Sheffield’s thin lips twisted in a cold smile, his golden eyes burning with malice. “But they hurt like hell, Runner.”
The front doors of the town hall opened just then, catching his attention, and the next thing Jeremy knew, a fist with tattooed knuckles went sailing past his face, barely missing his nose, followed by a solid punch to his kidneys from behind. With a laughing snarl, Jeremy grabbed the fist of the first teenager and twisted the punk’s wrist until it snapped, then spun with a side kick that knocked the one behind him onto the ground, the guy’s body curling into a ball as he clutched at his broken ribs. With their friends incapacitated, four more of the thugs moved in. Fists were flying and bones crunching as the Lycans attacked together, too confident and brash in their youthful arrogance, thinking they could easily take him simply because they outnumbered him.
But they hadn’t spent their lives training as a Bloodrunner. Jeremy had had Mase as a sparring partner for years now, and Mason liked to fight dirty—which meant Jeremy had learned long ago how to handle himself in a good ol’-fashioned street fight.
He’d already sent two more to the ground with minor injuries and was just preparing to take out the last two, when someone grabbed him from behind, wrapping their arms around his upper body and dragging him away. He knew from the male’s scent that it was Dylan, which was the only reason he hadn’t thrown the guy over his head and slammed him into the concrete sidewalk.
“Come on, Jeremy,” Dylan muttered in his ear, still dragging him away from the scene. “That’s enough!”
“All right, all right,” he growled, jerking out of Dylan’s hold. Cutting an irritated look at his friend, he wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “And it was just getting fun,” he complained with a rough laugh.
Sending a furious look at the battered teenagers, Dylan snarled, “Get out of here. Now!”
They sent quick glances at each other, then took off down the street, leaving their broken buddies to crawl after them. When Jeremy glanced up at the steps, he saw that Drake and Sheffield had slithered back inside the town hall.
“Cowards,” he muttered under his breath. Turning his gaze back on Dylan, who stood glowering at his side, he leveled a look of accusation on his friend. “What the hell is going on around here?”
“Don’t give me that look,” the Elder muttered, knowing exactly what he was talking about. “You and the Runners knew what was going down.”
“Like hell we did,” Jeremy growled. “Yeah, we’ve known a traitor was targeting the younger Lycans, tempting them to turn rogue. That was Simmons’s specialty. But this is out of control. The teenagers in this town, the ones who are still around, are acting as if they’ve been turned into a bunch of brainwashed Stepford brats.”
“Jeremy, we’ve got it under control,” Dylan argued, his face flushed with anger. “Until we have proof they’ve gone rogue, which we don’t at this point, you and the Runners can’t go after them. Unless you’re fighting them in self-defense, you can’t even touch them until a kill has been discovered and a Bloodrun assigned. Drake and the rest of the League will have your ass if you do.”
“So then this is all for our sake?” he asked with a rough burst of laughter. “You’re just trying to protect the Bloodrunners by keeping us in the dark?”
“I’m trying to hold things together around here,” Dylan growled through his clenched teeth, taking a step closer, going nose-to-nose with him. Jeremy had never seen the Elder lose his control, but Dylan’s face was flushed with anger, his eyes wild as they began to glow an unearthly shade of gold. “You focus on finding the asshole responsible for the rogues and let me deal with the kids.”
Jeremy matched Dylan’s challenging stare, then rolled his shoulder, wiping at his busted bottom lip again. “Yeah, fine. Whatever,” he muttered, turning to leave.
“Where are you going?” the Elder demanded.
Shooting a belligerent look over his shoulder, he snarled, “What’s with the inquisition?”
Dylan opened his mouth, bit back whatever he’d been about to say, and blew out a rough breath of air. “Look, I’m on your side, Jeremy. Just promise me that you’ll stay out of trouble.”
“Sure thing, Mom,” he drawled, his tone thick with sarcasm as he walked away, shaking his hands out at his sides. Beneath his fingertips, his claws still burned with the urge to slip his skin, which was about all of the change he could manage during the day, other than the lengthening of his fangs. It’d been hard as hell to keep from killing the little bastards while fighting them, but he’d made allowances for their youth. God only knew he’d been a pain-in-the-ass at nineteen. True, he’d never been quite that bad, but he knew what it was like to want to rebel against authority.
As long as they hadn’t gone rogue and hadn’t hurt anyone, he’d let them live. Jeremy still thought they were twisted little jerks who didn’t know right from wrong, but as Mason was always telling him, you couldn’t kill people for being idiots.
Drake, on the other hand, needed to be dealt with. And fast.
As far as Jeremy was concerned, the second the bastard had dared to threaten Jillian, he’d sealed his fate. Pulling his cell out of his back pocket, he punched in Mason’s number and filled him in on everything that had gone down that day, starting with the broken window and ending with Drake’s threat against Jillian.
Recognizing that he needed to see for himself that Jillian was unharmed and safe, Jeremy headed toward her house, assuring Mason he’d check in with him later. His hair was probably standing on end, he was covered in dust and dirt and blood, not to mention sweat, but he couldn’t take the time to go home and clean up. He needed to see her—now—because he had the strangest feeling that if he didn’t get close to her, he wouldn’t be able to breathe.
He couldn’t shake the fear that something was going to happen to her.
Drawing a deep breath into his lungs, he concentrated on taking the focus off himself and, instead, worked to pull in the details of his surroundings, like an artist reaching for color with his brush. Hell, he needed something fresh to wipe away the ugliness of Drake’s hatred.
He needed something clean—and the second he turned onto Lassiter Avenue, Jeremy found it.
The wind surged past him, and he caught her scent. Fresh. Sweet. Almost innocent, though Jeremy knew that was too much to hope for. A woman as desirable as Jillian Murphy didn’t reach the age of twenty-eight as a virgin. He didn’t blame her for being a woman…but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to take every man who’d ever touched her apart with his bare hands.
He could see her in the small driveway at the side of her house, leaning into her car as she took a leather satchel out of the backseat.
Shoving his hands deep in his front pockets to keep from grabbing her, Jeremy managed to scrape a few words out of his dry throat. “I need to talk to you.”
She jumped, startled, and spun around to face him. Her eyes went wide as she stared, mouth slack with surprise. “Wh-what happened? What have you been doing?”
His lips twisted with an embarrassed grimace. “Sorry,” he grunted, reaching forward to take the heavy satchel from her arms. “I’m grimy and smell like hell.”
“No.” Her voice was soft, her cheeks flushed. “You just look as if you’ve been fighting.”
“Huh,” he snorted, heading for her front door. “Go figure.”
Groaning, she followed behind him. “Please tell me you haven’t been in a fight.”
At his telling silence, Jillian moved past him and unlocked her door, mumbling under her breath. “Come on inside,” she said wearily. “You look as if you’re about to drop.”
“Thanks,” he said tightly, his male pride irritated that she thought a little scuffle with some street thugs could leave him sapped. “At least I was able to walk away,” he muttered, setting the satchel on her coffee table. “Can’t say the same for Drake’s goons.”
She paused in the act of taking off her jacket, her face pa
le. “You were fighting with Stefan?”
“Not really.” Jeremy lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Just some of the thugs from his little ‘youth movement’ I heard about today. And they started it.”
Jillian closed her eyes. “Of course they did,” she agreed, though her tone was wry. “God knows you’d never try to provoke someone into a fight.”
Jeremy watched her hang the jacket on a peg behind the door, the tension in his gut easing with every second he spent near her. “So where have you been?” He could see the shadows under her eyes, sense the underlying fatigue in her movements.
“After my meeting with Graham, who expected a full accounting of the fight with Danna last night,” she told him, rolling her head over her shoulders as she braced her hands against the back of a chair, “I had to go out to the Harvey farm. Mrs. Harvey delivered her fourth child this afternoon.”
Damn, no wonder she looked exhausted. Jeremy knew that as the pack’s Spirit Walker, it was Jillian’s duty to assist in all births, lending her powers to the mothers, easing their way through the labor. Then once the infant was born, she had to give the ceremonial birth rites of protection and health to the newborn child.
“Did it go well?” he asked, perching himself on the edge of the sofa.
A small smile played at her lips as she took a seat in the chair. “It was tough there for a bit, but they’re both fine.”
“That’s good, then.” He ran his hands back through his hair, then exhaled a shaky breath. “Look, I came by because I need to talk to you about something.”
“Okay,” she said softly. She must have sensed his tension because she stood up and moved to stand in front of the window, the pale shafts of light spilling through the muslin curtains painting her with iridescent stripes of color.
Jeremy braced his elbows on his spread knees, staring at his hands clasped loosely together. His jaw locked, the vein in his temple throbbing with worry. Drake’s threats were echoing in his head, and she needed to be warned.
Feeling as if he had a frog stuck in his throat, he finally said, “I’d stay away from you, but it wouldn’t matter at this point. They all know that we’re…”
* * *
“That we’re what?” Jillian asked when his voice trailed off, while a swift jolt of panic stabbed through her middle.
His head shot up, eyes swirling with a glowing blend of colors as he stared at her, daring her to stop being a coward. “They all know that we’re mates. Not saying it out loud doesn’t make it any less true. And the fact we’ve never had sex doesn’t change it. We are mates, Jillian. Which means the second I set foot back in this town, your life and the way they look at you changed.”
Oh, yeah, something bad had happened. “What are you talking about, Jeremy?”
“Drake threatened you,” he admitted in a low, almost silent rasp, “as a way to get to me.”
“That’s impossible,” she whispered. “He couldn’t possibly get away with—”
“He did and he could. Dylan was there with me, as well as others, and that didn’t stop him. He’s arrogant enough not to care who heard him. If he thinks it will hurt me, he’ll hurt you.” He made a gruff sound of frustration that wasn’t quite a growl or a laugh, but caught somehow in between. “I guess using you to get to me is more important to him than seeing you matched up with his son.”
Jillian wrapped her arms around her middle, hating the cold, slithering sensation of fear slipping between her shoulder blades, inching its way down her spine. “Great,” she muttered through stiffened lips. “What am I supposed to do about it? What do you want from me, Jeremy?”
His mouth tightened. “I want you to be careful.”
“I always am,” she said unsteadily.
“And I want you.” His expression became fierce, the angles sharpened by a vicious, visceral intensity and purpose as the guttural words seemed to just pour out of him. “I’ve barely been back in town a day and I’m already burning, Jillian. I can’t be near you like this and not ache inside with the need to touch you. To have you under my hands, my mouth, my body. I want to lay you down and lose myself in you until we’re so exhausted we can’t even walk.”
“Jeremy,” she rasped, the sound of his name thick in her throat, crowded by the same impossible lust he’d spoken of. “We—we can’t.”
“Why?” he demanded, his brows pulling together over the masculine line of his nose. “We’re both adults. We both know the score. Why the hell shouldn’t we take what we both want?”
Jillian pressed her hands against the heat in her face, wondering what she could say to make him understand…without having to spill the truth. Because once out, it would reveal far more than she was willing to give him. “Dammit, Jeremy, it isn’t that simple!”
He started to stand, when her cell phone began buzzing. Glaring at her pocket, he growled, “I’m really starting to hate that thing.”
Turning her back on him, Jillian pulled out the phone and read the text message from Graham. Groaning, she shook her head in disbelief.
“What is it?” he asked, rolling to his feet as she looked at him over her shoulder.
“Drake’s got some kind of rally going on in town.” She turned, slanting him a hard look of frustration. “You really got him stirred up today, didn’t you?”
Jeremy shoved his hands in his pockets, his gaze sharp beneath lowered brows. “I’m not here to sit and twiddle my thumbs, Jillian. Stirring up Drake is going to be the least of my plans. I have no doubt he’s the traitor, and once I can prove it, I’m taking his ass down.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been ordered to make an appearance at the rally,” she told him, heading toward her jacket. “Graham doesn’t want me giving the pack any reason to be suspicious of my loyalty right now.”
“And why would they question that?” he asked in a quiet drawl.
Pulling on the dark blue jacket, she said, “You know damn well why.”
“If they’d asked me,” he muttered bitterly, “I could have told them that nothing was more important to you than your duty to this pack.”
She paused for a moment, just staring at him, then ripped opened the front door. “I don’t have time to argue with you about this right now, Jeremy. I have to go.”
“Not without me you don’t,” he growled, following her outside.
* * *
“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” Jillian warned through her clenched teeth, clearly irritated with him as she locked her front door.
“Whatever you did before is in the past,” he explained in a soft voice as he waited behind her. “That’s what I’m trying to get through to you, Jillian. I’m home now, which means everything is different, for both of us.”
“No, it isn’t,” she argued, whipping around. “It’s not as if you’ll be staying. The second you have your madman or traitor or whatever the hell he is, you’ll be back at the Alley. Everyone knows it, Jeremy.”
“They don’t know jack,” he grunted, sliding her an irritated look as they set off down the sidewalk together. “You want an answer about my intentions, then ask me the questions. But don’t waste your time listening to small-town gossip. I would’ve thought you’d learned that lesson by now.”
She pressed her lips together, but remained silent, and he locked his jaw, unwilling to back down. The tension between them remained strong, combustible, until they approached the end of the block and a little girl in pigtails ran from the front yard on their right, her tiny legs hurtling her toward them. “Jilly!” she squealed, throwing her arms around Jillian’s leg and offering up her chubby cheek for a kiss.
“Hey, sweet pea,” Jillian said with a smile as she knelt down, giving the little girl a quick hug and kiss on the cheek. “Are you being a good girl for your mommy today?”
The child gave a gap-toothed grin, her baby blue eyes shining with mischief. “Uh-huh. Mommy even let me ride my bike again!”
Jillian laughed, and the happy sound made somethi
ng in Jeremy’s chest clench hard, the burning sense of tension in his body replaced by something softer…sweeter, and yet, infinitely more powerful.
“That’s wonderful,” Jillian told her, straightening one of the child’s lopsided hair bows. “I’ll have to come and watch you as soon as I can.”
“Promise?” the little girl squealed, deep dimples showing in both cheeks as she smiled and clapped her hands together.
“I promise.” A dark-haired woman waved from the front yard, smiling at them, and Jillian waved back. “See ya later, sweet pea.”
“’Bye,” the cherub-faced child called out, sending a shy smile at Jeremy before she turned and ran back to her mother.
Jeremy chuckled softly under his breath as they set off back down the sidewalk. “Looks like you’ve got a fan there.”
* * *
Waving goodbye one last time, Jillian glanced at Jeremy as she explained. “Kelsey broke her arm last week and I helped it heal. She’ll be eternally grateful,” she added wryly, “since riding her bike is her favorite thing to do.”
They’d just turned onto Mitchell Lane when she realized he was staring at her strangely. “What?”
His gaze slid away, focusing on the cracked sidewalk. “They rely on you,” he offered in a low, husky voice, “more than I had imagined. You belong here.”
“You belong here, too,” she stated softly.
The corner of his mouth lifted in a lopsided grin, but she could see the shadow of bitterness in his eyes as he met her gaze. “No, I don’t. And that’s always going to stand between us, isn’t it?”
“I…I don’t know, Jeremy,” she said after a moment, wishing she knew what was going on behind those mesmerizing eyes.
He blew out a hard breath, pulling his gaze from hers once again, hands still shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans. “Maybe the fact that we never got together was for the best. I mean, let’s face it. You were never going to give up all of this for me.”
She was painfully aware of the butterflies taking flight in her belly. “Would you have asked me to?”
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