by Tamara Hogan
His first officer was absolute hell on his profit margin, and that he could not abide.
***
Gabe stood in front of the bank of old TV sets lined up on hand-me-down coffee tables in the living room area of the bunkhouse, a snarl of black wires in his hands. “No wonder your budget is so outrageous,” he called to Lorin, who was in the other room snapping sheets onto beds. Three different video game systems? Things sure had changed since he was a grad student working in the field.
Although it was evening, Lorin emerged from the other room wiping sweat from her hairline, dressed in a pair of those saggy-waisted cargo shorts she seemed to live in, and a tank top that bared her muscular shoulders and arms. Gabe had shed his light coat when they’d entered the bunkhouse, but he was still glad for his long-sleeved sweatshirt. The woman must have a blast furnace for a metabolism.
Walking to the battered refrigerator, she grabbed one of the Diet Cokes they’d loaded earlier, opened it, and drank thirstily. Swiping a wrist over her mouth, she said, “Most of the gaming gear is donated. Some of the students leave supplies here for future groups to use after their own field season is over.” She nudged the refrigerator with her boot. “Donated. The TVs are donated. Almost everything in here except the mattresses has either been donated or left behind by work crews over the years. You might have noticed there’s not a lot of nightlife in the area.” She looked around and shrugged. “It might not have all the comforts of home, but—”
“Pretty damn close.” Gabe appraised the bunkhouse, which over the years had taken on more of the patina of a frat house than an up-north hunting shack. In the living area, a trio of sagging, mismatched couches faced the bank of televisions, surrounding a big wood table scabbed with dings and water rings, perfectly positioned for feet or the next beer. A beautiful shallow pottery bowl—Rafe Sebastiani’s work?—sat on the center of the table, filled with remote controls, pinecones, condom packets, and spare change.
The readers in the group would probably prefer one of the two overstuffed chairs cozied up next to the table and lamp near the window. Bookshelves covered one full wall, loaded with board games, comic books and graphic novels, DVDs, random rocks, video games, photographs, and yes, even some books. The bare-bones kitchen to his left featured a battered sink with cold running water, a microwave, a toaster, a toaster oven, some mismatched dishes, and two full-sized refrigerators.
There was no hot running water and no indoor toilet, but with unlimited free Internet, video games, beer, pizza, and condoms, Gabe could see why the Schlessingers had hundreds of students applying for summer field positions.
Gabe peered into the other room, briefly considered claiming one of the bunks for himself, but just as quickly discarded the idea. He valued silence, and none would be had here.
“Want to take a run before hanging it up for the day?”
Gabe couldn’t help the snap of his head. They’d been working like dogs all damn day, getting the site ready for the crewmembers who’d start straggling in tomorrow, and she still had enough leftover energy to run? All he wanted to do was flop onto one of these hideous couches and not get up for hours. “Sure,” he said instead. If she had the energy to run, so did he, damn it. “Let me change and meet you at your cabin in five.”
She slammed the rest of the can of pop. “On our way back, we can swing by the sauna.” Dropping the empty can in the recycling bin, she sauntered out the door while he stood locked in place.
Sauna? Did she mean… bathe? Together? His face heated, and blood pooled in his groin. He knew that saunas were a historically communal bathing ritual, brought here by the Iron Range’s Scandinavian immigrants, but… just how authentic did she mean this sauna to be?
Authenticity be damned. He was going to wear his swimming trunks, which, thankfully, were very, very baggy. If she sauntered into the hot, cedar-scented enclosure wearing nothing but her birthday suit, he’d find a way to deal. Somehow.
Back at the tent, he changed quickly into his running gear and joined Lorin on the cabin’s deck. She had changed and was already stretching, wearing viciously expensive running shoes and clingy black leggings with a snag running from the left knee to ankle. On her next bend from the waist, she stayed down, a disgusted look on her face as she glanced at his feet.
Gabe fought his eyes away from the taut globes of her ass. “What?”
“You have really big feet.”
“So do you. What’s your point?”
“Just figures,” she said moodily, shifting over to give him some room to stretch.
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Lorin brace her hands against the picnic table and lean into a quadriceps lunge. Her muscles flexed and rippled as she deepened the stretch, deeper, deeper, until her crotch nearly rested on the heel of her running shoe.
She didn’t so much move as… flow from one movement to the other. What would she look like writhing underneath him, lost in the throes of passion? What would it feel like to have those legs twined around him as she shook apart in his arms? Absolutely spectacular.
Gabe cursed as his body responded. The sweatpants wouldn’t camouflage his condition very long. For a split second, he felt like a pimple-faced pup again, but he shoved the guilt away. An erection was an autonomic physiological response, nothing he could control. They were both adults here. A woman as beautiful as Lorin Schlessinger had certainly seen more than her share of inconvenient erections.
She pointed to the deck. “Footprints.”
She hadn’t noticed his condition; she hadn’t even been looking at him. Gabe didn’t know whether to be relieved or insulted. He crouched down beside her. Sure enough, there were muddy footprints on the deck in front of the window.
“Looky-loos.” At his raised eyebrow, Lorin flapped her hand toward the nearby town. “Trespassers. We get a couple every year, usually kids on a dare, or someone who’s drunk, on foot, stumbling home from Tubby’s.” She narrowed her eyes. “Though usually not this early in the season.”
Gabe examined the muddy footprints. The trespasser had a slightly smaller foot than he or Lorin did, and wore shoes with virtually no tread. The prints tracked from the cabin door to the window, and then trailed off the deck into the birch and pine trees. “There’s no mud today. Whoever it was must have been here yesterday. Anything missing from the cabin?”
“Not that I’ve noticed, but I wasn’t looking, either. I lock the door when I leave camp.”
As she went into the cabin to check her possessions, Gabe examined the cabin’s lock and doorknob. No pry-marks. The metal was smooth and unscratched.
Lorin came to the doorway, standing so close that even through the top notes of sunscreen and bug dope, he could smell her warm skin. “Doesn’t look jimmied,” he said, stepping back.
“How about you? Missing anything?”
“Shit,” Gabe muttered. Trotting back to the flimsy tent, he mentally ticked off his valuables. The prototype Bat Phone never left his body, even when he jogged. His laptop was stored in a locked file cabinet in the workshop, and he’d used it not two hours ago. Sweeping the zippered door open, he quickly scanned the few possessions he’d brought. Over in the corner, his duffel bag slouched, agape. He jammed his hand into it and fished around, past his own sunscreen, bug dope, and a small first aid kit, until he felt the hard clamshell case of his backup glasses, and the magnifying glass he sometimes needed for reading. His prescription eyedrops were still there. A sigh of relief escaped.
“Wow,” Lorin said from behind him. “What a mess.”
She was right. Like a teenager dithering about his first date, he hadn’t been able to figure out what to wear to go running—and bathing—with Lorin, and his clothing was strewn all over his bedroll and the floor. “It doesn’t look like anything’s missing,” he said after a cursory search of the rest of his tent. “Most of the scientific equipment I brought is still locked in the trunk of my car.”
Lorin sighed. “We haven’t had to be too concerned about
physical security around here before.”
“We are now,” he stated. “The data on our laptops alone is worth a bloody fortune to anyone who wants inside information about Sebastiani Labs. Imagine what could happen if someone hacked yours, with Council communications on it. The locks I’ve seen up here so far are pretty damn flimsy.”
“I’ll call Lukas, see what he recommends,” she finally responded. “There is such a thing as safety in numbers. The grad students will be arriving tomorrow, and after they do, you’ll have a hard time finding anyplace to go without tripping over someone else. This quiet, this… privacy will soon be a thing of the past.”
Thank gawd. Right about now, Gabe would appreciate having more people around. Anything to cut through this… tension that now wafted between them, as stubborn as wood smoke.
“Let’s check out the dig site.”
Gabe followed Lorin out of the tent. She locked her cabin, the workroom, and the bunkhouse before zipping the key ring in her jacket pocket, and then led them on a steady, single-file jog down a trail winding through the tall tamaracks and jack pines. Years of fallen needles carpeted the trail. Birds chirped, and something rustled in the underbrush. He focused on his footing, avoiding the strewn pinecones. Anything to keep his eyes off her ass.
Lorin slowed as the trail dumped out to a clearing, to the excavation site that looked nothing like it had in Alka’s season-ending status report last fall. That site had been neat and orderly, with the active area’s grids laid out with military precision, and shaded by protective overhead tarps. Now it was a muddy mess, and the shallow pit’s north wall was partially caved in. Off to the west, the treasure that the site had spit up years ago—the residence, dug into the side of a hill, with its priceless wall of glyphs—was protected by the pole barn that Alka had erected around its entrance.
Lorin worked her way over to the corner of the pit where he knew she’d found the command box, put her hands on her hips, and sighed. “I can’t tell whether anyone else has been up here or not. When I found the command box, I was on my feet, my knees, my stomach.”
Gabe’s thoughts skittered to Lorin sparring with Chico Perez, her toned stomach streaked with mud.
“We should be just about done with overnight frost,” she continued. “Once we know the dirt won’t liquefy under our feet, we’ll be able to grid this area off again.”
He pointed to a corner of the knee-deep hole, approximately twenty feet square, where a large ring of boulders was surrounded by rotted wood logs, too precisely placed to be random. “That’s the cooking ring?”
Lorin nodded. “Excavated last year. The charred wood dates back about a thousand years. I found the command box over there,” she said, indicating the other side of the pit. She fell silent as she stared.
He shivered, and not with the evening chill. If her theory was right, their ancestors’ ship had crashed nearby. People had lived here, died here. They were standing on hallowed ground. “Any indication of burial mounds?” he asked, loath to speak into the hushed silence.
“Not that we’ve found,” she responded softly, “but there’s a lot of the property that we haven’t yet explored. The radiocarbon dating aligns with our oral histories. Written records pick up in the early twelfth century, and most of those come from Europe. Wyland and Bailey are doing what they can to digitize and store what we have, but some of the documents are crumbling to dust right in front of us.”
Gabe listened carefully, all senses on alert. It wasn’t often that anyone not on the Council received any visibility into its inner workings. He’d been so busy dealing with Lorin as an epic pain in his ass, and more sensitive body parts, that he’d forgotten that she represented her species—hell, she represented all of them—as a Council member. It had to be a crushing responsibility.
He had to ask. “Why is a human working on our archives?” Prior to Bailey Brown’s arrival on the scene, Lukas’s business partner Jack Kirkland was the only human alive with confirmed knowledge of their existence. Dr. Brown’s very presence at Sebastiani Labs had lit up the office grapevine for weeks. One day he’d helped the little human shove a cart groaning with computer equipment over the lip of the elevator that led to Sebastiani Labs’ sub-basement, where the backbone of its network resided.
“Because she’s the best,” Lorin said simply. “She actually works for Lukas, and he’s billing Elliott through the nose for her time.”
“Quite a gig,” Gabe said. “Knowing Jack Kirkland certainly can’t hurt.” He couldn’t keep the cynicism out of his voice.
“Bailey would die before disappointing him. He’s her family.”
After an uncomfortable silence, Lorin gestured to the fire pit. “Mike and Paige will continue this work when they arrive.”
“They were here last year?”
Lorin nodded. “Most of the crew is returning this year.”
“No humans on the crew, right?”
“Nope.”
He nodded with approval. “Nice to have some experienced hands.” Yesterday Gabe had pulled and reviewed their applications himself. Mike Gill’s scholastic interest was forensic anthropology, and by all indications he was an impressive student, but Gabe’s long-dormant teaching instincts were piqued by Paige Scott, a faerie geologist who didn’t yet realize she’d be working on the discovery of the ages. Ms. Scott had done some very solid work last summer—potentially leadership-caliber work. Her signature had appeared on the most recent sonar, radar, and magnetic and metal detection assays, and her field reports were meticulously written. If he could trust Paige’s work, the box Lorin had found a couple of days ago hadn’t caused even the slightest ping during last year’s ground-penetrating radar sweep.
What kind of properties did such a metal have that it evaded all their tests? Gabe couldn’t wait to get back to SL and get his hands on the thing. If the schedule he and Julianna had worked out held, he’d have to wait a couple of weeks, but the thrill of the academic hunt already coursed through him, made him shift on his feet.
The discovery of the ages. The Lupinsky family, those damaged mutts, would have their place in the history book. A mere footnote, to be sure, but his name would be linked with Lorin’s for all posterity. The idea both satisfied and disturbed him.
“You’re shivering,” Lorin said. “Let’s head for the sauna.”
Gabe swallowed to lubricate his suddenly dry throat. “Okay.”
Lorin led the way, backtracking on the trail they’d taken to get here, and veering off on a side trail that led to the sauna sitting at the edge of the site’s small lake. “We’ll put the dock in and the raft out once it gets a little bit warmer,” Lorin said, indicating several large tarp-covered mounds near the shore.
He followed her into the sauna, a weathered wooden building that definitely looked like it had been there awhile, shivering in pleasure as cedar-scented heat bled into him. The sauna had the traditional two-room configuration, a changing area and steaming area, with a door in between. The changing area had a curtain that could be drawn to provide privacy, but it was frayed and dusty with disuse. Storage cubbies tic-tac-toed up one wall, and three were currently in use. He’d brought his swimsuit and his toiletries up earlier, and Lorin’s things already filled two squares. Amongst the shampoo, conditioner, lotion, and other detritus of femininity was a tiny mound of Baywatch-red fabric that hadn’t been there yesterday.
Swimsuits, then.
His eyes widened as Lorin reached for the zipper of her fleece jacket. Did she mean to strip down right here in front of him? Nudity wasn’t necessarily sexual in their society, but… sometimes it damn well was. He glanced at the curtain in quiet panic. How would he ever be able to face her across a conference room table if he saw her naked? If she saw him naked?
He swallowed with a quiet click. If she could do this, so could he.
Gabe toed off his running shoes, placing them neatly next to hers. Socks next. Taking a deep breath, he reached for the zipper of his jacket—just as Lorin shr
ugged hers off with a lithe movement that would be engraved on his retinas for a long time to come.
She closed her eyes momentarily, shivering with obvious pleasure. “Doesn’t that heat feel fabulous already?” She folded the jacket and reached past him to place it in a cubby.
When their bodies touched, she jerked back like she’d touched a live wire. With her jacket off, clad only in a duo of tank tops, her nipples pebbled under his gaze. Snatching her swimsuit from the cubby, she released the curtain from its ancient moorings, drawing it across the changing area with a puff of dust and a screech of rusty metal hoops. “Hurry up, I’m freezing.”
Gabe hurriedly undressed. Hearing her do the same without being able to see her was almost worse, because his imagination was aflame. While Lorin chattered about the summer crew’s qualifications, he stared at the long, narrow bones of her feet, the high arches, the toes tipped with pansy-purple polish.
Not at all what he expected from Lorin Schlessinger.
“Do you need some help over there? Hurry up.”
He glared at his unruly cock, currently standing at attention. Damn her for lobbing such an incendiary comment over this flimsy, ineffectual wall. She had to know where his testosterone-poisoned brain would go. Did she think him so neutered that he wouldn’t take her up on it? His cheekbones throbbed as he let the silence lengthen.
You can’t take her up on it, asshole. She reports to you—and she’s the Valkyrie Second. He might temporarily outrank her at work, but in every other way that counted, she was fathoms out of his league.
“Coming,” he said through the gravel in his throat. Let her make of his comment what she would. He quickly stripped off his clothes, folded them, and stepped into his swim trunks. He took a deep, cleansing breath and looked down at his groin. At least the baggy surf shorts provided some coverage.
He swished back the curtain and choked back a groan. Lorin was bent over in the bathing area, pouring warm water over her hair, her sighs of pleasure audible over the splat of falling water hitting the concrete floor. His eyes zoomed in, fetish-close, on her ass, on the skimpy red bikini bottom that revealed as much as they concealed.
