Natural Evil (Elder Races #4.5)(18)

She shook her head, her eyes smiling. “I owe you too, at least a few Heinekens. Maybe even a diner dinner.”

“Right,” Jackson said. He heaved a sigh as he looked around the trailer. “Don’t bother to lock up when you leave. I keep hoping somebody’ll steal that old TV.”

Chapter Six

Death

Claudia followed Jackson to the door. Luis turned away, giving the other two their moment alone. He shook out a pair of faded blue sweatpants, held them against his waist and considered the length. They ended mid-calf.

The door opened and closed. Then Claudia expelled a soft gust of air, and he knew without looking that she was laughing. “You’re going to look like the Incredible Hulk.”

“I know,” he said.

“Give me those,” she said. “I’ll hack off the elasticated hem.”

He handed them over and inspected the T-shirts in the bundle. They were all too small for the width of his shoulders. He gave up on the clothes, tossed them aside, and went to raid the fridge for the beef dinner. Suddenly he was ravenous. He didn’t bother to heat the meal in the microwave. He found a fork and started shoveling food in his mouth.

Claudia remained silent. Without looking at her directly, he was aware of everything she did, every breath she took. She picked up the blankets from the floor, folded them and set them in the shadowed alcove on the bed. Then she rolled up her sleeping bag. She didn’t waste anything, not a single motion in anything she did or a single word urging him to explain. She waited for him to speak in his own time and every spare, fluid movement she made was pure poetry.

Fuck, his whole body tightened at the sight. He wanted her more badly than he had wanted anyone or anything before in his life, and to be frank, up until this point, he had been a promiscuous bastard. Desire was a fire dancing underneath his skin.

All too soon the dinner was gone. He used the last of the rolls to sop up the cold gravy and gazed at the empty container. Then Claudia spoke, sounding amused, “There’s more food in the fridge. Eat anything you want. Eat everything.”

He gave her a grateful look and dove into the fridge to polish off all the lunch meat, a half loaf of bread and several individual containers of yogurt. He ate quickly, to fuel his taxed body rather than for enjoyment. He was just finishing the last container of yogurt when he heard an odd noise, and he remembered he had heard it earlier as well.

Shuffle, flip.

He looked at Claudia, sitting at the table on the end of the L-shaped couch. She had finished hacking off the elasticated hems of the sweatpants and set the pants on the table. Now she was shuffling a deck of cards. She flipped over the first seven cards, scooped them up, reshuffled the deck and flipped over the top seven cards again. The deck gave off a faint glow of Power.

Intrigued, he walked over to her, and his reaction to her proximity was so strong, his c**k stiffened and began to tent the sheet. Quickly he snatched up the sweatpants and held them in a casual way so that they draped in front of his groin.

Claudia looked up. He noted with deep satisfaction that she glanced at his bare chest and averted her gaze quickly. She had so much innate poise that any slight, telltale sign of reaction she had was as loud to him as a shout, and her clean scent, still with that hint of gun oil, now carried dusky notes of sexual attraction.

He loved it. He loved her. The carved, sensual maturity of her features was totally unlike the girlish, rounded faces of the young women he had known. She was so far beyond anyone he had ever been involved with, complex and nuanced, sleek as a bullet and just as dangerous. He’d had no idea that someone could embody everything he admired and also capture every ounce of his desire, until she had.

He knew without being conceited that nature had been prodigious in its gifts to him. He had more than his fair share of looks, physical and intellectual strengths, and abilities. Until now he had cruised through life at half-throttle. He played at dating and wallowed in sex, and it all came too easily for him.

It was all too simple, until he encountered Claudia. Now something that had been curled tight inside of him and asleep his whole life awoke, and expanded, and said, Now there’s a challenge worth striving for.

And hell’s bells, his body was out of control. He could not get his flag to fly at anything below half-mast.

He felt the sudden urge to growl, bend over and kiss her lavishly. He wanted to fling all the rest of the world’s considerations away. He wondered what she would do if he did, if she would kiss him back or push him away… Man, he had to grab at the nonsense galloping around in his head and rein it in hard.

Because the rest of the world’s considerations mattered, so much so he had shed blood and nearly lost his life over them.

Her attention had turned back to what she was doing. He watched her deal out the first seven cards from the top of the deck, and he recognized the god on each card as she turned it over. Nadir, Camael, Hyperion, Taliesin, Will, Azrael, and Inanna. The Depths, the Hearth, Law, the Dance, the Sacrifice, Death, and Love.

Then she scooped them up, shuffled the deck—really shuffled it, he saw—and flipped over the first seven cards, and all the gods appeared again.

Well, damn.

“What are you doing?” he asked, growing fascinated, despite his runaway hormones.

She said, “I’m giving my hands something to do until you’re ready to talk.” Was her voice a touch huskier as she replied?