Jared (24 page)

Her pale, bloodless lips shaped around a word.
“Where?”

“Far enough from anything pertinent you don’t have to
worry.

Now make the damn transmission.”

She closed her eyes and reached behind her head. Her
brows drew down into a frown. He waited one minute. Two. He didn’t sense any lessening
of her pain. “Well?”

“Give me time.” She frowned at him from under her
lashes. “This isn’t as easy as they made it out to be.”

“You’d better not be telling me you don’t know how to
do this.”

“Technically, I do.”

“You left it to the last minute, and you don’t know
how to transmit?”

“We don’t know this is the last minute.”

Considering she was about to pass out, he was pretty
sure they were at the last level of whatever system the son-of-a-bitch
Sanctuary had put in place. Suddenly the tension in her sharpened.

“Tell me again exactly what I’m supposed to say.”

He didn’t waste a second. “Tell them you heard the
weres are planning an attack on a secret compound west of here.”

She focused, licked her lips, and then grabbed him.
“If it’s not enough, I just want you to know—”

He scooped up a handful of snow and wiped the blood
from her face. The shock of the cold snow cut off her statement. “Not now.”

“It has to be—”

The pain stopped. She froze, and he stilled right
along with her. He scanned, ready to block any incoming energy, but there was
nothing. No pain, no energy, just the calm of the night enfolding them in its
embrace.

For three heartbeats, Raisa didn’t move. Then she
smiled, a bright-as-sunshine smile. “It worked.”

He wiped the snow and blood from her face with his
sleeve, covering the shaking in his hands with brusque movements. He couldn’t
live like this, ripping between anger and fear. He threw a shield up around
her, strong enough to hide her presence from anyone who might be in the area.
Hopefully strong enough to scramble any signal that would be sent after them.
Or out from them. He glanced down into her smiling face.

“I told you it would.”

Her brow arched as the lines the pain had carved in
her face eased. “And I should have believed you because . . . ?”

It was hard to look into that open face and see her as
a traitor. He set her on her feet. “Because I’m never wrong.”

THE sensation came to her across the snap of wind.
Fragmented traces of energy—no source, no consistency, blips on her radar, but
spaced out in a rough half circle. They were coming for her.

She caught Jared’s hand. “Time to go.”

His brows snapped down. His energy flared out.
“Trouble coming?”

Flickers of flame appeared at the edges of his eyes.
Everything in her responded to the image of pure predatory male with an
ecstatic declaration of Mine. She was in such trouble. “Definitely.”

His frown increased. And right along with it, his
suspicion. “How many?”

“Three.”

He cut her another glance. She could sense the war
going on inside him. Whereas he had believed her implicitly before, now he
didn’t. She got to her feet. “Just because you can’t sense them doesn’t mean
they don’t exist.” She brushed the snow off her butt. “But just in case you
want to stay and chat, expect them to come at you from . . .” She pointed to
the right. “There.” Straight ahead. “There.” She pointed to the left. “And
there.”

Raisa grabbed her pack off his shoulder and slung it
over her own. “I, however, am out of here.” She headed in the only direction
open to her. Twenty feet later a hand clamped down over her arm. She sighed and
glanced up at Jared. His expression was unreadable. Cold as the night, emotion
as untraceable as the energy of the approaching weres. Just flickers of
what-might-have-beens combined with what was. Doubt, resentment, frustrated
anger. Need. It was the need that gave her hope. “What?”

“You’re going the wrong way.”

“I’m going the way I have to.”

“What makes it a have to?”

The urge to confide in him was strong. Illogical, in
the face of his doubt. More of the vampire bonding that went so much deeper
than a human one. However, Miri had been explicit in the prejudice against her,
what would be lost if the wrong person found out, and as far as Raisa could
see, Jared was as anti-were as any vampire.

“The fact that there are three killers coming at me
from the other directions.”

He didn’t let go of her arm. “We’re going this way.”

Naturally, his direction involved up. “No, thanks.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “You’re better now.”

“That doesn’t change the fact I’m still morally
opposed to going up.”

“Well, since I’m morally opposed to being herded like
a sheep to the slaughter, I think we’ll go up.”

She hadn’t considered that. “You think there are more
ahead of us?”

“What I think is that if we were horses and I wanted
to catch us, I’d set up men in a fan pattern behind and let the horse run into
the trap I’d set ahead.” He paused and lifted his head, scanning she knew.
“It’s a hell of a lot less work.”

Trap. Oh shit. She hadn’t even considered that. “I
thought they just wanted to kill us.” “Us” sounded so much better than “you.”
She was pretty sure they wanted to kill him. Everyone did, but they had a plan
for her.

“I don’t think so.” He started up the hill, the
direction he’d chosen perpendicular to the course she’d sensed the enemy
taking. Since he’d clamped her wrist in his hand, she had no choice but to go
with him. It was a lot easier levitating, but she still didn’t like it. “That
doesn’t make sense. They just sent me out.”

She forgot to adjust for obstacles. She ran into a
log, lost her concentration, and landed on her side in the snow. Jared dragged
her two feet before he could correct for what had happened. Snow was in her
hair, her ears, her eyes, and worse, down the collar of her shirt.

“Son of a bear.”

At least he was back to monitoring his language. “I’m
sorry.”

“If you’re hoping to slow me down, you’ve got another
think coming.”

Even, she amended, if he did think she was some sort
of conniving two-faced evil bitch. His shadow blocked the view of the stars.
Beneath the shadowed brim of his hat, his eyes glittered at her like twin
flames. He wasn’t happy. He grabbed for her arm. She flinched. He paused and
bent over her, the sheer size of him blocking out everything else from her
field of vision. His fingers touched her cheek and brushed a gob of snow from
the edge of her hairline, before sliding around and grabbing a handful of snow
from her collar. “What am I going to do with you, sunbeam?”

“Let me go?”

The softness left his mouth. “No.”

“That’s the vampire side of you talking.”

“When it comes to you, baby, there isn’t anything
else.”

That was not something she wanted to hear. She wanted
the tenderness of a human for his wife, the care, the consideration, the bigger
scope of emotion than the vampire’s need to possess. Jared’s fingers curled
around the back of her neck and lifted. She went with the pressure.

“You do know how to make a girl’s heart go
pitter-patter.”

“Apparently, with you, it’s not hard.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Her honesty gave him pause. He blinked before asking,
“Don’t you have any sense of self-preservation at all?”

She shook the snow out of her hair. “Yes, but I tend
to save it for battles worth fighting.”

“You don’t think I’m worth it?”

“In your present mood, you’re completely hopeless.”
She turned in the direction they’d been going and resolutely started up the
hill.

He was right behind her. “You’re the one who was
sneaking around Ian’s office.”

She tugged more wet snow from her hair. “You’re the
one who decided it was for all the wrong reasons.”

“Son of a bitch, now you’re going to tell me there was
a right reason?”

She stopped and put her hands on her hips as he came
up to her. “No, because all you want to do is pick a fight and then twist
things.”

He caught her arm and carried her forward with him.
When she tugged, he didn’t let go. “I don’t think I even have to give it a
twitch to have the mess of your logic revealed.”

“As I said, picking a fight.”

“Dammit, look at it from my side.”

“No.”

“What in hell do you mean, no?”

“Precisely what I said. I don’t care to see things
from your point of view.”

His grip tightened on her arm. “You are a nutcase.”

A few minutes passed in which they continued
relentlessly up before he asked, “What in hell would you have done if I’d been
the one messing in Ian’s private papers?”

“You mean if we had just spent the night in bed
together and I had just decided you were worthy to be my husband and had made
you so and, therefore, had declared my loyalty to you above all others?”

He eyed her warily. “Yeah.”

“You know exactly what I would have done.”

“You would have called me a son of a bitch.”

“No. That’s what you would have done. What you did.”

“I protected you.”

“By not revealing my supposed duplicity to the weres?
By screwing me on the couch with all the emotional connection you would have
for a plastic doll?”

His brows came down over his eyes, and anger whipped
around them. “Yes.”

She smiled her sweetest smile. “Then, I guess I’d
better thank you, hadn’t I?”

“Don’t fu—” Another glare as if his upbringing were
her fault and then he said, “Don’t bother.”

He took four more steps. Long strides that forced her
to skip on the third step to keep up. “And I didn’t screw you.”

Like heck he hadn’t. She held on to her temper with
difficulty. Fighting with him now would get her nowhere. “I’m sure there’s a
more colorful term for it, but it’s pretty much semantics.”

“I was angry.”

“You were hurt.”

He looked at her hard. “I was angry.”

“Fine, you were angry.” The man was seriously out of
touch with his emotions. She had to skip again. “Could you slow down. My legs
aren’t as long as yours.”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“How fast are the Sanctuary coming up?”

How could she have forgotten about them? She checked
the flickers of energy. “Very fast.”

“How’s your strength holding up?”

“Good, I think.”

“You’re not sure?”

She rolled her eyes and took a breath to keep from
snapping at him. “I’ve never done this before; therefore, I don’t know.”

“In that case”—his hand left her arm and slipped
around her waist—“lean on me.”

She only had time to grab hold on to the back of his
shirt under her pack before he took off. Beneath her grip, his muscles worked
with smooth precision as he effortlessly carried her across the distance. Trees
and rocks flashed by in a blur of gray, streams flashed in slashes of black.
And through it all he carried her, without an ounce of strain. She leaned into
his side and let his power flow over her as her mind wandered. She wished
things could be different, that she’d met him before the Sanctuary had captured
her, that there wasn’t everything ugly standing between them. That Miri wasn’t
depending on her. That she hadn’t made her promise to keep the secret.

You asleep down there?

No. Just enjoying the ride.

Anything on the bad guys.

How could he make her forget about the bad guys?

It’s my masculine charm.

Right. She’d lost it to the point that she’d forgotten
to protect her thoughts.

They’re still following the same course. We’re past
the one on this side.

Good.

Her side was beginning to hurt.

Hold on a little longer.

I’m fine.

A brush of his mind over hers. She took the comfort he
offered. He owed it to her, after all.

She ignored the snort her unguarded thought drew from
him and clung to the moment of softness. Five more minutes and he put her down.
She wrapped her arm around her ribs. “Remind me to build up my strength so I
can do my own running.”

Another strange look crossed his face, and a twitch of
his lips preceded his “I’ll see what I can do to oblige.”

She closed her eyes and counted to five. “I mean, find
my own men to feed off, so I can build up my muscle.”

“You’re not compatible with anyone else, remember?”

He was entirely too smug. “Yet, but the fact that I’m
compatible with you raises all sorts of possibilities. I’ve just got to keep
experimenting until I find a few more.”