Page 15 of The Mating Fire
“She left. I was just about to go back inside and talk with the pretty hostess. She’s more my style.” He grinned.
He couldn’t let this asswipe escape without punishment. He loathed men who hurt women.
Don’t you do the same?
That tiny pinprick of a conscience nagged him. Ignoring it, Jared folded his arms across his chest.
“Trying to score a date because you need to satisfy an itch in the crotch?”
Crude statement. It got the man’s eyes widening, but then he grinned slyly. “What other purpose are dates but to find a girl to screw? Especially when you have a bothersome itch.”
The asshole had the temerity to wink at Jared. Bosom buddies, men sharing a moment of camaraderie about women.
What you know about women wouldn’t fill a petri dish.
“You have an itch,” Jared said slowly.
He flicked his gaze at the man’s trousers.
Burn baby burn.
Suddenly Harper’s blind date began to moan, rubbing his privates. “Oh dear heavens, it itches, ow ow ow, what the hell is happening to me?”
Satisfied, Jared walked away. “Instead of a blind date, try lotion and a hand job next time, asshole.”
Laughing silently, he waved a hand and vanished back to his home, knowing midnight approached and he didn’t dare show his face to the public after that.
Especially not to Harper, for instead of saving his soul, she would shrink back in horror.
And run away screaming, as many other women had done since the curse was laid upon him nearly one hundred years ago.
Chapter 7
The next day at the lab, Harper tried to focus on her work, but images of Jared kept nudging aside facts and figures. She was close to completing a masters, and already planned her PhD thesis on pyroclastic density currents and their deposits. Using field data, she studied past deposits from lethal flows to determine what formed them.
Her thesis was to provide a better warning system for when a volcano such as Mt. St. Helens would actually erupt, forming a deadly pyroclastic flow that could kill in minutes. There was no reason for her to accompany the other grad students and professors on the trip to Indonesia next month.
Yet her passport was ready, and she longed to see the rare blue lava and study the sulphur emissions. The crater itself contained a lovely blue lake that looked like a swimming pool, only it was filled with deadly acid that could eat through steel as easily as a hot knife slid through butter.
Harper didn’t know why she itched to see such a spectacle. Her PhD field of study had nothing to do with the lava and deadly gases. It leaned more toward geology. She wanted to get a job as a volcanologist studying dormant volcanoes, not active ones.
Yet in the past few weeks, the desire to see the volcano increased. It called to her in a way she didn’t understand.
Didn’t make sense.
Equally frustrating was her base reaction to the man who called himself Jared Griffin. A brief encounter at a bar after a failed date and she couldn’t get him out of her mind. Not only was she sexually attracted to him, but the fact he’d seen the very volcano she longed to visit…
Jared Griffin. Who was he? When he’d grabbed her to yank her away from the car, she’d felt an electric shock all the way to her toes. A thrilling awareness, more than sexual, more than mere biology.
It was if she’d been buried in rock for years and suddenly the rocks shattered, and she felt sunshine upon her face.
Being a logical person was a bitch when faced with something she couldn’t explain away through physical biology. Harper felt equal parts fascination, confusion and fear.
I can’t control this and what I can’t control can be dangerous. I must have control.
One reason she didn’t bother much with dating or men. After losing her virginity at 21, simply because she didn’t want to be the world’s oldest virgin, she decided against sex again. The experience was rushed, lackluster and worse was the feeling her body and emotions were out of control.
Harper turned her attention to her laptop and the notes she’d made on a recent fieldwork study. But the letters and data kept jumping on the screen, as if dancing.
