Chase Me (30 page)

Had he ever seen her wear a lick of makeup? He didn’t think so.

Lorin’s hand emerged from under the blanket, stroking up his cheekbone and sliding into his hair. “You’re not wearing your glasses,” she murmured against his jaw.

“I usually don’t when I’m sleeping.”

She stroked his temple, where the bow usually rode. “But you usually do when we make love.”

Something in Gabe’s chest leaped at her words. “I can’t see very well without them,” he finally said in the understatement of the decade, trailing his fingertip over her eyebrow. “And when we make love”—he repeated her words gingerly, experimentally—“I want to see every inch of you.”

There was no panicked expression, no rush to correct him. Instead, she brought their heads together, nuzzled his lips with hers, and looked at him with mossy green eyes filled with sleepy desire. “Where are they?”

“Never mind,” he whispered. “I’m pretty good working by touch.” There wasn’t an inch of her body that wasn’t burned into his memory, and he wanted to revisit every one.

A tiny sound came from her throat, a release of breath escaping. “Yes, you are.” She licked the corner of his lip with her agile pink tongue. She suckled at it, then started unfastening the pearl snaps of her denim work shirt, working her way down, exposing her bright purple bra. The shirt finally unbuttoned, and Lorin wrestled out of it, her writhing and shifting bringing their bodies into electrifying contact at the groin.

She was destroying him, one molecule at a time.

Leaving her to fight with the cuffs, he cupped her satin and lace-covered breasts, closing his eyes as the tender weight filled his hand. Lorin might live in denim shirts, fleece, cargo pants, and work boots, but his kick-ass Valkyrie Princess wore silk and satin against her skin. He never knew what kind of girly confection he’d find under her utilitarian clothes.

Her shirt now gone, Lorin climbed atop him and made quick work of his. His oxford shoved aside, she jerked his snowy white T-shirt out from his waistband, shoved it up under his arms, and threaded her fingers through the hair on his pecs, tugging so deliciously that he moaned. Her mouth replaced her hands, nibbling and suckling, stroking the sensitive skin under his arms before continuing oh-so-lightly down his sides.

He shivered at the sensation, clenched his teeth. Who knew his sides were erogenous zones? The things this woman taught him. His cock punched against the layers of fabric separating their bodies, and he grabbed her hips to tug them more tightly together. She leaned down, and suddenly his nipple was in her mouth. “Jesus.” His fingers clutched her head convulsively. His hips churned, seeking a firmer touch. He shuddered as her lips curved against his hypersensitive skin, shivered when her long, streaky hair dragged over his chest and abs as she transferred her attention to his other nipple.

With a twist of his hand, her bra was unfastened, sagging off her shoulders. Lorin lifted her torso, sending the silky garment sliding down her arms to drape over his rib cage. As she wrenched at the fastening of his pants, he blindly reached for hers. Not being able to see what he was doing heightened his sense of touch. He felt the hard disk of the brass button, could practically read the raised words ridging its rim. Smaller brass buttons marched down the fly under a placket of fabric.

He knew these pants, soft and pliable from countless washings. All he had to do was tug. When he did, the buttons slipped open easily, exposing more purple fabric.

Matching
panties.
Gabe closed his eyes, rested his palm against the silky fabric. Above him, Lorin gasped, stilled momentarily, then finally located the tab of his zipper, drawing it down with a soft gnash of metal teeth. Gabe sighed in relief as the fabric loosened, gaped.

Her downward progress was impeded by her own body position. Suddenly, Gabe wished—violently—that he had his glasses on so he could better see her hand, poised next to his at the V of her legs. Rising up on her knees, she shifted down his body a couple of crucial inches, the movement causing her pants to sag at the back.

I’m a dead man.
But what a way to go, because she was finally touching him, cupping him, measuring every inch of his rampant need with her clever, clever hands. When she leaned down, her hot breath caressed him. His abs clenched. Clenched again as she edged her rough fingers under the elastic waistband of his boxer-briefs.

And something… snapped, broke apart inside, something natural, violent, and inexorable, like ice heaving in the spring, leaving open water in its wake.

His mate.

Chase. Taste. Take.

Clamping an arm around her waist, he tumbled them off the couch and pinned her to the floor, his hips nestled snugly between her spread legs and his hands pinning her wrists to the floor over her head. At this distance, he could see her eyes, the mossy green nearly obliterated by her dilated pupils.

She twined her legs around him. “Love me, Gabe.”

I
do.
But instead of saying it with words, he said it with his hands, tearing off the rest of her clothing, then his own, snagging a condom from his wallet and quickly donning it. Told her with his mouth as he kissed and licked every inch of skin he uncovered. Told her with his body as he plunged into hers, over and over again, until they finally shattered in each other’s arms.

Lorin watched Krispin Woolf pace the Sebastiani Labs boardroom, his rising voice a tip-off to his growing frustration level. No matter how loudly he repeated his arguments, he hadn’t changed anyone’s mind. Breach the vials in the capsule and accelerate the pace of genetic research, on the off-chance that one of the vials contained lupine DNA? Gene splicing? No fucking way. On the other hand, Krispin’s proposal meant that he accepted the possibility that the capsule might have originated on the
Arkapaedis
, a theory he’d discounted for years.

“Krispin, please calm down. Certainly you can see—”

“I’m immune to your siren’s wiles, Claudette.”

Lorin’s fingers curled, forming fists under the boardroom table. Sitting at her side, Gabe gasped—whether at his alpha’s tone or at his words, she didn’t know. What she
did
know was that Krispin Woolf, having failed to make his case with questions, arguments, declarations, guilt-mongering, patriotism, and vocal brute force, had now resorted to name-calling. He’d just skated uncomfortably close to calling the Siren First, the Council president’s bondmate, a whore, implying that the rest of the Council was operating under her vocal influence.

“Father. Control yourself,” Jacoby Woolf said, his voice switchblade-sharp.

Krispin’s nose and mouth twitched as he glanced at his wheelchair-bound son. Was Krispin about to shift? Here? Adrenaline surged, pulling her upright from her comfortable slouch. Shifting in the boardroom was forbidden, tantamount to making a physical threat.

Lukas inhaled, his chest expanding to linebacker proportions as he assessed the room’s emotional energy. Jack rose from the table to stand beside Elliott. Lorin stood and joined him, flanking Claudette, weight balanced lightly on the balls of her feet.

Gabe sat wide-eyed, and rightly so. When they’d worked their flowcharts last night, no one had really thought “Imprison WerePack Alpha” was a likely possibility.

“Okay, everyone, it’s been a long, stressful day. Let’s calm down.” Scarlett’s voice saturated the room like an anesthetic balm, and Lukas shot her an annoyed look that Lorin completely understood. Though Scarlett had defused the standoff, they’d all be fighting off the effects of her voice for minutes to come, rendering their physical protection less effective. On the other hand, Krispin would feel similar effects.

“Willem, could we take a short break, please?” Claudette asked.

“Certainly.”

Krispin turned his back to the room, and Lorin hoped he was making a sincere effort to pull himself together. He had four minutes left on the clock, and then they’d finally be able to vote and get this over with. Any more time than that, and she was sure he’d stroke out.

“Please, take your seats,” Elliott murmured to her and Jack. Jack nodded and sat, but the adrenaline coursing through her system was waging a royal battle with the effects of Scarlett’s velvet-covered bludgeon of a voice. She needed to move.

She strode to the refreshment station set up along one of the conference room’s side walls and poured herself half a cup of coffee. Keeping one eye on Krispin, she paced, sipping caffeine she certainly didn’t need. After the meeting was over, she’d work the excess energy out of her system with a vengeance. Eyeing Gabe’s wide suit-covered shoulders from behind, she knew exactly how she wanted to proceed.

She looked around the room, where people still milled about after Krispin’s near breach of protocol. As Scarlett had noted, it had already been a long, stressful day, with every Council member attending the meeting in person. Two additional seats were filled by Gabe, who sat between Lorin and her mother, and Bailey Brown. They’d started the day hours ago, working through their regular agenda, with Krispin predictably finding “insurmountable” issues with the latest candidate being considered for the open Humanity Chair. Personally, Lorin thought that the very appeal Krispin had cited as a negative in mediagenic physicist Brian Cox was a huge, huge asset. They’d need someone with a firm grasp of media relations if their existence was ever outed to humanity; Dr. Cox’s boyish mein and adorable English accent wouldn’t hurt one little bit. Voting as a bloc, they’d managed to table further discussion of his candidacy until the next meeting.

Lukas’s update on the search for Stephen had been terse and short: “No change since last report.” Wyland and Bailey’s presentation on the data archiving project showed some forward progress, but the effort was seriously behind schedule due to competing demands on Bailey’s time. They’d voted to greatly restrict the Internet privileges of a teenaged were who’d posted a picture of a friend, mid-shift, on a popular social media site.

After breaking for a short lunch, she and Gabe had been up, with her providing a verbal update on the work at the Isabella dig while Gabe clicked through the sequence of pictures they’d chosen: the closed command box as it sat on the cabin’s rough wooden table. The open box, a downward shot, taken in the downstairs lab. A sequence of photos of Nathan discovering the capsule, each picture exposing more and more of its freakishly clean, greenish-platinum metal. After much debate, they’d included a picture of the latest discovery, made by Paige just last night, of a stack of silvery, sharp-edged metal pieces found not two feet from where the capsule had been found. Vertically stacked by size, with the largest resting on an intricately woven mat, the pieces had clearly been arranged by sentience rather than by chance. There’d been a collective gasp as Gabe showed some of the nighttime shots he’d taken of the metal-flecked trees, and he’d picked up the presentation from there, displaying one of the samples at extreme magnification. The jagged edges suggested violent manipulation of the metal.

“We also found traces of an unknown accelerant,” he said, “supporting the working theory that these pieces may be remnants of the
Arkapaedis
.” Gabe suspected the same could be true of the pieces that Paige had just found. With Elliott’s full support, they’d asked Anna Mae Whitman to helm the next phase of the lab work, freeing them up to return to Isabella early tomorrow morning. Too many important finds were being made solely by their student crew.

“You have no proof,” Krispin had challenged.

“As I stated, Alpha, it’s a working theory. There’s a lot of work to do yet—both in the lab and at the site.”

He’d clicked through more pictures taken down in the Sebastiani Labs basement: the tech unit. The locks of hair. The small totem, the kernels of rice. Bailey then supplied a pithy update on the tech unit’s theoretical breach of the Sebastiani Labs and Council_Net networks. “No damage noted so far. Still analyzing.” They’d ended their presentation by playing the recording of the capsule opening at Gabe’s touch—which Krispin Woolf didn’t bother to pretend he hadn’t seen before.

Then it was Krispin’s turn to reveal details about the genetic research he’d been performing in Sebastiani Labs’ basement lab facilities. It was an oral report—the WerePack Alpha was notoriously reluctant to put anything in writing—with each detail being pried out of him like rusty nails from a board, and ending with his unexpected zinger of a demand: access to the organic material in the capsule Nathan had found. His request had been summarily shot down, lighting the fuse on the fireworks still whizzing around the room.

“Let’s settle, please,” Willem requested. He waited for the room to quiet. “Mr. Woolf, you have four minutes remaining.”

Now facing everyone again, Krispin glanced at the clock—and then directly at Gabe.

Trouble.
Lorin quickly strode to the table, taking her seat at Gabe’s side.

“Gabriel, I don’t understand why you, of all people, would disagree with this proposal.”

Earlier in the meeting, Gabe
had
disagreed with his alpha—diplomatically, and using the language of science—but publicly, and on the record. The tension which had subsided slightly during the break was now back with a vengeance. At Gabe’s other side, her mother’s knuckles whitened around her pen. Elliott, Lukas, Jack, and Jacoby had all straightened in their chairs.