Page 5 of Inflamed By an Incubus

She was on a mission.

Her black T-shirt stuck to her back as she hurried towards her destination and she grimaced as she tugged at it. Maybe she should have let herself cool down after her training session and the shower that had followed it before pulling all her clothes on, but she had overheard one of the other women in the changing room mention that the alpha team was finally back from their latest trip to Hell.

Evelyn hadn’t seen Archer in close to six months, not since she had been forced to rest up following the incident in the Fifth Realm of the demons. The doctors had refused to sign her off for duty, had kept her locked inside headquarters, stopping her from heading into Hell with one of the teams working there to chart the realm. She had tried petitioning the higher-ups but had met with the same result.

Boring rest.

She wasn’t even supposed to be training, but Rob, the man in charge of the gym and practice rooms, was sweet on her and had turned a blind eye.

For the first time in weeks, the cream corridors didn’t look dreary and dull, and she wasn’t desperate to get out on patrol.

Well, maybe she was a little desperate.

Might be thinking up ways to bend her partner around her little finger and make him agree to take her out. No one would argue with her heading out if her partner was with her. Surely?

Evelyn reached the end of the corridor and glanced at the sign above the twin doors. The Central Archive. He was bound to be here. Her partner was nothing if not predictable. She pulled the door on the left open and smiled as she spotted him sitting at one of the computers spaced along the double row of desks that ran down the centre of the room, his back to the wall of black cases that contained the servers. The screen reflected off his black-rimmed glasses as he leaned on his elbow, his chin propped up on his palm as he worked the mouse with his other hand.

“Couldn’t have guessed I would find you here.” She let the door swing close behind her and ignored the looks the other hunters in the room gave her, ones that told her to be quiet. It wasn’t a library. She was allowed to speak here.

Archer glanced up from the screen, his dark eyes dropping to it again before he lifted them once more and sat up this time. He rubbed his left shoulder through his tight black Henley, his lips quirking towards that side as he massaged it, and then sank against the back of the chair and pushed his glasses up his nose with his index finger.

He pulled off the handsome geek look, had half the women in HQ panting after him and envious of her for being assigned to him as his partner. She’d had more than one run-in with a jealous woman in her time here, something that wasn’t helped by how close she was to Archer. There had been a few times when she had thought about them romantically, but she had never acted on it. It wasn’t that the timing had never been right. It was just a feeling she had that they weren’t right for each other and making the shift from partners to lovers would only ruin this good thing they had going on.

Archer was absolutely her only friend in Archangel, had had her back more times than she could count and was the reason she was here working for them, had joined their mission to protect people from dangerous non-humans.

Because he had saved her from one of them.

She didn’t want to mess up their friendship.

So she had never acted on the occasional spark of desire she felt for him.

Archer ran a hand over his dark brown hair, mussing the longer lengths, and stretched, clasping his hands together as he raised his arms above his head. When he was done, he sank deeper into the chair and placed both hands behind his head, supporting it as he looked at her and drawing the gazes of the other women in the archive.

Those women would probably claw her eyes out if they knew she had seen him naked once, had witnessed him in all his glory, could have drunk her fill of his honed muscles and maybe done more than that if she had accepted his offer to skinny-dip in the lake with him.

The thought of swimming in pitch-black water under a moonless sky and not knowing what else was in there with her had been enough to keep her on the shore.

Archer raked his dark eyes over her, a flicker of a frown dancing on his brow before he relaxed again. “How are you doing? Cleared for action?”

Evelyn touched her side through her black T-shirt and grimaced. “Still a little sore. I’m not sure why I’m taking so long to heal. It’s not like me.”

The doctors had always been fascinated by how quickly she could heal any wound she picked up in the field, and sometimes they had looks in their eyes that unnerved her and made her wary of them. The sort of looks they gave the guests held in the pens downstairs.

So she was worried that it was taking her months to heal, even when the doctors she had seen at her regular check-ups had assured her that it was normal to take a long time to fully recover from a wound like this. The wound was in a spot that was easily aggravated by her moving and there had been extensive tissue damage. Enough that the surgeons who had patched her up had told her countless times she was lucky to be alive.

She wouldn’t have been if not for Archer.

Archer sat up and brushed her hand away from her right side, lifted her T-shirt and didn’t hesitate to sweep his fingers over the still-pink scar on her skin just above the waist of her trousers. That earned him a few gasps from their audience and her a few death looks.

It wasn’t her fault that Archer didn’t operate in the same way most men did. He had never been backwards about doing this sort of thing. It didn’t even seem to register that it wasn’t the done thing for a man to just bare a woman’s skin and touch her. Sometimes, she had the feeling he was nothing like other men.

His fingers were warm against her flesh and seemed to grow hotter as they paused over the scar.

“You need at least a few more days rest. Maybe a couple of weeks. This should be healed by now.” His hand dropped from her side and he sat back in his chair again and tossed her an unimpressed look. “You’ve been ignoring the docs again when they tell you to relax and take it easy, haven’t you?”

She tensed.

Rumbled.

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