Page 5 of Her Christmas Beast

I try to strangle him with my hug. He’s not a beast. I know he might resemble one on the outside, but he’s the sweetest, smartest, best person I’ve ever met. Billy lets me get it out, soothing my back with gentle swipes of his hand. “Why William?” I choke out finally.

“So I could always be your Billy,” he tells me so softly I almost miss it.

Then I’m crying for real. After a minute or two I gulp in air and try to sound stern, “I still haven’t heard why we can’t be together.”

“That wasn’t enough? Angel, I can’t, or rather I won’t, have children. I don’t actually know if I can because I’m never going to risk it. God only knows what would get passed on to them.”

“Okay. That’s good in a way. I mean, um… I definitely can’t have kids so…”

“What do you mean? I always pictured you with a flock of them.”

“Then you’re crazy.” I poke his chest affectionately. “The definite aspect happened a few years ago.” His arms tighten around me in concern so I quickly rush on, “some of my parts… didn’t have that great a warranty and had to come out.”

“But you’re okay now?”

“I’m great now,” I reassure him. “And in full disclosure, I don’t think I should be allowed to care for small children. Not until they’re self-sufficient enough to use the phone to call for help.” I trace patterns on his shirt-covered chest. “I uh, once babysat a cat for a friend. The cat was in my apartment and I managed to forget to feed it for two entire days.”

“Didn’t it tell you it was hungry?”

“Yes. But I was busy with an equation. I thought only a few hours had passed. So what if I’m not good enough foryou? Did you think of that, big guy?”

“Does that mean that you also didn’t eat for two days?” Billy growls, and I jerk my shoulders dismissively.

“I don’t get hungry when I’m working.”

Billy’s gaze grips mine, his expression almost angry. But he reins it in, his clenched fists the only physical display of his displeasure. For now.

* * *

“There’s more.”

I roll my eyes. “If you’re not into me, you could just say so,” I tease as I wiggle against his growing erection.

“Angel. Behave.”

“Make me.” I bat my eyelashes at him. I don’t know where this sexy brat came from, but it gets a reaction from Billy. He growls again and an excited shiver skids down my spine. Suddenly, I want him to lose control, to pin me up against the wall and ravage me. But Billy’s not picking up on that at all (or he’s ignoring me) because he simply carries on talking.

“I made a few friends at Harvard. Not many, but a few. One of them was Javier. I don’t think he’s met a computer system he can’t get into and his line between right and wrong is more of a dot dash arrangement. After I had my first big success and had a little money to spare, I hired him to look into my past back in Russia.”

“Did he find your parents?” I ask quietly.

“No. There don’t seem to be any parents to find. The orphanage I was placed from specialized in overseas adoptions. Probably for a reason. It was in a small town on the border with China. The only other thing of interest in that town was a lab.”

Oh. Shit. Billy confirms my suspicions. “As near as Javier could tell, I was one of the mistakes. And known only by a number until they slapped a name on me for the adoption profile. I doubt anyone even told me what they’d decided to call me. I don’t remember anything from that time period, but then who would want to?”

“But you must have had a mom of some sort. Right?”

Billy shrugs. “Probably some kind of surrogate, but nothing past that. I had another DNA test run discretely against the newer science and as much as they could tell, my biological mother was probably British and my father Russian, but it’sunlikely they even knew anything about me or each other. Mostly I’m a lab creation.”

“What happened to that place? They aren’t still experimenting, are they?”

“Not there, and that orphanage closed down not long after I left. Nobody’s even sure if it was the Russians or the Chinese behind it. They like to pretend the border is a solid wall, but it’s not really. And if you were doing something really taboo, better to do it in your neighbor’s yard than your own. Or maybe it was a secret from both governments. That’s also why they didn’t, um, dispose of the viable rejects. That leaves all kinds of evidence. But a child out of the country is much harder to trace back, particularly back then. Javier managed to dig up a few old emails that said basically that.”

“So is that why William Zver is never seen in public? Are you worried about our government wanting to test you?” I hang onto him like I’m going to single-handedly wrest him from the clutches of the FBI or whoever tries to grab him.

“No. The American government already knew about the lab. And maybe they’d be interested in the successes, but the failures are exactly that.”

“You are not a failure. You’re freakin’ William Zver, revolutionary architect of the decade if I remember correctly. And commonly referred to as a reclusive genius.”

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