“But how did you know he’d be a help?”
“After I met her”—he nodded at Lydia—“and learned what she was, I got sick. Or was diagnosed, whatever. I didn’t know anyone like her, but then I thought of him… and figured he might have some contacts. That’s how I got your number.”
There was a pause. And then the female said in a dry voice, “Any chance he had a mohawk?”
“As a matter of fact… yes.”
Alex Hess rolled her eyes. “He’s a goddamn busybody. But what I can’t figure out…”
“Is what?” Lydia asked roughly.
“I don’t know any wolven, either. Yeah, sure, I’m sorry about… what’s going to happen to you both in a couple of months. I just don’t understand why I’m some kind of connector for you? I’m just being honest. A dying human, a wolven, and me? There just aren’t any intersections here.”
As Lydia lowered her head, Daniel stroked her arm. “Looks like all three of us are confused.”
Lydia was trying to think of something to say when from out of the corner of her eye, movement registered in the trees. Flaring her nostrils, she got nothing in terms of scent. Then again, the wind was blowing from the opposite direction, so there was no way to sniff out who or what it was.
But someone—or something—was watching them.
“We’ve got company,” she said quietly. “Right there.”
TWENTY
DOWN IN C.P.’S laboratory, things had gotten quite quiet, the hustle and bustle of researchers dimmed down, only a few stragglers passing by outside of her patient room. Although what time was it, midnight? She checked her watch. Then slipped off the exam table and went over to the computer at the desk. After she signed in, she glanced at the clock at the bottom right-hand corner of the monitor. 12:17 a.m.
But who was counting.
Turning away from the blue glow, she tucked the two halves of the loose fleece she was wearing around her bare upper body and paced back over to the exam table. Then she returned to the desk. Went back to the table.
Glancing down at her bare feet, she noted the pressure marks from her high heels, the bunions, the callouses. Wearing stilettos was hard on the toes and heels, but mostly where it didn’t show… on the balls of one’s footsies.
When she’d arrived down at the facility, she’d had no intentions of getting into a hospital johnny. No, thank you. She’d come in fully clothed as she always was, ripping the door open with her chin held high and her professional facade firmly in place. It had only been after Gus had shut them together in this exam room that things had gotten undone. And not just her jacket and blouse.
Goddamn, you were never more naked than fully clothed in front of a doctor—when you knew something was wrong with you.
On his side, Gus had been amazing. To keep down the chatter among his fellow researchers, he had been the one who’d drawn her blood, taken her vitals, and run the tests. He had also asked her more questions than she could count about her medical history—and when she’d gotten cold and started to pull her jacket back on over her blood-draw sites and the electrodes he’d stuck all over her, he’d taken off the fleece he had on and draped it around her.
She hadn’t zipped it up. But like that made it any less intimate? At least she had kept her bra on the whole time.
C.P. checked the door. Still closed. No footsteps coming down the hall to it, either.
Tilting her head to the side, she brought up the fleece’s sleeve, closed her eyes, and drew in a deep breath.
What cologne did he use? It was incredible—
“Did I spill something?”
C.P. gasped and dropped her arm. “I’m sorry?”
“On the sleeve?”
She blinked at him stupidly and tried to translate the words he’d spoken—
“Ah, no.” She straightened her shoulders. “You didn’t.”
“I just washed it, actually.” He went over to the rolling chair and sat down. “Good thing I don’t like the cold, right? Otherwise, we would have had to wrap you up in layers of lab coats.”
“What kind of car do you drive?” she blurted as she sat down in the chair next to the desk.
Annnd where had that come from, she wondered.
Gus paused as he logged out of her sign-in and put in his own. “I—ah. I drive a Tesla?”
“Oh.”
He sat back. “Is that a problem?”
“Oh, no. It’s great.” She refolded his fleece over her torso, wrapping it all around herself. “Really.”
“Don’t tell me…”
As he refocused on the screen, she frowned. “What.”
His fingers hit the keys in a hard pattern. “You’re a car guy, aren’t you.”
“I’m a woman who likes cars, yes.”
“You’re a motor head, I mean. Who doesn’t approve of electric cars because you’re a dinosaur who refuses to give a shit about the environment.”
C.P. thinned her lips. “Guess you’ve got me dead to rights. Tell me, all that electricity you’re using, are you going to ignore the amount of fossil fuel that’s used to produce it?”
“You’re really playin’ like that. After gas-guzzlers have ruined the—”
“And anything that needs engine sounds piped through the speakers to—”
Both of them shut up at the same time. And she wasn’t sure who started laughing first. Maybe it was him, probably it was her, but either way, all of a sudden, she was wheezing and wiping her eyes while he was holding his belly, the release of tension like a sea change in her, in him.
When things had run their course and they were both sitting back in their seats and smiling, she was the one who refocused them.
“So,” she said on a sigh, “what do you think, Doc.”
Gus cleared his throat and brought up a couple of different reports, minimizing the windows so he could look at all of them at once. As his dark eyes went back and forth, it was like he was trying to read tea leaves in the numerical values in those columns, and though she was sure to know what some of the results meant, she wasn’t going to look.
Instead, she focused on his face, noting everything from the way his lashes curled up and his brows arched… to the cut of his jaw… and the curve of his lower lip. He’d had his ears pierced on both sides, but he never wore earrings so the holes were just pinpricks that were slightly darker. And he had a chicken pox scar on his cheek.
She found herself wondering what he’d been like as a teenager, all lanky limbs and dreams of basketball. He’d told her once, in an offhand way, that he’d wanted to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar when he was younger.
No wait… he hadn’t told that to her. He’d made the comment to someone else, when they’d been riding the elevator in a group.
Gus turned his whole body toward her, swiveling his chair around. And even though they had known each other professionally for a couple of years, and she trusted him as much as she trusted anybody, she was suddenly scared of him. But that was more what he might say, wasn’t it.
His face was a mask, no emotion showing.
“Tell me,” she said in her best C.P. Phalen voice.