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.
She didn’t understand him at all, but she thought she needed to pound it into her head that he was as contemptuous of her as he was all the other humans. He tolerated her presence only because he was doing his job. He didn’t want her as his woman. He didn’t even think of her as woman. He despised humans—and that included her.
Unfortunately, it was really hard to focus on building up a wall of defense, on convincing herself that she despised him when she’d spent so many days fantasizing about the man … because she’d already more than half convinced herself that he was interested in her as a woman. That attempt at self-defense was made more difficult by the images that kept flickering through her mind and refused to be banished, images of how he’d looked with the moonlight glistening on his damp skin. Because every time those pictures rose in her mind’s eye, she felt the same breathless excitement/fear she’d felt then, when she’d struggled to get up the nerve to touch him, as if she was standing on the edge of a cliff and felt some unseen force pushing her to take the leap.
She couldn’t leave it alone no matter how many times she brought her thoughts to a halt and redirected them. She kept worrying it over like an aching tooth. He was like the dancing light of a campfire, fascinating, mesmerizing, tempting her to try to get closer and closer even though she knew she was going to get burned if she got too close.
It dawned on her after a while, when she’d exhausted herself going back and forth with ‘I hate him, I hate him not’ what the other thing was that made her keep going over and over the memory of the attack.
There hadn’t been anything but moonlight to illuminate the scene, but she had good night vision and she finally realized when she allowed her mind to focus on the attack itself that she’d seen the cat that had attacked Gabriel better than she’d thought she had at first. Well enough that the ‘something’ strange about it finally hit her.
The cat was sleek and strong and well fed.
Most of the animals she saw looked like the people she encountered—skinny and underfed. Like it was for her, survival was a constant battle. There never seemed to be enough food and there was always so much work that needed to be done to get it that there was no filling out the bones.
So where had the cat come from that it looked so well fed?
Emerging from her focus on her thoughts after a while, Lexa scanned the terrain around her. Was it pure imagination, she wondered, or was there a lot more green than she was used to seeing? Less bare, scarred dirt?
Pausing after a few minutes, she moved away from the group and crouched down to examine a patch of green. It wasn’t moss as she’d thought, which was most of what she generally saw that was green. Instead of the ‘furry’ mat, this was tiny, thin blades. Frowning in confusion, she glanced around from her lower vantage point and saw that even what at first appeared to be bare patches of dirt had tiny green sprigs.
They weren’t all the same. There were different shades of green and some of the blades weren’t long and thin but more rounded and shorter.
Different plants, but all young and just sprouting from the soil.
It reminded her of Sir’s fields—except he never managed to get so much to sprout and his was confined to narrow rows.
A shadow fell over her and she looked up to discover that Gabriel had come to stand over her.
Irritation flickered through her—and discomfort.
Ignoring her frown, he crouched beside her. “The new seedlings are sprouting,” he said with satisfaction.
“These were planted?” Lexa asked in surprise, immediately forgetting her discomfort and anger that he seemed to watch her so closely.
Gah-re-al sent her a look of surprise. “You’re familiar with planting?”
It was actually insulting, Lexa thought with fresh anger, that he thought she didn’t know anything at all! “Sir planted things,” she said stiffly. She decided not to elaborate. He hadn’t had nearly this kind of success and she wanted to put Gabriel in his place, not reinforce his conviction that humans couldn’t do anything. “So your people planted this?” she asked when he looked like he might pursue that line of questioning.
Something flickered in his eyes. “They spread the seeds. They’ve been genetically altered to adapt to the conditions. This world has had a drastic climate change since those plants grew here naturally.” He lifted his head, surveying the terrain. “From what we can determine.”
Lexa wasn’t certain she understood much of what he was talking about, but it triggered a memory from her childhood. “Sir said it was different after the bomb.”
He sent her a sharp glance. “Bomb?”
Lexa shrugged. “They didn’t know what it was. Nobody saw it, nobody that lived anyway, that I’ve ever heard. Sir said his parents thought they had dropped the bomb, though.”
“They who?”
She shrugged again. “Just they. His parents never told him who ‘they’ were. They weren’t even sure that was what happened, but there was fire and then the sky was full of clouds and the sun could barely shine through at all and that’s when everything began to die and there only seemed to be one season—winter.”
“Assuming it actually was his parents and not his grandparents … two generations … more or less,” he said speculatively, then added with conviction, “It wasn’t a bomb.”
Lexa frowned. “How do you know?”
“Any bomb capable of so much destruction would leave enough radiation to make this a completely dead world. Nothing would grow for hundreds or thousands of years … if ever again. There are areas with elevated radiation but nothing significant enough to make the bomb theory work.” He looked down at her, studying her speculatively. “Your father’s parents told him about it?”
Lexa was
n’t sure she liked his interest. The questions made her uneasy, mostly because she could see it wasn’t idle curiosity. “Yes.”
“So he was born after?”
She was sure of that point. She shook her head. “He talked about ‘after’, but he remembered ‘before’. I was born ‘after’.”
“How old …? Do you know how old he was?”
Lexa stared at him blankly, trying to figure out what he was talking about.
“How many years since Sir’s birth when it happened? How many since his birth would Sir be now?”
“Birthdays?” Lexa asked when the mention of his birth triggered a memory.
Gah-re-al struggled for a moment to come up with the reference and finally recalled that it was their word for each anniversary after their birth—at least the builders had. So maybe that was why Lexa seemed different than the others? Maybe her father had been descended from the builders just as the man she called Sir seemed to have been? “Yes.”
“He had ten birthdays before. He used to talk about the birthdays. He said they were pretty and they tasted wonderful. They put candles on them and set them on fire.”
Gabriel stared at her blankly, confused when he’d thought moments before that he knew what she was talking about, but although he knew that the old ones had celebrated births and anniversaries of them, nothing she’d said seemed to coincide with anything he’d learned. She seemed to be talking about a thing rather than an event.
After a few moments, he realized it was a dead end anyway. She didn’t seem to understand the correlation between birth anniversaries and age. He might as well take a wild guess himself.
Not that he supposed it mattered a great deal. He’d been told to get as much information as he could so that the khabler, the archeologists, could crosscheck it against the data they were collecting and the theories they’d come up with, but wild speculation was as useless as their theories.
“Is your father—Sir—still alive?”
Lexa felt a jolt go through her at the question. Partly that was because it triggered a flood of memories she’d tried very hard to block from her mind. Mostly, though, it was because it struck her abruptly that there was more than idle curiosity behind the questions. He was looking for information and she was suddenly uneasy about his motives.
Not that there was anything he could do to Sir—she was certain he was dead. And for all she knew the man who’d fathered her was, but the fact that he’d asked seemed to indicate that he—meaning the angel-demons—was looking for others and she wasn’t about to help them, not when, regardless of what she’d been told, she had no certainty of why they wanted to track all of her people down. Finally, she merely shrugged.
“You don’t know? Or you don’t want to say?” He hooked a finger beneath her chin and forced her to meet his gaze when she didn’t answer. She struggled to assume the blank mask she always wore when any show of emotion was liable to set Ralph’s temper off.
Not that looking perfectly blank ever really made him happy.
It didn’t satisfy Gabriel either. After a moment, he released her, rose to his full height and strode away.
She watched him, feeling the brand of his touch fade slowly away. Lifting a hand, she rubbed the spot, wondering why it almost felt like a burn, why she could still feel the ghost of his touch. His hand hadn’t felt overly warm and he hadn’t held her hard enough to bruise.
It was strange that so slight a touch could make her feel so very peculiar.
Chapter Ten
Gah-re-al had moved beyond much in the way of reasoning ability where it concerned Lexa—or more specifically his balls. It was one thing to abstain when there was no choice because there was no woman available. He was actually able to put sex out of his mind for periods of time and focus completely on whatever task was at hand. It wasn’t a great deal harder to manage his libido when the only females within range didn’t appeal to him or were downright revolting.
He’d never been a great hand at ignoring the demands of his body when there was a woman damned close that did appeal to him, however, and he’d given up on trying to convince himself that Lexa didn’t.
Because his mind and his dick were in complete disagreement over that issue.
He spent part of his time trying to think of some way to get her alone—away from the prying eyes of the villagers—part of the time berating himself for not seizing the opportunity to fuck her brains out when he’d had the chance, and the rest of the time trying to figure out some way to put some distance between her and himself before he did or said something truly stupid.
Contrarily, when he finally emerged from his preoccupation sufficiently to notice his surroundings and realized that they were within a few days of the rendezvous he was far more dismayed than relieved. Happily, it occurred to him shortly behind that realization that his proximity to the rendezvous point meant that he was close enough to Maya for a quick visit to assuage his physical distress—if he could come up with a reasonable (in the eyes of his superiors) excuse to abandon his charges to take care of it.
A growing sense of desperation eventually provided the solution.
They were dangerously low on supplies. Of course, they had been since the onset of their journey. The resources of the village hadn’t been abundant enough to provide what they’d needed for such a grueling trek. If not for the fact that the villagers were accustomed to starvation rations he doubted they would’ve gotten as far as they had before they ran completely out of food.
If hunting the newly introduced wildlife hadn’t been forbidden they could have done far better in rationing the supplies they’d brought.
They needed rations to supplement the little that was left or the villagers were going to be too weak to make the rest of the trip.
And high command’s refusal to provide medical attention for Lexa when he’d felt it was warranted was a perfect excuse to go in person to requisition supplies.
He was still uneasy about leaving Lexa. She’d been attacked when he’d left her with the villagers before. But he managed to convince himself that he wouldn’t be gone long enough for them to grow brazen enough for another attack even if he hadn’t managed to convince them that the penalty for assault was steeper than they’d want to pay.
When he’d settled them to make camp, therefore, he left, heading directly to headquarters to report. He wasn’t surprised that it took longer than he’d hoped it would to make his report and request the supplies, but he was irritated … and anxious about getting back.
Indecision wasn’t something he was accustomed to, but his uneasiness about leaving Lexa with the villagers had seriously impaired his sense of time. Did he dare take more time for a visit with Maya? He decided he could afford it. He thought he’d reached the point where he couldn’t afford not to.
Maya had a visitor. He didn’t know why he hadn’t considered the possibility—unless it was due to the fog swirling in what was left of his brain once he’d allowed the fever to take full possession—but he hadn’t. He didn’t in fact tumble to it for many moments. He met Maya at her door with a searing kiss and an all over greeting with his hands to prepare her for what he was about to bestow upon her—weeks of frustration and a buildup of semen that was liable to put her in orbit.
It took more than a few moments, in fact, for it to penetrate the heated fog of his mind that, although she’d returned his kiss after only a momentary resistance, she’d planted her back against the door frame and firmly resisted his attempt to dislodge her and sweep her inside. When that finally clicked, he broke the kiss and lifted his head to look a question at her.
There was uneasiness in her gaze and nervousness in the false smile she pinned firmly on her face. “I didn’t think you’d come by. I have … a visitor.”
Gah-re-al stared at her blankly. When it finally sank in, he flicked a glance over her head. A quick sweep of what he could see of her living area failed to reveal any visitor and his mind leapt, not unnaturally, to her bed chamber
—which had been his goal—assuming he couldn’t convince her before they got that far.
Discomfort, disappointment and anger swept through him in quick succession. “You’re entertaining,” he said flatly, trying to decide if the anger was from jealousy or just vast disappointment, more than a little outraged that she’d chosen this moment of all times to decide to fuck somebody else—in the middle of the day at that!
She flushed. “I got the impression the last time you were here that you didn’t care.”
His lips tightened. Her fishing expedition for a jealous reaction, however, immediately doused his anger. He released her and stepped away. A vague sense of nausea washed through him.
He thought it was a physical reaction to the abrupt deflation of his cock.
The Lawgivers: Gabriel Page 13
