and Diggs sparred a lot, mostly because they were bored and needed to burn off energy. But Hicks had never felt the way he did now. Like his blood was too hot to stay in his veins.

He spread into a wide-legged stance and raised his arms in front of his face. “Care to give it a try?”

“How about we make a new bet?”

“What kind of bet?”

“Winner gets to take on her case.” Diggs pulled off his shirt and flung it on the ground, his torso a work of pure lean muscle. He’d be a worthy adversary for any opponent. Sometimes Hicks even let him win.

But not tonight.

“Deal.”

Diggs sprung as he spoke, diving in a blur of speed straight for Hicks’s waist. An average person might’ve been caught off guard, but he was ready. He braced himself for the blow, and they collided with a loud thud to the floor. Hicks rolled as he landed, tossing Diggs across the mat. Both men were on their feet and circling each other in an instant, knees bent and arms out, ready for the next move.

“Admit it, you never wanted me to take her case,” Diggs taunted.

That blast of red returned and Hicks threw a quick jab with his right fist, following up with a left. Diggs did a back tuck and landed on his feet, untouched and unharmed and annoying as hell.

“With moves like that, she’ll be mine in five minutes. Keep it up. I can’t wait to get to know her better.” Diggs lunged forward. Swept his leg in a full arc and caught Hicks on the calf, knocking his feet out from under him.

The mat took most of the pain away from the fall, but his leg throbbed. Hicks shook his head, trying to clear it of distractions—of her—and focus on the task at hand. “Keep talking.”

Diggs ground out a quick side hook, and this time Hicks was ready. He dipped down so that Diggs’s fist just flew right over his face and his left arm shot up and caged Diggs’s wrists in a crushing grip. Diggs, strong as he was, couldn’t shake his hold.

Hicks yanked down, tossing them both to the ground. “I was just playing with you.”

Diggs sprang to his feet, his ground not quite as wide as it had been a few seconds ago. No more taking it easy. They circled, each of them moving slowly. Methodically. Both men were trained to kill. They fought ruthlessly and with one objective in mind. To win. And although they’d never physically harm one another, Hicks was determined to win this fight.

He didn’t want to consider why.

Every man on their team had qualities and abilities that had been enhanced by Project Mayhem. Diggs seemed to have gotten an equal spread of speed and strength, and his mind was as sharp and fast as his body. Hicks had already considered himself quick enough, especially after all the training he received. But there was no doubt that strength was his gift from Project Mayhem.

“Are you just gonna stand there and stare at me?” Diggs continued to circle, watching Hicks’s every twitch with a calculating gleam in his eyes.

Hicks pressed his lips into a hard line and stopped rotating, forcing Diggs to stop and become an easy target for attack. Either way, he was ready.

Diggs bared his teeth and dove, going for Hicks’s knees. Smart move, but Hicks intended to do the last thing his teammate expected. He was going to stand there and take it. He tightened his leg muscles into steel bands. Diggs’s shoulder collided with his knees. He then wrapped his arms around Diggs’s waist and squeezed, lifting him high in the air. The effort would have cost a typical man precious energy, but he didn’t feel the least amount of fatigue.

Diggs tried to shove his hands down and break Hicks’s viselike grip, but he had no hope. Hicks wrapped his other arm around Diggs, pinning his arms to his sides, and squeezed. “Say it.”

Diggs grunted and tried to wriggle out of his grasp. “No.”

Hicks squeezed his arms tighter, forcing the air from Diggs’s lungs. “Say it.”

Diggs tried to extract himself, but Hicks planted his heels and didn’t move. It was only a matter of time before Diggs ran out of energy or air or both. The man tried to heel kick him in the leg, but the blow barely glanced off Hicks’s thigh.

“You’re gonna pass out,” he warned. He locked his teammate down hard enough to keep him from moving but not hard enough to break anything. Not seriously anyway.

Diggs gave a heave and then finally collapsed. He tapped Hicks’s arm, signaling his surrender. When Hicks let go, Diggs crashed to the floor at his feet, gasping for air and sprawled out flat on his back. Hicks leaned down over his teammate, not bothering to hide the pure male satisfaction. “I win.”

Diggs made a show of gasping for breath and clutching at his side as he rose to a sitting position. “Man, why’d you try so hard to get rid of her when it’s obvious you want her this bad?”

It was a question he had not yet answered. The busted punching bags could attest to that fact. Either she was a high-class call girl, or she was doing something else on the wrong side of the law. Those options were the only way the pieces added up. He’d spent his life trying to avoid women like her. Women who used their bodies to get what they wanted. Women like his mother…

He’d found her and Jed one day in the living room, both cold on the floor. The coroner had classified their deaths as an unintentional overdose of bad crack. Hicks had been thrust into the foster system with all the gentleness of a bull ramming through glass. He’d bounced a few times, landing from one faithless grown up to another – none of them had cared about him. All they’d cared about was getting their check.

But at least he hadn’t had to worry about Jed anymore.

And at age eighteen, he’d sat his ass in the nearest recruiter’s chair and joined up. He’d thought he could learn to protect the innocent from predators. It was why he’d joined Project Mayhem.

He and the others had found out too late that Mayhem wasn’t intended to protect their homeland. No, its objective had been to create super soldiers who’d destroy anyone they were ordered to kill.

Now they were stuck with the good and the bad. Yes, they’d each been enhanced, but a lethal weakness had also been built into them as a way for their handlers to maintain control. If only they knew what stimulus had been used to turn them into mindless killers. It was the only way the good doc could change it.

As soon as the team was stable enough to go on missions for the unit, they’d be back in the field. With the money donated by Caroline, they’d be able to form their own private security firm, selecting the missions they wanted.

Until then, Whitney’s mission was small and easy. He could find out who’d broken into her apartment in no time. And Dr. Averton was right—it was a semi-safe field test to see if he’d lose control.

His body tightened. He’d already lost control. “Hell if I know.”

“Talk to me, bro. I won’t tell anybody else. That babe is seriously hot, and she seriously wants you. We all knew it.” Diggs hooked his arms over his knees and sat patiently.

Of course, they all knew it. All of their senses had been enhanced to the degree that they could probably smell it. Just like he could. Were the enhancements responsible for this crazy attraction? It was possible. Maybe his reaction to pheromones had amped up like his other senses. He hadn’t been around a female besides Dr. Averton in a long, long time, but he wasn’t drawn to Doc like that. She was more like a sister or a teammate.

And he’d also been around Reaper’s woman, his team leader’s now-fiancée. Reaper’s attraction to her was so palpable; Hicks had never even thought to be attracted to her.

Made sense if he thought about it long enough. Did that mean the rest of his team was just as attracted to Whitney as he was? The thought drained his remaining energy and Hicks collapsed onto the mat next to Diggs, placing his hands behind his head and staring up at the ceiling twenty feet above. “Do you think it’s because of the serum?”

On a typical day Diggs would’ve taken that and run with it, poking fun at him for trying to blame the serum, but he didn’t tonight. “Could be. Hell, we still don’t know what that shit has really done to us besides seriously screw up our systems.”

Each of them occasionally suffered from debilitating seizures, headaches and flu-like symptoms—too sick to get out of bed. It happened when it was time for them to have more serum…and sometimes right after they were dosed. Dr. Averton was working on making them better, and whatever she was doing had promise.

Maybe it would be best to talk to Dr. Averton directly—to ask her if his reaction could be another side effect of the experiment.

That black leather corset that had been hanging in Whitney’s closet slammed into his mind, and suddenly he couldn’t stop picturing her in it. Whitney, her long, slick hair flowing down around her shoulders, looking up at him from the bed, her breasts shoved high over the top of the corset…

Hicks shook his head. It had to be the experiment. It was the only thing that made sense. He didn’t have a fetish and had never been the least bit turned on by that kind of stuff. “I’m going to talk to Dr. Averton. She can give me the answers.” But first, he was going to take a long, cold shower.

“I hope so, man, for all of our sakes.”

Diggs’s reply had him stopping in his tracks. Spinning slowly on the balls of his feet, he asked the question he’d been too chicken to ask before. “Do you feel the same thing? This raw, hungry need clawing at your guts every time she’s around?”

It was a question any man should lose his balls for asking, but Diggs looked at him with a solemn gaze. “No, brother. That’s just you.”

* * *

It was one a.m. by the time he got through with his cold shower and felt in control enough to talk to Dr. Averton. Thank God, she didn’t sleep much. She rarely took much of a break from her research, no matter how much he urged her to. Odds were she’d be up in a lab running some numbers, testing some new serum and trying to figure out how to stabilize their reactions.

Hicks slowed in his progress down the long, dark hallway where the team’s sleeping quarters were housed. Melissa, with Caroline’s funding, had somehow managed to find the one odd recluse who’d soundproofed his entire mansion. The extra-thick walls gave the men relief from overstimulation. Too much sound and noise and lights had triggered their outbursts in the past, and that was a risk they couldn’t take. His feet brought him to the door at the end of the hall. He stopped and stared without making a move to knock.

Quantum.

Their teammate who was steadily losing the battle of holding on to his sanity. He rarely talked, and most days he didn’t get out of bed. His frame, once nearly as big as King’s, had grown gaunt from lack of exercise and proper nutrition. Every so often, they had to knock him out just to force feed him through an I.V.

That thought brought a deep ache to his chest. Although six of the original seven men on their team had escaped Project Mayhem, only five of them were really here. From the get-go, Quantum had never been able to handle the injections. His body just didn’t react well to them. But he hadn’t given up the fight yet, which meant he was still in there. Still fighting for survival.

The man who hadn’t made it, John Dawson, had suffered a massive seizure. Scientists had carted him off into some private room, and they’d kept him there for days with no word. It wasn’t until that day, that awful day when their enemy had forced them to kill innocents, that they’d found out Dawson was dead. Massive brain bleed.

He lifted his hand, ready to knock, but he pressed his ear against the door instead, listening for any signs of movement from Quantum’s room. All he heard was the quiet beeping of the monitors stationed around his bed. If Hicks were a stronger man, he’d go in and sit with his teammate, even knowing Quantum was too out of it to hear anything. Except…Every time he laid eyes on Quantum, all he saw was a future version of himself.

If Dr. Averton didn’t figure out the weakness in the serum that caused his team to be so reliant on the weekly injections, they might all end up in the same state.

Insane. Comatose. Dead.

Hicks turned and walked away, continuing down the hallway. He wasn’t strong enough. Not tonight.

He went to the lab, only to find it empty. Most of the lights were turned out, which was unusual. Dr. Averton never turned the lights out. Maybe she’d gone to the study; she liked to work in there sometimes—she said being surrounded by all those books made her feel comfortable. That was something Hicks didn’t understand. He didn’t care much for reading; he cared more for action. Even as a kid, he’d been less interested in school and more interested in fighting and playing sports. Which had made him a great fit for the military.

He padded silently down the stairs and around to the west wing, where a massive study was located, but he knew it was empty before he even crossed the threshold. He could always sense Dr. Averton’s presence—she had this calm, cool, collected air that never ceased to amaze him. Even when he’d carried her out of the chopper on his last failed mission, she’d been issuing out orders like a commander, broken arm and all. It was part of the reason he admired her so much.

Doc didn’t hang out in the kitchen—as far as he could tell she rarely ate anything—so the only other place she was likely to be at this time of night was her bedroom. Maybe she was still awake, but she’d escaped there to do some more studying up on genetics or colder formulas. Shit, to be honest, he didn’t know what the hell she studied, only that she was working her ass off to protect them. He took the stairs two at a time back up to the second floor, only this time he took a left at the top instead of a right. Her door was about dead center in the hallway. He didn’t even think, he just lifted his hand and knocked.

It sure as shit wasn’t Dr. Averton who yanked open the door. It wasn’t Dr. Averton who stood before him, her eyes heavy with sleep and her long, dark hair tumbling around her shoulders. It wasn’t Dr. Averton who made his blood so hot he couldn’t think.

“What do you want?”

Even though the reason he was here stood in front of him—Whitney—he had to shake himself to refocus on his purpose. That strappy nightgown thingy, paired with short, silky shorts, was enough to make his mouth so dry he couldn’t force his tongue to move. Dear Jesus, that shower hadn’t been nearly cold or long enough. He’d have to take a dip in the frozen Arctic to do that, and even then, he doubted it would do the job. “Need to see your sister.”

The sexy sleepiness disappeared from her gaze as it narrowed in on him. “Well, you can’t. She just fell asleep thirty minutes ago. I don’t know what you’ve been doing to her, but she’s exhausted. Go away.”

Whitney made to slam the door in his face, but his hands shot out, blocking her. He knew she was right. He didn’t want to wake Dr. Averton, who certainly deserved (and needed) more sleep. But if he walked away now, he wouldn’t be able to look at Whitney. He wouldn’t be able to smell her honeyed scent. “Is she okay?”

“And you care why?” She wasn’t able to shut the door all the way, but she didn’t back off any either. Through the few inches of open door, he could see the swell of her breasts as her chest heaved. She wasn’t unaffected by him either, dammit.

“She doesn’t sleep enough. It’s a good thing you’re here to help her with it.” His response seemed to take her aback. For about a second.

“Someone around here needs to.”

For some reason, her catty tone didn’t irritate him as it had before. In fact, that husky note of sleepiness in her voice was a freaking turn on from hell. “You should try to get her to eat when she wakes up. She doesn’t eat enough either.”

Whitney blew out a sigh, and it was all he could do not to lean in closer. “She never does when she’s on a project. Someone needs to remind her to eat and sleep. Sometimes she goes for days without taking a break. It’s not healthy.”

What wasn’t healthy was this animal lust felt toward Whitney. No matter how much he logically fought the attraction, he hadn’t yet figured out how to obliterate it. Maybe that’s why he was looking for an excuse to stay in her presence for just a few more minutes. Wasn’t like he was going to sleep tonight anyway. Not with his body so tense and unsatisfied. “I can do that. Is there anything else we should do, you know, to help take care of her like she takes care of us?”

Whitney glanced over her shoulder and then pulled the door further open and stepped out into the hallway. He countered, backing up to give her space. When she turned to peek back inside, checking to make sure her sister was still asleep, he couldn’t help but soften a little bit on the inside. No matter what she was trying to cover up back home, she obviously cared deeply for her sister. That had to say something about who she was as a person.

Then she turned and crossed her arms and glared at him, and it couldn’t be more obvious that she didn’t much care for him. “She just forgets the basics. Eating. Sleeping. Changing clothes.”

“All the stuff we do automatically.”

“Exactly.”

Why couldn’t he walk away? Hicks shoved a hand through his still damp hair and blew out a long breath. It had to be the enhancements—it was the only logical explanation. Even if knowing didn’t solve his problem, it did give him a reason for the illogical attraction. Knowledge would give him some measure of control.

Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. He wouldn’t wake Dr. Averton, so no matter what he said or did, he’d still feel this way about her at least until tomorrow. Which meant he was through worrying about it tonight. Might as well embrace it for what it was, an uncontrollable reaction.

He needed to be close to her, so he cast about for any topic to talk about that could keep her in the hallway. The two things that came to mind were her fetish wear and her love for sister. Her sister was definitely the safer topic. “So, has she always been like this?”

Whitney gave him a grudging nod, but she didn’t relax her stance in the least bit, something that was driving him nuts, especially how her arms were crossed over her ample breasts, shoving them up over the edge of her top. Had his mouth watering remembering how they’d tasted. How they’d felt in his hands. Jesus Christ, he wanted to pin her against the wall again.

“Since we were children. Melissa operated on a level above everyone else. A lot of kids were jealous, and so were our parents. Which is not to say they’re not proud. They feel like they hit the lottery ticket with her.”

Hicks used all his strength to focus on her words and not her body. Or the fact he couldn’t stop thinking about taking her right here in this darkened hallway. “But you weren’t jealous of her, were you?”

“No, never. Melissa’s very special, and I’ve always treasured her for it.” Whitney shook her head, and her hair tumbled around her shoulders, sending a fresh wave of her scent straight to his nostrils.

“And she treasures you too.”

She shrugged, but in a confident way—as if he’d told her nothing she didn’t already know. So the two sisters were close despite their differences. Interesting.

“That’s how family works, right?” There was the tiniest bit of bitterness in her voice—something he wanted to explore further, but the last thing he needed right now was to get her thinking about things she didn’t like.

“So, what were you like growing up?”

Her entire demeanor changed. It was like a tsunami was rolling toward him from the distant horizon, growing larger and stronger. He felt the power of her presence as she unwound her arms and laid a hand on her hip. She dropped her chin and looked up at him with thick, impossibly black lashes. Her effect was just as devastating as the rogue wave. “What do you think?” She tilted her head just a little bit and stepped toward him. As she touched his chest with her finger, he sucked in a breath.

And then she looked up at him, and he lost his ability to reason. “I—I don’t know. Tell me.”

Her lips curled at the same time as her arms slid up and around his neck, her fingers toying with the hair at the nape. “I’ll give you three guesses.”

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t keep his hands at his sides. Instinctively they went to her hips. Hips that seemed to have been carved out just for him. “I’m not good at guessing.”

His mouth was close to hers, wanting to taste her again. With her body plastered against his, he was barely able to hold himself back. She was the most gorgeous creature he had ever laid eyes on. He could feel every inch of her through their clothes. Heaven help him, he knew what she looked like underneath that silk nightgown.

“Well, aren’t you full of surprises?” Her nails dug into his arm with a bite of pain, instantly arousing him. His hips bucked reflexively as he turned her toward the wall and held her against it, savoring the fact that he could feel his erection digging into her belly.

They were so close now, their lips hovering inches apart. He was going to kiss her again. Going to fill himself up with her sweet taste and touch. He was so close. He could feel her breath fanning across his face.

“You were a master at guessing earlier.” Her eyes narrowed, and she shoved him away.

He let go, surprised, and watched as she stomped off, her hips swaying provocatively in the darkness.

“Whitney?”

She went inside and shut the door, and the soft click of the lock seemed louder than an explosion. She’d just played him for a fool, and he’d walked right into her trap completely blind.

Son-of-a-bitch. He’d completely mistaken her arousal for what it truly was—anger.

She was still pissed off from earlier, and she’d just made sure he’d spend the entire night without one wink of sleep. Dr. Averton better have set her alarm bright and early, as he didn’t know how much longer he could wait for an answer to his problem. The next time he saw Whitney Averton, he’d be ready. She’d never dictate his responses again.