Talk about ridges. There was one particular ridge she was interested in, and it didn’t have shit to do with his legs.

Behind his button fly, his cock was ready for airtime and then some, the erection so big and so demanding, she knew he had to be in pain from the tight squeeze.

Guess she’d have to help her male out.

One by one, the buttons of that fly came free. Top. Next. Next. Next … and final.

His arousal barged out and she looked up from the floor at him as she took the shaft in her palm.

John’s eyes glowed and his chest was pumping from ragged inhales. As he breathed heavily, the sight of those abdominals flexing and relaxing under the falling light was so erotic, she almost forgot what came next.

Nah, she remembered. She just liked the view.

Parting her lips, she extended her tongue and licked her way from his heavy sac all the way up the underside of his erection. And she liked his clenched jaw and flaring eyes so much, she did that again, taking her time.

Annnnnnnnnnnd how about one more for good measure.

Holy. Fuck.

As John braced his arms and prayed like hell that his legs continued to hold him up, he stared down at Xhex as she crouched at his shitkickers, her gunmetal-gray eyes low-lidded and sexy, her hand wrapped around his arousal, her mouth—

Oh, God, she was going to lick up his cock again.

He wanted to watch. He really did. But more than the incredible visual of her pink tongue taking its sweet time as she tilted her head to the side and looked around his erection—

Wait. What was the question?

Coming. That was the problem. If he added what things looked like down there to the sensations of wet and warm on his sac and on his underside and the would-she-or-would-she-not take his head into her mouth? He was going to orgasm—which, okay, fine was the point to all this, but he didn’t want it to stop.

He needed this powerful distraction. After what had gone down with that civilian, he needed this so-intense-he-didn’t-have-another-thought-option, this total, primordial priority, this incredibly hot nothing-else-matters.

All there was in the world was he and Xhex. Sure, there was a crowd of five hundred humans downstairs, and there was music thumping, and please Lord don’t have Trez come into his own bathroom right now—but none of that really registered. Just like he didn’t think about the reanimation and the fight … and the way Manny had come over in the mobile surgical unit, and John and Blay had loaded the civilian’s corpse into the back still handcuffed—

John popped opened his lids. The instant he saw his mate’s mouth hovering a thin inch away from his head, all the stuff that had come back to him was evac’d out a side door.

Xhex was all that he knew.

She led with her tongue, and treated him to a swirl that made his toes curl, the tip of his erection getting the kind of attention that made his sac tight. Then she sucked him down, her whole throat somehow opening, his entire length disappearing into her lips.

Warmer. Wetter.

And she started to suck.

With her hair so short, there was nothing in the way, nothing tangling around her face or his sex, nothing blocking him from watching everything: The way when she retracted, his shaft glistened in the light from overhead. The way when she came forward, her mouth stretched thin to accommodate his girth. The way she teased him with her tongue when she popped him free of her pressured hold.

It was frustrating not having a voice. He wanted to tell her that he loved this. He loved her. He loved them being together like this, clandestine, semi-public, on the verge of discovery if the Shadow happened to enter his office.

But he wasn’t going to move his planted palms so he could sign. Nope. He’d be liable to fall on her.

The rhythm started slow, and did not stay that way—and he knew she was getting ready to finish him because she slid her hand back onto his shaft. Deep in her mouth. Almost out with a twist of her hold. Down again, her lips touching the skin of the front of his hips. Almost out again, twist of her hand, and a lick this time. Back down, all the way down, the whole shaft inside of her.

It made him think of the other places on her he could get into. Leave something of himself behind.

Faster now. And he had to close his eyes again because goddamn, as much as he wanted to come, he didn’t want to come. The suspension between the hyper-charged almost-there and the sweet sting of release was an addiction that was deadly.

Because the top of his skull was surely going to blow the fuck off if she kept this up.

He started to pant with sawing breaths that went in and out of his mouth as his cock went in and out of her mouth.

Faster again. And then she gripped his sac and squeezed—at the very instant she popped his cock out of her mouth and opened wide.

As jets shot out of him, he watched himself come into her. At least until his eyes squeezed shut of their own volition—because it was either that or they popped out of their sockets, ping-ponged off the closed door behind her, and ended up on the floor.

Making moaning noises in the back of her throat, she finished him off nice and slow, sucking him in once more, helping him ride out the tides of pleasure that ebbed and flowed for what was about ten minutes.

Vampires males made big messes.

Fortunately, she liked cleaning up after him.

When things eventually wound down, she licked her lips, her pink tongue making a lazy round of her mouth like she had enjoyed the taste of him—and holy hell that was nearly enough to get him going again. But he was dry. At least for the next ten minutes.

His cock was known to rally quick.

As she sat back and stared at him from under those low lids, he wanted to thank her. Instead, he bent down and drew her up to her full height. Putting his lips to hers, he kissed her in the hopes he could communicate in that way how much it had meant to him.

In fact, he was glad his hands were shaking too much to sign. If they had been in good working order? Well … then he might have started to explain himself with words, and he would have been unable to keep from her the true reason for his gratitude at her erotic distraction.

He would have had to tell her that he’d been bitten by that reanimated corpse.

The cursory examination he’d given himself in the field had not been thorough enough—and on some level he must have known that because he had raced up here after the surgical unit had removed the civilian’s corpse from the scene. He had intended to check properly in this private bathroom only to relieve his mind.

But paranoia had proven to be prescient.

And he had the twin rings of teeth marks to prove it.

Keeping the injury from Xhex was wrong, but it made him feel like it hadn’t really happened. That he hadn’t seen the marks in his shoulder. That he hadn’t pulled a borrowed shirt closed so she didn’t see the wound.

Keeping it from her … meant he didn’t have to admit to himself that he was terrified he’d been infected with something evil.

The following morning, Sarah Watkins looked out her bedroom window without disturbing the venetian blinds. Given that the slats were closed, all she had to go on was the inch and a quarter vertical gap next to the molding. It was enough if she contorted her neck.

Across the street and down three houses, there was a car parked facing her property. American make. Pale, nondescript color. No parking or gate pass stickers on the windshield. Nothing hanging from the rearview mirror.

There was a person in it. She couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman, and that didn’t matter.

Looked like her hunch was correct. The question was whether the FBI was watching her from the back, too, but she wasn’t going to waste time answering that hypothetical.

Finally, it was light enough. She had never been a let’s-savor-the-sunrise kind of person. Daybreak had always been late, in her opinion, its inevitably lazy arrival meaning that she could finally go back to work, her brain always chomping at the bit to return to whatever she’d had to quit the night before. Prior to coming to Ithaca, she had liked that Gerry had been the same. Romance in their relationship had been rooted in mutual intellectual support; as a couple, they were a think tank that each could come to and vet ideas and solve problems in. To her, progress on research had always been so much better than bunches of flowers or lingering gazes in the moonlight.

So much more practical and important.

But BioMed had changed that, although not the part about her wanting someone to think work through with. No, Gerry had stopped talking to her about what he was doing, and had not given her any opportunity to share her own trials and triumphs. Once that previously two-way street had been closed off? Everything had fallen apart.

And she did judge him for that. She also still to this day had no idea what changed for him.

Straightening, Sarah pulled her sweatshirt back in place and padded across the carpet to her bedside table. Back when Gerry had been alive, they had each had their side of the bed. Hers was the one closest to the door because she had an irrational fear of burning to death in a house fire and couldn’t settle unless she was close to the exit. He hadn’t been picky.

Now that he was gone? She slept all over the place.

Too bad it felt rootless rather than an expression of mattress freedom.

As she picked up her cell phone and double-checked the time, she glanced over at where he would have lain. There were no pillows where he’d put his head. She’d had to stash his two away in a closet. She’d also bought all new bedding, down to the mattress pad, the bed skirt, the headboard. When she’d still not been able to get a good night’s sleep, she’d gone out and gotten a new mattress.

Nothing had worked. Even now, she tossed and turned.

Refocusing on her phone, she realized she’d looked at the time and not seen the numbers at all. Eight thirty. And given that it was a Saturday, she had nowhere she needed to be.

Out in the hall, she flipped the switch that turned on the overhead light.

The closed door to Gerry’s study was wood paneled, and not in a fancy way. It was just your bog standard, fairly cheap but serviceable, Home Depot special.

Facing off at it, she felt like the damn thing was a locked vault without a combination.