My Next Breath Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Description

  Also by Shannon McKenna

  My Next Breath

  Praise for the novels of Shannon McKenna

  Copyright

  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

  Epilogue

  Meet Shannon McKenna

  Right Through Me

  Chapter 1

  Zade Ryan. Rebel supersoldier. Nearly superhuman. On a desperate quest to rescue his missing brother Luke by any means possible. To do it, he must seduce the elusive Simone Brightman, inventor of the ingenious and deadly tech used to capture Luke and hold him prisoner, location unknown. Zade will do whatever it takes to get close to Simone. Her mysterious beauty and highly sexual allure have him at a disadvantage, but time is running out ...

  Simone is fighting battles of her own, on her own. Until Zade—six foot four of sinewy muscle and lethal combat skills—rescues her from street thugs and leaves her breathless. His smoldering black eyes and overpowering sensuality—and his seductive invitation to spend one wild, unforgettable night with him—prove too tempting to resist.

  Their passionate encounter unleashes scorching desire that neither can control—leaving them vulnerable to their enemies who watch from the shadows and wait. And when they are lured into a trap by a monstrous killer hellbent on their destruction, they must fight with every weapon they have to save Luke, and each other.

  Because one night together could never be enough—and they might not live to have another ...

  Also by Shannon McKenna

  The Obsidian Files Series

  Right Through Me

  The McClouds & Friends Series

  Behind Closed Doors

  Standing In The Shadows

  Out Of Control

  Edge Of Midnight

  Extreme Danger

  Ultimate Weapon

  Fade To Midnight

  Blood And Fire

  One Wrong Move

  Fatal Strike

  In For The Kill

  Stand-alone titles by Shannon McKenna

  Return To Me

  Hot Night

  Tasting Fear

  Anthologies

  All Through The Night

  (with Suzanne Forster, Thea Devine and Lori Foster)

  I Brake For Bad Boys

  (with Lori Foster and Janelle Denison)

  Bad Boys Next Exit

  (with Donna Kaufman and E.C. Sheedy)

  Baddest Bad Boys

  (with E.C. Sheedy and Cate Noble)

  All About Men

  (a single author anthology)

  My Next Breath

  The Obsidian Files

  Shannon McKenna

  Praise for the novels of Shannon McKenna

  “Blends an intensely terrifying psychic thriller with a

  mind-blowing erotic romance.”

  —Library Journal, on Fade To Midnight

  “Blasts readers with a highly charged, action-adventure

  romance . . . extra steamy.”

  —Booklist

  “Pulse-pounding . . . with searing sex and raw emotions.”

  —Romantic Times, 4 ½ stars

  “Shannon McKenna makes the pulse pound.”

  —Bookpage

  “Shannon McKenna introduces us to fleshed-out characters in a tailspin plot that culminates in an explosive ending.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “An erotic romance in a suspense vehicle on overdrive. . . sizzles!”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “McKenna expertly stokes the fires of romantic tension.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “McKenna strikes gold again.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Her books will take readers on a nonstop thrill ride and leave them begging for more when the last pages are devoured.”

  –Maya Banks, New York Times bestselling author

  “Full of turbocharged sex scenes, this action-packed novel is sure to be a crowd pleaser.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Edge Of Midnight

  “Highly creative. . . erotic sex and constant danger.”

  —Romantic Times on Hot Night (4 ½-star review and a Top Pick)

  “Aims for the heart with scorching precision.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Ultimate Weapon

  Copyright

  Copyright © August 2017 Shannon McKenna

  http://shannonmckenna.com

  Cover Design by Wax Creative

  Interior Design by Renee Rocco

  Edited by Hilary Sares

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9977941-2-0

  Digital ISBN: 978-0-9977941-3-7

  eBook: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  eBook and Print book: All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  eBook and Print book: 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 persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  That voice. Hers.

  Zade isolated that sound from all the others competing to be heard: traffic, gusting wind, cold rain driving down on the black asphalt, dripping off the vinyl awning he lurked beneath.

  Fading out. Fuck.

  Zade listened hard for that free-floating sound thread, thin as a strand of spider-silk waving around out there in the humming urban buzz of Seattle.

  Yeah. There she was. Coming out of the Mercer Center with some people. Adults and kids. Umbrellas whooshed open. Cars pulled up. A few taxis stopped. He heard her, talking, laughing, saying goodnight. A subtle thrill racked him as that low, husky female voice stroked delicately down his nerve endings.

  Simone Brightman. He liked her voice.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked the display.

  cold out here wtf

  He tapped back a response.

  wait

  Lightweights. His hired goons had been waiting hours in the rain. Boo-fucking-hoo. He was damp and chilled, too, but he wasn’t bitching about it. Nor should he.

  It was what he deserved for prowling around in the dark like a fucking criminal.

  Whatever it took. He’d kill for information about his lost brother Luke. And what he was about to do fell way short of killing. Nobody was going to get hurt tonight. At least not physically.

&
nbsp; Simone Brightman had to know something. And that was as far as he’d gotten. Months had crawled by without a single opportunity for a chance meeting with her. He’d plotted and schemed, increasingly frustrated. But no dice.

  Mostly she stayed stubbornly locked in her house. No errands, shopping, gas stations, malls, post office, restaurants, movies. No workdays at her biomed lab, which used to be the sum-total of her life. This once-a-week math tutoring thing she did with kids was the only reason she’d gone out at all since she and Noah Gallagher broke their engagement.

  She must be depressed. Fine. He could work with that. All she needed to make her misery complete was some mouth-breathing scum menacing her on a dark street.

  Add terror to the mix. And himself, never on the side of the angels.

  He followed a brief conversation she had with some kids on their way out of the Center. He could barely hear what they were saying, but they seemed to really like her.

  “Get home safe. See you next week.” There was laughter in her voice.

  Finally it was just her, making her solitary way toward her car, not knowing that it had been disabled. About three blocks away now. Her rubber-soled lace-up leather boots squeaked.

  Lately, for some unknown reason, she no longer bothered with her ultra-professional ice maiden look.

  At first, he thought he’d miss that super-controlled vibe. It had been stimulating to watch that round, taut ass twitching purposefully along in tight pencil skirts as she went about her business, heels clicking.

  Also gone: her sleek designer suits and smoothly styled hair. She’d been so tightly buttoned up it was actually kinda kinky-porno-hot. He got off on it.

  Now when she got dressed, it was in battered jeans or pilled leggings, sloppy sweatshirts, full-length skirts. Black, horn-rimmed glasses so butt-ugly they passed for aggressively cool. Her curly blond hair—surprise, surprise, not smooth at all—was out of control, unless she bothered to pin it up or put it in a messy ponytail.

  Her new look was as different from the old as it was possible to get. And it jazzed him just exactly as much. Go figure.

  And he looked at her a lot. Getting surveillance vid-cams installed in her place had been a hell of a thing. Her home security was top of the line. He’d finally succeeded in maneuvering a few micro-drones through her front door, two while the housekeeper came in to clean, one while Simone was having groceries delivered. Completely silent, nearly impossible to see. One was perched on the kitchen light fixture. One was on a bedroom curtain rod. The last sat on one of the wall-mounted speakers in her living room.

  She was always in her studio or bedroom. Always working. She slept very little, and ate so seldom it had actually started to worry him. The fuck? An adult human being couldn’t live on yogurt, a slice of toast, and the occasional fucking fruit chunk. It was a miracle that she functioned at all.

  Damn, now he’d lost the sound thread again. He reached for it—listening harder … yes. Rubber boot soles on the wet pavement. He’d know that little squeaky-squeak song anywhere. He’d memorized its exact rhythm and pitch.

  Less than a block away now. He was already getting a whiff of her. Warm, female smells. He seriously dug that honeysuckle shampoo. Couldn’t wait to sniff it at close range.

  He stepped out of the shadow of the awning, and raised his hand to signal the men waiting down the street. One of them lifted his hand in response. They were ready. She was an easy target, parking an almost new Audi on a badly lit street like this.

  His heart raced as his augmented sensory processor kicked into high gear, as if revving for combat. Which was overkill. He didn’t need an ASP jolt for this. The Obsidian researchers had wired him and rewired him during the Midlands experiments on their quest to produce the ultimate, relentless war machine. The data that speed-scrolled over his field of vision whenever he was stressed was a constant reminder of how they’d changed him. Permanently.

  But he ignored it. He’d stolen himself back. He and all the rest of the Midlanders. He was more than what Obsidian had tried to make of him. Fuck them all.

  Tonight—for her—he needed to be funny, smart, and unthreatening, for starters. And good in bed, if he got lucky. Past experience suggested that he would. It was bad form to get cocky about it, but whatever. A guy could hope.

  In fact, he quivered with hope. Watching Simone for two whole months had kept him perpetually half-hard. It wasn’t like she was doing anything sexy. On the contrary. She mostly just sat there on the bed, cross-legged in a thick snarl of wires and cables, surrounded by screens, dressed in leggings and a sweatshirt. Braless. Eyes narrowed with ferocious concentration as she typed so fast and hard the detached wireless keyboard bounced against the mattress.

  He loved how the mad typing made her nipples jiggle.

  He could watch that for hours without losing interest. Simone Brightman’s life was slit-your-wrists boring, yet watching her somehow kept him continually buzzed.

  He was in a groove with surveillance monitoring. Forget sleep. Not happening, even thought he’d sworn never to inflict sentinel sleep on himself again after their escape from Obsidian’s research facility at Midlands. He hated the way sentinel sleep made him feel. Constant vigilance turned even the strongest into a numb, circuit-fried robot, no matter how skillful he might be at alternating his brain hemispheres, resting one while using the other and blah-blah-di-fucking-blah.

  He was good at it, yeah. And so? He was good at a metric fuckton of unspeakable things. That didn’t mean he would ever do them again. He’d won his freedom back. Obsidian could go suck its own dick.

  But he’d do sentinel sleep for Simone. He’d do any number of desperate, unspeakable things for a chance to find out what happened to his brother.Besides, watching Brightman prance around in her underwear was no chore. She was so damn pretty it just turned his head around. Why sleep when he could look at that?

  She was almost upon him. His ASP processor sent a fire-hose of data scrolling wildly up both sides of his field of vision. His senses sharpened to a level beyond painful. He hadn’t expected this. Bullshit timing.

  Her footsteps echoed in his ears, boom-scrape-squeak. Her soft breathing, the quick and steady drum of her heart. He smelled the warm mix of her hand lotion, her wool coat, the leather of her boots, heard the swish of her long skirt, the brush of wool tights between her thighs. He smelled the coffee she’d had not long ago and a hint of the vanilla flavored creamer she’d lightened it with. Whiffs of the perfume she used to wear back in her corporate days wafted out of her purse like little ghosts.

  He also smelled the festering mouth-breathers who waited across the street.

  His heart thudded loudly. In a few seconds, he’d see Simone in the flesh. The mysterious ex-fianceé of Noah Gallagher, Zade’s friend and fellow Midlander rebel.

  A woman who might or might not hold the key to the last possible clue that could lead him to his brother.

  Or to his brother’s bones.

  That thought stabbed through him like a thin blade of ice just as Simone Brightman rounded the corner and hit his line of vision.

  Showtime.

  Chapter 2

  Of course she’d left her umbrella in the car on the one night that the rain decided to dial it up from the usual Seattle drizzle and start pelting down. At least she had the right boots for the rain these days. No more fancy designer shoes for her. She was done striving for feminine perfection. Who gave a shit?

  Years of effort, down the drain. She was so done with it.

  She tried to hang on to the happy buzz hanging out with her Sci-Tech team gave her. She loved those kids. Creative to the max. Going places, all of them.

  They were a complicated bunch. Too smart for their own good. Builders, makers, coders, geeks, videogame nerds, hackers. She scrambled to keep their hungry, restless minds busy. They’d had a blast brainstorming tonight. Goofy, giddy fun.

  Goofiness was in short supply in her life. Those kids had taught her how it felt.


  There would be no more fun tonight, that was for sure. Her happy buzz was draining away and that strange roar was filling up her head again. Stabbing pains, flashing lights, and that constant, grinding noise.

  It started last year after she broke up with her first fiancé, Jordan. Then, after the humiliating episode with Noah and his exotic belly dancer, the problem had gotten abruptly worse.

  Stress, her family doctor said, before handing her a scribbled prescription and recommending hypnotism. Not. She did not want Dr. Laera’s flesh-creeping hypnosis sessions, and the drugs the doctor prescribed put her into a robotic fog. She felt like crap most of the time, but she preferred misery to feeling nothing at all.

  Lately, the predominant feeling had been fear. Because Mom’s illness had started like this. Just exactly like this, when Simone was twelve.

  You either inherited the gene mutation or you didn’t. Don’t anticipate the suffering. That way you suffer twice. Simone repeated that silent mantra as she turned the corner and hit the button on her key fob. The car squawked and flashed a greeting. Rain was beating down even harder now, so she made a dash for it, splashing through dirty water rushing through the gutter.

  She pulled open the door and plopped down into the leather seat, shivering as she listened to the rain drumming on the roof.

  Breathe. Think of nothing. Or just good things. She’d enjoyed four great hours with the Sci-Tech team. She could try to call Megan, her oldest friend ever since that first Mayburg summer internship years ago. They had shared an apartment through college and grad school. Two girl nerds against the world. The original idea had been for Megan to fly in to visit her and hold her hand while she got the test results. Then Megan’s asshat boss insisted on sending her to some conference in England.

  Still, evening in Seattle was morning in England. If anything could make her feel better, it would be hearing Megan’s voice.

  Get that heater going. She shuddered, teeth chattering, thinking of the hot tea she’d make at home. Honey and lemon, to warm her from the inside. Her hand was so cold and numb, she couldn’t get the key into the ignition.

  After a few stabs, it went in, but all she got when she turned it was click, click, click. No purr of a motor humming to life, no lights, no heater’s comforting hum.