Her Lone Wolf (11 page)

When she said it, the words weren’t nearly as outrageous as when he’d said them because they were true. She was damn hard to resist. Especially the way she was looking at him right now. It was all he could do not to cup her chin in his hand and taste that mouth of hers again. The thought only got him more turned on and he swore.

Shit.

She’d said that to make light of the whole thing so he wouldn’t feel more uncomfortable than he was, not because she was trying to come on to him.

As the silence stretched on, he fumbled for something to say that wouldn’t make him sound like an idiot. Or like he was trying to get in her pants. While he’d never been any good with words, he’d never been shy around women. But this was different. He had no idea what the hell was happening between them or where this was going. If it was going anywhere. But if it did go somewhere, he was damn sure going to enjoy the ride.

“You’re right,” he agreed. “About being irresistible, I mean.”

Danica smiled up at him and wiggled closer. “Good answer.”

Clayne inhaled sharply. Was she trying to kill him? If she thought there’d been something hard poking her in the ass before, she was about to get a big surprise now. He was like a freaking fence post.

God, this was torture. It was one thing to look at a woman’s ass and imagine how firm and delicious it would feel. It was a completely different thing to have that ass in your lap, moving around in the most tempting way. He had to put some distance between them before he lost his mind.

He pulled his arm from around her shoulders so he could get a good grip on her hips, but once he had a hold on her, he hesitated. He’d intended to lift her off his lap, but what he really wanted to do was yank her down even harder. Preferably while he buried himself inside her.

Danica turned to look at him over her shoulder again. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. I just, um, thought you might still be cold.”

Which explained why he was holding on to her hips like this. What was he going to do next—ask what she thought about the weather they were having this time of year?

She gave him a sexy smile. “I’m not cold at all.”

He could attest to that. And his body’s response to the scorching heat she was putting off was immediate and all consuming. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, this is where the two of them had been heading for weeks now. From the moment he’d kissed her in Mexico City, he had wanted it to go here. Hoped it would go here. Prayed it would go here.

Clayne gazed into Danica’s big, dark eyes, knowing he had a decision to make. If he let this go where he thought it was heading, things between them would never be the same. If he didn’t, he knew he’d miss a chance at something his gut told him only came along once in a lifetime.

It wasn’t an easy choice. If he went down this path, he’d be risking their partnership. Was he willing to give up what he had for what was behind door number two?

He tightened his hold on her hips and lifted her off his lap, but instead of setting her down on the sleeping bags like he should have, he spun her around and settled her back down on his lap so that she was facing him. Then he reached down and pulled the blanket around her shoulders again.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m much warmer now.”

He leaned closer, letting her sweet scent fill him. It was exhilarating. Like HALO jumping from twenty-five thousand feet. But even the high-altitude-low-opening jump wasn’t this much of a rush.

“Let’s make sure you stay that way.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” she whispered.

He’d been wrong. She
was
coming on to him.

The small gap between them closed by mutual consent, then Clayne’s mouth was on hers. Danica sighed, the sound soft and sexy, and a growl vibrated deep in his throat before he could stop it. Another woman might be frightened by the animal lurking beneath the surface, but not Danica. She was the one woman he didn’t have to hide the wolf from.

He deepened the kiss, his tongue going in search of hers. He slid his hands up her sides to cup her breasts, lingering there a moment before reaching for the zipper of her coat. He’d intended to unzip it slowly, but he was too impatient for that. He yanked. Metal flew. Cloth tore.

Danica pulled back, her eyes wide with shock.

Shit.
He’d blown it. Damn his animal side.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I didn’t mean to—”

She pressed a finger to his lips, silencing him. “Don’t be sorry. You surprised me, that’s all.”

He caught her hand, gently pulling it away. “Danica, are you sure about this? Really sure?”

When he had sex with a woman, he’d always been careful to keep the wolf in check, but he wasn’t certain he could do that with Danica. There was something about her that made him think he might very well lose control.

She leaned forward to kiss him long and slow on the mouth before trailing her lips across his jaw to whisper in his ear.

“I’m absolutely sure.”

* * *

“You still like chili on your burger, right?” Danica asked from the front seat.

Clayne nodded, not sure what he’d just agreed to. But then he looked around and realized they were sitting at the drive-through window of the fast-food restaurant. He was still trying to reposition the painful hard-on in his jeans when Danica handed him two chili-smothered cheeseburgers, onion rings, and a Coke. He hoped she didn’t notice the tent he was pitching.

Apparently she hadn’t, because she turned around without a word and settled back in her seat as Tony pulled away from the window and parked in the first available space.

Clayne covered up the evidence of his excitement with the wrapper from the first burger. He was still so lost in the pleasant—and painful—memory of making love to Danica for the first time that he barely tasted the food. They’d lain in that pile of blankets and sleeping bags the whole night and most of the next day, making love like they needed it to survive. The contact who was supposed to meet the Chinese diplomat never showed, and he and Danica couldn’t have cared less. Once they’d gotten past the thing that had been holding them back, it was like a dam bursting. They hadn’t been able to get enough of each other.

For Clayne, it had been… Well, a moving experience was probably the best way to put it. He’d felt things that night he’d never felt before. He’d had sex with other women—okay, plenty of other women—before her, but what’d happened that night with Danica made all the others nothing more than a vague and distant memory.

Which was why before they had left that cold, dark, beautiful stakeout location, Clayne had opened up and shared things with Danica that he hadn’t told anyone. Not John, not Dick—nobody. And she had listened to him talk, never once unsettled about the things he told her and the life he’d led, about the man he used to be. She’d held his soul in the palm of her hand, and he knew without a doubt he’d found the thing that had been missing from his life.

Clayne shoved a few more onion rings in his mouth and chewed them along with a big bite of burger. In the front seat, Tony was saying his wife would kill him if she knew he was eating this stuff. Clayne sipped his Coke as he watched Danica eat. Damn, she even made eating a cheeseburger a sensual experience.

He shook his head and focused on his own meal. That night had been the first of many nights—and days—that convinced him that he and Danica would be together forever. But that wasn’t the way it had worked out. Danica had dumped him. Not simply dumped him, but just about cut his heart out and fed it to him.

That’s what a man like him got for being stupid enough to think soul mates really existed.

He’d lain awake countless nights since she’d walked out, wondering what he’d done to mess things up with her and drive her away. If he asked her now, would she tell him? Probably not. What would be the point anyway? He and Danica couldn’t pick up where they left off and expect everything to go back to the way it’d been.

* * *

After eating, they talked to a few more people on their list—or tried to anyway—then did as Carhart had ordered and picked up yet another suspect. This time it was a guy who’d been arrested a few years earlier for hunting deer out of season up in the mountains. Danica guessed that qualified him as an extreme hunter or something, but it seemed like a big leap from there to being a serial killer. They brought him in for questioning anyway, even though it was a complete waste of time.

Thankfully, there weren’t any more suspects left to pick up by the time they got back to the field office. After dropping off their guy, they headed to the main conference room to see if anyone was around. If they were lucky, someone on the task force had learned something that might be useful. If not, they’d probably be pulling another all-nighter poring over the files, looking for anything they might have missed. Beyond waiting for the killer to strike again, there wasn’t much else to do.

She glanced over her shoulder at Clayne. He hadn’t said more than two words since they’d stopped to get something to eat, but she knew he was frustrated. She was frustrated, too. But she couldn’t let it show. She might not work for the DCO anymore, but she still considered it her responsibility to keep Clayne calm and focused on the case. It was the only way they were going to catch this killer.

Unfortunately, Clayne’d never dealt well with obstacles. When he got exasperated, he usually ended up punching someone. Her ability to keep those violent tendencies in check—until it was the right time to release them—was one of the things that had made them such a good team. In fact, John had told her that was the main reason he’d recruited her. She never figured out how the DCO had known they’d work so well together, but they’d been right. She and Clayne had developed an almost instinctive understanding for how the other person operated. He recognized her need to plan and think everything out, and she respected his need to kick down doors rather than knock on them.

It wasn’t surprising Clayne had developed his attack-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to solving problems. He’d had a rough life before the DCO recruited him. Clayne had been abandoned by his mother when he was five. She’d taken him into a church and just left him there. Clayne had never had much use for churches after that—or mothers. As someone who’d grown up with loving parents and three protective older brothers in the suburbs, Danica couldn’t even begin to understand what he’d gone through living in foster care, shuffled from one place to the next.

It didn’t help things any when his shifter side came out in his teens. He’d had no idea what the hell was happening to him and didn’t know how to handle it. After getting thrown out of high school at sixteen for fighting, he’d lived on the streets doing what he had to in order to survive. The petty crimes he committed turned into other, more serious offenses, which had landed him in jail on more than one occasion.

But that didn’t stop Clayne from doing things his own way. He followed a code that didn’t make sense to anyone but him. He’d rarely carried a gun, even in situations where someone might shoot him. He wouldn’t take things from people he considered weaker than he was, and he never did what other people told him to do.

That code had both kept him out of trouble, and gotten him into it. More often than not, people viewed a man as independent as Clayne as a problem. No one could tell where his loyalties lay, and that scared them.

Clayne’s bizarre code of ethics was ultimately what put him on the DCO radar. At the time, he’d never told her what he’d done and she hadn’t asked, but she’d gotten the impression he would have gone to prison for a really long time if they hadn’t recruited him.

It wasn’t until later that she’d finally learned what kind of trouble he’d gotten into. She’d wondered so many times since then how Clayne’s life—and hers—might have been different if she’d met him before he’d gotten mixed up in the things he had. They probably wouldn’t be chasing serial killers, that’s for sure.

“Agent Beckett!”

Danica turned to see a blond man running down the hall to catch up with them. She thought his name was Collins. Or was it Foster?

“Thank God I found you,” he said breathlessly. “Carhart wants you and Agent Buchanan in the command center ASAP.”

Crap. What had they done now? Or had her boss simply come up with a new form of torture to keep them occupied and out of the way?

“The Hunter made contact, and he’s demanding to talk to Agent Buchanan.”

* * *

Watching Ivy cry tore at Landon’s gut. And he couldn’t do a damn thing to comfort her because no one in the DCO could know they were husband and wife because workplace romance was against the rules. So he stood there outside the abandoned farmhouse in Saskatchewan, Canada, and cursed the stupid rule that forced them to keep it a secret.

They’d been visiting Jayson when John called saying he wanted them to check out another possible hybrid research lab. The DCO had tracked several large computers perfect for handling the huge amount of data that came with modeling and simulating DNA strands, as well as various medical equipment, to a rural community outside of Saskatchewan. He and Ivy would have been here weeks ago, but now that the doctors knew the DCO was on to them, they’d started covering their tracks. The farmhouse was one of at least twenty different places all over the globe that had come up as possible locations in the past week. Almost all of them had turned out to be bogus, which meant the doctors were deliberately leaking false information, knowing the DCO had limited resources to cover all of them.

John wasn’t the only one at the DCO who was concerned. While everyone knew the doctors were out there somewhere, they’d all thought Stutmeir had been the driving force behind the hybrid research. With him dead, the DCO assumed the program would fall apart. Clearly, it hadn’t. While they hadn’t stumbled on any more nests of vicious man-made shifters, they’d still found evidence of research. And now they had decoy labs popping up all over the world. Even if the doctors weren’t actually in all of them, it took a huge amount of money to make the DCO think they were. This wasn’t some small-time operation. It was large, well-funded, and growing.