Page 28 of Double Take

She giggled.

“How about I toss a log on the fire—and then show you my wood?” He slipped out of bed, and she rolled up onto her side to watch him. Taut buttocks and back muscles shifted as he tossed a couple of logs on the fire. She caught a glimpse of his front. He was making more wood!

“If you’re ready for dessert, we can have the peaches now.” He picked up the jar on the hearth.

“I’m ready for dessert, but not peaches.” She waggled her eyebrows.

With a grin, he set the jar on the table away from the heat. Scooping up a fallen blanket, he approached the bed. She ogled him, sweeping her gaze from his broad shoulders, down his washboard abs, to his hard-on—then upward to rivet on the white, puckered skin below his ribs.

Mark had that scar.He’d come home from a business trip with stitches and a prescription for antibiotics, but no good explanation for the injury, just a muttered, impatient mention of a window grate.

An icy shiver skittered up her spine. “That scar.” Scars resulted from injury after birth. They weren’t genetic or congenital.

He dropped his smile and his gaze, fingering the area. Then he met her eyes. “After Hammond got himself knifed, Dark Ops stabbed me so I’d match.”

“Theystabbedyou?”

“More or less surgically, but they cut me to make a scar. I got a topical anesthetic, anyway,” he explained, providing more information than Mark had.

“That’s—that’s…barbaric.”

“I had to match him physically in order tobehim. When I assumed his place, someone could have noticed the absence of a scar.” His mouth quirked. “I’m lucky he didn’t lose a kidney.”

“That’s not funny!” How could he be so nonchalant? The more she heard about the organization, the less she respected them, and her opinion hadn’t started out high. She shouldn’t have doubted his authenticity. But after the lies and betrayals, trust didn’t come easy anymore. Pressure built in her cheeks with an urge to cry.

He crawled into bed and cradled her against his chest. “Hey, it’s okay. Bad joke. They wouldn’t remove my kidney. Kidneys aren’t visible.”

“What if he’d lost an eye? Would they have blinded you, too?”

His silence chilled her to the bone.

“What is wrong with those people? How can they do that?”

“There’s no one to stop them. No one is aware of the agency other than those in it, so they operate unchecked.”

Mark’s enlistment in Dark Ops made sense. He would enjoy the power, the secret, feeling superior to those not in the know. But John was a gentle soul with a caring heart. He hadn’t chosen to enlist—the organization had created him. He’d been born into it. “Do clones ever leave?”

“After they’ve served their time.”

“Sounds like a prison sentence.”

“Not quite. You do get paid, and you get vacations.”

“So when can you quit?”

“After I’ve served out Hammond’s term—plus or minus.”

“How long is that?”

“As long as Dark Ops says it is. The rules are a little different for me than most.”

“But you didn’t choose it. You didn’t enlist.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t have any recourse?”

“It is what it is,” he said.

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