Chase Me (34 page)

As the waitress walked away, Lorin smirked. “No green salad?”

Was he really so predictable? “I decided to indulge myself. I’ll run it off tonight.”

Indulging. Running.
Ordinary words suddenly seemed spoken in bold font, and Lorin’s dilated pupils indicated that she felt it too. Shifting in her red vinyl chair, she fiddled with her napkin-wrapped silverware, removing the paper ring that secured the bundle. Her breathing was a little fast, and her pulse throbbed at her neck.

Just the two of them, sitting at a restaurant. No weathered picnic table, no noisy, rowdy crew, no blaring tunes. No paperwork, no ticks and mosquitoes, no meeting agenda.

It felt like… a date.

Gabe glanced out the window, trying without success to ignore her luscious scent. So much had happened within the last twenty-four hours. Gabe’s presentation to the Council—which, under most circumstances, would be a career highlight—somehow seemed… insignificant now. The tense discussion he’d had with the alpha after the meeting barely registered. What lodged in his mind like a sliver was Lorin’s response to the question that Woolf had asked. “Loved ones are loved ones, regardless of their health issues.” Was it possible that Lorin didn’t see his genetic weaknesses as a barrier to a relationship? Or had she simply been making a point about the alpha’s attitude toward his own son?

Could both be true?

Then last night at Underbelly. He’d been eaten up with jealousy watching Lorin dance with that slinky vamp, but he hadn’t felt even one tug of regret seeing Kayla with her new bondmate.

Later, in Lorin’s bed, he’d shifted spontaneously in his sleep after making love with her. His wolf had known it was safe sleeping at her side.

Must be love.

He watched her shred her paper napkin. They could never turn the clock back, pretend they were simply work colleagues anymore, even if he wanted to. But now what? So many things were yet unsaid, but if he said too much—asked for too much—he’d lose her for sure.

“Why didn’t you tell me about your eyes?”

Her soft question, and the slight hint of hurt feelings under the surface, blindsided him. All these issues swirling around them, and
that’s
what she wanted to talk about?

“You’ll need surgery soon?” she prompted with an ideal balance of interest and concern. Not too blasé, but… not wigging out either, prompting him to offer comfort rather than accept it, as was usually the case. Before he knew it, he was actually telling her about the blurriness, the black voids in his field of vision, and in more detail than he’d felt comfortable sharing with anyone except Gideon. His head-tilt trick. How driving was sometimes a challenge, especially at night. That he’d discovered in the lab that using an old-school microscope was now pretty much beyond his capabilities. That only yesterday, he’d been forced to increase the default font size on his laptop.

She reached across the table to twine their fingers together. “Schedule the surgery, Gabe. What’s up at Isabella has been there for hundreds of years. It can wait a little longer.” As she asked pointed questions about the procedure, risks, and aftercare, her expression riveted him. Soft, caring, yet battle-ready. Willing to fight on his behalf—and apparently willing to postpone at least some of their work until he’d recovered and could join her again.

Their
work.

A weight he wasn’t aware he carried lightened. Tangling his feet with hers, he leaned in closer to the table separating them.

“Is your vision better or worse when you shift? Could you see me this morning?”

Shock rocked him back in his seat. She’d… seen him? Seen his wolf? And she’d still made love with him, with such sheet-tumbling abandon? “I’m blind when I’m shifted,” he admitted. He indicated his glasses. “Until Sebastiani Labs creates glasses for wolves, or implantable vision correction lenses that can bridge a shift”—he shrugged fatalistically—“I’m shit out of luck. At least in human form, glasses can help with the myopia.”

“But your other senses aren’t impacted? Scent, touch, hearing?”

Of course she’d focus on capabilities instead of deficiencies. Despite claiming to possess not a single molecule of sentimentality in her spectacular body, she was definitely a glass-half-full girl. And she cared for him. The question was, how much?

He had to know. “Lorin, what are we doing here?”

“Eating?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Shagging each other senseless?”

He couldn’t let her joke her way through this conversation. “I’m serious, Lorin.”

“Believe me, so am I.” Under the table, her sneaky foot stroked north along the inner leg seam of his jeans. “Excellent sex is no laughing matter.”

The waitress approached, carrying a circular serving tray. “I’d say not.” She looked at their linked hands as she set steaming plates on the table. “You folks enjoy,” she said, departing with an amused backward glance.

At the table next to theirs, a toddler screamed, gleefully pounding silverware against the tray of his high chair.

Hell.
Why had he broached such a sensitive topic at the busiest roadside restaurant in the state? No matter how the conversation went, he and Lorin would have to spend three more hours together in the tight confines of her truck—unless she decided to turn right around and drop his sorry ass back at his place.

For an intelligent man, sometimes he wasn’t very smart.

“You’re my lover, Gabe.”

The tone of her voice as she said “lover” made his stomach jump. He heard a banked sensual heat, exasperation, and affection—as if, maybe, he wasn’t just the most convenient candidate for the job. He said as much.

She shot him an annoyed look. “Gabe, I’m capable of sleeping alone if I choose. If I didn’t want you in my bed, you wouldn’t be there.”

“What about your adrenal condition?” he asked. “You need to leach off the excess hormones somehow.”

“There
are
other ways I can deal with it,” she replied, exasperated. “Run. Chop wood. Masturbate. Spar. Mike won’t spar with me, but nothing’s stopping me from driving south once a week and playing racquetball with Andi, or hitting the cage with Lukas, Jack, or Chico.”

His thoughts were still snagged on “masturbate,” but… “A cage?”

“Yeah. Have you ever watched mixed martial arts? There’s a sparring cage in the basement at Sebastiani Security.”

He thought back to the down-and-dirty fight Lorin and Chico Perez had been having when he first arrived at the dig. Her mud-soaked clothes had clung to her like a second skin. How barbaric—and how utterly, undeniably hot. “Is there mud in this cage?”

“No.” The toe stroking up his leg delivered a hard nudge, uncomfortably close to some sensitive flesh that had just woken up to join the party. “Sorry. No mud, no Jello, no chocolate pudding.”

“Pity.”

She picked up a plastic bottle of ketchup from the collection of condiments, adorning her meatloaf with a decorative squiggle. “Men have some very odd fantasies.”

Gabe didn’t waste energy denying it, but now he had one more thing to worry about. Lorin and Chico were pretty evenly matched. She and Jack probably were too; Jack was big but human. But the thought of Lorin fighting with Lukas—even as a workout—turned his stomach.

Those
damn
Sebastianis.
Picking up his fork, he asked the question that had been picking at him for ages. “Is your relationship with Rafe Sebastiani over?”

Her hand stilled, holding the ketchup bottle momentarily suspended. “Of course.” She set it down carefully. “Gabe, my relationship with Rafe was a friends-with-benefits thing. Pleasurable, convenient, until it was time to move on.” She shrugged. “He wanted to move on.”

Rafe
had ended it? “How could he not want you?” he blurted.

“Want wasn’t the issue, Gabe.”

The amusement in her voice made him visualize long hair and long limbs tangled together in artistically rumpled silk sheets. Hell. Rafe was an incubus—a frickin’ sex demon—with a reputation for hedonism even among his kind. How long would it be until Lorin felt the need to take advantage of her friend’s… benefits again?

Lorin put down her fork. “Gabe, Rafe and I are friends. You’re my… lover. The lover I choose. The lover I want.”

“For how long?” How could a half-blind werewolf with zero lineage and damaged genetics ever be enough for her? “I’ve gone and fallen in love with the Valkyrie Princess. Isn’t that a fucking laugh.”

She stilled. “You… love me?”

As Gabe dropped his head into his hands, the toddler next door shrieked again. Perfect timing, because he’d just dealt their fledgling relationship a deathblow.

“Gabe? Look at me. Please.”

Would she let him down easy, or chop him off at the knees? He’d almost prefer the chop. Surely some sort of obvious physical injury should accompany the pain that was already rising, ruthless as the tide.

Steeling himself, squaring his shoulders, he did as she asked—only to find her staring back at him with an expression he couldn’t read. At least she wasn’t laughing, or looking at him with the sympathy that signaled an “it’s not you, it’s me” kiss-off.

“I think about you when I should be thinking about other things. I look for you when you’re not with me. I can’t get enough of your body. You make me think. You make me feel. Damn it, Gabe. I don’t know what to do with this. With”—she gestured with a violent hand—“us. You scare the shit out of me.”

What? “I’d never hurt you, Lorin.”

She picked up her fork again, stabbing at her ketchup-coated meatloaf. “You… could. And that’s what scares me.”

Goose bumps sheeted over his body despite the room’s perfectly reasonable temperature. “Will you quit torturing that meatloaf and talk to me?”

She dropped her fork with a loud clank and glared at him. “I suck at this, Gabe. I suck at relationships. I don’t have the experience or the vocabulary.”

He swallowed down the laugh that pushed up in his throat. Damn, the woman could jerk him from sorrow to delight to feral need to inappropriate humor in seconds.
My
woman.
His face and fingertips started to tingle, but he fought it back. Taking her hand, he kissed it, licked her inner wrist with an ownership that he couldn’t hide, stared at her, knowing that his need and his love shone, undisguised, in his eyes.

She stared back, her dilated pupils shoving the mossy green out of the way. Muttering a curse, she stood, the legs of her chair scraping loudly against the tile floor. “Can we leave? Now?”

Lorin, leaving a full plate of food behind? He wanted to howl in triumph. Reaching into his back pocket for his wallet, he dropped a random wad of bills on the table, then grabbed her hand and tugged her toward the building’s entrance.

“Do you know how many gravel side roads there are between here and Isabella?” she murmured. She wrapped a proprietary arm around his waist as they reached the door.

“No, but I’m glad you do.” He nuzzled the delicate skin where her shoulder met her neck. He nipped. Her gasp of response grabbed him by the balls. His body pulsed, his muscles pushing and shoving from the underside of his skin.

“Hey!” their waitress called from the door, waving bills. “You paid too much.”

Not slowing down, Gabe called back, “Keep it.”

Hand in hand, they nearly jogged to the nearly empty overflow parking lot. Standing at the truck’s passenger door, fingers on the handle, he scanned the area. Hinckley’s city streets trailed off to forest and fields pretty quickly. There was a decent motel adjacent to the parking lot.

No way would he make it even a mile down the highway.

Lorin pushed him back against the passenger door of the truck, slamming her mouth to his, clutching at his hair so hard it stung. Without thinking, he pivoted, flipping their positions so her body was pinned to the sun-warmed metal door. Plowing his fingers into her surfer-girl hair, he held her head in place and plunged his tongue back into her mouth.

Her
taste.
He couldn’t get enough. His eyelids drifted closed when her tongue slid alongside his and back into her own mouth, teasing, drawing him in. Their bodies clicked together like puzzle pieces, aligning soft to hard, concave to convex, give to take. But under the softness, she was strong—strong enough to take his full weight, strength, and outrageous demand. He pinned her against the metal from torso to knee, pressing so hard that her soft skin must surely bear the imprint of his shirt buttons.

His breath dragged in and out of a throat that suddenly felt too small for the job. Denim rasped against denim as her showgirl leg twined around his upper thigh. Thousands of tires hummed and sang from the nearby highway. Birds chirped, doors slammed, and her soft moans of excitement, of need, seemed plucked straight from his most fevered dreams.

She pushed him away momentarily and fumbled with the door handle, cursing when it took several tries to open it. Finally, he heard a metallic click, the door swung open, and he found himself falling, tugged on top of her long, lithe body as she lay back on the truck’s big bench seat.