Still, he was no telepath.
Hailey straightened in her seat as if she’d been goosed. By that, she of course meant that he didn’t invade her privacy whenever he pleased. It was nice to actually get to talk to a guy without him already knowing everything she was going to say. Who cared if she had to explain some things several times before he got it? That was part of the fun of holding a conversation.
And an added bonus was that she could keep her secrets undisturbed and just enjoy him lavishing her with his steamy looks and saucy remarks.
Except…
As much as she enjoyed hearing what Marco said to her, Hailey sensed the script behind his words. He didn’t flirt because he liked her, necessarily. He did it because she was a female wearing a bikini in his presence. It made her feel kind of cheap. And he definitely did not inspire any toe-curling fantasies. What was up with that? It wasn’t like she was looking for a happily ever after here. Hell, she wasn’t looking for anything at all.
But if she happened to come across a willing, steamy one-night stand she wasn’t going to turn it down.
In theory.
In practice, Hailey was pretty sure she actually had turned down several willing, steamy one-night stands recently. She might be a little rusty in her flirting skills but she was pretty sure that when someone said, “I know this amazing place with a hot spring,” it wasn’t an invitation to go sightseeing.
Marco’s eyebrows quirked down for a quick frown. “Something wrong?”
I’ll say! The damn telepath wasn’t even here and still he was messing with her head. It didn’t take a PhD to figure out why she was turning down perfectly good studs left and right. None of them were Jeremy Calen. How screwed up was that?
Hailey made herself smile. “Nah, just a bit too much sun, I guess.”
“Ah,” he said, a man who must have heard that ten times just today. “There’s room back here by the grill, if you want to duck in for a while. Although it does get a bit … hot, if you know what I mean.”
Oh, the lost art of punning. She hadn’t missed that at all. “What’s on the menu today, maestro?”
He grinned, not in the least affected by her lack of interest. “For you, I got something special. Paulo over there decided to do squid day today and forgot to tell his meat guy. So I have a pound of the freshest steak you’ve ever seen.”
Meat. Her mouth watered for a bite of juicy steak. Maybe a baked potato and a fruit cup to go with it. Side of succulent telepath and a bottle of bold red wine … yum.
God, what was it, snow leopard mating season again? Exactly how many did they have? And why couldn’t she have latched on to someone easier to deal with? Like Marco here.
Marco was giving her a strange look. If she didn’t knock it the hell off with the daydreaming about the telepath she’d scare off her social circle again. “You know, sometimes you look so beautiful to me; your eyes … they glow.”
Gulp. She forced a chuckle. “You’re such a sweet-talker,” she said, and did that girly, halfhearted, limp-wristed slap on the shoulder thing she’d used to be so good at. “Steak sounds like just the thing today. I’ll have that.”
Strong male arms slid around her waist, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. On her high stool she might as well have been standing. She felt his chest vibrate against her back when he said, “Make that two.”
No. Way.
Hailey twisted around, wondering if this was heatstroke or just a stroke of good luck. Bad luck, damn it! Remember? This was supposed to be vacation party time, celebrate life to the fullest, escapism at its best? No guests invited? Yeah, and just like everything else in her life, it was working out exactly as she’d wanted.
Or was it?
Jeremy looked like he hadn’t shaved in days—damn, it was a good look for him. Hellcat liked it too. She was making purring noises in Hailey’s head, pretending that she was rubbing her face against Jeremy. God, she was so easy!
“Hello,” Jeremy said, grinning like he’d just won the lottery.
“Not possible,” she said.
He scowled. “You of all people shouldn’t be so quick to judge things possible or not.”
Marco made a sound of enlightenment, so out of place in a surfer dude it was almost funny. “I see now why you resist me. But he would not mind if I borrowed you, no?”
Hailey knew he was winking and smiling that player smile again by the annoyed look on Jeremy’s face. “He most assuredly would. In fact, he would go so far as to beat the shit out of any guy who so much as looked at her inappropriately. Comprende?”
Hellcat thrilled at the territorial display. Even Hailey couldn’t say she was unaffected. She breathed in the scent of him, feeling about ready to swoon. She’d missed that scent. Her eyes grew heavy-lidded and she couldn’t keep from leaning into him a fraction of an inch.
“Sí,” Marco said. “I’ll go make the steak now.”
“Good idea,” Jeremy muttered. When Marco disappeared into the kitchen, Jeremy’s expression smoothed and he smiled at Hailey again. “Now then, where were we? Oh, yes. Want to explain to me why you ran again?”
“Well, gee, I guess it’s sort of in my nature,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it. Her voice was way too breathy to pull off indignation. Then she frowned. “Actually, it’s in my name, too.”
“Chase,” he said. Then, to himself, “Right. We’ll have to fix that.”
Hailey shook herself. No way was he just strolling into her life now, when he couldn’t even have been bothered to come see her at the lab. “What are you talking about? And why are you here? Another contract for the good Dr. Chase?”
He took a breath to say something then just grinned. “I suppose you could say that.”
“Well, you can tell her to find herself another guinea pig. Thanks for the save, but I am done and done with needles.”
“I’m not here for Amelia,” he said.
“Oh? What, then? You decided it was time for a vacation?”
“Maybe.”
“And just happened to end up in the same exact nowhere location as me.”
He shrugged. “It was either this or Everest Bay. My travel agent got me a deal.”
It was the sort of comeback she would have delivered. So completely out of character for him she didn’t know what to make of it. He looked different. More at ease, almost lighthearted, as if some great weight had been lifted from him.
Even as she stared at him, grasping for something to say, he smiled wider, his eyes twinkling. Hailey shook herself and scowled. “Stop looking at me like that!”
“Like what?”
Like you’re Prince Charming and I’m your happily ever after. “Like you don’t plan to look away any time soon.”
“Ah, my stubborn, sexy, pain in the ass, beautiful Hailey,” he said. His arms tightened around her, almost pulled her off her stool, leaving her no choice but to lean on him in a very awkward position. “There’s nothing else here worth looking at.”
“You’re going to make me fall.” Really? That was the best she could come up with?
“I would never let you.”
“Sometimes you have to fall to learn how to get back up again.”
“Sometimes it’s okay to let someone catch you.”
This conversation was veering off into the absurd. “Seriously, if I end up face-first in the sand, you’re a de—”
“Marry me.”
Hailey’s jaw went slack. She stared into his smiling eyes, more blue than black in the bright sun. He didn’t look away, or even flinch. He actually looked amused.
She was forgetting something … what was it?
Oh, yeah. Breathing.
Jeremy nudged her chin.
Hailey closed her mouth but that breathing thing still wasn’t coming to her. She pushed away from him enough to straighten in her seat. “I almost wish I was a telepath too,” she said. “I can’t begin to imagine what you could be thinking to say that.”
Jeremy sat on th
e stool next to hers and took her hands in his. “Let me show you.”
She felt him enter her mind like a physical caress. Hellcat curled up to him immediately and while he greeted her, he did something probably only another telepath would understand. Whatever it was, her eyesight went wonky, the entire world shifted, and then she was looking at herself through Jeremy’s eyes.
It didn’t last long. This wasn’t what he wanted to show her—although he did take a second to appreciate the way she looked in her tan and mini bikini. Then he closed his eyes and built an entire world for her. Beaches and mountains, lush valleys, dense forests, towns and cities filled with smiling faces, but that was all just backdrop. The main scene taking place was a house. Just a house, with flowers in the garden and on windowsills, cozy rooms inside with a fireplace. A home and hearth. A warm place to come back to at the end of the day.
And the two of them.
The tranquility of the picture shattered into thousands upon thousands of scenes of them together, laughing, smiling, fighting, sleeping, dancing, traveling, making love, yelling the lyrics to a very loud song; all the little things and the big ones, with friends and on their own. Hailey saw a snapshot from their wedding, lovingly framed and displayed in a place of honor on the fireplace mantle. In it, she wore a white gown but no veil, her hair pinned in an intricate knot at her nape. Jeremy held her off balance, leaned back against his arm. They were smiling, gazing into each other’s eyes.
The emotion of that picture was so powerful, so cherished, it almost felt real to her. She could almost remember that day with its hassles to get the last-minute details squared away, and the nerve-racking walk to the altar, the indecision and need to flee, which she stamped down almost completely by the time she came within Jeremy’s reach and he took her arm and looped it through his. Oh, how well he knew her.
But that moment, just as the photographer had captured it, was what held her captive in the imagined memory. If something as incorporeal and incomprehensible as love could ever be given shape, she was looking at it. It was there, in the possessive hold of Jeremy’s arm, in the tenderness of his smile, in the heat of his gaze. And she could see all those things mirrored in herself.
Alone or not, parents or not, it didn’t matter. That was why, of all the images he’d shown her, this was the one that stuck. The variables were endless, and that was all right. As long as the constant remained: Jeremy and Hailey together.
The image came closer, grew larger until she could distinguish the millions of pictures that made up that magnificent mosaic. Jeremy showed her an entire lifetime, fragmented into moments, flying by so fast, and yet each held some significance. Nothing was trivial. Each built on the next, all of them tying together in an endless chain of a sense; a feeling of such depth and width that it overwhelmed everything else. It said, I love you.
He showed her Hellcat, to tell her that just as the leopard had become a permanent part of Hailey’s life, the both of them had become a part of his. And he couldn’t get them out of his mind if he wanted to.
He didn’t want to.
His life had changed enough that it wouldn’t make sense now without them in it.
Hailey felt him squeeze her hands. She hadn’t even realized she was clutching his so tightly. “Foolish,” she thought to him. “To stake so much on another being. To be so completely dependent on them for your own happiness.”
“Call it a leap of faith,” he replied. She was leaning toward him and felt his raspy cheek against hers. His mouth was next to her ear but she didn’t hear what he said, only what he thought. “Don’t be afraid of this,” he told her. “I don’t need you to catch me. I just need you to leap with me.” At her ear, he whispered, “So we both can fly.”
Hailey returned to herself, dizzy and disoriented, with Jeremy the only point of focus. Her anchor. “From anyone else,” she said, “that would have been such a sappy line.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “But not from me?”
Hailey shook her head. “That’s what’s so insane. You actually mean it.”
“So what do you say? Want to get hitched?”
“Yes. Yes! YES!”
“Wait, we just decide that quickly?”
Oh, who was she kidding? She was in the most beautiful place in the universe, something she’d dreamed about for months and years, and still, if he didn’t take it back in the next five minutes she would leave it all in a heartbeat and move into a concrete cell if that’s what it took. “Well, Hellcat is all ready to jump on the happy joy-joy bandwagon,” she said drily.
Jeremy laughed. “She has good taste.”
“Try not to be so smug about it. She’s just horny.”
He was still grinning but now his blue-black eyes began to smolder. “Funny thing I notice about your Hellcat. She’s not really a separate entity anymore. She’s you. She thinks what you think, feels what you feel … even what you try to hide.”
Hailey blushed. Not like I’m known for my self-control. Even before she’d amped up her animal id to the max. That was probably it, anyway. If she just studied her blood some more, she’d probably find the underlying reason for her persistent … preference to one male in particular.
“There is absolutely a reason,” he said.” It’s been studied for centuries. Has a name, too: love.”
“Occam’s Razor,” she retorted. Just for the hell of it. “It’s far more likely that I’m just horny and you’re the most qualified to give me what I need.” Of course he already knew otherwise. Damn telepath.
“And you know I’m always happy to oblige, baby.”
The pet name made her snicker.
“So where does a guy go to get some privacy around here?”
Marco emerged from the kitchen and set two plates before them. “There is a lovely spot to the north,” he said, smiling big and wagging his eyebrows at Hailey. “Not many people know. I told you about it, remember?”
Jeremy’s grin turned into a snarl. “I’m going to kill him.”
Hailey bit back a laugh. That jealous streak of his was adorable. “Hmm, bloody murder, or an early wedding night,” she said and hopped off her stool. “Tough choice.”
When she turned north and started walking, swaying her hips for good measure, Jeremy was less than a split second behind her. “So where are we going?” he asked, openly projecting his refusal to go anywhere that jackass cook suggested.
Hailey just smiled. She turned to him and snatched him close for a kiss. His arms came around her, so tight her feet left the sand. It was the kind of kiss that happened in movies and books. The kind that left her breathless, and dizzy, and hot. A perfect ending to a love story, but it was only the beginning.
Where were they going?
When Hailey’s feet touched sand again and she looked at the man she loved, who loved her enough to go chasing her across the universe, Hailey answered simply, “Heaven, as far as I’m concerned.”
The End
About the Author:
Alianne is an avid lover of stories of all kinds. Having grown up with fairy tales in a place where it almost seemed they were real, it was no surprise when she began making up her own stories. She loves books, music, hiking, and archery, and won't shy away from travel and zip lining. Alianne graduated with a business degree and when she's not off in the land of fantasy, she lives in California.
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Blood Trails
Blood Trails Page 31