Primal Cravings (9 page)

“Flu,” she rasped.

“Don’t cough on anything,” he told her.

Dee nodded, and squinted into the dimness of the store rather than turn her attention on anything masculine. It was packed full of narrow rows of shelves. She could make out candy and grocery items, with pop, beer, and other drinks in tall coolers in the back. For all she could tell there might be a weapons cache and hardware supplies stuffed into the crowded space. Never mind. She walked carefully toward the counter, stopping a few feet short when the man put his hand up.

Just as well to keep her distance. She fought the temptation to grab any man and have her way with him as it was.

“I’d like to rent a room,” she told him.

He eyed her critically. “Maybe you should go to an ER.”

“Need to rest,” she managed to say in an almost normal voice. She needed a bed all right, but not for resting. “And a shower.” More than anything else she needed water running over her skin, cold and strong and bracing.

The man brought out a form for her to fill out.

Dee stifled a groan. The last thing she was up to was any kind of paperwork. She glanced out the store’s wide glass window to where Piper waited by the SUV, arms crossed, expression deeply annoyed.

“My friend can take care of the details. Please just let me have the key.”

He hesitated, then looked her over worriedly. “Get some rest,” he said and put a key on the glass-topped counter. “Room two.”

She grabbed the key.

Piper came toward her as she exited the store. She waved him toward the door. “We’re staying. I’ll be in room two.” He looked puzzled, but didn’t ask any questions. She took another step, then turned as she remembered something important. “Sage,” she said. “I need sage for the spell. See if there’s any in the grocery area.”

Chapter Sixteen

Jake took his time about approaching the motel room after he parked the SUV in the space in front of the door. He paced outdoors for a time, furious with McCoy’s forcing this travel delay, as well as using the exercise to work off some of his own overheated energy.

He carried with him not only a plastic container of herbs from the convenience store shelf but also their go bags from the back of the SUV. It was Dark Angel policy to carry small backpacks containing personal items along on assignments. You never knew when a change of underwear or a shave might actually prove important for an op.

He knocked. No answer. Jake discovered McCoy hadn’t locked the door of room two behind her when he checked the knob. It was a security protocol breach, but also saved him from breaking the lock when she didn’t respond to his knock.

McCoy wasn’t in the small bedroom, but he felt her burning presence in the bathroom. He heard water running, imagined it sizzling and steaming over her bare skin. He doubted she was taking a shower for the sake of cleanliness. Water was probably part of the spell she’d mentioned when they’d passed each other in front of the store. And it was probably as cold as ice.

He put his hand on the door handle just as a loud groan issued from the bathroom. The door was off its hinges and he was in the small room a moment later.

She was on her knees in the tiny shower cubicle, fully clothed, face turned up to the spray washing over her. Her whispered words were drowned out by the running water. Droplets hit him. The liquid was indeed cold, yet there seemed to be a sizzling heat haze in the air. He accepted this as some sort of magic at work.

Jake waited for a pause in McCoy’s chanting before he said, “The store didn’t have sage. The man at the counter gave me this.” He held up a small round plastic bottle. McCoy’s gaze shifted to it. “It’s called poultry seasoning,” he told her.

McCoy pressed her hands against the shower wall and shook with laughter despite her radiated pain. She managed to glance his way. “Do I look like a turkey?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t see any resemblance. Will this be of any help?” he asked, holding the container toward her. Water rushed over his hand and wrist.

“It’ll do. Open it for me.”

She turned her face back up to the water. He took off the plastic lid and slit the inside cover with a slightly extended claw.

When he tried handing it to her again, McCoy shook her head. “Sprinkle it on me.”

“What?”

She took several panting breaths before she could speak again. “Need your, help, Jake.”

That was the first time she had ever called him Jake. “Sprinkle it?” He nodded. “All right.” He hesitated another moment before asking, “Will you need basting at some point?”

This drew another shaky laugh from her. He was stupidly pleased at being able to distract her a bit from her pain. Stupid of him to do this, as the best thing was to get her through this magical medical emergency so they could get on with the assignment.

“I guess I am simmering in my own juices,” she whispered, so low she probably didn’t think he could hear her.

He choked on a dirty laugh.

She flashed him a dirty look. “Sprinkle.”

She started chanting again, her hands raised so the water poured over her outstretched palms. He took a pinch of the herb mix between thumb and forefinger and dropped it toward the top of her head. The mixture clumped in her wet hair, then was washed across her upturned face. The second pinch rolled to her shoulders and clung to her shirt.

Jake couldn’t help but notice the way the thin knit shirt clung to her body, how her hard nipples stood out under the material.

“More.”

Jake didn’t know how long he’d been doing nothing but stare hungrily at her. His throat ached and his fangs were extended. He gave his head a hard shake. He started sprinkling herbs again. She went on chanting. The water poured from the shower head, drenching McCoy and occasionally splashing Jake. He was grateful that the it was icy cold.

“Better?” he asked when she reached up and turned the water off. The herb mixture had all been rinsed down the drain but its scent was still in the air. Along with the fresh water and the tangy spice of her heat.

McCoy rested her head against the tiled wall of the stall. “Some,” she said. She didn’t seem ready to move.

“Do you need help getting out?”

“Not ready to be touched. Towels.”

Jake considered her answer, and decided he’d had just about enough of being accommodating. He was Prime!

He grabbed up the only two towels in the bathroom and scooped the female out of the stall. It took him a moment to strip the soaking clothes from her shivering body. Claws could come in handy that way. He didn’t look as he vigorously rubbed her naked skin with the thin towels.

She gasped and moaned and writhed as her skin was rubbed. He ignored that, too. He couldn’t resist lightly slapping her bare behind when he was done. He instantly regretted doing it, as the tempting, tactile memory of her shape lingered against his cupped palm.

“Get into bed,” he ordered McCoy. “To rest,” he added when she gave him a big-eyed look that was half alarmed and more than half seductively hopeful.

He reminded himself that any male would do for her right now. Not her fault. No reason to resent that her lust was impersonal. Although he did.

“Go, woman.”

He was gratified when the usually argumentative witch gave him one more shocked look but still did as she was told. She scampered from the little room. Both of the towels were tied around her, but they were short and thin and did more to enhance her hips, thighs, and bosom than hide them.

Jake waited in the wet bathroom, taking deep, calming breaths as he listened to McCoy move around in the bedroom. He heard the bedclothes turned down, the creak of mattress springs as she got into bed, the soft slide of a sheet covering her body. He listened to her breathing, her heartbeat, the blood flowing through her. He felt the warmth of her skin from even this distance, and her normal seductive scent beneath the musk of arousal and earthy hint of herbs.

He could breathe her in forever.

Which was not a commitment of any sort to this female, no matter how much she fascinated him.

He walked into the bedroom and watched with eyes that saw shades of heat and the tracery of blood beneath fragile flesh. He ached to touch her. But there was nothing new in this longing, he was long-practiced at avoiding any contact with Dee McCoy. Though it was getting harder with every moment they spent alone together on this op.

He wasn’t stupid enough to not realize that was exactly what Tobias Strahan had had in mind when he sent them to look into some unknown magical danger.

I’m only nominally one of the good-guy Primes, boss,
Jake thought.
I do not understand how you Clan and Family boys can let your guard down enough to be led around by the nose—and dicks—by females, vampire or mortal. I don’t get it. I’m not able to get it.

He couldn’t help but look at the sleeping McCoy with emotions he supposed were tenderness and concern.

Weakness.

“I don’t want to get it.”

He walked out of the motel room and closed the door firmly behind him.

Chapter Seventeen

Jake walked outside, trying to concentrate on anything but his jumbled non-relationship with Dee McCoy.

Dee was an odd name for a mortal, wasn’t it?

Someone had told him Dee was short for Delilah, which seemed even odder to Jake than Dee. In mortal mythology, wasn’t Delilah a seductress and traitor?

As if females needed names.

Jake jolted in shock at his own thought.

Where was this backsliding come from? He was hungry. He was horny. He was on his own when he was used to the support and camaraderie of being with the Dark Angels. The security of being one of the Crew meant a lot to Jake. Maybe these things, or lack of them, made him weak, prey to doubts.

“You’d think I hadn’t passed all my ‘how to be a Family Prime’ tests from the way I’m thinking lately.”

His mind flipped over and over in too many directions. He looked around to get his bearings. The sunlight on his skin told him it was late morning. The sky overhead was clear. The air was still. Yet there was an energy in the atmosphere, under the parking lot concrete beneath his feet.

A storm was coming.

All his psychic senses said so.

A storm centered on him? On McCoy?

He fought the urge to run back into the motel room, scoop up the sleeping woman, and take her back to the shelter of the Crew.

He recognized this as a protective urge.

“Now, that is Family Prime behavior. Closer to Clan.” He gave a mock-shudder of distaste.

He also took a seat on a bench against the wall outside the bedroom. It was time to get organized, to get things done. Time to report in. His thoughts and emotions were a little too raw right now to make telepathic contact with communications back at the Dark Angels base. Telepathy might be simpler, but he took out his cell phone instead. And got no signal.

He supposed it was just as well, as he recalled he still hadn’t gone over the packet of interrogation data from Laurent Wolf blocked off in a corner of his mind. Might as well absorb what had been learned from the Satanists, or whatever they were. Kinky, black-arts-using, sex-pervert sickos, he supposed was a good description.

Used to be my kind of people.

Not that the Dark Angels wouldn’t claim to be at least most of those things. Everything but the black arts—Nanny McCoy wouldn’t blink at the kinky, sicko sexual perversion, but she’d frown and shake a finger under their noses at the least hint of black magic.

He smiled at his nonsensical thoughts, even though his thoughts always came back to McCoy.

Maybe he was going to have to leave the Dark Angels to escape his obsession with her. To go where? To do what?

Come home.

The voice in his head was sweetly seductive. It was also not his own.

He blamed exposure to magic, and the raw telepathic data still crammed in his head. Jake opened up the packet Wolf had placed in his mind and rifled through it.

Magic everywhere in those fools’ heads. Very strong. But he knew that from McCoy’s reactions, because she had to be a powerful magician herself or Tobias wouldn’t have her in the Crew. What had the coven been trying to do, really raise a demon straight from hell?

Bring home the Lost. Bring the worlds. Bind the worlds.

That sounded like something out of
The Lord of the Rings
.

Jake filed away what little he thought was useful, then blew the rest of the telepathic data out of his head. He checked his watch as well as the feel of the light. Time to go check on McCoy.

The room was small, dim, smelled faintly of cleaning products. Jake took the few steps from the door to the side of the bed. He looked down at the restless woman rolling around the mattress. Her bare skin was pale against the bedclothes.

“It’s time for us to go,” Jake said.

He got no response. She was dreaming, he decided. Lost somewhere in a nightmare, he suspected. The magic she’d absorbed had a lot of power in it.

“That was a stupid move, McCoy,” he said.

Brave. Compassionate, even admirable, but totally stupid.

He caught himself smiling at the mortal woman as he began to lean forward to wake her. Movement caught his attention before he touched her.

All he saw when he turned his head was his own reflection in a mirror on the wall across from the foot of the bed. Just a mirror. Just his own reflection.

Yet it was all wrong.

He’d had this odd, eerie reaction to a mirror before, though he couldn’t place the deja vu sensation at the moment. Jake turned to look directly into the mirror. What he saw, what was really there, was himself, a tired, rumpled man in need of a shave. But the harder he stared into the glass, the more it seemed like something else was there, behind the mirror. Behind a barrier, a bubble.

“I know Primes are vain, but aren’t you taking it a bit far?”

Jake turned to face McCoy. She was sitting up, the sheet wrapped tightly around her breasts, outlining them. Her bare shoulders were incredibly sexy.