If I’d learned anything about this woman, it was that she was rarely on time for anything that wasn’t work.
She came down the stairs a few minutes later, and we slipped into the car, heading out of London on a silent trip.
Throughout the drive, I kept my gaze on her with no concern for subtlety. My goal was not to make her feel comfortable. My goal was to understand why this mortal had taken up so much headspace and drove me to the brink of insanity.
Scott had a foul temper, triggered by small things like bad traffic. Her time management was poor. Her house was a mess, books and items stacked haphazardly on any available surface. She was the furthest thing from divinity that I’d encountered, and yet I was drawn to her indescribably.
When we arrived, Scott pulled a cooler and her bag out of the back of the car and slung the bag over her shoulder.
“Hand it here,” I told her, holding a hand out.
“I can manage,” she brushed me off sharply.
“Hand it here, Scott.”
“I don’t need you to carry it,” she snapped. “Lock the car.”
She tossed the keys at me and carried the cooler, using both arms, down to the mass of people on the beach. She melted in among the rest of the mortals, and I clocked the Gods spread between them.
“They make so many poor decisions,” Erik said as I joined him, pocketing Scott’s keys into my shorts. “But I love seeing when they get it right.”
He watched Gareth with his wife and young daughter. The three of them sat in the sand, building sandcastles with smiles plastered across their faces. A perfect, happy family.
“You’re a sap,” I told him, disgusted.
“And you’re a cynic,” he replied airily.
“Where’s Sloan?”
Erik nodded over to some loungers and a parasol where Sloan was laid out comfortably in the shade, bump proudly on display.
“Not long now,” I said.
Erik grinned. “Two more weeks.”
“Are you going to bring the rest of the kids down?”
“Gareth’s trying to clear it. I think Archer might pay a visit then. We’ll have to see. The project is growing, and I think it’s unsettling him. He’s worried it might be more than he can handle.”
“Fantastic,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Come on,” Erik said. “Let’s join the rest of them.”
A small group, comprising a few male colleagues, had formed and tossed a rugby ball between them. I pulled off my t-shirt, leaving me in my shorts, and let the sun warm my skin as we joined them.
I could feel the eyes on me and then the thoughts, but there was only one string of thoughts that caught my attention. One stream of consciousness that interested me above all else.
My eyes combed through the faces on the beach until I found Scott standing by a lounger with her sole focus on me. It appeared that we were both having a similar issue.
I smirked and watched as her face flushed, looking away once she knew I had caught her. She’d need to be more subtle than that if she wanted to get away with eye-fucking.
“You playing, Grayson?” Holden tossed a ball between his hands.
When I glanced back to Scott, she’d stripped off her shorts and tank top, and my dick twitched in my shorts. Outside the lab, she didn’t do modest when it came down to her clothes but seeing her stripped down to two pieces didn’t help my predicament.
“I’m not sure you’re going to want to play games with me,” I muttered in response, brain already formulating a plan as he turned away to talk to other colleagues.
“Bet you get a similar view all the time at home,” Ig said, jogging up next to me and watching Scott as she stretched out on a lounger in the sun.
