Free Way Out of Control by Tatiana Caldwell Page B

Victor to still him, her arms slightly outstretched as if to hold him back. “Relax doctor, just give him a moment,” she said. Then she turned her head to visually scold Jaxon. “Please, calm down. May I remind you that all of us are trying to help you? Try to use that knowledge to practice maintaining control.”
    Jaxon scowled and folded his arms across his chest, but he blinked long and slow and gave a single obliging nod of his head as he sat back down.
    Victor backed down, but he cut a last warning look over at Jaxon before turning his attention back to Celise. “You seem a bit unlike yourself today,” he whispered to her, palming her lower back. The tips of his long fingers splayed slightly over the top of her butt. “Did he frighten you at all last night? Are you really all right? Maybe you should let me be the one on Neanderthal watch today.”
    “Dr. Morhamer, please remember that because of your efforts, even when you’re whispering, he can still hear you.” Celise pinched her lips together as she glanced at Jaxon out of the corners of her eyes, who was again rising to his feet at that very moment.
    “Well, I think I better go and let you guys get to it.”
    “Didn’t mean to offend you,” Victor muttered with a smirk.
    “I couldn’t fucking care less about anything you say anymore. It’s what you do –” Jaxon snarled as he briefly eyed Victor’s hand, still touching Celise. “And what you don’t do that concerns me. Like fixing me.”
    “Much easier for us to do without you scowling in our faces. Shall I escort you back to your old cell?”
    “I’m not going back in there.”
    “You must. We’re busy here, we need all hands here. Celise can’t –”
    “I don’t need a chaperone.”
    “Like hell you don’t.”
    “Dr. Morhamer, please,” Celise sighed. “It’s not as if he can leave the building while we’re on lockdown.”
    “True, but he –”
    “Where will you go, Wentworth?”
    “The gym. Or the pool, perhaps. I could use some cooling off.” He glared coolly at Victor.
    Victor dragged his eyes from Jaxon, to the others in the room, then back to Jaxon again. The scientist attempted to meet the cop’s stare head on, but he removed his hand and backed away, trembling, when Jaxon’s upper lip curled upwards into a menacing growl. She watched as Jaxon marched out of the room, his fists clenched with the stress of keeping his temper within his grip.
    “I don’t like that man roaming the building.”
    Sri clacked his tongue against his lips. “Then let’s hurry and get to work, so we can quickly determine what went wrong when we gave him the formula.”
    “I’m still not so sure it was the formula,” Victor grumbled.
    Celise peeked into the microscope, examined the genetic material swirling underneath the lense there, and sighed. The original formula had worked successfully. The chimp they called Bebo was transformed a few weeks before they tried it on Jaxon. With her arms folded, she studied the chimp as he sat in the large cage he shared with two other chimps. The female chimp, Mimi, whom he’d mated with before, appeared to be in heat and was taunting Bebo with glimpses of her flushed sex organs, and enticing shimmies of her pheromone-laded butt and tail near his nose. But she was completely ignored. Bebo chowed through a bundle of apples, but barely paid attention to the lady chimp attempting to seduce him. Celise narrowed her eyes in thought as she watched Bebo yawn and stretch lethargically after finishing his snack, and curled up in a casual ball, covered his ears and went to sleep. He didn’t even seem to notice when the other male chimp in the cage began to pay a lot of special attention to the parts of Mimi that were exposed.
    “Dr. Ashni, does Bebo have the exact same strain of the formula as Mr. Wentworth?”
    “Well, of course not exactly the exact same. Human and chimpanzee DNA are very similar, but not identical. It’s been tweaked slightly to work