PARALLEL ATTRACTION (Book One of the PARALLEL SERIES)

Parallel Attraction (Chapter Three)

CHAPTER THREE

Kelsey slid several geological samples across Dr. Carrington's desk. "They're from Mirror Lake. I need to know if there's anything unusual about them."

Carrington's warm eyes fixed on her. She was his star student in the graduate geology program, and he almost always took her seriously, but today she glimpsed doubt in his weathered face. "Kelsey, I'm not saying I don't believe you—" he began, but she cut him off.

"I did see something there."

"Even if you did," he continued, "what makes you think you'll find sedimentary proof?"

She thought of trying to explain her hunch, as outlandish as it might seem, but decided against it. "Could we just send this most recent batch in for testing?" she tried again, her voice filled with undisguised frustration. "Then maybe you'll come out there with me."

He nodded. "What if you do find something, Kelsey?" he asked. "What then?"

Recalling the stranger by the lake—the way he'd affected her—she could only shake her head. "I'm not sure what I'll do," she said, pausing in his doorway. "But I have to know who he is"

"He?" Dr. Carrington asked in surprise, but she was already leaving, eager to get away from her mentor before he asked any more questions she didn't want to answer. Pretending she hadn't heard him, she sidestepped another graduate student who was busy texting someone. As she angled out of the way, she nearly bumped into a tall man with black eyes, who for a moment gave her a kind of pause. The skin on her neck prickled, and she turned back for another glance at the stranger, but he was gone—no one stood where he'd been at all. With a shiver, she walked onward down the polished floors, the echo of her footsteps the only sound behind her.

"She's been taking rock and soil samples." Scott watched Jared across the meeting table where the mitres drawings were spread. "Turned them in to one of her professors at the university."

Jared lifted his eyes, and Scott answered his unspoken question. "She's a geology student. Graduate level." He nodded, turning his attention back to the schematics. They'd paid for these blueprints with blood many times over, smuggling them away from their enemies. All in hopes of gaining access to their own hidden technology—technology left here on Earth some two hundred years ago, at a time when many of the Antousians had still been their allies.

Jared studied the various chambers on the pages, the mapped catacombs, but his mind strayed again. Back to the human. All his life he'd been set apart; few spoke to him without filtering every word, which meant that few truly touched his soul. Yet she'd opened to him—and easily. Oh, far too innocent for this conflict, he chided himself, thinking of what a gift such innocence would be. And far too alien.

Should he ever form a match, there would be expectations. And, by the gods, he knew exactly what they were, as surely as he saw his dear cousin Thea eyeing him from across the meeting room. She tucked an errant blonde curl behind an ear, looking—just for a moment—more like a female and less like a soldier. Just a moment, but it was enough that he could infer her thoughts at the moment. He frowned back at her sharply, and repressed the urge to growl his dismay aloud. She quickly gazed away, red blotches coloring her fair cheeks, and he felt horribly cruel. She was a good woman, and he did love her. Just not in the way the council hoped and urged at every given opportunity. Theirs was a bond of bloodline and experience—but never could it be the love shared by bondmates.

"Jared," Scott snapped, glaring at his leader. "Are you listening?" No other person in their midst would dare speak to him so audaciously. But Scott was practically his brother, and knew the boundaries he could push.