Demon's Embrace (2 page)

There was something about him that radiated sex to the point Miri had to suck in a breath and resist the urge to fan herself.

As the girls in her classes would have said, the man was a hottie, absolutely and exotically beautiful.

Their eyes met and the charge between them was nearly instantaneous. The jolt of pure heat in that simple glance shot straight to her core to dampen her panties and harden her nipples even further. She also caught the sense of an awareness of her attention at some deep level and his knowledge of her appreciation for the view he offered her, which was impossible.

Then there was that sculpted face, that incredible body. Her body seemed to go white-hot in an instant.

Ridiculous. A man like him wouldn’t give a thought to a musty academic like me,
she thought.

She was popular enough among the academics but not among the kind of women that man would attract.

With a soft private chuckle, Miri scanned the room, waiting for the last of the stragglers to find their seats while she tried to keep her eyes from drifting to the back and the handsome, impossibly sexy stranger who stood there.

Her amusement and good humor disappeared the instant she caught sight of the man who stood just to the side below the stage.

Jonathan Hargrove. She didn’t find him either attractive or funny at all.

She remembered the day he’d appeared at the door of the tiny closet the University liked to call her office.

A tall man – although the man at the back of the room would have made him seem small – Hargrove was balding, thin almost to the point of emaciation, with hawk-like features and black eyes as flat and dull as pieces of coal.

“Dr. Reynolds?” he’d said, his voice surprisingly high.

“Yes?” she’d replied, a little puzzled to find a stranger at her door. She rarely had visitors who weren’t staff or students. “May I help you?”

“Actually, perhaps I can help you,” he’d said, as if conferring a major favor on her, offering her not his hand but his card. “My name is Jonathan Hargrove. I represent Prometheus Corporation and we would like to make you an offer.”

Startled and already a little put off by his presumption and his superior attitude, unsure how to handle it, him, or what it was he really wanted, Miri had just gestured him to go on.

“As the up and coming expert in your fields of physics, my company, Prometheus Corporation, would like to hire you, starting immediately, to come work for us. The contract would be for one year. The pay is one million dollars.”

Her eyebrows had shot up.

Sitting back in her chair, Miri had folded her hands on her desk and looked at him.

It was a lot of money, no doubt.

There was no need to consider it. She’d graduated at the very top of her class, Summa Cum Laude, and her research had had more than a few corporations hammering at her door, offering exorbitant salaries. Some equal to this one.

“No, Mr. Hargrove. I chose to teach so as not to work in the corporate world. Too many of the best leave the academic world for the ‘real’ world and the students suffer for it. The University also offers me a great deal of latitude for my research.” A lot of latitude to tell the truth, despite Constantine. “I chose not to have my work directed along some corporate pathway. Please tell your boss or bosses, thank you, but no thanks.”

“You’re turning down a million dollars?” he’d said, incredulously.

Miri had looked at him. “I am. What in the world would I do with it? I have everything I need and I’m doing what I love. I’ve found that the more money you have, the more you tend to waste it on things you don’t need.”

“You have substantial student debt,” he said.

“Far less than a million dollars,” she replied, “and manageable, not enough to make me want to enter the corporate world.”

She’d watched that world chew up her father as casually and carelessly as a lawnmower and then spit him out at age fifty-five, taking away his reason for being, his existence, his definition of himself. He’d been a brilliant man and some essential part of him had died that day although he’d lived for a many more years. Him and the bottle.

It still pained her.

“You’re young yet,” Hargrove had said, “still building your reputation. Working for us would gain you prestige, some degree of presence, even respectability, in your chosen field.”

“Mr. Hargrove,” she’d said, quietly, “what part of ‘No’ do you not understand, the N or the O? You can keep talking but the answer will still be the same. Or I can call security and have you escorted out.”

Hargrove had left but had tried to go over her head to the Dean, offering him a substantial amount of money for the University to ‘convince’ her to agree.

It had fallen to Miri to tell the Dean what she’d told Hargrove, to threaten to quit and go elsewhere if he pushed it, therefore denying them the money either way. Considering the prestige the University stood to gain from her research if she stayed, it hadn’t been a hard decision for him to make.

Contrary by nature, when pushed she tended to dig in her heels. She didn’t like being pushed.

Unfortunately, it was a public lecture so she couldn’t have Hargrove kicked out but the man’s presence unsettled her.

She turned away from him, returned to setting up the projection, light, and sound equipment as she talked with the students who waited on the floor just below the raised stage. Now and then she glanced to the back of the room and the preternaturally handsome man who stood there as a balm to her agitation.

He certainly improved the view.

At first when Ashtoreth walked into the lecture room he’d thought the young woman on the stage who chatted and laughed with the students standing around was a graduate student there to help the professor.

For one thing, she was quite young and for the other she was pretty.

To his pleasure, she wasn’t one of the skinny bloodless women he’d seen so much of, their eyes vacuous, dis- and un-interested in anything of value. Women who had beauty and body, but no thoughts, no emotions, nothing behind their powdered mask-like faces, flawless in a way nothing human should be, their smiles stiff and unnatural. It had stunned him to discover some had breasts made of plastic while others injected chemicals into their faces to keep away what character and emotion imprinted there. Women who gave in to the demands this society put on them to conform, to starve themselves. There was no passion, no joy in them.

Such women sought him out in droves, drawn by the attraction that he and all his brothers possessed but they were so cold, so calculated, they disturbed him on some intrinsic level. In a way they reminded him too much of the mannequins he saw in store windows.

Then the woman on the stage looked up, her gaze scanned the hall and Ash froze.

She was lovely, true, beautiful in a purely natural way, in the way only intelligent women were beautiful. It was there in her alertness, in the curiosity in her striking eyes.

It was her eyes that caught him, though. Although such women were long gone they were the eyes of a seer, a mystical, magical green, long-lashed and lovely.

His breath caught to look at her.

She had unfashionable curves for this time and brilliant, abundant curling red-gold hair that fell nearly to her waist. Her breasts were high, rounded, beautifully displayed in the crossed neckline of the light green dress she wore. The pretty dress highlighted those glorious eyes while also making the most of a pair of truly spectacular legs. She was also just a little thing and that brought out the possessive, protective side of him in an instant.

Something about her eyes, her face and her lovely body called to him.

His own tightened instinctively.

To his astonishment, he found he had to fight the instinct to approach her, knowing the risk even such simple contact offered. Just the sight of her though had a surprisingly strong effect on him. If his mission hadn’t been so imperative Ash might have persuaded himself to stay for a few days to explore a little more.

But it was important, even vital that he learn what he could here or else he would have stayed for more reasons than just this sudden, strong attraction to the woman on the stage.

There was so much to learn here, so much he’d missed over the years. He loved a good debate. Not that his brothers couldn’t offer the same, but he knew them. Here there were different voices, different minds, new perspectives. That was something he hadn’t known for years.

Then the pretty girl stepped up to the podium with authority, a sense of self-possession, and he realized with a shock who she was, who she must be – Dr. M. Reynolds, the very woman he’d come to see.

Here was no dowdy intellectual as he’d expected from reading her work but a beautiful, shapely and surprisingly young woman. A very attractive woman who somehow called to him, attracted him in a way no other had.

Given the subject matter, Ash had expected an academician as he’d known from his youth, tall, thin and gawky or short and portly from days spent sitting behind a desk. He certainly hadn’t expected her to be lovely and engaging. He had expected her to be serious and she was, but he hadn’t expected the glints of humor that brightened her pale green eyes and curved her pretty mouth.

Nor had he expected the jolt that went through him each time he looked at her.

His entire body seemed aware of her, of every inch of her, and not just sexually, although he definitely responded to her in that manner, but on every level, heart, soul, mind, body and spirit.

Even less did he expect that her voice when she spoke would be a sexy, throaty contralto that sent shivers through him. His cock stood at sharp attention, taking immediate notice, making his jeans uncomfortably tight. Surreptitiously he adjusted himself so his twitching member was less constricted.

Suddenly this adventure, however desperate and necessary, had become much less of a trial.

With a smile, Miri tapped on the microphone to get everyone’s attention. After a moment, the room went silent and everyone turned to face her.

“Hello, ladies and gentlemen. For those of you who don’t already know me, I’m Professor Miri Reynolds,” she said as she looked out over the small lecture hall. “I’ll be presenting this lecture on Physics and Metaphysics – two topics generally considered to be polar opposites to and from each other. But not by me. To answer the obvious questions first, though… Yes, I’m young to be a full professor…”

In fact, she was very young for it. She’d graduated high school at fifteen by taking advanced placement courses, received her bachelor’s degree at seventeen, her Masters at eighteen and her doctorate at nineteen. Seventeen had been a remarkable year in many ways. To her astonishment, she’d also turned from ugly duckling with untamable hair to graceful swan.

“And no, you can’t have a date.”

She’d been asked often enough during the question and answer period for it to have become embarrassing.

There were disappointed groans from some and chuckles from others.

On cue music, uplifting and inspiring, swelled softly in the background.

“Here is the heart of this lecture in a nutshell…and I’m paraphrasing Shakespeare for you Philistines who don’t know it…,” she said with a grin, “‘There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than exist in your philosophy’.”

“Two more quotes and then I’m done.”

“‘
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine’. And… ‘Once we used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding out we must learn a very great deal more about ‘and’.”