Banks

At dinner that night I sit across from my wife, my eyes filled with images I never want to erase. I may have thought she was an innocent virgin when I met her, but I have no doubt now that she’s an experienced woman.

She sits eating her slice of cherry pie, whipped cream on her fork and my fucking cock betrays me again as I watch her lick it off. Her eyes meet mine and a flicker of a smile tells me she knows just how tempting she is.

Still, I can’t lose control. Not here, not in front of everyone. If I give in, for a second time with her, I have a feeling I’ll smack her perfect ass until it is bright red, that I’d have her blindfolded and bound, begging for me to make her come.

I push from the table, turning quickly so my goddamn hard on isn’t visible.

But I know Tia saw, the same way she saw me touch myself while she spread her knees and was taken by four men. I couldn’t help it. My cock was raging at the sight of her being fucked so freely.

She has no clue what she does to me.

Or maybe she does. Maybe she loves this game, lifting her eyebrows just so, biting the side of her lip to hide a smile.

She’s probably thinking about how good it was when she called me Sir. When I pulled her hair and took her from behind.

It’s like she thinks that just because we fucked once, she knows all about me.

Sweet Tia may not be a virgin, but that darling girl is still so damn innocent. She has no clue about the dangerous games the men around her play.

I go to my room and lose myself in the files I secured from the research lab. I want to know everything about her blood work. If she really was patient C65 it changes everything. It makes her an asset even Lawson doesn’t realize. I want to memorize her files to be the expert on her DNA. Right now, more than ever, she needs a husband who understands exactly what we are dealing with.

Exactly what she is.

Warren Thorne may use women to test his theories, but in Alaska, we follow the law as dictated in the Alaskan Code of Ethics. Unless we have data to back up our hypothesis, women and children are off limits.

The ACoE was drafted, proposed by Salinger's mother two years ago when a treatment went gravely wrong. We had tested our formula first on pregnant mice, and finally on newly pregnant women. The mice took it fine, the sheep, the cows. But when women were injected, what started as a hope for the future ended in more burials than should ever happen at a research facility.

All of the patients died in the third trimester. Mother and child. We can’t let that happen again. Hence, the ACoE.

The treatment I gave Tia today is our greatest hypothesis. It may not be FDA approved, but it should be. Everyone is in agreement on that.

The only reason it isn’t yet, is that some world governments are corrupt. They seem to think the shortage of women is an asset, not a catastrophe. When Emerson’s ship was torpedoed, I knew it was another government wanting our intel. Looking to make women less protected than they already are.

A knock on my door causes me to break my eyes from the computer screen.

“Who is it?” I call, sitting up in bed.

“It’s me,” Tia’s voice calls out.

“Come in,” I say, closing my computer as she walks in my room.

She looks around my space, no doubt judging the sparse room. No messes, everything in order, and certainly no family photos on the dresser.

“Cozy,” she says teasingly.

“I don’t have a need for clutter.”

“Me neither,” she says, running her hand over the oak dresser. On the top of it rests my watch and wallet, nothing else. She runs her hand over the brown leather wallet. Picking it up, she eyes me. “Do you mind?”

“What’s mine is yours,” I say, sitting on the edge of my bed, preparing myself for her onslaught of questions.

Instead, she just examines my identification, pushing out her lips. Counting my bills she smiles. I got cash from the bank the other day so I have quite a large stack. When she flips through the few business cards tucked in pockets, I tense.

“Who is this?” she asks frowning. “It has an address in Boston?”

I take it from her and place it on my desk, upside down. “Just an old colleague.”

“Is that where you’re from originally?”

“I spent a bit of time there, yes.”

Her lips purse and I know she wants more. “You don’t talk a lot about yourself.”

“You know everything that’s worth knowing.”

“I doubt that.”

“If you’re looking for some sob story to explain the way I am, you won’t get one. Some people are just hard-wired differently.”

It’s only half a lie. My story is cold, brutal, but I think I was wired differently from the start.

“You say that like I’m judging you,” she says.

“Sweetheart, if you knew the thoughts that have been going through my mind since this afternoon, you would and should be judging me.”

“Why don’t you let me make that decision?”

I hold her gaze. Fuck. It wouldn’t take much for me to lose control again. And that’s the one goddamn thing I pride myself in. Can’t, won’t let her make me lose my focus.

Her survival depends on it.

“Anyways,” she says, setting the wallet back down. “I wasn’t trying to pry.”

“Except you walked into my room and started pilfering through my things.” I stand and walk across the room, resting my hand on my doorknob, ready to pull it open and send her away. Having her here, in my space, is too much. I don’t trust myself.

“Sorry.” She runs a hand through her hair. It smells so good, lavender and something sweet, like apple blossoms. I can tell she’s showered again. Probably after fucking Salinger. Her hair is wet and droplets of water spread over her sweatshirt. She’s in leggings and has slippers on.

She looks cozy.

Not like my room, or my damn heart.

“Look,” she says, sighing. “You’re just so hard to read, Banks. I don’t exactly know how to get close to you.”

I laugh sharply. “That’s the point.”

Her jaw tenses before she says, “Were you always such an ass?”

I shrug. “I don’t hold tight to anything or anyone if that’s what you mean.”

She shakes her head. “That’s not true. You hold tight to your research. Why do you care so much about that and nothing else?”

Her words strike a chord, but that song is long buried. No way in hell am I going to wax poetic about the things I’ve long put to rest.

“I’m a scientist, Tia, that’s why.” I force a smile. “You know all about that, don’t you? You’re a Ph.D. after all. All those years of study. You had to have your reasons.”

“I want to help people.”

“So do I.”

“Right. Well,...” She closes her eyes briefly and takes a low, steadying breath like she’s trying to find some sort of patience in dealing with me. “Maybe that’s what we should focus on. Research.”

“We?”

“Yes. We.” There’s a stubborn tilt to her chin. One that tells me she’s not about to back down.

I get that she’s smart. She’s already proven that. But the research I do is on a whole other level. But if she wants to pore over my research, what harm could it bring?

“Fine.” I pull out a large binder from my desk and hand it to her. “Start here.”

“You want me to read this?”

“If you can understand it, then I’ll let you see some of the coding I’ve been working on recently.”

She sighs, but instead of leaving like I’d thought she’d do, she moves towards my bed and flops down on it, opening the binder.

“What are you doing?”

“Reading.” She’s lying on her stomach, her perfect ass on display, and my cock is instantly hard.

“Here?”

Her lips twitch up, but she resumes reading. “Yep.”

I grumble under my breath and sit back down at my desk. She has no clue the things I want to do to her right now. The positions I could have her in, the ways I could tie her up and have my way with her. It’s dangerous having her here, this close to me.

She doesn’t speak after that, only the sound of pages flipping reminds me that she’s there.

Hours pass and when I glance at the clock on my laptop it’s past two in the morning. I push my chair back ready to tell her to go to bed, but her eyes are already closed, the binder still spread out on the bed beside her.

“Tia,” I say. Marking where she’d been, I close the binder and place it on the desk.

She murmurs something drowsily.

“Time to go to bed,” I say.

“I am in bed.” Her eyes remain closed, and she curls up like she has no intention of leaving.

Shit.

But what’s the harm in letting her stay?

Because she’ll start to expect it. Start to think that there’s something between us that there isn’t.

“Tia,” I say, a little louder this time, leaning down, ready to carry her to her own damn room if I have to.

“Your stats are wrong,” she mumbles, and I swear she’s talking in her sleep.

“My stats are perfectly fine,” I say, defensively, even though I doubt she has any clue what she’s saying.

“No.” She rolls over so her back is to me, and pulls the blanket over her shoulders. “You should have used a multivariable linear equation. It changes everything.”

I’m about to dismiss her words, but something presses at the back of my head, making me wonder if she isn’t right.

I pick up the binder and flip through the pages she’d been on, scrolling through the numbers. Opening my laptop, I plug in the data using the equation she’d suggested.

My chest constricts.

She was right. It changes the outcome of the study.

I frown at her small frame, curled up on my bed, and wonder what else is in that head of hers. I’d had eight of my top research assistants go through these numbers multiple times, none of which had seen what she had, and without even using a computer.

Part of me wants to wake her up, to help me delve into the new data, and make sense of what I’m seeing on my screen, but she needs to sleep.

I don’t.

I’ve learned how to survive on only a few hours of shut-eye a night, and I doubt I’ll be getting even that. Because this is huge. Bigger than huge, it’s paramount, because if what I’m seeing is accurate, she may have just helped me crack the code of the genetic mutation.

And what that means is we could be one step closer to finding a cure and protecting my wife.

More hours go by as I pore over the information.

The phone rings downstairs, and an uneasy feeling settles in my gut.

Who the hell would be calling this late? And not to one of our cell phones, but to our house phone.

It keeps ringing until I finally hear one of the men stomping downstairs, grumbling all the way.

Seconds later, Fallon is at my door, a frown tugging at his lips when he sees Tia in my bed, but when he turns to me, it’s only concern I see. “You need to come with me, now.”