Chapter 13 Calder #2
Lara’s hands on my shoulders began to move, sliding around the back of my neck and locking at my nape. Her deep-green gaze settled on my mouth. Wanting. And then her tongue slid along her lips, whipping a foreshock through me. A warning of something coming. A tectonic crash that only promised ruin.
“Welcome the wildness of want in all its forms. Sight and sound. Scent and the sensation of touch,” Maxwell continued like she was only speaking to us. To me.
I was already drowning in the feel of her, but every inhale of her soft lavender scent only threatened to swallow me from the inside out.
“When it grips you, hold it right back. Latch on to the beast and let it consume you.”
Was her goal of this to work everyone up? To send the campsite into a cacophony of cries and moans? Was that her power trip? Controlling others’ intimacies?
Instinct forced my breathing to slow. Control your heart rate, control your fear.
Panic is a luxury survival doesn’t afford.
The caution Cassius had carved into our bones reared its head now.
Now, when I wasn’t in the wilderness. When I wasn’t facing a threat of nature or weather or beast. When the only danger I had to fear was my attraction to my ex-girlfriend’s younger sister.
Electric like lightning. Thudding like thunder.
Drenching like a downpour. And gnawing as though made of the sharpest teeth.
“Here in the wild, there are no rules. Here in the wild, there is no propriety. Here in the wild, you can take what you want.”
Lara’s gaze unspooled into mine, netting us in a moment of stillness as her head drifted lower, her mouth on a clear trajectory for mine. A path so unmistakable, it might as well have been etched in stone.
What if I took one kiss? One taste so I would know how to survive this? How to survive her . . .
“Calder . . .” Want baked into her breathless plea, desperate and needy. And god, did I want to give in. To take care of her the way she wanted. The way I’d always wanted.
I went stiff—some parts of me more painfully than others. There were some things in nature humans weren’t made to survive; the smartest survivalist recognized those things. Respected those things. And retreated from those things.
For me, Lara Crane was one of those things.
There was no having or taking, touching or kissing my fake girlfriend. There was no coming away unscathed from succumbing to the ache for my ex-girlfriend’s little sister.
And I couldn’t do that to her. Or to me.
“There is no off button,” I grunted and loosened my hold. Every inch of her body, as it slid along mine, left only scorched earth behind until her feet touched the ground.
Even if there was a way to turn it off, I didn’t trust whatever—or whoever—might be lurking to not take note that we’d silenced the very coaching we’d paid for.
“I’m sorry—”
“I’m going to step outside for a few minutes. Excuse me.” I took myself, and my raging hard-on, through the flap to our tent and as far away from her as I could justify.
Shit.
I scrubbed my hands over my face and then adjusted my throbbing cock, heading away from our tent as the last dregs of dusk filtered through the trees.
For several long, assessing minutes, I did nothing but pace and listen to the breeze whirring the leaves. The rustle and crack of branches giving way under the scamper of small animals. The howls of wolves galloping over the open expanse in the distance.
What the hell was I doing?
I closed my eyes and saw Lara’s face looking down at me again. Hoping . . . Wanting . . .
No. I turned in the direction of Maxwell’s RV, clinging to my directive. Finding Rachel—not falling for her sister. The sooner we left here, the better.
We hadn’t even made it a single night—with one bed—“Dammit.” Another bridge we would need to cross soon. There wasn’t room for someone to sleep on the floor. I’d admit that I’d toyed with the idea of sharing, respectfully, the bed, but now there was no way.
I’d sleep outside; it wasn’t like I hadn’t done it hundreds of times before.
Cassius and Mom had engineered countless “sleepovers” when we were younger. Not sleepovers at friends’ houses like most kids. Sleepovers in nature. Survival sleepovers.
They’d started short, a night or two in the wilderness. Then they’d gotten longer, with no shelter. No prepared food. Nothing but what Cassius and Mom had taught. How to track. How to forage. How to hunt. How to find or make shelter.
The final “sleepover” was ten days in the wilderness. Ten days, at fifteen, to prove we were capable of survival. Callum’s ten days were spent almost entirely in straight sequence of severe thunderstorms; we’d always said that was the crucible that had turned him into a storm chaser.
Mine had finished the day before Mom was murdered.
“Calder?” Lara whispered, and I turned, though not enough to get a good look at her; my body was still raw from the burn of having her against me. “Dr. Julia’s done,” she said like I had any interest in returning to my own personal purgatory.
“Okay,” I acknowledged, but didn’t move.
Of course, she didn’t move, either. “Can I ask you something?”
All kinds of warning sirens went off in my head, and I ignored them. A new, bad habit of mine. “Yeah.”
She quietly came over and stood beside me. “If Rachel isn’t here. Do you think she’s . . .”
“No.” I wasn’t going to go down that path. First, because a tracker’s rule of thumb was alive until proven dead. And second, because I wouldn’t—couldn’t—do that to Lara.
Lara didn’t say anything for a beat, her eyes drawn to the indeterminate shelter of shadows around us. I tried my damnedest not to look, but it wasn’t very long at all before my gaze slid to her profile.
The button curl of her nose. The bow of her lips. The freckles that charted constellations over her cheeks.
Beauty wasn’t a survival skill except in the most figurative of ways, and so it was something I rarely took notice of beyond an objective assessment. But Lara . . . she was the kind of beauty I couldn’t ignore. The kind that stopped me in my tracks.
It didn’t steal my breath, but chambered it in my chest like a bullet to be fired.
One that would obliterate the thin veneer of professionalism between us.
Regardless of our past connection, she’d hired me to do a job—to find her sister—and that was all this should be.
It was all it was supposed to be. All it could be.
A breeze swept around us, and Lara shivered.
“You should go back inside.”
She stubbornly didn’t move.
“I’m sorry about your mother. I didn’t know she was . . . murdered.”
A thread of tension pulled my spine taut. “It was a long time ago.”
“Time is like a drug. It doesn’t cure the disease, only lessens the symptoms.” She folded her arms. “At least, in my experience.”
There was a reason I didn’t talk about Mom, but it didn’t have anything to do with the circumstance of her death, only the aftermath. But maybe that was why I should share it. Because what had just happened in the tent almost completely ruptured my restraint.
I needed a reminder that the worst thing in my life wasn’t not having Lara, but what could happen if I lost her.
“Before Stonewall and us, Mom was a biochemical engineer,” I began, the growing darkness dragging me into the memory of a similarly dark night. “She was recruited by the Department of Defense to work on a top-secret project, and that’s where she met Cassius. He was FBI.”
“Wow.” The shape of her lips should’ve been criminal, the way it broke into my senses and entered a thieving heat into my veins. “So, your dad . . .”
“Didn’t always exile technology?” I chuckled. “No. Far from it. That’s why he is the way he is. He knows just how . . . dangerous it can be.”
“What were they working on?”
“I don’t know exactly. They never spoke of it. And to guess . . . well, there are very few kinds of top-secret DOD projects that the government would need one of the nation’s foremost biochemical scientists for.”
“A weapon?” I could hear surprise elevate her voice.
“Or a defense against one.”
The concepts of biochemical warfare and bioterrorism weren’t new to the discussion of national defense. As time ticked on, it had only become more likely that bioagents would be the weapons of the future.
“Whatever it was, it didn’t end well. At least in my parents’ opinion.
They both got out of the field and moved here.
Off the grid. Away from that project. Their past.” I paused, hearing a screech just before a dark, winged shadow of a bat zipped across the pale haze of the full moon. “At least they tried.”
Lara shivered, her arm brushing against mine.
“I was fifteen. Cassius had taken Creed, Callum, and Colt out for storm-survival training. I was at the house with Mom, Colby, and Creighton.” I remembered the smell of electricity in the air.
The hush of the wind through the trees like a whispered warning.
I was surprised to feel my throat start to tighten.
“I was in the library, studying. I had a geography test the next day. Colby came running in, trying to hide from Creighton because she’d let her pet chicks loose in his room. ”
Lara laughed then, the sound forcing me to stop. Rich and decadent, just like the homemade hot chocolate Mom had loved to drink every night. And just as uncommon.
“You’re telling me you never played pranks on your sister?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“I . . .” Lara pulled her lips between her teeth and then expelled a smaller, sadder laugh. “No, I never really pranked Rachel. We were always on the same side.”
Instantly, I regretted the question, and went back to my story.
“I was about to buffer their fight when Mom came running in. Something was wrong, I could see it. Even as a kid, you kind of know—can sense when something is really wrong.” I lifted my hand and ran it along my jaw like I could forcibly stop it from clenching.
“She told me to take them into the storm cellar. It’s underground, below the greenhouse. ”