by Zara Chase
Tony was dead. All that blood. The killer’s cold eyes. Where the hell was she?
She could remember driving away in a hurry, arriving somewhere, and then nothing. If she was in prison, it was a five-star facility. The room she was in was large, painted in soothing pastel colors, sunlight streaming in through a gap in the drapes. What the hell! She glanced down and discovered that she wasn’t very clean and that she was wearing nothing but her underwear. How did that happen, and where in God’s name was she?
Caitlyn’s skin prickled as she became conscious of someone watching her. It wasn’t Marvin wanting to know where his breakfast was, and he was the only creature she’d woken up with since forever. Someone else was in the room with her. She turned her head to the left and her gaze collided with the most dazzling, penetrating brown eyes she’d ever seen.
Except she was sure that she had seen those particular eyes somewhere before.
She swallowed back her fear, taking a moment to assess the owner of those eyes. A man in his mid-thirties sat beside her bed and flashed a warm smile that resonated deep inside her gut, making her feel safe when she ought to be out of her mind. He had long, tan-colored hair with a dark stripe running down its center and outrageously good looks, right down to a cleft in a chin that sported a day’s growth of beard. He didn’t appear to be wearing anything other than a pair of ragged shorts, giving Caitlyn a close-up view of the rippling muscles in his broad chest, washboard abs and a lean waist.
“Hey, you’re awake,” he said in a deep voice that made her shiver, but not with fear. “You had us worried for a while there.”
“Where am I?”
Marvin roused himself, stretched, and the man reached out a hand to him. “Don’t touch Marvin! He doesn’t like people. He’ll scratch you to pieces.”
The man chuckled. “Marvin, eh? So the beast has a name.”
Caitlyn’s jaw fell open when, in response to hearing his name, Marvin went right up to the man, tail erect. He rubbed his face against his hand and purred loudly when the man tickled him beneath his chin.
“I’ll be damned!” She shook her head. “He’s never done that before.”
“I have a way with felines.”
“Obviously.” She saw a full glass of water beside the bed. Her throat felt parched, and she drained it almost completely in one go. “Where am I and how did I get here?”
“You’re in Impulse, West Florida—”
“Ah yes, I remember that much.”
“We found you unconscious in the crawl space beneath our house.”
Her hand flew to her mouth. “I remember going in there after Marvin, but nothing after that.”
“You have Marvin to thank for being here now. He alerted us to your plight, otherwise…” The man’s words trailed off, like he thought he’d said too much. “We have thin air here. People can’t breathe it easily unless they’re used to it.”
“I remember feeling like I had a vise around my lungs.”
“Well, like I say, you were lucky.”
“Thanks to you.”
“Hey, not me, but Marvin.”
“I can’t believe he did that.”
Caitlyn smiled and reached down to scratch her cat’s ears. Then she recalled she wasn’t wearing very much and hastily pulled the covers back up to her chin. The man’s sexy smile told her he hadn’t missed the gesture. Her face heated when she figured he was probably the one who’d stripped her of her clothes. Well, he might have seen it all anyway, but that didn’t mean he got to have a second look.
“You feel up to telling me what you’re doing here?”
“I er…I guess I got lost.”
“Where were you headed?”
Where indeed? “Look, I’m sorry I put you through so much trouble, but I’ll get out of your hair now and be on my way.”
“It was no trouble. Besides, I’m betting you must be hungry.”
She was famished. “No, not really.”
He shot her a look that told her he wasn’t buying it. “Marvin probably is.”
She rolled her eyes. “Marvin always is.”
The door opened and another man walked through it bearing a breakfast tray. The smells made her stomach growl. The guy beside the bed, whose name she still didn’t know, flexed an amused brow.
“Hey, you’re awake,” the newcomer said.
Caitlyn figured he must have already known that if he was delivering breakfast. Unless the tray was meant for her bedside guardian.
“Er, yes,” she said, rather unnecessarily.
“Welcome, Caitlyn. How do you feel?”
Panic welled. How did they know who she was?
“My car?” she asked, kind of answering her own question.
“It’s in our garage, out of sight.”
Were they mind readers or something? Certainly something. This second guy was at least as good-looking and as well built as his buddy. His hair was also longer than was fashionable, but it suited him. It glowed like a golden halo, complementing unusual amber eyes fringed by thick lashes.
“Thanks,” she said as he placed the tray across her knees and poured coffee for her.
“We didn’t introduce ourselves,” the first guy said in the lazy drawl that she found totally compelling. “I’m Jared Carlton and this is Bryce Harling. Welcome to our home, darlin’.”
“Jared Carlton.” She opened her eyes very wide and glared at him. “The psychologist. We’ve already met.”
Chapter Four
As soon as she opened her remarkable, doe-like eyes, Jared was dazzled by silver flecked with hazel and remembered where he’d seen her before.
“That Criminal Justice Seminar in Fort Lauderdale about six months ago,” he said, grinning. “I was on the juvenile psychology panel and you were in the audience. You asked a lot of aggressive questions but…”
“But you didn’t have a lot to say for yourself,” she replied with asperity. “You disappointed me.”
“This is the babe you talked about for weeks afterwards?” Bryce asked, shooting Jared a probing look.
Jared was again rendered speechless, just as he had been six months ago. He agreed with most of what Caitlyn had said but couldn’t defend her against his fellow panel-members mainly because he was struck dumb by the sight of her. Something about the way those eyes of hers flashed when she was angry, something deep inside of him that came alive at the sight of her, made him incapable of rational thought.
“You did well enough without my help,” Jared said. “I looked for you after the session but you were gone and no one knew who you were.”
“I stood in for a colleague at the last minute and my name didn’t make it onto the list of delegates.” She paused. “Impulse? Perhaps that’s why the name sounded familiar to me when I saw the city sign. I looked you up, you see, and knew that’s where you were from.”
“Shit, this is bad, buddy,” Bryce pheromoned. “There can no longer be any doubt that she was deliberately sent here.”
“Think I don’t know that?”
In spite of pretending not to be hungry, Caitlyn cleared her tray of all the food Bryce had delivered. Jared smiled. This just got better and better. He liked a woman with a healthy appetite—for all things.
“What happened to my head?” she asked, reaching up to touch the dressing.
“We figure you must have bashed it when you tried to rescue Marvin. It’s not serious, according to our resident doctor.”
“A doctor has seen me?”
“We didn’t want you bleeding all over our sheets,” Bryce quipped.
“I’ve really caused you problems, haven’t I?”
“Hey, problems are what we do best,” Jared replied.
“Even so, I’m grateful to you.”
“I expect you feel like getting clean,” Jared said. “Then we’ll answer all your questions. There’s a bathroom right through there. You should find everything you need. Bryce will bring up your bag.”
“Yes, that would
be good. Thanks.” She glanced at Marvin. “You’ve already been good to me, but…er—”
Bryce laughed. “Don’t worry about his lordship. He came down earlier while you were still asleep and dined on the finest filet steak.”
She rolled her eyes and winced at the pain it obviously caused her. “Now I’ll never get him to eat canned food.”
“Well, he was the hero of the hour,” Jared replied, rubbing faces with Marvin. His rattling purr made it abundantly clear that he enjoyed the exchange.
“I can’t believe he lets you do that. Every time one of you goes near him I still expect him to scratch your eyes out.”
“After we gave him filet steak followed by double cream?” Bryce chuckled. “He’s got way more sense than that.”
“Even so.”
“We’ll leave you to it then,” Jared said, desperately wanting to stay and scrub her back. “Come down when you’re ready and we’ll talk some more.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Those eyes,” Bryce said, sighing dramatically once he and Jared were out of her earshot. “I’ve never seen anyone with such enormous silver eyes before. They’re astonishing.”
“Well, you didn’t think our mate would be ordinary, did you?”
“No, but… Oh, Rafe’s here. What are you going to tell him about knowing her?”
Jared blinked, surprised at the question. “The truth, obviously. It’s not her fault if she’s been manipulated, and we’re still agreed that she’s the one for us, right?”
“No question.”
“Then we make it happen.” He paused, grimly determined. “Somehow.”
Vadim, the jaguar in charge of Impulse’s security, was with Rafe. Both men were sitting at the kitchen counter, helping themselves to coffee and chatting quietly.
“Sorry to call unannounced,” Rafe said by way of greeting. “I figured you wouldn’t want to leave your houseguest alone, and we do need to talk about her.”
“She’s awake,” Jared replied. “But what’s the urgency?”
Rafe flashed an apologetic smile. “I have a bad feeling about her. The timing has got me worried.”
“No need. She’s human!” Jared and Bryce said together.
“Which means fuck all.” Rafe raised a hand to stop Jared from speaking. “We haven’t been attacked for a long while now, which bothers me.”
“Thanks very much!” Vadim said in an affronted tone. “So much for all my efforts in increasing security.”
Rafe chuckled. “Your efforts are noted and appreciated, Vadim. Even so, you know as well as I do that our enemies are getting more creative in their methods of attack, and we need to stay one step ahead of them. It’s in my job description to be suspicious of anything unusual that happens.”
“Yeah, okay.” Jared threw himself into a chair, knowing Rafe was right. It was onerous enough for him and Bryce, having overall responsibility for the cheetah population in Impulse. Rafe had the welfare of the whole damned colony resting upon his shoulders and couldn’t afford to relax his guard. “And there’s something you need to know.”
Jared explained about their meeting at the seminar and how drawn toward her he’d been.
“If you two were attracted like that in public—”
“She didn’t say that,” Jared replied.
“No, but she said she looked you up, so that had to mean something. Besides, if you were flirting in an open forum like that—”
“We weren’t exactly flirting, but I’ll admit I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Wait until you see her, then you’ll understand.”
“Okay, and if any of our enemies were around, and we can assume they were, because if one of us alphas appears in public anywhere they always are—”
“They would have picked up on the connection.” Jared nodded. “Yeah, Bryce and I already figured that much, which is why you needed to know about it.”
“Right. I asked Vadim to do some digging after your earlier pheromone telling me who she is.”
“And?”
“I ran her plates. Her name is actually Caitlyn Denton and she lives in Jacksonville, has no family, grew up in the care system, graduated high school but didn’t go to college,” Vadim replied. “She’s a freelance illustrator for children’s books and makes a decent living from it in spite of the fact that she has no formal qualifications.”
“Natural talent rules,” Bryce murmured.
“So what’s she running from?” Jared asked.
“I have absolutely no idea,” Vadim admitted. “What I can tell you is that she’s never been married, has no kids and no hobbies. In her spare time she volunteers at a drop-in center for kids in care.”
“Ah, now I get it.” Jared crossed one foot over his opposite thigh and leaned his elbow on his raised knee, rubbing his chin in his hand. “That’s why she was so passionately defending the rights of the underprivileged at that seminar. She must have been there on behalf of her drop-in.”
“Right. It’s a place where kids can go and talk to people like her about absolutely anything,” Vadim told them. “It’s a bit like a confessional in that the volunteers make a solemn promise never to reveal anything that’s said to them, unless a crime’s been committed, and not always then. That way they earn the kids’ trust and the kids have somewhere to go and vent, secure in the knowledge that nothing they say will be repeated.”
“See,” Jared said. “She’s a good person. She went through the care system herself, knows how crappy it is, and wants to help others have a better time of it.”
“That’s the way it seems,” Rafe agreed, conceding the point with a nod.
“Shit! Not quite.”
Bryce was staring at the television above the counter which was tuned to a local news station. All the others followed the direction of his gaze, and Bryce turned up the volume. The anchor cut to a reporter standing outside an Italian restaurant that was cordoned off with crime-scene tape.
“The owner of this restaurant, forty-two-year-old Anthony Angelo, was gunned down last night shortly after closing time. A waitress called 911 but then disappeared. Police are anxious to speak with this woman…”
A picture of Caitlyn, the one from her driver’s license, filled the screen.
“Oh!”
All heads turned to see Caitlyn standing in the doorway. Dressed in jeans, barefoot, and her hair still wet from the shower, she had one hand clasped over her mouth and a horrified expression on her face.
* * * *
“I’ve got to get out of here! They’ll find me if I stay in Florida.” Panic surged through Caitlyn. “Where are my car keys?”
“Calm down.” Jared stood up and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Sit down and take a moment. You’re not fit enough to go anywhere right now.”
She did as he asked, mainly because she couldn’t think what else to do before her legs gave out beneath her. Marvin had followed her downstairs and now sat on the counter like an Egyptian sphinx standing guard over his mistress. His dedication calmed her, and she absently scratched his ears.
“Caitlyn, this is Rafe Landon and Vadim Frye, buddies of ours here in Impulse.”
Caitlyn shook their outstretched hands, too distracted to notice much about them, other than that they were both at least as good-looking as Jared and Bryce. It must be something in the water, she thought, that produced so many hunks in one small corner of the country. “Pleased to meet you,” she said listlessly.
Jared sat beside her and took her hand in his. “Why don’t you tell us what this is all about? Perhaps we can help.”
“I don’t want to drag you into it.”
“A bit late for that,” Bryce said, taking up the position on her other side and sending her a reassuring smile.
“We know you live in Jacksonville,” Jared said when she didn’t respond. “What we don’t know is what you have to do with the dead guy in Palm Beach.”
“You’ve been checking up on me?” she asked indignantly.
“We were worried.”
She snorted. “That would be a first.”
“Besides, it’s all over the news,” Bryce pointed out. “The murder, that is.”
“You grew up in care, so you’ve gotten used to no one caring, pun intended,” Jared said. “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
She arched a brow. “My, my, you have been thorough.”
“Why do the police want to talk to you about the dead guy?” Rafe asked, his cool, decisive tone commanding her attention. “I know you didn’t kill him, so—”
“No, I didn’t kill him,” she said, sighing. “You’re right about that but probably the only person, present company excluded, who thinks so now. I worked there, you see, and saw the crime go down. So I called it in, like a good citizen should. More fool me.”
“Back up a bit,” Jared said. “You’re an illustrator from Jacksonville, right?” She nodded. “So what were you doing working as a waitress in Palm Beach?”
“You might as well know that I mentor kids in care,” she replied after a prolonged pause. “I know what it’s like to go through a system that doesn’t always work, and to live with families who don’t really want you. Oh, not all of them are like that, but a hell of a lot of them are into fostering for all the wrong reasons.” She shrugged. “In my day there was no one to talk to, and I saw a lot of kids go off the rails because of that. It almost happened to me. I was lucky to have a talent that I could use that saved me from self-destructing.”
“Your art?” Bryce suggested.
“Yeah, that. Anyway, I heard about the mentoring program and volunteered. You’re not supposed to get personally involved, of course, but that’s bullshit. To identify with the problems these kids have, you have to get close, get inside their heads and see things from their perspective. Some of them invent stuff, but if you’ve been through the system yourself you know pretty much at once if someone’s spinning you a line just to get attention.”
Bryce stood up and refilled everyone’s coffee mugs. “That’s a good thing that you do,” he said, smiling at her. “I don’t suppose too many bother.”
