In Like a Lion (10 page)

Anjali stared at him. “What?”

She’d thought this part was gross when they’d discussed it earlier, but according to the website any liquid could fool the lock.

“You heard me. Lick your palm and wet his thumb.”

Anjali winced as she followed his directions—she should have argued harder for the bottled water—and put Anders’ thumb back on the plate.

The lock clicked, and Jake swung the bars open while keeping his grip on Anders. He was forced to release Anjali and she made a show of trying to get away, hoping she looked frightened enough when they reviewed the videos.

She didn’t have to act much. She had never gone against authority in her life and her nerves were stretched so tight she thought she might throw up.

He caught her easily, before she had gone more than a meter.
Damn, he was fast
.

“Sorry, Dr. Mehta,” he said and clipped her on the temple.

He barely brushed her in reality, but she slumped and he set her down. She struggled to appear unconscious. The floor was hard and cold through her lab jacket and thin blouse. Her heart and breathing raced.

Slow, even
, she reminded herself. She had to give him as long as she could.

Jake hated leaving Anjali on the floor, but Anders could wake up any minute and even if he didn’t, each guard had to check in every fifteen minutes or the cavalry arrived.

He glanced down at his bare feet. A half-naked, barefoot man running down the street would definitely attract attention.

He shrugged the lab coat on and buttoned it. He hadn’t had any luck with shoes, but the employee locker room had yielded plenty of lab coats. This one almost fit him.

Suddenly an alarm shrieked. He pressed his hands to his ears. With his sensitive hearing, the sound was so painful it nearly drove him to his knees.
Damn
. The unscheduled stop had cost him. Any second now they would check the cameras and know exactly where he was.

Chapter 12

Anjali lay still until Anders picked up her wrist to feel her pulse. “What happened?” she asked, holding her head.

“Finn hit you. Are you OK?”

Anjali nodded and rubbed her thumb on her temple, hoping the mascara she’d put on her finger earlier created a realistic-looking bruise.

It must have, because when he inspected her head, he whistled, a long, sliding note. “Wow, that’s already turning black.”

She tried to seem calm. “I’ve always bruised quickly.”

Anders had already turned away and was calling for help. Sirens wailed to life as he clipped his phone back on his belt. Anjali prayed Jake was out of the building. Every second she had faked unconsciousness had seemed like one hundred.

If God were kind, Jake was long gone. But then, having lost her whole family in the space of two years, she didn’t hold out much hope for human kindness, let alone God’s.

Anders closed his phone and trotted to the door. “I’m sorry, Dr. Mehta. I’ve gotta go. Finn’s been spotted in the locker room.”

Anjali hid a groan at his words. Her chest felt like it was being squeezed by a giant fist, but she only nodded.

The door clicked closed. She supposed if Jake had really hit her, she would expect to be checked and debriefed, so she dragged to her office, her mind occupied by a repeated prayer.
Let him escape. Please, let him escape.

She rubbed the smooth finish of a gold bangle with her thumb, as if polishing away the lingering taste of his mouth. Damn him for making it personal. The last thing she wanted to do was care.

On her way to her office, she passed the room she’d used to view the first DVD. Her pulse accelerated.

Surely, no one would find it odd for her to be curious about the escape.

She flipped on the monitors. Anders and an unfamiliar man, probably from the evening shift, rummaged through the locker room. Jake was nowhere to be seen. She sighed, her heart easing into a normal rhythm.

She could hear the man speaking over the microphones. “He must have come in here searching for clothes,” Anders said, indicating an open locker.

Anjali squeezed her eyes shut for a moment.
Shit.
She should have thought of that.

None of the monitors showed Jake.
Be out of the building, not between cameras,
she urged.

She studied the monitors for several minutes more, but didn’t catch a glimpse of Jake. The alarm continued to ring, and men continued to search, but by the expressions on their faces, Jake had left the building.

Her head fell back onto her shoulders. He had done it.

He was free.

Jake had had no intention of going to the address Anjali had written on the card, which he suspected was her apartment. How could he drag her any further into the mess that was his life? But somehow he found himself rooting around for her spare key under a loose brick in the wall by her door.

He’d have to talk to her about that. It wasn’t safe.

He entered and wiped his dusty feet on the mat. Getting out of the building had been a close thing. Fortunately, he could move quickly when he had to.

Jake scanned the tiny apartment, basically a studio with a kitchenette and a bathroom.

There were family photographs on the wall. Smiling faces on the younger ones. An older man seemed serious as he spoke on the phone. A woman he suspected was Anjali’s mother wore a saffron sari and a bright green blouse. A long braid like Anjali’s—though threaded with gray—hung down her back.

All the pictures of her family had been draped with floral garlands.

There were no recent pictures of Anjali. It was as if her life had stopped when she had lost her family.

His heart ached for her. She’d experienced so much loss in her life. He refused to be another source of pain.

Jake glanced at the clock. Anjali would probably have to wait until Kincaid came back to work and questioned her. Time enough for a shower and then he’d be gone.

Anjali let herself into the apartment, tired but happy.

She might have risked her job, but she’d stood up for her principles.
Go, me!

She surveyed the flat for Jake and her teeth snagged her lip when she found the room empty. Her buoyant mood disappeared. Unwanted tears stung her eyes. She blinked the wetness from her eyes, angry at herself for being so disappointed. What had she expected? He was on the run and she was just the means of his escape. Despite the flash-fire heat of his touch, it wasn’t even like she wanted anything more.

Then she heard the water running. Jake was in the shower.

He hadn’t left. She exhaled in a rush and glared at her face in the hall mirror. “Hey,
lallu
!” she chastised her reflection. “He’s on his way out of town. Don’t get attached.”

And if he
were
staying? If he didn’t have to worry about the Kincaid group?
He wouldn’t be interested in you, anyway. Powerful supernatural creatures don’t date women like you
, she added silently.

The jarring thought drew her up. What was she thinking? She had no interest in dating anyone. And anyway, she couldn’t imagine Jake doing anything as tame as dating.

The sound of the water in the shower changed, claiming her attention.

She shook a finger at the mirror and whispered, “And you’re not going to picture him with soap sliding down his wet, naked body.”

Too late.

She might not be interested in dating, but she wasn’t dead.

His skin had appeared so soft earlier. Even with her heart singing in her ears with nervousness, she couldn’t help noticing that.

It had been difficult to concentrate on the details of the plan when all she wanted to do was trace her fingers across the plane of his chest and caress each ridge of muscle on the way down—when his hands had been around her throat and all she could think of was how
right
he smelled and how much she wanted to be in his arms.

She barely knew him. Didn’t know the real him at all. But she could feel his pain. He’d struggled his whole life with an illness he didn’t possess, but it
had
shaped him.

The shower turned off. A moment later, Jake emerged from the bathroom in a fragrant cloud of steam, white towel wrapped around his lean waist.

Her breathing grew ragged.

He stopped when he saw her. The expression on his face said her presence wasn’t a welcome surprise. She pressed her lips together, fighting not to show the sudden hurt burning in her chest, clogging her throat.

“I didn’t expect you so soon.”

“Anders said I could be debriefed in the morning, if I didn’t feel up to talking. Besides—” She reached into her pocket. “—I wanted to give you this.” She handed him his phone.

He stared at it for a minute as if he didn’t recognize it. “How?”

Anjali shrugged. “I told Darcy I’d lost an earring in Mr. Kincaid’s office. Luckily, he doesn’t have a camera in there.”

“But he’ll see it’s missing.”

She shook her head. “I bought another one and switched it and the DVD, as well. I also took pictures of your file with my phone. They’ll only take a minute to print out.”

He whistled through his teeth. “You took a huge chance, but . . . thank you.”

Anjali shrugged again, hiding how much his words meant to her.

She’d never been so nervous in her life as she had been in Mr. Kincaid’s office. Taking the photos had taken longer than she’d thought and she’d expected Darcy to come and check on her any second.

Jake snatched his scrub pants from the floor and turned toward the bathroom.

“Hold on a minute,” Anjali said. “I still have some of my father’s and cousins’ clothes. Let me go through them and see if anything might fit.”

Jake nodded and his hair fell forward, masking his eyes. The desire to brush the strands back was so strong Anjali fisted her hand as she went to the long closet lining one wall of the apartment.

Her hand trembled as she touched each item. Finally she settled on a pair of jeans. She handed them to Jake. “These were my cousin Vinit’s. They’re probably too short, but maybe we can cut them off.” Rifling deeper in the closet she came up with a soft gray T-shirt with a faded slogan on it. “This was Vinit’s brother, Dilip’s. He left it when they came to Boston looking at colleges. I think it’ll fit.”

She closed her eyes briefly against the familiar tide of guilt. “I suppose it’s silly to drag all these things from one place to another, but they’re all I have left.”

“You have your memories.”

Anjali smiled. “I do.” She laughed through the grief still heavy in her chest. “Maybe I’m being self-indulgent. Holding on to the loss when I should be grateful for the time I had with them.” She echoed the words of a counselor she’d seen last year at a friend’s insistence.

“You’ve had more loss than most people. When you can remember them without pain, you will.” Jake met her gaze and she noticed his eyes.

She crossed the room. “Your eyes are blue again.” The researcher in her buzzed with excitement. “I’ve been so busy absorbing that you’re able to change your shape, I’ve never had a chance to think about the why and how.”

“Anjali, I don’t know what you think you’re seeing, but no one can change shape.”

Exasperation made her roll her eyes. “Put on the clothes and come and watch the discs.”

It was hard to concentrate as Anjali brushed by him to get the remote. Her scent intoxicated him, and he fought the raw need to bury his face in her hair or the curve of her neck and just inhale her. He’d been fighting the urge since she’d walked in, a smile shaping her lips, her face alight with welcome.

In that moment, there’d been nothing he wanted more than to press her up against the wall and devour her, one succulent kiss at a time. But she wasn’t for him, no matter what his body said.

Guilt weighted his chest. He’d been short with her as he struggled to hide his arousal, erasing the happy glow in her face. He owed her more than he could express, and he regretted hurting her.
You’re an ass, Jake Finn
, he thought as he focused on images on the TV screen in front of him.

Kincaid entered the younger Jake’s cell, the one that had made some pretense toward being a bedroom. He balled his hands. He remembered that day. Bile soured his tongue.
God, he’d felt helpless.

Anjali made a comment about the recordings, but he was deafened with fury, and he didn’t trust himself to speak.

Then he saw the boy on the screen turn into a young lion and back.

Anjali replayed the scene a couple of times, her eyes wary as she observed him, then moved on to another scene, until he had seen himself change into a dragon or a lion hundreds of times. Finally, she switched off the TV.

She watched him, eyes wide, like he was a unexploded bomb. He could smell her fear of his reaction.

He sat back on the couch and folded his arms, while he processed what he’d just seen. “I’m not sick. I can actually change into a lion and a dragon.”

Anjali stood, then wandered to the kitchen table and sank into a chair. Trying to give him some space, he thought.

He sat frozen for a minute, staring at the light brown wall behind the TV, momentarily numb, then got up and wandered into the kitchen area. Anjali was leafing through the printouts of the photos she’d taken in Kincaid’s office.

“I can really change shape,” he repeated. Maybe if he said it enough, he would accept it.

Anjali considered him, her pointed chin raised. “I suppose the ability could come about as some kind of illness. Something that causes genes to mutate on a large scale? Or it could just be a natural talent. I think that’s more likely, but it raises other questions.”

“What other questions?”

She shrugged. “Are you genetically human? Is your DNA compatible with human DNA? Is the mutation recent? Or have you always existed?” Her tone was so purely scientific, it might have come wrapped in a lab coat.

“I was born twenty-seven years ago,” he said dryly. “And I’m human.”

“I said, ‘genetically’ human,” Anjali corrected. “There’s no doubt you’re phenotypically human. At least in this form. Phenotypic means—”

“I know what it means. Kincaid might be a liar, but he made sure I was well educated.”

“So I see,” said Anjali, her face already reburied in the file. “Everything from physics to martial arts and battle tactics. I guess we know what he wanted to use you for.

“I also see a note here that your eyes were blue until age five. There’s a lot of information in here that he didn’t give me. I’ll have to finish it later.” She closed the file. “What I don’t understand is why he needed me at all.” She stood and stretched, rolling her head on her neck. “And why he let me find out. He didn’t give me the information, but he didn’t make it hard to find either.”

As she stretched, her blue-green cotton shirt molded her breasts, outlining the soft contours. His palms itched to know just how soft they were.

His body reacted immediately to the thought, and he turned away to stop himself from pouncing on her.
Down, boy. She’s not for you.

Anjali moved to the stove, stirring something heavenly smelling in a pot. She’d prepared the food while he watched the discs. He tried not to notice the way her slacks hugged the rounded curve of her bottom, to imagine what exactly she wore, or didn’t wear, under the garment.

“I hope you like Indian food,” she said.

He couldn’t help it. “I’d love to eat Indian.”

Jake half-closed his eyes and savored the spicy flavors of the chicken
pulav
Anjali had made.

“I guess you like it.” Her words were light, teasing.