Wounded Angel (The Earth Angels) Read Online Free Page B

thought to hitting the kill switch. No harm in giving up, right? Not when he was sure he was about to heave up a lung.
    “Three more minutes.” Ella’s voice came from behind him, and in the mirrored wall he could see her past his shoulder, her gaze glued to him as if searching for any sign of weakness. Sheer grit stiffened his spine and he lifted his knees a little higher in renewed effort. There was no way he’d let her get the best of him. Not for another three minutes, anyway.
    Wouldn’t she feel bad if he keeled over dead right about now? That’d sure show her.
    “You’re almost there.” As she had done countless times in the past half hour, she put a gentle finger on the back of his right hand, which had fallen to grip the handrails. Don’t touch .
    Furious with the constant lapse, he concentrated instead on the spot where her fingertip had tapped. It was no bigger than a dime on the back of his hand surface-wise, but its effect was staggering. Like she’d managed to spark a low-level electrical field in that one area, exciting all the nerve endings to jangle out of control until it was as though that one spot was glowing. Maybe that was why he kept using the damned handrail. It was a pathetic excuse to get her to infuse him with a jolt of pleasure in a world that had become filled with a marathon of pain.
    “There we go. You made it.” The program shut down, the digital readout going to all zeroes while the treadmill slowed down incrementally into a walk. He kept at it rather than stepping onto the machine’s side rails; no doubt his legs would seize up for all eternity if he came to a full stop. “Congratulations, Nate. You just set The Body Electric record for finishing the Pike’s Peak challenge—basically the equivalent of running up the last three miles of Pike’s Peak—in just under thirty minutes. No one has ever come close to that.”
    “Great.” He didn’t take a chance on saying anything more. It would be undignified to throw up on her shoes.
    “Here.” At last the treadmill wound down to a stop. To his relief she handed him a fresh bottle of water, as he’d drained the last of his about ten minutes ago. “Keep hydrating. Are you cramping at all?”
    “Does my whole body screaming in agony count as a cramp?”
    The hint of a smile flashed before she nodded past his shoulder. “I noticed you have some scars on your back. Old injury?”
    “Scars? Oh, those.” He shrugged and downed a third of the water while his heart rate slowly eased out of the danger zone. “It was a birth defect my mother insisted had to be corrected when I was an imperfect little newborn.”
    “So you don’t have any pre-existing injuries I should know about?”
    “No.”
    “I know I’ve already asked, but there are no medical conditions holding you back?”
    He frowned. Didn’t she just say he’d broken some sort of record? “No.”
    “Then I must confess—you have me mystified.”
    That lush hint of magnolias drifted through her Chicago accent yet again, almost distracting him from the actual words. “What are you talking about?”
    “You just ran up the last three miles of a mountain at top speed and you’re still daisy-fresh enough to have an amiable conversation with me, rather than being passed out on the floor, the way anyone else would be.”
    At last the light went on. Whoops . “So I guess this means I’m in pretty good shape, huh?”
    “You’re not just in good shape. As far as I can tell, the shape you’re in borders on demigod status. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you could do the Pike’s Peak challenge all over again.”
    Just the thought of it made him want to faint. “No, thank you.”
    “The point is that you probably could do it. And that makes me wonder... Why are you really here?”
    For only a heartbeat everything inside him froze like a deer in the headlights. What an embarrassing noob mistake. Like the overly hormonal idiot he was, he’d been so busy trying to