“See, that’s where you’re wrong.” Footsteps thumped on concrete, and a third man walked into view. “You killed my brother. It doesn’t get more personal than that. Does it, McNamara?”
Silence. Tense, dangerous silence. “Guess that all depends.”
Fuck.
The Morgans’ crazy was bad enough, but if Bud started poking around about Ben’s death, he’d get a lot more than he bargained for.
Anna scanned the parking lot again. She couldn’t do anything about their potentially magical senses, but she could handle the basic five. The man hunkered behind her car was out of his brothers’ view, and she had clear line of sight. She raised one pistol and peered down the barrel, preparing her shot.
Bud laughed and beckoned his brothers. The one by the pumps stepped forward, and the one behind her car simply vanished.
Double fuck.
“Come on, McNamara,” Bud taunted, seemingly encouraged by Patrick’s silence. “Or are the rumors true? You gone soft and stup—”
Patrick lunged into view, moving so fast Anna could barely track him. It was clear the brothers couldn’t. Before the one at the pump managed to take more than a step, Patrick had Bud trapped, both of the man’s arms caught behind his back and Patrick’s forearm across his throat.
A human shield, and from the look of Bud’s face, he wasn’t getting much air.
Bud’s brother was already reaching out, a white-hot circle of energy forming in his open palm. Anna skirted the big metal ice bin and squeezed off a shot from each gun. The bullets exploded from the barrels, eerily silent, and found their marks—one in the man’s shoulder, the other between his eyes.
Patrick spun toward Anna, dragging a sputtering Bud with him. “I can still feel him. The third—”
He could be anywhere,
literally
anywhere. “Tele—” A gust of magic burned through her like a desert wind, and instinct moved her, because there was only one place the last man would want to be. Behind Patrick, with easy aim and no clear shots for her.
Behind you.
She didn’t have time to say it, but she didn’t have to. Patrick knew, and she could see it in his eyes.
I’m sorry.
Another thought, an answer to the dread that twisted his face just before she hit him. He and Bud went sprawling, and she stood there for what felt like forever.
But it was only a split second, the span of half a heartbeat. Patrick had barely landed, skidding across the cracked concrete, when the first bullet shook her. Fiery pain bloomed in her shoulder, and another in her side.
Patrick tore the gun from her left hand. She couldn’t hear the shots, not his, only the third crack of the spell caster’s gun before one last blow knocked her down. She couldn’t feel it, not really, and she blinked up at the rust-edged metal canopy over the gas pumps, vaguely aware that calm and numb weren’t the same thing, not at all.
So which one was she?
Patrick appeared, hovering over her with eyes that had that carefully blank look, the one someone only got when they’d panicked enough times to learn how to hide it. “Can you hear me?”
“My ears are fine.” The words came out slurred, and she fought a momentary surge of fear. It faded quickly enough, because Patrick wouldn’t be over her if the Morgans were still a threat, so that meant he was safe. “I hear you.”
He stripped off his shirt, and the jagged sound of fabric tearing drifted over her. “Stay with me, all right?”
“Your poor bike.” She lifted a hand to his face and grimaced when it fell away, leaving a streak of blood across his cheek. “I changed my mind.”
His jaw clenched, but he kept his tone light as his fingers worked at her throat. “Changed your mind about what, dollface?”
“I’m not sorry.” The world wavered, went dim.
She floated until Patrick’s voice dragged her back. “—think you’re going to pull something like that again, I won’t tell Alec. I’ll tell Sera. Or Nicole Peyton.”
I don’t care.
The words wouldn’t come. The pleasantly numb feeling had started to fade into shivers, and she tumbled into blackness, kept tumbling until the world moved. High, higher—Patrick, lifting her in his arms.
“Dollface,” she mumbled.
“Sweet thing, lover girl, sugar pie, honey bunch.” He slid her into the front seat of her car. “I’ll call you anything you want. You just keep talking.”
She could have argued with any of them. Sweet, sugar, honey—stupid words to describe a woman like her. Prickly. Mean.
Lover.
No, not that one either. Anna shook her head, and the pain that lanced through her neck left her breathless and trembling. She pawed at the fabric wrapped around her throat, and Patrick pulled her hands away.
The pain was something to focus on anyway, and it kept her from drifting in the black. It was sharp, sharp enough to hang on to while the engine roared beneath her.
Lover.
Sharp enough to cut.
“Anna!” Patrick’s hand landed on her thigh. “God help me, woman, if you don’t stay with me, I’ll sing. I’ll sing classic rock, and you’ll wish you couldn’t heal.”
Silly man. A noise like a pained, animal moan escaped her. “Can you sing ‘Freebird’?” She wanted to laugh, but the darkness had grown claws, and they dug deeper the more she struggled.
So she let go, and floated back into nothingness.
By the time Patrick rolled in to the cheap motel parking lot, he’d driven ninety miles out of their way, and he’d done it in fifty-eight minutes.
Not that he’d counted every one. Just the odds, and only after his voice grew hoarse from belting out Skynyrd’s greatest hits in an attempt to lure Anna back to consciousness.
The doctor was waiting for them in front of room 107. Patrick skidded to a stop on the gravel, and the man pulled open the passenger door. “How long has she been unconscious?”
“Just shy of an hour.” Patrick glanced around the parking lot before pushing open his own door. Easy to imagine what he looked like, crawling out of Anna’s little sports car shirtless, his tattooed body smeared with her blood.
They looked like the lead story for the six o’clock news. “You got a key? I can carry her.”
“I propped open the door. Hurry.”
The room had already been prepped. A clean sheet was draped over the dresser with a portable IV stand set up next to it. Patrick laid Anna down as Schmidt closed and locked the door and pulled on a pair of gloves.
He peered into Anna’s eyes, then began to unbutton her shirt. “My partner’s on her way. She can sanitize the car and your clothes, anything inanimate, but you’ve got to get yourself cleaned up. Now.”
Not a request, and not about washing Anna’s blood off Patrick’s body. It was about getting him out from underfoot, and even knowing it, even knowing Anna’s life
depended
on it, some part of him wanted to fight.
If he’d ever needed proof that his feelings for her had skated far past reasonable, this was it. A frozen moment in a crap motel where fear overcame reason, and he wanted to shake Schmidt until the man promised Anna would be okay.
So much for bounty hunter nerves of steel.
He shuddered as the doctor bared Anna’s second and third gunshot wounds, then turned away before he really
could
do something idiotic. “Will you need help before your partner gets here, or can I take a shower?”
“Go ahead.” The dark-haired man’s voice gentled. “You got her this far. Let me handle it now.”
If Patrick hadn’t trusted the man with his own life—and Ben’s—a half dozen times before this, he still might not have been able to haul his ass into the bathroom.
Getting clean didn’t take long. He had the art of washing away dried blood down to an efficient science, but he lingered even after the water circling the drain ran clear.
Anna had taken his bullet. She’d lunged at him like an alpha wolf in full-on protective mode and knocked him right the fuck out of the way. He’d seen Alec, Andrew and Julio react the same way, like willing meat shields, though maybe it was just common sense to alpha shifters. Even with three dangerous wounds, the chances were good Anna would heal.
He wouldn’t have. The scars on his back were painful proof of that.
By the time he climbed out of the shower, he could hear conversation in the other room. Not Anna’s voice, but Schmidt’s partner, a tall, dangerous woman whose name Patrick could never remember. He wrapped a towel around his hips, gathered his bloodstained clothing and carried it into the main room.
Anna was stretched out on the bed. Schmidt sat beside her, his fingers on her wrist, and he looked up at Patrick. “Miss Lenoir was lucky,” he said. “No major vessels were compromised. Even the shot to her neck must have barely nicked her jugular. I pushed some fluids to give her healing time to play catch-up with the blood loss, and she’s resting. She should be fine.”
Thank fucking God. Patrick covered his weak-kneed relief by dropping his clothes on top of the dresser. “Can your partner clean up my jeans and boots?”
“She’s handling the car right now, but it shouldn’t be a problem.” Schmidt raised an eyebrow. “Not to be crass, but there’s the matter of payment.”
He retrieved his wallet and flipped open the picture insert. Instead of smiling shots of friends and family, he had six debit cards from six different banks, each with a different name printed across the front. Thirty thousand dollars in untraceable money in accounts the banks’ computers barely knew existed. Legacy of his technopathic baby brother, who’d had a knack for convincing computers to do whatever he wanted.
In the months since Ben’s death, he’d managed to avoid using any of them. “How much?”
“Fuck that,” Anna rasped, shifting on the bed with a groan. “It’s Alec’s fault I look like Swiss cheese. Send him a bill, Doc.”
“Alec Jacobson, I assume?”
“He should be easy enough to find.” Anna stared up at Patrick as Schmidt abandoned his spot and let himself out the front door of the motel room.
“I have money.” It was the most inane thing to say, but it was better than shouting at her. Maybe. “And it’s
not
Alec’s fault, not this time.”
“Everything is his fault, sooner or later.” She struggled up on her elbows and groaned again when her left arm slid out from under her.
“Fuck, Lenoir.” Patrick dropped to the edge of the bed and pushed on her uninjured shoulder. “You were bleeding to death in the front seat of your ridiculous car an hour ago. Stay on your back for a few minutes and take it easy, huh?”
“I’m a shapeshifter,” she told him wearily. “Get us past the danger zone and we recover quickly. You heard the man, I’m fine. Besides, I want a shower.”
“No.” He left his hand on her shoulder and leaned over her. “You may be healing just fine, but you took a decade off
my
life. So have some damn pity.”
She turned her head away. “You think you would have been this spry if I’d let you take those bullets?”
No, he would have bled to death in a gas-station parking lot. He
couldn’t
yell at her, even with his male ego badly tattered. “Thanks, Lenoir. I mean it.”
“Oh God.” This time, she did sit up, clutching the sheet to her bare chest. “If you want us to be square, help me with that shower. I was joking about the Swiss-cheese thing—mostly—but my shoulder really does hurt. I don’t think I can raise my arm to wash my hair.”
He glanced at the door, then down at the towel around his hips. “I’ll make you a deal. Let me square away things with the doc and bring our bags inside. Then I’ll help you get cleaned up.”
“Good. I need some clothes.”
“And some food, no doubt.” Maybe he could slip Schmidt a little extra to make a pizza run. Easier than leaving Anna in the motel room alone. “Promise me you’ll stay put.”
She met his gaze, her expression challenging in spite of her pallor and the dark circles under her eyes. “I don’t make promises.”
“So make an exception,” he countered. “Five minutes, Lenoir. The world won’t end if you promise me five minutes.”
“Shows what you know.” But she held up a hand in capitulation. “Fine, I’ll wait right here.”
Five minutes. Patrick actually felt smug about that victory, even if it could be measured in seconds. Three hundred seconds, but it was a start.
He’d just keep stealing time until she was ready to promise him everything.
In the end he took twenty minutes, and Anna was already in the bathroom. She leaned out to glare at him
and
the three pizzas he’d acquired. “The rest of the blood in my hair has dried, and it’ll take forever to wash.”
So much for pushing his luck. “The doc said you need food,” he said, trying not to stare at the ugly pink scars that had so recently been vicious wounds. “A lot of food, or your body will start eating itself.”
“Really, McNamara, cool it with the sexy talk.” Her teasing subsided into a self-conscious look. “I was going to shower without you, but I can’t move my arm. I tried some range-of-motion exercises, and I ended up having to take one of those stupid pain pills.”
He dumped the boxes on the table and shrugged out of his jacket. “It’s okay. Let’s get you clean, and you can eat pizza and gripe at me over what we watch on TV.”