she cooperate.
Slowly, methodically, he managed to move the pipe toward the rear of the vehicle. He’d hooked a leg about one of hers, which held him down and his powerful muscles flexed against hers. Another pause, he pressed his palm flat to hers again, and she knew before he left he had to resurface to take in air.
Wolves couldn’t breathe underwater? A girl learned something new every day.
Those minutes she lay in the darkness were the longest in Danni’s life. Six months ago she’d never imagined this for herself. She wouldn’t let this be her end, she was stronger than that. Curling her fingers about the end of the pipe, she felt but a foot left to go, but she couldn’t move it herself. Even with the infusion of blood she’d taken in the car, exhaustion coiled about her bones. She couldn’t hold her eyes open and let the lids fall shut.
The next time she opened her eyes it was to thin moonlight upon silver waves as she was being pulled ashore. Her body landed on a hard surface and she choked up water endlessly.
“Gotta get out of here,” a male voice with a British accent said near her head. “I can hear sirens now. I’m sure neither of us wants to talk to the police. Trust me, eh?”
Danni’s eyes closed as she felt her body lifted and tossed over the burly wolf’s shoulder.
* * *
He walked the half mile home with the vampiress flung over one shoulder as if she were a sodden sack of laundry. He only encountered a few odd looks at the half-clad, soaking wet man as he went along the way. He growled at an elderly gentleman who’d suggested he take his antics to the privacy of his own home. The French were such snobs.
Hart dropped the vampiress onto the ceramic-tiled floor inside his apartment, not wanting to lay her on the suede sofa. Without a glance behind him, he aimed for the bathroom, striping off his wet pants and the few remaining shreds of his shirt. Walking right into the glass-walled shower, he turned on the hot stream. “Bloody yes, I needed that.”
Ten minutes later, he grabbed a towel and wandered out to the living room to find the vampiress alert, crouched against the door and flexing to stand as he approached. She put up her fists, as if ready to go a couple rounds with him.
That gave Hart a mirthless chuckle. “Feisty longtooth, aren’t you? Here.” He tossed her the towel, and she pressed it to her gut, which didn’t bleed anymore, but then, he hadn’t expected it to. “You healed?”
She nodded.
Anger returning in a whirl of energy, he fisted the air as if he’d just laid the punching bag flat. “What the hell are you about? Going after my principal, then nearly drowning me? And this?” He slapped the side of his neck where the bite wounds had finally healed, yet had marked him forever in ways no wolf could comprehend.
“Just doing as I was ordered.” She straightened, lifting her chin defiantly.
Despite her bedraggled, wet-rat appearance, her eyes were bright blue and her thick lips were jeweled with water that dripped from her candy red hair. The dark clothing clung to a long, narrow frame defined by lean muscle.
Hart’s first assessment of her stood: gorgeous. Yet deadly. And too cocky for a vampire standing before a wolf who could shear her head from her neck with one flick of his wrist.
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?” Hart snapped, pacing before her, unsure yet if he should get out the stake he kept in a kitchen drawer—he’d lost the gun in the Seine—or shove her out the door and wish her good riddance.
“You saved my life.”
He flung a hand outward, dismissing the heroic deed. “Wasn’t like you were going to die.”
“No, but I would have been stuck down there forever.”
“Yet still alive. So there. I didn’t save your life.”
She heaved out a sigh and nodded. “Either way, I owe you one.”
“I don’t need a favor from a longtooth, thank you very much.”
“I know. You hate me. I’m supposed to hate you.” She lifted the clump of her wet hair and squeezed the water out onto the floor. “What’s your name?”
He snarled, thinking she had some nerve. By rights he should bring her in to the compound to let the pack serve her the justice they saw fit.
I’m supposed to hate you. Like she wasn’t sure whether or not she should?
“Hart,” he offered briskly. He never used his first name; Christian was too sissy. “You can take the towel with you. Just get the hell out before I decide to serve you as chum for the pack.”
Wrapping the towel about her shoulders, she opened the door. A sigh preceded her darting glance at him. Sadness wafted through the air and permeated Hart’s chest. He felt the hit directly and sucked in a breath.
“Name’s Danni Weber,” she said. “Tribe Zmaj. I know it doesn’t change things, but...sorry about the bite. I was in survival mode.”
With that, she closed the door, and Hart let out his breath.
“Sorry? About changing my life forever?” He grabbed the nearest thing—a pillow on the couch—and hurled it at the door so hard the seams split and out spilled thick white stuffing.
Hart slapped a palm to his neck. The wound was achy and hot. He would have preferred death over a bite, any day.
Two
Danni stood naked before the mirror mounted on the back of her bedroom door, inspecting her smooth stomach. Gliding her fingers up the skin, taut with underlying muscle, she frowned at the absence of a scar below her ribcage. That her body healed at an insanely fast rate did not cease to bewilder her. It was unnatural. Wicked. Perhaps even demonic.
Truth was, it was vampiric. And thinking the V-word ignited a wrenching twist in her gut. She hated what she had become. Or did she fear it?
A little of both, for sure.
Pressing a palm to the mirror she opened her mouth and watched as she willed her fangs lower. It didn’t hurt, but accompanying their descent, she felt a strange tingling for fulfillment, to satiate her needs with blood and sex. Another wicked, demonic thing that had become a part of her life.
It was all Slater’s fault.
She’d not called him this morning to check in. Revealing her incompetence wasn’t so much a risk to her status in the tribe as it would be to her brother’s neck. Literally. No, she had to avoid Slater for a few days until she could again put herself near the pack leader, Remington Caufield. And this time she wouldn’t screw things up.
The sticky tracking device had slipped off her finger before she’d gotten it on the principal. And the device being miniscule, she hadn’t a chance to find it in a dark nightclub. She’d fled in a panic. The pack wolf who had pursued her—Hart—had been a surprise.
This lurking about and spying business wasn’t her thing. Though tribe Zmaj seemed to think it was. As a former
