Badlands: The Lion's Den (4 page)

Finn leaned against the bar, his heart hammering in his chest. Sweat plastered his hair to his skull, and he was bathed in delicious heat. Should he take Flora upstairs right now and finish what they’d started? Would it be fair to her? She barely knew him, and she hadn’t exactly volunteered to be his mate – he’d just jumped in and claimed her.

Why not? She wants it as much as I do.

He couldn’t tell if that was his brain thinking, or some other portion of his anatomy.

He grabbed a napkin and mopped the sweat from his forehead while Jennifer silently held out the two beers he’d just ordered. When he reached across the bar to take them from her, she held on to them and looked him in the eye.

“Interesting timing on claiming your mate,” she said, her voice monotone. “What with the anniversary coming up and all. Three years ago next month.” She raised an eyebrow. “Or did it slip your mind?”

“No, it did not slip my mind,” Finn said, a surge of anger flaring up in him at the insulting suggestion. He forced himself to tamp it down. This was Jennifer speaking.

“Well, I guess now you’ll be able to put it all in the past.” Her eyes were swimming now, although she didn’t shed a tear. “Forget Marybeth ever existed.”

“Jennifer. How can you say that?” Finn rasped. The hot, triumphant feeling that had roared through him just minutes ago vanished. Images of Marybeth flashed through his mind now, and his throat tightened in remembered sorrow.

“I just didn’t expect that you’d find a replacement for her so fast. No big deal.” She shoved the beers into his hand.

“Flora isn’t a
replacement
, and I don’t understand why you’re acting like this.”

“With you moving on, it’s just…it’s just like letting her go for good.” Her mouth pursed in hurt and she blinked hard.

“I’m not
moving on
. I’m helping someone.” He struggled to keep the anger from his voice. “I will never forget Marybeth, and you know that.”

Jennifer glanced at Liam, who had been summoned to the bar because of the intrusion of Ruben’s men. “It’s different for you,” she said coldly. “You still have family. Marybeth was
all I had
.” Then she looked him right in the eyes, with a spark of fury. “You let her die,” she spat at him, and stomped off, leaving Finn reeling. Jennifer had never spoken to him like that before.

Finn felt the familiar roaring in his ears, and memories from his past rolled over him like a suffocating sandstorm.

Sergeant Marybeth Collins hunkered down beside him, wiping sweat from her face. Her hair was damp and her fatigues hung limp on her slender, wiry frame. “Any idea how we’re going to get out of this one, Rex?”

Finn’s rank was staff sergeant, but shifter habits and shifter hierarchy died hard. Marybeth was a lion shifter too, and she deferred to him as much as a pride leader as she did because of military discipline. He didn’t correct her. And he knew she thought of him as her Rex not just because they were both lions, but because she believed him to be her destined mate. They didn’t talk about it. Ever. And she didn’t let her feelings for him get in the way of her duties. She was a damn good soldier and had forged her four-man fire team into a tight, disciplined group with a strong sense of camaraderie.

Three men now. Rodgers had taken a shot to the belly the night before. He hadn’t made it. Usually the big wolf would have been able to heal the injury, even out here, running low on beans and bullets. But the insurgents had good intel and good funding. The round that had taken Rodgers out had been silver. There was no coming back from that. Gut-shot with silver. It was a hard, bloody, brutal way to go.

Finn glanced at Marybeth and shook his head. “It’s a clusterfuck,” he growled.

The second half of the squad, under the command of a fox shifter who made up for what he lacked in brawn with keen tactical intelligence, was under cover behind a building on the other side of the square but visible from Finn’s vantage point. Eight of them left altogether.

More than a dozen of the other guys to take down. All human, but well-armed and with a superior knowledge of the terrain…and Finn’s squad weren’t the shifters they’d been when they’d first been shipped overseas. The relentless heat, the injuries, the exhaustion and their dwindling supplies had worn down their strength and stamina. Worse still, the psychological strain of warfare was taking its toll. A couple of the men were spooked – nerves as taut as violin strings and jumping at shadows. Brown, the massive, good-natured bear shifter who had always been so ready with a joke, had become a sullen, snarling loner. Finn had heard him sobbing in the night. Marybeth had developed that burned-out vet’s thousand-yard stare, her eyes huge and glassy in her gaunt face. Still…

Finn rasped his palm over the stubble on his square jaw. “They have better kit and better intel. They know the terrain. But they’re human. We’re faster and stronger. Better reflexes. Our best chance to take them out is a full-frontal assault.”

Marybeth nodded. Though her wiry, muscular frame was bordering on the too-thin after weeks of reduced rations, she was the quickest of them all – sharp-eyed, intuitive and as fast as a rattlesnake. Both teams had some serious brawn as well – Finn was a Rex, and there was an Alpha wolf and a bear shifter among their number.

“Hit ’em hard, hit ’em fast,” Marybeth agreed. “Put ’em down.”

“Finn?” Flora’s voice rang in his ear, and he realized she was standing there, staring up at him with deep worry etched on her face. She was still pale and sweat-drenched from the scene they’d played out just minutes ago.

He should be the one asking her if
she
was all right. He was a fucking mess. What right did he have to claim a woman like Flora?

Then again, what choice did he have? He couldn’t deny it – something about Flora called out to his very soul in a way that no woman ever had before. He would die before he’d let the bears, or anyone else, take her away.

“Let’s go. Up to my apartment. I’m done for the night,” he said to her, his voice raspy. He saw her look of confusion and worry, and it hurt him to the core.

* * * * *

The apartment was located right behind the Lion’s Den. To get there, all they had to do was go through a door at the back of the club, down a hallway, and up a flight of stairs.

Finn flung the front door open and Flora strode in, looking around curiously.

The living room/kitchen was utilitarian and completely impersonal.

There was a black leather sofa and matching armchair and a beat-up wooden coffee table facing a wall-mounted TV set, and a bookcase stocked with a couple of dozen well-worn military history books and thrillers. The window had blackout curtains, Flora noticed. The kitchen had a small, square wooden table and two chairs.

There was one picture on a shelf of the bookcase, of a military squadron in some desert country. The picture frame was black.

So, he had suffered a terrible loss. Given the sudden grim look on Finn’s face, now did not seem like the appropriate time to ask about it.

Other than that one photograph, there were no family pictures, no knick-knacks, no trophies – nothing that spoke of his personality or his tastes, or what he loved and treasured.

Flora thought the room felt hard and lonely. She thought back to her own room, living on the farm with her family and then at the Wilkinsons’. She’d never had money, but she’d always managed to personalize her little space. She’d put wildflowers in Mason jars. She’d fished old pictures from trash heaps and painted the frames with leftover paint jars purchased at a steep discount from the hardware store, and she’d framed pictures from discarded magazines or decorative fabric that she’d bought from thrift stores.

“Be it ever so humble,” Finn said, gesturing at the room.

Flora laughed. “And there I always dreamed of mating for money.”

“Did you?”

She smiled at him. “No, silly. I just dreamed of being able to choose who I’d want to choose.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

It certainly did. But from the age of sixteen, she’d been told who she was going to be mated with. She’d been told how lucky she was that a man like Loren Haig would even look at her, when he could have anyone – the implication being that he was mating down. And she was mating up.

And then she’d found out exactly what kind of man Loren Haig really was. She shuddered and hugged herself.

That bastard will never father my cubs.

“Is it really that bad?” Finn asked, and she realized she was scowling.

“No, no,” she said quickly. “Really. Before I came here, I lived out in the middle of nowhere in a farmhouse with no electricity, and shared one bedroom with two other women.” Two women she’d grown up with and thought were friends. “I was just having a bad memory flashback.” Anxious to change the subject, she looked at his TV. “You guys actually get TV reception here?”

“Yeah, we can pick up satellite signals. We have all the equipment from before the last government crackdown, and stuff gets smuggled in on the regular. Weapons, medicine, cars…everything. That’s how I got my books.” At her shocked look, he added with amusement, “You’re surprised? It’s a state full of rebels and outlaws.”

“True,” she said, nodding.

Finn stood there awkwardly, as if he didn’t know what to do with himself now that there was another person in the apartment. Maybe he didn’t have guests here that often. That thought made her feel oddly happy. Special. It would be so nice to be special to someone, rather than a burden.

“So you won’t have to worry about missing
Vampire Diaries
, or
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
, or whatever your addiction is,” he said.

“Vampire what? Keeping up with who?”

He looked at her, puzzled. “You literally don’t know who I’m talking about? Nobody in your town watched TV?”

“When I was fourteen, my family sent me off to live with another pride. They were these back-to-the-land types who didn’t have electricity or anything.”

“Why’d they do that?”

Why indeed. The memory still stung. Ripped away from her school, her friends, her community… And nobody had even missed her when she was gone.

She shrugged lightly. “I was the only girl. There were twelve of us. My brothers were helpful on the farm. I guess I wasn’t. My family couldn’t really afford me.” And apparently, as she’d found out a year ago, it had been very lucrative to give her up.

“Didn’t you go to school?”

“The Wilkinsons homeschooled us all.”

Her only contact with the outside world had been the monthly check-in by the Council for Shifter Affairs representative. Ameera Radwell, a fussy little bureaucrat of a woman. And thank God for that check-in, because without it, she had a feeling they wouldn’t even have bothered with hiding her out on that farm for all those years. She’d just have been shipped off to some facility somewhere until…

She shuddered and quickly pushed those thoughts out of her head. “Would I be able to work at the Lion’s Den, maybe cleaning up?” she asked him. “I have no money left at all, and I don’t want to be a burden.”

“You wouldn’t be a burden, but I understand if you want to work. I’ll talk to Blair – she’s one of the managers. You can start tomorrow.”

“Oh, that would be lovely. Thank you so much. What? Why are you smiling?”

He gave her a lopsided grin. “Your manners. There aren’t that many people here like you. Most of us are…hard, I guess. We keep up barriers.”

She looked at him suspiciously.

“I’m not making fun of you,” he protested. “It’s actually really nice.”

Was that genuine warmth in his gaze?

She felt herself blushing, and looked away. Then a thought occurred to her. “So, if you have TV, you must get internet service?”

Maybe she could get some intel on the people who were chasing her. The ones who had hired Loren to deceive her. The ones who wanted to use her as a lab rat.

Finn shook his head. “Unfortunately, not anywhere in our territory. The only cell tower that connects to the internet is in bear territory, and ever since Ruben took over, we’re cut off.”

“Oh. Okay.” She found herself bobbing her head for no reason, and stopped. Then she stood there, not knowing what to say next. She didn’t have a lot of practice in making conversation with men. And although Finn struck her as the kind of guy who would normally be as smooth as silk when it came to women, he didn’t seem to know what to say to her.

There was a long, awkward silence that seemed to stretch on for several years. What was he thinking?

Finally, he cleared his throat. “Anyway, I’ll take the couch. You can have the bed. I’d sleep in the bed with you, but then I wouldn’t actually get any sleep. You have that effect on me.”

She felt her cheeks heating up, and warmth rippled through her body. “Uh…thank you?”

He managed a rueful smile. The fire that had been in his eyes earlier when he’d looked at her…it had been extinguished. Something had happened to him after he’d spanked her, something that had upset him. “It’s meant as a compliment, I assure you.”