Die For You: Catastrophe Series, Book 1 (10 page)

Chapter Twelve

“You know, you don’t have to hover.”

Adam clenched his fists and fought the sudden urge to throw Rachel over his knee and spank her perky little ass.

“I’ll be okay by myself,” she told him. “You don’t have to stay here with me.”

Her voice seemed unnaturally loud in the vast university library. She stood there frowning at him, hands on her hips, looking so damn beautiful it hurt. She was wearing layered tank tops, form-fitting just as he liked, and underneath he knew she still wore that red bra. His pulse started racing. That damn red bra.

He’d fucked her last night. Taken her virginity. And Jesus Christ, it had been spectacular. Right now, all he wanted to do was fuck her again. If she expected he’d keep his distance, she was in for a rude awakening.

“You don’t carry a gun. You can’t fight, and you’re little. Forget it. I’m stuck to you like glue,” he told her.

She lifted an eyebrow. “I’m not that little.”

He looked her up and down from the top of her auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail, down, past her long legs in skinny jeans to the tips of her brown boots. True. Rachel wasn’t petite. She was certainly stacked. Built. Jesus, his dick was getting hard again.

“I feel like you’re trying to rush me,” she complained.

“No, I’m not.” Was he?

“There aren’t any live people here. You’ve already searched the whole floor, and the three above us. There aren’t any dead bodies in this section. It’s safe. It even smells kinda nice. Why are we in a hurry? It’s not like we have to be somewhere.”

He listened to her words and scanned the ocean of bookcases surrounding them, row after row of thick, boring-as-hell scholarly journals. He stomach clenched.
Fuck.
This shit was his kryptonite.

“I saw a copy of
Guns & Ammo
back in the periodicals section.” She smiled brightly.

His head jerked around like a hound catching a scent. “Where?”

She pointed. “On the other side of the elevators.”

Hell, kicking back with his favorite magazine sounded great. He even had an emergency beer stashed in his backpack. He peered down at her. “I’m not illiterate, I can help.”

“I know, honey, but I need to browse. Slowly. Without someone looking over my shoulder telling me to hurry up. I need some possible locations for our dream farm so we don’t end up driving around aimlessly. It’s better if we find what we want here and drive straight to it. It sucks that we can’t just search the internet. We probably could have found what we needed, and with directions on how to get there, in less than an hour. But instead I need to go through this.” She swept out her arm to encompass the whole area.

He smiled.
Honey?
She’d called him honey? “Don’t you want to look at books on farming? Or on solar or wind power, first?”

“Well, I want to find a place that’s cutting edge. I thought maybe I’d find some kind of article touting a fancy new organic farm. After that, I’ll go look at those sections. I’ll come find you when I do. We need to take all of those books with us. And any others we can find on how to live like it’s the eighteen hundreds again.”

He chewed on that for a second. “Okay, I’ll get outta your hair.”

“I just don’t want you to be bored.”

“Uh-huh.” Total bullshit. He knew when he wasn’t wanted. Fortunately for her, he didn’t really want to be here either. One thing he’d learned about Rachel was she was smart, real smart. He’d never gone to college and she had. Hell, she’d been at UC Davis, majoring in History. She’d do a better job with this than he ever would. Adam pulled two walkie-talkies out of his backpack, turned one on and handed it to her. “Here. Channel one. Call me if you need anything. You breathe into this and I’ll come running. Don’t go too far. And keep that pepper spray in your pocket. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.” She saluted him.

He stared at her, unblinking. Gave her the look he gave new recruits.

“What?” she said, her voice full of fake innocence. “Go…go.” She shooed him away. “Have fun. I’ll be fine.”

But he wasn’t about to be dismissed. He stepped close and cupped the back of her head with his hand. Something flickered in her eyes, something dark and inviting. Something that made him understand she was remembering last night, playing out their night of sex in her head, the same as he was.

Oh, hell yes.

He dove in and pressed his lips right below her ear. He loved her lips, but right now he wanted this more. Rachel drew in a sharp breath. He felt her shiver as his tongue swept out to lick her skin. She dug her fingers into his biceps. He’d already discovered he loved this spot. The secret spot. Her scent drove him crazy, and it seemed to be concentrated right here. Her clean perfume managed to slice through all the morbid environmental smells, a bright light that sent him into a frenzy of need as quickly as throwing a lit match on a gasoline spill.

She swallowed. “Adam—”

“You smell so damn good.” He sucked in a deep breath, his nose pressed against her throat. “What is that?” He’d seen her use it before but had no idea what it was.

“It’s, um, Amazing Grace by Philosophy.”

“I could smell this all day.”

“Well, good news for you. Today, I sprayed it everywhere.”

He lifted his head, his breath stuck in his throat. “Everywhere?”

“Uh, huh.”

“Christ.”

He threaded his fingers in her hair, tugged her head back and crushed her lips with an almost brutal kiss. She melted into him. Tongues clashed as she met him stroke for stroke. He kissed her like there was no tomorrow. Because, like Rachel often reminded him, maybe there wasn’t. He needed to take this life and live it to the fullest, take it in with great big gulps. And he did, until he finally broke away, both of them breathing heavily.

He rested his forehead against hers and cupped her face with both hands. “You stay safe, baby—” he paused, “—because after this, I’m fucking you again.”

Rachel stood there watching Adam’s retreating back and his magnificent ass—her pulse pounding, chest heaving, lips tingling. She tried her best to recover from his overwhelming masculinity. He was so manly, so sexy, so everything. She swayed on her feet and grabbed the back of a chair for support.

He was going to fuck her again right after she finished her research?

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and smiled that goofy smile again. Well then, she’d better get cracking. No time to waste.

Invigorated by the nostalgic scent of paper and ink, she got to work and waded through the shelves of journals, touching them reverently. This grounded her, something as normal as research. These days, normal wasn’t boring, normal was good.

She meandered through the cases of journals and eventually pulled out an armful of potential candidates, shuffled over to a table, dumped the load and started reading. One abstract comparing the efficacy of free-range, organic farming to corporate mega farms seemed promising. Aha. A list of demonstration farms, along with locations in the bibliography.

Score. A few were even in California.

Rachel gnawed on the inside of her cheek. Should she call Adam first before she went looking for maps? She glanced at her watch, maybe just a quick check in. She might be clueless when it came to guns, but walkie-talkies she could handle.

“Hey, Adam?”

“Copy. You found something?”

“Almost. But I need to find the map room first. I think it’s just down the hall. I wanted to check in with you before I changed locations.”

“I want to check that room out too. I brought my netbook and solar charger. I want to see if I’m able to power up their equipment. They might have some digital maps I can download.”

“Sure, but there’s no need to hurry. I have a list of farms that might be what we want, but I still need to find their locations. For all I know, I might need to go back out in a few minutes and start over again because these might all be somewhere we don’t want to live. I’ll call you as soon as I figure that out, and I know I’m staying in here, okay? Then we can work together.”

“Check in with me in fifteen minutes or I’m coming to find you.”

“Okay, honey.” She smiled. “Copy that.”

Rachel clipped the walkie-talkie to her pocket, stowed the journal in her backpack, slid it over her shoulders and went looking for the map room…and a bathroom, because she really,
really
needed to pee.

She walked down the hall and her nose twitched, picking up a familiar, god-awful smell.
Oh, shit.
She whirled around in a panic. Dead-body alert. What the hell? How could Adam have missed this in his sweep? And where was it coming from? It was impossible to pinpoint because everywhere in this area smelled bad. She stopped, pulled out some Vicks and spread some on her upper lip, trying to mask that familiar ghastly stench of death. Then she hefted the backpack on her shoulders and kept putting one foot in front of the other.

Nowadays, dead bodies were everywhere, if she let them bother her, she’d never get anything done.

She pushed inside the map room and the heavy door clanged shut behind her, louder than expected. Rachel scanned the room, a row of large rectangular windows providing dim light. A long, dark wood table with a reflective surface and sleek, reddish-brown matching wooden chairs dominated the center of the room. She bypassed the complicated geographic stuff and picked up a simple road atlas. She slapped the book on the table and sat down with her loot, intending to dig in and get comfortable.

She squirmed, her heavy bladder making its presence known, reminding her that she had to pee, and pee
now
.

Damn.

Rachel stood, her chair scraping across the floor. Her eyes swept the room. Oh, thank God, a restroom right there. She pushed open the unisex door. The smell of death hit like a blow, causing her eyes and nose to sting. Oh, shit. That dead body she’d scented back in the hallway had to be in here somewhere, rotting behind one of the bathroom stalls. Darn it. She’d probably pee her pants by the time she found another restroom.

“Shit,” she whispered.

Okay, which one was empty?

“I can do this. I can do this.” She squared her shoulders, strode over to the handicap stall, yanked open the door and stepped on a corpse.

Rachel shrieked, scared more in that instant than she’d ever been in her whole damn life—and that was saying a lot, considering she’d just survived a freaking apocalypse.

A long-dead, heavy-set woman in a red shirt slouched on the toilet, wig askew. Face distorted and crumbling, eyes open and staring up, beseeching, at…God? Rachel heard something squish and glanced down to see the woman’s blackened bare foot underneath her own boot.
Lovely.
She’d stepped on the dead lady’s toes and they’d squirted out across the floor like cherry tomatoes.

Rachel covered her mouth. She was going to be sick. Or pee her pants.

Or both.

You’d think she’d be used to the dead bodies by now, but
no
, they still managed to sicken her on a daily basis. The corpses always seemed to come up with new and creative ways to scare the crap out of her.

Today being a terrific example.

She tried to step back out of the stall, but her foot slipped on the slick floor and she started to fall.

“No!” she cried.

Her hands flew out. She tried to gain purchase against the metal stall to stop or delay the catastrophe. But there wasn’t a damn thing to grab on to, and her hands skidded uselessly down the shiny walls. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. First, she went down, down, down. Then her ass slammed into the hard tile floor. She crashed like a kid on an ice skating rink. Breath whooshed out of her chest as agony exploded up her spine. Her eyes watered at the intense rush of pain.

She gulped in a deep breath and tried to scramble up and get the hell out of there, but her feet tangled with the dead woman’s legs, causing the body to become unstable. The corpse tipped and swayed. Her breath caught, her heart pounded against her ribs. It started coming for her. Fast. She screamed and scooted back like a crab, but couldn’t get far, her palms slipping on the tile. The monstrosity that used to be human careened over, like a mannequin attacking. Rachel twisted and pushed, trying to avoid getting slammed with the brunt of the dead woman’s weight, but there was no avoiding it.
Oh dear God
. It was about to fall on top of her. Smear all over her body. All the gore, the juices, the stink. She tensed and squeezed her eyes shut.

“I’ve got you,” a deep voice said from behind her.

Two hands dug under her arms and quickly dragged her clear, pulling her out before the disintegrating flesh could touch her. Wired with fright, she twisted and clawed frantically in her haste to escape. He trapped her arms and hauled her up. The corpse hit the floor behind her with a sickening thud.

“You’re all right,” he soothed.

He walked her back into the center of the restroom, next to the sinks. She was a mess. A mass of shaking, quivering nerves. Rachel squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to cry. Strong arms went around her and drew her in tight. She planted her face in his chest and held on to him, twisting the fabric of his shirt with her fists as she tried to calm her ragged breaths.

Her nostrils flared and tears pricked her eyes. “Adam,” she blubbered. “I thought it was all clear. You said this floor was empty.”

“Who’s Adam?” he said.

Chapter Thirteen

Rachel sucked in a breath. Fear shot through her like an electric current. She looked up, startled, at the man who was holding her.

The man who was
not
Adam.

She gazed into incredible blue eyes that watched her with unholy intensity. The stranger was stunningly handsome, with shoulder-length surfer-blond hair and a deep tan. She glanced down. Blazing tattoos shaped like flames peeked from the collar of a crisp white polo shirt and licked up his neck.

It made her wonder what was underneath.

Her mind quickly processed all of the available clues. He’d just saved her. So, maybe he wasn’t planning on rape and murder? At least not yet.

His eyes narrowed. “Who is Adam?”

“He’s the asshole who’s about to blow your head off,” a steely voice announced from the entrance to the bathroom. “Now let her go and step away.”

Rachel’s head whipped around and her jaw dropped. Adam stood there, feet planted in a wide stance, body rigid, shoulders pushed back. A stone-cold killer, all business, a gun in each hand. Both aimed at this stranger who’d come to her rescue, but whose motives were unclear.

It was very comforting.

The tough-looking blond guy pulled a handgun out of nowhere and aimed it at Adam’s chest. He let go of her, so she staggered back. Her heart hammered furiously as she tried to figure out what to do next. They all stood silent for a beat, the two men evaluating each other with hard, unflinching stares.

“What are you?” the blond guy asked Adam. “A cop or something?”

“A Marine. What are you? Prison bait?”

Rachel’s eyes darted back to the stranger. She examined him closer. Adam was right. There was a small swastika tattooed on the side of the guy’s neck. She’d watched a TV documentary once on prisons and remembered a swastika on the neck signified membership in an Aryan gang. You had to belong to a gang in prison. If not, you’d be killed.

“Are you two the only ones here? Are there more survivors with you?” he asked Adam.

Adam inched inside the bathroom, the door swinging shut behind him. He ignored the stranger’s questions. His eyes collided with hers. “You all right?”

“How many of you are there?” the man asked impatiently.

“I’m fine,” she told Adam and lifted her chin toward her savior. “He didn’t hurt me. He tried to help.”

“Why were you screaming?”

“How many of you are there?” the man shouted. She cut him a glance. He looked tired, worn out, like he’d been down ten miles of bad road.

Well, hadn’t they all?

“Come on, guys,” Rachel said, trying for diplomacy. After all, this man was the first survivor they’d seen and actually had a chance to speak to. He wasn’t exactly the type of person they’d been hoping to find, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, could they? He had helped her. That had to count for something. “This isn’t an action movie. Put down the guns. Let’s talk.”

Right then, the bathroom door banged open, missing Adam by a millimeter. Another tall stranger, this one with short dark hair and pale skin, pointed an even bigger gun at Adam’s chest. Her stomach dropped to her knees. The new guy looked normal, like he’d stepped out of the pages of her old life. Except none of the men in her old life pointed guns at each other. “Put your weapon down,” he boomed.

God, could this get any worse?

The dark-haired stranger looked at her and sucked in a breath. “A woman?” he breathed.

Oh shit.
Yes, it could.

Since the guy was momentarily distracted, Adam took the opportunity to lunge forward and elbow him in the face. Blood splattered and his dark eyes rolled into the back of his head. The guy fell to the floor like an imploding skyscraper.

The blond guy let out a sigh of defeat and lowered his gun. “Fuck, dude,” he said to Adam, “you probably broke his nose. That’s gonna be a bitch to heal with no doctors around.” He reached up and tugged his fingers through his sun-kissed hair.

Adam still looked pissed as hell and kept both his guns trained on the blond guy’s chest. “Why were you screaming?” he asked her again.

“I stepped on a corpse…it was falling on me.”

“What? I checked this floor—”

“Look, can we move this along?” the blond guy interrupted, his voice dripping with irritation. “He and I were traveling together and we came here to do some research. I was walking down the hall and I heard a female scream, so I ran to help. She’s right. She’d stepped on a corpse in a bathroom stall, very advanced decomposition. I managed to pull her out before it could fall on top of her. End of story. Now, how many of you are there?”

Adam lowered his weapons. “There’s just the two of us.”

“Fuck. Have you seen anyone else since the end?”

“Yes, we saw a group of about twenty assholes a week ago, who looked a lot like you, down in Oxnard. They killed a man and were about to gang rape a woman before she committed suicide.”

“That’s it? No one else? No other women? No towns of people? Just one group of killers?”

“Yes.”

“Where have you looked?”

“All over California.”

“Fuck,” the guy yelled. He spun around and slammed a fist into the nearest bathroom stall. “Goddamn fucking shit.” He continued cursing and pounding his fists into the metal door.

“Rachel, come here,” Adam ordered.

He didn’t have to ask
her
twice.

She ran over and Adam hooked an arm around her neck and pulled her to his side. She sighed and automatically wrapped her arms around his waist.

The blond guy stopped his tirade. His eyes narrowed as he watched their embrace and took in Adam’s stamp of possession. His chest rose and fell. Sweat trailed down the side of his face. He looked like a cross between a blond Greek god and a badass biker dude. A multitude of colored, flaming tats ran up both his thickly muscled arms, disappearing behind the short sleeves of his white shirt. He stared at her with laser intensity.

Uh oh.

He lifted his chin at Adam. “She’s the only woman any of us have seen alive since the end.”

“And she’s mine,” Adam said, his words hard as stone, his meaning crystal clear.

The man took a step forward. “You met her first, got first dibs. I get that. But—” he paused for a moment, “—maybe she’s yours because she doesn’t know any better.” His blue eyes locked with hers. “Angel,” he said, smiling, a slow, easy smile she suspected worked brilliantly for him when it came to luring women into his bed, “if it does turn out that you’re the last woman alive, or one of the few left, you’re going to have a lot of choice in this new life. There’s going to be lots of men wanting you, wishing you were their woman, offering to be your man. Think of how much choice you’ll have, darling. And while you’re thinkin’ on that, think on if you’re sure he’s giving you everything you need. You sure you don’t want to give a man like me a chance to prove I can do better? Because, angel, I’m sure I can.”

Rachel’s mouth dropped open. Did he really just make a move on her like that in front of Adam? Sure he was blindingly handsome, but come on, she had Adam. The area between her legs still ached in the best way possible, every movement she made reminding her of last night, of Adam’s cock pounding into her, leaving her breathless and quaking for more. And this guy thought he could talk her into leaving?

Was he high?

Adam curled his fingers around the back of her neck. He answered for her. “Last night, she was screaming my name while I fucked her tight pussy. So, yeah, I’d say she’s got everything she needs.”

She gasped, heat flaming across her cheeks.

He did
not
just say that.

She looked up at Adam. His expression was hard, unyielding and completely unrepentant. “You did
not
just say that.”

“You bet your sweet ass I did.” He smiled down at her.

A part of her was actually happy to hear this pronouncement. Happy to see this reaction from him. She’d always wondered what he’d do when they met other men, and now she knew.

Mine
, he’d said, and he’d meant it.

Adam cupped her ass and dragged her in close. Boneless, she melted into him. Not even caring that he’d just humiliated her a moment ago. Goosebumps ran up her spine. Warmth pooled between her legs.

Adam locked eyes with the new guy. “If you touch her, I’ll kill you.”