Gasping for breath, frightened witless, Lena had already thrown herself into the man’s arms before she realized the hard chest beneath her cheek didn’t belong to Morris.
Heady sensations washed over her. His scent was clean and as appealingly manly as the hardness of the chest she burrowed against and the strength of the arms that tightened around her. To her surprise, the arms tightened more when she realized her mistake and struggled to push herself away from him.
The face she looked up into was as purely cauc as Morris’ own but far younger and a great deal more handsome.
His expression, however, was grim, his blue eyes stormy with both desire and something else she couldn’t quite interpret.
Dragging her gaze from his, she spotted Morris, who’d pushed himself from his easy chair and was standing tensely in the center of his living room.
“Morris?”
“Lena! What in the world are you doing here, baby girl?”
Almost reluctantly, the arms around her loosened and the stranger stepped away.
“We’ll continue our discussion later,” the stranger said.
His deep voice sent shivers of awareness through Lena. She glanced up at him again.
He turned away, pulled the door open and went out, closing the door firmly behind him.
A wave of disappointment went through her at his abrupt departure. The temptation arose to jerk the door open and peer out at him, to see if he was as gorgeous as she’d imagined, but she killed the impulse forming. For one thing, she could hear the pack of cauc youths thundering along the hall.
For another--well, if he’d been even nearly as interested in her as she was him, he wouldn’t have taken off like his coat tails were on fire.
“Who was that?” she asked instead of answering Morris’ question.
He frowned but finally shook his head. Turning, he shuffled toward his favorite chair and settled in it heavily. “Just a neighbor. Bolt the door. I expect he’ll give those ruffians what for and send them on their way, but there’s no sense in borrowing trouble.”
Since she was already in the act of doing just that, Lena finished securing the multitude of locks on his door and followed him into the living room. When she’d leaned down to kiss his weathered cheek and hugged him, she sat on the lumpy couch across from him. “I haven’t seen you in months. I missed you, you old goat,” she said as she settled, her voice chiding. “That’s not much of a greeting.”
The look in his eyes was almost vague, but at her comment he seemed to shake off whatever thoughts were distracting him. “Thought I’d finally drilled some sense into you. You’re going to get hurt if you keep traipsing down here. This is no place for you.”
Lena frowned. “It’s no place for you, either. Why won’t you move in with me? I got a bigger apartment just so I’d have an extra room.”
He smiled at that but grimly. “Because I’ve no business on the other side, and you know that, too. The gov would be down on both of us so fast it would make your head swim, baby girl.”
“I’m not a baby anymore,” Lena muttered. She’d been so confident when she’d gotten the two bedroom apartment that she could talk Morris into coming to live with her! She’d been certain she could appeal to his intense protectiveness toward her. In this instance, unfortunately, it was his concern for her safety that had convinced him she would be better off with his absence than his presence.
Morris peered at her, his old eyes suddenly keen. “What’ve you done to your hair?”
Lena grimaced. “Come on, Morris, don’t start that again.”
“Start what?” he growled. “You’ve been down to that damned clinic, haven’t you, baby girl? Didn’t I tell you to stay away from that place? God knows what kind of experiments the gov is carrying on there, but you can be damned sure it ain’t something you want to be a part of!”
Sighing inwardly, Lena sought patience. “Nigel is a tech there. You know that. And they keep his nose to the grind stone. About the only time I get to see my big brother is when I go. And it isn’t a gov facility. You know that, too.”
He shook his head. “Lena, child, you’re a beautiful girl, a credit to your race. Why the hell would you let them take some of that away from you?”
Lena could feel a guilty blush climbing into her cheeks, but irritation surfaced. She released a huff of anger. “I’m a breed, Morris. I’m not a blood. I’m not any more pure than anybody else on the other side. Anyway, it was just cosmetic. I got tired of spending half my day trying to get my damned hair to do what I wanted it to.”
He snorted but shook his head. “Everything is too easy these days. That isn’t a good thing. Hard as the old days were, struggle gave folks strength. The whole human race is going to go down the tubes if they let the gov take all their strength and treat them like infants.”
She ought to have known the moment he noticed her hair he was going to go off on one of his gov conspiracy rants. “If you’d come to the other side of the city with me sometime you’d see everybody works hard. We’re not being pampered to death.”
Of course she supposed she didn’t have a lot of room to talk. She was a gov employee, a historian, and it wasn’t the sort of job that made one break a sweat. She wasn’t even a field tech. All she did all day was work on restoring the artifacts that were found, analyzing them, and recording her impressions.
Oddly enough, it was Morris--a cauc and died in the wool purist--who’d inspired her choice of profession, not the parents she could barely remember. He’d raised her and Nigel, though, and taught them pride in their heritage and she’d thought the best way to demonstrate that pride was to preserve the history of their race. It helped that she was actually fascinated by her people’s roots. Theirs was a long, long history of struggle. In the end, they’d pretty much been absorbed in the melting pot like all of the other races, but their unique genetic traits were as strong as the cauc’s at the other end of the spectrum. In spite of generations of cross breeding, many of their special traits remained preserved in the gene pool.
