by Lara Adrian
“I don’t want your blood, either.”
Relief escaped the human on a gusting breath. He glanced over his shoulder, back toward the moonlit desert, then he said something really stupid. “You want the girl?”
Asher scowled, only now realizing the obvious. “The kid is a female?”
He nodded. “She’s yours, if you want her. I won’t tell a soul. Just let me go, and you can do whatever you want with the bitch.” A note of confidence stole over the human’s face. He even managed to smile. “Take her. Then you and I can just . . . forget this.”
Asher grunted, far from amused. “I never forget.”
With lightning speed, he thrust his hands out and twisted the man’s head until the spinal column snapped in two. With the corpse crumbled to the pavement, Asher walked around to the back of the sedan and took stock of his surroundings.
Three dead bodies and an unconscious young female in need of medical care.
Just fucking perfect.
To think a blown tire had been his biggest headache when he set out earlier tonight.
He’d been in the area for about fifteen years and managed to keep a low profile. Though if by chance law enforcement decided to roll through this section of desert before the coyotes and vultures got to the three dead men, he knew he’d be getting a visit. Just because no one bothered him didn’t mean folks were unaware of his presence. Ned’s ranch was one of only a handful of homesteads between Cima and Kelso, and while there were plenty of Breed living in Las Vegas proper, he would be first on the list of suspects due to proximity alone.
He feared no man, but the thought of being caged or collared, or having to kill those sworn to protect and serve didn’t sit well with him. Especially when he’d done them a favor by eliminating some of the riffraff.
With one last glance toward the small form still lying on the sand where she collapsed a short while ago, Asher popped the trunk with a mental command and cursed when his suspicions were confirmed. There beside the spare tire and jack sat two rusty shovels, a tarp, and some electrical tape.
Grimly, he grasped one of the shovels and stalked back into the sand and bramble, figuring he’d check on the kid one more time before getting busy digging a grave for her would-be murderers.
When he reached the spot where the girl had fallen, Asher stopped in his tracks and blew out a low curse.
“What the hell?”
She was gone.
CHAPTER 2
Naomi stumbled more than ran, her feet moving so sluggishly she wondered if someone had tied the laces of her Vans together when she wasn’t looking.
But it wasn’t her shoes slowing her down. It was her head.
Damn, it hurt.
She’d spent the better part of her night being manhandled by those Vegas gangsters. Her skull had already been ringing from what she was sure was a concussion following the initial blow she’d sustained when they’d stuffed her in the trunk back at Casino Moda.
Now, her left temple was pounding like a drum, her senses foggy after the pistol-whipping that had been the crap icing on an already shitty predicament.
At first, when Leo Slater’s henchmen had confronted her on the elevator at the casino, she’d been pissed at herself for getting caught, but it had never occurred to her that she wouldn’t survive the night. Shocking how quickly things had escalated. Even when they took her straight down to the basement and out through the secret underground entrance to the garage, she was confident she’d squeak through somehow. But then Gordo, the big guy with the noxious breath, plowed his fist into her forehead and it was lights out.
She woke up as they were hauling her out of the trunk in the middle of the desert under a black sky. Not good.
But even then, she hadn’t given up on herself. She was skilled at getting out of tight spaces and dangerous fixes. Hell, she’d survived so much in her twenty-six years that nine lives wouldn’t have cut it. She was sure she’d been born with a dozen-plus. It was only the sight of the gangsters’ guns and the tomblike silence of the Mojave’s back forty that made her worry that her streak of seemingly endless luck had finally run out.
She’d always been wired for fight over flight, but she clued in pretty quick that her only hope of escape was to fake meekness and lull the three idiots into a sense of complacency as they marched her out onto the sand. All she had to do was play her role and bide her time until she had a chance to make a break on foot. It had been a good plan—her only plan, really—until Gordo’s buddy got impatient and smashed the butt of his Beretta against her cheek.
The last thing she remembered was dropping to the ground and pleading for them to spare her. Some of that had been part of her game, but as her vision had begun to fill with stars and her skull became thick with cotton, she realized a moment of true fear.
Odds were damned good she was about to die.
Then he showed up.
Not some white knight riding in to save her, but a Breed male. Big. Grim. Lethal.
Possibly the only thing worse than eluding certain death at the hands of Slater’s henchmen was the fact that she’d been spared by an even bigger threat to her existence.
She wasn’t sure why the immense vampire had come to her rescue, but she wasn’t about to stick around and find out. Whatever his reasons, she wasn’t keen on offering up her carotid in payment.
Not to mention anything else the snarling immortal might have in mind.
So, she was back to Plan A.
Run and hide, then figure out a way to get back to Las Vegas in one piece.
If only her legs were on board with that plan. Every step over the hard, uneven sand seemed to require Herculean effort, like trudging through molasses. The night was as dark as pitch, but she was slowed even more by the fogging of her vision and the incessant drumbeat inside her battered skull. Nausea rolled over her, making her stagger.
“Suck it up, buttercup,” she berated herself under her breath. “You’ve gotten through worse shit than this. Just keep moving. Keep pushing.”
Buoyed by the self-directed pep talk, she put her head down and took another few steps . . . only to run into a massive wall that seemed to materialize out of the cool night air.
Except this wall was warm. Hot, even. And constructed of muscled flesh and immovable, solid strength. And this wall smelled good too. Dark spices mixed with clean soap and something less easy to define. She breathed the scent in and moaned in reflex at the vast improvement over anything else she’d been inhaling all night.
“There’s no need to run.” The deep voice jolted her mind back to cold reality.
Holy shit!
She leapt back, then pivoted around and bolted in the opposite direction with everything she was worth.
But there he was in front of her again, blocking any hope of escape.
She drew up short, huffing and sagging, on the verge of passing out.
“I said stop running, girl.”
“Fuck you!”
She tried to dodge him, but his big body was faster. Unearthly so. “You realize you’re only wasting what little energy you have left, don’t you?”
Was he taunting her, or just stating the sad facts? Either way, she didn’t like it.
She glanced up, forced to tilt her head so high in order to see his scowling face that the hood of her sweatshirt jacket fell back off her head.
Immediately, she wished she hadn’t looked. It wasn’t that he was ugly, as much as she wanted to pretend he was. Not quite handsome, but arrestingly masculine. Compelling on a primal level that made even her contused senses respond with unwanted appreciation.
His face was rugged and shadowed beneath the shaggy brown waves of his overgrown hair, as though Heaven’s sculptor had taken a rough-hewn block of stone and chiseled away until he was almost done and then stopped. Hard planes, sharp angles, square chin.
She couldn’t tell the color of the eyes that scrutinized her from below the chestnut slashes of his brows. Banked embers lit his irises, their heated glo
w leaving no question that he was something other.
As if the sharp, pearly white tips of his fangs weren’t enough to remind her what she was dealing with here.
A cold, emotionless killer.
She’d seen him in action as she’d played possum and watched from under her lowered lashes while he dispatched Gordo and the other two thugs. He was ruthless. His methods swift and brutal, without hesitation. She’d made it a point to stay as far away from his kind as possible, but every species since Earth’s creation had serious menaces like him. The kind of guy no one wanted to run into in a dark alley because you knew only one person was coming out and odds were it wouldn’t be you.
And now, here she was, defenseless and alone with this enormous Breed male in the middle of the Mojave, the unmarked burial ground for countless hookers, runaways, and card cheats. Nowhere to run and no one to hear her screams, even if she could muster the juice to attempt either one.
She glanced up at him again, trying to judge his intentions. The rough-hewn face staring down at her was unreadable, but there was conflict in his eyes. As if standing there with her was the dead last place he wanted to be too.
“You’re bleeding,” she pointed out, her gaze flicking to his chest. “Gordo shot you.”
He shrugged. “It’s nothing. I am Breed. It will heal in a few hours.”
“I know what you are.”
She didn’t mean for it to come out sounding like an accusation, but it was too late to call it back. To be fair, she hadn’t met a man of any stripe, mortal or otherwise, that she could truly trust in all her twenty-six years. Well, except Michael. And he hardly counted because he’d been more like a brother to her since they were both orphaned kids running loose on the streets.
Shit. Michael.
He must be worried sick about her.
By now, her phone was probably blowing up with calls and messages from her best friend asking for her status. Not that she could answer even if she wanted to. Her phone was buried in a dumpster back at Moda, tossed there along with the fake student ID Leo Slater’s hired help had taken from her in the moments before they stuffed her into trunk of the sedan.
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Zoe,” she replied, letting the lie fall off her tongue as easily as it had when the trio of goons came to escort her away from the casino floor. She had scores of AKAs, so many it was sometimes difficult to remember her true given name. The one her mother, Aiko, had given her on the day she was born. The one she hadn’t heard spoken since she was eight years old.
Her unlikely savior grunted, studying her in unsettling silence for a long moment. “You don’t seem like a stupid child, Zoe,” he remarked. “So, what kind of trouble were you in with men like those three and their boss?”
She swallowed, trying to decide what would serve her best with this dangerous man who seemed to have fallen for her teenager disguise as readily as her original captors had. But this Breed male was no steakhead like Gordo and Company. His shrewd, glittering gaze was fixed unblinking on her, and she felt with a cold certainty in her marrow that he would know if she tried to feed him any more lies.
“I tried to steal something from them tonight. From a casino.”
He grunted. “Money?”
She nodded, wincing at the resulting pain that small movement caused. “Yeah, I took a little bit of money from a slot machine that went on the fritz. They caught me before I could make it out the door with it.”
His square chin lifted, then he gave a faint shake of his head. “Maybe you are stupid. Greed and bad choices are two of the main reasons people end up out here in the middle of the night.”
She had no doubt he was right. And although she was giving him a small helping of honesty, she saw no reason to explain that the “little bit of money” she attempted to steal tonight was in the neighborhood of two grand, nor that the fact she’d even gotten close to that sizable amount of cash was because she’d managed to finesse one of the machines in a way only she could, then bribed another player a hundred bucks to collect her winnings for her and hand them over.
Instead of the gray-haired old lady from Kansas meeting her at the elevator with her payout as agreed, Naomi had been intercepted by Moda security.
She refused to call her motivation greed, but she supposed she had to cop to the fact that it had been a poor decision to take such a big risk. From here on out, she wouldn’t rely on go-betweens when it came to collecting her takes at Slater’s casino. She’d have to start getting more creative.
She rubbed absently at her wrists as she tried to think clearly.
Everything hurt. It had been a long day and an even longer night. Her brain was scrambled and she just wanted to go home, climb into her bed and lie down for an hour or ten. Even though some dim logic reminded her that a long sleep was just about the worst thing she could do for a concussion, she was so exhausted it was all she could do to remain upright. If she didn’t get out of this desert soon and back on the road to Vegas, she was liable to collapse right where she stood.
With her brain fogging over and her legs growing weaker underneath her by the second, her capacity for clever plans and daring moves was fading fast. Along with her options. She had to rule out her original plan to run and seek shelter until she could hoof it or hitch her way back to the interstate. In her current condition, she’d never make it anywhere on foot.
Which meant she was not only in this Breed male’s debt tonight, but at his mercy too. Since both fight and flight were off the table so long as he was looming over her, all she had to work with was her negotiation skills. And chutzpah.
She might as well grab onto both and roll the dice.
God, she liked it so much better when those dice were loaded in her favor first.
“Look, Mister, ah . . . what’d you say your name was?”
“I didn’t.” Those glimmering Breed eyes seemed to bore right through her. “I’m called Asher.”
Unusual name, and strange way of putting it, too. But then nothing about this night had been normal, least of all this run-in with him.
“Okay, Asher.” She nodded, reminded by the painful slog of her brain inside her skull that even small movements weren’t a good idea right now. His scowl darkened when she wobbled under the wave of another round of nausea. “As I was saying, Asher, I really appreciate what you did for me here. And even if you’re not concerned about that hole in your chest, I’m sorry you got shot trying to save my bacon. Right now, I just want to go home and take a nice hot bath, then sleep for a week. I’m sure you must have things you’d rather be doing tonight as well.”
As she spoke, his gaze traveled her face in measured scrutiny. If the displeasure in his expression was anything to go by, he didn’t seem to like what he saw. “You talk too much.”
And he hardly spoke at all, not that it mattered. She couldn’t read his stony face and unearthly stare any more than she could gauge his clipped, measured words and toneless growls. All she knew was he seemed as eager to be done with her as she was to put this entire evening in her rearview mirror.
“Okay,” she announced, feeling almost cheerful. “So, I guess I’m going to be on my way now. Seeing as how Gordo and his friends won’t be needing their car anymore, I’ll just go find the keys and get on the road.”
She forced a tight smile despite a blooming ache in her jaw, but he didn’t smile back.
“You don’t even look old enough to drive.”
She scoffed. “I’m twenty-six.”
“Like hell you are.” Those blazing eyes roamed over her again, from head to toe this time. It was a short trip, considering she was only five-foot-two. She was also buried in layers of loose clothing that could have fitted three of her inside.
“I’m not a girl,” she murmured, indignation ripe in her voice. “Those goons only thought I was a kid because of how I’m dressed and because I told them I was underage. I thought that would be enough for them to turn me loose, but I thought wrong.”
He hardly seemed pleased to hear it. “You’re not a child?”
“I may be a foot-and-a-half shorter than you and about a hundred pounds soaking wet, but I’m a full-grown woman.”
Probably not the smartest thing to tell a predator like the one now narrowing his gaze and cocking his head to study her more closely, but she blamed the reckless blurt on her mounting concussion. Besides, if this male wanted to assault her, her state of adulthood probably wouldn’t matter and he’d already had ample time and opportunity to do his worst.
At least, that was the rationalization she clung to as she prayed for her only viable escape out of this mess.
Talons of pain closed over her throbbing skull, tightening their grip. She moaned before she could stop the pathetic sound from escaping her.
“You’re hurt. That lump on your head needs medical attention.”
“I know,” she said, as much as it cost her to admit it. God, she hated feeling weak and helpless more than just about anything else in the world. She spent much of her childhood that way and had fought every single day to make sure she never felt that way again.
She heard his deep exhalation—and the curse that rode it. “The nearest hospital is in Henderson. You’re in no shape to drive, let alone make it that far.”
He was probably right. No, he was definitely right. A sudden rush of exhaustion flowed over her and she moaned, wearier than she could remember being in a very long time. Her head was starting to spin, her vision clouding over. Dammit, she was fading fast. Getting behind the wheel now would probably only finish what Leo Slater’s thugs set out to do with her.
Still, what other choice did she have?
“Let’s go,” he stated flatly.
“Go?” She blinked up at him dully, watching that squared chin dip with his curt nod.
“To the hospital. I’ll take you there.”
Oh, shit. Was he serious? Get in a vehicle with him? Trust that he would actually do what he said and not detour somewhere else instead, or maybe decide to collect on her debt with a pint or two of her blood?
“No.” Her reply shot out of her, no easy feat when her tongue was thickening inside the cotton dryness of her mouth. She took a step back from him and her vision swam. “I’ll be fine,” she murmured, her words slurring as she spoke. “I just . . . need a minute . . . to . . . rest and . . . catch my . . .”