The Serpent in the Stone (The Gifted Series)

by Nicki Greenwood

  She remained standing, wrapping herself in offended dignity.

  After a few minutes of charged silence, he sat forward just enough to pull a leather journal from his back pocket. He laid it on his knee and studied it as though it were a precious artifact, staring at it instead of her. “The man who attacked my family wanted something from my dad. I don’t know what. My dad wouldn’t cooperate, so the guy killed him. When I tried to fight back, the sick son of a bitch spent the next half-hour using telekinesis to draw little knife marks all over my back while my mother cried. Is that enough information for you?”

  Bile rose in her throat. She swallowed back the burn and sank onto her cot, rubbing her arms against the sudden chill in the tent. She longed to say something, but words lodged in her throat. They stared at one another for a long, uncomfortable stretch.

  At last, Ian spoke. “Anyway, there’s a reason I’m still here.” He opened the book on his knee and flipped through it. He stood and carried it to her, holding it out.

  She saw a beautiful pencil sketch of a falcon in flight. “Falco p. peregrinus,” she murmured, reading the words scribbled below the sketch.

  “A Eurasian peregrine falcon. An endangered species.”

  She searched her memory. “I thought they delisted the peregrine.”

  “The American peregrine was delisted. This is a different subspecies. I need your help with him.”

  “Him?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s a male. He’s been roosting on the cliff. I saw him the day before I dislocated my shoulder.” He closed the book, then put it back in his pocket.

  “You want me to help you—what? Take pictures?”

  “That, and get some information on his habits. You said you were a zoo minor. This is a big deal for my work, finding this bird out here.”

  “I have a full-time project going on, Ian. I can’t just leave it to help you with this.” Not to mention, the idea of working shoulder-to-shoulder with him sounded far too appealing, in spite of their mutual misgivings. She stole a sidelong glance at him. His attention was on the page. Expressive eyes. She remembered the way he’d looked at her the instant before kissing her. Hungry. Possessive. She wrapped her arms around herself to quell a giddy shiver and said nothing further.

  His gaze came up. “I left my work to help you with your necklace.”

  She hugged herself harder.

  He mistook her silence for reluctance. “If I help you dig, will you come climbing with me?” When she still remained wordless, he added, “What, I can’t manage a shovel?”

  Words. Say something. “What about your shoulder?”

  “I already said it’s healing. Besides, if the rope breaks this time, I’ve got you right there to back me up.”

  “Don’t joke about that.” She shuddered, not wanting to think of what might have happened to him if she hadn’t gotten there in time.

  He crouched in front of her. The motion washed his chalky scent and body heat around her. He stilled, seeming to realize how close they now were. She held her breath and jammed her hands between her knees to keep herself still.

  Those eyes. Those eyes traveled all over her. Curious. Cautious. Something more that was too dangerous to name. She shivered and wondered how it would feel if his hands followed where his gaze led. Shivered more, because as scared as she was, she wanted it.

  He snapped out of it first. “I’m calling a truce. Or trying to. Give me a day, two at most. I’ll help you for today, and you try rock climbing with me. If you don’t like it, we don’t do it.” He extended his hand.

  There was no way out of this but to touch him. She took his hand. The sensation of his warm skin on hers set off a shivery chain reaction that started from the tips of her fingers and traveled all the way down to her feet. She couldn’t let go. She wanted to stay angry with him for the way he’d cornered her. Outraged. Something. Anything that didn’t feel quite so much like the need to kiss him again. Flustered, she dropped his hand and jumped to her feet to move away.

  Ian stood, too. “Please help me with the falcon?”

  Absorbed in the movement of his mouth, she hardly registered his words. Her pulse raced. She managed a nod.

  He reached for her hand again and shook it, smiling a little. The contact surged through her body. His gaze dropped to her mouth and the smile faded. Her every nerve screamed “Kiss me,” and to hell with their baggage. Do it, just do it.

  As if he’d heard her thoughts, he bent his head closer. His gaze caught hers and sizzled.

  A wild shriek from outside brought them reeling apart. Faith. In an instant, her fog of desire washed away in a flood of fear. Sara bolted from the tent to see what had happened.

  Dustin stood at the edge of the dig, chuckling. Faith sprawled on the ground several feet away, shaking with laughter.

  “What’s wrong?” Sara called. God, she was getting jumpy.

  Her sister clambered to her feet and windmilled her finger in the air. “We were doing the victory dance over the good news, and I slipped.”

  Thomas ambled toward them with a bucket of tools. “Don’t get victorious just yet. We’ve got a long way to go, and that’s not counting the uncertainty of finding any artifacts.”

  “Spoilsport,” Faith groused.

  Sara felt Ian come up behind her. Her skin tingled in response. “We’ll have help,” she blurted. “Lambertson’s coming in a few days with more people. And until then, Ian’s offered to pitch in.”

  Faith, Dustin, and Thomas swiveled as one to stare at her. Sara took a quick step away from Ian. “In exchange for my helping him with his wildlife project. I’ll need a couple hours the next few afternoons. I’ll make up the time after dinner...uh, doing charts or something.”

  Okay, now she was babbling. And why did she feel like she had to explain this to them? She wanted to go back to her tent and crawl under the cot in mortification.

  “Lambertson,” Ian said. “He’s a big-time archaeologist, right?”

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “Luis Rivero talks about him all the time. Lambertson’s kind of like his god.”

  Sara gave a small, edgy laugh. “Yeah, he has that effect on people. I guess we should start by giving you a tour of our project, then?”

  “Sure.” He cast a meaningful glance back at her tent, but then he grinned and started toward the ruin.

  She offered up a silent prayer for strength, and jogged after him.

  As she showed Ian around the dig, the team fell back into the rhythm of their work. The men appeared delighted to have another strong back to add to their crew, if only for a little while. Faith didn’t seem so easily persuaded. Her sister labored over a plot of earth with her shovel, not speaking. Sara picked up another pair of shovels for herself and Ian, then descended into the pit.

  Faith glared at her. Not now, Sara mouthed, glaring back.

  For most of the day, she worked side-by-side with Ian on one end of the excavation site. He asked intelligent questions, and listened to her answers with a scientist’s ear. His interest in her work surprised and pleased her.

  She found it hard not to stare when he hefted shovelfuls of earth as if they weighed nothing. Thunk. The shovel bit into the peat. Shoosh. Soil and stone hissed off the metal blade and sailed into the wheelbarrow outside the pit. Almost before that scoop had thumped to a rest in the wheelbarrow, he’d started on the next. The sheer physical demand of digging often left her body aching by the end of the day.

  Ian seemed to have enough stamina for both of them.

  Heated flames poured into her cheeks and she looked away…but not for long. Her gaze returned to him as if drawn by a magnet. He’d thrown aside the fleece jacket as the day’s warmth increased, and the back of his T-shirt was dark with a vee of sweat. His hair lay plastered to his scalp. A bead of perspiration ran down his unshaven cheek. Did men have any idea how sexy they looked while doing manual labor?

  He caught her eye and smiled. The work seemed to have loosened
his knots where she was concerned...or at least he was willing to put them aside for now. “Tired already?”

  “Already? We’ve been at it for hours.” The remark didn’t sound right the minute it left her mouth. He grinned, and she knew he’d caught the unintended double meaning.

  She bent over her shovel and thrust it into the peat. “How’s your shoulder?” she flung at him.

  “Fine. How’s your ego?”

  “What?”

  He laughed, full and throaty. The sound rang out across the moor and vibrated in her spine. “I think I’ve done most of the work here. Not bad for a rookie, wouldn’t you say, Doc?”

  She scanned the pit and saw that he’d cleared over half their plot while she’d been lost in her thoughts. With a look of chagrin, she said, “You’d have made a decent archaeologist.”

  He leaned an elbow on the handle of his shovel. His dimples resurfaced. “I can find more interesting ways to get dirty.”

  Was he flirting with her? Why was he flirting with her?

  Did she dare flirt back?

  Should she?

  Oh, God, how she wanted to.

  Dustin’s light-brown head was bent over the sieve box. Thomas had taken away another wheelbarrow of peat. Faith swung a pick into the earth a few plots away.

  Ian cast an eye at the lowering angle of the sun. “Ready to get out of here?”

  “Yeah.” She wiped sweat from her brow and came away with grimy fingers. “Ugh.”

  “We could go for a swim first.” He leaned closer and his smile vanished. “I promise not to sneak up on you this time.”

  His nearness almost overwhelmed her. Every molecule of her body seemed to fizz with awareness of him. The very air between them heated. “I don’t—”

  “For crying out loud, you two. Go swim!”

  Sara jumped and spun around.

  Faith laid her pick over one shoulder and wound her way through the markers. She grabbed Sara’s elbow and pulled her a few steps away. “I can feel the sparks shooting off you two way over there,” she hissed in Sara’s ear. “You are scrambling me. Get out of here so I can hear myself think, for God’s sake.”

  Horrified, Sara said, “I am not sparking.”

  “In about five minutes, I’m going to radio the fire brigade from Unst to come put you out. Go.” She gave Sara a little shove in Ian’s direction, then stomped back to her plot.

  “What was that all about?” Ian asked, pushing sweaty bangs off his forehead.

  “Nothing. Let’s get out of here.” She walked ahead of him toward the edge of the pit, as fast as she could without making it look like running.

  Chapter Six

  Ian stared as Sara waded into the inlet without looking back. She shivered as the water inched up her slender legs. His gaze traveled up the back of a sensible red bathing suit that had driven the sense right out of him the instant he saw her in it. There was nothing wrong with looking at her, he told himself. But oh, God, she had curves in all the right places.

  Then she ducked under and came up with water sluicing down her back, and he wanted to do a whole lot more than look. Get in there, you idiot.

  Dustin had offered him a pair of swimming trunks—quite possibly the ugliest Ian had ever seen. He’d refused. His jeans were good enough. He hoped they would also do a better job of keeping his growing interest in her dripping, hourglass figure in check.

  Before he could embarrass himself, he stripped off his T-shirt and tossed it on the sand beside his jacket. He strode down the beach and splashed into the water.

  Cold water jolted his exertion-heated body, and he huffed in surprise. His arousal fled before an onslaught of chills. Thank God for that.

  Watching him shivering with the sudden cold, she laughed. His pulse jumped at the soft sound as though she’d touched him.

  He’d thought that by forcing her to admit to her abilities, he could drive away the blazing desire to kiss her the way he had the night of the storm. Even now, he battled the urge to feel her satiny skin under his hands again.

  She was everywhere, damn her. At his camp, she haunted his waking hours. A chill would fly up his back as he worked. He’d get the feeling that if he just turned his head, she’d be there waiting. Hair whipping in the wind, arms reaching for him...

  He’d have taken a hundred such days over the nights. At night, his dreams boiled with images of a blood-covered man who ordered Ian to help her.

  What he wanted right now didn’t qualify as help.

  “Ian. What’s on your mind?”

  “I thought you could read minds.”

  “I can. I choose not to. It’s invasion of privacy.” She waded closer and sank neck-deep.

  Good thing she felt that way, because the direction of his thoughts might have earned him jail time. Below the water’s surface, he saw the glint of gold in her repaired necklace. The stone pendant rested just above the curve of her breasts, onyx-black against her opaline skin. He warred with himself, aching to kiss her, longing to retreat.

  She backed away and dipped to her chin. Her hair swirled on the water, dark and slick as sealskin. “What’s so important about this falcon of yours?”

  Good, a safe topic. “Aside from being an endangered species? I’m hoping for a breeding pair.”

  “Was there another?”

  “Just the one. If he has a mate, I haven’t seen her yet.”

  Breeding? Mate? Okay, maybe not so safe a topic. His body agreed in the most painful way possible. Should have gone with the ugly shorts, he thought, wishing he could loosen the fit of his jeans without being obvious.

  “So the falcon is why you haven’t left for Mainland?”

  Yes. No. “Partly.” Frustrated, he dove underwater for some distance. He waded back up the inlet until the water level dropped to his waist, and began stretching out his shoulder.

  “Does it hurt much? I can’t see how digging all day has helped it,” she said.

  “It’s all right. Better than it’s been. I’m off the painkillers, at least.”

  He heard water slosh. He looked around and confirmed that she’d submerged.

  She surfaced right in front of him. “Will you tell me something?” she asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “When that man attacked your family...”

  He angled a look at her. She wouldn’t meet it. “Say whatever you’re not saying,” he prompted.

  She took a breath. “Did his eyes change color the way mine do?”

  He stopped working his shoulder and frowned. “I don’t remember.”

  She knew he was lying; he saw it on her face. He remembered like it had just happened. One moment, the man’s eyes had been nondescript brown, and the next...

  Then came the knife. Then his father’s grunt of shock, and the thud as he crumpled to the floor.

  Days earlier, Ian had seen someone else call an object across thin air. A tiny waif of a girl, and her eyes had changed, too. After his father’s death, he’d gone out of his way to avoid her.

  Until now.

  Sara’s lips parted. “Did he...? How did he...?”

  Her gaze flicked away and back like an indecisive dragonfly. Ian saw how much she yearned to ask the questions he didn’t want to answer. He steeled himself. “You want to know how much like you he was.”

  “Never mind,” she said, too fast. She turned and started to wade off.

  He caught her by the hand. “Gold.” He let go, and wished he hadn’t. “Just before it happened. They were gold.”

  She crouched in the water. Ian, still standing, tried not to think about how close she was to his groin. He flew through a mental recital of the Latin name for every bird he could think of. When that didn’t work, he sat down in the shallows beside her, shifting furtively to ease the tightness in his pants, and the conflicting tension in his neck.

  “He did the same thing you did,” Ian said at last. “With your necklace, as a kid. Raised his hand and—” He reached into the air and waved his fingers.


  “It’s not the same,” she said at once. “I’m not the same.”

  He dunked his head backward, washing off the rest of the sweat. Saltwater trickled stinging into his eyes, and he wiped it away. For a time, they both fell silent.

  “My sister has pyrokinesis, among other things,” she said at last. “Fires, she can light fires. She could be dangerous, but she’s not. We’ve never hurt another person in our lives.”

  “And your father?”

  “I never saw him do anything like what Faith and I can do,” she said. “But he was a good man. A good father.”

  “So was mine.”

  Bird cries sounded in the air over the surging of ocean on rock. Ian looked up. A flock of gulls passed overhead. Reminded of his work, he got to his feet once more. “We should go.” He offered his hand to help her up.

  She took it, but released it again as soon as she’d gained her feet. Wet tendrils of her hair settled in the hollow between her breasts. Ian gritted his teeth. Elanoides forficatus, Buteo jamaicensis, Pandion haliaetus. He spun away, then stalked out of the water after his shirt and jacket.

  She’d brought a sweatshirt and jeans. He found it easier to breathe once she’d put them on over her bathing suit.

  But not by much.

  ****

  During the walk back to Ian’s camp, he explained the basics of rock climbing. Sara tried to listen, but couldn’t concentrate. She told herself she only lagged behind because she was thinking about his climbing instructions, but then she looked up.

  He’d tucked his shirt and jacket under his arm, and she had an uninterrupted view of his naked back. She followed the line of his broad shoulders, down through a mesmerizing vee to his narrow hips. As he walked, she stared at the play of muscle. He had such a beautiful back. She hated to linger on the scars.

  Seeming to notice she’d fallen behind, he paused. “Something wrong?”

  She shook her head and hurried to catch up.

  They said nothing more until they arrived at his tent. He showed her how to buckle his spare belt and ropes and adjust them to fit her body, then donned his own gear. “Ready?” he asked.

  “You know you’re crazy to do this kind of thing voluntarily?”