The Lawgivers: Gabriel (16 page)

She didn’t know whether to be
disappointed or relieved when he left it at that, left the upper
part dangling and crouched to scoop up water. He hissed as he
poured the water over the cuts from the cat’s claws and she felt a
flicker of sympathy but the truth was she was far too fascinated
with his bare flesh to really think about much else.

She crouched beside him, watching him
for a few moments. He flicked a glance at her and then, frowning,
ignored her. The muscles beneath his skin rolled and bunched with
his movements, fascinating her. She began to feel the urge to touch
them to see what it felt like.

For a few moments desire warred with
fear and then curiosity won out. Scooping up a palm full of water,
she poured it over one of the claw marks on his bulging upper arm
and then coasted her palm and fingers lightly over his
skin.

It felt amazing to touch him. It made
her belly do all sorts of strange things.

He stiffened, flicking her a sharp look
and Lexa jerked her fingers back reflexively. A muscle tightened in
his jaw. “I don’t need help.”

She felt her face redden at the rebuke.
Shooting to her feet, she rushed blindly back to the campsite in
complete disorder and scrambled into her pallet. Her heart was
still beating frantically in her chest. She wasn’t sure if it was
from fear or something else, but she thought it was a combination
of fear and that something else. She was embarrassed, too. She was
fairly sure that he knew she’d been more focused on touching him
than helping. Underlying all of that, though, was an odd sense of
hurt.

She examined the sense of hurt since
she didn’t want to probe her reaction to touching him too deeply
and realized that she didn’t feel wounded by his rejection of help
so much as she was hurt by the sense that he considered her foul in
some way and her touch revolted him.

She didn’t have to search hard to
figure that out!

As cool and distant as he was most of
the time, there was an underlying aura of contempt. He didn’t just
exude confidence. He exuded disdain and revulsion toward humans in
general —not her in particular, but it was clear that he lumped her
in with all the others.

And why wouldn’t he? She was nothing
special, no different, really, than any of the others.

She was almost sorry she’d helped the
asshole!

The spark of anger didn’t actually
ignite, but it was potent enough to chase away most of the
hurt.

Rolling over, she curled into a tight
ball, snuggled under her thin blanket, and closed her eyes
resolutely. He was nothing special himself, she told herself. She’d
touched him. His skin felt pretty much like human skin. The flesh
was hard beneath and silky smooth to her palm and fingertips, but
that really wasn’t so different either. Ralph was hard like that …
in places, his arms anyway.

So he had wings! He was a stinking
angel-demon!

Not that he actually stank. He actually
smelled good. But they didn’t belong here. None of them. They’d
just come from the stars and taken over and it wasn’t theirs to
take over. That was why everybody else hated them—well mostly. They
hated them because they were scared of them, too.

She should’ve just let the cat bite his
head off! Then she could’ve gone back to her old life—which wasn’t
great but it wasn’t that bad either. How stupid was it that she’d
helped the bastard when she didn’t even know what sort of evil
things he might have it in his head to do to all of
them?

He claimed his people were going to
help them, but how much of that could she really
believe?

For all she knew, they might eat
humans! It was obvious Gabriel thought of them as nothing but
animals.

And he’d laughed at her effort to help,
she recalled abruptly, feeling suddenly ashamed and
embarrassed.

* * * *

Lexa wasn’t happy when Gabriel
approached her, but she held her ground instead of leaping to her
feet and running.

She was sorry she’d been so stubbornly
determined to prove she wasn’t afraid of him when he crouched in
front of her and held out his hand. “Let me see your
hand.”

She eyed him distrustfully.
“Why?”

His lips tightened. “Wounds can get
infected really quickly here and humans don’t seem to fight them
very well. Let me see the burn.”

Reluctantly, Lexa held her hand out.
She figured she might as well because he looked determined and he
might deign to touch her if she refused.

He studied her palm without touching
her and then reached into a pocket and withdrew a small vial.
Removing the top, he caught her wrist with his free hand and then
tapped a little of the contents onto her palm.

It burned like holy hell! Lexa sucked
in her breath at the unexpected pain.

To her surprise, he blew on it, cooling
the burn. “It’ll only sting a minute. Don’t wipe it off. The pax
will prevent infection.”

Blinking back the tears that filled her
eyes, Lexa flicked a glance at his face. She discovered he was
watching her and for a long moment his gaze snagged hers. “What you
did last night …. That was a brave thing. Stupid, but brave. Thank
you for helping. But don’t ever do anything like that
again.”

Lexa blinked at him. Her face had
already started reddening from what she thought was a reminder of
the incident by the pool. It took an effort to change gears when
she realized he was talking about the attack. She didn’t know how
to take his comments—as praise or a rebuke. It sounded like
both.

She felt like agreeing with him that,
yes, it had been stupid. She should’ve let the cat eat him, but she
decided against it.

“Sorry, now, that you didn’t just let
that cougar eat me?” he asked, amusement threading his
voice.

A chill went through Lexa. She wondered
again if he could read minds.

He looked like he might say something
else. Instead, he straightened abruptly, capped the vial and shoved
it into his pocket again.

Lexa focused on her palm, but the pain
was already subsiding and, to her surprise, the burn wasn’t nearly
as red as it had been before.

They had wondrous things, the angels,
whether it was magic or not.

It was a damned shame they were such
assholes!

* * * *

Gah-re-al thought it had probably been
one of the worst mistakes he’d ever made when he’d followed Lexa to
the pool and then stayed to watch her bathe. It made no difference
that he’d followed her because he’d believed she meant to slip
away. That had been reasonable motivation for following her to
start with. It also hadn’t been a mistake to stay when he’d seen
what her intention was since she was under his protection and it
was immediately evident that she was deafened to danger by the rush
of water or she would’ve heard his approach.

Watching her had been the mistake. He
could’ve stood guard and protected her without actually watching
her. He should have retreated when he saw her intention and merely
kept an eye open for any threat.

Instead, he’d allowed himself to become
distracted, to become so deeply enthralled that he’d been as blind
and deaf to danger as she had been and that might easily have
gotten them both killed. He’d given in to temptation, telling
himself that it was nothing more than a natural urge for any male
to want to look at any naked female—primitive or not—a natural
curiosity to see how different the human female was from the
females of his own species. He hadn’t had a woman in a while, after
all, hadn’t had the time to appease his natural urges.

He’d already been far too interested in
her for his comfort, though, and watching certainly hadn’t
squelched his interest. Why he was interested when he certainly
shouldn’t have been, he didn’t know. He wasn’t inclined to examine
a physical attraction to a woman. He was attracted or he wasn’t. If
he’d been no more than mildly curious, though, he knew he wouldn’t
have watched her as he had. Once he’d seen that there was no
difference between a human woman and an udai—beyond the fact that
humans were flightless, which he already knew—he would’ve dismissed
her and retreated.

If he’d had any sense he wouldn’t have
studied her so raptly anyway, he thought derisively.

Before that incident, though, he was
fairly certain he’d had his libido firmly in control and his
interest was more curiosity than lust, more a product of having
gone too long without a woman than a particular interest in her.
Since then, he hadn’t been able to convince himself it was anything
else.

He’d spent a long, miserably
uncomfortable night trying to reason the lust away and he was
hornier now that he had been when he’d started trying to banish the
images planted so firmly in his head.

And for a primitive—a human
female!

A female so emaciated from
semi-starvation that he should’ve been repelled even if she hadn’t
been a human female!

He supposed the truth was that he’d
begun to see her in a totally different way as soon as she’d told
him everyone believed she was his woman. From that moment, even
though he’d been outraged at the suggestion, he’d stopped thinking
of her simply as an alien—a sexless creature that he was obligated
to protect—and seen her as a woman. He’d had to discipline his
thoughts over and over since then, but he thought he’d been
completely in control until she’d fired his imagination by asking
him why a woman would want him to fuck her. He’d wanted to show her
then and every time he’d looked at her since he’d been tempted to
broach the subject again to see if he could convince her to let him
show her.

Watching her bathe had just made him
more fixated on fucking her.

Stupid move, really stupid!

Evidently, she wasn’t particularly
attracted or interested in learning why, he thought irritably.
She’d been careful to keep her distance since, and not just
physically. He didn’t think that it was just his imagination that
she’d seemed to be losing her distrust, seemed to be warming toward
friendliness—something he hadn’t wanted to promote
anyway!

It had occurred to him when he’d
followed her to the pool and found her bathing that she might have
orchestrated the entire situation, that she might not have been
oblivious to his presence, but the look on her face when she’d
discovered him had pretty well squelched that fantasy. She not only
hadn’t been aware, she hadn’t been happy to discover he’d seen her
everything. She’d looked appalled not seductive.

His just deserts, he supposed, for
leaping to the conclusion that she was as manipulative and
calculating as Maya!

It was unfortunate that he’d been too
pissed off about the cat attack to seize the moment when she’d
touched him. He thought that had been more sympathy for his
injuries, though, than sexual interest and he’d been in no frame of
mind for seduction!

Which was a great pity because he was
fairly certain she wasn’t going to give him another
opportunity!

He should’ve been relieved by that
realization. He didn’t need the kind of complication in his life
that was likely to arise from that sort of liaison—if he should
achieve it. But he was just too pissed off—and horny—to feel any
sort of relief.

* * * *

In the ordinary way of things—before
she’d met Gabriel, at any rate—Lexa’s mind was usually preoccupied
with food and water and how to get both as she trekked across the
land. Almost from the beginning of their march, however, she’d been
preoccupied with Gabriel himself. Before the attack she’d been
focused on watching for an opportunity to escape and anxiety about
his plans for them, but mostly her own hide. After the attack,
she’d been preoccupied with her fascination with him as a man. The
incidents the night before and that morning before they’d gathered
their belongings and resumed their journey had successfully thrown
her into more conflicting emotions, though, and she was so deeply
engrossed in untangling her contradictory thoughts and feelings
that she barely noticed her surroundings.

The rebuff when she’d touched him stung
more than she would ever have admitted to a soul—more than she
wanted to admit to herself—but it was the source of a good bit of
anger. She thought most of that was anger directed at herself and
mostly from embarrassment. She didn’t think she would’ve been quite
as mortified if not for the fact that she suspected he knew why
she’d touched him. Maybe she would still have been discomfited and
angry about the rejection, but she would have at least had the
comfort of knowing he had been unaware. She didn’t even have that,
though, and that magnified her anger and humiliation.

If he’d just left it at that, she
thought she would’ve been far better off. She could’ve convinced
herself that she hated him and she didn’t actually find him
attractive at all. He was an asshole and that tarnished his
physical perfection to such a degree that it basically nullified
it.

But, no! He couldn’t even do that! He’d
felt compelled for some reason to act concerned about her and had
even unbent so far as to actually thank her for helping—even while
he’d fucked that up by, basically, reminding her that he didn’t
need her help or appreciate it.