by Pam Godwin
Leather collar.
No. No no no no no. I dropped the carbine on its sling, my hands covering my mouth. “Jesse? That’s not…”
It couldn’t be. Darwin was safe in the mountains. With the Lakota. Hundreds of miles away.
“Evie! The door!” The strained catch in his voice launched me into motion.
I couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe, as I sprinted toward the animal clinic, slamming a shoulder into the door and fumbling with the handle. “Shea!”
The door flew open, and I stumbled in, my toe catching on the metal lip. Shea had lit a kerosene lamp, the dim light guiding my way.
I grabbed it, darting for the nearest metal counter and wiping it clear with a sweep of my arm. “Shea. My dog. He’s hurt. He’s—”
My throat closed up, my attention on the wall of cabinets, the doors hanging from their hinges. I scanned for medical supplies, bandages…fuck. What the hell was I looking for?
Shea ran to a lower cabinet and dug through its shelves. “You have a dog?”
Jesse burst into the room and skidded to a stop beside me, shouting something at Shea. His voice garbled through my head, his profile blurring in my periphery. He faded away as all of my senses narrowed on the limp, skeletal German Shepherd he laid on the counter.
The black and tan fur was thin and spotty, balding around crusty green sores from head to tail. Blood caked around his toenails and muzzle, and trickled from a fresh gash along his ribs. His chest heaved, his jaw a rictus of pain, tongue lolling against the counter, as he whined and wheezed.
I buckled over him, my hands clenching around his hackles, my fingers brushing the engraved Darwin in his collar. His eyes rolled up, dull and cloudy as they locked on mine, and he whined louder, his head lifting weakly as if to lick my face. He yelped, and his head dropped back to the counter, his tongue slavering anxiously over his jowls.
We should have brought him with us. I could’ve protected him from making this journey alone. What if he hadn’t reached us? What if he—?
Pain swelled in my throat, robbing my air. My fingers tightened in his fur. What have I done?
I sensed Roark entering the room behind me, but I was too frozen, my chest hurting so fucking badly, to pull my eyes from Darwin.
Shea pushed me toward the direction of Darwin’s head as she lined up plastic packages and metal instruments beside his bloody body. Her movements were focused, calm and clinical, like her voice. “Roark, there’s a black case on the floor in my bedroom at the house. I need that, as well as some supplies from the shed.”
She listed off the labels on the boxes she needed, and Roark’s footfalls faded quickly beyond the doorway.
“Pulse is weak,” she said softly beside me. “Dehydration. Blood loss. Infection. It’s going to be a long night.”
I dragged my gaze away from Darwin’s big brown eyes and placed a hand on her face. “How are you feeling?” Can you do this? Can you save him?
“Honey, I’m fine.” Her skin felt normal, her expression alert, but her mocha complexion still lacked its warm color from this morning.
She prodded the chewed up flesh around Darwin’s gash with gauze. “Let’s just focus on your boy. What happened?”
I slid my hands over his bony cheeks, cupping his head in my hands. When my fingers reached his ear, I bumped into scabbed skin and torn cartilage around the ear against the counter.
My pulse hammered in my throat as I angled for a closer look. Oh my God. Where his left ear used to be was now just a twisted hole of severed flesh and dried blood. I gasped, and a mass of emotion clogged my voice.
"Evie." Shea glanced at me. "Looks like he lost that ear a couple weeks ago. I need to know how he got the laceration on his side."
I nodded, my fingers pushing through the fur on his neck as I tried to calm his heavy panting. I swallowed, and swallowed again, unable to croak out a coherent sentence.
“He attacked a lion tonight,” Jesse said, his quiet voice floating from the doorway. “We left him in the Allegheny Mountains over three weeks ago.” His eyes, stark and bloodshot, found mine. “He must’ve followed us.”
Shea’s head shot up, her neck craning to look over her shoulder at Jesse. “That’s…”
“Four-hundred and thirty-six miles away.” He glanced outside and rubbed a thumb over his eyebrow, his other hand tightly gripping the bow. “This dog…” He looked back at Shea, his voice thick and raspy. “We cannot lose him.”
My stomach caved in, and a sharp burn lit behind my eyes. So much death. Too much goddamned death… A fierce spasm gripped my muscles and squeezed my lungs. Oh God, he couldn’t die.
“Okay.” Shea turned back to Darwin and injected him with a shot of something. His whining quieted, and his eyelids grew heavy and closed.
A jolt of panic crashed through me, and I hugged his slackened neck. “What did you do?”
She touched my shoulder. “A heavy duty painkiller. He’s just dreaming.” She went back to work, cleaning the wounds and setting up a makeshift IV drip. “We only had one lion on the reserve. Goliath was his name.” She smiled, sadly. “I’m surprised he lived this long. He was a big baby.”
My chest clenched, and I breathed through it. Big baby or not, Goliath wanted to eat us.
The sound of Jesse’s pacing steps saturated the silence. I knew what he was thinking. We had been on the lookout for wild animals, but after losing Tallis and Georges today, our perimeter was down, our defenses gone.
I looked back at the door, and my muscles locked up. Roark was out there, alone. “What other predators were on the reserve?”
“A cheetah.” Shea dug through another cabinet. “She was old. Pretty harmless. I doubt she survived a week. A few alligators. Snakes. That’s it.”
I shivered, thinking about the waterhole I’d been bathing in.
Thirty minutes later, Roark returned with an armload of boxes and bags. Darwin slept through Shea’s prodding, pricking, and stitching. I sensed my hovering annoyed her, and she refused to give me a definitive answer on his chance of survival.
My body buzzed with worry and dread, and my hands twitched with restlessness. I reached out and gripped Shea’s fingers, where they softly stroked the fur on Darwin’s hindquarters. “Thank you. For everything.”
She smiled. “He’s a fighter.” Her eyes flashed. “And so am I. Now give me some space.”
Space? I wanted to be right here, breathing down her neck and putting the pressure on. I pulled a shuddery breath through my nostrils, which only made me feel more jittery and amped up.
Fuck, I was unraveling, fucking eyes burning and throat swelling. If I stood here another second, watching Darwin heave through his pain, I might blow a gasket.
Shea was right. She needed space, away from me and my impending breakdown. And I needed space, away from Darwin to pull my shit back together.
I turned away, thanking my lucky stars for Shea’s veterinary skills, and zeroed in on Jesse. There’s my distraction.
The rims of his eyelids glowed pink with exhaustion, the skin around them sagging and bruised. I suspected the wall was the only thing holding him up.
Planting myself before him, I stared up into his eyes. “You need to sleep.”
He harrumphed and leaned away from the door frame. “Not gonna happen.”
I grabbed the carbine and a bedroll and pushed past him to step outside, confident he would follow. Heaven forbid I step out of his sight.
The soles of my feet ached as I spread the bedroll on the porch and collapsed onto it, settling on my back, emotionally drained and mentally wired.
The rain had stopped, leaving a cloud of moisture hanging beneath the black sky. The aphids wouldn’t venture out until the ground dried. We had a few hours to sleep.
The door opened and shut as Jesse slipped out. He set his bow beside me then did something I would’ve never expected.
Lowering to his knees, he crawled between my legs and slumped against me. His chest lay heavy on m
y stomach, and his cheek rested between my breasts.
My hands went to his hair, pushing the strands away from his face. I adjusted my hips, relaxing into a comfortable position beneath his weight. He felt so good against me I could almost forget about the struggle Darwin was enduring inside. Almost.
Jesse lifted a finger and pointed at the darkness. “Look.”
I followed his gaze, my eyesight adapting to the shadows. Flickering over the landscape were hundreds of fireflies. Their glowing yellow beacons danced over the field, a synchronicity of nature, pulsing to a song I couldn’t hear.
I’d never seen so many in one place, and I felt like I was witnessing a magic trick, Mother Earth’s serendipitous balance in such a violent world.
I leaned down and kissed the top of his head. “Beautiful.”
“Even in death.” He nodded at the spider web that stretched between the beams of the building’s canopy above us.
A spider bounced at the center of the silken strands, legs spinning threads around a trapped firefly, its meal still pulsing light from within its gossamer cocoon.
I shivered, my mind flicking to the Drone and Michio and the genomes they carried from the spider. “Did you believe Michio when he said his transformation might’ve made him infertile?”
Jesse rested his arms beneath mine, his head growing heavier against my chest, as if snuggling against my heart. “He had no reason to lie about that.”
True. No matter how badly Michio wanted a child, he wouldn’t resort to tricking me.
“Have you thought about…if Michio returns, if he bit you…” My thoughts circled around this idea, my mind rebelling at the mere mention of it. “He could make you infertile.”
Assuming Michio could mutate others to be like him, he could create an army of men to fight the Drone and kill aphids. That sounded pretty badass, but there was always a downside. Could those men transform other men? Would the bite be sought after, traded, and spread like a coveted superpower?
A planet filled with infertile men would not fare well for the longevity of the human race.
“I’ve considered the ramifications.” Jesse traced a thumb along my arm. “If I were him, I’d bite me to eliminate the threat of fatal pregnancy. But I’m not him. Nor am I inclined to play God and fuck with my genetics.”
His response both relieved and disappointed me. An infertile Jesse would un-complicate our relationship, but the last thing I needed was another fangy guardian with a craving for blood.
For the umpteenth time that day, I mentally reached out for Michio, searching my senses for some sign of him. Was he still alive? Was he biting men and gathering an army? Did he miss me as much as I missed him?
Oh Michio, where are you?
A long period of silence hung over us, neither of us brave enough to talk about Darwin. Neither of us willing to vocalize the scariest questions: Why did he leave the Lakota? Did he miss me? Or was the answer more harrowing? Had something chased him away?
Jesse’s breathing slowed, and his body relaxed heavily against mine. Finally.
I didn’t move from the porch, didn’t move a muscle. I spent the remainder of the night clinging to the peacefulness of Jesse’s slumber and holding his powerful body close to mine.
Hours passed, and I watched the night sky ebb into the golden blush of dawn, keeping a vigilant eye on the hillside, agonizing over Darwin, dreading the moment that door might open to deliver the kind of news that would destroy my heart.
The sun climbed the sky, bringing with it a blanket of heat so stifling my back stuck to the bedroll in a puddle of sweat. And to think, it was probably only eight or nine in the morning.
Didn’t help that Jesse was smothering my body with nearly two-hundred pounds of hard muscle. He hadn’t moved since he passed out. I might’ve thought he was dead, but his heart beat solidly against my stomach, and his breaths whispered across my breast.
A couple feet away, the door to the animal clinic stood tall and disheartening in its silence. Neither Shea nor Roark had emerged since we shut it. No sounds from within. Not a voice or a footstep.
The mental pep talk I’d given myself through the sleepless night waned in the daylight. Dread coiled inside me, eating a hole through my stomach and nagging me to open that door.
Which meant waking Jesse. Checking on Darwin wasn’t the only reason we needed to move. In another hour or so, the ground would be completely dried up, and the aphids would come out of hiding.
My bones ached beneath his weight, my back cramping, my legs tingling with loss of circulation. And my bladder…holy hell, the pressure was unbearable.
Just one more moment. A moment to absorb the tranquility breathing from the man in my arms.
His hair stuck up in haphazard strands, reflecting the sunlight in reddish-brown hues. His facial features, while slack with sleep, were sharp and pronounced in the most masculine way. From this angle, I could see a slight bend in the bridge of his nose. His eyelashes, thick and coppery like his hair, lay against his cheeks, hiding the intense glare I’d fallen in love with.
Asleep, he almost looked gentle. I chuckled, soundlessly, but the heave of my chest bounced his head.
His breath stuttered, and his fingers curled against my ribs. Slowly, he lifted his cheek from my chest, blinked against the sunlight, and turned his neck to find my eyes.
Oh my. His eyelids hooded, heavy with grogginess, his full lips parted and pouty. Sleepy Jesse looked positively mouth-watering.
“Hey,” he rasped.
“Hi.” I reached up and traced the lines between his furrowed brows. “Feel rested?”
He inched up my body and buried his face against my neck, drawing a deep breath. “Never felt better.”
Perfect answer. Except the adjustment in his weight caused two problems. One, the thick press of his morning wood against my clit produced a sudden and tingling surge of arousal through my body. And two… “Ugh, my bladder.”
He dropped a kiss to my lips so quickly I almost missed it and rolled to his feet with way too much grace for a man his size.
Scratching at his stubble, his bicep flexed with the movement. All that sweaty skin on his torso stretched tight over chiseled packs of muscle, each dip and ridge guiding my gaze downward, over his flat stomach and narrowing on the dusting of hair that trailed into the waistband of his jeans.
He stared at the door, his bottom lip rolling between his teeth, causing the whiskers beneath his mouth to stand on end. “Any news?”
I shook my head, unable to stop my gaze from lowering again and latching onto the stark outline of his erection.
Rising to my knees on the mat, I nodded at his pants. “You…uh…need help with that?”
He glanced down at the distracting bulge and disregarded it to look out over the tall grass in the field.
His eyes lingered on the dead lion ten yards away and returned to the door. “We need to get going.”
Pivoting, he grabbed his bow and quiver, strapped it over his back, and stepped to the corner of the porch. His zipper sounded, and damn if that didn’t fill my head with all kinds of dirty thoughts.
With his back to me, his shoulder leaned against the building, and one hand in the vicinity of that zipper, he stood motionless.
I chewed on my lip. Was he really doing what I thought he was doing?
The discernible sound of urine splattering dirt knocked my brain into gear. I scrambled off the bedroll and ran toward him. Jesse had his cock out.
I skidded around him and stepped into the grass just as he tucked himself away. I twisted my lips into a pout. “What are you hiding? A little dick? Warts? Scales?”
With the exception of last night, Jesse used glares in lieu of words. This morning was business as usual, his opinion about my questions hardening his eyes and tightening his face.
The bastard thought he could return to the way things had been?
I fisted my hands on my hips. “Don’t point that glare at me.”
His e
xpression blanked a millisecond before he launched. Grabbing me around the waist, he lifted me off the ground, twisting my body in his arms and pressing a hand against my belly. Hard. “Thought you had to pee?”
Bent over his arm, I folded at the waist, the pressure testing the strength of my bladder. Fuck, I might’ve peed a little in the struggle. “Put me down.”
He dropped me to my feet, and I staggered, yanking my pants down and squatting right there in the open. I spread my bare feet as much as the stretchy pants allowed and angled my ass away as my bladder released. Ahhh, relief.
His footsteps circled around me, the golden skin of his muscled torso shimmering with sweat. It was daunting the way he watched me so intensely—while I was peeing no less—but something had definitely shifted between us.
Walls had fallen last night, and a comfortable, intimate kind of closeness had nuzzled its way in. No more awkwardness. No more hiding.
He crouched before me, his eyes glimmering like crystals of copper. “I loved watching you come.”
“No sexy talk while I’m peeing, Jesse.” But I couldn’t stop a happy smile from spreading across my face.
The corner of his mouth twitched.
Bladder empty, I stood, yanking my sweat-soaked pants into place. “I will be returning the favor.”
He rose with me, his gaze on the horizon, furrowed brows firmly in place.
I looked at the door of the animal clinic, sobering instantly. Seducing Jesse would have to wait.
His hand slid into mine and squeezed tight. “No news is good news, right?”
“Unless they didn’t want to wake us.”
We stood there, hand in hand, staring at the door, the air growing heavier by the second. I willed it to open, to see Darwin bounding out with his tongue flapping and tail wagging.
Jesse didn’t seem inclined to move from the spot. So I took the first step, then the next, gaining speed and ironing out my nerves as I dragged him behind me.
At the door, I grabbed the carbine, pulled in a deep breath, and turned the knob.