Jordan Read online

  “VIVIANNE, YOU’RE WITH ME.”

  Jordan stalked from the bridge, without waiting to see if she followed. Ever since he and Vivianne had gone back to the engine room, he’d been riled.

  His skin prickled. No matter how much he tried to repress the need, he was close to losing control again.

  “You think us being together’s a… good… idea?” Vivianne’s tone was soft and raw. She might as well have caressed his flesh.

  He gritted his teeth. “It’s… happening… again.”

  “No. It is not.” Vivianne spoke as if she was in agony.

  It took every ounce of his control not to rip off her clothing and take her right there in the hallway. He swallowed hard. “I’ll be in the captain’s quarters.”

  Not in his entire life had lust ever pounded him like this. They were in danger. But it didn’t matter. They might die tomorrow. It didn’t matter. The crew would know exactly what they were up to. It didn’t matter.

  He had to have her. Now.

  “Fast-paced and sexy otherworld adventure.”

  —LINNEA SINCLAIR, RITA award–winning author of Hope’s Folly

  PRAISE FOR SUSAN KEARNEY AND LUCAN, THE FIRST ROMANCE IN HER PENDRAGON LEGACY SERIES

  “4½ Stars! Kearney’s back and better than ever as she launches a thrilling new trilogy… Hang on for a most excellent ride!”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Kearney captivated me with her action-packed, emotional tale… I couldn’t turn the pages of this book fast enough while, at the same time, I didn’t want the story to end.”

  —RomanceNovel.tv

  “[Kearney] combines sexy romance with spaceships, laser guns, psychic powers, and time travel.”

  —Tampa Tribune

  “5 Hearts! Takes you into a completely different realm… I thoroughly enjoyed Lucan and look forward to the next installment in Susan Kearney’s new series.”

  — TheMysticCastle.com

  “Kearney is a master storyteller.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Virginia Henley

  “A fairy tale… with a futuristic twist… the sensuality makes it well worth the read.”

  — TheRomanceReadersConnection.com

  “A credibly (and explicitly) passionate and rough romance… for fans of sexy space opera intrigue.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An interesting blending of science fiction, Camelot mythos, and romance… fans will enjoy the first Pendragon Legacy thriller.”

  — Alternative-Worlds.com

  “Susan Kearney takes you on a wild ride, keeping you guessing until the very end.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Karen Rose on Kiss Me Deadly

  “Out of this world love scenes, pulse-pounding action, and characters who come right off the page.”

  —USA Today bestselling author Suzanne Forster on The Dare

  “Looking for something different? A futuristic romance…The Challenge gave me a new perspective… love and sex in the future!”

  —New York Times bestselling author Carly Phillips

  ALSO BY SUSAN KEARNEY

  Lucan

  Rion

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by H.E. Inc.

  Excerpt from Lucan copyright © 2009 by H.E. Inc.

  Excerpt from Rion copyright © 2009 by H.E. Inc.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Forever

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/foreverromance

  Forever is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. The Forever name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: March 2010

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55844-0

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  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

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  A PREVIEW OF LUCAN

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  A PREVIEW OF RION

  Chapter 1

  THE DISH

  To all the booksellers out there who read, love, and sell romance books. Without you, writers would have a hard time connecting with readers. Thank you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First, I need to thank my editor Amy Pierpont for all her hard work on the book. She’s very much appreciated. And to Alex Logan for keeping track of all the little details. To Melanie Moss and Anna Balasi, your work behind the scenes makes promotion painless. I’d also like to thank Claire Brown and Christine Foltzer for my best cover ever!!!!! And thanks to Anna Maria Piluso in book production for taking care of JORDAN at the last minute. And of course, Bob Levine and his team in the sales department, the book wouldn’t be out there without you.

  And as always I’d like to thank Julie Leto, Charlotte Douglas, and Jeanie Legendre for all their wonderful suggestions, but mostly thanks for being my friend.

  As we lay in the sweet grasses under the constellation of Orion, I knew that what we had done was not so much lovemaking as a release of an inexplicable act of passion.

  —HIGH PRIESTESS OF AVALON

  1

  Damn it, Jordan. You lied to me.” Vivianne Blackstone, CEO of the Vesta Corporation, tapped the incriminating report against her leg and restrained her urge to fling it at Jordan McArthur, her chief engineer. The world was in a total meltdown after learning an ancient enemy had infiltrated Earth’s governments and major industries, and Vivianne was determined to keep her Draco Project safe.

  Head throbbing, she stared at the spaceship’s complex wiring. The Draco was the only ship of its kind, the most advanced spaceship Earth had ever built, and she had to fly as planned. It had to work out. So much was riding on this venture to find the lost and legendary Holy Grail. Vesta’s future. Earth’s future. Her future. Everything she’d ever wanted, everyone she’d ever loved, might be lost if this project didn’t succeed.

  When Jordan didn’t respond, she nudged his foot with her shoe. “I’m talking to you.”

  Lying on th
e deck with his head halfway through a hatch, Jordan shifted until she could just see his intense blue eyes.

  “I heard. How did I lie to you?”

  She dropped the papers, but she’d already lost his attention to the ship. He’d wriggled back inside the compartment, pulling another wire to hook into the circuits, no doubt following an electrical schematic that existed only inside his head.

  He threaded a wire into a panel box of delicately networked circuits. “Pass me a screwdriver.”

  Scowling at his back, she slapped the tool into his hand.

  “Tell me these findings are wrong,” Vivianne demanded.

  “What findings?” He didn’t so much as spare a glance at the folder she’d dropped. His profile, rugged and somber, remained utterly still, except for a tiny tick in his jaw that told her he was unhappy she’d interrupted his work.

  “You’ve never attended Harvard. Never got your PhD at MIT. Never taught at Cambridge.”

  “The Phillips head.” He held out his hand again, impatience lacing his voice. “It’s the screwdriver with an X on the tip.”

  Like she didn’t know a Phillips head when she saw one? While her specialty was communications technology, she’d designed and built her first hydrogen rocket by age twelve.

  However, when it came to spaceship design, Jordan was the go-to guy. Despite his doctored résumé, the man knew his aeronautical engineering. From hull design to antigrav wiring, no detail on the Draco was too small for Jordan to reengineer and make more efficient.

  One of Jordan’s engineers spoke over the ship’s intercom. “These voltage-converter equations can’t be right.”

  “They are,” Jordan answered evenly.

  “They’re frying the circuits.” The man’s frustration was evident in his tone.

  “Sean, you’ll find a way to keep them humming. You always do.”

  “I’m stumped.”

  “I’ll give you a hand as soon as I can.”

  “Thanks, boss.”

  “But I’m sure you’ll figure it out before then.”

  Sean chuckled. “I’ll do my best.”

  While this was a side of Jordan she hadn’t seen, his easy relationship with his team didn’t surprise her. But it wasn’t his leadership skills that she questioned. Vivianne’s gut churned. “Jordan, we really need to talk.”

  “So talk.”

  Vivianne paused and considered precisely what to say. She’d already made one mistake by hiring Jordan before he’d been properly vetted. She couldn’t afford to make another—like accusing him outright of being a spy for the planet’s worst enemy.

  “The Draco is Earth’s first and only spaceship that can carry a full crew to the stars.”

  “So?”

  “This ship has caught the imagination and attention of the masses. Everything we do is under intense scrutiny and makes headline news, and when the press finds out that my chief engineer falsified his employment application—”

  “Damn it, Vivianne, I know what I’m doing.”

  “To the public, a liar is a liar. And if you lied to get a job, they’ll wonder what else you’ve lied about. In these dangerous times, we can’t have our loyalty questioned.”

  “So we don’t tell anyone. Problem solved.”

  Vivianne pinched the bridge of her nose to ease her headache. “But if your lies come to light, you don’t just lose your job, you ruin my credibility. My company’s reputation. It could crash Vesta’s stock.”

  Jordan threaded one of myriad wires into a nexus of circuitry. “As long as this ship doesn’t crash, your stock will be fine.”

  She could handle the business end. What she couldn’t handle was a traitor. Who was he? The PIs she’d hired had found nothing on him back further than six months ago, when he’d applied for a job with Vesta. His fingerprints and eye print weren’t on file. He had no military record. No record of birth. With the entire planet on the alert for alien moles, Jordan’s nonexistent background and his lies had her suspicious as hell… and yet, she was good at reading people.

  Maybe his brilliant blue eyes and intellect had fooled her. Hell, if she put his picture on the news, the female half of the planet would fall in love at first sight and forgive him anything. Mr. Dark, Tough, and Brilliant’s gorgeous face might just sway the general population and perhaps her stockholders, as well. And she needed his expertise badly enough to give him the chance to convince her he had a damn good reason for his deception, before she called in the authorities.

  “What other lies have you told me?” she asked.

  “Whatever would get me this job.”

  “Real inspiring. Why didn’t you respond to the memo I sent last week?”

  “If I spent all my time reading your memos, how would I get anything done?”

  Vivianne tried coming at him with another tactic. Last week’s change orders had been over the top—even for Jordan. “You’ve installed miles of wiring that aren’t in the specs.”

  “We’re ahead of schedule, so why are you concerned?”

  She frowned. Before she’d known about his lies, she’d shrugged off his clever modifications. But now she wondered if his alterations had been necessary. Or simply a sneaky way to delay and undermine the entire project.

  She’d tried to hire theoreticians to double-check his work. But the specialists couldn’t keep up, remaining bogged down in theory while Jordan had gone on to build working prototypes. Now even his brilliance seemed suspicious. How did he know what he knew? Where did he come from?

  In a desperate attempt to suppress her frustration, Vivianne reminded herself how far she’d come. Peering at the Draco’s shiny metal, she had difficulty believing they’d built this ship in just over three months. Almost every system was a new design, and while the number of things that could go wrong was infinite, she had high hopes for success.

  “If the story of your doctored credentials leaks, our client may get cold feet,” she explained.

  “Chen won’t back out.” Jordan sounded completely certain.

  She didn’t bother to keep the exasperation from her voice. “Billionaires willing to buy a spaceship in order to search the galaxy for the Holy Grail aren’t a dime a dozen.”

  Jordan grunted.

  “If Chen does back out, I’ll have to refund his investment. And with the way you’ve been spending, not even I have that much credit.”

  “Down to your last few billion, are you?” Jordan teased without glancing in her direction.

  She clenched her fists in irritation. “That’s not the point.” She wished he’d trust her with the truth. Maybe he would if she reassured him. Because in truth, the government had gone a bit overboard looking for alien moles. As far as she knew, they hadn’t found even one. “Maybe we can break the news, spin it in our favor.” She pictured an advantageous story. Something like “Genius engineer discovered.” “The article could praise you and some little-known college. I’ll have my PR department put together a package.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  His blue eyes glittered dangerously, and his response made her uneasy. Something wasn’t right. He should be grateful that she was willing to fix the publicity nightmare he’d created. Instead he was acting like a man with something else to hide. But what? Was he here to damage her ship? But if so, why would he work day and night to build it? Why give them all his marvelous inventions?

  She needed more information. She’d hire new PIs. Dig deeper and watch him more closely.

  “Do you always make contingencies for contingencies?” he asked.

  She snorted. Orphaned at age ten, Vivianne had become a ward of the state. Control became her lifeline. She’d used her obsession to earn herself a first-class education and to build a successful small business into a worldwide conglomerate.

  The downside of running a huge company, however, was that she had to rely on others. Brilliant engineers like Jordan didn’t give a damn about her minute-to-minute expectations. He got the job done—but he certai
nly didn’t do things her way.

  But was his allegiance to Vesta, the Draco, and Earth? Why wasn’t he trying to reassure her?

  “In your case, I haven’t planned enough.”

  Jordan rubbed his ear and stood, reminding her just how tall and broad he was. But if he was attempting to use his size to intimidate her, he’d learn she didn’t back down.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked. “You have someone else who can build the Draco on budget and under deadline?” He didn’t wait for her reply. Why would he? They both knew the answer was no.

  “Where did you go to school?”

  Jordan shrugged. “Here and there.”

  Her blood pressure shot up ten digits, but she did her best to keep her temper under control. “Could you be a little more specific?”

  He shot her a nonapologetic smile that was way too charming. “I’m pretty much self-taught.”

  Hell. She needed more than a damn charming smile to convince her he hadn’t been educated on another planet. That he wasn’t a spy.

  “You don’t have a PhD?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Vivianne reminded herself that she’d dealt with many difficult situations in the last few years. She’d funded archeologist Lucan Roarke’s risky mission to a moon named Pendragon to find the Holy Grail. While he hadn’t brought back the Grail, he had found a cure for Earth’s infertility problem.

  Vivianne stared at the scales on the inside of her wrists. Like one-tenth of the population, she now had two hearts and could shapeshift into a dragon and fly.

  Too bad her new genes hadn’t increased her intelligence. How could Jordan have fooled her so easily? More important, what was he hiding? “What about job experience?”

  “Nothing verifiable.”

  “I suppose you fudged the glowing recommendations, too?” Her pulse pounded, and she massaged her aching temple. Was Jordan her ally or her enemy? “Who are you?”

  “You might want to take an aspirin—”

  “Thank you,doctor.” Her sarcasm escaped unchecked. “Oh, excuse me, you aren’t a doctor of anything, are you?”