Free Predator (Copper Mesa Eagles Book 1) by Roxie Noir, Amelie Hunt

how, but he was completely positive.
    “Probably,” agreed Jules. “I’m sure it gets struck by lightning plenty.”
    Seth just nodded, and Jules put it back in the box, then took the box from Seth and put it back in the drawer.
    Right away, he felt like the world stopped buzzing, and he exhaled hard, shaking his hands out a little.
    “You okay?” Jules asked.
    Seth nodded. “I’m fine,” he said. “I just need to take a quick break.”
    He found a saddle blanket, spread it on the floor, and sat on it, leaning against a big, heavy wooden trunk.
    “C’mon,” he said to Jules, patting the blanket next to him.
    She looked over, from his hand to his eyes, and suddenly seemed to stiffen again.
    “Are you still worried that I’m trying to seduce you into doing something about the mine?” he asked.
    Jules blushed a little in the dim light and looked at the floor.
    “I mean, I am in your attic and it’s almost two in the morning,” she said. “If you are, it worked.”
    Seth couldn’t argue with that.
    Then she sighed, blowing a stray strand of red hair from her face, and walked over to sit next to Seth on the saddle blanket. She picked at it with one hand, looking pensive.
    “What is it?” he asked. Seth ached to put his arm around her, but he didn’t.
    Jules took a deep breath, then started talking.
    “When I was in high school, I had this huge crush on this jock named Taylor Kimball,” she said in a rush. “And one day, he asked me out.”
    The whole story spilled out of her: the homework, the studying, the ridiculous love notes. The discovery that he’d just been using her, that he’d told half the school all about how pathetic she was, how she got him good grades while he was banging his real girlfriend. His friends waving her love letters and shouting at her and how she’d run out of the school, crying.
    “Holy shit,” Seth said, looking at the floor. “God, teenagers can be cruel.”
    Then he looked over at her, at her hazel eyes that seemed far away.  
    “I swear I just thought you were cute,” he said.
    “Thanks,” she said.  
    They were silent for a moment.
    “This thing smells like horses,” she said, wrinkling her nose, scrunching all the freckles together.
    “I like horses,” said Seth.
    Jules pulled her legs under her, then leaned her head back against the trunk.
    “I can’t get the mine stopped,” she said. “Believe me, I tried. In twenty years, it’s going to be in books and documentaries as a famous environmental disaster, but the people in charge of Quarcom don’t care. I think they’d drown a boatful of orphans if they thought they could make money from it.”
    She paused and picked at the blanket a little.
    “It’s going to fuck things up pretty bad,” she said. “The kind of mining they’re doing is going to be illegal within four, maybe five years, but this is the first time it’s been tried in the U.S., so there’s no laws against it yet.”
    “And we’re the unlucky bastards who lived in the right spot,” Seth said.
    Jules leaned her head against his shoulder and nodded, a stray hair tickling his cheek.
    Without thinking, he turned and kissed the top of her head, inhaling her earthy, spicy scent, and then she looked up at him, her lips slightly parted in the light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Her green-brown eyes nearly glowed in the low light, and once again he felt weightless, soaring, as he looked into them.
    Then he kissed her on the lips. For a moment she didn’t respond, but then she pressed herself against him, and Seth felt something deep down inside him tighten, a deep hunger he’d never felt before. Jules parted her lips against his, and Seth ran his tongue along her lower lip only to feel her tongue seek his out and tangle together with it.
    Her hand crept onto the side of his face, made its way into his hair, and before Seth knew it, he had tangled his fingers in her wild mane, pulling her against him, aching to feel her