Lethal Reaction Read online

  Lethal Reaction

  Dr. Calista St. James—Book Three

  S. A. Gardner

  LETHAL REACTION (A Dr. Calista St. James Medical Action Thriller—Book Three)

  Copyright © 2020 by S. A. Gardner

  Publisher: Seshat Press

  ISBN: 978-1-949920-04-8

  All rights reserved.

  Sign up to my VIP mailing list at [email protected]

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, stored in, or introduced into a database or retrieval system, in any form, or by any means, without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Disclaimer

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Contents

  Three Months Ago…

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  From the Author

  About the Author

  Also By S.A. Gardner

  Three Months Ago…

  I never thought it would end in a graveyard.

  OK. So I always knew “it” would end in one, if nothing so manicured. But I wasn’t talking about life right now.

  I was talking about me and Damian.

  According to him, this was our end.

  I leaned back against the oak where he’d told me to go no further. A rising gibbous moon booed through stratus clouds, bathing him in the erratic phosphorescence of a celestial Morse code.

  My reason receded as he did in the distance. He’d told me to keep mine. First time he’d ever done that. He’d never turned his back on me, either. No matter what I’d done to push him to it.

  He was doing it now. He’d had enough.

  He was walking away.

  He walked away before, a jet of desperation babbled its way from my gut, its force a momentary prop. He always came back.

  He said he wouldn’t this time. I believed him.

  You believed him before. He never meant it.

  But I’d heard, felt the unmeant times enough times to know the difference.

  This was for real.

  Then run after him. Tackle him to the ground, drown him in your bond that transcends will and willfulness. Show him just why he can’t walk away, won’t be able to stay away. You, a far more brainless and stubborn woman, have tried the walk-away-and-stay-away routine before him, and failed. Time after time.

  I didn’t run after him. I stood nerveless, mesmerized by the majesty of his form as he flowed away from me.

  Then he stopped. My heart followed.

  How stupid was that? I’d known he’d stop. Once he’d reached his destination. And he’d reached it.

  Mel’s grave.

  I’d thought I could handle it. If there were echelons of self-deception, I must have attained their nirvana by now.

  Sick electricity jolted from my teeth to my armpits, to where my feet felt they’d grown decaying roots into the death-infested earth. I squeezed my eyes on what felt like acid. It overflowed, corroded its way down my cheeks, my throat.

  To think of the collective sigh of our neighborhood’s females when they’d seen him handing me into the Mercedes he’d just laden with suitcases. They must have thought I’d-Kill-For-A-Look-From-Him Man was taking How-Come-She’s-with-Him Whatsherface to some paradise that would be one once he treaded it.

  Wonder if it would cool their envy if they knew our only “dates” involved life-and-death crises and scenes of devastation. And that this time he’d taken me to a graveyard.

  He hadn’t even taken me. I‘d almost grown tentacles so I’d tag along. He didn’t want me here.

  I’d never known where Mel had been buried. I’d never paid my respects. God, I almost never even thought about her. Apart from the sledgehammers that struck me at the weirdest of times. Almost always my happiest. In Damian’s arms, quivering with satisfaction, smug and secure.

  It was then I remembered her. The woman I’d overshadowed to the man she’d loved, the man I’d unwittingly taken from her, even while she’d still lived. The woman who was now dead, forgotten, or at best an avoided memory.

  I stood there, against a tree a hundred paces from her grave. From him. He’d made it clear. I came, I stayed the hell out of his way.

  I did. I was nowhere near sturdy enough to weather a close-up of my lover pouring obsidian grief and guilt over his dead lover’s grave. The lover I’d killed.

  OK again. So I hadn’t killed her. I’d only gotten her killed.

  Though, according to Damian, he had. He insisted he’d bought my life with hers, led her, and two of his men, in a suicide attack to save me from my own suicidal actions while attempting to save my patients in Darfur. He’d almost died, too. He’d wanted to die rather than live with the self-loathing, had swatted away my attempts to save him when I’d been the reason he’d doomed the woman who loved him. I’d just disobeyed another order, saved him. He’d hated me more for it, and himself, until all our barriers had come crashing down in Russia. We’d become lovers then.

  No. We’d become intimate then, admitted to our lust and obsession. The lovers part had come after Colombia, when I’d admitted that this man who’d manipulated me and lied to me to protect me, who’d honed me into the weapon I was today, who’d whetted my cravings and cleaved into my heart, had endless layers to him. And I loved each one. Even the ones I hated. And the ones I’d never peel back.

  Now seeing him, frozen in the private penance he hated me for insisting on witnessing, was unbearable. I took refuge in reliving the oblivious interlude that had come before this—ending.

  I sank into the replay, saw our septuagenarian neighbor following me into our kitchen with yet another of the incredible recipes she’d been gifting us with since we’d moved in two months ago.

  I was expressing my gratitude to her, thankful that people like her still existed, when Damian appeared, disrupting my synapses.

  Fresh from our gym/rehabilitation center, the limp of a pulverized femur disappearing by the hour, he was steaming from another rebuilding/retraining session, radiating virility and welcome. I whimpered as I got sandwiched between the fragrances of home-cooking and maleness, felt the day’s depletion settling in my gut like a hollowing punch.

  Damian gathered me into his arms and Lizzie, as she insisted we called her, sighed. “Such a stunning couple.”

  I nestled into Damian’s enveloping warmth and vitality, smiled. So nice of her to include me in the description.

  But what made us stand out, in her opinion, wasn’t the picture we made together, a Hercules-of-a-man and his angel-of-a-woman—her flowery description, not mine—but how we were there for each other while we overcame the injuries we’d sustained in our car crash. The detailed story of which had been another of Damian’s instant-o-fabrications.
>
  A justifiable one this time. Telling the truth wasn’t an option here.

  Not that anyone would believe how we’d sustained our assorted injuries. When I crash-landed a cargo plane on Russian soil, on its back, to avoid rupturing its lethal agent-laden dispensing tanks. Right after I’d killed the would-be catastrophe’s mastermind, my ex-lover, Jake. For the second time.

  Then both Damian and I had died in the crash.

  Damian had us reborn as Jordan and Laura.

  He let go of me with a last nuzzle to take the pie from Lizzie, to seat us both at the kitchen table before busying himself with preparing Earl Grey, Lizzie’s and my favorite tea.

  She gave me a volumes-speaking woman-to-woman glance. “You got yourself one fine, upstanding young man here, Laura dear.”

  I blinked at the fake name. I’d had so many in the last five years I could have my own yellow pages.

  Bet she’d never believe my “fine, upstanding young man” was a black ops assassin so lethal, so convoluted, he’d single-handedly toppled dictatorships, picked his teeth with the world’s most deranged and dangerous terrorists.

  I slumped down in my chair as Damian brought us steaming mugs then leaned me back into him, his hands that had crushed life out of brutes twice his size accessing agony points in my neck and shoulders, melting them away.

  Lizzie sighed again. “It’s so lovely seeing you taking care of your delicate flower, Jordan.”

  I sensed Damian’s smile. Delicate flower, indeed.

  The prototype for Global Crisis Alliance’s Combat Doctors Project, a Damian-molded commando and a genetic vigilante. Bet Lizzie would go catatonic if she knew just one of the things I’d done, the ways I’d used my medical expertise to inflict pain and end lives.

  We chatted in our usual ease, her kindness a balm to my rawness. That was, until she told us her grandchildren talked about nothing but us since they’d been here two weeks ago, and Damian extended an eager invitation for their return. The emptiness inside me tightened into a black hole. It wasn’t good seeing Damian around children. I didn’t second the invitation.

  At last she drained the last of her tea and started getting up. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds to enjoy your meal.”

  Damian’s hand transferred from my shoulder to hers, nonnegotiable gentleness keeping her in place. “Stay with us, Lizzie. We love having you.”

  It was still so weird hearing Damian referring to us as “we.” As if we were a couple long secure in our unity.

  We weren’t. I didn’t know what we were. A couple in any accepted sense, indicating stability and continuity, was something we, being what we were, couldn’t be. And then I didn’t even know what he was for real. I might never know for sure. I probably wouldn’t.

  I supposedly knew a lot. What mattered. But everything I knew, he’d told me. And he’d told me too many lies I no longer knew what was true and what wasn’t in what I thought I knew. He’d said he’d never lie to me again. Too many times. What made it tear-out-my-hair worthy was the way his lies were undetectable to me, whether they were straight-out lies or multiple-choice evasions. What took the cake was the way he omitted the truth.

  We were still mired in the fallout of his last omission.

  He’d omitted to tell me that instead of destroying my mad-scientist ex’s research, he’d done the bidding of his Preemptive Action Counterterrorism Team’s bosses and saved it.

  He’d later decided it should be destroyed, but it had been too late. The world’s first hybrid biological/chemical warfare agent had already been in production. And my own team had been its first target practice. The road back from the insult it had dealt their minds and bodies before we’d pulled them back from death’s clutches was dark and winding and seemed at times dead-end.

  But I’d taken his offer to start from scratch. On every level. The past had accumulated too much damage, too many dangers that no future could stem from it. Everything had to be wiped clean. Everything had been.

  We’d taken radical undercover measures. Now it was as if each member of my team had ceased existing since Colombia. There’d been no word from Damian’s team. I was sure worry for them was all that filled his mind. That, and me.

  And here we were, with more manufactured identities, living in this tranquil neighborhood as we regrouped and recuperated.

  I was finding it hard to exist in the daytime soap opera surroundings after years in L.A.’s most chaotic “disinvested neighborhoods.” Damian didn’t seem to have any difficulty.

  It amazed me how he fitted in anywhere. In the most brutal conditions of his field work as a PACT operative, in their ultra-modern privilege, in his mother’s fit-for-kings milieu. Now he seemed to have been born to this upper middle-class ease and predictability.

  God, which man was he?

  I only knew he was the man I loved. It could be argued he was the man I was born to love. There’d certainly never been or would ever be someone else who fitted me, kept up, put up with me like he did. No one who’d ever made me feel, or fear, this way.

  I sat there watching him as he charmed us, and wondered again. That his duplicitous, lethal self could house such sincerity and tenderness, which he poured over me, over the woman he said felt like the grandmother who’d been murdered by his father when he was two-years-old.

  Confusion didn’t seem to touch my emotions though. I couldn’t imagine not loving him anyway.

  Telling myself the knot in my stomach was hunger I forked pie into my mouth. My salivary glands almost burst.

  I whimpered with enjoyment. “Oh, Lizzie—keep feeding me such treats and I’ll join weight watchers soon.”

  She chuckled. “Nonsense. Jordan said you lost too much weight and you’re not putting on any back with the hours you keep at work. All the more reason to leave you now to relax.”

  This time no coaxing convinced her to stay. Damian hurried to fetch the crate of malfunctioning appliances that she’d kept over the years in hope of fixing, and which he now had working better than ever, and walked her back to her house.

  The moment they were out the door, exhaustion flattened me.

  I didn’t know how I made it to our bedroom, or how long it was before he’d come back. All I knew was that I was face down on the bed, and he was straddling my thighs, working what had to be forbidden magic all over my back and buttocks.

  He cascaded over me, essence and love, drenching my senses in cosseting and containment. God. I needed this. Him. Always. But now, coming back from my waking nightmare, desperation jutted through the need, lacerating my restraint.

  He knew, was the only one who ever did, everything I had brewing inside me. Even when I didn’t know it myself.

  His hands glided over me, possessing me, possessing the ability to dissolve my shackles, release my potential, exposing me to his transfiguring appreciation.

  And he had me. Exposed, vulnerable, all-powerful. Savored and worshipped and devoured. He had me writhing, pleading. Then he rose, turned and cradled me. My eyes clung to the twin infernos of his, burned with his greed for my surrender, my pleasure. And he made me watch. His hand delving between my thighs, his fingers knowing just where and how, plunging and withdrawing, stroking, stoking. And he gave it to me, without any hint of a build-up. A sucker-punch of an orgasm.

  His mouth milked mine for each last screech as his fingers changed rhythm, defusing sensitized receptors, infusing them with renewed desperation.

  He growled satisfaction at my resurrected hunger, tormented his way down my heaving body, came to lie where it all converged. “Open for me, mi vida. I’m hungry.”

  His purr would have been enough to make me do a split. But his hunger… Overkill, as usual.

  Incoherent under the pressure mushrooming in my loins, I opened wide for him. Legs and heart and abandon.

  He bent to my quivering flesh, swept me in a long lick that knocked my internal lights out, looked me in my defocusing eyes—and smiled.

  I could now say he could ma
ke me come with a smile.

  My body gushed molten agony, heaved in detonation after detonation of satisfaction. He sucked every spasm out of me, until he again had me climbing, clawing, crazed. Ready for him.

  And man, was he ready for me. Jutting against his trainers, the head of his shaft straining beyond the waist, wide and thick and daunting, glistening with craving, throbbing with control.

  I loved his control. I hated it. That he reduced me to pleading with him to have mercy, to have no mercy, while he surveyed my frenzy, not even breathing hard, and just radiated lust and a promise bordering on threat, to fulfill my pleas a hundred fold.

  I charged him, pushed him on his back, yanked down his trainers, sought him, that potency that meshed us together, rode me to incoherence on a steadily escalating basis. He was resting hard and engorged against muscles chiseled from living granite by virility gods and endless stamina and discipline. That usual thrill of intimidation rattled through me, the awe that my hunger was so huge it engulfed that much demand.

  He rumbled his appreciation of my fervor as I rubbed fever all over him all the way down to his erection. Then I devoured him. Burning silk and steel.

  He let me. He’d learned his lesson, knew never to deprive me of taking him over the brink in every way. He spread himself for me to dominate, to pleasure. Gave me what I craved as much as our union and the mindlessness of his invasion, the generosity of his hide-nothing, tell-all surrender.

  His fingers shook in my hair, his formidable body in my power. My heart expanded. Loss of control wouldn’t mean a thing from anyone else, but from Damian, the very embodiment of sufficiency and restraint, such a demonstration of dependence, such a confession of need was invaluable. Unique.