The Lawgivers: Gabriel Read online

  There hadn’t been any sign of a large animal near the edge of the water nor any between the camp and the spring.

  Of course, she’d been preoccupied once she’d settled to bathing, she reminded herself, too preoccupied to notice when Gabriel had arrived, and she should have sensed his presence behind her.

  That was a dangerous, stupid lapse and one she had trouble reconciling in her mind.

  Why, she wondered, hadn’t she heard him or at least sensed his presence?

  Because her mind had been on him to start with, she realized abruptly. She hadn’t been focused completely on bathing and she certainly hadn’t been focused on either the pleasure or the miserable conditions. She’d allowed her mind to wander to him as it did more and more often.

  And maybe that was why she hadn’t heard him come up? Because he’d already been with her?

  He tilted his head slightly, studying her. “I guess that means that wasn’t for my benefit then.”

  Lexa whipped her attention back to him at that comment, gaping at him open mouthed.

  He shook his head. “Get back to camp. Don’t leave it again without letting me know.”

  Nodding jerkily, Lexa scurried past him.

  She meant to at any rate. She’d just come even with him when she heard a rustle of sound. Directly behind it, she heard an inhuman scream that made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.

  Gabriel planted both hands on her shoulder and gave her a shove that sent her flying forward several yards before she hit the rocky dirt and slid another three or four feet.

  She caught a glimpse of the cat, though, as Gabriel caught it full in the chest.

  Chapter Nine

  Lexa was too stunned to move for several moments. Everything had happened too fast for her mind to process it at one time and her first thought was that Gabriel had hit her in a fit of anger. The ferocious snarls of the large cat and his wild dance on Gabriel’s chest penetrated the fog of confusion, however, and she leapt to her feet without assessing her personal damage, racing back and then freezing for several critical moments while she tried to assess the situation.

  Gabriel had managed to pull his club from his belt, she saw, but he’d caught the large cat with both hands as it pounced and she could see it was all he could do to hold the cat at bay as it snarled and snapped, surging toward his face in an effort to maul his face and vulnerable throat with its wicked teeth.

  Lexa whipped a look around for a weapon. Seeing nothing promising, she grabbed at Gabriel’s club, only to discover it was still trapped in his hand that was gripping the cat’s throat. There was nothing else, though, and she wrenched at it until she finally managed to dislodge it. She very nearly broke Gabriel’s grip in the process, but although she noticed, she was focused on a counter attack. As soon as she had the club firmly in her grip, she commenced to pounding on the cat’s head with it. That didn’t seem to have any other effect than to make it harder for Gabriel to evade the cat’s teeth and to make the cat writhe and twist more furiously.

  “Lexa!” Gabriel bellowed. “Don’t help!”

  Ignoring the order, Lexa merely changed targets and began to beat the cat across the shoulders and back with the club. When she saw that wasn’t having the desired affect either, beyond wearing her out and making the cat more furious, she stepped back to assess the situation.

  That was when she focused on the cat’s ass. The cat was crouched on top of Gabriel, it’s ass in the air. The animal’s swinging balls caught her attention first, and then the exposed rectum as it whipped its tail furiously. She looked down at her weapon, saw the tip narrowed down almost to a point, and rammed the point at the cat’s rectum. Her aim was dead on. The tip penetrated the cat’s asshole. The cat leapt upward with an earsplitting scream, tore free of Gabriel’s grip, and charged off into the darkness, wrenching the club, which was wedged in his asshole, from Lexa’s grip.

  Fortunately, it lost the club.

  Panting for breath, Lexa leapt over Gabriel to retrieve it. When she decided the cat had had enough and wasn’t coming back, she rushed back to Gabriel. “How bad are you hurt?” she gasped.

  Gabriel had already pushed himself upright and was examining his injuries. He was cut and bleeding all over from the cat’s claws. “Could be better,” he muttered and then looked up at Lexa. “Could be worse.” He frowned and extended his hand. “The trida.”

  Lexa blinked at him. “What?”

  “The weapon you were clubbing the cat with,” he said dryly.

  “Oh!” She laid it across his palm.

  He shook his head. “It’s against the law to touch the weapon of a Lawgiver.”

  Lexa gaped at him, feeling a surge of fear. “But …. I didn’t have nothin’ else ….”

  Gritting his teeth, he got to his feet, clearly in pain. “You’re lucky you didn’t accidently activate it.” He frowned, examining the weapon. “It should have jolted you when you touched it. The weapon is calibrated to my DNA.”

  At that, Lexa looked down at her stinging palm and saw that it was burned. Gabriel was studying her when she looked up again. “I guess I was too excited to notice.”

  He frowned. “I guess that’s what convinced the cougar to leave,” he said slowly, clearly confused.

  “I don’t know. I shoved it up his ass and he screamed and took off.”

  Gabriel gaped at her in disbelief. “You did what?”

  “I shoved the point up his ass.”

  He stared at her blankly a moment longer and then abruptly burst out laughing.

  Stunned, Lexa merely stared at him at first, but the sound of pure amusement was infectious. She felt her lips curl upward in response and then she thought about what she’d done and she started laughing, too. “Guess he didn’t like nobody messing with his asshole.”

  Gabriel let out a fresh roar of laughter at that, holding his stomach. “Stop! I’m in too much pain to laugh.”

  That comment sobered Lexa. She frowned at him worriedly. “We need to do something about those scratches and bites. They get infected real easy.”

  Gabriel shrugged dismissively. Turning, he headed toward the pool. Lexa followed him, too worried about his injuries to pay much attention to what he was doing … at first. When she saw he’d peeled away his formfitting suit from his upper torso, however, she halted abruptly.

  She didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved when he left it at that, left the upper part dangling and crouched to scoop up water. He hissed as he poured the water over the cuts from the cat’s claws and she felt a flicker of sympathy but the truth was she was far too fascinated with his bare flesh to really think about much else.

  She crouched beside him, watching him for a few moments. He flicked a glance at her and then, frowning, ignored her. The muscles beneath his skin rolled and bunched with his movements, fascinating her. She began to feel the urge to touch them to see what it felt like.

  For a few moments desire warred with fear and then curiosity won out. Scooping up a palm full of water, she poured it over one of the claw marks on his bulging upper arm and then coasted her palm and fingers lightly over his skin.

  It felt amazing to touch him. It made her belly do all sorts of strange things.

  He stiffened, flicking her a sharp look and Lexa jerked her fingers back reflexively. A muscle tightened in his jaw. “I don’t need help.”

  She felt her face redden at the rebuke. Shooting to her feet, she rushed blindly back to the campsite in complete disorder and scrambled into her pallet. Her heart was still beating frantically in her chest. She wasn’t sure if it was from fear or something else, but she thought it was a combination of fear and that something else. She was embarrassed, too. She was fairly sure that he knew she’d been more focused on touching him than helping. Underlying all of that, though, was an odd sense of hurt.

  She examined the sense of hurt since she didn’t want to probe her reaction to touching him too deeply and realized that she didn’t feel wounded by hi
s rejection of help so much as she was hurt by the sense that he considered her foul in some way and her touch revolted him.

  She didn’t have to search hard to figure that out!

  As cool and distant as he was most of the time, there was an underlying aura of contempt. He didn’t just exude confidence. He exuded disdain and revulsion toward humans in general —not her in particular, but it was clear that he lumped her in with all the others.

  And why wouldn’t he? She was nothing special, no different, really, than any of the others.

  She was almost sorry she’d helped the asshole!

  The spark of anger didn’t actually ignite, but it was potent enough to chase away most of the hurt.

  Rolling over, she curled into a tight ball, snuggled under her thin blanket, and closed her eyes resolutely. He was nothing special himself, she told herself. She’d touched him. His skin felt pretty much like human skin. The flesh was hard beneath and silky smooth to her palm and fingertips, but that really wasn’t so different either. Ralph was hard like that … in places, his arms anyway.

  So he had wings! He was a stinking angel-demon!

  Not that he actually stank. He actually smelled good. But they didn’t belong here. None of them. They’d just come from the stars and taken over and it wasn’t theirs to take over. That was why everybody else hated them—well mostly. They hated them because they were scared of them, too.

  She should’ve just let the cat bite his head off! Then she could’ve gone back to her old life—which wasn’t great but it wasn’t that bad either. How stupid was it that she’d helped the bastard when she didn’t even know what sort of evil things he might have it in his head to do to all of them?

  He claimed his people were going to help them, but how much of that could she really believe?

  For all she knew, they might eat humans! It was obvious Gabriel thought of them as nothing but animals.

  And he’d laughed at her effort to help, she recalled abruptly, feeling suddenly ashamed and embarrassed.

  * * * *

  Lexa wasn’t happy when Gabriel approached her, but she held her ground instead of leaping to her feet and running.

  She was sorry she’d been so stubbornly determined to prove she wasn’t afraid of him when he crouched in front of her and held out his hand. “Let me see your hand.”

  She eyed him distrustfully. “Why?”

  His lips tightened. “Wounds can get infected really quickly here and humans don’t seem to fight them very well. Let me see the burn.”

  Reluctantly, Lexa held her hand out. She figured she might as well because he looked determined and he might deign to touch her if she refused.

  He studied her palm without touching her and then reached into a pocket and withdrew a small vial. Removing the top, he caught her wrist with his free hand and then tapped a little of the contents onto her palm.

  It burned like holy hell! Lexa sucked in her breath at the unexpected pain.

  To her surprise, he blew on it, cooling the burn. “It’ll only sting a minute. Don’t wipe it off. The pax will prevent infection.”

  Blinking back the tears that filled her eyes, Lexa flicked a glance at his face. She discovered he was watching her and for a long moment his gaze snagged hers. “What you did last night …. That was a brave thing. Stupid, but brave. Thank you for helping. But don’t ever do anything like that again.”

  Lexa blinked at him. Her face had already started reddening from what she thought was a reminder of the incident by the pool. It took an effort to change gears when she realized he was talking about the attack. She didn’t know how to take his comments—as praise or a rebuke. It sounded like both.

  She felt like agreeing with him that, yes, it had been stupid. She should’ve let the cat eat him, but she decided against it.

  “Sorry, now, that you didn’t just let that cougar eat me?” he asked, amusement threading his voice.

  A chill went through Lexa. She wondered again if he could read minds.

  He looked like he might say something else. Instead, he straightened abruptly, capped the vial and shoved it into his pocket again.

  Lexa focused on her palm, but the pain was already subsiding and, to her surprise, the burn wasn’t nearly as red as it had been before.

  They had wondrous things, the angels, whether it was magic or not.

  It was a damned shame they were such assholes!

  * * * *

  Gah-re-al thought it had probably been one of the worst mistakes he’d ever made when he’d followed Lexa to the pool and then stayed to watch her bathe. It made no difference that he’d followed her because he’d believed she meant to slip away. That had been reasonable motivation for following her to start with. It also hadn’t been a mistake to stay when he’d seen what her intention was since she was under his protection and it was immediately evident that she was deafened to danger by the rush of water or she would’ve heard his approach.

  Watching her had been the mistake. He could’ve stood guard and protected her without actually watching her. He should have retreated when he saw her intention and merely kept an eye open for any threat.

  Instead, he’d allowed himself to become distracted, to become so deeply enthralled that he’d been as blind and deaf to danger as she had been and that might easily have gotten them both killed. He’d given in to temptation, telling himself that it was nothing more than a natural urge for any male to want to look at any naked female—primitive or not—a natural curiosity to see how different the human female was from the females of his own species. He hadn’t had a woman in a while, after all, hadn’t had the time to appease his natural urges.

  He’d already been far too interested in her for his comfort, though, and watching certainly hadn’t squelched his interest. Why he was interested when he certainly shouldn’t have been, he didn’t know. He wasn’t inclined to examine a physical attraction to a woman. He was attracted or he wasn’t. If he’d been no more than mildly curious, though, he knew he wouldn’t have watched her as he had. Once he’d seen that there was no difference between a human woman and an udai—beyond the fact that humans were flightless, which he already knew—he would’ve dismissed her and retreated.

  If he’d had any sense he wouldn’t have studied her so raptly anyway, he thought derisively.

  Before that incident, though, he was fairly certain he’d had his libido firmly in control and his interest was more curiosity than lust, more a product of having gone too long without a woman than a particular interest in her. Since then, he hadn’t been able to convince himself it was anything else.

  He’d spent a long, miserably uncomfortable night trying to reason the lust away and he was hornier now that he had been when he’d started trying to banish the images planted so firmly in his head.

  And for a primitive—a human female!

  A female so emaciated from semi-starvation that he should’ve been repelled even if she hadn’t been a human female!

  He supposed the truth was that he’d begun to see her in a totally different way as soon as she’d told him everyone believed she was his woman. From that moment, even though he’d been outraged at the suggestion, he’d stopped thinking of her simply as an alien—a sexless creature that he was obligated to protect—and seen her as a woman. He’d had to discipline his thoughts over and over since then, but he thought he’d been completely in control until she’d fired his imagination by asking him why a woman would want him to fuck her. He’d wanted to show her then and every time he’d looked at her since he’d been tempted to broach the subject again to see if he could convince her to let him show her.

  Watching her bathe had just made him more fixated on fucking her.

  Stupid move, really stupid!

  Evidently, she wasn’t particularly attracted or interested in learning why, he thought irritably. She’d been careful to keep her distance since, and not just physically. He didn’t think that it was just his imagination that she’d seemed to be losing her distru
st, seemed to be warming toward friendliness—something he hadn’t wanted to promote anyway!

  It had occurred to him when he’d followed her to the pool and found her bathing that she might have orchestrated the entire situation, that she might not have been oblivious to his presence, but the look on her face when she’d discovered him had pretty well squelched that fantasy. She not only hadn’t been aware, she hadn’t been happy to discover he’d seen her everything. She’d looked appalled not seductive.

  His just deserts, he supposed, for leaping to the conclusion that she was as manipulative and calculating as Maya!

  It was unfortunate that he’d been too pissed off about the cat attack to seize the moment when she’d touched him. He thought that had been more sympathy for his injuries, though, than sexual interest and he’d been in no frame of mind for seduction!