Dark or not, Erin was all too aware of the hungry gleam in the man’s eyes and it unnerved the hell out of her. She glanced uneasily at the back of Jesse’s head and then at the two men beside her and subsided, wishing she’d simply kept her mouth shut.
She was still wearing the hospital gown, but nothing else, and she felt completely naked and vulnerable. Clothing wouldn’t have protected her if the man was serious about what he had in mind, but it would’ve given her the illusion of security, at least.
* * * *
By Erin’s reckoning, it was nearly midnight when Jesse pulled the Hummer off the freeway and took to the narrow backstreets of the city. Some forty five minutes later, they pulled off the road and into a small parking lot in front a small block building. Instead of parking in front, Jesse drove around the side of the building and parked behind it beside another Hummer which, as nearly as she could tell in the dim light, was painted jungle camouflage.
She wondered if it was a custom job or if the vehicle had been purchased from the military.
A light came on by the rear entrance even as Jesse stepped out of the vehicle. Erin thought at first that the light was motion activated, but at almost the same moment a woman opened the door wide and stepped back, inviting them to enter. As Erin climbed out, she heard the barking of what sounded like a sizeable pack of dogs. The Lycan that had been seated on her right side grasped her arm just above the elbow, urging her toward the door and Erin realized the barking was growing louder as they approached the door.
Glancing back, she saw that Jesse and the man who’d so unnerved her had helped one of the men from the back and was supporting him between them. The Lycan who’d been seated beside her was helping the second man.
The stranger was the only one of all of them who showed no sign of an injury she realized, even as she studied the bloody bandage around Jesse’s upper chest and shoulder in consternation.
As she was dragged inside the building Erin’s attention was snagged by the woman still standing in the doorway. The woman met her curious gaze with a calculating one that didn’t hold so much as an iota of friendly curiosity. In point of fact, her gaze was downright hostile.
Erin couldn’t fathom why until the woman’s gaze lit on Jesse.
Enlightenment blossomed. The woman had a ‘thing’ for Jesse. Either they had a history, or they were currently involved. Erin wasn’t certain of which, but she knew the two of them weren’t just casual acquaintances and it was also obvious from the deadly look that the woman knew about her.
Encountering the woman’s challenging glance with a neutral expression, Erin held her gaze just long enough to allow the woman to know she wasn’t intimidated and then assuaged her curiosity about the building they were entering.
Cages lined the walls. Dogs and cats, every hair bristling with alarm, stood at the door of each, raising a near deafening din as the rag tag group entered the building.
The woman was a veterinarian? She supposed she had known that in the back of her mind from the deafening racket the animals were putting up from the moment they’d gotten out of the vehicle, but it hadn’t connected in her mind with the bullet holes in the Lycans until now. Horrified at the thought, Erin turned to glance at the men entering the building behind her.
From what she could see no one was either surprised or disturbed besides her, which, when she added in the fact that the woman had been ready to let them in when they arrived, meant that this wasn’t an unscheduled stop but an arranged one.
As soon as everyone was inside, the woman closed the door and locked it, then threaded her way to the front of the group and led them down a narrow hallway. The men filed into an examination room. When Erin paused and turned to follow them, the woman took hold of her upper arm, drawing her to a halt. “You’ll come with me.”
Erin frowned, but the woman’s grip was surprisingly strong. “Where?” she demanded.
Instead of answering, the woman gave her arm a tug that nearly wrenched it from the socket. Erin was still trying to decide how much of a threat the woman represented when Jesse stepped into the hallway. “We need to lose that chip,” he said tightly.
Erin glanced from him to the woman and back again. “You might have said so,” she retorted.
“I suppose you would have considered cooperating if I had?” the woman said tartly, speaking directly to Erin for the first time.
Erin glared at the woman and then glanced at Jesse again, realizing that, with or without restraints, she was obviously still considered a prisoner. Now wasn’t the time to argue, however. If the FEDS had recovered their cool by now from the assault on the facility, they’d discovered their prize breeding mare and mad scientist were missing. “I wouldn’t have told Jesse about it if I hadn’t intended to cooperate,” she said tightly, following the woman into another examination room.
The woman shoved her in the direction of a table.
Pushed off balance, Erin fell against it and turned to glare at the woman’s back as she moved to the supply cabinets. “Get on the table.”
Erin didn’t even look at the table. “I’m not one of your patients,” she ground out.
“We need to do a scan to find the transmitter.”
Erin turned from the vet and glared at Jesse when he spoke. “Maybe so, but I’m not lying on an animal gurney. The floor’s probably cleaner.”
The female vet turned with some sort of electronic device in her hands. “Put her on the table and strap her down.”
Jesse’s face tightened as his gave flickered from Erin to the other woman. “That won’t be necessary, Juliette. She’s offered to cooperate.”
Anger washed over Juliette’s face. “Do you want me to take care of this or not, Jesse?”
“Just locate the damned thing--or give me the scanner and I will.”
“You going to extract it, too?”
Jesse glared at her. After a moment, she moved toward Erin, flipped a switch on the scanning device and moved it slowly down Erin’s body, studying the gauge on it. When she’d reached Erin’s feet, she stood up and gave her a cold stare eye to eye for a moment. “Turn around.”
Erin didn’t particularly want to give the woman her back. After a pregnant moment, she turned, though.
The woman found the device in her hip. Figured!
The needle she stabbed into Erin’s hip to deaden the area made her knees buckle. She had to grip the examination table she was leaning against to keep from falling on the floor. Right up until the woman sliced into her flesh and began digging for the implant, Erin thought it might almost have hurt less to have the procedure without the medicine to numb sensation.
When she gasped, Jesse stepped around the table opposite her and grasped her arms. She wasn’t certain whether it was to support her--morally and physically--or if he thought she might try to lay the woman out, but it was good for her that he did. It kept her from passing out and crumpling to the floor.
If she’d been in any condition to do so, she would have knocked the woman out.
By the time Juliette had finally dug the electronic implant out, closed the incision with a couple of stitches, and plastered a bandage over it, Erin was beginning to wonder if she would puke or pass out first. She was relieved when she did neither, but she was only saved from the latter by the fact that Jesse gathered her against him when the woman was done with her, holding her tightly to prevent her from falling.
“Fucking bitch,” she managed to mutter when he’d half carried her to a chair and helped her to sit. “You can be damned sure I won’t be recommending you to anybody I know.”
It occurred to Erin belatedly that she wasn’t really in any better position to defend herself now than she had been when the woman had been torturing her with her scalpel. She hadn’t said anything at the time because she wouldn’t have put it past the bitch to ‘accidently’ cut an artery if there was one handy for cutting, but she was as weak as water, dizzy and nauseated. If the woman felt like stalking across the room a
nd slapping her head off she wouldn’t be able to stop her.
Thankfully, she decided to pretend she hadn’t heard Erin’s comments. When she’d finished wiping up the blood and dropping her instruments in the sink, she left the room and went down the hall.
Erin supposed to torture the poor, wounded men.
Lucky for them they had someone with some medical knowledge and access to medicine on their side!
As the dizziness finally subsided, it dawned on Erin that they’d been completely prepared to remove the tracking device from her. That not only meant that Jesse had gone with the intention of rescuing, or recapturing, her. It also meant that he knew about the device or at least suspected.
Was that why he wasn’t being as nasty as he had been before? Had some doubt shaken his conviction that she was a totally cold, insensitive, traitorous bitch?
Without asking, there was no way to be certain and she didn’t really feel up to a verbal battle at the moment if she’d guessed wrong. Besides, she wanted her baby. From what Jesse had said, she knew he meant to go after Joshua and she wasn’t going to do anything to rock the boat until she had her baby back.
Erin was half drowsing in the chair where she’d been left when the sound of footsteps coming in her direction roused her. With an effort, she lifted her head and focused her eyes. Jesse filled the doorway on the opposite side of the room. He studied her for several moments in silence but before she could wonder what thoughts were running through his mind, he moved toward her.
“We’re moving,” he said, his voice brusque.
Nodding, Erin got to her feet with an effort. Jessie caught her when she swayed on her feet, half supporting her as he escorted her from the examination room. The building that housed the veterinary clinic was strangely quiet as they moved along the hallway. Even the dogs had ceased to bark.
They set up another alarm as she and Jesse neared the kennel, however.
Confused when no one joined them, Erin glanced at Jesse questioningly several times, but she didn’t ask him what had become of the others and he didn’t volunteer the information. Outside, she discovered the Hummer had disappeared. In its place was a dark late model sedan.
“A cliché,” Erin murmured with a touch of amusement as Jesse opened the passenger door and pushed her inside.
When he’d settled beside her in the driver’s seat, she studied him for several moments in the dim pre-dawn light. “What happened to the others?”
He glanced at her, but he didn’t answer as he turned the key in the ignition and started the car. Frowning, mentally shrugging it off since she wasn’t actually that interested anyway, Erin focused on fastening her seatbelt.
“They’ve been removed to a safe house for recovery,” Jesse said as they left the parking lot and turned onto the dark nearly deserted street in front of the building.
Erin’s brows rose. Everyone, including Juliette apparently, had gone to the safe house while she was ‘resting’ in the room where the bitch had removed her tracking device? It was hard to avoid the implications of that, that she was the least important participant if she’d been the last to be moved to safety. “Are we going there, too?”
“No.”
So what was she, bait? She thought angrily? Again? He was using her to lead the pursuit away from the others? “Did Dr. Wagner have a devisc on him, too?”
“Yes.”
“Did, but he doesn’t now?” Erin persevered.
“They won’t know that for a while.”
Erin digested that for several moments, studying the cityscape outside the car windows and absently trying to place her location. “For a while?” she echoed. “You didn’t destroy it?”
Instead of answering this time, he shrugged.
“You’re playing a seriously stupid game with some very bad people,” Erin snapped, more scared than angry.
His lips tightened. “But then, being a dumb animal, I cain’t help myself.”
Erin gaped at him. A chaotic wash of emotions went through her--frustration, hopelessness, anger and most difficult to deal with, empathy. She could see his point, unfortunately. In her own way, she’d been just as guilty as the others in treating him as less than human, not to the extent he seemed to believe, but she had considered the Lycans little more than beasts. They were beasts when they shifted, controlled more by their instincts than their instincts were under their control, but Jesse at least had a gentler side when he had mastery of his beast, and he was intelligent--and quite devastatingly appealing both in personality and physical appearance.
As frustrated and frightened as she’d been about everything that had happened, she couldn’t avoid that knowledge.
Truth be told, believing what he believed about her, he had every reason to behave horribly toward her, to hurt her, or at least want to. He very obviously hadn’t wanted to hurt her or he would have.
Something else occurred to her as they drove, Jesse moving steadily and with purpose through the city, as if he was very familiar with it and had a specific destination in mind. The Lycans obviously moved among them. Even with everything she’d discovered about Jesse, she’d had a deep rooted prejudice about his kind. She supposed, in the back of her mind, and not too distantly, she’d thought they eked out an existence hidden away in the swamps.
Juliette was one of them, she realized with sudden insight, and practiced veterinary medicine right under the noses of humans coming and going every day with no clue of what walked among them. No doubt they all did.
They had money behind them--a lot of money.
Unless they went around stealing tremendously expensive vehicles and electronic equipment, and somehow she didn’t believe that.
“What were they doin’ when I arrived?”
Erin looked at him blankly.
He frowned, but more, she thought, because he didn’t want to be forced to make an issue of his interest than because she didn’t answer at once. “In the lab,” he added tightly.
Enlightenment dawned. She repressed a shudder with an effort.
She thought she’d repressed it.
“They were about to impregnate me with a little Jesse.”
His head whipped toward her so fast she wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d gotten whiplash from it. “An extremely repugnant thought for you, I see,” he said dryly.
Erin flushed, but she grew angry, as well. “Was I supposed to be thrilled only because it was yours? I’d like to see how fucking excited you’d be about being strapped to a table and having some asshole shove a syringe full of sperm into you!”
Several different emotions flickered across his face in rapid succession, too swiftly for her to grasp them all. “I’d just as soon no’ have sperm shoved into any of my orifices,” he said wryly.
He hesitated, obviously struggling with the urge to say more, and she knew suddenly that he wanted to ask her if the clinical aspect was the only reason she’d been repulsed. He repressed the impulse and a flicker of amusement replaced her anger. “You know what I meant,” she added a little testily. “If it had been you, instead of me….”
His whole mood shifted abruptly. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Erin sighed. For just a moment they’d almost had a conversation that wasn’t completely antagonistic and then she’d just had to resurrect the past!
A sense of hopeless frustration filled her with the realization that their past was always going to hang between them like an impenetrable wall of anger. Even if she could master the knack of thinking hard, and examining what she said before she said it, which she thought it was doubtful, she would have to worry that anything she said would touch off a memory better left buried.
After a moment it occurred to her to wonder why it mattered.
It did matter. She could lie to herself all she wanted to, but it mattered a lot, and not just because she needed his help to find the baby.
She couldn’t undo what had been done to Jesse, but she didn’t deserve his hate for her part in i
t. She’d been just as much a pawn as he had been, and she had neither consciously tried to hurt him, nor been indifferent to his suffering. It just plain wasn’t fair to be tarred with the same brush as those who had deliberately, and with malice, or at least an absence of conscience, trapped, imprisoned and tortured him.
Her feelings were more even than a sense of injustice, though, and regret for having been involved, she realized abruptly.
Like it or not, a bond had been forged between her and Jesse. She might not have chosen it if she’d had the choice, but it existed now regardless and she yearned to see that side of him that he had only teased her with, the passionate lover and intriguing companion.
Chapter Eight
Despite the nagging pain in her hip from having the tracking device removed, weariness invaded Erin after a time and she dozed. When she woke, roused by the slowing of the car, she saw that Jesse was turning onto a narrow dirt track that led through a thick tangle of vegetation. It seemed obvious from the encroaching brush and the high grasses that grew down the center of the track like a Mohawk hair cut that this track wasn’t used often. In spite of that, or maybe because it was used so seldom, the road was fairly smooth.
When Jesse stopped at last, Erin stared at the run down building in front of them a little uneasily. There was no doubt that the mansion had once been a grand one, but that had probably been before the Civil War. Now she had to wonder how the antebellum mansion could remain standing. There was hardly a fleck of paint to hold it together. The wood, weathered for so many years and battered by nature, was the same muted color as the woods around it so that, as huge as it was, it blended so well with its surroundings it would have been easy to miss seeing it at all.
The grounds were not in much better shape than the building itself. Waist high weeds and young pines cluttered what must once have been a beautiful lawn.
Jesse had pulled under a porte chochère, she saw as she got out of the car and looked around.
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