The Claimed (37 page)

Christopher must have sensed it also, for he looked down at her flat belly and covered it reverently with his hand. “Is that what I think it is?”

“It’s our child growing ever stronger,” she said, and brushed her fingers across the back of his hand.

A powerful shudder ripped through his body and he dropped to his knees, kissed a spot directly below her navel, and then wrapped his arms around her. He tucked his head to her abdomen, and the scintilla of energy quivered again, almost as if their child was responding to its father.

“It’s hard to believe it’s happened,” he said, dropping another kiss just below her navel before leisurely placing a trail of kisses up to her breasts.

She cradled his head to her as he brushed his lips across her nipples. “It is. It seems so sudden. Hours ago we were battling for our lives, and now this.”

“We were battling,
warmi
, but I don’t want you to ever risk your life, our child’s life, like that again.” To drive his point home, he grabbed hold of her hands and trapped them behind her, imprisoning her against him.

Her insides clenched as the action wedged his erection against her belly. With a sexy smile, she rubbed her hips along him and teased, “You know I don’t like being told what to do.”

“Really? What happens when—”

With a discharge of Quinchu power, she hurtled them across the short distance to the bed and pinned him beneath her. “You disobey? I might have to punish you.”

Christopher grinned, and his eyes glittered with sexy playfulness. “Then I guess I should tell you that I’ve been a bad, bad boy.”

“I’ll have to make sure you don’t do it again.” She leaned down, bit a spot at the crook of his neck, and then kissed it. His erection, which was still nestled tight to her belly, jerked in response.

Her power and his vibrated as their life forces melded, creating a huge aura around them, shimmering with vibrant streams of color as pleasure mounted. She moved down his body, bit his nipple, and he groaned, yanked one hand free of her grasp, and brought it to her breast. He gently caressed the tip, rotating it between his thumb and forefinger as she moved downward.

Her body pulsed with need as did his when she teased the edge of his head with her mouth before taking him in. Sucking him in and out of the warm wetness of her mouth until he pushed upward with his hips and begged her for more.

“You want more?” she said huskily, but as she had done before, he gave a blast of his Añaru power and reversed their positions, trapping her beneath him. And much as she had taken her time “punishing” him, he intended to do the same.

“You did a bad thing,” he warned, part in jest, part deadly serious.

It was the serious that somehow took root, bringing home just how lucky they had been. “I’d do it again to save you. To save Ryan.”

His body tensed at the mention of his friend, and she regretted it, until he brought his mouth down to her belly again. Softly he said, “If it’s a boy, I’d like to name him Ryan.”

“I’d like that, too.” She reached down and guided his erection to her center. Eased him inside her where he held still, his body trembling above her.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get enough of you. Of loving you,” he said, and bent his head to kiss her.

Victoria knew she would never stop wanting him. Never stop loving him. She returned the kiss, allowing their combined energies to grow and fuse more powerfully. Uniting them in every conceivable way. Binding them until not even death could part them, as the boundaries of their energies became indistinguishable. Each of them would forever carry a bit of the other, as would the child growing within her womb.

When their release came it sent a surge of energy across the heavens, so powerful it reached the hearts of all of the Hunters gathered in the compound. Even Maya couldn’t fail to be moved by it, so pure was the love it carried to each who felt its touch and accepted the message swirling through the energy: No matter how hard the future might be, with love all things were possible.

A
lthough Sammie was exhausted after the events of the day, there was no way she could just go home and rest.

So many unanswered questions remained about Victoria and her people, but also about what she was. Where she had come from and who her mother had truly been.

Victoria was right that she needed to know more so she could understand. So that she could maybe consider that she had more family than she had thought. That maybe she had Victoria and her odd group of people who could be part of her life.

Only one person had the answers.

She knocked on her father’s door, and after a short hesitation while her father likely confirmed who was there, he opened it.

He must have understood why she was visiting as soon as he set his eyes on her, surprising her because she hadn’t considered herself that transparent.

“You know,” he said, and stepped aside to allow her to enter.

“Were you ever going to tell me?” She walked over to his sofa, sat in the same exact spot on the couch where she had since she was a little child. There was even a small dip in the cushion as a testament to the time she had spent there with her father.

He closed the door and moved toward his recliner, his steps noticeably slower than they had once been. His head hung downward, displaying a wealth of gray in his buzz-cut hair. A slight hunch marred his usual militarily upright stance.

“Well?” she pressed, worried, since he seemed suddenly frail. When he finally faced her, his features were pale with a hint of sickly green.

“I had hoped I wouldn’t have to tell you. We moved so far from where it all began so that it wouldn’t catch up to us,” he said, plopping down in the chair and placing his hands on his knees, rubbing them there nervously.

“So
what
wouldn’t catch up?” She examined him, trying to gauge the multitude of emotions flooding his normally stoic face.

“The war. It had nearly killed your mother—”

“She was one of them, wasn’t she?” Sammie challenged.

He nodded slowly, and his features grew tight with pain as he told the story. “Many years ago, Salvatore Bruno and I crossed paths. He was a Texas Ranger who had been investigating a series of murders. I was with a special unit of the CIA researching unusual activities.”

“What happened?” she asked, needing to know a history that had long been a mystery to her.

“I came to a compound in the desert just as a battle began. It was like Armageddon with lightning and thunder tearing up the land and buildings. Killing and wounding people,” he said, using his hands to try to demonstrate the way the blasts had been flying through the night sky.

“My mom was one of the people?” Her peaceful, delicate, and fragile mother had been a warrior like those she had seen today?

He nodded. “My team and I took shelter because we were in the line of fire and outgunned. When the dust settled, only the dead were left. The dead, Bruno, and his son. He said they had been on their way to a camping trip after his visit to the compound to question a possible witness to a homicide.”

Except that Adam was like Victoria, which meant her father didn’t know that Adam wasn’t Salvatore Bruno’s real son.

“How was mom involved in this battle?” she asked.

He shook his head, as if clearing the dust from old memories, but then bolted out of the chair and began to pace, the recollection seemingly too much for him to handle. Dragging a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, he finally continued.

“I was assigned the task of moving the dead to a facility where we could perform autopsies and other tests to try to understand how these people could have so much power. I had a crew picking up pieces and moving the bodies away, but as I was checking the corpses, I saw her. Your mom. She was so beautiful, my heart broke at the thought she had died so young. And then I realized she was still alive. Barely, but alive.”

It occurred to her then what he had done. Her responsible and always by the book father had broken the rules. “You took her away.”

He dragged both hands through his hair, clearly tortured to this day by what had happened. “I couldn’t turn her over to my group. I knew what they would do to her. What they had done to others.”

“There were others?”

He nodded violently and came back to the recliner. “I’ve already said too much, Samantha. You cannot let anyone know. If you do, you’ll be at risk.”

She was already in danger, she thought, recalling what she had seen today and the horrible damage to Christopher’s friend.

“Samantha? Something has happened, hasn’t it?” he finally asked, but she would not burden him with that knowledge.

Instead she said, “Tell me more about my mother.”

With a sad smile he came to sit beside her and slung one burly arm around her shoulders, as he had done many times before over the many years of her life. “You know I love you.”

“I do, Dad. And I love you, but I feel different all of a sudden. I need to know why I’m feeling this way. I need to know about Mom and where I come from.”

Realizing she would not relent, he haltingly explained about what had followed. How he had taken her mother away and tended to her until she was better. How in those long days and weeks, they had fallen in love. Her mother had been stronger then. It wasn’t until later that the weakness had developed, slowly draining her mother of life until one day she just slipped away, leaving them alone.
Leaving him to move from place to place until he finally resigned from the CIA and its demands. It was then that he had relocated them here, trying to safeguard her until he knew whether she would be like her mother or like him. Human.

But she wasn’t like either of them. It was why she had been a loner for most of her life, always feeling apart from those around her. Only now there were others like her. Including her best friend Victoria.

Maybe that was why they had bonded years ago when they had first met, because they were alike in ways neither of them had realized. Now there was no going back to what she had been before. No going back to being a loner.

Samantha finally knew what had been inside her all along. She was a Hunter and her life would never be the same.

El Paso, Texas, 1991

A
s darkness slowly fled from his eyes, the boy woke, his head aching and his body sore, as if he had been beaten. He looked around the room, but nothing in it seemed familiar. Nothing except the man slumped in the rocking chair beside him.

He remembered the man and some kind of accident, the boy thought, recalling the bodies, fire, and debris surrounding him the last time he had roused. He had been afraid, unsure of how he had gotten there in the midst of all the destruction. Wondering why he was alone because he was certain he had been with others.

A man and a woman. Close by. Holding his hand until…

An attack? he thought, not that he really remembered. He had a vague image of light so bright that it burned his eyes and face. Another memory suddenly came to him of
flying through the air and hitting something hard. Possibly a wall.

Then he had been all alone until the man had come to save him.

A jingling sound intruded and the bed dipped as a big old beagle rested its paws on the edge of the mattress. The huffing sound of its breathing and the clang of the dog’s tags as it shook its head woke the man.

Gingerly the man sat up, wincing from apparent stiffness. He scrubbed his face with his hands to wipe away the remnants of sleep. His dark eyes looked sad and tired, the boy thought. When the man realized that he was awake, he said, “How are you feeling?”

The boy shrugged and even that small movement brought discomfort as every muscle complained. “Hurts,” he said, surprised by his own voice. He didn’t remember what it sounded like. But then again, he didn’t recall much of anything.

Except fear. Fear was the only real memory alive in his brain.

The man nodded and stood awkwardly, as if in pain himself. He gently urged the dog away from the bed with a soft nudge of his knee and a “Scat, Spottie.” Then he faced him and said, “Why don’t you lie back down while I get you some food…” His voice trailed off in question, but the boy didn’t understand what he wanted.

“Your name, son. What’s your name?”

The boy searched his brain, but couldn’t find the answer to that simple question, much less any of the others ricocheting through his brain.

“I don’t know.”

With a resigned sigh, the man said, “Could be the shot you took to your head. It’ll come back. Don’t worry.”

The boy lay down and as his head touched the pillow, he experienced tenderness at the back of his skull. He delicately rubbed his hand along the bump there, wondering how he had been hurt.