Prey (Copper Mesa Eagles Book 2) (3 page)

He nodded slightly and gave her a thumbs-up.

Her heart sank.

Please don’t let this be part of whatever scheme they have going on for this guy
, she thought.

“All right,” said Zach, putting his phone into his pocket. “I’ll see you Friday, then?”

“Perfect,” Katrina said.

For a moment, they looked at each other. Katrina wasn’t quite sure what to do — did they shake hands again, or hug, or something?

Before she could stop herself, she rose onto her tiptoes, put one hand on his shoulder, and kissed him on the cheek, a shiver of electricity rocketing down her spine as she did. He was almost too tall for her to reach, and she wobbled a little. Zach put one hand in the small of her back to steady her, and left it there until she pulled away.

For another second, they looked at each other.

He felt that too
, Katrina thought.

“See you then,” he said, grinning.

Then he left the room, and Katrina put one hand to her back, where she could still feel the heat of his fingers.

She was half excited and half filled with dread.

“Good,” Pete said softly behind her. “We’ll have a backup line to him.”

Katrina felt like she’d swallowed a lead weight.

Chapter Three

Zach

Zach eased his foot down on the gas pedal, watching the speedometer carefully. His ancient Ford Escort tended to start rattling around fifty-five miles per hour. If he got to sixty-five, things
really
got dire. Frankly, he was amazed that the car still worked at all, and he hadn’t shaken it to bits by now.

He got up to sixty miles an hour and decided it was good enough. As much as he hated blocking the slow lane of Interstate 15, he wasn’t about to let his stupid car get between him and Katrina. Hell, he’d piss off every driver in Northern Utah as long as it guaranteed getting to her place on time.

It had been a long, long three days. Three days where he hadn’t been able to focus on a single thing, looking at systems of equations in his homework and seeing her blue eyes and curly blond hair, the sparkle in her eyes when she’d teased him about poetry.

That
had never happened to Zach before. He’d had a couple of girlfriends, been on dates. He’d
seen
beautiful women, but he’d never found himself so hopelessly enthralled by someone like he was by Katrina. He’d never thought of someone to the point of total distraction like he did with her.

He pulled off the interstate and his little car finally felt less like a death trap, and he drove to her quiet, apartment-building-filled neighborhood.

I should have brought flowers or something
, he thought when he looked at the front door of her building.
Shit
.

He stood at her front door and pressed the buzzer next to her name, standing in the warm night, flower-less. Minutes later, she was coming down the stairs and Zach’s heart caught in his throat, just like it had the first time he’d seen her.

She was beautiful, her blond curls bouncing against her shoulders, her blue eyes almost glowing. She wore a blue dress that matched them exactly, and it fit her perfectly, hugging her breasts and nipping in at the waist, then flaring out into a full skirt.

Zach had to fight back his erection, just watching her come down the steps.

When was the last time I got a boner over someone fully dressed?
he wondered.

Then he thought about quadratic equations. He thought about them very, very hard.

“You’re on time,” Katrina said, pushing open the glass front door to her building.

“You sound surprised,” Zach said.

“No one’s on time to anything anymore,” she said. “So it’s a lovely surprise.”

As the door closed, he looked over his shoulder into the building, wondering what her place looked like. It
had
to be nicer than his dorm room — after all, she had a real job and everything.

Then she threaded her arm through his, her hand resting on his forearm, and he forgot about everything else immediately. Her fingertips were warm and made him feel like he was buzzing, deep down inside, a thousand excited bees all waking up at once.

Zach felt like a prince or a king or a very high nobleman at least as he walked her down the steps, down the sidewalk, and to his car.

He stopped feeling royal immediately.

This is why you don’t date much
, he remembered.
Because you tell women that you’re a college student, and then they see your car, and then they go to dinner with a lawyer instead.

“I used to drive one of these!” Katrina said. “Mine was blue, though.”

“This used to be blue,” Zach said, eyeing the huge, ugly sun spots on the side of the car where the paint had almost faded white. “I think, anyway. Either that or green.”

She laughed again.

“I loved mine,” she said. “Looking back, it was probably shitty, but I was seventeen so I thought it was the greatest. I named it Burt.”

“Burt?”

She shrugged.

“Seemed like a Burt, I guess,” she said, and sighed. “God, I used to drive Burt eighty, ninety miles an hour on some of the back roads in the desert west of here, going to parties out in the middle of nowhere. I’d tell my parents I was studying.”

Zach looked down at her. A grin crept onto his face.

“Troublemaker,” he said.

He bent down and opened the door for Katrina, offering her a hand. It seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do, and she took it, then gathered her skirt with a flourish, daintily lowering herself into the passenger seat.

Zach was the tiniest bit disappointed. He wouldn’t have said no to a flash of thigh, a quick peek down her neckline.

Quadratic equations,
he thought.
Come on
.

“I
used
to be a troublemaker,” Katrina said, once he was in the car. She had a grin on her face, almost like she was
daring
him to do something.

Like kiss her?
Zach thought. He nearly leaned over right then, aching to press his mouth against hers, hear the soft gasp as he ran his hand up her...

The area beneath a curve can be found by integrating a function between two points,
he thought.
 

“But not anymore?” he asked. He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine made a half-hearted scraping sound. Katrina looked at him skeptically.

“Practice try,” Zach said.

“We can take my car,” she offered.

He turned the key again, willing the car to start, and this time the thing finally sputtered to life. Zach patted the dashboard.

“Atta girl,” he said to the car, and pulled away from the curb. “And now you’re squeaky clean?” he asked Katrina.

“As far as anyone knows, I was always squeaky clean,” she said. “I was very good at telling my parents that I was at a friend’s house when we were really both getting drunk in the desert and waking up when the coyotes sniffed our faces at ten in the morning.”

Zach shuddered involuntarily.

“That only happened once,” she said. “We were always more afraid of rattlesnakes and most afraid of getting busted by the cops. In retrospect, I’m not sure how we didn’t.”

She looked out the windshield thoughtfully.

“You can get away with a lot in the middle of nowhere,” Zach said.

And even more when you don’t have parents
, he thought.

* * *

Soon, they were sharing nachos and drinking margaritas at El Coyote, a Mexican joint that was somewhere between a dive and a hole-in-the wall, but Zach had heard that it had the best drinks anywhere around.

He was inclined to believe that whoever had told him that was right, as he took another long swig. Half sweet, half tart, good tequila. Not that he knew good from bad tequila, but he
liked
it, at least.

“You haven’t told me anything about yourself,” Katrina said. She leaned back in the booth, both hands on the base of her margarita glass. Zach couldn’t help but watch as her bosom rose and fell beneath her dress, always threatening to stretch the space between the buttons but never actually succeeding.

“What’s there to tell?” Zach asked. “I go to class, I tutor other students, I go home and do my homework. Sometimes I try to find a job for the summer.”

“Start with why you’re an undergraduate at twenty-eight, maybe,” she said. “That’s got to be a story.”

Zach made a face. It was barely a story, much less a
good
one.

“What makes you say that?” he said. “Maybe I just fucked around until I was twenty-five.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But people don’t go from fuck-up to motivated for no reason.”

“It’s not a good story,” he warned. “If it ruins our first date, I’m blaming you.”

“If it ruins our date, then we were having a terrible date in the first place,” Katrina said.
 

She leaned forward, her breasts brushing the top of the table. Zach had to tear his eyes away.

“I grew up in a very, very tiny town, way in southern Utah,” he said.

“What town?”

“Obsidian.”

Katrina shrugged, and Zach laughed.

“Don’t worry, no one’s ever heard of it,” he said.

“I’ve been to southern Utah,” Katrina said. “I drove to the north rim of the Grand Canyon just last year. We went through one town that I’m almost positive was run by fundamentalist Mormons. You know, the ones who wear the prairie dresses and have ten wives.”

“Obsidian is further east,” Zach said. “Though I’m sure we’ve got some of those around.”

Katrina narrowed her eyes playfully.

“You’re not one, are you?” she asked. “Shopping for wife number four?”

Something deep inside Zach stirred again, some kind of awakening that
rumbled
.

“That all depends,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. “Can you make a good casserole?”

“Is baklava a casserole?” Katrina asked.

Zach just looked at her, raising his eyebrows a little, letting Katrina figure out the answer to her own question.

“Probably not,” Katrina admitted. “Then no. No good casseroles. Only baklava.”

“
Only
baklava?”

“Well, baklava and, like, grilled cheese. I can make okay omelets, sometimes.”

“You’re really not selling me on this fourth wife thing,” Zach teased.

Katrina just laughed and kicked her feet out in front of her. One found Zach’s foot just for a moment, then retreated.

“Who said I was trying?” she said. “Besides, I’ve got
other
skills.”

Zach’s mind went
there
, right away: Katrina, pressed up against the back of the booth, her skirt around her hips as he leaned into her, his body between her soft thighs. Burying himself in her, listening to her panting as her fingernails raked down his back...

“Also,” she said, taking a nacho and pointing it at him, “You’re avoiding the topic.”

“What’s the topic?”

“Why you’re in college at twenty-eight,” she said. “Don’t act like you forgot.”

“Right,” he said. His erection deflated immediately, and he was glad that she couldn’t see through the table where they were sitting.

“Well?”

Zach ate another nacho and frowned. He’d never found a good way into his story about himself.

“
Well
, my parents died in a car crash when I was thirteen,” he said, looking at the table and not at Katrina.

She covered her mouth with both hands.

“Oh my god,” she said, her voice muffled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring that up, I had no idea.”

“It’s fine,” Zach said, shaking his head. “Believe me, I got used to explaining it.”

“Was it a drunk driver?” Katrina asked.

“Just bad weather,” he said. “They were coming back from the city, a couple hours away, and they took a bad shortcut in a rainstorm. Skidded right off a mountain.”

“Jesus,” Katrina whispered. “Did you go into foster care? What happened?”

“I got lucky,” Zach said. “My oldest brother was a couple months shy of eighteen and talked a judge into giving him custody of me and my middle brother. So he had to raise the two of us monsters
and
deal with losing our parents.”

“Is he okay?”

Zach laughed.

“Seth’s fine. He got married about a year ago. Still lives in Obsidian.”

“What about the other one?”

Zach paused. He never knew how to answer when people asked him about Garrett. The truth was, he had no idea.

“He moved,” Zach told her. “I haven’t heard from him in a little while, but I think he’s doing okay.”

A little while meaning nine years
, he thought.
I don’t think those fucking postcards count, beyond telling us he’s still alive
.

Katrina just nodded, her face serious as she leaned across the table again.

“We did give Seth hell, though,” Zach said. “You’d think we’d behave a little better, knowing that our parents just died and our teenage brother was responsible for us, but instead I failed out of high school, and then spent a whole year not doing much except smoking on the roof and watching cartoons while he worked his fingers to the bone, trying to feed us.”

“How’d you afford the cigarettes?” she asked. Now she was leaning her chin in one hand, her bright blue eyes locked onto Zach’s.

He couldn’t look away, and felt himself opening up to her in a way he’d never opened to anyone before.

Zach glanced over his shoulder quickly, then hunched forward. Their margaritas were empty, the nachos just crumbs on the plate.

“I’ve never told this to anyone before,” he said, his voice low.

Katrina leaned in, and he got a whiff of her scent: floral and citrusy, utterly
intoxicating
.

“Why are you telling me?” she asked, her voice just above a whisper.

“I dunno,” he said. He looked over his shoulder again at the waitress taking the order from the next table, and Katrina followed his gaze.

Because I can’t stop myself when I’m around you
, he thought.
Because I feel this pull toward you that I’ve never felt toward anyone before, not ever
.

“I fell in with a bad crowd,” he started.

“In Obsidian?”