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I pop to my feet, appalled I’ve made such a spectacle of myself. My sexy Special Ops soldier follows. “Now you know my name,” he says, and this time, his firm, way-too-tempting mouth hints at a lift. Not a smile, a lift. God…it’s sexy. Really, really sexy. “Creed Monroe. Call me, Creed.”
“Master Sergeant Creed Monroe, I say,” guessing him to be early thirties, which means, based on rank, he’s been a lifelong solider.
“Creed,” he corrects.
“Addie,” I say, unable to utter my last name, dreading the moment all the men realize my lineage. I mean, what am I supposed to say right now? Hi. I’m the daughter of the man who changed your life forever by injecting you with alien DNA without telling you first, and then claimed it was to save you from an enemy biological threat? Now you’re a GTECH Super Soldier for what we think is the rest of your life, but who knows what that really means long-term for you? But, hey, I promise I’m one of the good guys, and I’m desperate to prove he is as well, but no matter what I’m going to ensure you are not used and abused just because you’re now a kick-ass, secret government weapon?
“Addie Lawrence,” he says, handing me my files, leaning in close, the warmth of his body blanketing me in sizzling awareness. “I know who you are. And, no, that doesn’t scare me away. I never run away from anything I want.” He leans back, fixing me with another one of those dreamy blue stares. “So how about that coffee?”
At this point, I can barely breathe with his directness, but, as a true general’s daughter, I manage to recover quickly, remembering my duty in a painfully responsible fashion. “I…don’t think that’s a good idea.”
He studies me a moment before stepping into the now open elevator doors. Without one second of hesitation, I rotate to face him. “I’ll ask again,” he says, and I find myself lost in those addictive crystal-blue eyes—eyes that had promised nothing, but somehow, promise everything—until the steel doors shut between us.
I inhale, the scent of him still lingering in the air—a masculine, earthy scent that reminds me of the wind on an autumn day—and I bite my bottom lip. Too bad he’s off limits, and I have so many reasons to swear off soldiers anyway—namely, my father.
He alone represents every reason I will never have coffee with Master Sergeant Creed Monroe, unless it’s in a professional capacity.
The end.
Chapter Two
Forcing myself to shake off the encounter with Creed, I head to the lab with a plan to unload in my tiny but convenient office in the back corner of the room, only I barely make it past the door.
Katie is just inside the room, waiting on me.
The two of us have been casual friends for years, having met at a military seminar, which also means I can read her well. She stands before me looking every bit the scholar with her light brown hair neatly piled on top of her head, her lab coat already in place, and a pencil tucked behind her ear, with mischief on her mind.
“It’s a shame those blue eyes of his are really black now, isn’t it?” she asks.
“Hello and good morning to you, too,” I say, piling my things on top of one of the many empty lab tables filling the room and turning to face her. “And what do you mean, his eyes are really black?”
“I see someone is behind on their homework,” she chides, claiming one of the stools beside me to sit down. “All of the GTECHs have black eyes, but they can camouflage them to their natural color. Well, except with their bonded females. It’s kind of freaky and amazing at the same time, like everything else around this place. And how do you not know this, considering who your father is?”
Because I didn’t want to know, I reply silently, and end up losing my father as I did my mother, and that’s about as selfish as it gets. But now, I’m not sure I can, in good faith, stay away. I wonder if she wrote the notes that were left for me, but I can’t assume anything at this point nor can I lie, so I tell another truth, one that played a large role in why it took three notes, not one, to get me here.
“I resisted leaving NASA,” I say, “and the project I worked on with my mother.” My belly tightens at the very idea of the work we’d started together and never finished because she’s gone. Forever. She’s never coming back. “But it was time.”
“I know you made some major moves to make colonization of other planets possible,” she says. “As happy as I am here, I was shocked you actually walked away.”
