Marcus Pelegrimas - Blood Blade

Holding up his hands, Cole said, “No problem. Honest mistake. Don’t worry about me.”

Paige smiled and nodded. “Good. Thanks.” It wasn’t clear whether she was talking to him or to whoever was on the phone.

As she turned her back to him, Cole couldn’t help but notice that she’d changed into a pair of black sweatpants and a matching halter top. Although her attire was less provocative than a few outfits he’d seen at the gym, Paige’s curves were even more impressive now that they weren’t hidden by jeans and a jacket. When she walked toward the kitchen, her hips twitched more than enough to take his eyes away from the shotgun she so casually slung over her shoulder.

Suddenly, Paige turned around. The motion was so fast that it was almost painful for him to pull his eyes up to a more appropriate level. “I need to go to Wisconsin. Are you coming with me or not?”

Having just noticed the freckles sprinkled along the smooth, tanned skin just above the slope of her breasts, Cole had to use a completely different section of his brain to form a reply. “Huh? Are you talking to me?”

“I’ve got one of our trackers on the phone,” she explained as she took the phone away from her ear. “He’s found something that may be linked to Misonyk and this Henry thing. It’s a small road trip, but we can see if anything’s hunting you by moving around. If nothing follows us, you should be clear…more or less. You in?”

“Yes,” he said before he had a chance to think better of it.

Lifting the phone again, she said, “Yeah, there’ll be two of us. Where are we meeting?” After a pause, she rolled her eyes and groaned. “Are you serious? Why?…Fine, we’ll see you there.” After hanging up, she tossed the phone onto a nearby counter as if afraid of catching something from it. Then she turned to him and asked, “Did any of those Nymar touch you?”

“Pardon me?”

“Not on your clothes, but on your skin. Even something like this.”

As she said that, Paige reached out to brush her hand along his arm. She was at least a foot shorter than him, but seemed even smaller now that she was in her bare feet. When she looked up at him, her easy smile was framed by a tussled mess of dark hair. She couldn’t have looked better than if she’d spent the day in a spa.

He tensed the muscles in his jaw and forced a breath out through his nose to keep from reaching out and doing some touching of his own. Her fingers lingered upon his wrist and sent a chill straight through him. “I don’t remember,” he admitted. “So much happened that it’s all running together.”

“This may sound weird, but did any of them…spit on you?”

Wincing, Cole replied, “No. I would’ve remembered that. Why?”

“Just to be safe, give me your wrist.”

“Which wrist? This one?”

Cole extended his right arm. Paige gently took hold of him and brushed her fingertips against his skin. The longer she touched him, the more Cole was worried he might slip and say something he couldn’t easily explain. Finally, she encircled his wrist with her fingers and ran her other hand along his arm so she could push up his sleeve. Every inch of the way was a test of his resolve.

After a quick look at the veins on his wrist, Paige smiled at him even wider. She didn’t take her hands away just yet. “There would have been some black showing up on you by now if any of them tried to infect you, so you should be all right. Just so you know, Nymar can produce venom like a snake. They’ll spit it at you, and if it gets in your eyes, well, that’s really bad.”

“It is, huh?”

She nodded slowly and kept her eyes locked upon his. “You did really well tonight,” she said as she patted his wrist and allowed his hand to slip free. “You didn’t panic and you kept me covered.”

“I didn’t panic? You must not have been watching me very closely.”

Paige laughed, but then pulled away and turned her head. He might have been overly tired or overly optimistic, but he thought there was some color flushing into her cheeks. Before she pulled even farther away, he reached out and closed his hand around her wrist. Before he could unleash the smooth talking he’d planned in his mind, Paige lifted his wrist straight up, to effectively and painfully lock the joint.

“Sorry,” she whispered as she loosened the hold. “Reflex.”

Now he was the one to back off. “It’s all right. My fault.”

The way she looked at him now, Paige might as well have been staring at him through a microscope. Slowly, her eyes wandered down along his body and then worked their way up again. “It may get rough around here, but I’d really like it if you stayed. I can keep an eye on you better that way.”

“Well,” Cole replied in the coolest tone he could manage, “maybe I should come along to keep you covered.”

Paige smiled and patted his cheek with her free hand. As she turned around, she put just enough muscle into her final pat to make it something close to a smack. “You’re cute,” she said. She picked up the shotgun and angled the barrel to keep it from scraping against the floor as she walked away.

Even after some distance had been put between them, Cole could still smell the scent of her hair and feel the bit of sweat that had been on her scarred, yet soft hands.

“I’m going to jump in the shower,” she said. “You’re welcome to stay here tonight if you want. There’s a cot in the freezer. It’s a walk-in and the refrigeration unit doesn’t work, so I was going to use it for a safe room since it’s got the thickest door in the place.”

“Sounds too good to be true,” Cole groaned. “By the way, what are the odds of that thing really tracking me all the way from Canada to Chicago? I mean, aren’t there enough smells in this city to cover mine up?”

Paige stopped and cocked her head to one side while keeping her back to him. Her hips shifted, drawing his eyes and holding them for the duration. “I once had a shapeshifter follow me for three months and across twelve states, but that was different. I wanted it to follow me. I’d say there’s about a ten to fifteen percent chance of that Full Blood losing interest in you. If you wanted to be safe, I could always teach you how to handle one of those things if they did find you.”

“You mean like train me in the ways of the Skinner?” Cole asked in a voice ripped from every cheesy movie trailer he’d ever heard.

Paige walked toward a door at the back of the kitchen that led farther into the restaurant. Since she still wasn’t looking back, he allowed himself to fully savor the way the sweatpants hugged her tight, rounded backside.

“I don’t need a partner,” she told him as she came to a stop near one of the back rooms, “but having one would make things a whole lot easier.”

“I think you’re forgetting something. I program video games for a living.”

“That was before, Cole. There’s too much out there for a man like you to just turn his back on it. If you’re waiting for a sign or a prophecy or any of that sort of crap to let you know what to do, you’ll be waiting a long time. I think you’ve already seen enough to know what you want to do.”

“You got any advice?”

“Sure,” she said as she sauntered from the kitchen. “Don’t gawk at a woman’s ass when she’s carrying a shotgun.”

Cole still couldn’t shake Paige’s scent even after she’d left the room. He could still feel her fingers roaming over his wrists and could imagine every strand of hair as it curled around her face. Her movements ran beneath everything in his head like a current of energy. He could feel the heat from her body no matter how many rooms separated them within that old restaurant.