Seduced by the Storm Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SEDUCED BY THE STORM…

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PREVIEW OF TAMING THE FIRE

  EXCERPT FROM TAKEN BY FIRE

  NOVELS BY SYDNEY CROFT

  COPYRIGHT

  acknowledgments

  As always, there are so many people to thank for helping us take this book from idea to finished product.

  To our agent, Roberta Brown, for all her support in ways too numerous to count.

  Thanks to everyone at Bantam who has helped make this book the best it can be, from cover to cover, especially our editor, Shauna Summers, for her continued guidance and belief, and Jessica Sebor, who goes above and beyond on a daily basis.

  Special thanks to Saskia Walker for being available to help out with some of the special British details, and to Michelle Willingham, for sharing her knowledge of the beautiful Irish coast.

  And we certainly can’t forget our families, who have supported us through deadlines and marathon writing spells. To Zoo, Lily, Bryan and Brennan, we love you.

  SEDUCED by the STORM…

  “I can always make room in my schedule for a beautiful woman,” he said in a rich, whiskey-smooth southern drawl that made her want to drink him in. And those eyes…even in the hazy, dim light from the beer signs, they glowed clear green. She’d never seen anything like it.

  And as a telekinetic who had grown up alongside people with gifts even more incredible than hers, she’d seen a lot.

  “I’m not usually so forward,” she said, tearing her gaze away from his when the pub door opened. “But see that man walking in?”

  The stranger inclined his head almost imperceptibly, as though he hadn’t looked, and she gave him points for his astute assessment of the situation.

  “He’s my ex-lover,” she lied. “He’s a loon. Completely mad, and he’s stalking me. I told him I have a new lover—”

  “And I was the first guy you saw?”

  “Yes.” No, but when she’d detected a tail as she strolled along the moonlit boardwalk, she’d slipped into the nearest public place that would be full of men, and as luck would have it, these weren’t just men. They were bikers, oil drillers and roughnecks, and the man who now held her had stood out as the toughest of the tough.

  Marco watched from near the entrance, not bothering to hide his annoyance.

  “Well,” the stranger said, threading one hand through her hair to pull her face close to his, “I can either take care of you, or I can take care of him.”

  CHAPTER

  One

  Faith Black had been beaten, drugged and imprisoned, but none of that scared her. No, what frightened her to the core was the man confined with her. Chained to an improvised medieval rack and bare from the waist up, he lay on his back, arms over his head, his incredible chest marred by bruises and a deep laceration that extended from his left pec to his right hip.

  He might have been rendered immobile, but he was in no way helpless.

  His weapon, far more dangerous than the telekinesis—to her, at least—was his overpowering sexuality, a force that tugged her toward him, made her burn with need despite their grave situation.

  Head pounding from a brutal blow to her cheek, she pushed to her feet and padded close, her nudity barely registering. She’d been stripped naked while unconscious, her clothes tossed into one corner of the windowless, steel-walled room. The weak yellow light from the single bulb emphasized the deep amber of Wyatt’s eyes, no longer green, as he settled into the transitional period many telekinetics experienced when their powers flared up. The air in the room stilled, and the chain around his right ankle began to rattle.

  “Don’t,” she said quietly.

  He shifted his head to look at her as though he hadn’t realized she’d regained consciousness. “Faith.” His voice was rough, as haunted as his gaze. “I didn’t tell him. I swear.”

  “Tell who what?”

  “Your boyfriend. I didn’t tell him about us. He knew.”

  “Sean’s not my boyfriend,” she said, and Wyatt cocked a dark eyebrow like he didn’t believe her. “And I know you didn’t say anything.”

  She knew, because she’d been the one to spill the beans that she and Wyatt had been sleeping together.

  Wyatt’s head lolled back so he was staring up at the steel beams crisscrossing the ceiling. The corded tendons in his neck strained and tightened as he swallowed. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”

  “You didn’t.”

  A growl rumbled in his throat. “I seduced you. I shouldn’t have. Not here. Not on the platform, where he could find out.”

  She inhaled him into her, the masculine scent that threw her off balance whenever he came near. No, she couldn’t blame him for anything, least of all her out-of-control desire for him. He was here to do a job, just like she was, which meant getting the assignment done by any means necessary.

  “I’m not here because Sean is jealous.” Though Sean was, furiously so, but Wyatt didn’t need to know that.

  “Then why?”

  Dragging her gaze from the strong, ruggedly handsome features of his face, she let her mind focus on a realm of existence most people never saw. Instantly, Wyatt’s aura became visible, a shifting, undulating layer of light around his body. And God, something was wrong, so wrong she nearly gasped.

  Wyatt radiated power, so his aura should reflect the same. Instead, it stretched thin around his body like an ill-fitting, secondhand coat, ridden with weak spots and holes, as though he’d suffered repeated supernatural attacks. She could repair the damage, but her efforts would amount to little more than a patch job on his psychic garment. Replenishing his aura, renewing it…that only he could do, subconsciously, through healthy living and mental wholeness.

  For now, she concentrated on the cut on his chest, worked her power into a psi needle and thread that knit the wound together. The muscles in his abs rippled, carved so deeply that they cast shadows on one another. She knew how they felt beneath her touch, how they flexed when they rubbed against her belly, and she had to clench her hands to keep from reaching for him.

  The wound closed in a whisper of sound, and Wyatt sucked in a harsh breath. “Jesus. You’re a fucking agent.”

  His eyes glowed amber again, and the chains binding him rattled.

  “Please don’t,” she said, letting her psychic fingers slide south on his body. “Let me. Follow my lead.”

  He moaned and then grit his teeth against the sensations she sent streaming into his groin.

  “I’m going to need you to scream, Wyatt. Scream like I’m killing you.”

  His shaft began to swell with each of her virtual caresses deep inside his body, and his eyes flashed green fire. “You are, Faith.” His voice rumbled, dark, dangerous. “I’ve been through the gates of hell and survived, but somehow I think you’re going to be
the devil who takes me down.”

  CHAPTER

  Two

  Two Days Earlier

  Wyatt Kennedy was a dead man, and other than a few problems, like being unable to use his credit cards, it hadn’t been so bad.

  Of course, he’d already been declared dead once before, a long time ago, so he knew the drill. Lay low, use cash, watch your back.

  When he’d dropped off the face of the earth years earlier, he’d had ACRO—the Agency for Covert Rare Operatives, of which he was one—on his side. ACRO had recruited him, changed his name and killed him off so he wouldn’t face a murder rap for the death of his half brother.

  Which, for the record, he still wasn’t sure he was responsible for, thanks to a memory lapse that had lasted for the past five years, despite ACRO’s best efforts.

  This time he got to keep the same first name, at least. The most important part of being dead this go-around was letting everyone at ACRO think he’d been killed—for reasons he didn’t quite understand but when orders were given, orders were followed. The rest of the world, and Itor Corp—ACRO’s major nemesis, had never known Wyatt existed anyway, and he knew the mission he was dealing with—finding the weather machine that Itor Corp had built and hidden on an offshore oil platform—was some serious we-plan-on-destroying-the-world shit.

  He’d handle it easily enough. It’s not like he looked as if he had special powers. But he was tall enough that most men gave him a wide berth, which was cool with him. He tended to live mostly inside his own head anyway and preferred his own space, big-time. Even when he was in a room full of people, like now.

  The bar crowd tonight was rough, made up mostly of roustabouts who wanted to be roughnecks and roughnecks who wanted to be drillers, all either preparing to rejoin their offshore crew or just coming off their fourteen-day workweek. Wyatt was just coming off his own two-week break, prepared to go back in and finish up the job he’d started for ACRO. He’d been on the rig, doing recon on the weather machine—ACRO wanted to make sure there weren’t any more out there like it. So he’d spent the first days getting the code and transmitting it back to Haley at ACRO. Now he’d been ordered by Oz to actually destroy the machine.

  Wyatt had grown up in this life, under the name of James Jasper. His father owned his own drilling company by the time Wyatt had been born, and he’d already had two sons from his first wife.

  Wyatt had been thirteen at the time all the other crazy shit had started happening around him.

  For as long as he could remember, he’d always had what he’d thought of as secret powers. He remembered moving an object with his mind when he was just two years old, and it had gotten worse when he hit puberty. Out of control, until every time he lost his temper even slightly, shit would fly.

  At first, the doctors at the mental facility he’d been forced into were concerned, and then they became downright fed up with him. Especially because he became really good at ripping up their offices, all while sitting in a chair, looking innocent.

  One minute, he’d been drilling, the next, learning how to avoid medication he didn’t want to take by hiding it in his mouth. He never did tell anyone at that mental institution about the sex thing, a power that ACRO scientists now believed had roots in his telekinesis—it hadn’t begun full force until he was fifteen. Even then, everyone just assumed he was getting laid on a regular basis because he was good-looking.

  Yeah, totally One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, only not as fun, and he’d escaped before the electroshock therapy, by seducing all the female nurses and pretending to be normal.

  Pretending. Wyatt did that a lot. Pretending to not be telekinetic. Pretending to be dead…

  So far, pretending to be dead this time around was pretty cool. He’d always wanted to come back as a ghost, thought that would be the coolest part of actually being dead. Creed, another operative at ACRO—a ghost hunter—had assured him that most ghosts were on the up-and-up, but Oz, a medium who spoke to ghosts who were the worst of the worst, disagreed.

  Oz had temporarily taken over for Devlin O’Malley, the head of ACRO. Oz was the one responsible for Wyatt’s death and his current assignment, which placed him back on the job as a roughneck.

  Like fucking being reincarnated.

  Just concentrate on getting your shit together, man.

  When his concentration went elsewhere, his gift began to scatter like loose marbles on a slick, hardwood floor. But then, he always felt scattered, not fully whole, not integrated. Motherfucking crazy. Like maybe he really did belong in a padded room somewhere. He’d tried to explain it to the psychics at ACRO, told them it felt as if his powers were Legos missing the connecting pieces.

  When he’d been released from the mental ward at sixteen, he’d worked on the oil rig with his father and brothers until he was nineteen and then he went the military route. Learning to drill had been cool, and in his blood—learning to destroy had been equally so. Fuck the middle-of-the-road bullshit. As bent on extremes as he was, he went straight for the roughest route possible.

  Special Forces—SEALs, specifically. The drill sergeant at boot camp had taken one look at Wyatt’s lanky six-foot, three-inch frame and laughed. Wyatt had knocked him out cold with one punch, spent the night in the brig and found himself in BUD/s two days later. As punishment.

  He loved it—every single brutal minute.

  He’d passed his psych evals for the Navy with no problem. He’d faked it, the way he’d faked a lot of things, and the Special Forces community wanted its men to be a little bit on the crazy side anyway, even if they didn’t outright admit it.

  Fuckin’ A right.

  But the sex thing, oh, yeah, he’d let his handle on that slip, especially this past week. Mainly because it was fun as hell letting it go out of control and he’d known he wasn’t going to get laid at all during the next phase of his mission.

  He’d been tamping it down hard when he’d been rigging for two weeks straight—so hard that it made his head hurt.

  When you could have any woman—or man, if he’d swung that way—sex got old fast. If his libido wasn’t in constant overdrive, he’d have given up sex altogether long ago, shaved his head and become a monk.

  He’d tried the monk thing once, when he was seventeen. His apprenticeship lasted exactly three weeks, until he couldn’t stand the other men trying to break into his room to have him. The head of the abbey agreed with Wyatt’s decision. Didn’t stop him from trying to screw Wyatt, though.

  Wyatt was still learning to control his pheromones—most of the time they only worked on people he wanted them to work on, unless he let himself go too long without, or if he and the object of his desire were around other people when he got turned on. In that case, everyone and their mothers—literally—needed to watch out.

  And there was an even bigger price to pay for the sex mojo—the women he’d been with never remembered the sex once he left the room. So yeah, that would be great when trying to have any kind of long-term relationship—waking up in the morning with a woman who would soon forget sleeping with him in the first place.

  He’d put the mojo to rest completely yesterday after a round with two women in a ménage à trois that lasted all night and into the afternoon. Sex wasn’t a severe drain on his powers, but it did mess with his head.

  When a man’s fucking, his walls crumble, Dev always said. And yeah, that was the truth in plain English.

  English. Like the accent purring against his ear: “Got any plans for tonight, love?”

  FAITH BLACK’S PLANS for the night hadn’t included a tall, dark and handsome man, but with someone trying to kill her, she’d had to make some adjustments.

  The stranger she’d propositioned wrapped his arm around her waist. Before she could so much as blink, he tucked her between his long legs. The bar stool bit into the front of her thighs and his fingers bit into her hip, and for some reason, all she could think about was biting into him.

  “I can always make room in my schedule f
or a beautiful woman,” he said, in a rich, whiskey-smooth southern drawl that made her want to drink him in. And those eyes…even in the hazy, dim light from the beer signs, they glowed clear green. She’d never seen anything like it.

  And as a biokinetic—a specialized telekinetic with the ability to manipulate living tissue—who had grown up alongside people with gifts even more incredible than hers, she’d seen a lot. She’d seen even more since the day she and her partner, with funding from the British government, had started up The Aquarius Group, a small, secret agency employing people with special abilities, like herself.

  “I’m not usually so forward,” she said, tearing her gaze away from his when the pub door opened. “But see that man walking in?”

  The stranger inclined his head almost imperceptibly, as though he hadn’t looked, and she gave him points for his astute assessment of the situation. She gave him extra points for having the most gorgeous, stout-colored hair, which just brushed the collar of his tee.

  “He’s my ex-lover,” she lied. “He’s a loon. Completely mad, and he’s stalking me. I told him I have a new lover—”

  “And I was the first guy you saw?”

  “Yes.” No, but when she’d detected a tail as she strolled along the moonlit boardwalk, she’d slipped into the nearest public place that would be full of men, and as luck would have it, these weren’t just men. They were bikers, oil drillers and roughnecks, and the man who now held her had stood out as the toughest of the tough.

  Not to mention the best-looking.

  Marco watched from near the entrance, not bothering to hide his annoyance.

  “Well,” the stranger said, threading one hand through her hair to pull her face close to his, “I can either take care of you, or I can take care of him.”

  A sweet offer, but no matter how capable this guy looked—and he did look capable, all steel-strapped muscle and broad shoulders beneath his black AC/DC T-shirt—Marco was a trained killer, an excedosapien with reflexes ten times faster than the average person’s. She knew because she’d gone head to head with him a year ago, and though her combat skills couldn’t be better, his speed and fondness of the wire garrote had nearly spelled her doom.