Hawk's Revenge: Lone Pine Pride, Book 3 (18 page)

Shit.
He’d been lying to himself. All those times he’d told himself he didn’t love her anymore. Lies.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Adrian slipped out of the clasp of her body and rolled away to dispense of the condom. His good sense tried to return with the flow of blood to his more thoughtful regions, but he ignored it. Rachel still lay on his bed, gloriously naked and turned on her side. He climbed in beside her, ignoring the way the old frame groaned beneath his weight, and rolled her into his arms, tugging the blanket over both of them to keep off the winter chill. He would need to stoke up the fire in the potbelly stove soon. Their activities had distracted him from the icy bite in the air, but his human lover would catch a chill if he didn’t warm the room.

But not now. Now he would warm her with his own heat, curling his body around hers and forcibly ignoring the niggling doubts that tried to burrow into the back of his mind.

He wouldn’t let himself trust her. Fine. He would keep that last barrier intact, but this—this had been inevitable from the moment he saw her. She was his on a level he couldn’t question or hope to understand. She belonged here, curled in his arms, warm and weary from his lovemaking. The rest would wait for morning.

Rachel lay in her lover’s arms, sated—and completely confused. She’d been in a state of mindless bliss for about five minutes after he climbed back in bed to cuddle—and then her brain had woken up, loud and dubious. What did this mean? Where did they stand? Had he forgiven her? Had anything changed?

On the plus side, he hadn’t run—which seemed to be his usual defense mechanism when he felt threatened by his feelings for her. That had to be a good sign. And in the bed department she was beyond satisfied—he’d aptly demonstrated once again that her memories of his prowess had not been exaggerated. But now they lay twined in each other’s arms and Rachel was no closer to understanding what the hell had just happened.

She’d hoped for the best, that he would forgive her and she would fall into his arms—that was why she’d picked up the condoms from the infirmary in the first place—but she had never suspected it might actually work.

She didn’t have the first idea if he’d really forgiven her and she was afraid to ask—especially knowing her self-respect wouldn’t let her stay if he hadn’t—but the question still loomed.

She lay half-beneath him, she on her back, he more or less on his stomach, spread over her like a not-entirely-human blanket. His face was buried against her shoulder, one arm tucked beneath her head like a pillow, the other idly exploring her hip and the dip of her waist. Her arms were looped around his back, stroking across the muscular plane of his shoulders.

He was lean and strong—not heavy like the cat shifters, but then hawks weren’t bulky.

She’d never seen him as a hawk, she realized. His eyes would be the same—that keen, yellow intensity. Would his feathers be brown or more gray? Did he fly often? Perhaps that was where he went when he ran from her. How often had he watched her from the sky when she didn’t know to look up?

The questions crowded to the front of her mind, safer than asking about forgiveness and begging to be answered. She could tell he wasn’t asleep. Just silent.

“Did you go fly today? When you left me?”

Her hawk stiffened. It was so subtle she would not have felt it if she had not been wrapped around him. He didn’t answer.

“Adrian?”

He moved then, pulling away from her even as she tried to hold on to him, climbing out of the bed. “Are you cold?” he asked, not looking at her, striding to stoke the fire.

He clearly didn’t want to talk about this, but shifting was the most natural thing in the world for shape-shifters. There was nothing taboo about the subject. Unless he still viewed her as an Organization doctor. But this was deeper than that, even chillier than the cold shoulder he gave her work.

“When was the last time you shifted?”

He looked at her then, something dead behind the gleaming yellow of his eyes. “I don’t, anymore.”

Why?
She wanted to ask, but it felt like the wrong question. “For how long?”

“Since your—” He stopped himself. “Since the Organization.”

She wished she could take it as a victory that he wasn’t calling them
her
people or
her
friends anymore, but all she felt was a horrified loss on his behalf. Months. He’d been unable to shift for months. For a creature that traded shape daily, that must be torture.

She’d read that in his file, she remembered now—that he hadn’t shifted in captivity, defying the scientists who wanted to study the process. But she’d thought it was only that—defiance. She hadn’t realized that something had happened to him to prevent the change.

“Have you talked to Dr. Brandt about it?” She sat up, tucking the blanket around her. Adrian was naked, crouched by the stove, as unself-conscious about his nudity as any shifter.

“Brandt is a lion doctor,” he said, attention on the logs. “It was a chemical cocktail designed to force feline shifters to change that broke my ability to connect with my hawk in the first place. I doubt the kitty-cat doc can help me.”

“Have you told anyone?”

“No. Just you.”

Rachel had no idea what to make of that. Adrian wasn’t the sort to ask for help, but to only tell her…it was a mark of unexpected trust. She was surprised he’d told her at all.

And even more surprised when he went on, volunteering on his own, “Dr. Brandt knew I couldn’t shift when I first arrived at the pride. He thought it was all the shit they’d been pumping into me. Figured once it got out of my system I’d be good as new. I just haven’t told him I’m not.”

Rachel remembered the way his eyes would change, the pupils vanishing into yellow, and the way his talons had nearly cut her after his dream. Physically, it seemed he could still shift, at least partially. So perhaps the block wasn’t chemical or physical. Perhaps it was mental or emotional instead. Was Adrian somehow stopping himself from calling his hawk?

His head snapped up, gaze whipping to the front door and then he was moving quickly, striding to collect his jeans. “Someone’s coming.”

Her heart rate accelerated and she realized she’d seen him like this before. Battle mode. He’d been arming himself as the Organization men crept down the hallway at the hotel. The night she’d jabbed the needle into his back. “Adrian?”

“Get dressed.” He was already lacing up his boots, further testament that he couldn’t shift. Few shifters worried about clothing going into a fight.

Rachel scrambled out of the bed and pulled on what she could find of her clothing. Her bra was MIA so she went without, pulling on underwear, jeans and just tugging her shirt over her head as a knock sounded at the door.

Adrian was crouched beside the door, gun out and held in an easy grip at his hip.

“Adrian?” a voice called through the door, and the Hawk instantly relaxed his ready stance.

“Kye.” Adrian stood, daring a glance out the window, then checking to make sure Rachel was clothed before reaching for the latch on the door.

The man who entered was one Rachel recognized from her various interrogation sessions, but didn’t remember well. He hadn’t spoken much, just watching her with the same quiet, steady gaze that assessed her now. She felt her face flushing, knowing a feline shifter would instantly be able to scent the sex in the room, though his nostrils didn’t so much as twitch in acknowledgement.

“Roman needs Rachel,” he said, all business. “They’re here.”

“They?” Adrian demanded.

Oh Lord.
Her heart rate quadrupled. The Organization had come. They were handing her over to them.

Kye shot Adrian a mildly incredulous look. “What rock have you been living under? The ambassadors from Three Rocks. The ones everyone has been expecting for months?”

Adrian frowned. “I don’t pay much attention to pride gossip.”

Kye looked back toward Rachel. “You can take five minutes. Don’t be longer than that.” He slipped back out into the night, leaving the door open behind him.

Adrian closed the door and turned to her, a frown crinkling his brow.

“What’s Three Rocks?” she asked.

“Another lion pride in Texas. There have been some rumors that they’re stirring up trouble, talking about the Organization and threatening to come out to the rest of the humans so the Organization can be exposed for what they’re doing to us. That kind of thing. I didn’t give much credence to the talk.”

“And now they want to talk to me?”

“If they are here—which it looks like they are—they’re using the Organization as their bogeyman to scare people into agreeing with them. Roman probably wants you there to vet whatever information they have on your people.”

And there it was. They were
her
people again.

And she had five minutes to get ready to face the Alpha.

Rachel grabbed a change of clothes and ducked into the bathroom. Doing the quickest standing-over-the-sink wash-up ever, so she wouldn’t reek quite so strongly of Adrian and sex, she emerged from the bathroom with thirty seconds to spare.

“Let’s go.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

The delegation from the Three Rocks pride was in a way both exactly what Rachel had expected and nothing like she had expected.

They looked like lion-shifters; that was undeniable. The woman was tall, blonde and looked like she could arm-wrestle a Viking without breaking a sweat. Her mate, sprawled in the chair at her side with his arm draped along the back of hers, actually bore a strong resemblance to Roman. Large, muscled and radiating authority with a feline’s lazy confidence.

But that was where Rachel’s expectations faltered. It was the woman, not the man who gave off the I’m-the-big-bad-Alpha vibes, who was the spokesperson for the pair. She spoke quickly, animatedly, gesturing with her hands, and sounding more like a sitcom character than a diplomat—all slang and quick comebacks.

When Kye guided Rachel and Adrian into the room, directing them to a pair of chairs set up along the wall behind Roman, away from the main conference table where the others were gathered, the ambassadors were already well into their plea. Patch and Roman faced the couple across the table, flanked by Grace and another of the lieutenants, who Rachel mentally placed as Hugo, the bear shifter. Rachel sat, Adrian beside her, one thigh brushing against hers, and Kye propped his shoulders against the wall on her other side.

It was a much smaller group than had been involved in her initial interrogation and Rachel couldn’t be sure if that was because these two had dropped by in the middle of the night—though a quick glance at the clock showed it was just past ten—or if this information was somehow more sensitive than what she had carried from the Organization.

Judging from her position along the wall, Rachel took it she was supposed to be seen and not heard, so she focused on listening to the gesticulating lioness.

“I know the tradition demands secrecy,” the woman was saying, “but you guys obviously aren’t hung up on traditions or you wouldn’t have a cougar Alpha’s mate and a bear sitting across the table from me. So what’s the problem?”

“Zoe,” the man said softly, though it did nothing to check her.

“Our best bet is to come out to the humans,” the woman—Zoe—insisted.

“And become side-show acts,” Hugo rumbled in his big bass voice.

“If we do it together, strategically, we can come forward from a position of strength. If they out us, we won’t have that. We’ll be the victims of our own story. This way we choose.”

“Why now?” Roman asked, calm and unmoved by the woman’s theatrics.

It was the man at her side who spoke. “There are more abductions every day. The Organization is getting bolder.”

“We were kidnapped right off our own land,” Zoe growled.

“That’s been happening for twenty years,” Patch said, with a decided edge to her voice. “What makes you so special? Other than the fact that your abductors were more incompetent than most Organization operatives.”

“They were a splinter cell,” Zoe admitted. “But we were able to capture one of them and she gave up everything she knows. We know more now than ever before. We’re in a better position to expose them.”

Rachel realized with a jolt that these two shifters had no idea that the Lone Pine Pride had Organization captives of their own or that the Lone Pine group had been moving against the Organization for weeks. She sat up straighter and Kye’s hand fell on her shoulder, reminding her to stay quiet.

“If we come out,” Roman said with soft authority, “what happens to all the shifters in Organization captivity now?”

Zoe rocked back in her chair, clearly not interested in answering that question.

Roman raised his voice slightly, though he didn’t turn. “Rachel?”

Kye lifted his hand. Apparently it was time for her to perform.

“They die.”

The lioness across the table speared her with a sharp, unfriendly stare. “All right, who’s the human?”

“We have our own sources of Organization intel,” Patch said, with distinct satisfaction.

Roman did turn then, waving Rachel forward. “May I present Dr. Rachel Russell, late of the Organization.”

She rose and came to stand next to the table, Adrian shadowing the move. Zoe glowered at her, studying her with no small amount of hostility.

“You decided not to take your suicide pill when you were captured?”

“I defected.” Or she would have if she hadn’t been rescue/captured first. “And to the best of my knowledge only the security personnel and C Block interrogators were issued with suicide pills in a false tooth—the personnel most likely to wish for a quick death if the shifters should get loose. With the rest of us, they found it much more effective to use trackers, explosives and threats.”

The lioness frowned, mulling that over.

Rachel went on. “The reason there are more abductions is because the Organization is larger and better funded than they used to be. Money is power and in the last few years they’ve suddenly had plenty of both. This splinter cell of yours, how long ago did they break off?”

The pair across the table exchanged a look and it was the male who admitted, “We don’t know. The one who survived, who is giving us all our information, was never part of the Organization. She joined them after they’d already broken off.”

Rachel nodded. “That explains why they haven’t been more aggressive about eliminating her. The others must have broken away long enough ago and had relatively insignificant positions within the Organization or they never would have been allowed to survive breaking away.”

“You survived,” Zoe pointed out.

“They haven’t found me yet. Frankly, I’m surprised even minor members would be allowed to leave. Though for all we know there was an Organization hit squad on their way to take care of the problem when you saved them the trouble.”

“Would that information be in the files we have?” Roman asked. His tone was casual, but she knew the question was very deliberate. He wanted these two southern lions to know that Lone Pine was not only larger and more influential than their little Texas pride, but that they were better informed too.

“It should be.”

Roman nodded to Grace, who whipped out an iPad and pulled up the database Mateo had built from the Organization hard drives. “Names?” she asked, all business.

“You have access to Organization files?” Zoe demanded, but her mate provided the names.

Grace typed in the first one and there was only a second’s delay before she announced, “He has a file. Listed as deceased. Security officer who left the Organization after his repeated requests to be considered for positions with more active interaction with shifters were denied. Considered loyal to the cause and not a threat, but marked for continued observation. There’s a note at the bottom of the file.
See incidence log Zoe King; Tyler Minor
.”

The couple on the opposite side of the table jerked as if they’d been tased. “They have our names?”

Grace tapped into the database. “Whole files on you by the look of it.”

The man—Tyler, apparently—reached over to put his hand over Zoe’s fist on the table where her knuckles had gone white. “What about Ava Minor? Or Landon King?”

Grace nodded, typing rapidly. “They have files too. Nothing much. Just
Known Location
and some coordinates.”

“Jesus, they know about our whole pride.” Zoe lurched up from the table, pulling a cell phone from her pocket and quickly dialing. She stepped away from the table, her voice low and urgent when someone answered. Every shifter in the room would be able to hear what she was saying—and possibly the other end of the conversation as well—but to Rachel’s human ears the words were indistinct, though the edge of fear to her tone was readily apparent.

“Her brother is Alpha of our pride,” Tyler explained quietly. “We’ve suspected they knew about us, but he’ll want to know about this. How long have you had their files?” There was a slight edge to his voice, as if he felt Roman should have shared this information with the rest of the shifter community, but it was restrained, as everything about him seemed restrained.

“Only a few weeks,” Roman admitted. “We’re still learning the extent of it ourselves.”

The large lion on the opposite side of the table nodded, somewhat mollified.

Rachel wasn’t sure if she was only supposed to speak if she was spoken to, but her curiosity was killing her. “How did you escape? When they captured you?”

She’d never heard of shifters breaking free during an acquisition—not that it had never happened before, but if it had the Organization had been quick to cover it up. Bad for morale, no doubt.

“They had us in a box truck. I kept shaking off the drugs they gave me faster than they expected—I could hear Zoe through the wall—”

“They transported you in the same vehicle?” Rachel frowned. That went against all protocols she’d ever read. “I was never in acquisitions and even I know that mated pairs are
always
separated immediately after capture. They’re too dangerous in close proximity to one another.”

Tyler frowned. “Candice mentioned something like that. Psychic mating bonds or some such ridiculousness. We thought it was just a function of the fact that she read
Twilight
too many times.”

“To the best of my knowledge, the Organization never actually proved the existence of a psychic mate bond, but there was something different about the mated pairs.”

Zoe returned to the table then, tucking away her cell phone, and Roman resumed control of the meeting.

“What do the other packs and prides think of your proposal?” he asked.

Zoe grimaced, visibly annoyed. “They all want to know what Lone Pine is going to do.”

Roman nodded as if he’d expected as much. “Lone Pine hasn’t decided yet,” he said with quiet authority. “Kye, find a place for our guests to spend the night. We’ll discuss this more in the morning.”

The leopard stepped forward, but the lions did not immediately rise in the face of their dismissal.

“We can’t stay hidden forever,” Zoe insisted. “The world is getting smaller, thanks to technology. We can’t even be sure that the Organization is the only group that’s figured out our secret.”

“I’m not suggesting staying hidden forever,” Roman said. “But we won’t rush into a course of action that will put more shifters at greater risk. We’ll discuss this
tomorrow
.”

Tyler rose, all but dragging Zoe up with him. “Until then, Alpha.”

His mate, obviously less accustomed to bending the knee to another’s authority, gritted her teeth and gave a little chin jerk of goodbye before following the ever-silent Kye out of the room.

There was a lingering moment of silence as the door closed behind them and they all waited for the group to get beyond the range of sensitive shifter hearing. Grace was the first one to speak.

“I don’t like her.”

Patch snorted. “That’s because she’s
you
.”

Grace gasped in mock horror. “Bite your tongue.”

The alpha’s mate chuckled. Roman held up a hand to forestall their conversation and turned to Rachel. “What do you think?”

“Their information is outdated, but they aren’t wrong. Coming out to the humans would put the Organization in a bad position—but it would also force them to get rid of the evidence of their wrong-doing and that could be very bad for any of the shifters they are holding when you go public.”

Roman nodded. He didn’t need to say more. They all understood the gravity of the situation. “Thank you, Dr. Russell. I won’t keep you from your bed any longer.”

There wasn’t so much as a hint of innuendo in his voice, but Rachel felt her face heating with a fiery blush as Adrian placed his hand on the small of her back to guide her to the door.

Had they been able to smell the sex on her? She wasn’t sure she was embarrassed even if they had. Sex seemed to be treated like a natural part of life here in the pride, not a sin to be ashamed of. She just wasn’t sure she was ready for everyone to be thinking of her and Adrian as a matched set, the same way they did of Patch and Roman or this Zoe and her Tyler. Rachel didn’t know where she stood with Adrian and it seemed unfair somehow that the shifters could
smell
their connection when even she didn’t know how far their affair would extend.

Adrian kept his hand on her back as he guided her home. They passed a few other shifters on the pathways before they reached the forest. It was not yet midnight and there were still several pride members out and about. They nodded greetings to Adrian and Rachel as if there was nothing odd about a bird-shifter and an ex-Organization doctor out for a stroll through the pride lands. They had to know who she was—there weren’t that many humans allowed to remain here, wandering about freely—but no one came after her with tar and feathers.

It was possible she could someday be accepted here. As an actual member of this wild and wonderful pride. It startled her how keenly she found she wanted that, to be part of this community. Especially if it meant Adrian at her side.

Her stomach clenched.

She was getting ahead of herself. Just because he’d shagged her silly didn’t mean anything would change. For all she knew when they got back to the cabin he would resume the same old routine—locking her in and only coming inside to stretch himself across the door after she was asleep. Perhaps the incendiary passion they’d shared was just an aberration to him. They hadn’t spoken about it. She was terrified of starting that conversation.

She fretted the entire walk back to the cabin. By the time they crossed the threshold, she had worked herself into such a state she couldn’t even look at the bed where she’d writhed beneath him only hours before. It was the world’s most uncomfortable mattress, but for those minutes it had been heaven.

And now the thought of curling up there without him as he stomped off into the night was almost unbearable.

“Thank you.”

Her heart suspended its beating for a moment when he spoke so close behind her. What was he thanking her for? Advising Roman? Sex? She didn’t turn to face him, still looking anywhere but the bed. “I don’t know what you—”

“I know you’re on our side,” he said, so close now his breath stirred the hair at her nape where she’d swept it up into a knot. “I know I’ve acted like you might betray us, but I wanted you to know that I can see that you aren’t out to hurt shifters.”