“Is he conscious?” Tom demanded, kneeling by Jane’s side as she slumped in relief.
“No.” She picked up one of Baran’s bloodied hands, examined it anxiously. The wound was already crusting over.
Tom frowned. “Then who were you talking to?”
Damn, he’d heard Freika. “He was babbling,” she improvised.
“Get back, miss.” The paramedic pushed her aside. She sat back on her heels. He put two fingers to Baran’s throat, then lifted one of his eyelids. Jane craned her neck anxiously, but the Warlord’s irises were simple human brown. “Pupils reactive, pulse is good,” the man said. “Don’t see any sign of electrical burns.”
The second EMT pulled a blood pressure cuff out of his bag and reached to wrap it around one of Baran’s thick biceps. Jane sensed rather than saw the blur of motion. The EMT yelped.
One of Baran’s huge hands was wrapped around the paramedic’s throat in a stranglehold as he held the man stiff-armed, half off his knees. As she watched in horror, the man’s face began to darken. He gagged, clawing helplessly at Baran’s choking fingers.
Brown eyes blazed as Baran peeled his lips back from his teeth, snarling at the EMT in an alien language. The words might be incomprehensible, but the tone of murderous threat was crystal clear.
“Baran!” Jane cried as both she and Tom grabbed for his hand and fought to pry away his choking fingers. “Let him go! He’s trying to help you! It’s okay!”
Baran’s gaze flicked to hers as the paramedic gagged.
“Let him go, mister!” Tom snapped.
The big hand released its hold. “Sorry,” he said gruffly, and sat up as the paramedic choked in a breath and fell back on his butt. “Didn’t know where I was.”
The EMT steadied his gagging partner and eyed him warily. “Lie back down and let us have a look at you, sir. You were unconscious for more than a minute. You may have a concussion.”
“I’m fine,” he said, and proved it by getting to his feet. Jane scrambled up, ready to steady him. She thought he swayed, but caught himself almost instantly.
“Beg to differ, son,” Tom said, stepping in close to study him. “Looked to me like you just got struck by lightning. You need a ride to the emergency room to get checked out.”
Where, Jane realized, an X ray might reveal entirely too much about the Warlord’s genetically engineered body. But if he really was hurt…
“I don’t have time for that,” Baran said crisply. “I don’t know what you saw, but I didn’t get hit by lightning.” He glanced skyward. “Obviously. There’s not a cloud in the sky.” Dark eyes turned to Jane. “Let’s go.”
“Your hands are badly cut, mister. You need stitches….”
“Let him go, Dave.” The paramedic rubbed his throat and coughed. “Man wants to leave, you don’t want to stand in his way.”
Baran started off across the highway, Freika trotting at his heels. Jane stared after his broad back, worried, then hurried after them.
Behind her, she heard Tom say, “That was thoroughly fucking weird.”
The paramedic coughed again. “Tell me about it.”
“You should have at least let them clean those wounds,” Jane said, running to keep up with his long strides.
“My computer will take care of it,” Baran said. “I just have to get the glass out.”
“There’s glass in the wound? Idiot. Why didn’t you—”
“Because right now Druas is somewhere in this town, deciding who to kill,” Baran interrupted, shooting a quelling glance at her over his shoulder. “And I need to get to him before he makes up his mind.”
Jane cursed and absently clicked her key fob so she could open the door for him, sparing his lacerated palms. “Didn’t your time cops identify the targets?”
“No. Evidently, they don’t want me to save at least some of them.” He shrugged. “The paradox problem.”
“Bastards.”
“That does sum it up.” He eased into the seat.
She caught the shoulder belt and leaned over his lap to fasten it. “I’ve got a first-aid kit in the back….” Jane looked up and found herself face to face with him. Suddenly she realized her hands rested in his lap, inches from the swelling bulge of an erection. His mouth was close enough to kiss. Baran’s eyes kindled into a hot male blaze that made her swallow. She froze, hardly daring to blink, like a woman afraid of goading a tiger into attack.
“He always gets horny after he’s been in riatt,” Freika told her, sticking his furry head around the door. “After he quits wanting to puke, anyway. Hormones…” He nudged her wrist with his muzzle, jolting her out of her hypnotized fascination with Baran’s blatant lust. “Hey, either step aside or open the back door for those of us without opposable thumbs.”
A hot blush rolling over her cheeks, Jane took a hasty step back and slammed the passenger door on Baran’s feral interest. With a relieved breath, she opened the back to get the first-aid kit and one of the bottles of water floating in the cooler’s melted ice. Freika jumped past her and settled himself in the seat. “You know, I hope this thing has better safety equipment than the one that woman was riding in.”
“Not really.”
The thunk of the closing door drowned out the wolf’s next grumble.
Horny. The man’s hands were sliced to ribbons, and he was horny. Hell, he’d directed so much erotic heat at her, she could almost hear her own body sizzle.
There isn’t time for this, Jane told herself sternly, striding around the SUV to the driver’s side, carrying the bottle of water with the kit tucked under her arm. We’ve got to figure out where Druas is going.
She opened the door and hopped up into the driver’s seat, dumping the water and first-aid kit into Baran’s lap. “I’ll find a place to pull over so we can tend your hands. Though I still say we should let the paramedics—”
“I don’t want them getting a closer look at me than they already have.” Evidently having flipped off his lust as quickly as he’d turned it on, he opened the kit to assess its contents. He pulled out a pair of tweezers.
“What’s this reeatt thing?” Jane asked after she’d pulled onto the highway into the northbound traffic. The cars in the southbound lane were just starting to edge past the woman’s crumpled Toyota under the direction of cops and firefighters. The victim herself had long since gone off in the back of an ambulance.
Jane glanced over at her passenger and almost ran off the road when she realized he was using the tweezers to dig into his injury. “Jesus, Baran, let me take care of that! Or at least wait until I pull over.”
“I can do it,” he said, pulling something from his palm she realized was a bloody chunk of safety glass.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” She pointed the SUV for the nearest exit.
Baran shrugged his broad shoulders. “My computer dulls the pain.”
“Well, that’s something anyway.” Sighing, Jane drove up the off-ramp and turned left on a less-traveled street. “So what’s this reeatt thing again?”
She asked the question as much to distract herself as him. Jane didn’t ordinarily consider herself particularly squeamish—not in her line of work. But somehow it made a difference that it was Baran bleeding all over her front seat, Baran in pain, Baran digging into his own skin with a pair of tweezers….
“Not reeatt, riatt,” he corrected absently, depositing the glass sliver in the empty trash bag hanging from the SUV’s central floor hump.
“It’s kind of a computer-induced berserker state,” Freika explained, thrusting his head between the seats. “Increases his strength by a factor of ten. The drawback is that his judgment goes to hell. He doesn’t feel pain in riatt, and without combat armor to protect him, he tends to break bones and cut himself all to hell doing something the human body isn’t designed to do. Here, let me lick that….”
“Ack!” Jane planted an elbow under his jaw and pushed his head back. “Get away from there. You want to give him an infection?”
“Freika’s computer secretes antibiotics in his saliva when I’m hurt,” Baran explained, raising his hand for the wolf’s swiping tongue.
“Which taste nasty,” Freika noted, licking.
Jane fastened her eyes firmly on the road. “Y’all are making me sick. Anyway, can’t your own computer do the antibiotic thing?”
“It does, but Freika does a better job on topical treatment.” He lifted an eyebrow. “‘Y’all’?”
“My Southern accent comes out under stress.” Spotting a likely place to pull over, she whipped the SUV off onto the shoulder. Deciding it was time for a subject change, Jane asked as she opened the driver’s door, “What are we going to do about Druas?”
“Personally, I think killing him’s a dandy idea,” Freika observed.
“Duh,” she said, getting out of the truck and leaving the door open as she started around the SUV’s massive hood. “I mean, how are we going to stop him from killing whoever he’s planning to kill?”
“I have no idea, but I’m damn well going to try,” Baran told her as she opened the passenger door and stepped to his side. “There’s another piece in my right hand. I can’t seem to get it out with my left. Can you try?”
She flinched mentally, then gave him a determined smile. “Sure. So what are we going to do now?”
“Exactly what we were doing before our little detour—check the hotels. If he’s at one of them, I should be able to sense him.” Baran handed her the tweezers as she cradled his hand in one of hers.
“What if he’s not there when we go by?”
“Then we’re out of luck, and his next victim’s dead. She may be already. Or close to it.” He clenched the other fist on his knee. “If I hadn’t dropped out of riatt…”
“If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t even have gotten that close to him,” Freika pointed out. “Druas knows better than to allow a berserk Warlord within striking distance.”
Jane’s delicate probes with the tweezers discovered something hard buried in his bloodied flesh. “You’ve got it,” Baran said.
“Joy,” she muttered between her teeth and tried to close the tweezers around the tiny object. “So in riatt you’re stronger than Druas, right?”
“Possibly,” Baran said.
Her tweezers slipped. She growled.
“Then again, possibly not,” Freika observed, leaning around Baran’s seat. “He’s got cybernetic implants that increase his strength, but it’s not clear by how much. He could be weaker than Baran, but then again, he could be a lot stronger.”
The Warlord nodded. “We won’t know for sure until I fight him.”
Jane clamped her lower lip between her teeth and jerked the piece of glass free. “Has anybody ever heard of the concept of firearms?” She tossed the piece into the trash bag and looked at Baran. “Is that it for the glass fragments, please, God?”
“Yeah.” He extended his hand to Freika. “But nobody but an idiot would try to make a Jump with an energy weapon. The Tachyon power packs would react with the temporal field and blow you to hell and gone.” Jane looked away as the wolf started cleaning the injury. Taking the water bottle out of his lap, she dumped part of its contents over the tweezers, washing them off. After tossing them back in the first aid box, she rummaged around in it for the roll of gauze to wrap his wound with. When she found it, she ripped it open and took his hand again.
“So what about weapons from this time? Like a gun, for instance.” Jane remembered her father’s pistol, buried in his stuff somewhere in the attic. “Couldn’t you just shoot him?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, but it probably won’t do any good. According to the sensor readings I just took, that T-suit Druas is wearing is armored. I doubt one of your contemporary firearms could puncture it.”
Still thinking, she wound the gauze around his hand. “So does he wear a helmet?” She knew from covering cops that all the body armor in the world wouldn’t protect you against a head shot.
“No, but his skeletal system is reinforced, so I doubt a bullet would get through his skull, either.”
“On the other hand, they still haven’t managed to do a damn thing about the fragility of gray matter,” Frieka pointed out. “If you battered him enough, you could bounce his brain around in that thick skull until he died of cerebral swelling.”
Baran shrugged. “If he didn’t manage to kill you in the meantime.”
Jane sighed. “Damn. It just can’t be easy, can it?” The Warlord’s hand felt deliciously warm in hers. Suddenly she found herself uncomfortably aware of him.
An image flashed through her mind: Baran moving over her, his head thrown back so the cords stood out in high relief in his powerful throat.
Then she flashed on the sight of his big body, sprawled and helpless on the pavement. Her grip tightened convulsively on his hand. She’d thought she’d lost him.
She still could. If he fought Druas and lost…
You don’t have him to lose, Jane told herself fiercely, tying off the bandage. He’s not going to stay with you, you idiot. As soon as this is over—one way or another—he’s going back to his own time.
And she couldn’t afford to let him take her heart with him when he did.
Clamping her lower lip between her teeth, she started wrapping his other hand. Despite the injuries he’d suffered, his palm was broad and square and solid, his fingers long, beautiful. She remembered how skilled they’d felt, teasing her nipples into tight points, sliding into her sex in deliciously seductive strokes. Something hot gathered below her belly button.
Cut that out. We don’t have time for this.
Which was when she glanced down at his lap—and the thick bulge that swelled behind his fly as she watched. She looked up to find his eyes were locked on her face again, heavy-lidded and hungry.
And glowing.
Jane started to draw back, but a gauze-wrapped hand lifted to cup the side of her face. The touch made her breath catch. Slowly he leaned forward until his mouth touched hers in a velvet-gentle kiss that made her heart pound. His tongue slipped over her upper lip, tempting her into opening for him. When she gasped, he slid inside slowly, taking his time. She heard a helpless, needy moan and realized it was her own.
“Well, if you’re going to do that, I’m going to go catch squirrels,” Freika announced. He slid between the seats and hopped out the open driver’s door. “Maybe I’ll get a little tail.”
Jane didn’t even register the quip. Her every sense was focused on Baran—the taste of his mouth, the warmth of his gauze-wrapped hand.
So even though she knew it was the wrong place, the wrong time, and the wrong man…
She didn’t care.
They didn’t have time for this.
He knew it. Knew he should cage his growling hunger and get back to work. Normally he’d be able to do just that, despite the hunger riatt had touched off. All it would take is a single order to his comp, and neuronet would chemically cool his ardor and let him concentrate again.
But she felt so damn fragile.
Every time Baran remembered Druas’s smug voice spewing those poisonous threats, rage and desperation rolled over him, and he felt the driving need to touch her, reassure himself that she was alive.
So very hot and alive.
She shouldn’t mean this much to him. She was, after all, only another mission. He’d protected women before in situations every bit as dangerous, and it had never affected him like this.
But there was something about Jane.
Maybe it was the fact that she didn’t know enough to back down from him. Every other woman of his acquaintance would have hesitated to challenge, infuriate, or tempt him the way Jane did. A Warlord was not, after all, someone to take lightly. Particularly him. The Xeran did not give a nickname like “Death Lord” for no reason.
Yet he strongly suspected that even if Jane had known what he was capable of, she wouldn’t have acted any differently. After all, she was already well aware of his greater size
and muscle, but that had never stopped her, either.
Which was why keeping her alive was not going to be easy.
Sweet goddess, what if Druas hadn’t been lying when he said this would end in her death? What if Baran really couldn’t save her?
No, damn it. No.
With a low, desperate growl he twisted in the seat until he could drag Jane against his body, feel the giving warmth of her belly against his stone-hard erection.
Soon women would be dying, and Baran knew with a black, hopeless despair he’d fail to save at least some of them.
But Jane was here, warm and soft, so deliciously soft, and he was going to protect her no matter what he had to do.
She was his. And right now he was going to claim her.
Even if, one way or another, he’d eventually have to give her up.
Eleven
Baran had taken her before in calculation and in heat, but this desperation was new.
Jane could taste it in the way he kissed her, openmouthed and fierce, his long fingers curling around the back of her skull, angling her head just the way he wanted it.
He took her in a long, sweet stroke of tongue and lip, hot and wet and hungry. Somewhere in the endless tumble into delight, she heard the rumble of a passing car, accompanied by the short, mocking toot of its horn. A tiny measure of sanity returned. Prying her mouth away from his, she panted, “We can’t do this on the side of the road, Baran!”
“Yes, we can,” he growled, and captured her mouth again, the kiss drugging, hungry.
Jane wrestled free and threw a desperate glance around them, trying to determine if they were being watched. She realized she knew the area from her wild teenage years. “There’s a spot down by the woods. A stream. We could…”
He looked down at her. The lust in his eyes was so intense, it didn’t seem quite human—and not just because of the fiery glow.
His lips pulled back from his teeth in a slow, erotic smile. “Run. Before I take you on the hood of the truck.” His powerful hands reluctantly relaxed their hold.
It wasn’t an idle threat. Jane whirled and fled as if chased by something that would eat her. And with a little squirt of heat, she knew he intended to do just that.
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