~*~
Miranda considered her options. A large and virile man had trapped her in a soundproof room, and he wanted her to sign a nondisclosure agreement about keeping her own technology a secret. He also wanted to screw her brains out, if she was any judge of male behavior.
What was wrong with this picture?
She accepted the packet of documents with a frown and leaned on the television counter. After attempting to decipher the legalese—words were not her forte—she glanced up from the documents and, unfortunately, into a mirror.
“Holy hell!” Her hair had frizzed out as big as a lampshade, and her gnarly robe exposed her personal assets to anyone who cared to look, namely Lupin. And he’d looked, all right. She’d been so deep in salvaging the atrocities he’d committed on her precious scanner she hadn’t spared a thought for her state of undress.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “I read over the documents. They’re pretty standard aside from the technology stuff. We all sign them at some point.”
She wondered who “we” was—the amateur inventors Mr. Fritz ripped off or the imaginary “we” in Lupin’s brain? Though what her gamma scanner was worth to anyone besides an alien hunter, she had no idea.
“It’s not the documents.” She clutched her robe at her neck. “I need to get dressed.”
“If you insist.” He shot her a wolfish leer. “I like the robe. Easy on, easy off.”
His words were smutty, but he made no move to follow up. All talk.
“Pervert.” She dragged some clothing out of a satchel.
“Beg to differ. Technically a pervert is somebody who gets off on unnatural things, and there’s nothing unnatural about admiring a beautiful female form.”
Her, beautiful? She rolled her eyes. He must still be hoping to get laid. “Uh-huh. I’m going to the bathroom.”
He followed and leaned against the jamb, blocking her from shutting him out. “Don’t lock the door, or I’ll break the doorknob off. And I need to warn you. If you don’t cooperate with me, Mr. Fritz wants to convince you himself, and he’s nowhere near as nice as I am.”
“You’re not nice,” she said, and slammed the door on his foot.
He gave an almost canine yelp, and she locked the door with great satisfaction.
“Two minutes,” he said. She yanked on a pair of shorts, khaki of course, and wriggled into a bra. Her nipples, she noticed, felt unusually sensitive. No surprise—she’d gotten very aroused when he’d had her pinned to the bed.
Shit, she’d forgotten about that when she’d been repairing her scanner. How humiliating! She’d kissed a near-perfect stranger while tied up in a bed—and she’d loved it. It gave her a zing to know he’d been highly aroused, too, so at least she wasn’t alone in her weird horniness. Miranda was no stranger to sex, but this was neither the time nor the place.
She had a job to do, dammit. Lupin, his hotness, and his insistence she explain her scanner were interfering. She needed to find out why her tech had gone haywire so she could locate the ET before the other Dreamers broadened their search to Vegas. Nobody had contacted her cell phone yet, but it wouldn’t be long. They’d need her to fetch coffee for the team or something stupid like that.
“You have ten more seconds,” he called, “before I open the door.”
Whatever. Hotel doors were strong. Regardless, she pulled her green T-shirt over her head and reached for the knob.
And froze because, though she’d locked it, it was turning anyway. It gave a metallic pop before falling to the floor. Lupin jerked the door open, the other half of the knob in his hand.
He smirked. “Warned you.”
“You destroyed hotel property.” Good Lord, the man was strong. Or the hotel was cheap. She grabbed a brush, struggling with the madness that was her hair. “You’d better tell Mr. Fritz I don’t have to pay for that.”
“You’re the one with fifty grand, not me.” He put the half knob on the counter and watched her detangle her hair and braid it. Did the man ever blink?
He’d confirmed that they planned to steal her machine, but he’d said it so casually, she hadn’t believed it. Plus, that line about hoping to get her along with the scanner...how could she take that seriously? “What are you getting paid to harass me about my technology?”
“Not that much.” He gestured toward the main part of the hotel room. “Shall we?” Only he didn’t step out of the way and she had to brush against him to get past.
Unless she was mistaken, the man still had an erection. Christ! Knowing he was thinking about sex made her think about sex. How was she supposed to concentrate?
He didn’t make it easy. He stood way too close when she showed him how to calibrate the unit, and his questions, his hot breath on her neck, sent shivers down her spine. When she tested his science with geek speak, he confirmed he knew his tech and even knew something about gamma, theta, mu and other brain waves.
God, techie men were hot. Especially ones who kissed like Lupin.
She finished calibrating the scanner and re-tuned it to a two-mile radius. Again, the scanner indicated high and low gamma waves were present, concentrated in the area that would be the Dunvegas hotel and casino. “So you see,” she finished, “either you broke my machine or everyone in Dunvegas is asleep. But I don’t think this is Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”
“It’s not broken.” He, blessedly, moved out of her space. “Where’d you put the handheld?”
She gave it to him and he clicked it on. “We’ve examined these before, but they didn’t work like yours,” he observed. “You rebuilt these yourself?”
“I did indeed,” she said with pride. “Nobody knows yet. My organization is a little...competitive. It’s my discovery, and this was the field test.” She didn’t tell Lupin she hoped her test was going to result in first contact between an ET and the civilian population of the Earth. He didn’t believe, and she wasn’t about to explain about her dad and his teachings and the Dream Team and twenty-nine years of obsession, all leading up to the radio signals she’d picked up thirty-six hours ago from Area 51.
“Impressive.” He flipped open the battery pack of the handheld. “How much range?”
“The big one, several miles. Little one, a couple feet. But the damned thing has got to be broken.” She thumped the top of the main unit, fiddled with some dials. How could she have been so wrong about the settings and filters? Years of investment and study, down the stupid, expensive vacuum tubes. The whole chart should be blank except for sleepers and the blip of the ET, if it was in range. “Gimme that handheld.”
She pointed it at herself. Sure enough, it registered blank. Baseline. Human. Gamma normal.
Slowly, she turned it on Lupin, who grinned.
It registered full gamma. The tomato red alert glimmered on his very white teeth.
“I won’t be phoning home, sweetheart.” He took the scanner out of her suddenly nerveless hands. “Like I said, I was born here. As were all the other people on your screen.”
“You’re all...” She gulped. “Extraterrestrials? Among us?”
“We’re as Earthly as you, and we call ourselves paranormals. But you can call me a werewolf.” He leaned a little closer. “Just as long as you call me.”