Sorcerer: A Loveswept Contemporary Classic Romance by Ruth Owen Read Free Book Online Page B

far door at a fast clip, wanting to put as much distance as she could between herself, the infernal machine, and the equally infernal man who’d created it. She pulled off her stiff DataGloves with a vicious tug, and wiped a lone tear from her cheek.
Tears of anger
, she assured herself.
I’ll be damned if I’m going to cry over losing a knight in shining armor who wasn’t even real to begin with.
    “Ms. Polanski!” called an all-too-familiar voice behind her.
    Sinclair.
He must have gotten himself out of his harness without waiting for Sadie’s help. Jill hunched her shoulders and kept on walking, pretending she didn’t hear him. With any luck, she’d make the door before he caught up with her.
    But luck, as usual, wasn’t with her. Before she’dtaken ten steps, Dr. Sinclair was beside her, his long legs making short work of the distance between them. “Ms. Polanski, just where do you think you’re going?”
    Somewhere you’re not
, she thought, purposely continuing to look straight ahead. Not that it did much good. She could feel him beside her, the lengthy, lean form of the man who had—and hadn’t—saved her life. Angry anew, she shoved her hands into her pockets, her ire increasing tenfold as she realized her bodysuit didn’t have any pockets. “What’s it to you?” she bit out. “Our search for Einstein is over until tomorrow. I’m leaving.”
    “I can’t allow that. We need to discuss the events that transpired during our time in the simulator, to log them in with the rest of my research and test results.”
    In your dreams, Doctor.
She wasn’t about to discuss what had
transpired
, with him or anyone else on God’s green earth. Hell, she intended to do her best to forget it! She glanced up ahead of her, noting that the laboratory’s door—and freedom—were less than ten yards away. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
    “We’ll talk about it
now
, Ms. Polanski.”
    He stepped directly in front of her, effectively cutting off her escape route. Firm hands grasped her shoulders, barely preventing her from running into him for the second time that day. Only this time there were two distinct differences.
    The first was that he wasn’t wearing his lab coat. Like her, he was still dressed in the simulator’s “immersion”suit, and the dark, form-fitting material carved the planes and angles of his body with the precision of a sculpture’s chisel. She saw the ridged muscles of his chest, the understated strength of his lean hips and powerful legs. With a shock, she realized that his voluminous lab coat had concealed the classic lines of a body so perfect, it would have put Michelangelo’s
David
to shame. The man was muscle and sinew from head to toe. No wonder he’d beaten the orc.
    The second difference was her point of view. The downward direction of her gaze afforded her a first-class look at a part of his anatomy that gave a whole new meaning to the word
perfection.
The black bodysuit left little of his form to her imagination, and at the moment her imagination was working overtime.
Strong fingers capturing her waist, holding her against him as they moved in unison to the rhythm of their beating hearts.
…
    Her head shot up. Her gaze collided with his, and registered the presence of something undefinable moving in the depths of his silver eyes. But the look was gone before she could identify it, his glittering metallic sharpness back in place. She swallowed, suddenly feeling as if she were the orc, facing down the tempered steel of his blade. “Please,” she said weakly. “I’m tired. Can’t we do this tomorrow?”
    Her voice pleaded for mercy. His eyes gave her none. He studied her with the same fascination she’d seen him use to examine logarithmic equations, absorbing the difficult problems into himself until theyhad no choice but to yield up their secrets. Unfortunately, she wasn’t an equation, and the bold intensity of his gaze robbed the air from her lungs and made her