Genesis Lost - Books 1 - 6, page 28
“I’m happy to … wait, Einar is your husband?”
“You met him?” she asked, her eyes still closed as if she had drifted off into her very own daydream.
“No,” I said, my mind wandering to his name on my list. “No, I didn’t meet him.”
But I wanted to meet him until five seconds ago. Now I wasn’t so sure anymore.
Nine
River
I was fucking sore.
Even after spending the night in my bed again, my neck was still on fire and my shoulders ached. No matter how strong I punched my knuckles into those tense muscles or rubbed my thumbs in circular motions; nothing helped.
That pity apology Ayanna offered yesterday morning? Yeah, that one didn’t make it better either. If anything, it had pissed me off even more.
The sensible side of me got how she might have been scared in this strange, new place surrounded by a bunch of desperate men. But the irrational side in me, the one that was fucking furious right now, demanded revenge for what she said.
Not necessarily because of what she said, but because I’d had enough of people telling me what I was and what I wasn’t. And it had nothing to do with that encounter between me and James.
Well, maybe a little.
That void inside me? He had ripped it open, giving me a name in exchange for my mother’s beautiful face. In the end, I was just as stupid as I was before, but now I had lost the means of showing people her picture. Bet there were more than two Katherine’s out there in the last four or five decades.
I stretched my arms behind my back and down my sides once more, my muscles burning me up from the inside. “You finally ready or what?”
“One second,” came from inside my cabin, where Ayanna got herself dressed.
I gazed over the forest once more.
No Monk. My dog hadn’t returned in days.
Not that I blamed him. I didn’t want to be here right now either, because neither my dog nor me did well with strangers. Especially not if they called you out just because a chair poked them in the ass.
“You still didn’t tell me where we’re going,” Ayanna said and stepped outside, my black scarf loosely draped around her neck.
Wordless, I stepped down the porch and grabbed the helmet from the ATV, giving a hearty pat on the back of the seat. “Take the helmet and hop on. My truck isn’t an option where we’re going unless we’d take the long way around.”
And I had no patience for the long way, because revenge was too sweet to leave it waiting.
“Still a surprise then?”
She smiled.
I smiled.
But my inner demon laughed his ass off. Oh… she had it coming.
I climbed onto the machine and handed her the helmet, waiting until she made it behind me while digging her tiny hands into my sweater. “Sorry. I know I’m not supposed to touch.”
I said nothing. Not because I enjoyed her gentle touch on my rough body. I didn’t. Like… at all. But an ATV wasn’t the kind of vehicle that let you put more than a few inches between the riders, which wasn’t too appropriate but hey… it was necessary.
When Rowan had suggested I showed her the protein farm, I shrugged it off as a terrible idea. What can I say? Waking up with my balls frozen to the rocker changed my mind.
“You can hold on to the rack behind you,” I said, starting the engine and slowly rolling off.
Everything worked out great as long as I stayed under fifteen miles per hour. Above that? She threw her frantic arms around me and dug her fingers into my stomach.
Clearly, this woman wasn’t a daredevil. At that rate it would have taken us four hours to reach the protein farm.
So I went with it.
Not sure what made her body tremble like that, the breeze or her nerves, but she pressed her little bit of tits against my back so hard they must’ve been flat.
The more she moulded against me, making herself fit just right for my body, the more my cock grew and strained inside my pants. A sensation I didn’t appreciate but had no control over.
Even with the wind blowing in my face, her female scent didn’t escape me. As if someone had dipped her in honey and rolled her in flowers right after.
And just as I reminded myself that being this close to her was already bad enough, I sped up some more and forced her body to melt against mine. For twenty minutes, this assignment was a dangerous kind of fun.
I took the long route along the outer mountain ridge after all.
At the bottom of it all lay Wolf Lake. The red and orange rock formations, spruces, and firs reflected on the surface of the calm water. From the other side of the lake, a pack of wolves kept their amber and golden-green eyes on us.
The cold fog clung to my skin and turned my beard damp. We rambled over the trail, the air filled with nothing but the scents of wet dirt and coldness.
I held my arm up and pointed at the wolves, hoping Ayanna would see them too. If deer freaked her out, how would she react if she saw a real wolf?
When we approached a slope which led back into the forest, I slowed down and followed a short path to the protein farm. The gray, big-pored concrete blocks had never been painted, but the roof gleamed blue underneath the cloud-covered sun. Heavy, thick smoke sputtered from the chimney. I spotted Jasper in one of the metal barns behind his home.
I parked beside the barn and cut the engine. “What’s up, man!”
Ayanna took her helmet off, and strands of her almost black hair clung to the fine mist of sweat on her temples. She was a beautiful woman. Not that it was of any matter to me. Her guard.
Jasper froze at the sight of her, then squared his chest and hurried down the gravel drive. I didn’t blame him. The go-to reaction of every unmarried man in our territory. We strutted our chests and flexed our muscles. Our courtship plumage, so to speak.
Jasper reached out his hand and flashed a huge smile.
I walked up and slapped his hand to the side. “A nod should do.”
Even under his bronzed skin, his cheeks turned peachy. He rubbed his palm over his five-o’clock shadow and diluted his embarrassment.
“Ayanna, meet Jasper,” I said and waved her closer. “He operates one of our three protein farms. Rowan thought you might be interested to learn where your protein powder comes from. I think that was a great idea. What do you think?”
He plunged his hands into his pockets with a grin on his face. “Let’s just say it will be educational. I just finished feeding them, so they should be busy. I hate when they escape. Takes forever to get them back.”
A line etched between Ayanna’s brows. “If what escapes?”
Jasper flicked his gaze toward me, his jaws clenched. Before he said anything, I pointed toward the oversized shed. “Let us show you.”
I let her enter the building first but followed behind as close as the law allowed. After all, Jasper was watching, and I already had my twenty minutes of being careless.
Four neatly arranged rows of aluminum boxes stacked man-high in the center, and the sides. The floodlights struggled to illuminate the room, and flickers of light reflected from the brushed metal.
“You either need a bigger battery bank,” I said, “or more panels. I should come out next week and measure your sun exposure. If you keep running this system without enough juice, you’ll fry it in no time.”
“It’s that huge pine right next to the other barn. Beautiful tree. Just takes way too much sun away, especially on gray days like this one.”
He patted one of the boxes.
Muffled tock tock tocks sounded inside and scurried into a rustle of shredded magazines and paper-thin wood chips. The stench of moldy onions and foul eggs spread through the room.
All color drained from Ayanna’s face, making my heart pump faster in a thrill of anticipation and something else I couldn’t name. Something less cheerful. More… guilty?
I shrugged it off.
All that touching and that heat between us on the way here must have confused me.
“I take it she has no clue,” Jasper said.
A wash of pity came across his eyes. Guess he felt a lot more sorry for her than I did. But then again, she hadn’t called him a rapist.
I pulled one drawer out.
Supporting the bottom with my arm, I bent over and held the box right underneath her nose. She hesitated at first, but eventually looked down and into the box.
“Is that a bad joke?” she asked. “That’s just a bunch of paper, sawdust, carrots, wet leaves and-”
“Oh, my bad!” I hammered my fists against the bottom.
Green and blue iridescent beetles crawled up from underneath the compost, carried by black fuzzy legs. Without warning, one bug pushed his hind wings out trying to buzz off.
Ayanna shot backward, her scream bouncing from one sheet of metal to the next. “Yuck!”
I released the deep rolling laugh which I had been biting back since last night, and slapped my hand onto my thigh. Jasper darted toward the box and grabbed it, fearing I would drop myself to the ground and roll around red-faced.
“W-what is that?” she asked and crossed her arms in front of her chest.
“That, little princess,” I said, “is your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You gotta get your protein from somewhere, right? But the council says animal agriculture is bad for the environment-”
“Which it is,” Jasper added.
I flew my hand in a dismissive wave. “Well, yes. But that’s beside the point here. Not to be mean but... you guys have been eating crushed insects for at least, um. Jasper?”
He rubbed his fingers over his stubble. “Around seventy years?”
Her furious eyes shot point blank to my face. “You are an asshole!”
“Oh.” I held my sides and laughed. “I am- I am horrified. But it’s still an improvement to being called a rapist, don’t you think?”
“That’s what this is all about? I apologized!”
She drove her heel into the concrete floor, then turned around and stomped off.
“Man, that was mean.” Jasper pushed the drawer back into the aluminum frame.
“She will starve herself to death once she goes back to the Districts. Most guys would try to come on to her while she’s here, and you chase her away with a handful of insects like a preschooler.”
I dropped my shoulders as quickly as I had lifted them.
Somehow I must have laughed too much, because something dark settled where I had kept that spitefulness all day. It expanded and spread through my core, leaving something bitter at the back of my throat.
This wasn’t how I wanted this to feel.
Why did I suddenly feel like… like… an asshole?
I gave Jasper a pat on the back. “They would be barking up the wrong tree, my friend. A slab of marble has more emotions than Districts women. More curves, too.”
What bullshit am I rambling here?
I liked her curves. Ayanna had a nice round ass, a narrow waist and small boobs which must have fit perfectly inside my palm. Not that I ever wondered…
I followed down the path and found her by the water’s edge. That radiant cinnamon skin of hers now wearing a veil of gray.
Picking up a pebble from the tip of my boot, I let it skip across the surface of Wolf Lake before I kneeled beside her. “Too much truth for one day?”
She let herself fall back on her ass and stretched out her legs. A long sigh escaped her mouth, and her breath rose up in a straight line. “I told you I was sorry.”
Her soft-spoken words confused me.
I had waited for this moment all day, expecting her to lash out and be as pissed as I was.
But she didn’t lash out.
She was calm. Small. Vulnerable. And suddenly too much freaking woman the way she sat there with tears welling behind her eyes.
“Do you have any idea how much of a change this place is for me?” She grabbed a pebble and threw it onto the water’s surface, where it immediately sunk without a single skip. Her head dropped. “Did you know that I was the only volunteer for this position? Nobody wanted to come here. Nobody.”
The river rocks crunched underneath my shifting weight. “I was freezing my ass off all night because of you.”
“I was scared,” she whispered. “I’ve never been alone with a man who might… you know…”
Her gentle voice rubbed me in a place I didn’t know existed. Some sort of primal cranny all the way back in my brain that made me want to punch the dude who did that to her. The problem was, I did that to her. I could hardly punch myself, could I?
“Feel physically attracted to you?” I asked, the sentence somehow struggling through my throat like a brick shoved down sideways. “I’m your guard, Ayanna. Attraction or not, it wouldn’t keep me from doing my job of protecting you.”
She observed me for a long while, the way her eyes locked on mine sending a bout of anxiety through my body. Then she cocked her head ever so slightly, asking a question I hadn’t seen coming. “Do you feel attracted to me? Sexually?”
Damn.
What was I supposed to say to that?
She was a god damn woman; of course I felt attracted to her. Something I knew even before I sported that nice boner on our way here, the mix of her heat against my body and the vibration of the engine juggling my balls making me have all sorts of inappropriate thoughts.
Deflect. That’s what I had to do.
I had only been allowed back inside my own damn house for one night now. No way I’d mess it up again by telling her what she did to my body.
“Listen, Ayanna.” I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry about what happened up there. Is there anything I can do to make up for it? So we can end this bickering between us?” When she didn’t react, I shuffled a bit closer, shrinking three feet into less than a few inches. “If I was gruff, or rude, or… I don’t know… I guess I could have been friendlier when you —”
“Can you take me to meet Adair?”
For a moment I thought she asked me to take her to Adair. “Huh?”
“You want to make up for what you did up there.” She pulled her knees against her chest. “I want you to introduce me to Adair.”
That didn’t sit well with me.
“Why would I do that? I’m supposed to keep guys away from you, not introduce you to them.”
“He seemed nice when I arrived.”
Nice?
I was nice!
Maybe not yesterday. Most definitely not today. But, like, generally speaking… yeah, I was a nice guy.
She pushed herself up, rubbed the dirt off her hands and built herself up in front of me, chin jutted and all. “I’m willing to forget this incident, but only if you take me to him. Then we can start over.”
I didn’t want her to meet Adair.
I did, however, want to start over.
There was no way I could live through a year of pranks and hard feelings. I’d much rather have her dig her nails into my chest while on the ATV. Granted, everything else had to stay strictly professional.
Me: guard.
Her: innocent woman.
“Alright, I’ll take you to him.”
Her eyes softened and her chin lowered, the woman now gazing down on me in a way I thought no woman ever would. That tingle it gave me sure as hell wasn’t the professional kind, but damn did my ego feast on it.
Ten
Ayanna
The cold breeze outside on the porch whipped my cheeks, but I ignored it and focused on my breath instead.
In… slooow.
Out… deeep.
River slouched down onto the rocker, the wood squeaking underneath the weight of his muscle-packed body. “I still don’t get why him.”
My hands rested on my knees, fingers pointing upward.
Breathe!
Mindfulness wrapped around me like a thick blanket. I let my lungs expand and took in the scents of sour apples and dry piles of leaves. Placing my palms in front of my chest, I opened my heart to the sunshine and allowed myself to —
“I’m not saying I won’t take you.” The rocker jolted with each toss of his body as if he wrestled with gravity. “I’d just really like to understand what’s so special about him. Adair is pretty arrogant, you know. Which I guess I would be too if I came from an old family with money. But jeez… I just wish he’d tone it down sometimes, you know.”
I pushed myself up from my yoga mat. “This is impossible!”
“What is impossible?”
“It’s impossible for me to focus on this while you are yapping in the background.”
I leaned over, rolled up my mat and put it against the cabin door.
“I’m not yapping…”
At the push of his toe, he rocked back and forth, the quilt loosely draped over his legs. He rubbed his thumb over his sternum as if he tried to touch an object — invisible to me, but real enough for his fingertips to obsess about it.
With each breath he took, his skin pulled tightly around his muscular chest, revealing a fine line of hair just underneath his bellybutton. Like a chaperone, his eyes caught my curious looks. “Something wrong?”
“No.”
Yes, something was terribly wrong.
Or to be precise, something was wrong with the way heat spread through my body now whenever I caught a half-naked glimpse of him.
And half-naked he was almost all the time! Walking around in those wide sweatpants which sat way too low on his hips, as if his upper body was somehow immune to the cold.
Shame filled me at the rise of his eyebrow, and my ears tingled as if he had told me to go stand in the corner. Is this what three days without enhanced water did to me? And if it was, just how deep could this odd behavior fall on the ladder of evolution?
I stepped in front of him and grabbed my ‘Coffee makes me poop’ mug from the side table next to him. “You promised you’d take me.”
“No ma’am,” he said and wiggled his finger at me. “I said I’d take you, but I never mentioned a promise. But yeah… I’ll take you. He works at the lab once a week.”
