Mark of the Wolf; Hell's Breed

by Madelaine Montague

  “And without a job I’m sure as hell not going to be able to hang on to my apartment. Not that that bastard landlord will hold it anyway. He’s been trying to get me out so he can jack the rent up for the next renter! This is the perfect opportunity!”

  “You didn’t take care of that?” Lucien asked, frowning.

  “I called the bastard and told him I was coming back! I made another payment via the phone, but if I’m not there I can’t stop him from moving my stuff out to the damned sidewalk!

  “Oh my god! This is a complete disaster!”

  “Laurie! Calm down,” Lucien said when she jumped to her feet and started pacing the living area.

  “Don’t tell me to calm down!” she snapped. “I’ve got every right to be upset!”

  “Is it helping anything?”

  Laurie narrowed her eyes at him. How dare the bastard be so damned reasonable in the face of her disaster! “That’s it! I’m going home,” she said decisively, stomping toward the room she’d used the night before.

  Lucien followed her. “You can’t. You’re in protective custody.”

  “Well, I’ve decided I don’t want it anymore. I’m going home.”

  “You can’t go home. They’ve already made at least two attempts on you that we know of—barely averted.”

  “Well, if I’m dead it won’t …. Wait a minute! You said two. What was the other attempt besides the hotel?”

  “At your place … Before you left for Atlanta. Peeples sent us down to escort you because he’d heard word on the street that somebody was looking for someone to take care of you before the trial. We discovered when we got there that someone was scoping out your place. When we confronted him, he ran—we chased. He managed to get away, unfortunately, and by the time we got back to your place to handle the escort, you’d left. Fortunately, we knew what the car looked like. We’d almost managed to catch up about the time you took the wrong turn off the freeway.” He shook his head. “You lead a charmed life.”

  Laurie glared at him. “You’re just saying that to convince me to stay.” Turning her back on him she dragged her suitcase out from under the bed and put it on the bed.

  Lucien moved up behind her, settling his hands on her shoulders. “I’m saying it because it’s true.” He was silent for several moments. “If you’re absolutely determined to go back to your place, then we’ll take it on the road.”

  Laurie turned to look at him. “What?”

  “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. If you’re hell bent and determined to go back to your place we’ll just have to set up a guard perimeter there. It won’t be easy, but it can be done.”

  Laurie studied his face for a long moment. “It’ll be more dangerous, though, right?”

  He shrugged. “Harder.” He considered it. “Yeah, probably more dangerous but we’ll watch you as closely as we can.”

  “I meant for you guys.”

  “Don’t worry about that. It’s our job.”

  That hurt! Laurie looked away, dragged in a pained breath. Stupid! Of course it was just a job to them! She’d let the fact that they were so solicitous of her wellbeing go to her head, taken it personally. “Oh. Well, I’d still hate to have anything to do with any of you getting hurt.”

  Lucien studied her expression, trying to figure out what he’d said that made her look so hurt. “Hey! Whatever it takes to keep you safe.”

  Laurie nodded. “They must be paying you guys a lot,” she muttered.

  That dart hit Lucien between the shoulder blades. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “You said it was your job to risk your lives to keep me alive. I just said they must be paying a lot.”

  Lucien’s lips tightened. “Lady, sometimes you really piss me off.”

  “What did you mean, then?” Laurie asked after struggling for several moments with the urge to probe.

  Lucien stared at her, feeling cornered, trying to figure out how he’d gotten himself in such a mess and how he was going to get out of it. “I didn’t mean that—not that way,” he growled.

  “Then what way did you mean it?” Laurie persisted, smiling faintly now, oddly convinced by his discomfort that she actually had gotten it all wrong, that she was more than a paycheck to him.

  “I tell you what … when you aren’t a client anymore, then I’ll explain it. Maybe. Right now none of us can afford the distraction. It could get somebody killed and I don’t want that somebody to be either of us … or in fact anybody in my pack.”

  That sounded promising.

  Very promising.

  The reference to his pack was a little jarring despite her preoccupation but pretty unimportant as far as she was concerned in the scheme of things.

  Laurie shook her head. “I’m sorry. Sorry for losing it a few minutes ago and sorry for making waves that could get somebody hurt. I just …. I’m so far out of my league here! This is so not something I’m used to I don’t know how to act.”

  Lucien smiled faintly. “Don’t think you’re the only client we’ve ever had to go stir crazy. They don’t usually do it on the first day ….”

  Laurie had the grace to laugh in spite of her embarrassment over the comment. “Well I believe in getting the worst out of the way as soon as possible,” she responded jokingly.

  “If that’s your worst, I think I can live with it.” He glanced around the room. “So … are we packing to head to your place? Or are we set here for a little while?”

  Laurie sighed, picked up her suitcase and shoved it under the bed again. “I think I’ll lie down for a little bit. I’m all worn out from that little exercise.”

  Nodding, Lucien moved toward the door. He paused there. “We can lighten things up a little in a few days if there’s no sign anybody tracked us,” he offered.

  Laurie nodded. She didn’t know what he meant by ‘lighten’ things, but she didn’t see much possibility of feeling any better about captivity in a few days—unless that meant the DA had called her in to testify and she could go home again.

  Kane had had a total cow when he’d seen her pull her cell phone out. She’d only gotten it out to try the internet—and discovered this was a dead zone. So, no phone and no internet. And no TV. They picked up some radio station, but it was mostly static for part of the day and the rest of the time playing country, which she didn’t particularly care for.

  Absolutely the only entertainment besides meal time was the tablet she’d had the foresight to bring, which had almost a dozen e-books on it that she hadn’t read yet. And another five that she had.

  Settling on the bed, she did her best to engross herself in a book. The escape soothed her even though the book was actually pretty exciting. Very improbable—but exciting, she supposed, as much because it was something that would never happen in a million years as it was for the action.

  Not satisfied with one larger than life, total hunk, as a hero, the writer had thrown in several—each one more exciting than the last. And the heroine got all of them!

  Like that would happen in real life!

  She could go for it if it was a group like Lucien and his men, she decided, thinking about what a handsome group they were. Lucien and Damien were drop dead, heart stopping gorgeous. She thought part of their appeal was that neither one of them seemed aware of just how good looking they were. It was such a turn off when people were conceited about their looks, whether it was warranted or not. And it was seriously annoying when they were conceited and had no reason to be!

  And very, very attractive when they were way above average in looks and seemed completely unaware of the fact that they turned heads everywhere they went.

  Neither Kane nor Basil were as handsome as the twins—still not hard on the eyes at all. She figured if Lucien and Damien were 10s, they were 8s, at least, maybe 8.5—but they had their own brand of charm that boosted their scores up to around 9 or 9.5.

  She tried to picture herself romping in bed with either pair and discovered it just boggled
the imagination. Truthfully, she couldn’t picture Lucien in her bed. Or Damien, and he’d actually tried to kiss her.

  The guys were way out of her league and besides that they were in the sort of macho business that guys got into when they weren’t the marrying/settling down kind. They might want to screw her—and she thought that was probably stretching it unless they were just hard up because they hadn’t had the chance to chase skirt in a while—but they certainly didn’t have anything else in mind. And they wouldn’t—ever—and she tried not to get involved with guys that had no interest at all in finding a forever kind of fit or even a ‘little while fit’. She tended to get emotionally involved and she wasn’t crazy about the ‘love ‘em and leave ‘em’ type of man.

  It was a damned shame. She really liked them, she realized with a touch of surprise and dismay. If she was getting attached when she’d known them less than a week, how was she going to feel by the time this was over? And was not getting intimate going to save her any hurt at all?

  * * * *

  Basil would have been happier if they hadn’t heard the conversation in the next room. He supposed the damned cabin had been built for humans and probably prevented them from hearing everything that happened in such exquisite detail that it was like being in the same room, but it would take a hell of a lot more to keep them from hearing with their enhanced abilities.

  If he’d just managed to get to sleep before all hell broke loose ….

  “Poor kid,” Kane muttered when they heard Lucien leave. “You think it’s true?”

  Basil sighed irritably. “Can we not discuss it?”

  “She’s in trouble,” Kane growled. “You want to just ignore it?”

  “I’d like to, yes. Because I know where this is headed and Lucien and Damien are going to kick our asses if I let you talk me in to doing something I know damned well Lucien won’t like.”

  Kane sat up abruptly and stared at him. “How the fuck can you know where this is going? And what has it got to do with Lucien and Damien?”

  “You were thinking about helping her out by going to her place to get her stuff?”

  Kane gaped at him. “Holy hell! You can do that now, too?”

  Basil frowned at him curiously. “Do what?”

  “Read minds.”

  “You can really be a dumb shit sometimes, Kane,” Basil said dryly.

  Kane looked indignant. “What the hell do you mean by that?” he growled.

  Basil rolled his eyes. “Forget it. I’m going to try to get some sleep. We have to stand watch again in a few hours. You should try to sleep, too.”

  “I don’t like her being so unhappy. She’s right. She’s an innocent in this. Why should she have to pay for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? I mean, I don’t see that we can do anything about the job or even the apartment, but we could get her stuff so the bastard can’t put it on the trash heap.”

  “How did I know that was coming?” Basil muttered.

  “I don’t know. You said you couldn’t read minds. You think it’s a good idea?”

  “Hell no I don’t think it’s a good idea!” Basil growled. “That’s exactly what I thought you were going to suggest and Lucien will eat us for dinner if we jeopardize the mission by doing something that damned stupid!”

  “I’m going to pound you into mincemeat, asshole, if you keep calling me stupid! What’s stupid about it?”

  “You don’t think her apartment is staked out? I mean, they had somebody there before. You think we just chased them off and they decided to forget about it?”

  Kane shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t really think about that.”

  “Ok so how about this—if we go to her apartment and move everything out, then the landlord is going to think she left and he’ll rent her apartment out. So we’d be making the thing she dreads happen.”

  Kane frowned. “Maybe. I see your point. But she said he’d been trying to get her out so he could rent to somebody else. He could still say she’d abandoned the place and move her stuff out like she said. And then she wouldn’t have the apartment or her stuff. We could at least save that much for her if we went over there and cleaned the apartment out. Females get real attached to their stuff. It’ll be easier to replace the apartment than stuff she’d been collecting for years.”

  “You make it sound so reasonable,” Basil said dryly. “And yet it isn’t. We’ve only got four men to cover twenty four hours of protection. If me and you go AWOL then that leaves just Lucien and Damien to cover things. And we sure as hell can’t take off in the middle of our watch!”

  “So we skip down time. How long could it take?”

  “A long ass fucking time!” Basil snapped. “We’re north of Atlanta. She lives four hours south of Atlanta! We’re talking a bare minimum of twelve hours travel time plus whatever it takes to pack her stuff up and move it to a storage unit. We don’t have anything we need to pack the place up.

  “And we don’t even know if it would be necessary! Or appreciated! What if we get down there and pack all her shit up and move it and the next day she gets called to testify and she goes home? She’s not going to be happy. She’s going to be pissed off.”

  Kane was silent for a little while. Just about the time Basil decided he’d made his point and Kane was going to drop it, he spoke again.

  “Good point. Guess it would be better to ask her than to surprise her. I suppose it won’t hurt to wait a few days anyway. We definitely need to wait until Lucien cuts us back to eight hour shifts.”

  Chapter Nine

  Laurie was pretty sure she would’ve gone stark raving mad if she hadn’t had books to keep her mind occupied. Except for the books, there wasn’t a lot else to do beyond lusting over the guys. She wasn’t allowed outside. She wasn’t even allowed to stand at the window and stare at the greenery and whatever wildlife decided to wander close to the cabin. Not that she would’ve been all that entertained with that sort of thing for long, but it would’ve beat the hell out of sitting on the couch staring at the floor.

  A week went by without a word from the DA.

  Laurie didn’t know if they’d even finished picking the jury. The waiting without a word was nerve wracking in and of itself!

  She got used to the routine, as accustomed to it as she could given the fact that it wasn’t ‘normal’ in any sense of the word.

  She got used to the guys, enough that she could actually relax around them as if they hadn’t all been every woman’s dream of a hot, high testosterone male!

  When they finally relaxed their high alert vigil, she discovered they were actually a lot of fun to be around. She’d never been in the middle of a group of males and gotten the chance to interact as if she was one of the guys. She hadn’t had a clue that they could be so interesting!

  There was another plus to the situation that she hadn’t considered. She’d had time to think about the murder without being scared to death, too upset to try to figure out things.

  And the more she thought about it calmly and rationally, the less sense it made to her.

  Not that she had all the facts. She didn’t actually have any beyond what she knew and had experienced herself. She’d been asked not to read about the murder or listen to the news about it so that she couldn’t be accused of having become ‘tainted’ by what she’d seen and heard since.

  As it happened, that wasn’t really a problem for her. She’d never been inclined to keep up with the news. It was seriously depressing. She didn’t see much point in watching and/or listening to things that were just going to upset and depress her, particularly when, for the most part, there was nothing she could do to change things and/or however bad it was it didn’t really affect her personally.

  Living under the protection of the guys might chafe—well, did. She wasn’t used to being idle unless she was on leave or vacation and this wasn’t even close to either one. But the guys made her feel safe, safer than she’d felt before she became an eye witness to murder.

&
nbsp; They’d been hired. She knew that, but they still made it feel as if she was important and nothing was more important to them than keeping her safe. They made her feel absolute confidence in their ability to keep her safe.

  That was what finally gave her the courage to take her memories out and really look at them when before she’d merely taken quick glances because she couldn’t handle more than that. Like peaking at something from between her fingers so that she didn’t have to see all of the ugly at one time, she’d avoided remembering some things that were crucial. And when she calmly summoned the memories and looked at them with the distance of having her fear removed, the story didn’t play out the way she thought she’d remembered it happening.

  Smith, the murderer, hadn’t attacked the federal agent that had been killed. It was the other way around.

  Now she recalled that she’d caught a glimpse of the fatal confrontation as it happened. Smith had been heading toward her, walking briskly. Randal, the man she now knew was a federal agent, had seemed to come out of nowhere and two men had collided. When it had happened, she’d glimpsed the collision and dismissed it as accidental. Later, she hadn’t recalled anything except catching a glimpse of the fight as Randal tried to overwhelm Smith.

  That was why it had seemed to her that she was the target!

  Because she had been. The agent had attacked the man as he’d come at her and fought with him and then died in her place. Smith had taken Randal’s gun. He hadn’t brought one with him. And he’d used Randal’s gun to kill him.

  Why hadn’t she remembered it that way before?

  Because she hadn’t wanted to believe that she was the target.

  But why had she been targeted? Random? He’d just been looking for a woman to rob? Rape? Kill? She fit his preferred victim type?