Witch Interrupted

by Wallace, Jody

  It wasn’t too late yet, was it? Katie said she didn’t want him dead, and the next step would be convincing her she wanted to help him. His cause was vital—and essential if he wanted to honor his sister’s name. It sounded like Katie wouldn’t mind some vengeance on Hiram Lars herself.

  If he had to underscore the fact she wanted him to get her help, he wasn’t above using any means necessary.

  He’d prove his theories faster if he had witch participation. If he had Katie’s participation.

  Normally he tried to stifle the wolf, the wildness in himself, as if remaining the person he’d been before would ease his return path. The struggle taxed him, and today he’d struggled more than usual. Technically, he’d lost the fight when he’d threatened Katie with sexual assault and kidnapped her—but his loss was looking like a gigantic win.

  Should he give in to the urge to stop the truck, shove her back on the seat and bury his face in her…

  No. He was a scientist, governed by reason and logic. He was not a beast.

  “I don’t know. You were pretty worried about us altering your memories,” Katie finally concluded. “I think you’re bluffing.”

  “Think what you want.” The truck bumped along the pitted gravel road to the site where he’d parked the Airstream. “I didn’t want you to know what you were up against.”

  “I know what I’m up against.”

  She was up against him. Her softness rested against him, and her breathing quickened. He parked the truck and stared down at her. Neither of them exited the vehicle. Not that she could, since he was restraining her.

  Marcus slid his thumb along her jaw. His gaze dropped to her lips. His id chanted something nonsensical about plunder and sweetness and taking advantage.

  His defenses against lust? Well, he didn’t seem to have any.

  Reluctance and fascination warred on Katie’s pretty face as she examined his. “You didn’t fake everything. Some things can’t be faked, Marcus. Some things happen whether you want them to or not.”

  He smiled. “No. I didn’t fake everything.”

  “I didn’t think so.” Her pupils dilated with interest.

  It was working. Somehow. She was playing into his hands. If their discussion led to intimacy, how would she react when he asked her to relay her experiences as clinically as possible during the different phases of lovemaking?

  He’d best broach his business proposal before seducing her, despite the fact her scent and body were seducing him.

  “Let’s go inside where it’s more comfortable,” he suggested, before he mauled her in the truck. “I’ll show you my research.”

  One corner of her mouth curled in a reluctant smile. “Is that like your etchings?”

  He smiled back. She had a quick wit, and he enjoyed the banter. “No, but there are a considerable number of photographs.”

  She allowed him to help her out of the vehicle. Her body slid against his.

  Yeah, he wasn’t faking everything.

  Biting her lip, she scooted sideways, cheeks pink. She rolled her shoulders, which probably ached from having her wrists cuffed behind her. “What would it take for you to share your defensive recipes with us? We’d like more protections against the keepers too.”

  He took her by the arm and led her to the trailer. “Look at it from my point of view. Why would I freely give you anything when you’d like to take everything from me?”

  “We could pay you,” she offered, not mentioning whether her intent to wipe him was still a factor.

  “I don’t need money.” As he followed her into the Airstream, he prepared to haggle. The longer he kept her curious, the better chance he had of persuading her. “I need my memories. My freedom. And I need help. Don’t you want to defy Lars?”

  From the far side of the room, she stared at him as he shut the door. They should be safe here until he and Katie reached an agreement; Tonya and Zhang Li would hardly be in league with any wolves or human policemen who could track them. Katie’s lips, where she’d bitten them, were reddened and plush. The desire in her scent ramped up again, and her gaze kept dropping—below his chest and lower.

  Did she like what she saw? What parts of his body did she favor? It wasn’t easy to remain analytical in a small space with a beautiful woman. One who wanted him carnally, even though she shouldn’t.

  “What kind of help do you need?” she asked.

  “I need you.” When her eyes widened, he swallowed a grin. He could get used to being ogled. “It has to be you. You’re alpha. You have so much power. I have a theory that transformed wolves can be recovered and that witches can access wolf magic. You can help me prove it. Imagine what that would do to the council.”

  “Your sister.” Her shoulders relaxed. “This is about her.”

  “This is about science.” But Katie was right. “And my sister. What happened to her haunts me. I freely admit that.”

  If she cooperated, he could have these answers and more. He’d never had to exploit his sexuality and wasn’t sure how to go about it. Should he pose with his hand against the cabinet? Stick a thumb in his waistband? How long before she wondered why he hadn’t put on a shirt?

  Silently, he urged her closer. Close enough to touch, so he could prove he wasn’t dangerous. Granted, he wasn’t positive it was true, considering the thoughts in his head, but she didn’t need to know everything.

  “Do you think you can figure out what thousands of years of witchery hasn’t?”

  “You’ll never know if you poppy me,” Marcus pointed out.

  “No, we wouldn’t, would we?” she mused. “What about the fact I was a keeper? You hate keepers.”

  “If you wanted to be a keeper, you’d still be with them,” he told her, mostly believing it. He couldn’t reconcile the two parts of the woman before him, the one who’d nearly cried at the thought she might have to kill him, and Chang Cai’s reputation or the way he knew keepers to be. She seemed to be Lars’s polar opposite. When things didn’t add up, it was because he was missing several factors in the equation.

  There wasn’t a scientific calculator in the world that would multiply Chang Cai times the keepers and get Katherine Zhang as the product.

  “I brought you here to tell you about my research.” He tapped his temple. “Let me prove to you why you don’t want me to lose anything up top.”

  “You’ll share the spell recipes?” She seemed unaware of the fact she’d crossed the room, drawn to him like a magnet. She had no interest in the diagrams on the walls, the lab equipment, the computers, the charts. She was completely mesmerized by him.

  He liked it.

  “I’ll share…if you agree to research with me instead of wipe me.”

  She licked her lips, glanced up at him and jangled her handcuffs. “If we’re going to work together, we should shake on it. Which I can’t do like this.”

  Her scent spiked. His wolf did too. A flicker in her throat indicated her racing pulse. Was she excited to touch him? Or excited by the sexual tension sizzling in the air, so obvious even a clueless scientist like himself could taste it?

  “If I take the handcuffs off, are you going to behave?”

  She smiled at him then, a bright, unexpected beam that lit up her otherwise serious face. “Define behave.”

  She was…flirting.

  “Have I convinced you to listen? We’re safe here. No keepers, no Birmingham packers, no covens, nobody but us.” He felt like an idiot, but he rubbed his hand across his chest, attracting her attention to it. “This place is fully warded. I’ll show you everything. Hypotheses. Recipes. Secrets.”

  “I want to see,” she breathed.

  It would have been practical to remove the handcuffs from behind her. Instead, Marcus reached around her and caressed her arms. His palms grazed her skin until he encountered metal.

  He clasped her wrists long enough that she glanced up at him. “Marcus?”

  “Good thing I don’t need keys.” He popped one ring, careful not to
let the metal bite into her. The handcuffs clinked as her wrist came free.

  She brought her arms in front of her, between their bodies where there wasn’t much space, and awkwardly shoved one hand into a front pocket while offering him the other. “Shake?”

  He took her hand, rubbing the back of it with his thumb. Her skin was silky, but her fingertips had faint calluses. It was an agile hand. A witch’s hand.

  He wanted her. Wanted that hand touching him everywhere. It took most of his willpower not to act on it.

  “Do we have a deal, Katie?”

  Her other hand joined the clasp. “I’m sorry, Marcus,” she whispered.

  “Why?” He smiled down at her, feeling oddly possessive, and then smelled valerian.

  Reacting faster than thought, he leaped back, landing on the other side of the trailer. Lab equipment rattled. A stack of charts hit the floor, scattering papers everywhere. His ears popped.

  “Shit,” she exclaimed, a wad of valerian root in one hand. She’d obviously secreted it in her pocket at some point. She held it out like a weapon. “You’re really fast.”

  “Too slow to realize you didn’t mean a word of our conversation,” he growled.

  She advanced. He avoided. He didn’t want to hurt her, but an alpha witch could knock him out long enough to do a lot of damage. All it would take would be that valerian, or her, contacting his skin. Luckily she didn’t have it in projectile form, like keepers used for combat situations.

  By the Goddess, he would not let the Black Widow chase him out of his own secret hideout.

  Chapter Six

  “Come on, Marcus.” Katie swung the herb, and the blasted wolf dodged again. “I might be the most despised person in both of our worlds, but I know my duty.”

  “Your duty?”

  “My duty to protect shifters from discovery. The sheer chaos that would erupt if wolves found out about witches. It would be the end of all secrecy.”

  She considered breaking for the door, but he’d be on her before she got two steps past the threshold. She had to knock him out if she had any chance of escape. She’d worry about neutralizing him later. Without other resources, dealing with Marcus might mean accepting Vern’s latest bribe—some new location spell that used family DNA. Vern hadn’t badgered her in months, which was unusual for him, but he’d jump at the chance to buy her services.

  Marcus, eyes glittering, grabbed a blanket off the back of a chair and shook it. “You’re about to be very sorry.”

  “I’m already sorry.” She snapped off a thread of valerian and flipped it at him, but it didn’t have enough heft to reach his skin. “You’re the biggest threat to my existence since Lars decided to kill me after the memory wipe. That was what they were going to do, you know. Vern just let them think they succeeded.”

  “You’ve spent too much of your life being a traitor to be able to trust anyone else,” Marcus snarled. “That’s your problem.”

  It hit Katie deep, somewhere she tried to hide from Tonya and Dad. Was she broken? Was she unforgivable? “That’s not—”

  Marcus sprang at her, blanket first, as if he was capturing an angry cat that didn’t want to go to the vet. He’d wrapped half her body before she’d finished registering his attack. Her valerian hand stuck out at one end of the blanket.

  Katie writhed in her fuzzy prison. All she needed was a whisk of his skin. A tap. Damned cognizant wolves. Always a trial, and Marcus wasn’t as fooled by her tactics as others had been. He’d covered her exposed areas with the blanket, including her head.

  She could hear him bitching and growling, but she couldn’t see him.

  She kicked and yelled. One moment he was friendly and thought-provoking, the next hot under the collar—and in other places. The constant U-turns were getting old. She suspected he shared her sentiment, but what else could she do? Go along with a wolf who was obviously imbalanced, just because she liked him?

  Wolves couldn’t turn back into witches. Becoming a wolf was a banishment from which there was no escape. If he preferred magic to fur, he should have kept it in his pants.

  And whoever he’d slept with to become a wolf, she was one lucky bitch.

  Katie tried to curl into a defensive ball. Marcus’s strong arms held her upright. A stinging blow smacked her extended hand, numbing it. She yelped and dropped the small tangle of valerian.

  He scooped her up, yet again, bundling her through his trailer. Her head swam as she fought. The blanket smothered her. He jostled her, slinging her forward. She landed on a relatively soft surface. Fabric tangled her arms, her face, part of her legs. His fingers grabbed her handcuffed wrist and dragged her arm up until she heard an ominous, metallic click.

  She tugged, hard, confirming she was now cuffed…to something.

  Uh-oh.

  Her nightmare. And her something else, something sordid and forbidden. She was almost entirely at his mercy, except for the lavender stashed in her bra and shoe and the mint in her pocket.

  Katie yanked anyway, to see if the handcuffs would hold. His abuse of the lock should have weakened it, but it wasn’t weak enough for her to break. She’d have to pick it.

  She’d never done this without backup. Keepers didn’t work alone. There was no way Tonya and Dad could find her in time to prevent…what?

  What was Marcus planning? If his primary goal was to keep her from wiping him and stopping his all-important research, wouldn’t running have been his best choice?

  He unfurled the blanket from around her. She was on a pull-down bed.

  Katie gasped for air. “Are you trying to smotherme?”

  When he tossed the blanket, her glasses clattered to the floor somewhere. Dammit. The needle concealed in the temple had been her best bet for the handcuffs. The specs were pricey for more than just the prescription.

  He loomed over her with an annoyed frown. His muscles rippled under his smooth, brown skin, and she tried to suppress lascivious thoughts.

  “No, I need you breathing.” He opened a drawer under the bed, and she scuttled into a sitting position. The cabinets above her had inset lights. Her wrist was cuffed to a fabric loop she presumed had something to do with the pull-down construction. Surely he hadn’t had it custom-installed for handcuffs.

  Censoring that part of her imagination, she assessed the area for makeshift weapons, lock picks, anything she could use.

  He shrugged into a long-sleeved gray T-shirt and opened another drawer. “You understand, of course, I’m going to have to make sure there are no more herbs.” He snapped on surgical gloves.

  Surgical gloves?

  If she went for the hidden lavender, he’d see. To put him off guard, she turned out her pockets with her free hand. The mint fell out of one, and a scrap of valerian fell out of the other. “This is all I’ve got.”

  “I’ll take that, if you please.” He watched her expectantly. “No magic.”

  She infused the herb anyway.

  He wriggled a gloved finger in his ear. “I said no magic.”

  “You say a lot of things.” She flipped the dried roots at him, gave him her meanest look and ate the mint. It wouldn’t do anything to either of them—there wasn’t enough of it—but she wanted to be defiant.

  “Is that all?” He slipped a green capsule into his pocket.

  He had to know he couldn’t harm her with magic. “What’s the pill for?”

  “Monkshood remedy.”

  “I don’t have any monkshood.” For starters, spell-grade monkshood was hard to come by. And if she had any, she wouldn’t have used it. She’d always—always—avoided killing when she could, and Marcus wasn’t a feral trying to rip her to pieces.

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” He lowered his hands to his belt and started unbuckling it.

  “What exactly are you doing?” As much as she’d like to see him naked, did he truly mean to…

  Marcus smiled and tucked his shirt into his pants. Despite her best efforts, she kept watching his hands. She imagined the
m on her body, without the latex coating… Hot and hard and demanding. She was handcuffed, trapped, unable to stop him. Her body reacted with a surge of lust.

  When he rebuckled his belt, she returned her gaze to his smirk.

  He knew what she was feeling. Of course. Goddess, he must think she was insane. He was right. She had to be insane to be turned on by this particular state of affairs.

  He reached across the thin mattress and drew her ankles down, trying to uncurl her defensive posture. Trying to position her for whatever he had in mind.

  “Are you ready?” His eyes, brown and unruffled, bored into her.

  Yes!

  But…no.

  She crooked her legs, knees toward her chest. He wasn’t expecting it. The movement knocked him off balance, and he stumbled against the edge of the bed. As soon as she had the right angle, she let him have it.

  He took the kick against his torso with an oof. Grimacing, he snagged her ankles again and hauled her body toward him until she was stretched flat. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

  “Neither.” She scissored her legs, twisted, threw pillows at him with her free arm. She jogged and swam to maintain her strength and dexterity, but she was no match for a wolf.

  Marcus, a neutral expression on his handsome face, let her kick and curse at him. She used every nasty insult thirty years of living around nasty people had taught her before she realized he was waiting for her to wear herself out. Like a child having a tantrum.

  Well, if that was what he expected… She pretended to be winded and settled down, breathing hard. Nodding, he slid off her tennis shoes one at a time, tossing them to the floor.

  “You’re right about one thing,” he said. “I am going to undress you. But not for the reason you’re fantasizing about.”

  “I’m fantasizing about kicking you in the head.” Her desires wouldn’t, never had, beaten her. Dammit, she was so out of practice. And so attracted.

  Marcus was harder to resist than any wolf or man she’d ever met.

  “Be that as it may, you might as well cooperate,” he continued. “I won’t stop until I’m satisfied you don’t have any more surprises on you. I will search you quickly, and I won’t violate your person in any way, shape or form.”