Wolf (3 page)

Mac was disconcerted when he found the woman. For a handful of seconds, it hit him that she was dead and he felt his heart contract painfully in his chest. Then he realized she was asleep and amusement and irritation vied for dominance.

Poor kid, he thought! They’d scared the ever-loving shit out of her, he didn’t doubt.

Which might’ve made him wonder how she could be sleeping so peacefully now except that he was familiar enough with nervous exhaustion to know it when he saw it.

There were dried tears on her cheeks. She wasn’t sleeping like a baby because she was too stupid to live, to know what danger she was in. She’d just reached the point of shut down from overload.

He hated like hell to wake her, not the least because he knew she was liable to go berserk on them since they had her cornered. Not that he was particularly worried about his own skin, but she was liable to hurt herself.

His hesitation redirected his mind down a road it shouldn’t have gone, allowed memories to surface of things his mind had recorded that he hadn’t even realized he’d noticed—the way she’d felt beneath him, the way she’d looked in her bikini.

The terrified doe eyes she’d trained on him when he’d cornered her.

Shrugging inwardly, he carefully lifted the blanket she was huddled under to see if his imagination had gone wild or if she really was as fine a specimen of female anatomy as he’d ever laid eyes on. He excused his curiosity on the grounds that it had been a hell of a while since he’d gotten the chance even to look at a woman and it was bound to be a while more before he got another chance—if ever.

He swallowed a little thickly when he’d looked, struggling to keep his cock from bursting through his fatigues. If anything, he decided his imagination hadn’t done her justice. She was soft and round in all the right places, alright, her muscles toned enough to show she regularly worked out—maybe jogged to stay in shape? Or maybe she was a dancer? She had the body to rake in some kind of dough if she was a stripper.

Maybe that was how she’d acquired the boat? Some rich old bastard that was drooling after her bought it for her?

Reluctantly, he dragged his gaze from her body to examine her face again and decided she didn’t look young enough to be a dancer—unless she was retired? Not that she was old, but it was usually the barely legal girls that danced and there was a mature look about her face that made him think she was probably closer to thirty than twenty.

Not that that mattered one way or another, he thought, feeling anger begin to build in him. He couldn’t touch her—didn’t dare.

Jesus he would like to, though! All over, several times.

He was struggling to banish the image of burying himself hilt deep in her, watching her face go slack in the throes of ecstasy, when Hawk, who’d been standing over him, released a ragged breath that made her stir.

Her eyes opened slowly. For several moments, she stared up at the two of them
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without comprehension and then her eyes grew so wide he could see the whites all the way around the irises—hazel, he mentally noted, not brown as he’d first thought.

She sat up abruptly, but to his surprise and relief, she didn’t start screaming.

“Nobody’s gonna hurt you, baby,” Hawk murmured in a voice that might have been soothing if it wasn’t so rough with desire.

Mac flicked an annoyed look at him but finally decided she might not have noticed that the two of them were hanging over her with raging hard-ons, drooling.

“Who are you?” she asked shakily.

“I’m Staff Sergeant Cole MacIntyre, US Marines, Special Forces,” he replied, nudging his head at Hawk. “He’s Corporal Gabriel Hawkins.”

Sylvie studied both men, trying to assimilate what they’d told her and make sense of it. “I don’t understand,” she said finally. “Is this … some sort of military exercise?”

The two men exchanged a speaking glance.

“Yeah,” Hawk responded.

“No,” Mac said at almost the same instant and then glared at Hawk.

Hawk glared back at him. “You
tryin’
the scare the shit out of her?”

Mac met Sylvie’s gaze. “That what you thought that was all about?”

Sylvie swallowed with an effort. “It seemed like it might be a possibility,” she hedged.

“But that isn’t what you thought.”

It wasn’t, but she didn’t think she wanted to bring up what she’d thought. Maybe if she pretended they weren’t convicts they wouldn’t feel any need to do anything to her?

“I won’t tell anybody anything—because I can’t, you know? I didn’t really see anything and I have a really bad memory for names and … uh … faces,” she said a little hopefully.

Mac studied her sardonically. “Where do you suggest we drop you? We’re miles from the coast … any coast.”

“Where are you taking me?” She held up her hand before either man could answer. “No! Don’t tell me. I don’t really want to know.”

Mac studied her thoughtfully. “You want to get out of there?”

Sylvie smiled at him a little weakly. “Not really,” she said, her chin wobbling noticeably.

“Nobody’s gonna hurt you,” Hawk said again.

She sent him a wide-eyed, disbelieving look.

“We just want the boat and whatever supplies you’ve got.”

She seemed to relax fractionally. “Take whatever you want. You can just drop me anywhere.”

Mac scanned her length, lingering a lot longer than he’d intended. She was pale when he met her gaze again. “Lady, I think that’s just about the worst idea I’ve ever heard. We drop you off
anywhere
dressed like that and you’ll be damned lucky to get two feet without ….”

She looked for several moments as if she was going to burst into tears. To Mac’s relief, she sucked it up. He felt like pure shit, though, seeing her eyes swimming with unshed tears—like he’d been pulling the wings off a butterfly.

The look Hawk bent on him pissed him off.

“You should get dressed,” he said gruffly. “I’m not trying to scare you, but we’ve
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got two squads on board and none of them have been within sniffing distance of a woman in six months—let alone one like you.”

Sylvie nodded jerkily, all too happy to oblige. Gripping the blanket she’d been covered with, she surged to her feet.

Unable to resist the opportunity to see if she felt anything like she looked, Hawk grasped her waist and lifted her from the box where she’d been hiding. It wasn’t one of his brightest ideas. He didn’t want to let go of her once he’d set her on her feet. His hands tightened reflexively on her tiny waist.

Mac punched him in his wounded arm. Rage surged through him at the sudden burning pain, but he managed to tamp the urge to punch his superior back.

It still took an effort to peel his fingers off of her when he had visions dancing in his head of throwing her down on the deck and fucking her until he was exhausted.

“Let go of her, Hawk!” Mac growled warningly.

Swallowing a little convulsively, he ordered his fingers to loosen their grip.

Flicking a frightened look at his face, the woman raced toward the cabins, struggling to cover herself with the blanket she was dragging.

“I didn’t catch your name, baby.”

Sending him a terrified look, she slammed the door. They heard the distinctive click of a lock.

Mac sent him a look of disgust. “Jesus, Hawk! Get a fucking grip!”

Hawk glared at him, but after a moment he managed to force himself to relax. He ran a shaking hand over his face. “Sorry, Mac. I don’t know what came over me.”

“I do,” Mac retorted grimly.

Hawk frowned, seemed to wrestle with himself. “It ain’t the parasites,” he growled. “Man, that is one
beautiful
woman. Don’t tell me you don’t want her so bad yourself you can taste it.”

“Like hell! I’ve known you a lot of years, Hawk. Don’t tell me you don’t know you aren’t the same man you were six months ago.”

Hawk swallowed a little sickly. “You think it’s starting to affect us all the time?

Even when we aren’t … you know?”

“I think it has been from the beginning.”

Hawk glanced around and finally flung himself down on the couch. “Maybe it would’ve been better if they’d just killed us,” he muttered. “I’m not sure I want to live like this.”

“Suck it up, soldier!” Mac growled. “We can deal with it.”

Hawk shook his head, but he didn’t argue. He grimaced after a moment. “It ain’t safe to touch her, is it?”

Mac frowned. Instead of answering immediately, he began to pace restlessly. “I don’t know. Nobody at the fucking ‘medical center’ got infected that I know anything about.”

Hawk snorted. “Now who’s living in a fantasy land? We infected our pick-up, remember? Everybody in the lab was wearing hazmat suits.”

Mac frowned and finally shrugged. “We didn’t infect the team they sent in to pick us up,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, but we were dead—or close to it after they strafed the pick up boat.

Maybe the parasites were too busy fixin’ us up to change hosts?”

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“Maybe. Maybe they just had better timing? Maybe the parasites were satisfied with the hosts they already had? Maybe, maybe … that’s all we’ve fucking got, a whole hell of a lot of maybes. Maybe she won’t catch whatever the fuck we have as long as we keep our hands off of her? I don’t know, but as much as I’d like to fuck her until I’m too exhausted to think anymore, we don’t have time for it. We need to keep our minds on escape if we want to stay alive—and I do.”

A sudden thought occurred to Hawk that made him feel distinctly ill. “Shit!

What if we’ve already … contaminated her? What if she passed it to everybody she meets up with?”

Mac chewed his lip thoughtfully and finally shook his head. “They said it was parasites—they seemed pretty sure of it, anyway. If it was that easy to ‘catch’ it, somebody else sure as hell would’ve when they were stacking us in the morgue.”

Hawk considered it and relaxed fractionally. “Well, that’s a relief, anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate those fuckin’ bastards, but I wouldn’t like to think we were a threat to everybody we run across.”

“That might not come up. We aren’t out of the woods, yet,” Mac said dryly. He glanced toward the door of the cabin then, trying to decide whether the woman had had time to dress yet and finally decided she had. Striding to the door, he tapped on it. “You dressed?”

He heard a grunt of exertion from inside the room. “Not yet! Just a minute!”

Shaking his head, he stepped back and kicked the door in. As he’d suspected, her ass was framed in the porthole in the bow of the boat above the bed. Crossing the cabin in two strides, he caught her by the waistband of the shorts she was wearing and dragged her back in. She surprised him by putting up a fight. The moment he’d dragged her upper body back inside, she whirled on him. He caught both wrists as she swung at him and pitched both of them back onto the bed, pinning her beneath him and manacling her wrists on either side of her head.

“Don’t piss me off, woman!” he growled. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m mad.”

Sylvie stopped struggling to buck him off of her abruptly—not because of the warning in his voice or even because she’d run out of steam. She was frightened enough adrenaline was pumping through her at about ninety miles an hour.

It was the change in his expression and the hard ridge rising against her mound that finally filtered into her frantic mind and set off warning bells. Gasping for breath, she went perfectly still. He studied her face for a long, long moment, breathing raggedly, but she didn’t think for a moment that it was from overexerting himself in trying to subdue her. His weight alone was enough to do that when he seemed to be solid muscle from the neck down.

Almost as if he couldn’t control it, he curled his hips into hers. A faint tremor went through him.

“You’re gonna hurt her,” Hawk growled from the door.

Mac tensed but he didn’t glance at Hawk. “Don’t do that again. Understand? I wouldn’t mind, at all, tying you to this bunk and giving you something else to think about.”

Sylvie swallowed with an effort, nodding jerkily.

To her relief, he eased off of her. Instead of getting off the bed, though, he sat up,
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propped his back against the wall and causally adjusted the raging erection tenting his military fatigues.

Drawn by the motion of his hand, Sylvie watched him, staring at the bulge until it suddenly dawned on her what she was doing. She flicked a quick glance at his face then, feeling her face heat. To her surprise, he was staring stonily at the other man standing in the doorway.

Relieved that he didn’t seem to have noticed her fascination with his ‘problem’, Sylvie sat up and put a little distance between them. “What were you doing out here?”

Sylvie blinked at him. Fortunately, she’d gone over and over her lie all day. It spilled out before she considered changing it. “I’m on vacation with some friends. They were scuba diving, but I decided to wait for them on the boat.”