Chase Me (5 page)

On the phone, Elliott said, “I expect you and Gabe to play nice, Lorin.”

Her stomach jumped. “Yes, Elliott.”

“I mean it. Don’t torture the man. No fighting.”

She eyed Gabe. “What if he throws the first punch?”

Elliott’s sigh was less patient this time. “Lorin, his job is going to be tough enough without you provoking him. Just stay out of his way. Do what you do best, and let Gabe do the same.”

Stay out of his way? How was she supposed to do that when he sat sprawled at her table like he owned it? As she watched, Gabe removed his glasses and cleaned the lenses with a small cloth he pulled from his pocket. It was like he’d removed body armor. As he stared myopically at nothing, she could see the flecks of silver in his icy blue eyes.

Sleet falling on Lake Superior.

She turned her back on him. “Okay, Elliott, I get it. Take care, and enjoy your Sunday. Okay. Kisses to Claudette. Bye.” The clatter of the handset sounded unnaturally loud in the small cabin.

“Tattling to the boss already?”

She stalked away from the phone, picked up the chef’s knife, and chose her next victim, a plump Vidalia onion. The first chop sounded like a falling guillotine. When she looked at Gabe again, his glasses were back where they belonged. “For your information, Elliott called me.”

“Okay.” His stomach growled audibly.

Guilt poked her again. No doubt her mother would be horrified at the hospitality she’d shown Gabe thus far. “Would you like to have some breakfast?”

“Thank you—as long as you’re eating too. Less chance of being poisoned that way.”

She rolled her eyes at him.

“What’s on the menu?”

“Breakfast pizza—a flatbread Mom and I learned to make when we spent some time at a dig in Ethiopia when I was young,” she answered. “It’s one of my favorite comfort foods—”
Lorin, you’re babbling. Just shut up.

But of course he’d picked up on the edge in her voice, and now he was watching her much too closely. “You’ve had a stressful few days, that’s for sure. Being quarantined isn’t an experience you forget.”

She flicked a glance his way before turning her attention back to her onion. Sounded like there was a bigger story there.

“Well, now that Wyland’s cleared you, you can dig and run and… fight to your heart’s content.” When he cleared his throat and started asking detailed technical questions about the sauna he’d just used, she knew she’d imagined the huskiness in his voice.

“It’s a wood/solar hybrid,” she told him. “We converted part of our grid to solar a couple of years ago.” When she walked past him to rinse her hands at the washbowl, she smelled her own shampoo. Somehow, on him, its crisp rosemary-mint scent seemed darker, less civilized.

He stretched a yard of leg under the table, crossing his booted feet at the ankles. “I was never so glad to see a building in my life.” He shot her a wry look over the rim of the steaming mug. “I was certain you were trying to kill me off with hypothermia.”

“Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind.” She wiped her dripping hands. “But don’t worry. If I wanted you dead, you’d see me coming.”

Gabe’s hand jerked, sloshing a tiny bit of coffee. “Sorry,” he muttered, catching the spilled liquid with a quick lap of his tongue before it dripped on to the table.

Lorin’s gaze locked on his mouth, and her sex gave a voracious clench.
Oh, hell no.
She knew she was hard up, but Gabe Lupinsky? Slick, ambitious,
annoying
Gabe Lupinsky? No.

But her traitorous body wasn’t listening to common sense, because rough and ready looked damn good on him. Unlike the corporate Gabe Lupinsky she had no problem ignoring when they were both at work, this Gabe hadn’t shaved, had towel-damp hair, and wore faded jeans that cupped him as faithfully as a lover’s hand. For a desk jockey, he had a pretty great body.

She assessed the subtle flexing of his forearm muscles as he drank the coffee. He had a pretty great body, period. He must work out, somehow. What did Gabe Lupinsky do when he wasn’t crunching numbers, squinting at a laptop screen, herding cats, and generally making her life miserable?

Gabe nudged an adjacent chair away from the table with the toe of his boot, indicating that she should sit down. “We need to talk.”

“Yes, we do.” Lorin sat but chose the chair across the table, trying to ignore the heat blooming between her thighs. Great body or not, they had to get a few things straight. Her mother wasn’t here to protect their find, so it was up to her to do it. “Reporting relationship be damned, you’re not in charge here.”

His face clouded with the first hint of temper. She hadn’t known he had one.

“Lorin, do you really think I want to be here, spending the summer living in a tent, with no decent coffee in a fifty-mile radius except here in your cabin?” Gabe rubbed his neck with his hand, looked at the beamed ceiling, then back at her. “You’re the one who screwed up. Don’t blame me for how Elliott chose to respond.”

Okay, that smarted
. “Have you seen the playback?”

“Not yet. I’m still waiting on clearance.”

She hoped Gabe thoroughly enjoyed the microscopic background check Lukas would perform before giving him access to the Underworld Council network. “Well, there’s no way that the box should have opened. I barely touched it. The metal is… unusual.”

“That much I’ve been told. I can’t wait to examine it.” At her narrowed eyes, he added, “Lorin, who did you think would analyze your find?”

Him. No matter how much he annoyed her, Gabe was the most skilled metallurgist and all-around geologist at Sebastiani Labs. Of course he’d be working with her on this project. She sighed and fidgeted in the chair. “Okay, cards on the table. You annoy me. A lot.”

“Same goes,” he immediately responded.

“Someone mark it on the calendar—we finally agree on something.”

Gabe took another sip of coffee, clearly considering his words before he spoke. “Listen. You don’t want me here, and I don’t want to be here. I’ll stay out of your way as much as I can. But we
will
present a united front to Elliott. I don’t care what kind of nepotistic connections you have to Elliott Sebastiani. I don’t care that you’re the Valkyrie Second. You report to me, and unfortunately, shit flows up the food chain as well as down. Your screwup is my screwup.” His gaze speared into her. “We won’t make another one of such magnitude.”

Her breath caught, but not with anger or fear. No, fear would be preferable. This was lust—sheet-rolling, wall-banging, bone-incinerating lust. Who knew that Gabe could be so… alpha?

He sighed. “Lorin, I have no intention of getting in your way on day-to-day operations—I’m buried up to my ass in my own work. But you can use me here.”

Lorin pictured his long, rangy body stretched out on her bed, those oddly sexy glasses dropped carelessly to the floor. She could think of a lot of ways she could use him—

He cleared his throat and stood, his neck flushed with ruddy color. “Maybe now would be a good time for you to give me a tour, fill me in on how things work here.”

“Good idea.” Breakfast be damned, she needed to get out of this cabin before she did something monumentally stupid. She stood too, crossing her arms over her pebbled nipples. “I can show you where we keep the space heaters.”

“Space heaters.” After a fleeting dirty look, he quickly schooled his expression. She had to give him points for control.

A phone blipped at Gabe’s waist. “Excuse me, I have to take this.”

Lorin’s eyes widened as he removed a Bat Phone from the leather carrier. “How the hell did you get one of those?” Lorin didn’t want one of the coveted Sebastiani Labs prototypes for herself, but the fact that Gabe had snagged one before she had a chance to turn one down smarted.

He grinned like the Cheshire Cat.

Game on.

***

Several hours later, Gabe sat in the outer room of his two-room tent, taking a breather before he started working again. Lorin had given him a quick tour of the site, pointing out the bunkhouse, the outhouse—Jesus, he was going to be using an outhouse all summer—but they’d spent most of the time in the site’s largest building, which housed a good-sized workroom on one side and eating facilities on the other. He’d immediately commandeered the one dusty desk in the workroom as his primary workspace.

They’d spent too much time in a tiny space Lorin called the Control Room, about the size of the stingiest networking closet at Sebastiani Labs. The room housed not only the backbone of the site’s computer network, but the brains of the idiosyncratic electrical grid. Earlier in his career, Gabe had happily rappelled into sphincter-tight crevasses and caves. Why had a six-by-six room felt so claustrophobic?

Lorin had been as ready to leave as he’d been, and he was finally, thankfully, alone in his tent, his home away from home for the summer. He was the proud borrower of not one but two space heaters, and a thick extension cord now snaked along the perimeter of the tent, providing him with electricity that he promised himself he’d use as sparingly as possible.

Now that he had firsthand experience with the conditions Lorin was dealing with, he’d cut her a little more slack the next time she called in late for a meeting. Network connectivity was dodgy, and the electricity, Lorin had told him, could be hit or miss. He’d been glad to see that the backup generator was gassed up and ready for action. Most of the devices he considered essential for daily life would be useless without electricity.

His phone blipped, and he snatched it off his waist. Tilting his head slightly to the left, circumventing the void in his field of vision, he opened the video his parents sent to him and his siblings. Gabe grinned as he watched his mother, in wolf form, pose in front of the shatter-topped mountains that time had shoved to the sky. It had taken every bit of his negotiating skill to stop his mother from coming home while his retina problems were being diagnosed.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he heard his father mutter. The picture jittered as he set the camera down on a rock. After a pause, his father trotted over to join her on four legs.

His parents looked healthy. Their fur was shiny, and they were moving well. The terrain they were covering was some of the most rugged and desolate on the planet, and the fact that his mother was navigating on three legs chilled his blood. But she and Glynna had never known anything else.

At least he had all his limbs.

Gabe stood abruptly. He had a steep learning curve on how the dig operated, and the filing cabinets he’d seen in the workshop office seemed as likely a place to start as any. Delving into files would also help him stay away from Lorin long enough to get his thoughts and unruly body under control. Exiting the tent and zipping it closed behind him, he walked to the workroom. Where
was
Lorin, anyway? She’d disappeared after helping him lay the extension cord in his tent. What was she doing?

It was… too quiet. He was used to the hustle and bustle of the city. What the hell did people do up here if they weren’t working? On the quick tour Lorin had given him earlier, she’d pointed out her running trails and the dock that the crew would help put in at the lake after they arrived. The local watering hole they’d eaten at last night, Tubby’s, was the closest thing to a social opportunity he’d seen. It was too depressing for words.

Well, he had his computer and a pile of technical journals. He could always catch up on his reading.

He could also remind himself of all of the reasons why sleeping with Lorin Schlessinger would be monumentally stupid—the first point being he was her boss. She reported to him, at least on paper. He’d never dated a co-worker, and he wasn’t about to break his rule with the Valkyrie Princess.

As he opened the workroom door, the phone gave a single blip, quickly followed by a second. High priority emails. Plucking the phone from its holder, he squinted and skimmed, a smile growing as he read. Lukas had finally authorized his access to the Underworld Council’s confidential workspace, and Elliott’s email approved Gabe’s request to retrofit Sebastiani Labs’ most secure facilities, a lab located in SL’s sub-basement, for this project. He tapped back a quick response to Elliott, confirming the timeline and thanking him for the speed of his response. Another blip; another message from Lukas:
Lorin will help you config your Council_Net access.

Yeah, right. He’d have to find her first. No, first things first. With a wince, Gabe opened the workroom’s sole file cabinet very slowly. “Hmm.” Instead of the unorganized mess he’d expected, crisp manila file folders lined up like soldiers on parade. He flipped through the files. Status reports. Geological assays. Budget. He pulled the file labeled “Training Records” and quickly flipped through its pages. Processes, procedures, confidentiality agreements, advanced first aid training… the records were current, complete, and clearly Alka’s work, thank god. Gabe was particularly glad to see the exhaustive inventory list of first aid materials, because Underworld Memorial was a good three hundred miles to the south, and they couldn’t exactly call a local doctor if someone got hurt. The injury log cited minor cuts and scrapes, a sprain here and there, a broken finger last season. Most of the entries were made in Lorin’s crabbed handwriting, and most of the injuries she logged were her own. He imagined her swearing up a storm as she did so.