Big Bad Bite (27 page)

She whipped her handgun from its holster
where it sat secured on her waistband at the small of her back,
pointed it to a spot on the floor exactly six inches from the tip
of Logan’s boots, and fired a warning shot. Running footsteps
thundered all over the house heading in their direction. In less
than thirty seconds, every wolf in the immediate vicinity, and one
tiger with freaky blue eyes, was standing behind Logan at the
kitchen’s entrance staring at Jenna as if she’d lost her flippin’
marbles.

Now that Jenna was entirely sure she had
everyone’s attention, she pulled her coffee cup away from her mouth
and calmly said, “The next person who tells me to hurry up before I
finish my cup of coffee gets a bullet in the ass.”

It took less than fifteen seconds before she
was left alone in the kitchen with not one single being within
hearing distance of her. A few minutes after she’d finished
savoring the other half of her coffee, she strolled out of the
house and had to bite her lip at all of the wary eyes following her
as they hid behind their SUV’s, watching her as if she might do a
psychotic impression of Annie Oakley at any given moment. Even her
Uncle was sitting in the driver’s seat of his vehicle, playing the
ever-impatient man waiting on a woman. The only brave soul that
dared to stand in the open was Adam who stood leaning against the
Pack Master’s SUV, arms crossed across his chest, an amused grin on
his face, and shamelessly eating her up with his eyes. He pulled
open a door to the back seat for her. Closing the distance between
the two of them, she couldn’t help but smile at the man that she
was quickly finding was crazy enough to like her just the way she
was. Stopping in front of him, Jenna shyly lifted up on her tiptoes
to place a chaste kiss on his lips.

She should have known a chaste kiss wouldn’t
be enough for him. His free arm wrapped around her back, crushing
her body against his, and he took possession of her mouth like he
was a marauding Viking and she his spoils from war. The moment
quickly built to something Jenna was sure she would later be adding
to her ‘Best Moments in Her Life’ list, but the sound of her
brother gagging kind of ruined it for her. So in tune with her
every move now, Adam slid his hand down the length of her back to
grab her own hand that had been reaching for the gun holstered
there, stopping her from pulling it out and shooting to maim her
own flesh and blood. Apparently, he was going to make it extremely
hard for her to get away with things if this relationship continued
to develop between them. That was clearly something to write down
on the ‘Con’ side of the list she started to help her decide
whether she should give this mate thing a chance. Adam pulled away
to smile down at her flushed and pouty face before gently pushing
her into the back seat. He climbed in next to her as everyone else
piled into the two vehicles heading for the airport.

That was only the beginning of a very long,
horrendous and mentally painful nine-hour plane ride where Jenna
spent most of her time squashing the urge to break big no-no rules
such as shooting someone in a plane at 30,000 feet. The insanity on
the plane started with her twenty-year-old brother asking for a
packages of peanuts thirty minutes into their flight, then whining
like a toddler for a half hour when he found out there weren’t any
peanuts and he was instead stuck with something rock hard and
questionable looking that was supposed to pass for cookies. He
finally shut up when Jenna threatened to feed him her boot in place
of said peanuts. That made him stop whining, but lead to their
first sibling argument which didn’t end until Uncle Owen had enough
of their so called ‘squabbling’ and roared his displeasure. Of
course, he roared so loud he scared the bejesus out of their mere
human pilot who temporarily lost control of the plane and soiled
his pants.
Poor, poor pilot.

After having the plane in a free fall for a
minute or so, everyone came to their senses and remained quiet for
the next hour or so while Jenna sipped on the cup of coffee that
Adam talked the still visibly trembling flight attendant into
making for her. When they were three hours into their trip, Jenna
learned the valuable lesson that three male wolves and one
behemoth-sized male tiger were incapable of sitting inside one
small private plane for an extended period of time without
fidgeting. Naturally, it was all Adam’s fault because he started
the fidgeting by bouncing his leg so fast that if someone placed a
foot pump underneath the offending leg, he could have inflated
bazillions of air mattresses on the way to Germany. On the other
hand, perhaps it could add some jet propulsion to the plane’s
engines. Either way, it was quickly getting on her nerves.

This started a fidgeting epidemic. From
Adam's bouncing leg, it spread to her Uncle who started tapping his
fingers on the small table next to his chair. Then over to the
rock-star-wannabe tiger who sat in a chair on the other end of the
grouping of three chairs facing the small couch she and Adam sat
on, where he was still bouncing his leg at warp speed. The tiger
started tapping his hands on the tops of his thighs to the beat of
his music playing from his mp3 player. The combination of Adam’s
leg bouncing up and down, her Uncle’s fingers going tap-tap-tap on
the table top, and the tiger’s rhythmic drumming with his hands,
caused Jenna’s left eye to twitch. She knew it was unreasonable to
shoot the antagonizing appendages, but it was starting to look like
an exceptionally flippin’ good idea. Looking back later, Jenna
could see that it was Logan who started humming the Mission
Impossible theme song that finally caused her to lose her grip on
reality, making her snap..

Jenna slapped her hand that was closest to
Adam down so hard on the top of his leg that he yelped, while
simultaneously using her telekinetic abilities to lift the couch’s
two throw pillows and slam them angrily into Logan and Alec’s heads
repeatedly. With her Uncle’s interest momentarily caught on the
proceedings next to him in the seating area of the plane, his
fingers stopped their tap dance on the table. After she’d smacked
her brother’s head for the fifth time, and the tiger had shredded
the pillow that was assaulting him, she had the four annoyed men’s
attention pointed at her.

She didn’t even blink.

“Please, for the love of Pete and all that’s
holy, stop with the fidgeting!”

Logan whined, “But we’re bored.”

Jenna pointed to the flat panel television
hanging on the wall, “Then watch a movie, you moron. But if you hum
one more note of that stupid song, I swear I will throw you off of
this plane.”

The stewardess walked past the entrance of
the seating area then as she moved into the plane’s kitchen, and
Alec’s eyes tracked the woman’s pin up worthy body every second
until it was out of sight.

Moving like lightening, he shot out of his
seat and stalked in the poor woman’s direction. “Okay kids, be
good. I’m going to entertain myself.”

Jenna shook her head in disgust. The poor
woman would never know what hit her. Just when she didn’t think the
plane ride could get any worse, a disturbing sound came from the
television. Hanging her head so that it was resting against Adam’s
chest, she whined the word ‘why’ to him when the first notes of the
Mission Impossible theme song started to play.

The red haired bastard chuckled at her
misery. “We’re shifters baby. Crowding us into small-enclosed
spaces where we can’t escape for hours on end has a tendency to
make us a little wired. Okay, more like slightly crazy. I’m amazed
it’s not bothering you.”

She groaned in dismay. “So what you’re
basically telling me is that I just have to deal with you fidgeting
like a pack of meth heads, and put up with annoying theme songs
from the action movies that Logan wants to watch while the tiger
screws our poor stewardess silly in the kitchen?”

“Pretty much.”

“I don’t imagine any amount of threatening
the lot of you with torture or cutting your balls off will get the
four of you to stop this madness?”

“Only in your dreams, sweetheart.”

Adam laughed when she started to pout.
Pulling her body around so that she was lying propped against him,
he wound his arm so that it was clamped against her chest just
under her collarbone, trapping her to him. Only she wasn’t in such
a hurry to escape this trap. With his chin propped on the top of
her head, they sat and watched the movie in contented silence. An
hour later, Alec swaggered back into the seating area just a tad
sweaty and smelling like sex. The good news was, he no longer
looked hyped up enough to tap out an entire concert on his lap
while listening to his rock music. The bad news was, the entire
kitchen now had to be disinfected from his sex cooties.

Ewwwwww.

After the movie finished her brother popped
in its sequel. Jenna was tempted to jump out of the plane hatch and
save herself from another two hours of this torture, but decided
that she felt too good wrapped up in Adam’s arms to actually move,
so she closed her eyes and took a nap instead.

Her body was floating. The dark warmth of
sleep still surrounded her, but she felt her body moving. Where it
was going though, she had no idea, so she cracked an eyelid to take
in her surroundings. The first thing she saw was a t-shirt covered
chest. Oh, and what a good-looking chest it was too. All warm and
muscled. But why exactly was she looking at it? She tipped her head
back and met a pair of amused amber eyes. Well, she’d already known
it was Adam’s chest because she was surrounded by his scent. But
that still didn’t explain why she was apparently sitting in his lap
and waking up in his secure arms, to the extremely drool worthy
view of his pectorals.

“Have a nice nap?”

She tried to clear her sleep hoarsened voice
before talking but failed, “Apparently so if I was out of it enough
that you moved me around like a sack of potatoes, and I didn’t even
wake up to notice.”

He chuckled. “Maybe you felt safe enough to
sleep so deeply because I was holding you? Not that it was a chore
or anything, sweetheart. I’d hold you anytime, anywhere that you’d
let me.”

His arms tightened around her, which caused
her body to tingle in his embrace. Sometimes she wondered if the
man had a live wire that was specifically designed to zap every
nerve in her body in the most delicious ways. Of course, the
downside to that was that half the time he zapped those overly
receptive nerves at extremely inopportune times. Like now, when she
could smell others in the space with them. Turning her head away
from Adam, she glanced to the front seat of the vehicle they were
apparently sitting in the back of, with an unknown man driving it.
Her brother, Uncle, and the randy tiger were nowhere in sight.

She looked back to Adam with curiosity. “Did
you kill them on the plane and hide the bodies when we landed?”

He smiled in answer, and then shook his head.
“They’re in a second cab. They all said that they didn’t want to
ride with our disgusting display of affection.”

Her lower tummy felt like it was melting into
a warm puddle at the images that came to her when the word
‘affection was applied to Adam. She, however, didn’t think they
were disgusting. But that devious little voice in the back of her
mind whispered that it felt like this was all moving too fast.
Goading her with doubts about how genuine any of this could be when
she’d only known Adam for such a short time. How genuine were his
displays of so-called affection? Or was this all part of some
intricate act he was performing to reel her into a mating to save
his own life? The disturbing realization of how much that would
hurt her put an arctic freeze on all of those warm gooey emotions
she was feeling just seconds before. So, that’s what a reality
check felt like.

No longer liking the idea of sitting in
Adam’s lap, wrapped securely in his arms, she tried to push off
him, only to be stopped by the same arms she’d just been admiring a
few minutes ago. “Yeah, well, disgusting display of affection
aside, this is probably killing my image, me sitting here on your
lap like some weak-willed woman who needs saving. Which, I’m not.
So I’ll just get off and sit on my own now. Thanks for being the
big bad protector while I was taking my nap.”

Adam’s eyebrows snapped down at her sudden
change of mood, and confusion was clear on his face. He refused to
let her up, and tightened his arms instead to hold her in place.
“What’s wrong, Jenna? Why are you upset?”

She gave a mock affronted snort to hide her
roiling emotions. “I’m not upset. Just ready to get off your lap,
and get a move on with what we have to do here. We’re here for a
reason, remember? Not a vacation.”

Still looking deeply confused at her turn
around in attitude, Adam remained silent as he let her slide out of
his lap and onto the back seat next to him. She kind of wished he’d
lash out at her snarky comments, say something to try to put her in
her place. That would have justified her bitchy attitude towards
him somehow if he’d been a dick in return to her. Instead, he sat
there, ever the stoic Adam, probably trying to figure out what he’d
done wrong for her to start acting this way towards him. It just
made her feel worse. Combine those feelings with her insecurities
and doubts, and well, she might as well be a hormonal teenager all
over again. Just lovely.

Turning her head to look out the window, she
watched the city of Frankfurt pass them by. It must seriously
payoff to be a rich, influential Pack Master. Not only had they
flown in a decadent private jet, but they also entered another
country without even going through customs. This for her was an
outstanding thing since she was still armed with a handgun. Jenna
wondered how much power her Uncle actually held. These thoughts
drifted away though as she started eyeing some of the buildings
landscapes. Most of the buildings looked like your average everyday
modern 20
^th
and 21
^st
century architecture.
High rises, shopping malls, and apartment buildings. Like hidden
gems though, every now and then she’d see a house or shop that
looked old world. These little treasures varied in design from
Gothic, to Romanesque, to cute cottage like buildings that were
half-timbered looking. She wasn’t an architecture expert, but she
did like looking at different styles for enjoyment. In a way, they
were pieces of art with their lines, arches, and embellishments.
Pieces of history that helped you imagine what it was like in those
times.