Inga’s eyes sparkled. “If you’re offering.” She took the cup with warm, strong fingers, and rather than dumping and refilling it as he expected, she drained the remaining water where his lips had just touched.
The movement of her long, pale throat gave him yet another thing not to notice.
“Oh, that’s good,” Inga said. She wiped the back of her mouth with her hand, rinsed the cup, and hung it back up. “No better water in the world, my dad always said.”
“Your family owns this place?” He dimly recalled she had mentioned something about that yesterday, but the whole thing was a blur to him now.
“Yeah.” She waved a hand to indicate the hills. “Technically the area around us is a nature preserve, but we’re grandfathered in, or I guess grandmothered in because my mom’s family has owned this for a long time.” A smile quirked the corner of her generous mouth. “Which means we don’t have to worry about neighbors, though it also means no hunting unless you’re a bear.” Rogue looked up. “Or a dog, sorry.”
“Can I get a quick tour? Let me know anywhere that might be off limits, other private property, that kind of thing.”
“There is nothing like that,” Inga said. “We are the only people here. You can shift without having to worry, as long as you take a quick look around for boats or hikers just to be on the safe side.” While Luke suppressed a shudder at the idea of shifting at all, she pointed down the hill. “There’s the outhouse I mentioned last night. The medieval accommodations are really the only issue. For showers, there’s a solar shower setup, but at this time of year you’re probably better off making do with a bucket bath or a dip in the bay in your shift form.”
“I think I got as much time in the water as I need yesterday, thanks.” Luke looked down at his hands. They were sore and chapped from the salt water, but he could only imagine how bad it would be if he hadn’t been a bear most of the time.
Which reminded him, with an unpleasant jolt, of his earlier speculation.
“Inga, can I ask you for a favor?”
“Sure,” Inga said brightly. “Name it.
“I need you to help check me over for microchips.”
Her face turned pink. “You need ... what?”
“Microchips. There’s a chance I’m carrying something that’ll give away my location. There’s nothing I can do about it if Rogue has something like that on him, he’s simply got too much fur, but it should be visible on my bare skin if anything was put in me anywhere.”
“But why would you have a microchip?” Inga asked, baffled. “Especially one you don’t know about?”
“I got away from some bad people,” Luke told her. “And I’m afraid they’re still after me.”
With that, he took off his shirt.
INGA
“Wait—what—”Inga stammered as Luke began to strip in front of her.
She had seen him naked the day before, of course, but at the time she had primarily been trying to find out if he was all right and get them both to a safe location.
Now she got to see every bit of the glorious body she had been working hard on not thinking about.
He was thin; as she had observed on first seeing him, he clearly had been living rough. But it was evident that he had been in good shape before that, and whatever he had gone through, it had honed him to lean muscle beneath a light dusting of curly brown hair that was just a few shades darker than the hair brushing his ears and rearranging itself in the breeze off the bay. Inga tried not to stare, but there was nowhere to look. Her gaze drifted to his muscular and slightly fuzzy legs, going up to?—
“If they put one on me,” Luke said, and she wrenched her eyes back to his face, “it’ll mostly likely be somewhere inconspicuous, I would guess. The inside of my arm or thigh, maybe, but I can check those myself. I need you to look at my back.”
“Um, okay.” Inga hoped her blush wasn’t as visible as she feared, but with her fair coloring, she had always radiated embarrassment with the intensity of a lighthouse. At least his back was one of the least worst options for naked parts of him she could be staring at.
She went around behind him, while Luke was already running his fingertips over the insides of his upper arms and down his forearms. Even his back was sexier than she’d hoped, a lean expanse of muscle that flexed when he moved.
“Uh, what am I looking for?” There were scratches and healing bruises, scrapes and a couple of scars. Even apart from what he’d been through lately, Luke had clearly lived an active, physical life.
“Little scars, maybe a hard bump under the skin.” Luke had finished checking his arms and was now feeling his neck. “I’m hoping if they did put one in me, they did a fast and sloppy job. If they took the time to do it right, we’ll never find anything, but there’s not much we can do about it if so.”
Inga swallowed and hesitantly placed her hand on his back. His skin was warm beneath her palm. “Are you sure you don’t—mind?”
There was a hint of a laugh in his voice, although it was still taut with tension. “I asked you to. Go ahead.”
She ran her hand cautiously down his back, and when he didn’t react, she became a little bolder and began feeling the muscular area around his spine and between his shoulder blades. He was tight and firm, and she thought that if there really was a microchip here, she ought to be able to feel it. Luke had very little subcutaneous fat. Any bumps or other anomalies would stand out.
