Not that she’d ever understood what held Devin James in its grip. Then again, she’d stopped understanding why she stayed, too. She just made sure it was a choice, each and every moment.
Carefully, heeding her stiffened body, she sat. And winced anew—this time at what she could see of the hallway wall, smeared with endless layers of watery blood—the result of one man’s endless, staggering, wet journey down the hallway with a wound that should have killed him but somehow bled less and less as the night passed.
No sign of him now.
Natalie eased her feet to the floor and stood, stretching out the stiffness. Here, where she’d been dragged. Here, where she’d fallen. She had no recollection of falling asleep—or of pushing off the loafers she now found and slipped on. Where is he?
She peered down the hall, finding the back half just as gory as the front...looking around and realizing that the home, as small as it was, as simply appointed as it was, had been tended in every detail.
This paint was fresh; the simple carpet had bounce beneath her feet. The windows were tight against the morning wind; the kitchen gleamed with updated appliances and fixtures, modern Southwest touches here and there. The house might be smack in the middle of an older neighborhood of less-than-modest homes, but behind the security door and dead bolts it was downright cozy.
Natalie shivered. Well. Maybe if she turned the heat back up.
A noise from the bedroom interrupted the current surreality and replaced it with a reminder of the previous. Cautiously—feeling like an intruder, and at the same time worried that she’d somehow fallen asleep at the worst possible time and now Devin James lay in a pool of his own blood—she peeked into the bedroom.
It was the largest room in the small house, made airy by huge south windows and a French door opening to a covered side porch, and filled with unassuming masculine things. A pair of running shoes, sweats thrown over the back of a chair, heavy furniture of solid old wood, a bed large enough for a man of height and substance to sprawl over.
And there, finally. Against the wall in a muddle, a smear of blood tracing the downward slide and on his skin...goose bumps. Across his arms, across his chest. A paled face, his eyelids looking bruised—and believe it or not, that was even a shiver. After a night of burning up, he finally shivered in this cold like any normal man.
Natalie swept a thin down comforter from the bed and dropped it around his shoulders. “You look better,” she said.
“Do I?” He frowned. “I’m not sure I... Who are...?”
“From last night,” she said. “It was dark, mostly. You saved me in the—”
He jerked his head, a single impatient movement. “I remember. I meant...who?”
An actual introduction. “Natalie Chambers,” she said, and automatically held out her hand—only for an instant, before she gave it a how-stupid-are-you look and withdrew it. “Mr. James.”
“Devin,” he said, and frowned. “My wallet. That’s how you found this place.”
“Your wallet,” she agreed. “And now that we’re communicating—look, I don’t understand what happened last night and I’m not sure I want to. But your arm... Let me take you somewhere.”
He shifted, pressing his back against the wall, and lifted his arm to get a look at the wound. “Stitches,” he said, which seemed to her to be the least of it. No one’s flesh should gape so casually unattended. “I can...” He frowned, and his gaze wandered, eyes clear in the morning light.
“Hey,” she said.
He tried. He took a sharp breath, pulled himself back. “I need to...”
She raised a hand to prod him—but something about the tension in his body stopped her. This wasn’t last night, when he was so beside himself that she could push him for a response. Now he was just enough here to show her some of what he’d been in that parking lot. So she crouched beside him, abruptly, and she said shortly, “Count your toes, then.”
And cringed. Not words she’d thought about ahead of time.
He looked back to her, for the moment refocused...honest bafflement.
“Your toes,” she said, wincing just a little. She hadn’t really meant to say that. “When you start to lose it like that. I don’t know what’s going on, but...you can hang on to the real things. And what’s more real than toes?”
“Count,” he said. “My toes.”
“Not just like that. Think of them when you do it. What does each one look like and what is it feeling at that moment, separate of the other toes. Not just a lump of toe-things on the end of your foot, but—” She stopped herself, briefly hid her face behind her hands and stood. “Never mind. Listen, I work for a man named Sawyer Compton. Maybe you’ve heard of him. I was on the clock last night when—” No, she wasn’t going to say she got lost, because she hadn’t. She’d gone to the address the architect had given her on the phone. “Anyway, thanks. And Mr. Compton would like to say thank you, as well—though he’s asked me to make sure you get help as you need it, first.”
“Toes,” he said, sounding a little surprised this time—and looking down at his bare feet. “What the hell.”
“Stitches,” she said, patiently. “Or something.”
He got, quite suddenly, to his feet. “Something,” he agreed, and reached for the hoodie draped with the sweatpants, not bothering with a shirt beneath. “You should go.”
Absurdly, hurt twinged in her chest. “But—”
“You should,” he said. “But my truck is still where I found you, and I need a ride. So if you could...” He trailed off again, hand on the hoodie zipper—and she was about to give him a verbal nudge when his eyes widened slightly and he took another of those sharp, sudden breaths, and looked directly at her. “Toes,” he said, and grinned, and thus transformed himself.
Natalie stared—and then she took a hasty step back, in case he hadn’t already seen the blush suffusing her features from inside and out. She straightened her shoulders. “Is it the hospital, then? Maybe the urgent-care clinic on Rio Bravo?”
He shook his head, a decisive motion. Not the man who had stalked out of the darkness and not the man who had spent the night trapped in some agonizing reaction she still didn’t understand. “I’ve got a place,” he said. “But my truck is still on Broadway.”
“Mr. Compton—”
“I do what I do,” he said, interrupting her without any apparent regret, a glimmer of that hard exterior back in play. “I don’t need to talk to your boss about it.”
One look at his mouth gone from rakish grin to hard line, his eyes regarding her with flat decision behind them, and she decided...not now.
It didn’t mean not later.
* * *
Devin almost remembered the sand-colored hybrid sitting in his driveway. He definitely remembered the blood-soaked blanket he found in the foot well of the passenger side; he tossed it to the side of his house and said, “I’ll replace that.”
“No,” she said faintly, watching him as if she’d forgotten about the blanket altogether and now wished it hadn’t been sitting in her car all night. “Please don’t think twice about it.”
Interesting woman. So polite, so carefully and quietly spoken. And yet the night before, she’d had that grit behind her. She’d fought back; she’d acted with a certain quick efficiency that spoke of habits ingrained. Old or current, he didn’t know.
And she’d stayed with him. Not that he’d wanted it, with his mind and body searing against the growing influence of the blade. But she’d done it, and she’d fought back then, too—against things she didn’t even understand.
She still fought back. Still trying to reconcile the situation in which she found herself, emotions just barely peeking out and then sublimating again. Trying to find the right steps on a path for which no one could have prepared her.
He levered himself into the car, the injured arm tucked to his side, hot and heavy and useless. No longer bleeding but still gaping, still burning with the unnatural attention the blade gave it. H
e didn’t have much longer to get it stitched.
He realized, suddenly, that she’d started the car with the press of a button, and waited—for how long, he didn’t know—for his direction. And he knew it because she took a deep breath and said, “Okay, then. Where’s this place of yours? I’ll take you there.”
“My truck—”
She laughed. Truly amused, a light sound of sunlight and briefly open heart. She tucked her hair behind her ear—ash-brown and blond, curls left unruly with the night’s dousing and faintly olive-toned skin devoid of makeup but blushing up nicely on her neck when she realized his regard. “I’m not taking you to your truck. You can’t possibly think you’re safe to drive. Toes or no toes.”
He wanted to scowl and demand and take the wheel himself.
Problem was, she was right.
Not to mention, she was still, indeed, fighting back. Her own way.
He muttered a curse. “Enrique’s,” he said. “It’s off Isleta. South of that giant spray-foam roadrunner.” He raised a challenging eyebrow. “In an alley.”
“I’ve been in alleys before last night,” she said. “No doubt I’ll be alleys again. And I’ve always thought that’s got to be the biggest roadrunner ever.”
“Not,” he murmured, conceding that particular skirmish, “as big as the freakish pecan outside that Tularosa pecan farm.”
“They had to put the Roswell UFO somewhere,” she told him, backing silently out of the short driveway. “So, dress it up as a giant pecan and stick it outside Tularosa.”
Okay, he couldn’t help it. To be sitting in this silent-running car with a uniquely beautiful stranger in the wake of a uniquely horrifying night, cracking wise about the giant pecan...
As if there was no such thing as a demon blade. As if his life wasn’t set along an irrevocable path of destruction, as possessed as he was. As if this were a normal morning on a normal crunchy-cold Albuquerque January morning. He let down his guard, just for that instant, and laughed.
It startled her, then wrung a wry smile from her—not that it lasted long. As she navigated the quick series of turns that took her back out to University, she slanted him a look. “I wasn’t sure, last night, what you would do. With me, I mean. After what I saw.”
He shifted his arm, a careful grip on his elbow, and snorted in disbelief. “Because maybe I’d go to all that trouble to save you just to kill you?” Soft fleece brushed hot skin.
She hesitated at a stop sign, long enough to look him straight on. Eyes bluer than his own, a little darker. Arching brows that held the perfect quirk of the cynic—but behind it, he saw wariness. “Who knows?” she said. “I still have no idea why you went to all that trouble at all. You could have done what everyone else would have done—grabbed a phone and kept your distance.”
“Maybe I don’t have a cell phone.”
She didn’t dignify that with a response. He kept his own silence, wishing for the luxury of painkillers and not even knowing what the blade would do with them. It tended to soak such things up for its own—or spit them back at him.
And even if he’d had a handy phone in that parking lot, the blade wouldn’t have let him use it.
The blade wanted things done its own way.
“Question is,” she said, “what do you do now?”
“Question is,” he said right back, “why did you come back? Why didn’t you just go call for help?”
She responded without hesitation. “Maybe I no longer had a cell phone.”
He laughed. It held none of the easy humor of the earlier moment. But appreciation for her ability to bite back—yeah. For sure. So many people ran from what they saw in him. And they’d never truly even seen it. Not like she had.
“Besides,” she said, “you know as well as I do that by the time I found a working public phone—”
He looked away from the cheekbones, from the slight flush there; from the wide and sculpted mouth and the particular way it formed her words. “Yeah,” he said, thinking about the impending reinforcements of the night before. “Probably.”
She held her silence a few long moments, navigating the Prius. Then she said, “You’re good at that. Evasion.”
This time he looked away—haunted, for that moment, by a glimpse of what it would be like to simply tell someone. And then he said, “Yeah. I am.”
Chapter 5
Enrique saw him coming. Sometimes Devin thought the man could smell the blood, holed up in that little office and surrounded by the thick scents of sweat and muscle rub and the peculiar eau de gym mat.
Typical trainer, Enrique. Tough on his guys, all heart beneath, running his little boxing gym for the love of it and, yeah, to give the kids a place where someone would kick their asses if they crossed the line and slap their backs when they tried to walk it. Knew how to drive a man on, knew when to back off...
Knew how to put his guys back together.
And, when a dazed younger Devin had wandered in, hunting a safe place to blow off steam, he’d seen some of what lay beneath the James brothers. Not everything, because only a handful of people still alive knew everything—or thought they did. Enrique had respected it, directed it...accepted it. And gained enough trust to become a confidant when the blade took Leo...and then changed him.
Now he came out of the little office with its plain plywood walls and jammed his fists on his hips, paperwork and all, to give Devin the little I-see-you lift of his chin. “Aiee, hijo,” he said. “What have you done now?”
Devin stood a little taller. “Brought company, Rick.” Not that he hadn’t felt her move just a little bit closer in wary acknowledgment of all the testosterone in the air—fists against leather, bodies thumping down to the mats, flesh smacking flesh.
Enrique lifted one hand to make a little circling motion at Devin’s arm. “And again?”
Devin glanced at the sweatshirt, found faint seepage through gray material. “Damn,” he said. “Made that one easy for you.” Not that Enrique and his highly tuned eye would miss even the slightest guarding of any injury, but...it was all part of the dance.
Enrique grunted. He’d been a featherweight as a fighter, and nothing in the years had changed that—still spare, still fast. And he’d gotten out young—he still had his ears, his brow and his lightning wit. His nose had taken a few good licks along the way—but not, as he made clear with a glance at Natalie, his good taste.
He didn’t linger there. “Now you tell me no doctors, no antibiotics, no worry...” His hand spun out the familiar litany of words. “Just sew, Enrique. Am I right?” He glanced again at Natalie. “Above all, no police. Does she know?”
“Are you protecting me?” Natalie said, surprise in that realization as she glanced from Enrique to Devin and back again. “From what?”
“From not knowing.” Impervious to the annoyance, Enrique jerked his head at the office, leading the way—a bowlegged walk with a hitch.
Devin hesitated, glancing at Natalie. Ever hidden beneath that peacoat, but never striking him as a person of physical substance and now...even less so. Now looking as though she might have hit her limit. “You might want to stay here.”
The skin went tight around her eyes, the corners of her mouth—she gave the gym denizens a meaningful glance.
“They’re good guys,” Devin told her.
“They’re average,” Enrique grunted. “But they won’t bother one of Devin’s.”
Yeah, that was the right thing to say. One of Devin’s. He expected the flash of annoyance; he wasn’t disappointed.
“You want a rolled magazine to bite on?” Enrique suggested with some bite of his own, rummaging through a drawer that had squeaked on the way open.
“Girlie magazine?” Devin asked, winking at Natalie, watching her eyes widen slightly. “Or some boxing rag that your guys have been pawing through?”
She shook her head at him, beyond words. This whole thing, beyond words...
He offered up a wry grin, a one-shouldered shrug, and fol
lowed Enrique into the office.
* * *
Natalie didn’t linger long at the door.
Long enough to see a broad expanse of shoulder, the harsh overhead light tracing strength she hadn’t truly noticed the evening before. She’d half expected additional tattoos, but his skin was patterned only by the shape of bone and muscle as he sat on the desk, presenting her with a clean profile—jaw stubborn, nose strong, eyes that flashed from brooding to carefree and back again too quickly for Natalie to find her balance with either. Quiet, at the moment. Patient...an air of resignation.
Beside him sat a pile of bandages and a few matter-of-fact bottles, clear and brown plastic. When Enrique came back into view, Natalie barely had time to register what he was doing before he slopped the contents onto a rough cloth and began scrubbing.
She closed her eyes; she turned her head away. She wasn’t fast enough to miss the tension that suddenly shot through Devin’s back or the pain on his face, eyes closed and jaw clenched and mouth tight with defiance of it.
She didn’t stay by the door.
After all, no matter what Enrique thought, she wasn’t one of Devin’s. She wasn’t one of anybody’s. But she did still work for Sawyer Compton. “I’m going to make a local call,” she told Enrique, happy enough when he didn’t break his concentration to do more than grunt a response. “I see the phone.”
Sitting on a bar-height table beside a tattered phone book and most of the morning paper, it was an old-style phone with a rotary dial and the phone cord tangled in so many knots it wasn’t functionally more than six inches long. Half the men in the gym stopped working out to watch her stride for it...but they also left her alone.
One of Devin’s. Right. She could well believe that no one here would mess with Devin James. Maybe he threw a mean punch, maybe not. But he had that white hot flash of a mutable blade, and just because Natalie hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask about it—to say the words out loud—didn’t mean she hadn’t seen what she’d seen.
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