Logan waited for her in the garage, sitting sideways on his bike and cupping his hands around a match as he lit a cigar. He heard her coming and smirked at the look on her face when she came around the corner.

"I can't believe you want to ride a motorcycle when it's below freezing out. Are all Canadians part polar bear or is that just the big ones?"

"You got a mouth on ya there, darlin'." He tossed her a helmet off the shelf. "Let's go. There's a diner I know of, got great food."

She nodded and put the helmet on after twisting her hair up inside, then she slipped onto the bike behind him. He kickstarted the bike and jerked when her hands came around him and she shoved them into his coat pockets. "I dinnae have gloves," she said. He laughed but the bike drowned it out as they roared down the drive.

She was a distraction against his back, would have been a dangerous one if he hadn't been riding motorcycles for as long as he could remember. It was his preferred mode of transportation since he never took much with him when he traveled anyway. Her arms were tight around his torso, her breasts pressed against his back and her thighs pressed up against the sides of his legs. She squeezed her legs when he did in turns and he couldn't tell if it was an automatic reaction or if she'd ridden before, but either way it was doing things to his brain.

It was almost disheartening, then, to pull into the parking lot of the diner and have her unwind her body from around his. He found he couldn't keep his eyes off of her when she took the helmet off and shook her hair out, leaving it to fall in a dark red curtain around her upper body.

She stared at him a moment, seemed to be caught in his gaze before she shook herself and walked inside with him following.

It was still early which meant it wasn't crowded, not on a weekday morning, so they snagged a corner booth and got down to business, sitting across from each other. The waitress didn't seemed phased by how much food Logan ordered, but Teva raised an eyebrow at him when she finally walked away, her attention then going to fixing her coffee the way she liked it.

"What?" he asked. "After a fight like that I either hafta sleep or eat to balance out the healin' factor. Don't feel much like sleepin' right now, I'm all revved up."

She was biting her lip again and giving him that look like she wasn't sure what his deal was, but he liked it when she did that. Her lower lip was full and he kept thinking of freeing it from its trap so he could nibble on it himself.

"I can imagine," she said finally. She put her hands on the table, seemed to be examining her chipped purple nail polish very closely. "I really was worried about you, all of you. The kids kind of made the X-Men sound like the most glamourous and cool thing ever, but you all could have died. Judging by the state of your uniform you'd be dead several times over."

"But we didn't die, did we?" he challenged, taking his cigar out of his mouth where he'd wedged it on the drive over. He leaned his head back and blew a couple smoke rings. He wasn't sure what kind of reaction he'd get from poking at her.

Teva huffed at him. "That's no the bloody point," she spat, her Scottish accent broadening with strong emotion. "You're such a damned man, Logan. Death is a possibility for everyone, and ye think that just because ye have a healing factor and sharp claws that it'll never come for ye."

"Why do ya care so much?" he asked, not entirely sure if he wanted the answer to that. The complications he hadn't wanted seemed to entangle him even without his intending them to.

She was fiddling with a silver Celtic knot ring on her right hand. "I never said I did. Ye can go cark it for all I care."

He coughed, reaching for his glass of water. "Cark it?" he managed to get out after he drained half the glass.

"Means 'die'." She let her hair fall into her face, a way to hide the fact she was blushing. "Póg mo thóin," she muttered angrily.

"What did ya say?" he asked, his eyebrow going up.

"If ye cannae understand the Gaelic I'm no telling ye what it means."

He left it alone and silence fell over the table as the waitress brought their food. He really was ravenous, felt like there was a black hole in his gut, gnawing at his spine. It was an excuse to not talk, to not think about where the conversation had been headed.

Teva dug in, too, apparently feeling little need to curse at him in foreign tongues again. She was finished before he was, though, and she sat back in her seat, alternately watching the rest of the diner and him.

When the check came he grabbed it before she could, smirking when she glared at him again. Damn but it was fun to rile her up and watch her temper rise. She was outside waiting for him after he paid and he grabbed her hand before she could put the helmet on. He wasn't sure if he did it out of contrition or a need to touch her.

"Listen, Teva, I didn't mean to ya mad, least not entirely. I'm not used to anyone givin' a shit if I live or die." He smiled. "Although I did kinda like hearin' ya talk the way ya did." It was honest, there was something about her accent and the cadence of her words he liked.

"Maybe I'll curse at ye some more, then," she said, kicking his foot. "I dinnae like being put on the spot."

Logan rubbed his thumb across the back of her hand, waiting for her to look at him. "I'll try not to do that, then."

She finally lifted her gaze from his chest to look him in the eyes.

He heard her breath catch, watched her tongue dart out to wet her lower lip and suddenly he was wondering what she tasted like. He knew he shouldn't kiss her, shouldn't let it go this far but sometimes the beast reared its head and he was hard pressed to stomp it back down, especially when her pupils were spinning out to engulf the golden brown of her irisis and her breath was coming a little faster. He'd blame it on his libido before he'd admit to anything else.

Ah, fuck it . His other hand moved to curl around the back of her neck and he pulled her mouth down the last inch of their height difference to his. He ran his tongue along her lips and tasted the remnants of strawberry lip gloss before she gave him access to her mouth and he sank inside with a quiet groan of pleasure, heard her whimper and then the helmet fell from her fingers to smack against the pavement of the parking lot. Her arms came up around him, one hand sinking into his unruly hair, and her body moved restlessly against his. He wanted to feel the heat of her skin against his and slid a hand inside her jacket, up under her shirt.

He broke the kiss when he felt the last of his control slipping. He actually had to catch his breath. "Jesus, girl, where the hell'd ya learn to kiss like that?"

She cleared her throat, blinking rapidly before she smiled sweetly at him. "Practice."

He hmmphed at her as he bent to pick up her helmet and hand it to her. "I'm not sure I wanna know what ya mean by that."

"I would'nae tell you, anyway," she said, twisting up her hair before she put the helmet back on so that it was secure inside. She straddled the bike and patted the seat, her eyes still grinning at him even if he couldn't see her mouth. "A lady does'nae kiss and tell."

"You're not a lady," he shot back. "I don't think ladies wear steel toe boots."

"Or have calluses on their fingers from guitar strings." She wrapped her arms around him again as he gunned the engine. The trip back to the mansion seemed shorter and he found he didn't want to leave her company just yet, so he followed her inside and down to her room.

She didn't say anything as she took her coat off, laying it over the back of her desk chair, her scarf following after she'd untwined it from her neck.

Logan looked at her guitars, flicking a finger over a string on her Ibanez. "Ya been playin' at all?"

"A little." She shrugged. "Just have'nae had the heart to play much lately." Absently she picked up the Washburn acoustic and sat down on the windowseat, cradling the instrument against her body.

He leaned up against the wall next to her, just listening to her pick out random tunes on the strings. Finally a discernible melody emerged and her soft alto voice picked up, singing the words to Kansas' "Dust in the Wind." Her eyes slid closed.

At first Logan wasn't entirely sure why his mood started to shift south, changed from hazy contentment to sharp melancholy, until he realized his mood had changed when she started singing. She didn't seem to realize she was projecting.

She looked up when he touched her shoulder. "What?" she asked, eyes distant.

"You project somethin' other than yer voice when ya sing," he said softly, brushing her hair back from her face with his hand. "I didn't mean to make ya sad mentionin' yer music."

Teva shrugged. "I think I just miss playing for people sometimes. Listening to the crowd sing back my own words, hearing them scream when they recognize the opening chords to their favorites songs ... kind of hard to fall from a god-like status to this, whatever I am now."

"Yer still Teva Lawson, nothin' changed that." His hand had lingered against her hair, touched her shoulder again. "The record company was a bunch of dumbasses fer droppin' ya like they did. Not like ya can fuckin' help who ya are."

"Does'nae really matter anymore. I cannae go back to that." She got up, putting the guitar back on its stand before turning to look out the window at the snow that had begun to fall. "No really sure I'd want to go back to being on a tour bus, bored out of my bloody mind and half-ready to kill anyone who looks at me sideways."

Logan moved up behind her, slipping his arm around her back. He couldn't deny that it felt right to touch her. The fact that it didn't feel quite so much like lust anymore (though that was still there flickering at the base of his spine) should have been a warning sign. "Ya could put out a solo album, like Warren said."

"That'd be my only choice." She'd turned to bury her face against his neck.

"Just be careful around him." He growled when she nipped at his earlobe. "Don't do that."

"Warren's an ass and I've known that for years. Why cannae I do that?" she asked, lifting her head enough to look at him. She was getting that heated look again, the one that threatened to burn him up.

"Just think about it and smack him around if he gets grabby." He hauled her closer. "And ya can't do that because it makes me wanna molest you."

That got a laugh from her. "Molest me? That's a new one." She shifted so that her lips were a breath away from his. "Not sure I'd complain if ye did that, though. It's been a while since I've been roughed up."

"Roughed up?" It was his turn to laugh. "I always figured ya fer a girl who liked it rough."

"Oh, ye have no idea," she purred, dragging her fingertips along his neck and smiling. "Only bad thing is that I bruise easy."

Logan growled because he'd just been thinking about the marks he could leave on that pale skin. "Careful there, darlin'," he said when her hand stroked low along his back, above his belt.

"I can teach ye some naughty words in Scots," she said, her tone still playful but her voice lowering, becoming a little husky. "Like 'houghmagandie.'"

"If that means what I think it means, ya might wanna kick me out of yer room an' bar the door."

Teva laughed. "I'm a big girl, I think I can take care of -" He cut her off by kissing her, couldn't think of anything else, needed to taste her again. He must have done it hard enough to knock her lip back into her teeth because he tasted her blood and it made him a little insane, began to shred the last bits of his control.

He pushed her up against the wall and got his hand under her shirt again, fingers splayed across her side to hold her against him. She was putting off almost as much heat as he did and she was gasping for breath as he nipped his way from her mouth to her neck, his teeth leaving a burning trail over her skin.

"God, please," she begged, her own hand tugging his shirt out of his pants to dig short, blunt nails in along his spine. Her hips rocked against his and she cried out when his hand slid down her thigh before pulling it up to hook around his body, letting him grind himself against the hottest part of her.

He knew he was losing it, his vision narrowing down as the animal inside of him tried to wrest control from him. He still fed from her mouth like he'd crawl inside of her but he'd let go of her with his hands, pressing them into the wall on either side of her and letting her direct the kiss. Finally he jerked away, took a couple steps back.

"Logan?" Her voice was breathy but worried. "What's wrong? What happened?"

He scrubbed a hand over his face but only served to get more of her scent in his nose, then the hand moved up into his hair. "Ya do things to me, darlin'," he said, finally looking at her.

"If it's any consolation, I was'nae exactly unaffected by that," she replied, her voice steady now.

"Ya don't get it. I'm not a kind, gentle lover, Teva; I don't have it in me to be." He paced a few more steps away, not trusting himself to be that close to her just now. "Losing control is somethin' I fight against, 'specially when I'm around you, babe."

"I'm no afraid of ye."

When he looked at her he knew it was the animal peeking out, viewing her not as a woman but as a potential mate. He watched her push back into the wall, palms pressed flat against it, and he could smell the mixed fear and lust. Fuck, but he craved that like oxygen. "Goddammit," he ground out, turning around and leaving before he did something he'd regret. He needed a cold shower right this fucking second.