Odds were, she would be fired by the end of the week.

She pushed free of her admirers and ran for the woods. Avery Landon was a worry for another day. Right now she had to bring clothes to a na**d man. As she struggled through the bracken to get deeper into the woods and farther away from potential witnesses, she suddenly heard the snapping of branches and Sargent bounded out of the brush, barking happily at her arrival. She moved quicker at the sight of him, headed in the direction he’d come from. Suddenly a hand grabbed her by the arm, pulling her to a stop. She was such a jumble of high-strung nerves that she shouted out in surprise.

“Easy,” he soothed, reaching to take the gym bag from her tightly clutched fingers. “Is everything all right?”

No. Nothing is all right, she thought. “It was fine. Nothing of note happened.”

“Damn that’s unnerving. There are weapons in that trunk.”

“Yes. I kind of figured that out,” she muttered.

He unzipped the bag, and after withdrawing a uniform let it drop to the ground.

“You carry a second uniform to work?” she asked, surprised that it wasn’t street clothing. On her way back she’d been wondering how he was going to explain his missing uniform.

“We all do, if we’re smart. I can’t even tell you how often I’ve had a drunk puke on me.”

“Oh I see.”

Yeah she did see. She watched, unable to even give him the courtesy of turning her back to him, as he stepped into his pants and drew them up over extraordinarily defined calf and thigh muscles. Apparently undershorts weren’t a part of his backup bag because he zipped himself in with caution, going utterly commando. Marissa ignored the part of her brain that pouted heavily as he hid all that tanned, glorious strength. He quickly drew on an undershirt and then his uniform shirt, taking the unimpeded beauty of powerful biceps and shoulders away from her.

More internal pouting. Damn him, she thought a bit grouchily. How was it that she constantly felt like she was being pushed and pulled at the same time whenever she was around him? It wasn’t as though she’d never seen a beautiful, lean, muscled, deliciously male person before.

Marissa went hot and wet in one second flat and she forced herself to turn away, lecturing herself for being so weak and so damn pathetic. Okay sure it had been a long, long, looong time since she’d gone to bed with a man, but she’d somehow managed to keep from panting over just any man in sight for all that time. Or any man at all for that matter, she amended.

He’s a patient, she reminded herself fiercely. An alien patient from some sort of cosmic lab experiment. It was all she could do to keep from biting at her lip, shifting her weight or chewing her damn nails off she realized with no little irritability. She had worked so hard to eradicate all of those kinds of fidgets and tells. It was so important to her to demonstrate the level of competency and professionalism she needed in order to work with these alpha men and women. All it took was a single impression of weakness and any chance of them respecting and trusting her strength and guidance would crash and burn. Some of them even went for her throat, casting her as the villain who was trying to rob them of the job they depended on for self-definition and self-worth. She had to hold on to her competence even more now that she was faced with this potentially paralyzing situation. She was, she knew instinctively, going to need every moment of calm and strength she could muster up in order to cope with this unbelievable turn of events.

“S-so … you have a, um, dead pharaoh living inside of you?” she asked, looking for a more focused explanation of what he’d been telling her. Bodywalker 101 for dummies … or at the very least a completely dumbfounded doctor who’d always thought the planet housed only one kind of humanoid species. Now she’d been exposed to at least two others and was struggling to make herself accept it. “And that other creature … the thing made of stone …”

“A Gargoyle. Gargoyles are … well, the gist of the story is that the Templars used their spell casting abilities to create the Gargoyle race in order to have powerful protectors and servants.”

“You mean slaves?” she asked, turning back to him.

“Exactly,” he said, a grim expression on his face as he finished strapping another flack jacket across his chest. She had witnessed how little of a help his other one had been against that fierce red energy his attacker had wielded against him. But a little bit of help was better than no help at all and it made her feel better to see him somewhat protected.

“That’s horrible,” she said, her stomach feeling sick in sympathy for the creature she’d seen.

“Long ago, however, a large amount of Gargoyles escaped from the Templars control.” He looked directly into her eyes. “It was a very brave and risky thing to do. Their masters created them in such a way that each Gargoyle is prevented from attacking their individual creator, and their creators had linked them critically to an object called a touchstone. If a Gargoyle does not return to their touchstone with a certain amount of frequency, they will very quickly lose control of their bodies and their minds. It only takes a matter of days before that happens. So not only did they have to find a way to rise up against their masters, they had to retrieve their heavily guarded touchstones. The Templars knew that to control the touchstone was to control the Gargoyle.”

“If they couldn’t fight their creators, then how were they ever able to escape these horribly powerful Templars?”

“There was only one way. They had to enlist the help of the Politic Bodywalkers. They had to pledge their loyalty to another Bodywalker and ask them to help free them.”

“And … did you? Did your type of Bodywalker fight the Templars to free the Gargoyles?”

“Oh yes. We did. In fact,” he said, so quietly she could feel the deep gravity emanating from him, “the exodus of the Gargoyles and the fight for their freedom was the catalyst that began the war between the Templars and the Politic.” He moved a step closer to her and, like all the other times he put himself into her personal space, her breath caught in her throat. Marissa forced herself to breathe, but all that managed to do was bring the rich scent of potent male onto her suddenly keen senses. “The Templars are ravenous for supremacy. They are also inhumanly callous. They do not respect the exquisite intelligence of the Gargoyles, or the culture of tribes they have created for themselves. Templars don’t even respect the host souls they share a body with.”

“But … that Gargoyle was … is he still a slave?”

“There are several generations of Gargoyles, each different in some way from the last as the Templars tried to improve on their design, along with improving their methods of enslaving a Gargoyle’s loyalty.”

“Oh my god,” she breathed, sickened and disturbed to her very core.

“That is the nature of each Gargoyle tribe, Marissa. Each tribe is a different generation of Gargoyle. So far there are six different tribes. Apparently the Templars have grown another generation, which leaves me to believe that the free Gargoyles will soon find themselves ferrying the seventh tribe-to-be along their underground railroad. Those who are free endanger themselves nightly in order to help liberate the enslaved.”

“You said they pledge loyalty to Politic members. Do you mean they let you hold their touchstones? And if so, how is that different from being enslaved by the Templars?”

Jackson was always impressed by Marissa’s quick and thoughtful intellect. The workings of the Bodywalker world could be very complex. Just as complex as the relationship the Politic had with the Gargoyles.

“The Templars created the Gargoyle touchstones in such a way as to force a Gargoyle to be closely connected to either their creator or another Bodywalker. The energy of our entwined souls revitalizes the power of a touchstone, which then transfers it to the Gargoyle. They are closely attached to us, it’s true, but they are not slaves to those of us who are Politic. We deny them nothing, give them total freedom to the best of our ability, and enjoy and respect them just as they enjoy and respect us. They are our bodyguards, our companions, and our closest friends in some cases.”

“I see. That’s very good of you,” she said softly. Jackson could see the empathy for the Gargoyles’ plight in her eyes, even though she was trying to come off as nothing more than analytical and thoughtful about the situation. It made him wonder why she always felt the need to project a sense of flawless self-control to everyone. The fear she had shown in the cave was only the second time he had seen her become emotional. The first time had been during Docia’s disappearance when she had set him back on his pompous ass, as was rightly deserved.

There was a creature of fire and feeling beneath all of her cool beauty and powerful professionalism. What she didn’t realize was that this veneer she clung to so desperately made her come off as arrogant and cold. Oh, she sympathized with her patients—he could attest to that—but always in a controlled manner. He wondered what had happened to her that made her feel so compelled to project perfection at all times.

It also made him crave the opportunity to tousle her up and ruffle her feathers. It made him want to strip away the layers of her psyche, her always-neat appearance, and tumble her across his bed until she absolutely shattered for him. The simple thought of it had him craving her all over again, had him leaning in closer to her so at the very least he could feel the radiance of her warmth and smell that sweet, feminine scent of her hair.

Marissa felt the change that came over him like any prey would feel when faced with a predator. He was so close again that she had to tilt her head back in order to look up into his eyes and she watched as his teal-framed pupils widened a little. He was one of those men who had been gifted with thick, beautiful lashes. Their blackness the perfect foil for the color of his eyes. There was no innocence to his features, no boyishness. He was every inch the mature and vital male.

A dangerous male.

“What do we do now?” she asked in a voice so close to a whisper.

He smiled then, a wolfish quality to it that made her heart skip a few beats. His hand came up and once again his thumb traced over the rise of her cheek and then the shape of her lips.

“I have such amazing answers to that question,” he said to her.

There was absolutely no mistaking the entendre of his remark. She should have laughed and set him down, putting him back at a safe distance. She was actually quite good at that. There had been a great deal of practice over the years as she had been the object of a lot of unwelcome attention. What she had intended to be a projection of a neat polished appearance was, for some reason, seen as some kind of invitation to the opposite sex. Or perhaps challenge was the better word for it.

But up until that moment when he had bluntly told her that she was in his crosshairs, she hadn’t lumped Jackson in as a source of unwelcome advances. She had handled the whole thing badly, become stupidly flustered and at odds with herself over it.

Now she had the most powerful argument against him she could possibly have conjured. He was a Bodywalker. He wasn’t entirely human anymore. She simply was not adventurous enough to get tangled up in something like that. Not to mention all the other reasons that were still in play. He was a patient. They worked together. It was just a bad idea all around.

She opened her mouth to speak, but the act of parting her lips brought the touch of his thumb a little farther inside her mouth, as though she were inviting him in. The smoldering hot look that entered his eyes made the touch erotic, for all it was a simple and unintentional thing. His thumb hooked onto the tips of her lower teeth and his remaining fingers curled to grasp her by the chin. The capture, as simple as it was, made her heart and breath seize in her chest.

But the instant his head dropped toward hers, his attention fixated on her mouth, she shoved away from him, nearly tripping herself up and falling on her backside.

“Stop it! Stop this,” she panted, righteous anger warring with the jumble of feelings his small movement of intent had given birth to inside of her. Her face felt hot from the sudden heat erupting all along her skin. Goddamn him, why did he have to be so inaccessible! So ethically out of her reach. “You know. You know how many reasons there are why you and I cannot even entertain …” Marissa had never been so at a loss for words in her life as she was whenever she was clashing wills with him. It was completely flustering and infuriating.

“Knowing doesn’t always dictate desires,” he retorted quietly, his hand coming out with a blinding speed, snagging her by her upper arm and yanking her forward until she crashed up against him, her feet jumbling up together beneath her. But before she could fall his other hand was at her back and jerking her up completely off the ground. “You think I don’t know what I’m doing? You think I haven’t weighed all the possible rights and wrongs of it? Do you think I’m really that thoughtless? I’ve thought of nothing else for weeks. Fought myself into wild circles of confusion as the part of me that craved you warred with the part of me that knew you should be off-limits. Even now I hear the voice of my conscience telling me to stop this, but it can hardly be heard over the voice screaming at me to take you in every way I can possibly imagine.”