Hidden Heat (8 page)

Being a doctor would factor in there somewhere, too, but thinking about the university just scared me today. It was too much of a reminder of the lies I had to tell on a daily basis.

And speaking of lies, I should really get going.

“See you at the hospital tomorrow, then?”

Interpreting the glum look on my face correctly, Scott wrapped his arms around me and squeezed. “You look like you’re stepping outside to get shot.”

“Maybe not shot. Vanished off the face of the earth, maybe?” Thinking of my Aunt Leah’s disappearance, I shuddered. “If I don’t come back…thank you for this weekend. It’s meant a lot to me.”

“You’re gonna be fine. Go and see your family, talk about the course, your roommates, the latest news…and then go home and call me. After the anatomy practical tomorrow, we’ll go see Beth, let her quiz you a bit.”

“I’d rather come back here and submit to
your
questioning.” I tried to buoy my own spirits with the teasing, and it worked—a little, anyway. Scott gave me an evil grin, and I kissed him, unable to help myself.

He curled his fingers around my waist as he responded, and I couldn’t help but kiss harder, driven by the demands of my constantly lustful body. I’d thought that actually having sex would take the edge off my craving, but it only seemed to have intensified the situation, and every tiny thing about him made my head swim with desire.

Scott drew back before I did, breathless, and cupped a hand to my cheek. “How is it possible that you’re still horny?” Beneath the amusement, I could sense unease. I obviously wasn’t the only one scared by my out of control hormones.

“Will it pass, do you think?” I needed to calm down, so I pulled out of his arms and wandered across the room. A fine drizzle was falling outside the window, and I knew I’d be frizzy-haired and bad-tempered when I arrived at my parents’ place.

“Hope so.” He sighed, ran his hand through his hair. “Not that I’m complaining on one level, but it’s going to make your training rough.”

Even that sounded sexy to me. “Okay, I’m gonna go. Maybe when I get back out into the world, I’ll remember my self-control.”

Together, we went downstairs and towards the front door. Grant heard our approach and appeared in the living room doorway. “Leaving us so soon?”

“I wish I didn’t have to,” I said, chancing a look at him. Grant was good-looking, but the urge to do entirely inappropriate things to him was only a tenth as strong as what I felt for Scott. What kind of a screwed-up situation was I in that made me relieved by that?

“You’ll be back, then?” He grinned. “I figured as much, the way we barely saw you all weekend.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the gentle teasing. There was something about Grant that put me at ease, and I was grateful for it. “Sorry. It’s been a while.”

“Wounded!” Scott staggered, as if hit by a bullet to the heart. “It didn’t have anything to do with me, personally… Any piece of male meat would have done…”

Something about his overly aggrieved tone told me he was in a better mood than his words suggested. Turning, I kissed him, meaning to just brush his lips with mine then reassure him he was the only one in my heart. Once the kiss had begun, though, I lost track of everything except how good he felt—his hand at the back of my neck, his warm chest against my breasts, his tongue just briefly flicking against mine…

“Get a room, you guys,” Grant said after a few seconds, and I tore free of Scott’s arms before I could get too carried away, blinking back tears of frustration.

“God
damn
it!”

“Uhhh…” Grant’s voice was confused. “I was kidding.”

“It’s not you,” Scott told him, his voice low. “She has nymphitis.”

Chapter Seven

Something about the way he’d said it told me I wasn’t the first case of this fictional disease he’d seen. “Nymphitis? Is this another committee thing no one has bothered to tell me about?”

Scott put his hands on my shoulders, sighing. “Relax, Holly. I didn’t want you to go out there freaked out. I knew it wouldn’t help you.”

I wrenched out of his grip, hurt. “So I’m not the first to go through this? Why aren’t you being honest with me?”

“Chill, Holly.” Grant’s voice brought my spiral of irrationality to a temporary halt. “Let him explain, okay? He’s a good guy.”

I believed that, deep down, but my brain was filled with images that sickened me: Scott, taking advantage of my vulnerable state to get laid all weekend, knowing that there was something really wrong with me. “Have you slept with
other
nympho girls? Am I the latest in a long line?”

Both Scott and Grant shook their heads, glancing at each other. “Come on. Let’s sit down,” Scott said, holding a hand out towards me.

Brushing the tears from my eyes, I hesitated, then took his hand. His fingers folded around mine, warm and reassuring and somehow sensual at the same time, and I allowed him to guide me into the living room and onto the couch.

“There was another girl who slipped through the net. A doctor helped her fake it, the same way your aunt did. She was going to be a lawyer. And no, I never met her.”

My mind raced, confused by this new information. Had Aunt Leah helped her out? “What was her name?”

“Theresa Mason.” It was Grant who answered, his voice quiet. “I was around when Beth brought her in. By that point, she was hitting on any guy in the vicinity, so I had to leave pretty quickly.”

I stared at him, fear overcoming everything else. “I’m going to get worse?”

Scott put a hand on my arm, and even through the encroaching panic, I had to fight the urge to climb into his lap. “I didn’t think you had the same condition until you couldn’t calm down just now, Holly, I swear.”

“What happened to her?” I didn’t want to know, but I needed to.

“Beth gave her meds to counteract the hormone imbalance, but it shifted too quickly. She was taken into clinic custody a couple of days later,” Grant said. “We never saw or heard anything about her after that, but one of the committee in the corporate sector hacked into her governmental record. She’s listed as deceased.”

The words hit me like a physical blow. Would I share Theresa’s fate? How long would I have until I went completely crazy?

“Can you cancel things with your parents today? Tell them you’re sick? I wanna get Beth to take a look at you.” Scott’s voice grounded me, and I nodded, glad to have something to focus on.

“I’ll call Beth.” Grant got up and left the room, and I dug my phone out of my purse.

While I spoke to my mother, who could hear the distress in my voice and took it for physical discomfort, Scott paced the room, getting tenser by the moment. By the time I hung up, his hands were balled into fists.

“Scott?” I said quietly.

He looked over at me, and I saw the helplessness in his face. “I don’t know what to do. How to help. I don’t even know if I should touch you, or whether that would be taking advantage—”

I acted on instinct, getting to my feet and crossing to put my arms around him. He hugged me back, some of the tension draining from him as I tried to reassure him.

“I believe you when you say you didn’t know. Don’t distance yourself from me…please?”

He sighed, then pressed his lips gently against my forehead. “You’re only in the early stages. By the time Theresa got to Beth, she was too far gone, but she should be able to help you.”

I hope.

His unspoken words rang loud in my ears, no matter how hard I tried not to hear them.

* * * *

Beth arrived an hour later, carrying a bag full of diagnostic equipment. “Hello, Holly. How are you feeling?”

“Scared,” I said honestly.

She gave me a sympathetic smile. “I can understand that. But I’m here to help you, if I can.”

Something about her was immediately calming. I understood a little better why she was the head of the medical section of the committee. “What do I need to do?”

Beth shot a glance at Scott and Grant. “First we need to get some privacy. Honestly, you’re both medical students and you’ve never heard of doctor-patient confidentiality?”

While they protested their innocence, Beth beckoned me towards the door. “Come on, Holly. The kitchen will have better lighting.”

It did—fluorescent lighting, to be precise. At Beth’s urging, I sat down at the kitchen table and tried to relax, watching her close the blinds in case anyone should glance in from out on the street. “They told me about Theresa.”

Beth tutted, opening her medical bag. “Theresa has become a committee ghost story since it all happened. Don’t believe what you hear, because a lot of it is over-embellished.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” I murmured, holding out my arm so she could take my blood pressure.

Compared to a lot of the medical instruments we used nowadays, the blood pressure gauge was pretty archaic—unchanged from how it used to be over a hundred years ago. Apparently, there was no more reliable way of measuring BP. I slipped my arm into the fabric sleeve and let it squeeze tight around my biceps, while Beth watched the readout connected to the in-sleeve sensors.

“Normal,” she said, and I let out a sigh of relief. At least that word applied to
one
thing about my life right now.

Beth continued to work her way through the basics, shooing me off to the bathroom to obtain a urine sample, then drawing enough of my blood to feed an army of vampires for a year. While she worked, I told her how I’d come to slip through the net, the same way I’d told Scott a couple of days before. She listened without comment, nodding every now and then and looking thoughtful.

“I’ll look into your records a little deeper when I get back to the university. The information you’ve given me should help shed some light.”

She became immersed in her task and as I watched her test my bodily fluids my mind drifted back to how things had been that morning, before it had all gone so wrong.

Beth must have noticed me mentally swooning, because she laughed. “I take it you had a good weekend.”

I nodded, a little embarrassed. Sex was never really mentioned in Focused social conversation, so to freely admit that I’d had it was still strange to me. The committee members all seemed very sexually liberated. I guessed it came from knowing that the main factor that had brought them all together was the desire to keep their sex drives.

If I did have this ‘nymphitis’, as Scott and Grant thought, I was going to get a lot more relaxed talking about sex. And not in a healthy way.

“Until today, yeah…it was a good weekend.”

Studying the readout on her portable blood-testing kit, Beth frowned and I tensed up, terrified again. “You’ve found something.”

“I have. Nothing to get too worked up over, don’t worry. Just higher than usual hormone levels. Testosterone, oestrogen, dopamine, endorphins—the whole lust cocktail.”

I was a doctor in training, and we’d studied a little about the suppression procedure in class. I knew what that meant. “All the stuff the hormone dams are supposed to limit.”

“Unfortunately, yes. I’ll need to scan your brain to see how the failed dams are looking. I’m not sure if your aunt would have removed them while you were out during your third attempt. Did she mention it?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Not to worry. We’ll find out soon enough.” She paused, then asked, “Have you noticed a decrease in your inhibitions? When it’s just you and Scott?”

I was certainly more inhibited now, and I stared at the table top as I tried to formulate a coherent response. “I’ve been more…ummm…”

“Adventurous? Confident? Wanting to try things you’ve never had any interest in before?”

“All of the above.” Grateful that she hadn’t made me say it, I fidgeted. “Is that bad?”

Beth sealed away samples in her medical bag and tucked them out of sight, then looked up at me with a slight smile. “Not by itself. In fact, it sounds rather fun. But it
is
a symptom.”

“Yay,” I muttered, and she reached out to take my hand. Surprised, I stared at her.

“Holly. I’d like to get Scott in here for a few minutes and then take some more blood. Do you feel safe enough to try that?”

Part of me felt like doing a happy dance at the thought of seeing Scott. Part of me was terrified my condition would worsen. “If it will help.”

Beth squeezed my hand, then let go. “Any extra information we can get is good, right?”

At my nod, she stood up and left the room. I wandered over to the kitchen window, nudging the blinds aside a little to check on the weather. It was still raining—more heavily now, as if the clouds sympathised with my plight.

“Hey.”

My pulse skipped at the sound of Scott’s voice, and I turned to watch him shut the door behind him. I leaned against the kitchen counter, unsure what to do for the best. “Hi.”

His smile was a little crooked, but genuine. “Beth said not to hold back. She also said we shouldn’t have sex on the kitchen table. Anything in between those two extremes is fine.”

Now that he’d said it, all I wanted was to have sex on the kitchen table. “How about sex up against the wall? Or on the kitchen counters?”

His soft laughter sent a delicious tingle through my pussy. “No sex. But come here anyway.”

He didn’t need to ask a second time. I crossed the room and pulled him into a kiss, and he returned it without restraint. I slipped my fingers up under his shirt, caressing his abs teasingly, then tried to work my hand into his pants. He grabbed my wrist before I could, breaking the kiss to tell me breathlessly, “You know what that’d lead to. Beth would kill us.”

“At least we’d die happy…” I rested my head on his shoulder and my hand over his heart, smiling at the feel of it pounding against my palm.

“Just let Beth do her thing, then we can do ours. Okay?”

With a slight pout, I looked up at him. “So what
do
we have permission to do?”

Scott kissed the pout away in response, and I tried not to do anything that would send either of us out of control. It was trickier than I’d have thought, since I was already on the brink of sexual insanity, but I put my arms around his neck and tried not to wriggle against him too much.