Forever The World of Nightwalkers - By Jacquelyn Frank Page 0,34
see the errors of his ways.
Odds were, she would be fired by the end of the week.
She pushed free of her admirers and ran for the woods. Avery Landon was a worry for another day. Right now she had to bring clothes to a naked man. As she struggled through the bracken to get deeper into the woods and farther away from potential witnesses, she suddenly heard the snapping of branches and Sargent bounded out of the brush, barking happily at her arrival. She moved quicker at the sight of him, headed in the direction he’d come from. Suddenly a hand grabbed her by the arm, pulling her to a stop. She was such a jumble of high-strung nerves that she shouted out in surprise.
“Easy,” he soothed, reaching to take the gym bag from her tightly clutched fingers. “Is everything all right?”
No. Nothing is all right, she thought. “It was fine. Nothing of note happened.”
“Damn, that’s unnerving. There are weapons in that trunk.”
“Yes. I kind of figured that out,” she muttered.
He unzipped the bag, and after withdrawing a uniform let it drop to the ground.
“You carry a second uniform to work?” she asked, surprised that it wasn’t street clothing. On her way back she’d been wondering hem; line-height:1.4em; } div.toc_vg.ow he was going to explain his missing uniform.
“We all do, if we’re smart. I can’t even tell you how often I’ve had a drunk puke on me.”
“Oh I see.”
Yeah she did see. She watched, unable to even give him the courtesy of turning her back to him, as he stepped into his pants and drew them up over extraordinarily defined calf and thigh muscles. Apparently undershorts weren’t a part of his backup bag because he zipped himself in with caution, going utterly commando. Marissa ignored the part of her brain that pouted heavily as he hid all that tanned, glorious strength. He quickly drew on an undershirt and then his uniform shirt, taking the unimpeded beauty of powerful biceps and shoulders away from her.
More internal pouting. Damn him, she thought a bit grouchily. How was it that she constantly felt like she was being pushed and pulled at the same time whenever she was around him? It wasn’t as though she’d never seen a beautiful, lean, muscled, deliciously male person before.
Marissa went hot and wet in one second flat and she forced herself to turn away, lecturing herself for being so weak and so damn pathetic. Okay, sure it had been a long, long, looong time since she’d gone to bed with a man, but she’d somehow managed to keep from panting over just any man in sight for all that time. Or any man at all for that matter, she amended.
He’s a patient, she reminded herself fiercely. An alien patient from some sort of cosmic lab experiment. It was all she could do to keep from biting at her lip, shifting her weight, or chewing her damn nails off, she realized with no little irritability. She had worked so hard to eradicate all of those kinds of fidgets and tells. It was so important to her to demonstrate the level of competency and professionalism she needed in order to work with these alpha men and women. All it took was a single impression of weakness and any chance of them respecting and trusting her strength and guidance would crash and burn. Some of them even went for her throat, casting her as the villain who was trying to rob them of the job they depended on for self-definition and self-worth. She had to hold on to her competence even more now that she was faced with this potentially paralyzing situation. She was, she knew instinctively, going to need every moment of calm and strength she could muster up in order to cope with this unbelievable turn of events.
“S-so … you have a, um, dead pharaoh living inside of you?” she asked, looking for a more focused explanation of what he’d been telling her. Bodywalker 101 for dummies … or at the very least a completely dumbfounded doctor who’d always thought the planet housed only one kind of humanoid species. Now she’d been exposed to at least two others and was struggling to make herself accept it. “And that other creature … the thing made of stone …”
“A Gargoyle. Gargoyles are … well, the gist of the story is that the Templars used their spell-casting abilities to create the Gargoyle race in order to have powerful protectors and servants.”