Mark of the Wolf; Hell's Breed

by Madelaine Montague

  She’d just finished getting ready for her appointment and was looking around to make sure she had collected everything she wanted with her when there was a tap on the door. Startled, she nearly dropped her purse. “Coming!” she called out, hurrying toward the door.

  In the back of her mind she questioned why they would come personally to summon her for the cab she’d ordered, but no one knew where she was and she hadn’t ordered anything else so she assumed it was either the maids come to clean the room or someone had come to fetch her for her cab. She paused at the door after she’d taken the security bolt off. “Who is it?”

  She heard a low, rumbling male voice. She couldn’t quite make out what he said, but she decided her first guess had been right. It certainly wasn’t a maid!

  She pulled the door open and then just gaped at the man scowling at her from the other side.

  “Lady! You need a keeper! It’s a damned good thing Peeples hired us to look after you,” Lucien growled. “Don’t you know better than to open the door when you don’t know who it is? Especially with some nut case targeting you because you saw him murder somebody?”

  Laurie blinked at him as he pelted her with the criticism. By the time he’d finished, indignation had overcome her shock and—she hated to say it!—admiration at the picture of raw male beauty that had greeted her at the door when she opened it. Otherwise she might have found herself babbling an apology for something she had no reason to apologize for. “Like I would stick my damned eye to the peep hole! I watch TV! That’s where the assassins put the gun barrel and then when you stick your eye to it, they pull the trigger.”

  It was Lucien’s turn to gape at her. “What? That doesn’t make any damned sense! You were worried I might blow your head off but you opened the door?”

  “I didn’t say that. I called a taxi. I figured it was someone who’d come to let me know it was here. I’m just saying I wouldn’t make a habit of looking through the peep hole because I’ve seen bad guys shoot people through them.”

  “They don’t come to your room to let you know the cab’s arrived,” Damien, whom she discovered was standing behind him with the other two men, said dryly. “They ring the room.”

  “Oh,” Laurie responded, considering that. “I guess I should use the phone, then, and find out if the taxi is here yet. I mean, I don’t want to stand around in the lobby.”

  The bookends exchanged a speaking look. “We’ll give you a ride,” Lucien offered. “That’s why we came.”

  “Oh hell no!” Laurie snapped. “I am not getting on the back of that motorcycle again! I appreciate being rescued and all that. I’m sure I forgot to thank y’all for that last night when I should have. But it was actually reasonable to get on the back of a motorcycle given the options I was looking at last night. It damned well isn’t reasonable now.”

  “We brought the tank,” Kane said cheerfully.

  Laurie turned to stare in disbelief at the blond when he spoke. “Tank?”

  Chapter Four

  It wasn’t a tank—exactly—but it didn’t miss it by much. It was a Hummer—not the stripped down version the carmakers sold the public, but the armored kind the military used.

  Well it actually looked like it might have been used in WWII except she was pretty sure they didn’t have them back then. It rode like it might be that old, too. Laurie couldn’t actually recall any experience in a moving vehicle that even came close to her ride from the hotel to the DA’s office in the courthouse complex, but she thought blondie’s description was probably the closest—tank. It didn’t appear to have any shocks—either in suspension or the cracked leather seats. Thankfully, Atlanta’s freeway system was in pretty damned good shape even if the same couldn’t be said for a lot of the city’s streets. Laurie still managed to bite the inside of her cheek a couple of times, but not hard enough to draw blood. And although her tailbone felt like somebody had been pounding on it with a bat by the time she fell out of the door, she was pretty sure it was just bruised and not cracked.

  “Thanks for the ride, guys,” Laurie said with a tight smile, trying to ignore the fact that she felt like a quivering pile of pudding from the vibrations that had rattled through her the entire way.

  It was Kane (the blond one she’d learned along the way—from the conversation since they hadn’t bothered to introduce themselves) who helped her out. “No problem,” he said cheerfully. “You look ….”

  He didn’t finish the thought. Lucien elbowed him in the ribs and Damien, who’d come around from the other side of the vehicle, stepped on his foot, stopping him, literally, in his tracks as he stepped away from the vehicle.

  “Damien and I will walk her in,” Lucien growled, glaring a warning at Kane that Laurie couldn’t decipher. “You two take a quick look around and then stay with the Hummer till we get back.”

  Laurie glanced around at the four men surrounding her and shook her head faintly. “Y’all aren’t from around here, are you? Not saying we don’t grow them big here in Georgia, but clearly you’ve all had your wheaties and then some!”

  All four of them looked at her blankly.

  Well, not Kane. He gave her the quizzical look of a baffled puppy.

  He really was cute!

  Not that all of them weren’t lookers! The twins, Lucien and Damien, gave her heart palpitations whenever she looked at them—which was why she didn’t look directly at them except when she had to … unless they weren’t looking at her. And the shy one, Basil, wasn’t suffering in the looks department either.

  “You’re all really tall,” she clarified. “Well, built like tanks, too. You guys must work out all the time.”

  The four of them exchanged looks she found hard to decipher. She thought relief was part of it and that puzzled her, but she could also see that they seemed to be trying to decide whether she’d complimented them or criticized.

  “Just saying. You guys in the military?”

  “Not anymore,” Kane responded, earning another elbow to the ribs.

  “Didn’t I tell you and Basil to scope out the area?” Lucien growled.

  Kane glared at him, rubbing his ribs, but he followed Basil off.

  “That was mean,” Laurie said.

  Lucien sent her a surprised look and then reddened. She wasn’t sure if it was from embarrassment or anger because she’d criticized him, but she decided to pretend she hadn’t let her motor mouth outrun her brain.

  It was a problem that went all the way back to her childhood—probably from birth. Almost as soon as a thought entered her brain it came out her mouth—without being filtered for content and/or consumption first. The impulsiveness of her nature was something she’d finally managed to master to a degree, but mastering the impulsiveness of her tongue had been pretty much an abysmal failure. It had gotten her in trouble more times than she could count, but she couldn’t seem to learn from the unpleasant aftershocks of being painfully honest/blunt.

  Subterfuge was certainly not in her nature!

  They attracted attention, something Laurie had never been particularly fond of. Of course mostly the attention was focused on the matching bookends on either side of her. The men looked them over assessingly—probably felt threatened by the testosterone cloud surrounding them. And the women looked dazed and confused. They got several double-takes.

  It was enough of a distraction that Laurie’s stomach wasn’t tied in knots when she reached the DA’s office. She was sure it would have been otherwise, because the thought of driving to Atlanta to give a deposition had tied her in knots for weeks before she left to do it and she tensed as soon as she entered the office and sat down to wait in the waiting area. Lucien and Damien each grabbed a magazine, sprawled in a chair, stretching their long legs out, and seemed to become immediately engrossed in the contents.

  Laurie thought that was deceptive. They weren’t so engrossed they didn’t notice everyone around them. Each time someone passed in or out of the door, they scanned them from the tops of their heads
to their toes, assessed them, and then returned their attention to the magazine.

  That was her impression anyway and she was attuned enough to them to feel like she didn’t miss a lot.

  They came to attention when she was called back to talk to the DA, dragging their long legs in and sitting up straighter. Neither of them actually got up, however, since the receptionist directed them to wait there.

  The deposition wasn’t the nightmare she’d expected, never having experienced one before. It was still grueling. The DA put her through her paces, asking her the same questions, each phrased a little differently, over and over until she began to think of him as the ‘enemy’. He kept reminding her that the defense was bound to ‘batter’ her once she got on the stand in an effort to rattle her so that he could discredit her testimony and obviously the DA was hell bent on testing her medal himself.

  She had a headache by the time they broke for lunch and not much appetite. The guys escorted her to a sandwich shop nearby and settled around her, giving everyone that came anywhere near them such cold, assessing looks that most of the traffic simply took a different route to and from the ordering counter. “Like Moses and the Red Sea,” Laurie murmured. “Where are you guys from? Originally, I mean?”

  That caught their attention, riveting it firmly on her. All four of them stared at her as if she’d asked them to strip naked in the middle of the restaurant—suspiciously, with speculation, as if it was an interrogation. Irritated, Laurie shook her head. “Never mind. I was just trying to make conversation.”

  “In our line of work, it isn’t a good idea to get too personal,” Damien volunteered after a few moments, earning a deadly look from his twin.

  He grimaced and shrugged. “No sense in being impolite,” he muttered, this time in response to the look his brother had given him.

  “And that comment was so polite,” Basil responded dryly, blushing when Laurie glanced at him.

  “Like I said—never mind,” Laurie said a little stiffly. “It hadn’t occurred to me that you might want to keep your distance, emotionally speaking, since I have a target painted on my forehead. That was just downright inconsiderate.”

  “We’re from Wyoming,” Lucien said tightly.

  Laurie held up her hand. “No! Don’t tell me! Obviously divulging deep dark secrets like where you were born is giving me dangerous information. I don’t want to get bumped off for asking questions that are too personal!”

  They finished their lunch in uncomfortable silence and headed back to the courthouse complex for a cheerful afternoon of rehashing the murder. The DA finally released her into the custody of the four horsemen around five and she was escorted back to the hotel to collapse. Exhausted, more emotionally, she thought, than physically, Laurie literally collapsed on the wide king sized bed and dropped off the face of the earth. She felt drunk when she woke some time later and completely disoriented. It was dusk-ish outside but she couldn’t decide if it was morning and she’d slept through the evening and night or if it was evening and she’d only slept a little while. The clock beside the bed was no help. The display showed 8:00 but it could’ve been AM or PM and looked pretty much the same light-wise outside. She finally decided that it must be PM and she’d only slept a little while.

  She was starving. She’d barely touched her sandwich at lunch because of her headache and the tension of the guys that had made her own tension that much worse. Turning the TV on, she sat down with the local attractions books the hotel had provided, trying to decide whether she wanted to go out to eat or stay in. It was bound to be expensive either way. This was the big city, after all, and although it offered way more than the small town, it was pricey. Beyond that, she’d had to take off from work to come, as badly as she’d hated using vacation time for court. She needed to watch her expenses. She was supposed to be compensated for her time, but she doubted it would be much and there was no telling when she’d get it if ever.

  On the other hand, she’d had to use her vacation time to come, and she wouldn’t be getting another one for a whole year. She might as well wring what little enjoyment she could out of the trip.

  That still left her with the decision of whether to go out or stay in, but she finally decided she was just too hungry to hunt a restaurant and then wait on ordering food. She picked up the phone and dialed room service.

  Since they told her it would be forty five minutes for the delivery, she decided to take a bath rather than stare at the TV and try not to think about her stomach.

  The nice thing about taking a shower at a hotel was that she could use all the hot water she wanted. She took a leisurely shower, washed her hair and shaved everything—a long, drawn out process at any time even though she had short legs.

  Actually, she only managed to get one leg shaved before some bastard decided to beat on her door. She yelled from the shower that she was busy, but either they didn’t hear her or they had no damned consideration! The imperious, demanding knock sounded again.

  It sounded like a cop summons.

  A little unnerved by the thought, Laurie got out of the shower, threw the thick robe on that the hotel provided and hurried to the door, leaving trails of soapy water behind her. Leaving the security latch on, she opened the door and peered out. Lucien stood on the other side. Well, she assumed it was Lucien. It could’ve been Damien.

  “What did I tell you about opening the door without checking?” Lucien growled, instantly identifying himself by his demeanor.

  “Is it me?” Laurie snapped. “Or are you always this damned cheerful? I was in the middle of a bath. Is this important, because if it isn’t I still have one leg to shave!”

  His gaze dropped and then his jaw—which was when Laurie discovered she hadn’t actually closed the robe that well. The belt was tied alright, but the two front halves gaped, exposing pretty much everything from the neck down. She slammed the door in his face.

  Torn between the hysterical urge to giggle like a maniac at the look on his face and the desire to weep with embarrassment, Laurie headed back to the shower on autopilot. After standing under the spray for a few minutes, she finally remembered she’d gone back to finish what she started. She was halfway through shaving the same leg for the second time when someone beat on the door again. Sticking her head out of the shower, she snarled, “I’m in the fucking shower! Don’t get your panties in a wad!”

  Shutting the shower off, she grabbed a towel to dry off as quickly as she could, put the robe on again in spite of the fact that it was now wet and cold, closed and tied it very carefully, and then went to the door. That time when she opened the door to peer out she discovered someone had brought the food she’d ordered. Apparently after her greeting they decided to just leave it outside the door. Shrugging, trying to ignore the heat creeping into her face, she closed the door long enough to take off the security lock, opened it again and grabbed the cart, dragging it inside the room with her. When she’d locked the door again, she went to her suitcase to find clothing. Opting to just get ready for bed, she pulled out panties and one of her favorite sleeping shirts—a sloppy big, thread bare affair that had started out as uncomfortable but was now, after a zillion washes, like being wrapped in cloud nine.

  When she’d flipped through the channels until she found a forensic show, she settled down to watch it while she ate. The image of Lucien at her door kept playing in her head, though, making it nearly impossible to figure out ‘who done it’ when she couldn’t concentrate worth a flip.

  Laurie wasn’t the only one having trouble focusing on something besides the encounter at the door. Lucien returned to his room like a sleepwalker and dropped into the easy chair next to the window. Damien had been flipping through stations on the TV, but he noticed something seemed just a hair off about Lucien’s demeanor. “Problems?”

  The question penetrated Lucien’s abstraction and he glanced at his brother. “Why would you ask that?” he barked.

  Damien was taken aback and looked it. “You went to
check on the client. I was just asking about the status,” he said slowly, turning Lucien’s response and behavior over in his mind and trying to decide just what it was that they pointed to—beyond the fact that something had happened that Lucien hadn’t been expecting.

  Lucien felt his face heating with discomfort. “Oh. Yeah. She’s tucked in for the night. Still doesn’t have the sense of self-preservation of a bird.” He frowned at the comment. “It’s almost like she’s the complete opposite of her counterpart on our side, you know?”

  Damien was beginning to feel a vague sense of ‘something’s not quite right’ about the situation. “What happened when you went to check on her?”

  Lucien managed a credible expression of surprise. He shrugged. “Nothing really. I knocked. She opened the door. I reminded her that she could be in danger as the only eye witness to the murder and not to open the door without checking to see who it was first and then came back here.”

  “That’s all there was to it?” Damien demanded suspiciously.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  Damien stared at him. “You mean aside from the fact that you went over there to check the room security and came back without, apparently, checking a damned thing? You came back in here like a … zombie and flopped in that chair without saying a damned thing. What the fuck is going on with you?”

  That time Lucien felt more than just a faint heating of discomfort. The blood flooded his face and he could feel each heartbeat as a pulse in his cheeks like a flashing neon sign. He cleared his throat. “You questioning my judgment?”

  “I’m wondering if I should go check on Laurie myself, yeah,” Damien responded tightly.

  Lucien surged out of his seat. “Just when the hell did you start calling her Laurie? You’re referring to a client by their first name and questioning my professionalism?”

  Damien gaped at him for a split second but that was all the time it took to bring his own anger to the forefront. He slid off the bed and straightened as Lucien got out of his chair and approached the bed where he’d been sitting. “You’ve been fucking referring to her as Laurie since we got the job,” he growled. “I hadn’t questioned your professionalism. We all agreed that it would probably be best to keep our distance as much as possible from the people on this side—and it was you that suggested it—that it could make things miserable at the very least if and when we go back and could be dangerous in ways we haven’t even thought of.