The wolf knew what had happened. I will kill them for this.
Don’t kill anyone for me, she thought, her mind fogging. Survive.
Dimly Lilah felt her body sag and go limp, and then the wolf was on top of her. She wasn’t alarmed by it; the weight and warmth of his body felt protective, comforting. The last thing she felt was a cold length of metal sliding over her wrist, and the whine of the wolf as he buried his muzzle in her hair.
She was barely breathing when they dropped her body next to his. He smelled the chemical odor of the sedative on her shallow breaths, and felt the laxness of her muscles where they pressed against his side. If he had been able to move, he would have lunged at the men and torn them apart, but unlike his mind his body remained dead. He couldn’t even open his eyes to look at her.
But he could smell her, and feel her on his skin. Her heart still beat, and his body, it seemed, was not entirely dead.
“Shit, Bob, check out the rack on this bitch.” Joey was close, bending over them, his hands busy. Cloth tore. “Look. They’re real, too.”
“Quit screwing with her and get the goddamn cuffs,” the older man snapped. “We need to get the fuck outta here.”
“Yeah, yeah.” The younger man moved away, and then returned. Metal clicked. “What do I cuff her to?”
“Him. He’s not going anywhere.”
The clicking sound repeated, and he felt something hard and tight encircle his wrist. It had been so long since any of his senses had worked that he hardly knew what to think.
“She’ll probably freeze solid before we get across the state lines,” Joey said, his regret plain. “Won’t be able to fuck her unless I put a woolly on my woody.”
A match was struck, and he smelled cigarette smoke.
“Guess it’s better she goes this way, huh?” Joey sucked in and blew out. “Pete told me what they do to them. Wouldn’t want to be alive and awake for that shit they’re gonna do to her. Do they really cut them up into pieces first?”
“Pete’s got no business telling you anything,” Bob said. “You keep running your mouth way you do, you’ll end up in the back of one of these trucks. Gimme that tarp over there.” Canvas stretched out over him and the woman. “Tuck in those sides. Hurry up. All right, that’s good enough. Come on, we gotta hit the road.”
The men climbed out of the truck and slammed the rolling door down, securing it with a lock from the outside. As soon as they were gone, he tried desperately to move but found he could only twitch his hand.
He concentrated, pouring every ounce of strength he had left into his arm, and slowly his hand flattened against the floor of the truck. He pushed against it, and his body shifted a fraction of an inch. He tried again, moving another inch, and then again. The truck jerked into gear, and a quick turn made his body slide against the woman. He used the momentum to fling his left arm over her.
The woman’s soft, bare breasts moved beneath his arm as she took a breath into her chest and released it.
He felt the throbbing ache in his arm and hand with no small amount of pleasure. Movement and pain promised only more of the same, but he welcomed them. He was alive, and his body was slowly awakening.
As soon as he came fully back to his senses, he would free himself. And the two men who had put their hands on her would die. Slowly. Painfully.
Chapter 4
He allowed the heat of fury to burn through him before he beat it back. He could not give in to his murderous impulses, not when he was still as helpless as a newborn. They subsided, but the heat remained, and only after several moments did he realize it was coming from the body of the woman. She was warming his cold form, her skin almost hot against his—and it was growing hotter.
The back of the truck was refrigerated; a vented unit above them poured out a continuous stream of frosty air. They had kept the interior temperature so low that ice had formed on every surface. Naked as she was, the woman should have been losing body heat, not radiating it like a living furnace. The canvas the men had pulled over them was stiff from the cold, but it also seemed to be insulating them against the frigid air inside the truck. It trapped the heat she was generating, forming a cocoon of growing warmth around both of them.
Was she feverish? The drugs they had given her might be responsible, or perhaps she had been ill before the men had found her. He pressed his wrist against the smooth skin of her arm where they were cuffed together until he could feel her heartbeat. Like her breathing, it was slow but strong. Her skin felt soft, not tight, and along all the places where their skin touched, he felt dampness forming.
A woman with fever did not sweat, at least not until after the fever broke.
He tried to lift his arm but succeeded only in shifting his forearm a few inches. His hand opened against her shoulder, fingers curling over the gentle curve. She made a sound, and he forced his eyelids to open a sliver.
The truck’s interior was not completely dark; some murky light from a source above them filtered through the canvas. At first it hurt to see again, his eyes burning like the blaze of red in front of him. Then he saw that it was the woman’s hair, as vibrant and alive as a roaring fire.
This close he could pick out the different colors of each strand: gold, amber, copper, crimson, garnet. The length of it was straight and thick, tumbling down to disappear under her shoulder. In the sunlight the bountiful stuff must have made her head look as if it blazed.
His gaze shifted to what he could see of her face. Alabaster skin showed the tracings of deep blue where the veins scrolled at her temple; a tiny dark brown mole tried to hide in the burnished copper fringe of her lower lashes. She had wide brows and a short, straight nose; another, smaller mole sat on the cusp beneath it, almost on the edge of her upper lip. Her mouth was a lush, decadent flower blooming, her lips the color of a jeweled pomegranate.
His arm blocked his view of her body, but from what he had felt under him, she was young and healthy, her curves full and ripe. He had grown so accustomed to the starved-waif standards of beauty that being so close to such fertile lushness was like finding an orchard in the middle of the desert.
He gripped her shoulder as pain struck him again, this time from his legs, which trembled as the nerves and muscles began to twitch. Whatever they had used on him had been intended to keep him locked inside himself, and from what he had heard them say, the effect was supposed to last for as long as they kept him cold. Being warmed by the woman’s body heat must be neutralizing the drugs.
No, it is more than that. He had not cared to come back to himself before; he had been patiently waiting for the final release. He had already given himself to Death in his heart, or they would never have been able to capture him.
Now he was dragged back to life by this woman and his need to protect her, and a part of him resented being denied oblivion again. Survival held no attraction; he was done with the business of living. Until he had gone to war for the last time, his existence had been a void, a series of empty streets and fields and pathways he had wandered, aimless and cold, a caricature of the man he had been. Not all of his dignity had been stripped from him, and in the end it had sent him overseas, into battle, determined to die as he had never been permitted to live. His last purpose, to fight the enemy and protect those who did not have his talent for killing.
She needs me now.
The men had come to Florida to take the woman; from their conversations he knew they were driving from here to Colorado. He didn’t know the roads in this part of the country, but he guessed the journey would require two, perhaps three days. As long as he kept the woman warm, she might live, and at the rate his body was recovering, in another day he could regain enough mobility and strength to attempt an escape. He had no doubt he could elude the two fools abducting them; the real question was the woman and what state she would be in when she regained consciousness.
He couldn’t see what bound them together, but as needling spread up from his right arm, he felt the cold metal of the cuff the younger man had snapped around his wrist. The cuffs added another problem: Until he found the means with which to remove them, everything he did would be with her at his side, open and vulnerable to attack.
However much the men who had taken them deserved to die, he doubted she would stand by and do nothing while he slaughtered them. That narrowed his options to convincing her to help him escape.
By now the cold had retreated from his skin, leaving in its wake fresh pain as the last of his senses came to life. He clenched his jaw as his flesh crawled and stung; it felt as if he had been caught in a swarm of bees. He focused on her face, taking refuge in the slumbering, peaceful beauty there. Her lids and lashes kept him from seeing her eyes, but whatever color they were, he suspected they would be as fetching as her fiery hair, her sumptuous shape, and the generous warmth of her body.
A new sensation crept over him, one that moved under his skin and sank in, curling like a fist in his gut. That he wanted her came as no surprise to him; a man would truly have to be dead to lie beside her and feel nothing.
What shook him was the desire itself. He had not felt it in so long he had forgotten how primitive and powerful it was, how urgently it seized him in its grip. Left unsatisfied by his physical inability to serve its need, the new hunger rose into his head, battering through his defenses and engulfing him.
So relentless was the wanting that he began imagining how it would be with her, her softness under him, her eyes open, her pretty mouth smiling. He wanted to look into those eyes, to take sanctuary in her body. He would hold her to him as he forged into her, and hear her say his name as she clutched at him, his possession, his woman—
She is helpless.
His left hand convulsed, shaking as it moved to her face. He could feel the silky brush of her mouth across his palm, the whisper of her breath through his fingers.
It felt like the promise of a kiss. It sounded like a sigh of sadness.
He inched his hand down until it left her face and rested across her throat. Her pulse beat under his fingers, still sluggish but growing stronger and steadier. In a few hours she would awaken and find herself naked and bound to him, and undoubtedly that would horrify her. She would need to be calmed and told what had happened. She would depend on him to free her, to defend and watch over her, not add to her terror. And if he failed her …