Witch Interrupted (8 page)

“If you wanted to be a keeper, you’d still be with them,” he told her, mostly believing it. He couldn’t reconcile the two parts of the woman before him, the one who’d nearly cried at the thought she might have to kill him, and Chang Cai’s reputation or the way he knew keepers to be. She seemed to be Lars’s polar opposite. When things didn’t add up, it was because he was missing several factors in the equation.

There wasn’t a scientific calculator in the world that would multiply Chang Cai times the keepers and get Katherine Zhang as the product.

“I brought you here to tell you about my research.” He tapped his temple. “Let me prove to you why you don’t want me to lose anything up top.”

“You’ll share the spell recipes?” She seemed unaware of the fact she’d crossed the room, drawn to him like a magnet. She had no interest in the diagrams on the walls, the lab equipment, the computers, the charts. She was completely mesmerized by him.

He liked it.

“I’ll share…if you agree to research with me instead of wipe me.”

She licked her lips, glanced up at him and jangled her handcuffs. “If we’re going to work together, we should shake on it. Which I can’t do like this.”

Her scent spiked. His wolf did too. A flicker in her throat indicated her racing pulse. Was she excited to touch him? Or excited by the sexual tension sizzling in the air, so obvious even a clueless scientist like himself could taste it?

“If I take the handcuffs off, are you going to behave?”

She smiled at him then, a bright, unexpected beam that lit up her otherwise serious face. “Define behave.”

She was…flirting.

“Have I convinced you to listen? We’re safe here. No keepers, no Birmingham packers, no covens, nobody but us.” He felt like an idiot, but he rubbed his hand across his chest, attracting her attention to it. “This place is fully warded. I’ll show you everything. Hypotheses. Recipes. Secrets.”

“I want to see,” she breathed.

It would have been practical to remove the handcuffs from behind her. Instead, Marcus reached around her and caressed her arms. His palms grazed her skin until he encountered metal.

He clasped her wrists long enough that she glanced up at him. “Marcus?”

“Good thing I don’t need keys.” He popped one ring, careful not to let the metal bite into her. The handcuffs clinked as her wrist came free.

She brought her arms in front of her, between their bodies where there wasn’t much space, and awkwardly shoved one hand into a front pocket while offering him the other. “Shake?”

He took her hand, rubbing the back of it with his thumb. Her skin was silky, but her fingertips had faint calluses. It was an agile hand. A witch’s hand.

He wanted her. Wanted that hand touching him everywhere. It took most of his willpower not to act on it.

“Do we have a deal, Katie?”

Her other hand joined the clasp. “I’m sorry, Marcus,” she whispered.

“Why?” He smiled down at her, feeling oddly possessive, and then smelled valerian.

Reacting faster than thought, he leaped back, landing on the other side of the trailer. Lab equipment rattled. A stack of charts hit the floor, scattering papers everywhere. His ears popped.

“Shit,” she exclaimed, a wad of valerian root in one hand. She’d obviously secreted it in her pocket at some point. She held it out like a weapon. “You’re really fast.”

“Too slow to realize you didn’t mean a word of our conversation,” he growled.

She advanced. He avoided. He didn’t want to hurt her, but an alpha witch could knock him out long enough to do a lot of damage. All it would take would be that valerian, or her, contacting his skin. Luckily she didn’t have it in projectile form, like keepers used for combat situations.

By the Goddess, he would not let the Black Widow chase him out of his own secret hideout.

“Come on, Marcus.” Katie swung the herb, and the blasted wolf dodged again. “I might be the most despised person in both of our worlds, but I know my duty.”

“Your duty?”

“My duty to protect shifters from discovery. The sheer chaos that would erupt if wolves found out about witches. It would be the end of all secrecy.”

She considered breaking for the door, but he’d be on her before she got two steps past the threshold. She had to knock him out if she had any chance of escape. She’d worry about neutralizing him later. Without other resources, dealing with Marcus might mean accepting Vern’s latest bribe—some new location spell that used family DNA. Vern hadn’t badgered her in months, which was unusual for him, but he’d jump at the chance to buy her services.

Marcus, eyes glittering, grabbed a blanket off the back of a chair and shook it. “You’re about to be very sorry.”

“I’m already sorry.” She snapped off a thread of valerian and flipped it at him, but it didn’t have enough heft to reach his skin. “You’re the biggest threat to my existence since Lars decided to kill me after the memory wipe. That was what they were going to do, you know. Vern just let them think they succeeded.”

“You’ve spent too much of your life being a traitor to be able to trust anyone else,” Marcus snarled. “That’s your problem.”

It hit Katie deep, somewhere she tried to hide from Tonya and Dad. Was she broken? Was she unforgivable? “That’s not—”

Marcus sprang at her, blanket first, as if he was capturing an angry cat that didn’t want to go to the vet. He’d wrapped half her body before she’d finished registering his attack. Her valerian hand stuck out at one end of the blanket.

Katie writhed in her fuzzy prison. All she needed was a whisk of his skin. A tap. Damned cognizant wolves. Always a trial, and Marcus wasn’t as fooled by her tactics as others had been. He’d covered her exposed areas with the blanket, including her head.

She could hear him bitching and growling, but she couldn’t see him.

She kicked and yelled. One moment he was friendly and thought-provoking, the next hot under the collar—and in other places. The constant U-turns were getting old. She suspected he shared her sentiment, but what else could she do? Go along with a wolf who was obviously imbalanced, just because she liked him?

Wolves couldn’t turn back into witches. Becoming a wolf was a banishment from which there was no escape. If he preferred magic to fur, he should have kept it in his pants.

And whoever he’d slept with to become a wolf, she was one lucky bitch.

Katie tried to curl into a defensive ball. Marcus’s strong arms held her upright. A stinging blow smacked her extended hand, numbing it. She yelped and dropped the small tangle of valerian.

He scooped her up, yet again, bundling her through his trailer. Her head swam as she fought. The blanket smothered her. He jostled her, slinging her forward. She landed on a relatively soft surface. Fabric tangled her arms, her face, part of her legs. His fingers grabbed her handcuffed wrist and dragged her arm up until she heard an ominous, metallic click.

She tugged, hard, confirming she was now cuffed…to something.

Uh-oh.

Her nightmare. And her something else, something sordid and forbidden. She was almost entirely at his mercy, except for the lavender stashed in her bra and shoe and the mint in her pocket.

Katie yanked anyway, to see if the handcuffs would hold. His abuse of the lock should have weakened it, but it wasn’t weak enough for her to break. She’d have to pick it.

She’d never done this without backup. Keepers didn’t work alone. There was no way Tonya and Dad could find her in time to prevent…what?

What was Marcus planning? If his primary goal was to keep her from wiping him and stopping his all-important research, wouldn’t running have been his best choice?

He unfurled the blanket from around her. She was on a pull-down bed.

Katie gasped for air. “Are you trying to smotherme?”

When he tossed the blanket, her glasses clattered to the floor somewhere.
Dammit.
The needle concealed in the temple had been her best bet for the handcuffs. The specs were pricey for more than just the prescription.

He loomed over her with an annoyed frown. His muscles rippled under his smooth, brown skin, and she tried to suppress lascivious thoughts.

“No, I need you breathing.” He opened a drawer under the bed, and she scuttled into a sitting position. The cabinets above her had inset lights. Her wrist was cuffed to a fabric loop she presumed had something to do with the pull-down construction. Surely he hadn’t had it custom-installed for handcuffs.

Censoring that part of her imagination, she assessed the area for makeshift weapons, lock picks, anything she could use.

He shrugged into a long-sleeved gray T-shirt and opened another drawer. “You understand, of course, I’m going to have to make sure there are no more herbs.” He snapped on surgical gloves.

Surgical gloves?

If she went for the hidden lavender, he’d see. To put him off guard, she turned out her pockets with her free hand. The mint fell out of one, and a scrap of valerian fell out of the other. “This is all I’ve got.”

“I’ll take that, if you please.” He watched her expectantly. “No magic.”

She infused the herb anyway.

He wriggled a gloved finger in his ear. “I said no magic.”

“You say a lot of things.” She flipped the dried roots at him, gave him her meanest look and ate the mint. It wouldn’t do anything to either of them—there wasn’t enough of it—but she wanted to be defiant.

“Is that all?” He slipped a green capsule into his pocket.

He had to know he couldn’t harm her with magic. “What’s the pill for?”

“Monkshood remedy.”

“I don’t have any monkshood.” For starters, spell-grade monkshood was hard to come by. And if she had any, she wouldn’t have used it. She’d always—
always
—avoided killing when she could, and Marcus wasn’t a feral trying to rip her to pieces.

“I’ll be the judge of that.” He lowered his hands to his belt and started unbuckling it.

“What exactly are you doing?” As much as she’d like to see him naked, did he truly mean to…

Marcus smiled and tucked his shirt into his pants. Despite her best efforts, she kept watching his hands. She imagined them on her body, without the latex coating… Hot and hard and demanding. She was handcuffed, trapped, unable to stop him. Her body reacted with a surge of lust.

When he rebuckled his belt, she returned her gaze to his smirk.

He knew what she was feeling. Of course. Goddess, he must think she was insane. He was right. She had to be insane to be turned on by this particular state of affairs.

He reached across the thin mattress and drew her ankles down, trying to uncurl her defensive posture. Trying to position her for whatever he had in mind.

“Are you ready?” His eyes, brown and unruffled, bored into her.

Yes!

But…no.

She crooked her legs, knees toward her chest. He wasn’t expecting it. The movement knocked him off balance, and he stumbled against the edge of the bed. As soon as she had the right angle, she let him have it.

He took the kick against his torso with an
oof
. Grimacing, he snagged her ankles again and hauled her body toward him until she was stretched flat. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

“Neither.” She scissored her legs, twisted, threw pillows at him with her free arm. She jogged and swam to maintain her strength and dexterity, but she was no match for a wolf.

Marcus, a neutral expression on his handsome face, let her kick and curse at him. She used every nasty insult thirty years of living around nasty people had taught her before she realized he was waiting for her to wear herself out. Like a child having a tantrum.

Well, if that was what he expected… She pretended to be winded and settled down, breathing hard. Nodding, he slid off her tennis shoes one at a time, tossing them to the floor.

“You’re right about one thing,” he said. “I am going to undress you. But not for the reason you’re fantasizing about.”

“I’m fantasizing about kicking you in the head.” Her desires wouldn’t, never had, beaten her. Dammit, she was so out of practice. And so attracted.

Marcus was harder to resist than any wolf or man she’d ever met.

“Be that as it may, you might as well cooperate,” he continued. “I won’t stop until I’m satisfied you don’t have any more surprises on you. I will search you quickly, and I won’t violate your person in any way, shape or form.”

The impact of his announcement slammed into her. He was about to remove her clothing, all of it, and inspect her. Everywhere.

Goddess. An ache woke in her pussy that was impossible to ignore. “If I don’t cooperate, are you going to violate my person?”

She was
so
not cooperating.

“Absolutely not.” He peeled off her pink sock, shook it and smirked when lavender fell out. He inserted it into a small medical waste bin before his gloved hands tightened on her bare ankles. “I’m not a keeper. I don’t violate people.”

Without further ado, he grasped her jeggings at the knees and yanked.

They slid off her as if she was oiled. Katie squeaked and tugged her T-shirt to hide her underwear. Marcus examined the seams of her pants before giving them a vigorous shake.

Then he looked at her. Her cheeks burned as his gaze traveled up her legs, lingering at her hips. She pressed her thighs together.

“You’re in good physical condition,” he observed. It didn’t feel like a compliment—merely an observation. “That’s not always the case with a witch.”

She glared at him. “I never know when I might need to kick someone’s ass.”

He didn’t look the least bit intimidated by her declaration and eased himself onto the mattress. When he reached for her free hand, she flailed at him. “Do you see any lavender? No. You found it. Back off.”

Instead, he sprang. In a fraction of a second, he had her spread on her back. His hands grasped her shirt at each shoulder. Their eyes met right before he ripped her T-shirt in half, laying her nearly bare.

But…he’d promised not to!

He was just like the wolves she’d dealt with. Violent and crude. She hated him—she had to hate him for this. He fell on her, his weight pinning her down. Her traitorous body responded with a joyful pulse of desire.

Her thrashing wedged his hips between her thighs, increasing their intimacy tenfold. She tried to pull his hair, claw his eyes, but he grasped her wrist and held her away from his skin.

“I’m going to check your undergarments for spell components. That’s all I’m going to do.” He stared down at her, his irises fading to pale blue. She watched the brown disappear until only the wolf was left. “In case you were wondering, casting my antidote capsule would increase my vitality.”

She considered cursing some more, but something in his expression silenced her. Especially when his gaze dropped to her lips…and his cock hardened against her pussy.

Katie barely withheld a groan. His shirt, she noticed distractedly, smelled like her favorite fabric softener.

Marcus adjusted his fingers around her wrist. When she struggled, the rubber of his gloves tweaked the tiny hairs on her arm. His other hand patted her shoulder.

“This isn’t personal,” he said, though his arousal told a different story. His gloved hand cleaned the shreds of her shirt away and slipped between their bodies.

The lavender hidden in her bra prickled her skin. Could she use it like that? She’d never cast a spell with her boob before, but there was always a first time. She just needed him to touch her. She licked her lips hopefully. She’d get him to kiss her a few times before she infused the lavender. Of course, then she’d have a big, sexy wolf passed out atop her and still no way to escape him.

But he didn’t kiss her. He adjusted his torso and ran a finger under the strap of her satin demi-bra. He was going to find the lavender if he continued downward.

He swept his fingers under the material, her breast in his rubber-coated hand. Her nipple hardened. The stimulation tumbled through her helpless body, landing right between her legs.

She bit her lip to keep from whimpering. Goddess, she wished he’d drop the pretense of searching her and…

He brought the lavender out and twirled its silvery stem between them. “Look what I found.”

“Oops.”

He pitchedit behind him without taking his gaze off her. “Did I miss any leaves?”

He folded the lightly padded cup inside out, checking with his fingers instead of his eyes. Satisfied, he shifted to check her other breast. This time it was almost a caress. The bra strap slid off her shoulder. His palm, the glove, dragged across her tight nipple. She tried to control her breathing, but it rushed out of her as if they were already having sex.

His eyelashes fluttered down as he gave in to the urge to look at her chest. This was her opening. She could whip her knee into his groin and wound him long enough to…

What? She was handcuffed to his bed, and he’d stolen her lavender.

And she was enjoying his strip search so much more than she should.

“Are you happy now? There’s nowhere else I could hide anything.”

Rising to his hands and knees, he slid his hand down her body and hovered over her hips.

“No,” she said, when what she really meant was,
Please
.

Staring into her eyes, Marcus palmed her between the legs. And she let him. She just let him. With gloves on, he hopefully wouldn’t notice the dampness, but his nostrils flared all the same.

His fingers pressed but didn’t probe.

Or pleasure.

“You’ll regret this,” Katie said in a surprisingly relaxed tone, considering how crazed she felt inside.

“Oh, I really doubt that.” His huskiness was the first sign this was affecting him more than he let on. It went beyond his body’s obvious reaction, beyond his wolfish irises. He slid his hand farther, curving around to her ass. Her thighs separated of their own volition.

He paused for a moment, and his dominance of her sank in. Katie swallowed hard. She knew what she smelled like to him, what it meant that she wasn’t lifting a finger to fight.