Authors: Celeste Anwar
She drifted for an endless time, aware of little
beyond the harsh pulsing of her blood in her veins and in her ears. Jesse lay
bonelessly atop her, however, and after a time she began to grow uncomfortable
under his weight. When she began struggling to shift to relieve the pressure
against her ribcage, he rolled off of her and onto his back on the bed beside
her.
She grew cold the moment his heat left her.
Shivering, she rolled onto her side to look at him.
He was staring at the ceiling, she saw, and
wondered what thoughts were going through his mind.
His expression told her nothing.
Doubts, unwelcome and certainly not summoned,
began to creep into her mind. She wasn’t sorry it had happened. She had never
tried to lie to herself that she was physically attracted to Jesse--at least
not since the episode in the bayous. Her body had been humming for his
possession ever since and it was a relief on many levels to have worked that
burr from under her skin.
But was he sorry he’d caved in to his own needs?
After a few moments, she slipped from the bed and
went into the bathroom to clean up and dry off, shrugging into the shirt he’d
brought her to put on.
It was his shirt and even clean a faint trace of
his scent clung to it.
Her traitorous body hummed to life again.
Frowning, trying to ignore the fresh provocation,
Erin returned to the bedroom. Jesse, she saw, had climbed beneath the covers.
He rested on his stomach now, a pillow gathered beneath his head. His bare
back and arms, browned from the sun, and his flesh supple and toned with muscle
snagged her gaze, made her belly tighten.
There was no denying he was a beautiful--specimen
of a male--whatever he was.
Swallowing her wayward thoughts with an effort,
Erin moved to the bed and climbed in, rolling onto her side so that she was
facing way from him. The silence between them hung heavily, though. She knew
he wasn’t asleep.
She didn’t think he was.
She knew she should just let well enough alone.
They’d come together in explosive, wonderful
sex. If she just kept her mouth shut, they had that much going for them.
Finally, mentally kicking herself, she gave up the
struggle to let sleeping dogs lie. “Why did you come after me?”
He remained silent so long she’d begun to think
he wouldn’t answer her at all. When he finally did answer, she regretted, as
she’d known she would, opening her mouth.
“The objective of the exercise was to destroy the
research the government had been doing on the Lycans--and to get my son.”
Chapter Nine
Erin was surprised at how much that comment
hurt. The pain angered her, or maybe it was just anger at herself for being so
stupid as to give him the opening to slice a little deeper?
Struggling to catch her breath at the suffocating
weight of the pain, she tried to focus on what he’d said about Joshua, tried to
fan the faint glow of hope his interest in the baby spawned. “I haven’t seen
him since he was a few days old,” she managed to say finally, voicing the fear
that had never been acknowledged but was never far away. “I’m not even sure
I’d recognize him if I saw him.”
“If he is my son, I will know him.”
It took several moments for that comment to
penetrate her misery. The moment it finally did, Erin rolled over and sat up.
“You are
such
a complete fucking asshole! You know that?
If
he’s yours?
If
?”
Jesse lifted his head and turned to look at her,
his face a mask of surprise.
Erin’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t try to pretend that
just slipped out!” she growled.
Anger glittered in his eyes. “Exactly how am I
supposed to be so certain he is mine,
chère
? We weren’t exactly dating
at the time.”
“We were fucking, though, weren’t we? The last
time I checked, that’s the way it was done.” She realized she wasn’t being
completely reasonable. On the other hand, it was still insulting to have her
character questioned. She wouldn’t have suggested it was Jesse’s baby if
there’d been any doubt in her mind.
It dawned on her abruptly that she actually hadn’t
suggested Joshua was his, much less told him point blank. He had assumed the
baby was his and she had said nothing at all.
At least, he’d talked as if he believed the baby
was his and she had assumed he had no doubts that Joshua was his.
Obviously, she’d been wrong.
“You were no virgin,” he growled, his own temper
thoroughly aroused by now.
Erin abruptly dismissed the temptation to admit
that she’d been wrong to pick a fight with him over the baby’s paternity. “And
you were?” she gasped indignantly.
“That’s not the point.”
She knew it wasn’t, but she was beyond feeling
reasonable by now. “Right. That’s what’s really eating you, isn’t it? It
isn’t doubts about the baby. It’s wondering how you stacked up! Men!” Turning
away from him abruptly, she pounded the pillow into a ball and flopped down on
her side with her back to him.
“Tell me if he is mine,
chère
.”
Erin ground her teeth. “Oh, I just know you’d
believe me … like you believed everything else I tried to explain.”
He grasped her shoulder and pulled her onto her
back. “Did I get you pregnant? Or did they do it? Do you even know yourself
whose sperm they used?”
Erin stared at him in stunned silence for several
moments as that slowly sank in. In spite of all she could do her chin
wobbled. “You weren’t accusing me of … of anything?” she asked a little
weakly, suddenly feeling like a complete ass.
The darkening of his skin told its own tale. He
had doubted. He had thought terrible things about her. Maybe part of his
suspicions had been based on the possibility that they’d experimented on her
and she didn’t know who’d fathered the child, but she could see his distrust of
her ran bone deep.
“I wasn’t artificially inseminated,” she said
wearily, trusting his hand away and rolling onto her side away from him again.
“Believe what you want to believe. I don’t care.”
It was a lie, of course. She did care and worse,
she strongly suspected, unless he was totally dense, he knew it was a lie. She
didn’t know why or how or when she’d begun to care what Jesse thought of her,
but she did.
* * * *
The sun was already setting when they arrived at
the docks. Erin hadn’t been told where they were going. She resented it, but
then she assumed they were going after the baby and she didn’t really care
where she had to go, or how far.
The vessel she was led to--she wasn’t certain
whether it would be called a ship or a boat--was obviously privately owned.
The name Juliette was scrawled across the bow.
Erin gave Jesse a cold glance.
He pretended he hadn’t noticed, grabbing her arm
and hurrying her up the gang plank when she stopped to look the boat over.
“Juliette?” Erin said questioningly when they’d reached the main deck. “This
wouldn’t be the dog lady, would it?”
Someone snickered close by--one of the crew
members she supposed, but she didn’t look. She was too busy gauging Jesse’s
reaction.
He sent her a thoughtful glance. “It’s the name
of the ship.”
“I got that,” Erin said dryly, following him as
he strode across the deck and down one level via a set of narrow stairs
carrying the luggage he’d brought with him.
One bag was for her and contained clothing she
suspected had been purchased specifically for her since everything fit her as
if it had been. Jesse hadn’t said so and he’d certainly led her to believe
that he hadn’t gone after her to rescue her, but it seemed evident that he’d
expected to return with her.
Or maybe his last girl friend was just
conveniently of the same size?
Unfortunately, she hadn’t paid that much
attention to Juliette.
“We’ll stay in this cabin.”
“We?”
Jesse dropped the bags and turned to study her
for a long moment. “Unless you get seasick, in which case I’ll sleep on deck.”
There was a gleam of teasing humor in his eyes
when he said it. Erin wasn’t immune to it, so she simply chose to ignore it.
“I guess it’s a good thing you weren’t around while I was pregnant then because
I spent six months puking my guts out,” she said tightly, looking the cabin
over with jealousy gnawing at her insides. “I hope you at least changed the
sheets.”
She could hear his teeth grinding. “There’s
nothing between me and Juliette,
chère
, not like you’re thinkin’ anyway.
This is her yacht.”
Erin relaxed fractionally--enough to shrug as if
she didn’t particularly care. “She makes enough money as a vet to afford
something like this?” she asked in surprise.
When Jesse said nothing, she turned from her examination
of the cabin’s appointments to look at him questioningly. He looked--irritated.
“I gave it to her,” he said reluctantly.
“You?” Erin gasped, so stunned by the discovery
that Jesse could afford something this expensive
and
give it as a gift
that she was distracted momentarily from her jealousy, but only briefly. “And
there’s nothing between the two of you?”
Jesse grimaced. “She’s my sister.”
“Your sister!” Erin echoed, but then her eyes
narrowed suspiciously. “You mean really your sister? Or are you just
referring to her as your sister because she’s one of what you call the
brethren? She
is
a Lycan, isn’t she?”
He looked torn between amusement and irritation.
“She’s my half sister--by blood.”
Erin wasn’t entirely convinced. Looking back,
she really couldn’t recall anything Juliette had said or done that had led her
to believe she was Jesse’s lover. She
had
been very possessive, but
Erin supposed that could’ve just been a sisterly reaction to having her brother
drag in a female that had been involved in his captivity. Maybe it was nothing
more than that Juliette hated her for the same reason Jesse did?
Or maybe Juliette hated her because she wasn’t
Lycan?
The crew, Erin discovered without a lot of
surprise the following morning, was Lycan. She knew because they were some of
the same men that had been involved in the raid on the government facility.
Almost a dozen of Jesse’s pack had accompanied them on the trip, twice the
number needed to crew the ship and more than enough to fill the crew quarters.
Those who hadn’t been able to find quarters below settled in the other guest
cabins, which Erin supposed explained, at least in part, why Jesse was bunking
with her.
Possibly, it was also because she was the only
female on board. She didn’t know if Jesse had made the decision to protect her
from any unwanted attentions or not, but she was relieved to discover they all
seemed to consider her his property and off limits even though the situation
made it impossible for her to be sure of whether he would have chosen the
arrangement otherwise or not.
She offered to help in the galley, not because
she was such a great cook but because she didn’t particularly relish the idea
of being cooped up in the cabin all day with nothing to do. She knew nothing
at all about boats. She supposed she could’ve offered to swab the decks or
something, but Jesse spent most of his time on deck and she didn’t want him to
get the idea that she was hanging after him.
He’d made it fairly obvious, in spite of the
fabulous sex they’d had at the safe house, that he wasn’t even close to
forgiving her, or falling beneath her ‘spell.’ She ended up sleeping by
herself most of the time because Jesse only came to the cabin to sleep when she
left it.
She was relieved about that--at first. After a
few days at sea she’d had time to do a lot of thinking, though, and she wasn’t
too stupid to see that her situation was precarious. Supposing they did find
Joshua and rescued him and Jesse was relieved of all doubts that the baby was
his, she had to wonder if, after going to so much effort to rescue him if Jesse
would willingly part with him. It seemed to follow that if Jesse was willing
to risk so much for the baby when he wasn’t even sure it was his that he wasn’t
just going to give the baby to her and walk away.