by Tamara Hogan
Gabe was almost certain the fragments embedded in the trees at the grove were metallic. The same metal Pritchard’s lockbox was made of? Gabe didn’t know, but after his morning meetings were over, he planned to harvest more samples and run some tests.
Lorin propped her forearm on her sledgehammer, swiping her wrist across her sweating forehead. Command boxes, tech units, and now glittering trees. There were too many things she couldn’t talk to the crew about, and the need for secrecy was driving her nuts.
“That’s a vampire kiss on your neck if I’ve ever seen one,” Nathan hooted. “Who slipped you the hard fang injection? Mike?”
Mike almost dropped a handle of the wheelbarrow. “Hell no.”
Lorin winced on Paige’s behalf.
“Ellenore…” Nathan singsonged to the only other vamp on their crew. “You and Paige hooked up last night and you didn’t let me watch? I thought we were friends.”
“Paige is adorable, but it wasn’t me,” Ellenore said from inside the shady gazebo as she scooped another cup of clay-laden dirt onto her sifting screen. The experimental sunscreen that allowed Mike to move freely about the site for several hours at a time unfortunately gave her hives. “Men and their deluded ménage fantasies.” She sighed. Squinting, she picked up a fragment from the screen, squirted it with water, and set it aside for later examination. “When two women get it on, they’re doing it to please themselves, not you. It’s so refreshing to sleep with someone who knows their way around a clitoris.”
Nathan stood with his hands on his hips. “Hey, I know my way around a clitoris just fine.”
Ellenore poked at the dirt with a grubby finger. “Yeah, dude, you fascinate me.”
Everyone burst into laughter. Ellenore’s deadpan delivery of Neil Patrick Harris’s classic line from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle had been pitch-perfect.
When Nathan launched into a defense of his sexual prowess before the pack, Lorin shook her head. Werewolves. So damn predictable—except when they weren’t. Why had she assumed that Gabe would be a careful, deliberate lover, and that she’d be in firm control of their sexual dealings? Her body still sang with a delicious soreness, and now she bloomed with a heat that had nothing to do with the quickly rising temperature. Mind back on business, Lorin. Dropping the sledgehammer, she chugged some water from her insulated canteen before joining Paige at the table sheltered from the sun by a tarp roof.
“Looks great,” she said, using her height advantage to peer down the neck of Paige’s shirt. Nathan was right. Though partially healed, the twin punctures on Paige’s neck was a classic vampire kiss. And still half glamoured this far into the day? Paige had found a strong one.
She didn’t know whether to be happy for Paige, concerned, or both. As she’d told Gabe, Paige was an adult, but in terms of real-world experience, she was a babe in the woods.
Mike joined them, leaning over to peer at Paige’s neck—not being nearly as covert about his interest as Lorin had been. “Get away from me,” Paige snarled.
Whoa. Lorin stepped between them.
“I just wanted to—”
“What you want doesn’t matter in the least.”
Mike’s solicitous big brother act was going to push Paige over the edge. “Mike,” she murmured. “I think Ellenore has another load of dirt ready for you.”
“Okay. Yeah.” Mike stared at Paige, finally stalking off.
“Everything okay here?”
Gabe. Lorin wheeled around.
“Everything’s fine.” Paige glared daggers at Mike’s back.
Gabe smelled like pine trees, wind, wet soil, and man. He stood slightly too close to her, but she didn’t have the strength or desire to nudge him out of her personal space. The rustle of fabric as their hips brushed sounded unnaturally loud.
“Okay,” Gabe said agreeably, clearly not buying it for a minute. “Lorin, could you spare Paige for a couple of hours? I have some satellite data that I could use her help with.”
The timbre of his voice swirled low, tugging at her core. She cleared her throat and nodded. “Sure.” Good idea to get Paige away from the dig, away from Mike, and give her a chance to calm down. “Paige, are you at a good stopping point?”
“Yes.” Paige saved her work, shoved her floppy pink hat and sunglasses into an already-bulging tote bag, and stomped towards camp.
“Is she okay?” Gabe asked.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted, “but getting her focused on something else for a while can’t hurt.”
He trailed his fingertips over her hip. “How about a run after dinner?”
“Love to.” There were hundreds of places along their running route where she could have him flat on his back in seconds.
Gabe’s gaze dropped to her lips and back again. They stared at each other for several seconds before he finally turned with a curse and trotted down the same trail Paige had just taken.
“She left Tubby’s with that vamp last night,” Mike said from behind her.
Lorin stopped ogling Gabe’s ass. “But she was alone when she got back to the bunkhouse?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded. At least Paige hadn’t been so besotted that she’d forgotten their rule against bringing guests back to the camp. There was simply too much to lose if information about what they were doing here got into the wrong hands. “She’s an adult, Mike.”
He stared at the trail. “Barely.”
Linking her arm through his, she walked them back to the lip of the pit. “Come on, we’ve all had an ill-advised one-night stand or two.”
Rather than laughing at her comment, or ruefully agreeing, his forearm tensed under her hand.
“Let’s start getting things cleaned up,” she called to the crew. “Anyone up for a swim?” She needed to do something to cool her jets until after dinner, when she and Gabe went running.
“Not me,” Ellenore said with a shake of her head. “The ice is barely out.”
Gretchen’s horrified expression was answer enough.
“Mike?” she asked.
“Not tonight.”
“Pussy,” Nathan said around a theatrical cough. “I’ll swim with you, Lorin.”
Mike strode away from camp without a backward glance.
Ellenore raised an eyebrow at the wheelbarrow full of dirt that he’d left standing beside the gazebo. Gretchen stared after him but stayed at her station.
“What is wrong with people today?”
“Just let him walk it off, Nathan. I’ll talk to him later,” Lorin said as she lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow and pushed the load to the discard pile.
Later. When Gabe said the word earlier, its promise had floated on the air like exotic incense. Now?
It made her feel… uneasy.
***
Sitting in the workroom a couple of days later, Gabe and Julianna talked via conference call, methodically plowing through the list of items needing his attention. Personnel issues. Purchase requests. Test results and status updates. He smothered a yawn. How the hell did Alka ever get any actual work done?
“Add a dependency here?” Julianna mused aloud, not waiting for an answer as she updated the project plan.
He hadn’t mentioned the bark samples. Not yet, not until he had a better idea of what they were dealing with—a challenging task given how little equipment he had on hand, and how poorly his eyes were working. So far he’d been able to confirm that the fragments he’d dug out of the tree were metallic, but that was all.
They had more urgent problems to deal with. For some reason, after initially agreeing that his staff could hold to the schedule, Krispin Woolf was dragging his feet. One more experiment. Staffing shortages. Unanticipated vacations delaying his team’s move. “What’s the problem this time?”
Three hundred miles south, framed in the rectangle of the conferencing software, Julianna threw up her hands. “The PM said there was an unforeseeable delay on their last remaining experiment. One more task, three days’ de
lay. He assures me this one will be the last.”
“That’s what he said last time.” Reaching under the lenses of his glasses, Gabe closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Maybe it was time to call in the big guns. He hated to do it, but… “I’ll ping Mr. Sebastiani, ask him to help encourage the Alpha to keep things moving along.”
Julianna nodded. “Some additional muscle couldn’t hurt. This issue’s escalating above our pay grade—” The screen blipped, and her voice and face winked out.
“Damn it.” This was the second time today that they’d lost electricity.
Leaning back in the squeaky office chair, he rubbed his stiff neck, rolled his shoulders, and gave another jaw-cracking yawn. He needed to get his own ergonomic office chair up here, pronto, or he’d end the season permanently maimed. It would probably help if he got some sleep somewhere along the way.
Nah. He was enjoying his sleepless nights way too much.
And dusk was falling. It was night again. Despite his tiredness, anticipation booted him from his chair. He plucked up his Bat Phone, tapping out a quick email to Jules telling her what had happened with the electricity, that he’d check in with her tomorrow, and headed to the networking closet—the closet he and Lorin had spent too much time in a couple of hours ago, when the balky grid had crashed for the first time. Everyone’s dinner had been delayed because Lorin had shoved him back against the closed door, dropped to her knees, unzipped his pants, and taken him to heaven with her wicked, wicked mouth before starting repairs.
The woman was going to kill him, but… damn, what a way to go.
They’d done more together than just have sex. No, there had been talking and laughter, and plenty of debate. He’d actually helped put in the dock and raft, and given the temperature of the water, it had damn well been a sacrifice. He’d taught and he’d learned; he’d worked solo… and in the midst of too many chattering voices. And… yeah. He’d had more sex. Lots of great sex. Mind-blowing, gut-busting sex. He’d never synced so quickly and so well with a new lover in his life.
And he learned things about her—intimate things. She hid her chocolate—the good stuff—in a tampon box but left the Hershey’s out for Nathan to steal. She kept a supply of condoms in her bedside table drawer. She wore candy-colored lingerie under her utilitarian cargo shorts and tank tops, in every color but yellow. She hated the color yellow. She couldn’t stay still long, flitting about the cabin, the dig, and the workroom like a sturdy hummingbird. She twitched in her sleep, her body expending energy even when she was at rest. He felt unaccountably proud that she’d fallen into an exhausted sleep next to him three nights running. That didn’t mean she turned in her meticulous paperwork anywhere close to on schedule—“I have more important things to do”—but a guy could dream.
Being that it was nearly dark, very little natural light made it from the workroom’s single stingy window to the dark room. Though he’d watched Lorin fix the equipment earlier and had memorized the repair sequence, there was no way he could do it in the dark.
The flashlight was in the cabin. With Lorin. He left the workroom, practically skipping across the camp’s central clearing. Mike, Gretchen, and Ellenore were roasting marshmallows at the big fire pit, their hair wet from either a swim or a sauna. Though it was warm outside, they’d all changed into light pants and long-sleeved shirts because of the mosquitoes. Paige wasn’t with them.
“Gabe, my man. Full moon tonight,” Nathan called from the bunkhouse door. He was bare-chested, and his hand was at the button of his already-saggy cargo shorts. “Wanna go for a run?”
Undressing for a shift. Gabe shoved down a supersized portion of resentment. “Not tonight, thanks.” If Nathan only knew how much he yearned to join him, to crash through the underbrush muzzle-first, to frolic in the woods on four fleet feet while moonlight stroked his fur, but his vision was even worse when he was shifted. As long as he kept to human form, he could wear glasses to correct the nearsightedness.
His vision had been so bad for so long that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d called his wolf.
“Okay, but you’re missing out.”
I know. “I have other stuff to do, but you have fun.”
Nathan glanced at Lorin’s cabin and grinned knowingly. “Yeah. Find me if you change your mind.” Turning, he went into the bunkhouse.
Gabe approached the fire pit, shooting a quick glance at Lorin’s open window. “Grid’s down again.”
Ellenore rolled her eyes. “Paige’s blow-dryer must have put us over the top.” She held out a metal stick. Speared on its end was a lightly browned, perfectly roasted marshmallow. “Want one?”
“Sure.” He’d managed to eat a hasty, wobbly kneed dinner earlier, but he’d passed on the blueberry pie because he hadn’t wanted to be late for his meeting with Jules. He carefully removed the hot, sticky treat, recognizing the roasting stick as one of the batch he’d grabbed to protect Lorin with the first day he arrived. Blowing on the marshmallow, he stuck the whole thing in his mouth, closing his eyes as his taste buds flooded with sweet, sticky sugar.
“How about a s’more?” Gretchen asked, already assembling one.
“I’ll take one for Lorin.” And share it with her. The gooey treat would taste better licked off her lips.
S’more in hand, he approached Lorin’s cabin, half hard already—and little wonder, given how they’d nearly burned the place down last night. Thankfully she’d had more condoms, because they’d worked through his supply at record pace.
Jumping onto the cabin’s low deck, he heard Lorin swear. He peeked in the window and grinned. She sat at the wooden table, a legal-sized document in one hand and a cheap, chewed-up pen in the other, surrounded by the blizzard of paperwork delivered by the courier earlier that afternoon—in a beat-up camper trailer, of all things. Though he’d received his own considerable pile of work papers and personal mail, Lorin’s stack definitely had his beat.
Her head lifted, whipping to the window. “S’mores. Gimme.”
“What’s it worth to you?”
“Come here and find out.”
His cock jumped at the lusty twist in her voice, and he couldn’t open the heavy door fast enough. “The grid went down again.”
She glanced at the front of his pants, and she quirked a grin. “And you don’t sound the least bit grumpy about it.” She peered at her open window, then tipped her head back against the top rung of the ladder-backed chair. “Kiss me.”
“Am I that easy to read?”
“Yes,” she replied, still smiling. “But in this case, we want the same thing. And I always ask for what I want.”
And she wanted him, at least for now.
Need wound tighter with each step he took. Even though she was seated and he was standing, even though she’d exposed her delicate, delicious neck to him, there was nothing submissive about her position. Her eyes burned, and her hands clutched his ass with clear possession. The juxtaposition about blew the top of his head off. He set the s’more down on the table. Cradling her head in his hands, he bent his lips to hers… and gorged on her. There was no other word for it. Their lips clung and clashed, their tongues teased and tasted.
Lorin licked her lips. “Marshmallows.” She shoved to her feet with a scrape of chair legs, wrapping her arms around him with a strength he’d have to work to escape—not that he was stupid enough to do any such thing.
He clutched her back with equal strength. Felt her breath hitch. With a quick pivot, he backed her against the table, stepping into the V created by her spread legs. Her clingy, navy blue leggings ended just below the knee, and a white tank top exposed both her muscular shoulders and distinct lack of a bra. It would take only seconds to remove the shirt, to feel the weight of her bare breasts in his hands—not that he needed them to be bare to touch and taste.
He bore her back against the table, his mouth quickly following. Her eyes drifted closed as she scooted her butt onto the edge of the table, lying back—righ
t on the s’more.
Recoiling, she sat up quickly, but not quickly enough to save the pile of paperwork and the s’more from tipping onto the floor.
They both stared at the upside down paper plate before bursting into laughter. “There goes dessert,” Lorin said woefully.
“Not necessarily.” Gabe licked her shoulder blade, where she’d lain in the sticky treat.
Lorin let him take several laps before pushing him away, bending down to pick up the fallen papers with a sigh. “I promised Willem I’d have all this back to him tomorrow. The courier will be back to pick these up at first light.”
The document at the top of the pile was an intriguing mixture of old-fashioned calligraphy and small point font. Must be Council stuff. “A deadline. Horrors.”
“Shut up,” she said without heat. “So the grid’s down again?”
Gabe nodded. “Paige’s blow-dryer.”
“She must have a date with that vamp,” Lorin muttered. “Damn it.”
“What?”
She took a deep breath and determinedly straightened her shoulders. “Nothing.” Crossing to the shelving unit next to the sink, she grabbed a flashlight and held it out to him. “Do you remember how I fixed the grid this afternoon?”
He remembered a lot of things about that afternoon. The feel of her tongue lashing his hard cock. The undulations of her throat as she suckled on him, swallowed down his hot seed. “You’re not going to help?”
Was that rumbly noise his voice?
“Dr. Lupinsky.” She sidled up next to him, so close he could feel her body heat. “Think about multitasking. Efficiency. While you get the grid up and running, I can finish up my work. Then”—she stroked her fingertip over his lower lip—“we can… play.”
Jesus. He nipped the finger with his teeth, then drew it into his mouth, curling his tongue around the digit to soothe and madden. The scent of her humid need burrowed in his brain stem like a dart hitting the center of the target.
“Go,” she whispered, giving him the flashlight and a hard nudge. “Hurry.”
“Back soon,” he said, giving her lips a short, hard kiss. As he left, he heard her cell phone ring. Then heard her answer it.
