The Heat (11 page)

She looked from him to the other man and then to the driver, whose eyes she could now see in the rear-view mirror. They were gray as well, though not as stark as the scarred man’s.

“Breathe, Miss St. Claire,” the black man repeated.

She realized, then, that she had been holding her breath and her right hand had been squeezing Daniel’s motorcycle key so tightly that it left an outline in her palm. With effort, she opened her palm all the way and dropped the key on the seat. Then she released what was left of her breath and inhaled deeply. Her lungs expanded painfully and spots swam in her vision. She closed her eyes against them.

“That’s it.”

She took a few more deep breaths like this and found herself relaxing, ever-so-slightly, into the leather of the seat. Then she opened her eyes.

The black man smiled a pleased smile, his fangs still prominent. “Now, you do have to drink the wine; you have no choice in the matter.” He captured her gaze in his and held it. “But it will help settle your nerves.”

Lily really did not want to drink the wine. She was a light weight and there was a lot of wine in that glass. Wine always worked too fast on her. It went straight to her head and she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. If she downed the contents of that glass, she would be hammered before they reached wherever they were going. Without her faculties, how would she at least be able to make certain that Tabitha was okay?

“Please –” she started to say, but the scarred man cut her off.

“Drink it, sweetheart,” he told her, turning toward her so that her side was against his broad chest. “Your resistance is really only fueling the desire of every wolf in this car.” He tenderly brushed the backs of his fingers down her cheek and she flinched when it sent a strange and not entirely unpleasant spark through her. “Is that what you want?” he asked, leaning forward so that his words brushed across her skin.

Lily shivered violently and took the glass, placing it to her lips. She swallowed and the wine burned down her throat. Warmth immediately spread across her chest.

The black man laughed. “You really know how to talk to a lady, James.”

“James” hadn’t taken his eyes off of Lily. She could tell because they seemed to burn into her. She took another big drink of the wine and resigned herself to her fate. In a few minutes, she’d managed to knock back nearly all of the glass and warmth and numbness were spreading like an analgesic fire through her middle. She felt its fingers slide inexorably lower, inching their way toward a growing moistness between her legs. Wine always did that to her. It was another reason she hadn’t wanted to drink it.

When she felt it take full effect, she couldn’t help the very soft moan that escaped her lips. She let her head drop back against the leather seat and ran her hands across her stomach to her legs. There, her fingers clutched at her dress as she pressed her legs tightly together.

“Shit,” the black man said. “Get us there quick, Isaac.” His voice had grown strangely husky and animalistic. “I don’t want to die today.”

Lily barely noticed his discomfort, and what she did notice, she didn’t care about. She was too high. She let her head roll slightly to the side, where he cheek pressed against James’s shoulder.

“You look about forty. Maybe forty-five. But you’re a werewolf.” She blinked again and bit her lip. His gaze flicked down and then back to her eyes. “So, you’re a lot older than that. Right?” Her speech was slowing, growing encumbered.

“I’m one hundred and twenty-eight years old,” he told her softly.

“Wow,” she said, and closed her eyes against a wave of intoxicated pleasure. When she re-opened them, she saw a muscle tick along James’s jaw. “You have, like, a whole century on me.” She laughed then, as this seemed very funny for some reason. And then she became all seriousness. “Do you have a mate, James?”

James waited several long, quiet moments before answering. Then he inclined his head once. “She died in 1956, in a fire.”

Sadness swept over Lily. She suddenly imagined herself standing outside of a burning building, everything she had ever loved stuck inside, dying while she could do nothing to save it. It hurt. She’d always been too empathic. Too sensitive to other people’s pain. And now was no different, despite the fact that the people were werewolves and that she was utterly sloshed.

“I’m… I’m so sorry.” She told him, gently placing her hand to his cheek. His eyes widened almost imperceptibly. Something curious flashed in the depths of his silver gaze – there one second, and gone in the next.

Lily moaned again and let her arm drop. She writhed in the seat, the heat and moisture between her legs becoming uncomfortably demanding.

“I think you gave her too much, Thomas,” Isaac called back from the front seat. “She’s blitzed. Was that really the plan?”

Thomas, who was obviously the black man, seemed to consider her for a moment and then he sighed. “You might be right. It’s hard for me to judge these kinds of things.”

“That’s because you weigh as much as an elephant, dude,” Isaac replied. “She’s a slip of a thing. And she’s not a werewolf. And she’s just been marked. She’s weak. She’s going to cum and pass out before we even get there.”

“We need to bring her back a bit,” James said, his tone still low, his voice soft.

“We can’t,” Thomas said, “We can’t kiss her, can we? Like he said, she’s got Kane’s mark on her.” He gestured to the blue symbol on Lily’s arm.

“We can give her some blood,” James said.

The werewolves fell silent then and Lily licked her lips, closing her eyes against a wave of dizziness that bordered on uncomfortable.

“All right,” Thomas said slowly. “You do it, James. She seems to like you.”

Lily listened to the discussion with a sensation of being once-removed. As if she were watching a movie. And so, as she would ask a television, she asked, “Won’t that turn her into a vampire?”

At this, Isaac and Thomas chuckled. James smiled and shook his head, his fangs having grown a little more since the last time he’d smiled. “No, sweetheart. No vampires here. Only wolves. And again, no. You won’t turn.”

She nodded, as if that made total sense, and then distractedly ran her hand over her thigh and between her leg. Both of the men in the back seat stilled, their eyes locked on her roaming fingers.

Lily moaned again. She was so warm… so wet. She wanted…
something
. She
needed
something. The mark on her arm tingled. She remembered the hand cuffs. The kiss.

Isaac cleared his throat. “Better do it soon, gentlemen. Before one of you goes off the deep end.” He shook his head as a light turned green and he turned another corner. “We’re almost there. Cole wants her docile, not comatose.”

James sat up and shrugged his sports coat off once more. Then he raised his wrist to his lips and sank his fangs into the vein. At the same time, Thomas placed his left hand behind Lily’s head to hold her still.

Lily frowned, wondering what was happening. And then James was placing his wrist to her mouth. “Drink,” he told her.

She hesitated, but he leaned in and placed his lips to her ear. “Drink, Lily.”

She opened her mouth then, and ran her tongue over the welling blood. It burned her tongue like 180 proof alcohol and she tried to jerk away. But Thomas held her fast and James pressed harder. In response, Lily instinctively swallowed, feeling as though if she didn’t she wouldn’t be able to breathe. The blood slid down her throat like fire, and she gasped. James removed his wrist after a single swallow. His wound immediately began to close.

Lily watched him move away and then she closed her eyes. Changes coursed through her. She felt as if she’d been flying and was now nearing the Earth once more. Her feet would touch down any second. The wine’s influence within her began to recede like a tide and the ache between her legs lessened. But it didn’t go away completely. She still felt weak, still groggy and heavy and incapable of quick thinking.

She still craved Daniel Kane.

But she could sense that she was, at least, more coherent. And, in a few seconds, the burning from the werewolf blood ebbed away as well. She swallowed and tried to clear her throat.

“That’s better,” Thomas said, smiling a satisfied smile. “That’s perfect.”

“And just in time,” Isaac said, as a garage door began to slide up in front of him and he pulled the sedan into the darkness beyond.

James said nothing. His mercurial gaze shimmered like melted platinum. In silence, he pulled on his sports coat.

Lily turned to look out the window and when the car stopped, both Thomas and James opened their doors and stepped out. A few seconds later, Isaac did the same.

Lily stayed where she was.

Now that she was here – now that she was seconds away from meeting Malcolm Cole – terror once more bloomed inside her. And the wine didn’t help matters. It effectively sapped away what strength that terror would have given her, leaving her simply scared and stupidly helpless.

Which is how I would have been anyway
, she thought.
He’s a werewolf, after all. And he’s surrounded by other werewolves and I’m a puny human and he has my best friend. I’m so screwed.

“Please step out of the car, Miss St. Claire,” Thomas said. Lily looked up. All three werewolves had gathered to stand by the door on her left. James offered her his hand. With a shaky breath, Lily took it.

Chapter Eight: The Shield

“We’ve got her, Chief!”

Daniel spun around and strode to the screen where the seated man before it had been working furiously. “They took Highway ten to the East Bank and the signal stopped at….” The man at the computer zoomed in on the screen until the street names were visible. “South River Road and Bird Heights Avenue.”

Daniel straightened and called several officers with him.

Half an hour earlier, traffic patrol around the city had managed to mark Lily’s speedy progress through town as she’d fled his house. There had been reports coming in from all along Bluebonnet, seemingly all at once, about her rapidly changing location – and the laws she was breaking on her journey. Her speed and determination and frank disregard of the most basic safety measures told Daniel that she wasn’t running from him. She wasn’t that stupid. If she had a bone to pick with him; if she was rightly upset with him for marking her without her permission, then she would have waited and confronted him when he’d returned.

This was different. Several officers had claimed that she’d driven on the shoulder, didn’t stop at traffic lights, and didn’t care whether she passed marked police cars. If she’d been running from Daniel, she would most certainly have veered away from anything having to do with the police. She would have tried to attract as little attention as possible from the law. His police force were his eyes and ears and they stretched across the city with long arms.

No. Lily hadn’t been thinking about him. Her mind was on something else.

And Daniel had pretty much known what it was.

After all, Tabitha hadn’t answered her phone. Even as he’d driven to his home to confirm his fears, he would have been willing to bet a thousand bucks and his soul that Malcolm Cole had gotten to Lily and given her an ultimatum – and that it involved threatening Tabitha’s life.

He’d been right of course, and in the space of thirty minutes, everything that Daniel held dear in the world had fallen into the hands of the man he hated most.

A few minutes after Daniel had made it to his house, the boys had located his bike on the shoulder of the intersection on the south end of Bluebonnet and Hillmont Avenue. It was amazing luck that the bike was still there, actually; it was a relatively new part of town and the traffic wasn’t as heavy.

But the key – and Lily – were both gone.

Now, as he left the station, flanked by several accompanying officers, he’d never been more grateful that he’d had a tracking device installed in the key in case of theft.

He was worlds more grateful that Lily had taken it with her.

* * * *

Lily uncurled her long legs and stepped out of the silver sedan. Her movements felt uncoordinated and she had to concentrate very hard to remain steady. She knew it was the wine. She was so angry to be losing this way. She hated feeling helpless; it was eating her up inside and, at the same time, the tragedy of it was that the wine – and the mark on her arm – were blunting her emotions, causing her ire to flag.

Daniel had done something to her when he’d given her his mark. He may have meant to protect her or claim her or whatever it was that his male ego had decided was the caveman thing to do. But he’d done something else to her as well. He had inadvertently made her submissive. She could sense that it was a temporary weakness and yet, the timing could not have been more horrible. Cole must have somehow known about the mark. He seemed to know everything. He’d made her drink the wine to reinforce the mark’s sedating effects. She was walking right into his well-laid trap like some brainless bombshell in a B horror movie who, for some reason, just
has
to go and check out that strange noise all by herself. In the forest. In her nightie.

Lily was not the submissive type. She’d been known to stand up to drunk, potbellied men who were waving kitchen knives and swearing about under-cooked pot roast. She’d taken down a wiry sixteen-year-old football player on meth who was violently swinging a baseball bat at her.
This
wasn’t like her. Not at all. And it was infuriating. Or it would have been, had she had the
energy
to be infuriated.

As it was however, when she straightened in the car’s doorway, she swayed ever so slightly, and James released her hand so that he could gently take her by her upper arms and steady her.