Chase Me (16 page)

Against a birch clump, with endorphins and adrenaline coursing through both their systems? It had been a freaking collision. And once they’d dropped to the moss, she’d ridden them both into oblivion.

She’d never come so hard in her life.

She glanced over at him, lying on his back beside her, his lean, bare body gleaming with sweat in the bright moonlight. Though he was still breathing as hard as she was, his face was relaxed, satisfied, his eyes closed behind the lenses of his glasses. She felt inexplicably proud that she’d tired him out, that she’d ground the edge off his rough, uncontrolled need.

She wanted to feel it again—as soon as she could move.

“You okay?” He reached for her hand and clasped it.

Something about Gabe’s gentle grasp rocked her, made some internal fault line slip. Other lovers—Rafe, for Freyja’s sake—had done the exact same thing on countless occasions, but this was different somehow.

“Lorin?” He tugged, and she… went. She couldn’t quite find the will to resist. Physically, her body hummed, like she’d had a particularly relaxing massage. She felt tired yet… oddly energized. As she cuddled up next to his side and rested her hand on his chest, he kissed her temple.

And the ground under her feet somehow stabilized. Realigned.

But then he sighed. “What are we going to do about this?”

“Repeat the experience? Now?”

He turned his head and met her eyes in the moon-dipped dark. “You really want a repeat performance?”

Freyja, how could he doubt his appeal? She leaned over so she could see his face. She found his talented lips with hers, then suckled and nodded. “As soon as possible,” she whispered.

He nipped her lip and licked away the tiny sting. When he skated his hand down her back, curved it over her butt cheek, she shivered, and not from the chill. “Sorry I was so quick on the trigger earlier.” He gestured to the birch clump with a vaguely embarrassed wave of his hand. “It’s been awhile, and—”

“Do you hear me complaining?” she murmured, suckling at his neck. Odd. She’d never felt the need to mark a lover before, but she did now. “I was pretty quick on the trigger myself.”

His abs clenched as he lifted his head slightly. “What the…”

“Sorry—”

“No, not you. Look at these trees.”

“Trees?”

“Look.”

Lifting her head, she did—and caught her breath. The grove, the trees… they glittered in the moonlight, as if tiny shredded diamonds were embedded in the dirt and bark. “Wow. It’s like a crystal fairyland.”

“Or a crash site,” Gabe murmured. “Look at the luminosity.” Scrambling to his feet, Gabe walked to the nearest tree and examined the bark. Hands on his hips, naked—was that a grass stain on his ass?—he looked around the clearing, over to the odd rise that had captured his attention days earlier, and back to the trees again. “I think this is metal. Do you see my jacket?”

“Over there.” Pointing to a mound of fabric near the birch clump, she quickly stood. “Damn, I wish I had a flashlight.” Had she and Gabe had hot monkey sex at a second archaeological site? The one that might finally give their people the answers they’d sought for so long?

Goose bumps prickled. Gabe had been right. There’d been something here all along, and she’d missed it.

He retrieved his jacket—
definitely
a grass stain on his ass—and reached into the pocket. Her pulse jumped as he pulled out the Swiss Army knife he’d used to slice her leggings from her body. The blade clicked into place, and he carefully pried a piece of bark off the tree, tucking it into the other pocket.

She shivered as a breeze rustled the pine needles.

“I can see you gauging where to place the stakes already,” he said, draping his jacket around her bare shoulders like a cape. “It might be nothing. Let me run some tests first.”

“Come on, Gabe. Do you really think it’s nothing?”

“No, but we need some information first. There’s nothing else we can do here tonight.” He nuzzled into her neck. “And I haven’t had anywhere near enough of you yet.”

This time, her shiver had nothing to do with the chilly breeze. She didn’t want this night to end either. She hadn’t come close to slaking her need for him, and she didn’t know when she might. “Come back to the cabin with me?”

His eyes burned with an expression she couldn’t read, as if some epic battle were being waged inside. Finally, he lowered his lips to hers and gave her a succulent, luxurious kiss that wiped away her thoughts.

“Hurry.”

Gathering up their things, they did just that.

***

“So Paige, who’s the mystery vamp?” Nathan called as he kneeled in the pit, a short-handled spade in his hand.

Shoring up the wall where she’d staked Pritchard’s command box—and doing some surreptitious excavating when she could get away with it—Lorin eavesdropped. Paige had met someone last night? A vamp? Though it wasn’t unheard of to run into one of their kind so far away from the Twin Cities metro, northern Minnesota wasn’t exactly an Underworld hot spot.

Paige didn’t look up from her laptop at the artifact cataloguing station. Instead, she ducked her chin into the neckline of her fuchsia turtleneck like a turtle pulling its head into its shell. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Nathan.”

Paige’s voice was careless, but her expression was dreamy, besotted—the classic vamp glamour hangover. She was so pale she looked like she needed an immediate transfusion.

Lorin shot a glance at Mike, who pushed a wheelbarrow mounded with sifted dirt and extrusion toward their discard pile. She usually trusted his judgment, and his scowl made her stomach lurch.

Damn. Last night when she and Gabe had finally stumbled, wobbly kneed, back to camp, everyone had been in the bunkhouse, accounted for and asleep—which was good, because she’d been carrying her ruined running tights and relying on Gabe’s longer jacket to cover the breeze-kissed essentials as they’d slipped into her cabin. When had Paige had time to hook up with someone?

One more mystery to solve.

Gabe was almost certain the fragments embedded in the trees at the grove were metallic. The same metal Pritchard’s lockbox was made of? Gabe didn’t know, but after his morning meetings were over, he planned to harvest more samples and run some tests.

Lorin propped her forearm on her sledgehammer, swiping her wrist across her sweating forehead. Command boxes, tech units, and now glittering trees. There were too many things she couldn’t talk to the crew about, and the need for secrecy was driving her nuts.

“That’s a vampire kiss on your neck if I’ve ever seen one,” Nathan hooted. “Who slipped you the hard fang injection? Mike?”

Mike almost dropped a handle of the wheelbarrow. “Hell no.”

Lorin winced on Paige’s behalf.

“Ellenore…” Nathan singsonged to the only other vamp on their crew. “You and Paige hooked up last night and you didn’t let me watch? I thought we were friends.”

“Paige
is
adorable, but it wasn’t me,” Ellenore said from inside the shady gazebo as she scooped another cup of clay-laden dirt onto her sifting screen. The experimental sunscreen that allowed Mike to move freely about the site for several hours at a time unfortunately gave her hives. “Men and their deluded ménage fantasies.” She sighed. Squinting, she picked up a fragment from the screen, squirted it with water, and set it aside for later examination. “When two women get it on, they’re doing it to please themselves, not you. It’s so refreshing to sleep with someone who knows their way around a clitoris.”

Nathan stood with his hands on his hips. “Hey, I know my way around a clitoris just fine.”

Ellenore poked at the dirt with a grubby finger. “Yeah, dude, you fascinate me.”

Everyone burst into laughter. Ellenore’s deadpan delivery of Neil Patrick Harris’s classic line from
Harold
and
Kumar
Go
To
White
Castle
had been pitch-perfect.

When Nathan launched into a defense of his sexual prowess before the pack, Lorin shook her head. Werewolves. So damn predictable—except when they weren’t. Why had she assumed that Gabe would be a careful, deliberate lover, and that she’d be in firm control of their sexual dealings? Her body still sang with a delicious soreness, and now she bloomed with a heat that had nothing to do with the quickly rising temperature.
Mind
back
on
business, Lorin
. Dropping the sledgehammer, she chugged some water from her insulated canteen before joining Paige at the table sheltered from the sun by a tarp roof.

“Looks great,” she said, using her height advantage to peer down the neck of Paige’s shirt. Nathan was right. Though partially healed, the twin punctures on Paige’s neck was a classic vampire kiss. And still half glamoured this far into the day? Paige had found a strong one.

She didn’t know whether to be happy for Paige, concerned, or both. As she’d told Gabe, Paige was an adult, but in terms of real-world experience, she was a babe in the woods.

Mike joined them, leaning over to peer at Paige’s neck—not being nearly as covert about his interest as Lorin had been. “Get away from me,” Paige snarled.

Whoa.
Lorin stepped between them.

“I just wanted to—”

“What you want doesn’t matter in the least.”

Mike’s solicitous big brother act was going to push Paige over the edge. “Mike,” she murmured. “I think Ellenore has another load of dirt ready for you.”

“Okay. Yeah.” Mike stared at Paige, finally stalking off.

“Everything okay here?”

Gabe.
Lorin wheeled around.

“Everything’s fine.” Paige glared daggers at Mike’s back.

Gabe smelled like pine trees, wind, wet soil, and man. He stood slightly too close to her, but she didn’t have the strength or desire to nudge him out of her personal space. The rustle of fabric as their hips brushed sounded unnaturally loud.

“Okay,” Gabe said agreeably, clearly not buying it for a minute. “Lorin, could you spare Paige for a couple of hours? I have some satellite data that I could use her help with.”

The timbre of his voice swirled low, tugging at her core. She cleared her throat and nodded. “Sure.” Good idea to get Paige away from the dig, away from Mike, and give her a chance to calm down. “Paige, are you at a good stopping point?”

“Yes.” Paige saved her work, shoved her floppy pink hat and sunglasses into an already-bulging tote bag, and stomped towards camp.

“Is she okay?” Gabe asked.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted, “but getting her focused on something else for a while can’t hurt.”

He trailed his fingertips over her hip. “How about a run after dinner?”

“Love to.” There were hundreds of places along their running route where she could have him flat on his back in seconds.

Gabe’s gaze dropped to her lips and back again. They stared at each other for several seconds before he finally turned with a curse and trotted down the same trail Paige had just taken.

“She left Tubby’s with that vamp last night,” Mike said from behind her.

Lorin stopped ogling Gabe’s ass. “But she was alone when she got back to the bunkhouse?”

“Yeah.”

She nodded. At least Paige hadn’t been so besotted that she’d forgotten their rule against bringing guests back to the camp. There was simply too much to lose if information about what they were doing here got into the wrong hands. “She’s an adult, Mike.”

He stared at the trail. “Barely.”

Linking her arm through his, she walked them back to the lip of the pit. “Come on, we’ve all had an ill-advised one-night stand or two.”

Rather than laughing at her comment, or ruefully agreeing, his forearm tensed under her hand.

“Let’s start getting things cleaned up,” she called to the crew. “Anyone up for a swim?” She needed to do something to cool her jets until after dinner, when she and Gabe went running.

“Not me,” Ellenore said with a shake of her head. “The ice is barely out.”

Gretchen’s horrified expression was answer enough.

“Mike?” she asked.

“Not tonight.”

“Pussy,” Nathan said around a theatrical cough. “I’ll swim with you, Lorin.”

Mike strode away from camp without a backward glance.

Ellenore raised an eyebrow at the wheelbarrow full of dirt that he’d left standing beside the gazebo. Gretchen stared after him but stayed at her station.

“What is
wrong
with people today?”

“Just let him walk it off, Nathan. I’ll talk to him later,” Lorin said as she lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow and pushed the load to the discard pile.

Later.
When Gabe said the word earlier, its promise had floated on the air like exotic incense. Now?

It made her feel… uneasy.