Touch of Madness (19 page)

My hands struggled to unfasten his belt. Once it was loose I pulled hard at his shirt. I wanted, needed the touch of his bare skin. He was so warm, his skin utterly smooth beneath my seeking hands. The lock clicked loose, and he pulled back enough to lift the brace off my shoulders and toss it aside. I watched it drop unceremoniously onto the bed. When my gaze turned back to him he was smiling. It was a wicked little smile that told me he planned to do all sorts of things with my body and knew that I wouldn’t stop him. He used his hands to cup my breasts, his thumb and fingertips teasing my nipples through the thin silky fabric of my bra. His mouth moved to my throat, nibbling, kissing, licking as I writhed against his hips. Little whimpering noises escaped my mouth. I couldn’t help myself. He was driving me wild. I was hot, wet, and aching to be touched. He pulled back, a little, just enough to let me catch my breath and to give him room to unfasten my jeans. Sliding his hand between the fabric and my skin, his hand sought my opening. Using his fingers he teased my body, bringing me closer and closer to climax. He pulled away before I could reach orgasm, and I wanted to scream in frustration.

He kissed me hard. Using his hands, he pulled me off balance, pulling me with him onto the floor. His mouth never left mine as he stripped the jeans from my body as I used my hands to caress him. He was so hard, so ready, his cock throbbing as I traced my finger down his shaft and cupped his balls in my hand. With a low groan he grabbed my thighs, pulling them wide so that I was open and ready. This time it was not tender, not slow. His body pierced mine, again and again. The silken hardness of his shaft slid in and out in an ever faster rhythm.

The first orgasm hit hard and fast, my body bucking against him as my hands dug into his hips, pulling him even deeper inside my body until, with a shout of triumph, he came inside me.

It took almost two hours for the pizza to arrive. I was so happy about it that I gave the deliveryman a twentydollar tip.

13

« ^ »

Most of metro Denver was buried under a thick blanket of glistening white snow and it was still coming down. The windows of the apartment were limned with frost. If I hadn’t looked at the clock I wouldn’t have been able to tell that it was almost dawn. What I could see of the sky was a uniform gray. I was glad I’d called ahead yesterday to change my rental car over to something with four wheel drive. It would be more expensive, but worth every penny. I stared out the windows at the city below. It was quiet, the snow muffling what few of the city noises remained after nearly everyone had deserted the streets to avoid the snow. Only the distant sound of the snow plows and salt trucks working on Speer, and the ticking of the kitchen clock, could be heard from where I stood. The only light in the apartment was the light in the stove hood. It gave me just enough illumination to make my way around the apartment, but wasn’t bright enough to wake Tom, who was snoring away upstairs. Blank came up, wending his body around my bare ankles, purring like a miniature motorboat. I scooped him up, settling him against my shoulder. I ran my hands through his thick fur, feeling the purr rumbling against my chest through the fabric of my robe. He butted his head against my chin.

“Demanding little cuss, aren’t you?” I whispered, but used my fingernails to scratch his favorite spot. His eyes narrowed, and his body went almost limp with pleasure. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the wall, enjoying a few minutes of peace before the world woke and the day went to hell.

It was the cat that woke her. He jumped on the bed, giving a soft, high-pitched growl unlike anything she’d ever heard from him. She sensed…something…something not right, not normal. Sitting up in bed she reached over to the nightstand and grabbed her glasses from beside the water glass. Once she’d slid them on and could see what she was doing she slipped quietly from beneath the covers and eased the drawer open.

The knife was large and honed to a razor’s edge. People didn’t expect her to own such a knife, let alone know how to use it. But her father had insisted she learn. He’d sensed she’d need the knowledge. She’d inherited her ability to sense things from him, just like she’d inherited his blue eyes. She might be a little old lady, but she was no pushover, and whoever was in the house was about to find that out.

She stood, her bare feet sinking into the thick Oriental rug, and sent her mind outward, seeking the source of the disturbance. The cat’s growl faded into the background of her awareness.

Her mind slammed against something feral and deadly. This was no random attack. It knew who, and what, she was. She edged slowly forward, moving with absolute stealth through the familiar room. Her heart was pounding. She could taste the adrenaline on her tongue.

She had reached the center of the bedroom when a shape filled the doorway. She had a flash of recognition. “You!”

“Ouch! Damn it, Blank!” The cat thudded to the floor and dashed upstairs. I gasped in pain, my mind brought forcibly back to my own body. He’d dug in claws as he jumped, drawing blood. I padded across the room to the kitchen sink and washed the puncture wounds with antibacterial soap, drying them off with a paper towel. Was it a dream, or was it a vision? I needed to be sure. I concentrated, trying to reconnect with the woman in the bedroom. Nothing. Either it had all been my imagination, I was doing it wrong, or the old woman was dead. Shivering from a cold that had nothing to do with the weather outside, I pulled the robe tighter around my body. Coffee, coffee would warm me up. I puttered around the kitchen getting the first pot of the day brewing and tried very hard not to think of some little old woman fighting for her life against someone she knew. One of the things I hate most about the psychic stuff is that what I’m seeing doesn’t always happen in real time. The attack in that bedroom could be happening now, or last year, or next week. There was no way of knowing. If I didn’t distract myself, I was going to go nuts worrying, so I turned the volume down low and started listening to the messages that had accumulated on the answering machine.

Most of it was crap. There were a couple of social calls from Peg my best female friend in the world—who often called from strange, exotic locations because of her job as a flight attendant. Joe called to say he was due back in on Saturday and asking me to please call and let him know what the verdict had been. There was the call from Miles, a return call from Brooks giving me his cell phone number, and finally, a call from the lawyer. The jury had found the hospital 100 percent liable. The rest of us had been found to have zero liability. I wasn’t going to owe a thing.

I staggered backward and felt my way onto one of the stools by the breakfast counter. I’d pretended to myself and everyone else that I wasn’t worried. I’d lied. A part of me had been terrified that I’d be found responsible for the death of Mason Watts to the tune of several million dollars I didn’t have. The whole mess had been consuming my thoughts for months. I felt bad for his parents, guilty I hadn’t saved him, and terrified that I’d lose my home and everything else I’d worked so hard to earn. Now it was just, suddenly…over. Stress I’d been rationalizing away just vanished, leaving me limp and weak from the lack of adrenaline.

I heard movement on the steps and saw Tom padding downstairs wearing one of my pairs of sweatpants. He looked rumpled and delicious, the dim light casting shadows in the muscular hollows of his body. Normally my body would have reacted to the sight of him like that. I knew I was seriously stunned because it didn’t.

“Did I hear that correctly? You were cleared?”

I nodded, still unable to speak.

“WHOOO HOOO!” He let out a celebratory war cry that echoed through the large living room. “YES!” He pumped his fist in victory. He leaped down the last few steps and bounded over to me. Putting one hand on the counter on either side of me he leaned in and kissed me senseless, his mouth opening mine so that our tongues could dance. It was a couple of minutes before he pulled back, by which time I could see from the fit of the sweats that he was a very happy man.

“A good omen to start the day,” he observed.

“I’m not sure I believe in omens.”

“Party pooper. And you a psychic.” He was playing with my braid when he said it, twisting it around his fingers, playing with the loose hairs at the end. “Katie, sweetheart, things are getting better. We can deal with the pack; your legal problems are working out. It’s going to be all right. We’ll face Amanda together, and then, just imagine. Your brother will be all right again.” There was awe and excitement in his voice as if he couldn’t quite imagine it himself. I wanted to believe. I truly did. But I was terrified. I almost didn’t dare hope. Because, honestly, in the time since my parents died things have never really been easy, never really been “all right.” There have been good times, but they’ve been leavened with enough disaster to keep me on edge. For years I’ve spent my life waiting for the other boot to drop. Even though I wanted to, I didn’t know how to stop, how to change my entire way of relating to the world. I just don’t have that much trust left in me any more. And there was still the niggling knowledge that Tom never had told me what happened at the pack meeting, despite the repeated nudging into the topic. Tom sensed it, or else he just knows me well enough to guess. “It’s okay to be scared.” He put his hands on my waist and pulled me close. I buried my head against the warm skin of his chest, my hands resting on his shoulders.

“Good, ‘cause I’m terrified.” I took a deep breath, not daring to look up into those gentle, knowing, eyes. “I—”

Tom put a finger under my chin, tilting my face up so that I was forced to look at him. “Shhh. We’re going to take it one step at a time: plan our attack, defeat the bad guy, and live happily ever after.”

“You sound so sure.”

“Trust me.”

14

« ^ »

There are some arguments you are not going to win. The trick is to accept it, and move on. I would love to say I’m good at that. I’m not. But at some point I realized that unless I wanted to spend the next forty years or so arguing in the basement of my building, I was going to have to give in. Because Rob and Dusty weren’t about to back down, and Tom agreed with them.

They’d been waiting by the rental car when Tom and I exited the freight elevator. Dusty looked small and vulnerable in a lavender down jacket, zipped up to her chin—her hair hidden by a matching pull-on cap that was decorated with white and silver snowflakes. Her black jeans were tucked into an ugly set of glossy royal purple snow boots that were lined with thick crimson fake fur. Her hands were covered by the lavender and white mittens that had come with the hat. Despite the warm clothes, her face seemed pinched with the cold, or maybe with worry. Normally she tries to act aggressively tough. Today she didn’t bother. Rob was in his black leather trench coat. He wore boots, but more as a fashion statement than in reaction to the weather. They were heavy and black, and came up to his knees, fastening with complicated-looking steel buckles. There was probably some trick to fastening them that I wasn’t going to figure out at just a casual glance.

“What are you doing here?”

“Dusty sensed that something was up. She said we needed to be here,” Rob explained. I wasn’t sure how to answer that. Dusty’s psychic talent was what had made her Monica’s second choice for a replacement queen. But she’d never said or done anything to show off her talent before now, so I’d pretty much forgotten all about it.

I turned to Tom. “If I take the two of them with me, Amanda won’t have to kill me, Mary will do it for her.”

Dusty flinched a little, but didn’t say anything to deny it. It was Rob who argued, “You need us, Kate. I don’t know what you’re going up against, but you need reinforcements. Dusty saw it. If you don’t take us along willingly, we’ll just follow you in Dusty’s car, so you might as well stop arguing.”

The little shit meant every word. At least he wasn’t smug. If anything, he seemed a little nervous, as though he was afraid I might try to kick his ass.

“I think we should bring them,” Tom said. “Rob knows how to fight, and Dusty can drive us to the hospital, in case anybody gets hurt.” By “anybody” he meant me. Werewolves aren’t issued driver’s licenses because the condition is triggered by adrenaline. If we got in a fight, Rob and Tom were almost guaranteed to be in wolf form. He had a point. I didn’t like it, but there was a good chance I’d be hurt. Hell, Carlton and the queens thought I’d be killed. Having Dusty as a back-up driver could make the difference between life and death for me, Tom, or Rob. It made perfect sense, but that didn’t make me like it any better. “Fine.” I didn’t sound gracious, but none of them expected it.

“Just as long as Dusty agrees to stay in the car, no matter what.”

“Agreed.” Tom and Rob said it in unison. Dusty didn’t respond. She was already climbing into the back seat of the sedan. I noticed, but didn’t say anything. She wasn’t stupid. I knew she understood why we might need her as a driver. I was hoping it was incentive enough to keep her in the car and out of trouble. Our first stop was the car rental lot. I’d called ahead to arrange an exchange. Since we were going up to the mountains I wanted a four wheel drive vehicle. We might not need it, but I wanted to be prepared. It was a good thing I’d called ahead. We got the last SUV on the lot, a red Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was roomy, with a luxurious leather interior, and heating and cooling zones. We’d be driving into the trap in comfort and style. According to the map and directions in the envelope, the drive to meet with Amanda would take approximately three hours and four minutes. The destination was halfway between the towns of Grizzly and Bear Creek. Most of the trip would be spent on I-70. Tom and I had spent a fair amount of time this morning looking for another route, but there just wasn’t one. There simply aren’t that many roads through the mountains. The terrain is too rough. The road is an intruder, a thin ribbon of pavement carved onto the edge of steep cliffs of tan stone. At any time the mountain may hurl a boulder downward, smashing its way through everything in its path. The signs say “Watch for Falling Rock,” but the boulders themselves, wedged deep into the pavement of the road’s shoulder, are a better warning. Nor is it the only danger, there are hairpin turns. The runaway truck ramps bear witness to how easy it is for the driver of a semi or heavy truck to lose control of a vehicle in the mountains. The first ramp we passed already had a tanker buried in snow and sand. The truck had been going fast enough that momentum had carried it more than halfway up the steep incline before the loose sand beneath the tires slowed it to a stop.