Her face went an even deeper shade of red.
“What about what he said to me?” she stammered.
“You provoked him, Teagan. The two of you are like matches and gasoline.” Harley added, much to my surprise.
She stared at us, and I waited for the storm to hit, her fury was palpable, but surprisingly enough she sighed instead, and said, he voice weak, “I know, but something about him is like nails on a chalkboard. I tell myself that I’m going to be civil, and not instigate anything, but then he walks into the room and it’s like I’m possessed or something. He brings out the worst in me.”
She sat down heavily on the couch, and with another glance at each other, Harley and I moved to sit on either side of her. We leaned back together and stared at the swirling whiteness. I hadn’t even asked where Gareth was, thanks to the fireworks that were Noah and Teagan, but now his image flooded my mind and my skin flushed. Where was he?
“I know your thinking about him. He’s working out in the garage. I’m surprised you and as-I mean Noah, didn’t see him as you came through the garage.” It almost pained her to say his name.
“How did you know I was thinking about him?”
“You get all glowy. It’s quite nauseating.”
I bristled at her tone. “You know, Noah said almost the same thing to me. It’s funny how the two of you are on the same wavelength.”
“I resent that.” She glowered at me.
“If it fits...”
“I don’t like you anymore.” She gave me a playful nudge in the ribs to counter the words, her bubbly nature resurfacing.
“But I love you.” I replied with mock sincerity.
“Can you check on Noah?” Harley asked me out the blue. I looked at her.
“Well, it is a blizzard outside and he was kind enough to go check.” She said with a pointed look at Teagan, who had sense enough to blush.
“He just left, he can’t be more than a mile up the road, and besides, you can call him too.” My voice had a hint of whine to it.
“I know, but you’ve spent the better part of the day with him. It’s more appropriate.” She nodded at me; case closed, I would do it.
“Okay, let me try something first though.”
I shut my eyes and relaxed my body like Noah had taught me, and concentrated on his image, but not like I would do to call his thoughts; this was just a quick peek at his face. I was rewarded with a picture of him driving, his hand thrown over the steering wheel, like he was driving on any day but a blizzard day. Cocky even when he was alone.
I opened my eyes and looked at them. “He’s fine. He’s driving.”
“Did he say anything?” Teagan asked suspiciously.
“I didn’t talk to him, just…tuned in, is the best way to put it.” I shrugged.
I was itching to find Gareth, which amazed me because up until a couple of weeks ago, I was a single, independent woman who had been, if not thrilled, at least happy to not be with anyone. Now I couldn’t be away from him. Strange how things changed in such a short amount of time. I decided to go looking for him instead of just calling to him.
“Christ, go find him. We’ll be fine without you hovering over us.” Teagan groaned, putting a pillow over her face.
I didn’t need any more prodding. I jumped up from the couch and went through the kitchen and mudroom to the garage.
The garage was a converted barn, with the stairs to the loft room that Noah and I had used on the back wall, with the rest of the ground floor sectioned off into the main garage and two work rooms. It was as immaculate as the house, without even an oil stain on the garage floor. I couldn’t even imagine what he would do out here. Maybe he was a carpenter at heart?
Gareth?
I called out to him, and instead of answering, one of the doors opened and he stuck his head out. His icy eyes lit with pleasure at seeing me, and I couldn’t stop myself; I ran to him, flinging myself in his arms. He held me tight against him, lifting me off the floor.
“I missed you.” I gave him a deep kiss, nipping at his bottom lip.
“We’ll have to be separated more often if this is the kind of welcome I get. I missed you too.” His voice was deep and smooth and poured over me like an aphrodisiac. He looked in my eyes and saw what was brewing there, saw the tremors coursing through me from being so close to him and his eyes darkened in response. With a groan he stepped back far enough to close the door and that was as far as we got.
He had my legs wrapped around his waist faster than I could blink and we were kissing each other frantically, as if we had been apart for decades instead of a couple of hours. My hands were in his hair, tugging and pulling, his were grasping my hips convulsively, my back pressed hard against the door. We tore at each other, frantic to feel heated skin against cool. I ripped his shirt open, pressing farther back into the door to use leverage and buttons went flying. I alternately bit and kissed his chest and he tore my shirt away from me, raked his mouth across my shoulder, buried his head between my breasts, and I was panting, gasping his name over and over.
He set me down briefly, but just long enough for him to rip off my jeans and me to tug his over his hips, then he was hitching me up again. I locked my legs around his waist and he drove into me, my cry of pleasure loud in the room. He pressed me back to the door, his hands curling over my shoulders, his mouth at my throat, kissing the hollow at its base. The climax built immediately, but he caught my gaze, held me there, and slowed his movement.
Not yet.
I could only nod, but the pleasure was building in me to a boiling point and I thought I was going to explode. He spun me around and laid me down across something cold so that I was staring up at him and my gaze could travel the whole beautiful length of him. He grasped my hands as he started to move again, rotating his hips, moving deeper into me. With another gasp of pure pleasure at the feel of him, I arched off the flat surface I was on and he bent over me, his mouth blazing trails of heat over my skin.
With a scream I came, wrapping myself around him, as if I could burrow into him, and he shuddered convulsively, his arms holding me to him as if he couldn’t let go. We trembled together, our gasps and groans echoing throughout the room.
When my heart rate returned to some semblance of normal, I looked up and grinned at him before I kissed him again.
My legs were like wet noodles, and my insides were still quivering, and I probably couldn’t stand if I tried, so I just held on to him, my breath leveling out.
His cheek rested on the top of my head, and when he spoke I could feel his breath stir my hair.
“I’ve never felt the passion that I do for you. It seems that I can’t get enough.” His voice was hushed, but I could hear the wonder in his voice, and it matched what I was feeling. Never in my life had I craved any one like I did him, and it wasn’t just the physical aspect of our relationship. I wanted to hear his voice, see his face, listen to his views on everything, argue with him. It would have been easy to think that this was just new, that eventually we would tire of one another, but I knew deep in the very basic part of me that he was who I was put on the earth for, and nothing could change that.
He leaned backward, our bodies still joined, and cupped my face in his big hands. He peered intently into my eyes.
“I have lived a long time, Anna, and what I’ve found with you is timeless. This goes beyond lifetimes.”
I would’ve melted if I had been standing. Speechless I kissed him again, and pulled him down to cover me.
When I could think coherently again, I looked around the room from where I sat trying to make my shirt presentable. It wasn’t working for me, though. The collar was torn at the neck, and three buttons were missing. Gareth’s shirt had no buttons, so it hung open, framing his muscular chest and stomach. I almost lost control again, but I held onto it.
In looking around, it seemed that Gareth had a few tricks up his sleeve; I was in a mini-replica of our lab at work, and the cold thing I was sitting on was
a long stainless steel table. I was impressed. A bank of computers ran along one wall, a spotless work area on the other, with a confocal microscope, digital microscope, genetic analyzer…this was a complete lab. He had enough hardware and software in here to start another research lab. A walk-in freezer was on the back wall.
“Wow, you don’t even really need to go to work, do you?” I marveled, sliding off the table and moving around the room, investigating everything. This set-up had to cost him…my mind couldn’t come up with that many zeros in its befuddled state.
“Comes in handy on really sunny days.” He came up from behind the table, a button in his hand. “I can’t tell if this is yours or mine.”
“Doesn’t matter, it’s not like I have a sewing kit to repair our clothes. We’ll just have to take our teasing with dignity and heads held high.”
He grinned at me, and I had to resist the urge to climb over the table between us and throw myself at him again. I hoped this was something I could get used to. It would be embarrassing to be out in public and have the sudden urge to jump him.
“You can do whatever you want to me, whenever you want to do it to me.” He chuckled and it made me laugh.
“Did you call the lab?” I asked, wandering around, poking into things.
He nodded as he went over to the confocal microscope, checked all the settings.
“They’re used to me not being there. I’m usually only there anyway when there’s a promotion, a discovery, a breakthrough, that kind of thing. Otherwise, I’m here or one of my other labs.”
“Other labs?” My curiosity was piqued. I knew about the blood banks, although he didn’t know I knew that, but I hadn’t dredged his name up in conjunction with other research labs.
“You know about the blood banks, but not the other labs.”
Crap, head was open.
I smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, trying to do research on you, but this was before Monday. I was curious about you, can you blame me? Here’s this tall, dark, handsome man from out of the blue who apparently NEVER comes in the lab, or so I’m told, and he seems unusually interested in me. Then I think I see him in front of my car that night, and he really does show up at my house, but I thought it was a dream. Yeah, I was curious.”
“It was a nice ‘dream’.”
My skin flushed, remembering that first night with him. “Anyway, yes I did research. That’s what led me to Written, because things about you weren’t matching up.”
He leaned on the counter, his long legs crossed at the ankles, arms across his chest. “Do tell.” He prompted.
I squirmed under his scrutiny, but I wouldn’t keep anything from him.
“Well, first thing that caught my curiosity was there was nothing personal about you, except for the funeral pictures for your parents, which I’m going to assume were not, err, real?”
He nodded. “The names are correct, but that’s about it. It’s a charade I have to play.”
“Okay, I can see that, but what caught my attention was the picture of you at the gravesite. You hadn’t changed. Even through a grainy news photo I could tell you hadn’t really aged. Granted, at first I thought you had just inherited really good genes, ha ha, but then I found the diary entry.” This was the part I wasn’t going to like because I wasn’t sure he knew about it.
He didn’t. “What diary entry?” His voice held no hint of wariness, just curiosity. This would change, I knew.
I took a moment to answer, deciding how to word this. The diary entry was what had pushed me in the direction that Gareth was a vampire. Granted, it was obscure, but I wasn’t the only one who could be curious about him.
“Someone who worked at one of your blood banks posted a blog on the internet. It was a diary entry, from a scanned page, and it talked about how this person knew that you were a vampire because he would find missing bags of blood, and when he reported the shortage to his supervisor, you, and I quote, ‘paid him a visit’.” I stopped at his thunderous look.
“That insipid, whining little bastard.” Yep, now his voice was low and fierce, the words spat out in precise enunciation. “Do you know what my visit was intended to do?” He looked at me, his expression incredulous. I shook my head, but I knew it wasn’t to hurt the guy. He could see that I knew it wasn’t anything bad, even if he hadn’t been linked to my thoughts, but he still looked unsure, as though he thought I was thinking something different and hiding it from him.
“I paid him off, that’s what I went there for. I paid him off and he had to sign a contract stating that he wouldn’t mention anything about me or the blood banks or what he found out. I paid that little shit four million dollars to go away!” He finished on a roar and I cringed a little, feeling his annoyance. He probably needed to know, but I didn’t want to give him another problem on top of what we already had.
I went to him and hugged him, and although his arms came around me, he was still distracted. “Gareth, nothing has come of it, and it’s been, what, eighteen years? Don’t let it bother you. Maybe I can hack into the site and delete it. I used to be a pretty good hacker, and you’ve definitely got the tools to accomplish it.” I waved a hand at all the computers and the servers. His chest moved up and down in a sigh, and again I marveled that he could take breaths even though he didn’t need to breathe.
“No, because if he monitors the site, he’ll know it was me.”
“Who the hells cares? He breached your contract. Let him go public with it. He’ll just look like an idiot, no one will believe him.”
He moved out of my arms and went back to the microscope, shaking his head as he went. “No, someone would believe him, if not in the mythical sense, but that I’m some freak that gets his kicks drinking human blood and my reputation would be ruined. I can’t risk it.”
“Don’t let him get away with it, Gareth.” I begged.
“I have to pick my battles, Anna, and that’s one that I’m not worried about winning. I have other things on my, on our, plate that needs to be taken care of first.” He gestured to the lab and to me. I nodded, but I still didn’t like it.
“So, what other labs do you have?”
He waved his hand, as if he didn’t want to answer the question.
“Uh, no. There will be full disclosure in this relationship.” I placed my hands on my hips, but the stern attitude I was going for was ruined by my shirt gaping open in the front.
“We can’t have secrets from each other?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow at me although his eyes rested where my shirt was opened. I yanked it shut and held it closed with one hand.
“No! Not one that big anyway. If you cheat in a poker hand or sneak a cigarette, well those are understandable.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Very funny.” I narrowed my eyes at him, and I was relieved to get a smile in return.
“Right, well, I have three other labs, all under different names. You can find them under Angus Mackenzie, Ian Fraser, and James Macrae.”
“Which is your real name?”
“Does it matter?”
I thought about it; no, it didn’t matter, it was just a name, but I was curious. “No, it doesn’t matter, I just want to know.”
“Gareth Ian Macgregor is the name I was born with.”
I nodded, then thought of something else that had made me question him at the beginning.
“You are obviously from Scotland, and when you’re around everyone but me and the gang, you have barely an accent. Most people think you were born here. How do you get around that?”
“You’re just full of questions today, aren’t you?”
I looked at him, wondering if my questions were bothering him. I linked into his emotions, but he was calm, no wariness or unease.
“I want to know you, like I’m sure you want to know me.”
We faced each other across the table, him leaning back on the counter, me leaning on my elbows on the cold surface of the stainless steel table.
“Right, well I had pare
nts from Scotland, no? So it would just be natural that the son of Scottish speaking people would have a slight accent. No one knew my ‘parents’, because they didn’t exist. It’s easy to make up a life, and I’m sure that you could run into someone local who would swear that they’ve dealt with my father, or shopped at the market next to my mother.”
“Well, I prefer the authentic accent, not the one you use in public.”
“Do you now? I’ll have to strive to not lose it, won’t I? Maybe we should spend some time in Scotland. Have you never been?” At my negative head shake he seemed to come to a decision. “We’ll go then. Not right now, but soon.”
“How do you manage the flight? Sunscreen and contacts?”
He grinned, like a little boy with a big secret.
“I have my own jet. It’s sun proof. Especially the bedroom.” He came around the table in a blur of movement and swept me in his arms, then dipped me and held me there, my hair dragging the floor and my surprised laugh echoing in the room. “Imagine fourteen hours of uninterrupted sex. You would be begging me to stop.” His eyes were dancing with mirth as he leered at me.
“I don’t think that I would ever beg you to stop making love to me.” I grinned like a fool back at him, loving this playful side of him. He gave me a drugging kiss, and then set me upright. My head swam briefly from the fast movement.
“It’s my turn for questions, though I know almost everything about you.”
“Really?” I drawled. I just wanted to be cocky; he probably did know everything about me.
“Really. We do a very thorough background check at Macgregor Biosciences before we hire someone.” He was obviously joking, and I remembered the conversation in his office a thousand years ago, or so it seemed; so much had happened since then.
“Then I can’t imagine what you want to ask me.” I said dryly.
He took my left hand and touched a finger to my ring finger, his expression thoughtful.
My mouth went dry and my heart started to race. Was this what I thought it was? Before the man could even speak, hundreds of thoughts ran through my head, how we hadn’t known each other very long, the argument still standing whether or not I would be turned into a vampire, but what he said was, “When I saw you that first day in the office, you wore a wedding band. Why?”
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