Captured: Warriors of Hir, Book 1 (11 page)

Bill held up a finger. “You need to either get yourself the house phone cut back on or you get your butt to town and get a cell that’ll work up here.”

Jenna gave a nod. “Yes, sir.”

Bill held her with a narrow look for a moment. “All right, then,” he said, straightening. “You come on outside now and show me that thing works.”

Jenna kept her eyes off the bedroom door but her heart sped up. Would Ra’kur consider this threatening?

“It works,” she promised. “It works just fine if it’s got reception.”

Bill stuck his tongue in his cheek for a moment. “In fact, I’m gonna stand there and make sure you hear all them messages.” He indicated the stairs behind him. “Get your coat, Birdie, and let’s go.”

She hesitated, the cell gripped in her now sweaty palm.

“Well, come on, girl!” Bill said, stepping back. “You got your foot nailed to the floor or somethin’? I ain’t got all day—let’s go!”

“Okay,” she said, a little too loudly. “I’ll just come outside for a minute, just to show you my phone works, Bill, then you can get back to town. I know you can’t stay long.”

Jenna grabbed her coat. In the sliver of light under the bedroom door the shadows shifted restlessly.

She stepped outside with Bill and shut the front door behind her.

Eleven

“See?” Jenna asked, ending the call to her voicemail. “I got ’em all.”

Bill blew out between pursed lips, his breath showing in the cold. “All right, then.” He gave her a stern look. “Now, next time I see Lester and Sarah Jane they’d best tell me they got a call from you, saying as to how sorry you are they was frettin’ on you.”

“So, Bill,” she called after him as he headed for the cruiser. “How long you think it’ll be before you’ll be seeing Sarah Jane to ask her that?”

His cheeks reddened. “You mind your business, Jenna McNally, and keep a civil tongue in your head.”

“Don’t I always?”

Bill shot her a sour look then gestured at her SUV. “And get that thing cleaned off case you need it in a hurry.”

She frowned. “Why would I need it in a hurry?”

He paused at the car door; the worry lines clear on his face now. “Last night at Dolly’s Chester Davis said he saw something a couple days ago near his property, running fast. I said, Ches, it weren’t nothin’ but a damn bear, and he said it didn’t run like no bear. Said it didn’t growl like one neither.”

Damn it, I shouldn’t have let Ra’kur run the land like that, even at night!

But he’d needed so badly to blow off some steam from the long hours of working on his ship. There’d been a full moon that evening, the air cold and clear as could be, and he’d been just itching to show her how fast he was. Graceful for all his size, his speed was breathtaking and she’d lost sight of him in moments as he took off toward the woods.  Even hindered by snow she’d bet he could run down a buck without breaking a sweat. He was flushed when he returned to her, grinning with pride at her wide-eyed admiration. His deep rumbling laugh echoed through the woods as he swung her into his arms to carry her inside to their bed—

It was January; black bears would be hibernating now. Bill knew that too.

“You know Chester done always drink like a fish,” Jenna said with a toss of her hair. “He musta seen a bobcat. Or a wolf, maybe.”

“You seen anything?”

“No, sir.”

“I guess if’n you can’t be bothered to take two steps from the house to check your messages, Birdie,” he grumbled, “then you sure ain’t seen nothing out here.”

Jenna kept her expression contrite, knowing anything she said back to that would likely just come out sounding like she was sassing him.

Bill sighed. “All right,” he said, sounding a bit weary. “You take care now.”

She gave a nod. “You too.”

She waited outside while Bill got in the car and waved as he pulled away. As soon as the sheriff’s car was out of sight the front door opened behind her.

“I guess you heard everything,” she said. He’d probably be able to tell her what her heart rate had been.

“I think he is, as you say, an honorable male.” Ra’kur came to stand beside her. “I am glad I decided not to kill him.”

Jenna’s head snapped around and he gave a deep, rumbling laugh.

“Oh,
very
funny,” she muttered.

“You do not appreciate my joke, little one,” he teased and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.

“Yeah, that whole ‘aliens slaughtering my friends’ humor is positively wasted on me.”

“Come.” He caught her hand and urged her along toward the woods, to the path they’d walked so many times before. “I must finish the ship’s repairs and take you home where you will be safe.”

And that brought them right back to the argument they were having when Bill showed up.

“Ra’kur, I can’t just move to another planet.”

“Hir is a very beautiful world and not so different from this one,” he said, their boots crunching the snow. “There is nothing to fear.”

“I’m not afraid,” she protested as they passed into shadow, the trees growing denser around them. Not true at all; she just wasn’t sure whether she was more afraid of going with him or how it would feel when he went without her. “I—I can’t just leave Earth.”

“You will come home with me, Jenna.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “You will live at my clan’s enclosure. I will keep you safe and you will be happy there.”

“Enclosure?”

“Like your woods,” he answered with a nod at the forest around them as they headed down the hill. “The Erah clan has much land, many of my blood live there.”

“You still have family there?” she asked, surprised.

He gave a faint, faraway smile. “Yes, though it has been very long since I have seen my father, my brothers, or even spoken with them. It was difficult, sometimes dangerous, to contact them while I searched.”

“You have brothers? Older or younger?”

“Both are younger. I had two sisters as well.” His face clouded. “Before the Scourge took them and my mother.”

“I’m sorry,” Jenna said quietly as the trees gave way to the clearing where they’d met.

He stopped in their little clearing, his face ragged in the winter light. “I was only eight summers when the sickness came to our enclosure. In three days all the females of our clan were dead or dying. The ground trembled with the keening of warriors. Some did not survive their loss.” She saw him swallow. “I wonder at it still that my sire did. But he is clanfather and so many needed him to live.”

“Clanfather?”

“The Erah’s leader, but like most enclosures we have no clanmother now.”

“It’s hard for me to imagine.” She shook her head. “Half the population just wiped out like that.”

“No, it was far crueler than that. Had the illness taken half our people that would have injured us but to tear our females away as they did—They cut the very heart from our kind and left us in agony.” He focused on her again, and his eyes softened. “And you, my Jenna? There are no others of your blood now?”

“No, not now that Pap’s gone. My parents and Becca—my big sister—they were all killed in the car wreck. That’s how I came to live with him.”

His fingers traced her cheek. “I am so glad you were not with them.”

“I was actually. I was only six so I don’t remember much. Highway patrol said that when the back window smashed I got thrown free. I got cut up a bit, not bad, but I broke my arm. Pap”—she swallowed hard, fingering her necklace—“he gave me this when he came to get me from the hospital said, ‘Cain’t nobody take the place of your momma and daddy but you got me, Birdie, always. And I’m gonna make sure you don’t want for nothing.’ I told him how grateful I was, before he passed, for all he had done for me. And he said”—tears blurred her vision—“he said
he
was grateful on account that raising me gave him a whole bunch of joy.” 

Ra’kur pressed a kiss to her forehead. “You will bring joy to our enclosure too, my Jenna, when the clan welcomes you.”

He turned, his hand taking hers again as he headed toward the creek to the place where his ship remained cloaked.

“Would they welcome me?” she asked. “I’m human. Wouldn’t they object if you brought an”—funny to think of
herself
this way—“alien home?”

He gave a deep laugh and opened the door to his ship. “No, I will be much envied.” His gaze fell on her again and he sobered. “But we must go directly to the enclosure when we arrive on Hir. I cannot risk any others seeing you.”

Not that she was actually going to go but— “Because I’m human?”

“Because you are so beautiful.” His mouth curved into a rueful smile. “Many warriors will seek to take you from me.”

“What do you mean, take me from you?”

“Kill me.” He gave a careless shrug as they stepped inside and the door slid shut. “And claim you for themselves.”

“
What?
”

He raised black eyebrows. “I do not fault them for this. I would fight and kill to take you from another. I will do so to keep you.”

“Thanks,” she managed. “I think.”

He turned to key in the code to open the inside door. “No one will ever take you away from me. My clanbrothers will help me keep you.”

“Ra’kur”—she caught his arm—“I can’t just go live on another planet.”

“There is no more need to talk of this,” he growled. “This is the way it will be. This is the way it
must
be.”

She stared up at him, at his set jaw and shuttered alien eyes.

She let him go and took a step back.

“Well, I guess I just don’t see it that way,” she said quietly.

She’d been in the ship often enough to know how to open the outside door herself.  She stepped through and headed back up to the cabin.

“Would you have us live
here
?”

She glanced back down the hill to see him following. He threw his arm out to indicate Pap’s woods, making a dismissive wave at where she’d spent most of the happiest times of her childhood, of her life, of the clearing where they’d met.

“On this primitive world? Where you so fear that someone will see one not of your kind that you hide your own lifemate?”

“You didn’t even
ask
me if I wanted to spend my life with you,” she threw back at him, plodding up the slope. “You just decided that’s how things were going to be!”

She gasped; she’d scarcely heard him move behind her before he caught hold of her arm. He was just so goddamn
fast
.

“How can you say such things to me?” he demanded. “I called to you. I offered my life in service to you. I offered my body for your comfort and protection!”

Jenna looked away. “Humans do things differently, Ra’kur.”

His breath caught and he went very still. “Are you saying you do not want me as your lifemate?”

She wasn’t being fair and she knew it. He’d done everything the right way according to his species, his culture.

“I don’t know what I want,” she mumbled and pulled her arm out of his grasp.

She trudged toward the cabin, her eyes on the snow-covered ground, knowing he followed her, knowing there was no hope of compromise on this.

She just
couldn’t
. If she went with him, she might never see home again.

She was already well past the tree line when a metallic squeak brought her head up.

Bill, just now turning away from the front door where he’d been knocking, spotted her from his place on the porch.

“Hey, Birdie!” he called, waving as the screen door shut behind him. “I clean forgot to tell you that Lester—”

Bill broke off, looking past her, his face going slack in shocked disbelief.

Ra’kur was only a few paces behind her, already out of the woods, clear as day.

Oh dear God . . .

They’d been inside the ship—that must be why he hadn’t heard the car. Bill’s scent had to be strong here from his earlier visit and Ra’kur distracted by their arguing or he would have noticed Bill had come back.