The cold smile lifting Cole’s lips promised murder. “He. Touched. You.”
I was about to snatch a knot in his metaphorical tail when the cold place crashed into me without warning, dumping ice water over my libido. Something was wrong was me, with him, with Thom, but what? As my head cleared, I examined the area for clues, but only one thing caught my eye.
Lacy petals clung with bees, their sweet perfume a tickle in my nose.
“The flowers.” Cole had landed feet away from where Thom had collapsed. “I think we’ve got a problem.” Cole clamped his hands on my hips. “Okay,” I squeaked when the hard length of him pressed into my lower stomach, and he thrust once. “We’ve got a big problem.”
The husky chuckle threading through Cole’s voice did terrible things for my self-control.
“Why don’t we take this to the porch?” I wiggled in his grip, which, yeah, probably not my smartest move. His pained groan ignited fresh sparks below my belt. I had to think fast, and then it hit me. “You don’t want Thom to see us, do you?” I rested my hand on the flat expanse of his chest. “You don’t want to share me with him, do you?”
“Mine,” he snarled an inch from the tip of my nose. “You belong to me, Luce.”
Giddiness swirled through me when he spoke my name. Mine. Not hers.
The reckless urge to close the gap between our mouths rocked me forward onto the balls of my feet, his lips one bad decision away from mine. A growl was pumping through his chest, and his grip on my hips turned bruising. The sharp bite of pain heightened the burn until I was ready to go up in flames with him.
The glacier coldness in his eyes stung with their intensity. “Tell me I can have you.”
Tell him, as in we were locked in a stalemate until I granted him permission to take this to the next level.
But was the plea one from a man who craved the woman with him? Or from a slave to his mistress?
I didn’t know, and since I couldn’t tell, I withdrew and sucked in air until my ovaries stopped threatening spontaneous combustion.
Maybe I shouldn’t be standing out here either. My grasp on the cold place was always tenuous at best.
“Let’s talk about this on the porch.” I backed away from Thom, from the field, and Cole stalked after me. “Here.” I patted the top step. “You sit right here and I’ll go —” I yelped as he yanked me onto his lap. “Okay. This works too.”
While Cole nuzzled me, his teeth plucking at the tender skin of my throat, I slid my cell from my pocket and texted Miller with 911. Generic, yes, but he was a smart one… and crap. He was also supposed to be meeting with Santiago and an out-of-town client this afternoon. Too late to untext him now. That meant it was up to me to figure out how to diffuse the situation, and there was only one quick fix I could think of for a guy in his condition.
“You know what really gets me hot?” I leaned in close and whispered in his ear. “The chase.”
A crimson sheen covered his eyes when he drew back to look at me. “Yes.”
The little bit I’d gleaned about demons and their feral sides had convinced me the primal hunt for a mate would rev his engine the same as any animal.
Thank you, Discovery Channel.
“Why don’t you give me a five-minute head start?” I eased out of his grip. “And then you can chase me.”
He caught me by the wrist and anchored me beside him. “I can have you if I catch you?”
Only one answer was unlocking the manacle around my wrist. “Yes.”
“Then go.” He released me and leaned back, resting his elbows on the porch, giving me an eyeful of the tent he was sporting in his pants. “Run.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice.
I bolted across the yard, hating to leave Thom unprotected, and hit the tree line seconds later. I pumped my legs as fast as I could, but I was human-slow, and Cole was demon-fast. I wasn’t kidding myself that I would win this race. The best I could hope for was luring him away from Thom while using the exertion to burn through the drugging effect of those flowers on him.
No clock was required to inform me when my time was up, a roar that silenced the forest blasted out from the general direction of my house, and my heart attempted to spring from my throat and scurry to safety. Thirty seconds later, I heard limbs snapping, heavy breathing, and punishing footfalls.
I almost sagged with relief when I spotted the stream up ahead and cut a hard right to follow its path. Almost there. Panic lent me speed, and I kicked it up a notch until the scenery blurred around me while I ran hell-bent for leather.
Cole paced me so close his exhales painted the back of my neck. His hands brushed my sides, seconds from plucking me off my feet, but it was too late. We had arrived. With a triumphant yell, I hit the crumbling edge of a ravine and leapt, pinwheeling my arms all the way down into the deep basin of the small spring-fed pond.
Icy water closed over my head and stole my breath, shocking me from the cold place. I was already swimming toward the shallows when the entire pond exploded outward as Cole cannonballed into the center. I had a handful of mud, was hauling myself onto shore, when his arms clamped around my middle and hauled me back against the furnace of his body. The sad thing was, under different circumstances, this might have been the singularly most erotic event of my entire life.
“Okay,” I panted through the stitch in my side. “You win.”
The spell broke with an almost audible snap as his sharp exhale whistled past my ear, and Cole rested his forehead on my left shoulder. “I don’t know what came over me.”
All that delicious heat flushing my skin from the run, the sting of his teeth, the strength of his arms, snuffed out in a blink as confirmation he hadn’t wanted this, hadn’t wanted me, pelted my ego like hail in a late summer storm.
“It wasn’t your fault.” I didn’t move for fear of startling him. “Thom was acting odd today, but I didn’t put it together until I found him on the phone with you. There are wildflowers in that corner of the yard, weeds mostly. We don’t mow that area. I don’t know what all’s growing there, but I think we need to find out.”
We lingered there a moment longer while Cole sank back into his skin, and then he released me, the rush of cold water chilling after his warmth. We trudged out onto the muddy shore together and started toward home. I stepped on a rock and hissed out a curse but kept going. It was one of many aches and stings in my soles I had been able to ignore up to this point. I could last a while longer.
“You’re not wearing shoes.” Cole glowered at my toes like they were each personally to blame. “It’s my fault you’re out here barefoot. I could carry you back.”
“Nah.” More contact with him would be like splashing alcohol in an open wound. “It’s not too far. Besides, I roamed these woods as a kid and survived. I came down here every day during the summers to swim. Maggie and I would…” A fist clenched around my heart. “We used to jump from that exact spot to see who could make the biggest splash. Dad almost had a coronary the first time he caught us. He actually hired a local contractor to deepen the basin so we wouldn’t break our necks.”
“You miss her.”
“I do.”
“She might not come back the way you remember.”
“I know.”
“She might not come back at all.”
“I know that too.”
That was it, the entire conversation. It was nothing fancy. No depths were plumbed. No souls bared. Just a string of bald statements uttered on both sides. He didn’t cast blame on me, and I didn’t volunteer my guilt. Yet somehow those few lines from him accomplished what Miller, through no fault of his own, had failed to do.