Dark Wrath (12 page)

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.”

E
rin
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
girlfriend 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.

They could fight
over him, or she could try to make some sort of peace between them and they
could stay together.

She wasn’t
entirely certain how she felt about them all living together, but it didn’t
take a lot of thought to realize both she and the baby would be better off with
him than without him.  The government wasn’t just going to give up when
and if they managed to wrest Joshua away from them.  They would come after
her and the baby again.  She would be on the run, possibly forever, unless
she could at least make a truce with Jesse that would make it possible for her
to live among the Lycans and have their protection.

That wasn’t going
to be easy when Jesse was avoiding her.

She couldn’t even
find out where they were going, much less discover what plans Jesse had for her
future or even if he had any.

He’d said she was
his.  She hadn’t been in any state to really soak that in at the time he’d
said it and she’d thought he was just talking man talk anyway.  Men tended
to be territorial.  It seemed reasonable enough to suppose that Lycan
males were at least as territorial or more so, but she didn’t feel terribly
reassured by the claim made in the heat of the moment.

For all she knew,
he might not even remember he’d said it, much less feel that way now that the
thrill was gone.

Physically, he
was attracted to her, or at least he had been.  She didn’t place a lot of
faith that that was an enduring situation either, particularly when he seemed
to feel just the opposite about her on every other level.

For her own
safety and Joshua’s, she was just going to have to swallow her pride and try to
woo him.  Now was the time.  Now might be her only chance.  If
they did find and rescue Joshua, she was going to be focused on the baby on the
trip back and caring for him wasn’t going to give her a lot of time to seduce
Jesse.

If she couldn’t
convince him that he was wrong about her and/or to keep her and the baby close,
then she was going to have to try to steal the baby from Jesse and she would be
on the run from both the government and the Lycans.

Looking at it
that way, her pride was the last thing she needed to be worried about
protecting.

The plan was
easier conceived than executed.  Jesse was wary.  He didn’t trust
her, at all, and he was highly suspicious of her motives when she tried the
tactic of smiling at him encouragingly whenever he looked her way and
‘accidently’ happened upon him after searching for him all over the ship.

Hanging around
the cabin while he was in it was a bust, too.  He either slept through it,
pretended he was sleeping, or, occasionally, he would slant an irritated glance
at her through half closed eyelids for disturbing his sleep.

She’d spent too
much of her life being a scientist and not nearly enough being ‘just a
woman.’  The scientific studies she’d read on the mating ritual didn’t
seem to be that much help and, despite Jesse’s snide remark about her lack of
virginity, she didn’t really have a lot of personal experience to draw
from.  She’d had a few boyfriends, but she hadn’t been the aggressor in
those cases.  She had no idea of what to do when he wouldn’t allow her
close enough to even attempt to flirt, but it was obvious to her after only a
few days that remaining passive and trying to encourage him to come to her
wasn’t going to get her anywhere.

Would it help, she
wondered, to try to arouse his lust and keep him so busy expending it that he
didn’t have time to think about the lack of any other common ground in their
relationship?  She wasn’t certain that it would, but then she was willing
to try anything except that she couldn’t quite get up the nerve to simply strip
down, crawl into the sack with him, and molest him while he was sleeping. 
He’d be vulnerable then and easy enough to manipulate, she knew, but the
sticking point was that that kind of behavior was completely uncharacteristic
for her.  The more she thought about it and tried to work up her nerve,
the more unnerved she became.

After almost a
week at sea, she discovered that Jesse spent much of his nights in the main
cabin of the yacht, a large cabin that was used as the living area and dining
hall combined.  She’d already ‘strolled’ the upper deck for nearly an hour
looking for him when she decided to go below and see if he’d taken over one of
the other crew members’ bunks.  Hearing voices and an occasional chuckle
in the main cabin, she’d frozen in the corridor for quite some time, trying to
decide whether she had enough nerve to casually stroll through the room filled
with men in search of Jesse.  Was it even worth the attempt when he was so
surrounded that it wasn’t likely she’d get the chance to try to draw him into
conversation?