Chapter 1005: Hot Dr. Maria

The only heads-up Luna gave me was this:

Her mother was here to prove that I was wrong for her. That she’d do everything in her power to make that case—build it, argue it, win it—and drag her daughter back from the

devil’s

claws.

I

was the devil in this situation.

And the warning came too late, when Maria and I were already heading toward the private office by the time Luna caught my hand in the hallway, pulled me close, and whispered it all in a rush of panicked breath.

Her fingers were tight around mine. Her eyes were wide with the specific anxiety of a woman who loved two people and knew one of them was about to try to destroy the other.

I kissed her forehead.

Told her it would be fine.

She whispered something that made me choke... then I followed Maria into the office.

Now I sat across from her.

Dr. Maria.

Luna’s mother.

The woman who had created the woman I loved—and who currently wanted to

dismantle

everything I’d built with her daughter, brick by brick, with the surgical precision of someone who took apart problems for a living.

She sat with her legs crossed. Composed. Deliberate with a posture of a woman who had walked into enemy territory and refused to look anything less than

superior

.

And

gods

—the body on this woman.

She wore a dark taupe ensemble that had no business being that sophisticated

and

that provocative at the same time.

An asymmetrical top—

one shoulder bare, the other draped in a voluminous puffed sleeve

—with the fabric wrapping across her torso in elegant, diagonal folds that cinched at her waist and left a teasing sliver of midriff exposed.

A choker collar hugged her throat, connected to the top by a strip of fabric that drew the eye down the bare slope of her shoulder, across her collarbone, to the subtle, perfect swell of her breasts pressing against the wrapped material.

A belt with an ornate circular buckle sat low on her hips, anchoring a draped skirt that clung to her thighs before splitting at the side in a slit that revealed more leg than any mother walking into a confrontation should have been comfortable showing.

Her thighs were crossed at the knee—long, toned, the skin smooth and catching the office light with a warm, silken sheen that made them look like they’d been polished by years of disciplined movement.

The slit fell open just enough to show the full length of the upper

thigh,

the muscle definition subtle but undeniable—the legs of a woman who walked, who moved, who had never stopped taking care of herself even as the decades passed.

Every inch of her screamed quiet, expensive power.

Her hair was long and black—falling past her shoulders in loose, natural waves that framed a face that time had been absurdly,

unfairly

gentle with.

Full, naturally plush lips. Dark eyes that held the same fierce intelligence Luna carried but with thirty additional years of experience sharpening them into something far more dangerous. Slim—not fragile-slim but elegant-slim.

She was in her fifties. Same bracket as Catherine.

A bit older than Margaret and Dominique.

But

time

had been gentle with her—or had completely

avoided

her, driven away by the sheer force of her refusal to deteriorate.

I wondered, for one filthy, unfiltered second, how

insanely hot

she’d be if she got my Divine Seed in her system.

She’d be a goddess.

Truly. No exaggeration. No hyperbole.

If the Seed could do what it had done to Isabella, to Luna, to the others—what it would do to a foundation like

this

?

Those elegant curves would swell and tighten, that flawless skin would glow with impossible vitality, those already lethal thighs would become pure sin.

She’d be walking, breathing temptation.

No wonder Luna had been so beautiful even before my Divine Seed.

The blueprint was sitting right in front of me with her legs crossed, her jaw set, and murder in her eyes.

I had just spent hours inside Vanessa. My body should have been satisfied. Should have been calm.

Should have been operating in that post-sex equilibrium where desire takes a back seat and rational thought drives.

I wouldn’t mind Maria. Not one bit.

We’d already exchanged greetings.

Polite. Formal.

The kind of greetings two people exchange when one of them is planning to dismember the other’s reputation and the other is trying not to stare at their thighs.

Her voice—unlike her body—was loaded with judgment. Every syllable weighed, measured, and aimed like a scalpel.

She was trying so hard to not acknowledge what she was looking at.

Trying so hard to keep her expression neutral, clinical, the face of a disapproving mother and not the face of a woman sitting across from a man who made the air feel different just by existing in it.

But I’d already expressed myself.

When she’d first sat down and I’d taken my seat across from her, I’d told her—

plainly, honestly, with no game attached

—that she was

stunning

.

That I could see exactly where Luna got her beauty.

Her reply had been immediate. Practiced. A wall.

"Compliments don’t work on me. And they won’t change how I feel about you."

I’d nodded. Smiled. "That’s what makes you the most interesting woman I’ve ever met," I said.

Which was obviously true. But also not true.

Perspective,

my friends.

While she could sit there and lie to me—maintaining that stone-faced,

I-am-here-to-judge-you

composure like a fortress she’d spent decades constructing—I could

read

her.

And the thoughts moving through her mind like text scrolling across a screen she didn’t know was transparent.

{How is he possible?}

That was the first one. Raw. Unguarded.

That was a thought of a woman who had spent a lifetime understanding human biology and was sitting across from someone who broke every rule she’d ever studied.

{How can someone be this... godly?}

The word surprised even her. She didn’t use words like that. She was a scientist. A doctor. A woman who dealt in evidence and data and peer-reviewed certainty. And yet her own mind—her own

traitorous,

involuntary mind—had selected

godly

as the only accurate descriptor.

The second thought had hit right after, laced with reluctant heat she tried to bury under layers of professional detachment.

I leaned back in my chair, letting the silence stretch just long enough for both of us to feel it, and gave her my slowest, darkest smile.

{How did he get all these beautiful women so easily? So fast?}

She was cataloguing. Trying to find the explanation that would let her dismiss me.

A con man.

A manipulator.

Wealth and nothing else.

But the data kept contradicting the hypothesis, and she was a good enough scientist to notice.

{Would that work on me too?}

And there it was.

The thought that changed everything.

The Taboo Aura ignited—a cascade of abilities firing in sequence like a chain reaction that started in the space between her thought and my awareness.

The

Taboo abilities

woke up all at once, drawn by the situation like sharks to blood.

Sin Resonance came first: because this was Luna’s mother. Because the dynamic itself—the very fact that I was sitting across from the woman who had birthed my lover—was the most Taboo configuration imaginable.

Sin Resonance didn’t care about context or morality or the disapproving set of Maria’s jaw. It cared about the

resonance

between

forbidden and desire

, and this room was

vibrating

with it.

The ability amplified everything—every

Taboo skill, every Dark Seduction ability

—cranking the volume to a level that made the air between us feel heavier, thicker, almost electric.