Charlotte Boyett-Compo- Wyndsheer (7 page)

Tucking her lower lip between her teeth, she scooted off the bed and left him lying there with one knee crooked, his hands behind his head. When she came back, he had left the bed and was at the wash basin, pumping water into a kettle.

He glanced around at her to see her shrugging into his shirt again. He was disappointed that she’d covered up her perfect body. “Want some tea?”

She nodded, her gaze sweeping over his bare back and down the tight jeans that now covered his long legs, his bare feet making him even more sexy in her eyes. Her gaze drifted up him slowly.

“Are you staring at my ass?” he asked.

Her inspection had stopped at a large dark area on the left side of his back just above the waistband of his jeans. She walked to him, curious about the discoloration. “What happened to your back?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Draeton,” was all he said as he took the kettle to the stove and wood stove.

She let out a long breath. “How long were you there?” she asked quietly.

“Five years.”

She knew all about the Maximum Security Prison near Cuthbert. It was where they sent the truly dangerous criminals.

And Lycants who could not be controlled by ordinary means.

She went to him and put her fingertips on the dark area the size of a saucer that stained his back. “What caused this?”

He turned so her hand slid from the rough, puckered scar to his belly, smiling faintly at her as her fingers spiked through the curly hairs along his tigerline. “You really want to know?”

She slid her arms around his waist. “I want to know everything about you,” she answered.

Reaching behind him, he took her wrist and unhooked it from his body, then led her toward the rocker. When he would have offered it to her, she shook her head and slipped gracefully to the floor. She instinctively knew the rocker was the only thing that would help ease the pain she sensed in him. As he sat, she saw the flicker of it pass over his features. She laid her head on his thigh, her hand wrapped around his calf and stared into the fire.

Grateful he did not have to look into her eyes as he explained about his imprisonment, he tangled his fingers in her dark curls.

“I was arrested right after the final battle at Fairmoore,” he said. “That was when all my kind were being rounded up and sent to re-conditioning camps.”

“You balked at being arrested,” she said, understanding that he would have resisted what he had to have known was coming.

“It took ten of them to bring me to ground,” he said as his fingers slid through her hair, combing it between his splayed fingers. “I pissed them off so badly they would have slit my throat if one of the scientists hadn’t intervened.”

“One of the men who had engineered you?”

“The very one who made me what I am, aye,” he said. “He was a mean son of a bitch and determined to break me.”

She could hear the anger in his tone and felt it in the way his hand moved along her scalp.

“This particular bastard had developed what he called an equalizer,” he continued. “It was a weapon ....” He let out a harsh breath. “Nay, it was a torture device that allowed him to be able to easily control a recalcitrant Lycant.”

“Were there many of you at Draeton?”

“Just four of us full-bloods who had been government assassins,” he answered. “I was the only one who survived.”

She lifted her head and looked up at him. “What happened to the others?”

He looked down at her. “The scientist’s name was Ordwell,” he told her. “Simon Ordwell, and he was a sadistic bastard who got his pleasure from hurting us. He hurt the other three so badly they died ungodly deaths in unrelenting agony.”

Her hand tensed on his calf. “I’m glad you lived.”

“I was stronger than the others,” he said and a strange shadow flitted through his gaze. “He took more care with me.”

She watched him shift in the chair as though feeling the pain that had been meted out to him.

“The scarring on your back was caused from the weapon he created?”

He nodded. “It was a direct-energy transmitter. It sent 250,000 volts of electricity through the central nervous system to control the skeletal muscles.”

“That much voltage would kill a human outright,” she whispered.

“And put a major hurt on a Lycant,” he stated dryly. “The device was designed with two transprobes built into a wide fibromesh belt that was locked around my waist. If you tried to remove the belt, you got a warning jolt and if you continued, the voltage went up and the duration of the hit increased. Each probe was situated over a kidney. With the transprobe activated against a place where you’d been hit time and time again, it will burn the flesh and do permanent tissue and organ damage.”

“It damaged your kidney.”

“It destroyed one and severely damaged the other to the point where it began to fail,” he replied. “But lucky me, Ordwell had invented an artificial kidney that he was good enough to implant in me. The only trouble is when it is doing what it was intended to do--purifying my blood--it hurts like hell. The more active I am, the more frequently the AK works. The more frequently it works, the more pain I feel.” He shrugged. “It’s a no-win/no-win situation for me.”

The kettle began to whistle and he would have gotten up but instead she did, padding softly into the kitchen area to fix them a cup of tea. She brought the mugs to the fireplace and sank down at his feet again. She saw him wince as he reached for the mug she held up to him.

“Thank God you got out of Draeton,” she said, tears filling her eyes at the agony this man had been made to endure and was still enduring.

“They needed an assassin to take out General Bashenko and I was the only Lycant assassin left alive and they needed my killing abilities,” he said. “I was given a full pardon after I fried his evil ass.” He took a long swig of the hot tea then rested his head on the back of the rocker.

She thought of the head of military security who had attempted a coup of his own after the war, hoping to rule the world and was awed that she was in the presence of the man who had brought him down.

“I disappeared after that,” he said. “I didn’t want them to know where I was so I went looking for the perfect hideout and found it here.”

“Wendt will tell them where you are,” she said then took a sip of the tea.

“Oh, they know I’m up here,” he told her. “They just don’t know where. They’ve tried to catch me, have sent agents in but after awhile, they stopped coming.”

“If they pardoned you, why would they still be coming?”

“Ordwell wants me back,” he said. His eyes darkened. “For reasons of his own.”

“What happened to them?” she asked. “The agents, I mean.”

“I led them over the Ridge and into the territory of Ad Fear Liath Mor. What happened to them after that is anyone’s guess.”

She had no idea what he meant and wasn’t sure she wanted to ask.

He locked gazes with her. “I’ll be leading Wendt and his men over there tomorrow,” he said.

“You won’t hurt them?” she asked.

“I won’t lay a hand on them,” he said and his eyes never wavered from hers. “You have my word on that.”

She believed him and laid her head on his thigh again, her attention on the leaping flames. “How long will you be gone?”

“Two, three days at the most,” he replied.

“Will you leave me a map on how to get out of here if I ....”

“No.”

The one word was a firm denial that brooked no argument. She was silent for a long while then asked him what would happen to her if he failed to return.

“I’ll return, lass,” he answered. “Never doubt it.” He shifted in the rocker and grunted, wincing.

She lifted her head. “Why don’t you go lie down, Jamie? Or is it better sitting?”

“It hurts either way,” he said then finished off his tea, setting the mug on the hearth. “Come here and let me hold you.”

She put her half-empty mug on the hearth and sat down in his lap, worried that her weight would cause him more pain, but he wrapped his arms around her. She laid her head on his shoulder and began to twirl a lock of his chest hair around and around her finger.

“You’re obsessed with my chest hair, aren’t you, lass?” he asked with a snort.

“I love it,” she said and spread her fingers through the thick mass. “I especially like the way it makes my nipples hard.” She grinned when she felt his shaft tense at that comment.

He put a hand to her chin and lifted her head, covered her mouth with his and drank deeply from the sweetness he found there, slipping his tongue deep. His fingers trailed down her neck and beneath the hem of the shirt to tease the silky curls above her sheath. One finger dipped to the moist bud that began to swell the moment he touched it.

She pulled back from him and slid off his lap, positioning herself between his legs. “Now it’s my turn to do the tasting,” she said, her fingers going to his zipper.

Jamie spread his knees farther apart and watched her bent head as she undid his jeans and reached inside to free his cock. She took hold of his inseam and held it tight as she lowered her mouth to slide her soft lips down the length of him.

“God,” he breathed, closing his eyes and letting his head fall against the back of the rocker. His hands went to her head to hold it gently as she plied her mouth on his willing flesh. The suction as she worked her way up and down his shaft, the pressure she exerted on the fabric of his jeans to pull it taut, was causing such exquisite torment he never wanted it to end.

She heard his breathing increase in depth and timing as his hands flexed in her hair. He was elevating his hips in rhythm to her suckling and that turned her on as she relaxed her throat and took him as deeply as she could. He was a large man with a broad cock--at least ten inches of sweet, hot muscle--but she managed to accommodate him well enough, pulling him nearly free of her mouth only to swirl her tongue around the knob of him again and again before drawing him deeply into that moist cavern once more.

He was on the verge of release and would have pushed her head away but she would not allow it, obviously wanting to take all he had to give her and unwilling to break away at the last moment. His cock was rock-hard and throbbing and when he came, he gave a shout that he felt to the very tips of his toes and had to slap his palms on the rocker’s arms to keep from slamming her head down on his groin.

The climax seemed to go on forever and when she had drained him, milked him dry, he opened his eyes to see her looking at him, sweeping her tongue over her lips in such a way he felt another spasm rock his shaft.

“Lass, you’ll kill me like that,” he said, trying to push the agony in his back aside so he could enjoy the last tremors of pleasure her mouth had given him.

She knew he was hurting so she got lithely to her feet and held her hand out. “Come to bed with me, my husband,” she said.

Her words gave him a jolt of happiness. “Are you sure?” he asked, searching her eyes.

“I have no intention of ever going back,” she answered. “I’m sure.”

He slipped his arm under her legs even though she protested him lifting her. Carrying her to their bed--he would never again think of it only as his own--he laid her down and slid in beside her, gathering her tightly into his arms.

“I can’t love you just yet,” he said for the pain was disabling him so badly it was all he could do not to groan.

“Just hold me,” she said, her hand smoothing over his chest. “I’ll just play with your hair.”

He laughed. “A woman obsessed,” he said with a snort.

For a long time they just lay there in silence, content and at peace then his fingers began rambling over her arm, her shoulder, her waist and when one fingertip touched the scar beneath her right arm, he asked her how she’d come by it.

“When Stephen found us at the Carlton that day and shot Cody, the bullet went through Cody at an angle and grazed my arm, burying itself in the mattress,” she replied.

“It’s a wonder he didn’t kill you both,” he observed.

“Steve is a piss-poor shot,” she said. “Always was. He told me he aimed directly over where Cody’s heart is but standing where he was above us and at that angle, all he did was put a deep furrow in Cody’s back--painful though it was--and nipped me. We had a hard time explaining how Cody got shot.”

“Your husband wasn’t arrested?”

“We didn’t want anyone to know about the affair. That would have been career suicide for all three of us,” she said.

“He’s an agent, too?”

“Was,” she said. “After the incident, he quit the agency.” She raised one shoulder. “I was going to leave him when I came back from that last assignment.”

“And marry blondie?”

“Not likely,” she told him. “Cody was pressuring me to do that, but I had no intention of tying myself to him. He’s too unpredictable and like I said, he’s just plain mean.”

Jamie fingered the scar under her arm. “He hasn’t seen mean yet,” he said quietly.

She moved back from him and looked into his face. “You said you wouldn’t hurt him or his men.”

“I won’t.”

There was something dangerous in his eyes but there was truth there, as well. She believed him when he said he wouldn’t hurt the men though she knew he was more than capable of doing things a human assassin would never dream of doing.

She laid her head on his shoulder. “Tell me about the Warehouse,” she said.

“No.”

The one word was spoken with a finality that let her know he would not discuss the place where he and his kind had been created, their embryonic DNA spliced with that of their lupine dams. Since he was a full-blood, she knew his sire had been one of the first generation of Lycants that had to be destroyed because they could not be controlled. Though she’d heard horrible tales of the brutal training, the inhuman experimentation that had gone on at the Warehouse in the Highlands, she doubted he would ever enlighten her. Like most government agents she knew the Lycants had been produced as nearly-invincible, expendable warriors skilled in quick, savage killings meant to instill abject fear in the enemy. In their lupine form, Jamie’s kind could go where humans could not and accomplish inhuman acts only the warped minds of their controllers could conceive. Those who had been successfully re-conditioned after the war no longer posed a threat to mankind. Ones like Jamie were still dangerous.