Chapter 1: Greenhouse Seduction
He’d entered through the soil-ventilation shafts, a shadow dissolving into the humid dark, but the shift in air pressure gave him away. “Bruce,” she sighed, not turning from her workbench, “cologne was a bold choice for breaking and entering.” Vines, thick as pythons, dropped silently from the canopy of monstrous philodendron leaves and coiled around his ankles with terrifying speed. The world upended as they wrenched him off the concrete path, the blood rushing to his head as he swung, immobilized, before her. Pamela Isley finally turned, wiping peat moss from her hands, her smile a slash of genuine amusement. “You really should know by now,” she said, stepping closer, “nothing gets into my garden unless I allow it.”
Her eyes, green as new leaves, traveled the length of his suspended form with a botanist’s scrutiny. “My, my,” she purred, a single vine slithering up his inner thigh to trace the exaggerated, sculpted musculature of the suit. “They really do sew all the details in, don’t they? A perfect, plastic imitation of a man.” She leaned close, her breath hot against his ear. “All that armor, and you’re still so desperately empty.”
Her hand slid down the hard plating of his chest, fingers digging into the seam at his hip with intimate familiarity. “Let’s see what’s underneath all this fucking theater,” she whispered, and blew a shimmering cloud of live pheromone dust directly into his face. He choked, the particles glittering as they flooded his nostrils and mouth, a searing heat instantly blooming behind his eyes and coiling tight in his gut. The world dissolved into a wet, green haze, the vines holding him feeling less like restraints and more like eager, searching hands. A low, ragged groan was torn from his throat, every nerve ending now screaming for the touch of her skin.