Free Play It Safe (The Safe House Series Book 2) by Leslie North

opened his mouth to speak. Words of acceptance stalled on his tongue.
    “You still have questions,” Julian said, more statement than anything.
    “Just one.” Samson turned to Julian. “How soon do we go wheels-up?”
     
    ***
     
    The laboratory had always been Angela’s safe zone: the second skin of a white coat, the residual heat of the burners, the ability to manufacture outcomes based on knowledge, nothing left to chance. Julian’s laboratory was no ordinary facility. His equipment and organization and materials were a chemist’s dream.
    Except when that dream turned out to be a nightmare.
    The only constant in the creation of her faux-formula was the frequency with which she sought out Samson in the windows above her. Every time she glanced up, without fail, he watched her. His words gyrated in her memory: my objective is you . She sank into the reassurance of those words. The lab may have been her element, but this world belonged to him.
    “Doctor McAllister?”
    Her skin rippled from the stark intrusion into her work-zone of humming machines and private calculations. Tension pooled in her gut. She turned.
    “Yes?”
    A ginger-haired man in a suit and tie stood beside the lab’s cornea-scan entrance. “Follow me, please.”
    Angela glanced up at the wall of windows.
    Samson was gone.
    Her belly ache sublimated to the outer reaches of her body like a vapored carcinogen in a corked flask. “Where are we going?”
    The red-haired man remained stone-faced.
    She laid the glass stirrer she held forgotten in her hand on the cobalt surface, rearranged her lab coat so it felt less like a straight-jacket at her shoulders and squeezed the moisture from her palms against the pocket fabric.
    He led her down a sterile hallway with no natural light source. They might have been underground for all she had seen after Samson bested half of their abductors. The remaining thugs had cinched blindfolds around his face first then hers. After a maze of three such corridors, the red-haired man paused at a door with a gallery of graphical warnings posted. He ushered her inside a storage room then retreated back the way they had come.
    The silence was absolute, but for her stressed heartbeat against her eardrums.
    A scuffle sounded in the corner.
    The whom-whom-whom in her ears grew louder until she saw Samson round the far-end stainless steel cabinets. He cleared the distance to her before her instincts could pull back her internal defenses at being ambushed. Once he had her in his arms, a full-bodied hug that lifted her feet from the ground, she melted into him.
    “I was so scared when I didn’t see you…” she said.
    He set her down and threaded his fingers through her hair to her scalp. Forehead to forehead, breaths tangled, his eyes closed as if he fought off some explanation, some demon warring inside him for control. His memorable, comforting scent assailed her. She didn’t know if he wanted to ring her neck or…
    His mouth parted to say something. Instead of releasing words, he captured her lips. The heat of his hands at her scalp was nothing compared to the fire he unleashed in his kiss.
    The kiss was not born of relief, for that would have manifested as a brief brush of lips. It was not a kiss born of charity, for Samson demanded as much as he gave—the hot sparring of tongues, stroke for stroke—nor was it a kiss born of the scattered synapses fired off in the brain under duress. His body was fully engaged—arms that released his hold only to draw her against the full, solid length of him, hands that splayed low against her back and slid south ever-so-slowly, a knee that invaded the tight, parallel of her thighs.
    “For once, don’t think so much, Curie,” he said against her mouth.
    His hushed plea was like a gift from William Harvey, himself, for at that moment, Samson’s words reimagined everything she knew about circulation. Heart, core, sex—impossibly, they all demanded blood flow at once. She kissed