Brock (3 page)

When the police left with the driver of the big truck
, she moved out of her space and back onto the sales floor. She was watering the plants when she realized someone was close to her.

It was Neal.
He smiled at her and nodded to the man next to him. Neal used sign language to tell her who he was. “This is my brother Brock. He works with us sometimes, and when he’s around, I want you to feel comfortable. I try to introduce all the new hires to all my brothers in the event you see them hanging around.”

She took a step back when he took two toward her. She was suddenly afraid of the bigger man and what he might do to her.
She whimpered. Neal touched the man’s shoulder when he turned to him. She couldn’t tell what they were saying because they weren’t looking at her any longer, but she knew that whatever it was couldn’t bode well for her.

When the man reached for her again
, she pulled further away and looked at him. He was smiling, but she wasn’t stupid enough to think it meant he was being friendly. She looked at his mouth again when it started moving.

“I won’t hurt you, I promise you.”
She shook her head, and he backed up. “I won’t harm you, Em. I can’t.”

She had no idea what that was supposed to mean. He was twice her size in weight
, and he was a good foot taller than her. She looked at Neal, who was waving at his wife. She was desperate to know what was going on, and when Rayne touched her arm, she let her. The men were frightening her.

“This is my brother-in-law Brock. He wants you to know that he won’t hurt you
, but he would like to touch you for a moment. He has…he thinks you might be something to him.”
Rayne glared at Brock.
“He’s a nice guy most of the time, unless he’s scaring my employees. Can he touch your arm? I swear that’s all he’d better do.”

Em
was nodding before she could think of all the reasons why this was a bad idea. But even as his hands grazed her bare arm, something inside of her melted and she was more afraid than before, but not so much of the man but of what she was feeling. He smiled at her again and pulled her gently to him. She went because she felt she had no choice. Her heart was telling her it was fine, while her mind was telling her to back the fuck up.

When he buried his face in her
neck, she felt him…she thought he purred. When he licked her skin, her body seemed to catch fire, and she backed away from him, or at least she tried to. Something was off about this whole thing, and she wanted away from him.

“You’re his mate. Do you know what that means?”
She shook her head at Rayne, not because she didn’t know what it meant—because she did—but she didn’t want him near her.
“Em, listen to me, I won’t let him hurt you. He’s a good man, and he just wants to talk to you.”

“He’s not human, is he? He’s like that other man, Peter.
Is he?”
Rayne shook her head, but before she could answer her, Em nodded.
“He is. That man who tried to bite me said I was his mate, too, and that he wanted me as his bride. I would rather die than let anyone bite me again.”

Rayne spoke to the two men and the one that had licked her, Brock
, looked at her throat, and she felt like he’d burned her. Not a bad feeling, but…she looked at him when Rayne turned back to her.

“He wants to know when this happened and if the vampire is still alive?”
She nodded her head.
“Brock isn’t a vampire, Em, he’s a tiger like me. My mom is a wolf, but I’m a tiger.”

“How is that possible?
You can’t be a tiger, you’re…you’re human like me. That man that bit me, he was…oh my God, what have I done?”

Em
looked around, frantic for a place to run, but they were closing in on her, and she felt herself grow faint. She was just reaching for something to protect herself with or at least somewhere to hide from them all when Rayne touched her. She felt a slight pinch-like feeling in her head, then things went blurry. As she tumbled forward, she saw Brock reach for her, and thought that if she had to be caught by someone that he would do nicely.

She
must have only been out for a few seconds, because when she opened her eyes, he was still carrying her. She struggled a little, but he was bigger, and she could see the hard cords in his neck when she tried to fight him. She was surprised to find that while she was afraid, she wasn’t of him. She was being put on the sofa in the lunch room when she realized that they were alone.

“I’m going to sit with you until you get some color back.
You’re as white as a ghost.” She nodded. “Would you like something to drink? I would, but I doubt very much that Rayne has anything stronger than cola or tea.”

“
Water
,” she told him and waited to see if he could understand. When it was apparent that he couldn’t read sign language, she wrote it on her pad and handed it to him. He went to the refrigerator and handed her a bottle of water.

“You must go through a lot of those when you’re trying to have a long conversation.” She looked down at the pad and then up at him.
“I could get you a deal on them wholesale, or you could teach me how to understand.”

“Why?”
He sat down next to her as she continued writing. “I work at the other shop and will not see you.”

He lifted her chin so she could see his mouth. “I will be where you are.
You know what I am to you?”

“I don’t care.”
He nodded. “You will have to find someone else. I won’t be a whore to any man.”

Brock took her pen and paper and read her note. She knew that he could read it fine in her hand and wanted to snatch it back from him
, but he simply tore off the sheet and wadded it up before writing her a note.

“I don’t want a whore in my life. I want someone to love and to cherish.
You would never be my whore, and I’ll kill any man who would think that of you.”
He signed his name and handed it back to her, slipped off the sofa, and sat in front of her. “I’m not going to let you think horrible things about what is going on between us. I’ll come in tomorrow, and we’ll get to know each other. Okay?”

She shook her head
, and he stood up. She watched him as he went to the door, where he turned and walked back toward her. Em let him take the notepad from her fingers and waited while he wrote on it again. When he kissed her on the nose, she was so startled that she didn’t react until he was out of sight. Then she looked down at the note he’d given her.

It was phone numbers, four of them
, as a matter of fact, each one of them labeled with a place. Work had two numbers, his home number, as well as his cell phone number. And under those was
“if you need me, call me for anything.”

“Are you al
l right?”
She nodded at the voice in her head and realized that Rayne couldn’t see her, and told her she was
. “Good. I would like to have you come out and help Mom on the register for a little while. She has to leave soon to get our lunch, and she thinks you can run the register for her. And if you want, you can ask me any questions you might have about Brock. He gave me permission to tell you what a fabulous person he is
.” Em was sure he probably was, but she had no use for him.

“I can’t
run the register for you. What if someone has a question? What if I mess up and lose all the money?”
She was panicky and was pretty sure Rayne knew it.
“You should just let me water the plants and stuff. I’m pretty good at that, and they don’t ask me questions.”

“I should hope not. And you can do anything you want if you put your mind to it.
Also, if they have a question you can’t answer, call me through our link. You can do that, but I have a feeling you can answer anything that needs to be addressed.”
Em had never had anyone have so much confidence in her before, and wasn’t sure what to do about it.

“Brock said that he would be back tomorrow to speak with me. Do you think you could ask him to stay
away? I don’t want him as my mate or anything else. I don’t want anything to do with him.”
She had a feeling that Rayne wouldn’t ask him, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

“No
. If you want him to stay away, then you tell him. If you know what a mate is, then you have a pretty good idea of how they are when it comes to their mates. And Brock is very protective of his friends. I can only imagine what he’d do to protect you.”

“I don’t need a protector. I just want to be left alone.”
Rayne laughed, and Em felt herself grow angry. “
I’m not being funny. I do not want him to come near me. He makes me feel all mushy inside.”

“
If you tell him that, then you’ll never get rid of him. But I’m letting you know right now that it will do you little good to tell him, and you just might find he’s not so bad once you get to know him.”

That was the
problem; she didn’t want to get to know him, or anyone else for that matter. If it wasn’t for the fact that she needed a job, she would have left when she could after the man had grabbed her at the other shop.

Em
went to the cash register and watched Karin ring out a few customers. Everything was marked on it, and if there wasn’t a price on something, a sheet with prices on it was in a large notebook near her that had pictures of everything that they sold. As soon as she rang out the first customer on her own, Karin left. Em had never been so proud and terrified in her entire life. She hoped Karin returned soon because, for as much as she wanted to crawl away and hide, she wanted to make this work even more.

Chapter 3

Brock was just finishing up for the day when Bronwyn knocked on his open door.
She’d been in Ryland’s office for the better part of the afternoon and now came down to bother him. He looked at her when she sat the baby carrier down and glared at him.

“Were you going to tell me?”
He shrugged. “I have as much right to know what’s going on as anyone else. Why did I have to hear about your finding your mate from Neal when he called to tell me that he was going to be late to dinner? And what do you think your mom is going to say?”

“She told me that she was glad for me and to bring her by for dinner soon.
I told her, like I will you, that I don’t want you to go down there and welcome her to the family because she doesn’t trust me as yet, and I need to make her see that I won’t harm her. Rayne seems to think she’ll bolt if given enough reason to do so.”

“Someone hurt her?”
He nodded. “Do you know who yet? And when you find out, will you tell me so that I can beat the ever loving shit out of him? I may be a mom, but I’m one shit kicker when I need to be.”

“
Yes, you can be, but I think I can handle her for now. You don’t even know her yet and you’re already willing to protect her for me?” She smiled at him. “I’ll take care of the man, whoever he was. I have a feeling it’s a vampire, just so you know. She’s terrified of Peter, and when Rayne told her that we were cats, she didn’t seem all that surprised. I think she’s aware of us, but that doesn’t mean she likes us overly much.” At least she’d let him touch her. Now he had to convince her that he wasn’t going to hurt her too. That, he figured, was going to be a great deal harder.

“Neal told Ryland that she couldn’t hear or speak.
Do you know if the vampire did that to her or not?” He told her that he thought so but again didn’t know for sure. “What have you found out about her?”

“Not much.
She’s twenty-five and single. Her father is alive, as is her mother. She’s in a mental institution, however, and has been for the past several years. There are four brothers, all of them about as useless as they come, and Em is the middle child. None of the men, as far as I can tell, have held anything more than a fast-food job for more than a month, and that was a very long time ago.” He handed her the address that he’d been able to find. “They’re living in a house that has the utilities and other things paid monthly by a trust, though I’m still digging into that to figure out by whom. No phone service and no cell either, at least in their names. The father gets a check monthly from a settlement from about the time the mother went to the mental institution, but it’s not enough to afford the house that they’re living in. I’m still chasing down what the mother is locked away for.”

“You’ve been busy.”
He handed her the papers that had been on the printer, and she looked the pictures over. “She looks like her mother. And her brothers look like they haven’t missed a meal for some time. Do you suppose she’s hiding from them?”

“I think so. She left home about eight years ago under odd
circumstances. She’d been hospitalized for something, and when she disappeared the day before her release, her father threw a fit and demanded that they produce her. I talked to one of the doctors there, and he said that the man said they were keeping her from them. He wouldn’t tell me what she’d been in for other than to say that he hoped she stayed gone for her safety.” He took back the pictures and put them in the file with the other things he’d found. “Do you think I’m wrong in doing this sort of search on her?”

She looked at him.
“Do you?”

He did in a way
, but he also knew from experience that the more you knew the better equipped you were to be able to handle a crisis. And this had the markings for one. He looked at little Gabriella as she stirred in her seat, and walked around to pick her up.

“When she was born
, what did you think about? Right after Rayne handed her to you, what was your first thought?” He snuggled the little girl against his neck and smiled when she giggled.

“I thought ‘holy mother fuck, I’m a mother.’ Then I looked at her and fell completely in love. She’s not as hard to take care of
as I thought. Of course, I have help, but she’s…why?”

“When I touched
Em and licked her throat, I felt my life center. I know it sounds really stupid after just one touch, but she made me think I was both king of the world and the lowest part of pond scum as I could be.” She laughed and took Gabriella from him when he handed her to her. “She was terrified of me. Not just of what I was to her, but of me. I think that one of those men in that picture is the reason for it, other than the vampire. I think her family is going to piss me off and I’m going to have to put them in their place before this is all over. And I’m thinking that the place will be marked with a nice marble headstone that I can piss on when the mood strikes me.”

“Again, I ask you why you think this when you’ve only seen a few pictures and haven’t even bonded with her enough to know anything about her.”

He nodded and went back to his desk and handed her the last thing he’d been able to find. She read it and then looked up at him.
“Her brother tried to drown her? What the hell did he do that for? And why the hell isn’t he in prison?”

It was a newspaper article from about the time that
Em had been a year old. Her brother, Wilfred Cole and second oldest of the children, had been watching his sister while the father was absent. The paper hadn’t said where he’d been or how long he’d been gone, just that he was absent from the home. The boy, six at the time, had decided to give his sister a bath. When she wouldn’t stop screaming, he held her under the water in the hopes of making her go quiet, he’d told the police when they’d arrived on scene.

“He was made to see someone
, and I can only assume it was a psychiatrist. I can’t find out any information about the sessions other than he went to them and his father didn’t. He’d been at the hospital with the little girl for the first one, then after that….” Brock shrugged. “This doctor friend of mine told me that she might have had some damage to her brain and it caused her not to hear or speak. He said while it’s not common, the brain is something that no one has a clear grasp on totally.”

Rayne stood up.
“I’d see what I can find out about where the girl is living if I were you. I did a little digging myself and found that she only gave a post office box for her address. I would hate to find out she’s been living like I did, and without near the protection I had for myself.”

He’d already been looking into that and told her so.
“I’m going to try and see her tonight before she gets off work. If I can, would it be all right with you if I brought her to dinner tonight? I know that it’s family only for Jules’s homecoming, but she might do well to see us all together.”

“As of the moment you found her
, she became family. Bring her if you can, but don’t force it.” She picked up Gabriella and moved to the door, and stopped to look at him. “I’ll touch her and see what I can find out for you, but…Brock, I want you to be careful of this. Not of your mate, but the men who we both think are trying to find her. I have a feeling that they aren’t nearly as stupid as we think.”

“I will.”
He’d nearly told her he could handle anything they put to him, but he could see that she was worried. He stood up and walked her to the elevator, and when she was gone, he looked at May, his secretary. “Do you think you can find something for me from one of your many sources?”

“Of course I can. What do you need to know?
” He grinned. “I don’t think I like that look. It sort of says to me that you’re going to want more than just a few tidbits I can find by calling in some smallish favors.”

“I need you to find out why a woman by the name of Robin Cole is in
a mental institution and how long she’s been there.” She shook her head at him. “You won’t?”

“I know who she is. If you ever read the paper instead of just the sports section
, you would, too. She tried to murder her children. She claimed that they were all vampires and that they were going to suck her dry.” She clicked a few keys on her computer. “She went by her maiden name at the time, as she said she wasn’t really married to the man who had fathered her children, and she wanted nothing to do with him. The only reason I know her name is because a friend of mine was in the courthouse when she was brought in for trial. She said that Gilbert Cole and her sons were all made into vampires, and she wanted to stake them. Of course, she was put away for a while, but not in a mental institution. That’s where she ended up a few months ago when she tried to slit her wrists and nearly succeeded. Here it is.”

He read over her shoulder how
the woman had claimed that her sons and the man that she’d been wed to were now the living dead. She claimed that if no one did anything, she was going to. At the time, her children’s ages ranged from twenty-two to thirteen, and she claimed that even her supposed husband was a vampire. She was adamant that her daughter was innocent, but if no one would save her, then she, too, would be as dead as them. Em would have been seventeen when it happened.

“She
was
nuts.” Brock couldn’t agree more. “But see, she’s been out of it for a few months now. I think she was put away about the time your niece was born. Anyway, they said she’d been cleared of all the charges, but the attempt of suicide was a cry for help, and they put her away where she would be able to get treatments. It had been a postpartum problem. That’s what they claimed at the beginning, and that has since been taken care of with drugs.”

He sat on her desk and tried to think about what this might mean for
Em, or even if she knew. He went to his office and gathered up his things, and tried to think of a plausible reason for stopping by the flower shop to see her when he looked at May’s desk. Of course, he needed a flower for his office. And he knew just the person who could help him.

~~~

Em was ringing out a customer when Brock walked in. She’d managed to only think of him about a hundred times today, and now here he was. She tried her best to ignore him, but when he sat on the counter and grinned at her, she wanted to hide in the office.

“I’ve been thinking about you today.”
She didn’t know what to say to him, so she started wiping the dirt off the counter. When he touched her arm, she looked at him. “You’ll have to keep looking at me, love, if we’re going to get to know each other.”

She took out her pad and wrote him a note. “I don’t want to get to know you. I like not knowing you at all.
Go away.”

“Nope,” he told her with that grin again
that made her feel all tingly and mushy again. “I wanted to invite you to have dinner at my mom’s house. My brother Jules has been gone a month, and we’re having a party for him.” She shook her head. “Okay, then I’ll hang out at your house, and we’ll watch television.”

“I don’t have a TV
, and I don’t want you to hang out with me. Don’t you have someone else that you can bother?”

He jumped off the counter and stood behind her as she rang up a customer. When she realized he was speaking with the man
, she grew even more nervous about him being so close. When the man turned to her, she wondered if Brock had told him that she was deformed and what else he’d said. But the man only handed her cash and smiled at her. She gave him back his change and watched him leave.

“What did you tell him?
He’s mean whenever he comes into the shop across town, and won’t speak to anyone.”

He took the note and sat down again.
“I told him that you were learning a new trade today and would he mind smiling at you because you were so nervous. He said you always have a smile for him when he comes in down at the other shop, and he loved seeing you here. He goes across town to see you smile for him.” She looked at him to see if he was kidding and couldn’t tell. The man was driving her insane.

When he stared at her for so long
, she wondered if she had food on her mouth. She licked her lips to be sure. She didn’t understand men, and this one was proving to be the hardest of all. When he stood up and ran his finger down her throat, she felt his touch like he’d set a match to her. She lifted her head to look at him.

“Do it again.” She didn’t know what he meant
, but the harder he looked at her mouth, the more she felt the need to lick her lips again. When she did, he lowered his head to her, and she knew that he was going to kiss her. And for as much as she wanted him to do it, she wanted to tell him to back off. But when his mouth brushed gently over hers, she had to grab onto his arms to steady her.

The second time his mouth touched hers
, it was firmer, and he suckled her lower lip into his mouth and nibbled on it. She swayed forward, and he wrapped his arm around her and pulled her to his body as he deepened the kiss. The moment they were flush against one another, she felt her world tilt more until he was the only support she needed. As he lifted his head, she felt her entire body cry out.

“You’re so beautiful.”
He kissed her again, and she felt something like hunger come from him. “I would like nothing more than to lay you out on this counter and make love to you, but I won’t be able to stop until you’re mine.”