Ignited (26 page)

I called Lucy back.

“What?” she asked.

“You’re reading
Jane Eyre
.”

“You don’t have to sound so shocked. I can read.”

My laugh had an edge of hysteria.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Sure. You go back to your book.”

I hung up and stared at the wall. An entire floor separated Lucy and me, but I’d been able to hear her as if she sat beside me. Luckily, I had to concentrate to make that sense come alive. I couldn’t imagine being bombarded by noise constantly. It was enough to adjust to my changed vision and hearing. What else had changed?

Eager to do another test, I jumped up. I glanced around, looking for something heavy that I normally wouldn’t be able to lift. Nothing that wasn’t a huge piece of furniture. Too much. I ran into the family room and slammed into Gabe. He threw out his arms to brace us as we tumbled to the floor in a pile of arms and legs.

His breath rushed out of him when I pancaked his lungs. Awesome. I couldn’t be a petite girl who wouldn’t cause damage, could I? Beneath me, Gabe stilled. His green eyes narrowed, and I smiled, though it felt a bit wobbly. I couldn’t help it. I was nervous.
He
made me nervous.

“Gab—”

He lifted me off him with gentle hands and sat up. I watched in bewilderment as he stood and proceeded to leave without saying a word. Either it was my imagination or he was pissed at me. I’d spent the last several hours anxious about seeing him, and he ditched me the second we bumped into each other. My emotions whipped from confusion to hurt in a matter of seconds.

“Wow,” I said to his back. “I knew you were a player, but you do move on fast, don’t you?”

Gabe froze. His icy “Excuse me?” cooled the air around me by ten degrees.

I stood, too, putting my hands in my pockets like I hadn’t a care in the world. Screw him. I wasn’t like the girls who had chased after him begging for his attention. “Oh, I’m pretty sure you heard me. But just in case . . .” I lowered my mental guard and called him a few names in my mind.

He definitely heard me that time. He spun on his heel, and his mouth twisted in a grim smile. “Take that back,” he said slowly.

“ No. ”

“Remy, I’m not in a good mood, and you are pushing it.”

His eyes had almost narrowed to slits. Maybe I shouldn’t push him . . . I remembered how excited I’d been to show him my haircut and my eyes narrowed, too. Then again, sometimes it felt good to give someone a shove.

“Oh, I’m scared!” I mocked. “Why don’t you man up and tell me what your problem is?”

“My problem?” he asked in an incredulous voice. His brows shot up, and he took a step toward me. I rocked on my heels, ready to spring away. “
You
are my problem,” he added in a low voice that thrummed through me. “You said you’d give us a chance.” He took another step. “And that you cared about me.” Another step. “And then you kissed my brother. Who’s the player now?”

I blinked at him. “What are you talking about?”

“I saw you yesterday! Look, I’ll do my best to stay out of your way. Congratulations on patching things up with him.”

He sounded more tormented than happy for me. I considered his once-more retreating back. He wasn’t jealous so much as hurt. I could see that in the creases around his eyes before he turned away. He thought Asher and I had made up, and it was time to set him straight.

“For your information, that was a good-bye kiss, Gabe. He knows about us and he wants us to be happy,” I called to him.

I’d stunned him. He’d gone still as a statue halfway up the stairs. I could only see the bottom half of his legs, but when I opened my senses, I could hear how fast his heart beat, thumping against his rib cage with passion or excitement. He was so good at hiding how he felt because he’d gotten used to putting others before himself. Until me. I liked being the one that he wanted enough to grab hold of, the one person who made him lose his control.

The thought of Gabe losing control excited me. I shoved harder, hoping it would incite him to riot. “You know, for someone who said he was going to chase me with everything he had, I have to say this act is total weak sauce. I expected more of you.”

Whoa.
He launched off the stairs in an explosion of speed that would have been impossible to dodge without my new abilities. By the time Gabe reached the spot I’d been standing, I’d spun out of his way and stood on the staircase. We’d reversed positions, and he hadn’t seen me.

Gabe swung around, shock widening his eyes. “How did you do that?”

I’d never been faster than him. He had always been able to overpower me until I used my “special” violent abilities. A giddy bubble of excitement rose up in me. This was going to be fun.
Game on.

“Do you know what I thought of when they took me yesterday?” I asked in a conversational tone.

He shook his head, studying me like he sought a weakness. I could almost hear him thinking,
Challenge accepted
. I loved that about him, the way he stood toe-to-toe with me, and made me laugh while doing it.

“I realized that I might not see you again, and it hurt imagining that. You know what my next thought was?”

He devoured me with his eyes and didn’t say a word.

“I regretted that I hadn’t kissed you,” I told him. “I’ve thought about it. A lot. What it will be like with you.”

Gabe’s face lit up with a smile, and his muscles tensed. I could swear I saw steam rising from him. Any second now he would pounce. “Come here, Remington, and we’ll find out,” he said in a low voice that sent shivers along my spine.

I backed up a stair. “I don’t think so. You said you were going to chase me.” I breathed a little harder, remembering that moment in the wine vault. “Chase me, Gabe, and I promise to let you catch me.”

I stayed still long enough to see the fire catch in his eyes and then the game began.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
TWO

I
shot up the stairs with him hot on my heels. It didn’t help that I really, really wanted to be caught. I hadn’t understood how I felt about Gabe until confronted by him, but now it seemed like the emotions had been there forever, growing steady and sure over time. Still, when his fingers brushed my waist in the entrance hall, the challenge of the play lit in me, and I surged up the next flight of stairs, escaping him.

He gasped and rested with his foot on the bottom stair, while I hesitated on the top landing. I could feel the satisfied smile on my lips. This was a game we would both win, and the anticipation heightened every sense. I could inhale his scent from where I stood, the spice of him, and I wondered what he would taste like.

“Giving up?” I taunted.

“Not a chance,” he promised, his features sharpened by emotion. “You’re faster than before.”

“And I can hear better. Your heart is pounding.”

He seemed to listen to the silence. Then he smiled with a heat that curled into me. “So is yours,” he said, and we were off again.

On the next floor up, I managed to lose him. Many of the rooms had multiple entrances so I could enter through one door and leave through another. I hid behind a door on the third floor, but he sneaked up on me. I had a feeling he let me go; the escape was too easy and he had more experience with our powerful senses.

I made it to the fourth-floor storage closet, peeking around the edge of the cracked door. Gabe tiptoed down the hall, checking rooms with a smile on his face, and I wanted to laugh.

“Am I hot or cold, Remington?” he asked, tipping his head to listen for me.

I pictured him with his shirt off, a mile of muscles rippling from his wide shoulders to his lean hips.
Hot, Gabe. Definitely hot.

He paused mid-step in the hall, seeing the image in my mind, and his jaw clenched. The intensity upped another notch, and some of the playfulness dissipated. He stalked forward, slow and sure. “Have I told you about the first time I saw you?”

At the Underground. The first time Lucy brought me there.

“No, I saw you before then.”

Confused, I almost gave away my hiding place when my hand slipped, knocking into a broom that leaned against one wall. I caught the handle just before it clattered into the door. I paused, but Gabe passed my hiding spot, striding down the hall. He reappeared a moment later, and his low voice mesmerized me.

“Before you arrived in town, things had become unbearable. Asher was lost. Lottie was . . . well, Lottie. Something had to change, but I didn’t know how to help them. Maybe after what I’d done in Italy, how I became immortal, I didn’t deserve to be happy, but I couldn’t accept that for Asher and Lottie. I thought to go out of town, to clear my head, figure things out . . . That night, I sat at the airport in Portland, desperately wanting some kind of sign. And the doors opened at the gate, and you walked off the plane.”

I pressed my forehead to the door, feeling him on the other side, a disembodied voice. Gabe had been there the night I’d first arrived in Blackwell Falls, broken and battered by Dean. I’d been covered in bruises and soul-weary from years of his abuse and my mother’s neglect. Thank God, I’d changed since then.

“I saw you that night, Remy. I don’t know where your dad was, but you stood there for a while waiting for him. Do you remember?”

Yes.
My dad had been worried that people would jostle me. He’d asked the flight attendant to let me off the plane first so I wouldn’t be hurt further. It was one of the first times he’d shown me that he cared, and the memory was bittersweet.

“You didn’t have your guard up,” Gabe said.

I almost gasped. He was right. I hadn’t heard of Protectors then or understood that I should guard against them. I’d usually kept my mental walls up in crowds to protect myself from sick people, but I’d been waiting alone in a mostly empty airport, and I’d been so tired from the flight and my injuries and dealing with the father who’d abandoned me.

You knew. You knew I was a Healer.

“Yes. The first I’d seen since the war began. I almost went up to you, but you looked so angry and hurt. Then your dad joined you and I recognized him from town. I waited a whole fifteen seconds after you left before I grabbed my bags and went home. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but my gut said you would change everything.”

I placed a shaking hand over my stomach.
But when I saw you two days later at the Underground, you ignored me.

“You’re a Healer, and I’m a Protector, and our kind had hated each other for a century. I thought you would run the second you knew what I was, and I wanted to give you space so you wouldn’t feel threatened. I didn’t know that you’d met Asher at the beach that morning, and that I was already too late. I’d waited too long.”

I didn’t know. I thought you hated me then.
Something about Gabe’s power had always unnerved me, but I think it was because I’d sensed the intensity behind it. I’d thought the danger came from his desire to protect his family from a naïve Healer, but I’d been wrong.

“Back then you were afraid of me, but you’re not anymore. I’ve been waiting a long time for you, Remington.” I could almost feel him on the other side of the door, his heart pounding as he leaned close to whisper, “Don’t make me wait anymore.”

I took a deep breath, no longer caring if he heard me. I wanted to be found. The door opened the rest of the way when I gave it a slight shove. I stepped into the empty hall and glanced both ways, but Gabe had disappeared. I listened with my other senses.

“Chase me,” he said, from a distance.

The game had ended. I walked to the stairs and followed the sound of his heart. A minute later, I found him in the wine vault, leaning against the far wall where he’d held me less than a week ago.

“Gotcha,” I told him.

“For as long as you want me,” he said, his eyes smiling.

I stepped inside the room and kicked the door closed behind me. There was something about Gabe, about Gabe and me, that negated my nerves in this moment. Once I’d realized that he wasn’t scary, something had shifted in our relationship. It had happened so slowly that I hadn’t been aware of it. Maybe because I hadn’t liked him in the beginning, I’d never tempered my actions around him or tried to be someone else for him. He’d been treated to the undiluted, imperfect real me, and that was whom he’d waited for.

I twisted the door’s lock behind me, and then I walked up to Gabe, stopping only when my feet tangled with his. He didn’t move, and I glimpsed a small amount of doubt on his face. He’d chased me for so long with no reciprocation from me. This time, he needed me to make the choice to move us forward.

His chest lifted in a heady sigh when I finally laid a hand over his heart.

His eyelids lowered. “Remington, kiss me alre—”

I cut him off by pressing my lips to his. For a moment, he went completely still against me, my breath entangling with his. Then his arms wrapped around me and he whipped me around so that my back was to the wall. All hesitation evaporated the second he had his hands on me. And there the hurrying ended.

It was if the waiting had built a patience in Gabe, a desire to make our first kiss something lasting and infinite. His lips brushed mine, back and forth, asking me for an invitation, and I gave it. His hands gathered up the weight of my hair and let it fall through his fingers, testing the way it felt. His body leaned into mine, so that the wall propped us both up when gravity tugged me down. Then those fingers slid under my shirt to discover the small of my back, and my skin wanted to throw a party.

I stopped thinking and did what I’d imagined so there would be no regrets. My hands met at his neck, traced across his shoulders, and explored the muscles and skin between there and down to his hips. I flattened my fingers against his shoulder blades to pull him closer. I tasted his mouth, and I fell deeper into him. And when we came up for air, our eyes met, naked with emotion. Then he smiled and I had to see what that tasted like, and we dove back into each other to find out how our second kiss would be.