Trap glanced across the bar to see Wyatt grinning as he reached for the bottle of water Delmar handed to him. Wyatt wasn’t wrong. Trap had enclosed them in shadows and a protective ring that would keep anyone else away. He forced himself to relax and breathe. He hadn’t made a mistake like that in years. Hearing what her life had been like, just the small bit she’d revealed, had thrown him.
Wyatt handed him the bottle of water, sent Cayenne a cocky grin and made his way to the table where Mordichai sat with his brother Malichai. Trap twisted off the cap and gave Cayenne the bottle.
“Drink water when you prefer it and the hell with everyone else, baby,” he advised. “Live free. I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks of me. I care about my team and Wyatt’s family and now you. That’s it. Everyone else can go to hell.”
“Not me.” She shook her head decisively. “You can’t trust me, Trap. Don’t for one minute think you can.”
Her fingers moved on the table, a small drumming pattern, not loud, but definitely hypnotic. He put his hand over hers. She gasped as if he’d burned her and nearly pulled her hand back at the contact.
“Be still. Breathe.”
She left her hand under his, but her green eyes moved over him broodingly. “I can’t breathe. If I do, you’re inside me. I feel you there in my lungs, moving through my body. You’re a liability. You’d better hear me this time. When I get cornered” – she leaned close – “I’m lethal.”
“We all are, baby. Every one of us. Look around you. You see them. You feel them. Every last one of us is enhanced, just like you.”
“You aren’t flawed. You weren’t scheduled for termination.”
“Fuck that reasoning, Cayenne. You’re intelligent. Because you scare the hell out of them doesn’t mean they’re right to terminate you. Why would you accept any judgment they pass on you? Whitney and this man who had you in his lab, Braden, are megalomaniacs, believing they have the right to take
children
,
infants…
” For a moment a deep well of rage showed in his eyes, burning blue behind the ice.
He took a breath and flicked a glance at the shimmer surrounding them. It took effort, but he breathed away the evidence of that fury.
“To make his superior soldiers as well as the elite GhostWalkers, Whitney first experimented on little kids. God knows how many children he killed because they weren’t to his liking. He put men like Braden in place, scattering them in various countries in labs to do his dirty work. Wyatt’s brother Gator is a GhostWalker. His woman was repeatedly given cancer by Whitney when she was a child. He had another girl living in a sanitarium, training, running missions from right here in the swamp. She was forced to return here. The tract of land and the building I just bought? Whitney owned that. He had the sanitarium there, and it was burned to the ground because he suddenly decided the girl he’d forced to live there was expendable and he sent a hit squad after her. That’s the kind of man who decided you had to be terminated. Seriously, baby, get that
flawed
crap out of your head.”
She sat back and slowly pulled her hand out from under his. Her lashes fluttered, and he felt that small movement as if she’d fluttered them against his skin. Up close she was potent. He could see every breath she drew. The creamy swell of her breasts lifted when she drew in air. The temptation to tug at the ribbons of her camisole and open that crisscross of blue was difficult to resist. She was very lucky they were in a public place.
“Tell me about Wyatt’s daughters.”
It didn’t surprise him that she knew all about Wyatt and his daughters. She’d been rescued when their GhostWalker team had gone to rescue the toddlers from termination. When the soldiers had come in an effort to try to reacquire them, Cayenne had aided the GhostWalker team in protecting them. The triplets were not yet two and all three of them injected venom if they bit anyone. Wyatt and Trap had been trying to find a way to prevent that from happening.
“They’re happy. Nonny, Wyatt’s grandmother, is an amazing woman. She’s in her eighties, but she goes out in the swamp and transplants flowers and shrubs to keep her pharmaceutical bed alive and thriving. She adores those girls and treats all of us like family.”
“What’s that like?”
He raised an eyebrow at her.
“Being a family.”
Such a simple question, but it fed the rage building beneath the ice. He had to work at controlling the shimmer. Around him the faint, nearly transparent veil thickened, taking the air out of the room. Several men coughed.
Take a breath,
Wyatt advised.
This is fucked up, Wyatt.
But he took the breath. Killing everyone around him wasn’t going to help her. He made himself breathe. Deep and even. Finding a rhythm. Letting the ice inside consume him. He knew he was broken on the inside. He’d accepted that premise a long time ago and then used it as his strength. Cayenne hadn’t had a chance. Living in a fucking lab. What the hell was that? Who would do that to a child?
“Were there other women?” he prompted. “Like Pepper, Wyatt’s wife. Did you get to see them? Talk to them?”
She shook her head and rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if she were cold.
Trap took the jacket from where it was hanging on the back of his chair and wrapped it around her. She looked startled. Looked as if she might protest. She didn’t. She slipped her arms into the sleeves and held it close to her. It was his favorite jacket. He wore it a lot. That meant his scent was all over it. Now his scent surrounded her. There was a certain satisfaction in that.
Trap never thought that he’d ever be in this position. He had accepted that he wouldn’t have a woman of his own. He wasn’t that boy anymore. He had made himself into something dangerous. Something lethal. He knew some of the GhostWalkers were concerned with the experiments done on them with the DNA of animals, but he was stronger and faster, and he’d always been strong and fast. Now he was a predator, and he needed to be. He was actively hunting his uncles. His friends were like him. They were building fortresses in order to survive any attack on them or their families. Let his uncles come for the woman that meant something. He would be ready for them.
He’d been prepared to send Cayenne away. To find a way to reverse what Whitney had done, but the moment she’d stepped through the door of the bar, he knew he wouldn’t do that. He didn’t have anything or anyone who mattered to him other than his teammates. Unexpectedly, Cayenne was very important to him, and the more he learned about her life, the more he was determined to make the rest of it something else altogether.
He wasn’t certain why she would be paired with him, but there was one thing all the GhostWalkers were certain of – the pairings worked. The couples worked as a team in the field. They were extremely physically compatible, and all of them had developed incredibly strong emotional attachments.
Trap hadn’t thought himself capable of emotional attachments for a long time – until he met Wyatt at the university and then his GhostWalker team. He had chosen to follow Wyatt into the military because he wanted the psychic enhancements. He was grateful for the physical as well. He was determined to find his uncles and kill them. He would hunt them until the day he died. That had been his reason – to turn himself into a weapon – even more of one than he’d already made himself.
“Trap.” She said his name low. Her voice a caress. A soothing rasp of velvet over his skin.
Trap.
She moved inside his mind much more intimately. “What is it? What is making you so upset?”
He stared at her in astonishment. He hadn’t changed expression. He’d been extremely careful that the cloud around them stayed thin. Nothing should have betrayed his emotions. How had she known?
Deliberately he ignored her question. “You wanted to know what a family is like. Wyatt’s grandmother always has something on the stove cooking. She has music playing in the house and she dances with the girls. Pepper, Wyatt’s wife, dances now as well. The house always feels welcoming…”
Cayenne shook her head. “Not Wyatt’s family, Trap. Yours. What is your family like?”
His heart jerked hard in his chest. He didn’t want to lie to her. Or scare her. He’d shot his own father. Deliberately. He’d been nine years old, and he would have killed his uncles if he could have as well. What did he tell her? His woman. She had a right to know the danger she faced when gave herself to him – and she was going to give herself to him. He would accept nothing less.
“My family is Wyatt and the team, Cayenne. I don’t have anyone else.”
“But you did,” she persisted. “You were born into a family, not taken from an orphanage and put in a lab or, like me, made in a test tube.”
He sighed. “I tell you this, baby, and you’re going to run for the hills. I don’t want you to do that. How about I promise I tell you after the first time you let me have you. Once I’ve been inside you, once I’ve claimed you for my own, it will give me a fighting chance that you’ll stay with me.”
There was a short silence. “You know about my childhood. It’s only fair to tell me about yours.”
“I’ll give you this, Cayenne, you’ll know the worst of me, what I’m capable of, what I was born capable of doing, not what anyone shaped me into.”
She reached out, and this time, she was the one who took his hand. “Tell me.”
He shook his head. “I’m not sharing that fucked-up shit with you before you commit to me.” He had to change the subject and turned the spotlight back on her. “Coming here, choosing victims and robbing them is not okay. You know that, and you can’t keep doing it. These men may not be enhanced, but sooner or later, you’re going to slip up and you’ll make a mistake. Then you’ll have to kill an innocent to defend yourself or they’ll kill you.”
“I have to eat,” she whispered. “Do you think I
want
to rob people? I make certain whoever I choose is someone who deserves a little payback.”
“If you want to eat, you come to Wyatt’s. His grandmother would welcome you. If you don’t want to do that, come to me. Tell me what you need.”
Her green eyes flashed bright, anger stirring. Pride. “I don’t need your charity, Trap. I don’t want it.” She picked up the origami crane he’d made from the paper he’d scribbled formulas on.
“It isn’t charity,” he hissed. “Why are you being so damned stubborn? I’m not going to hurt you.”
“No, but I could hurt you.” She glanced down at the crane, started to say something and then noticed the writing along the wing. “P = #AR. HYP.” She didn’t ask a question, but she repeated it softly as if musing out loud. Very carefully she unfolded the crane, revealing Trap’s formula and his assessment.
She glanced up at him. “You used the difficult way. You built a temporal model, didn’t you? I can see your equations.”
She smoothed the paper, running her gaze over the formulas. “I worked this out last week using a spatial model. The peanut husks are concentrated under the bar stools, and I counted around one and multiplied, and around the tables, especially during the first three days after Delmar sweeps. If you notice, almost all the husks around the round tables form a donut ring that runs about one foot under the table to about twice the radius of the table.”
Trap stared at her, his heart stuttering in his chest. For the first time, he actually was completely shocked, but he shouldn’t have been.
“I just counted the husks around one chair at the four-chair table and multiplied by four to get a pretty good estimate of the total husks associated with the table.”
He leaned close. “You took the easy way out. And it isn’t very accurate.”
She raised her chin. “I did not. I did it the
intelligent
way.”
“Over a week’s accumulation the peanut husks turn to mulch and can’t be counted. They get kicked around…”
“I factored in the ones that fall beneath the bar and get kicked back where Delmar works. I came up with thirteen thousand, two hundred and sixty per week.” She sent him her first real smile. The kind that made a man’s cock hard. Made his heart jerk and happiness spill through his bloodstream like sunshine. She raised her green gaze to his. “Nice. You’ve got a brain.”
Hell, yeah, he had a brain. Excitement burst through Trap. He’d wondered why Whitney had paired him with Cayenne. Now he knew. She could satisfy his mind along with his body. She would be a complement to him in every way, not just in the field or in bed. She would stimulate his mind. Understand him. And he would do the same for her.
Movement had her standing, and he turned his head to see the two Comeaux brothers exiting the bar. “That’s my cue to leave. I don’t want to see you around, Trap. You stay away from me. I mean it. This is the last time we’re going to be friendly.” She moved around the far side of the table when he stood also, shaking his head.
“Damn it, Cayenne. Don’t make us enemies.”
“That’s what we are,” she whispered. “That’s the way it has to be. You don’t know the worst in me, and I don’t want you ever to know. Or to see. Or to experience.”
She hurried across the room to the door, taking his favorite jacket with her. She turned at the last minute and sent a whisper into the air. “See but not see. Hear but don’t hear.”
Instantly he felt that pull in her voice, the one he felt when he’d gone into her cell to rescue her and she’d called him to her. He was much more resistant than the others, because he didn’t allow emotions too close to the surface and her voice seemed to tap into an emotional stream. Now he knew how she kept the men in the bar from describing her.
He signaled to Wyatt and the others, although he didn’t need to. They were already disposing of their beer bottles and making for the door.
“I’ll meet you back at home,” Trap told them. “I’ve got a couple of things I have to do.”
Wyatt smirked at him. “Yeah, I’ll bet you do. The boys will take the airboat home and I’ll go with you in the
Pepper
. I’m thinkin’ you need a babysitter.”
He wasn’t going to stand around arguing, and when Wyatt put that smirk on his face, he was as stubborn as hell. Trap nodded and hurried out.