Call of the Wolf (11 page)

In all honesty, she couldn't believe any of the four had ever had a lot of experience with rejection. Maybe it was just completely justifiable self-confidence that made them seem so ... aggressive in their pursuit? Clearly, however, even though she'd been inclined to dismiss their seemingly pointed interest, they not only were interested in her, they were pretty damned confident ‘bagging’ her wasn't going to present them with much of an effort.

It probably wouldn't have, if it came to that, if all
four
of them hadn't decided to make a play for her. That was just confusing and damned unnerving!

She still couldn't quite figure out, though, how their discovery of her situation had them practically camping out at her place. Maybe they thought they were protecting her?

If that was the case, though, why was it that
all
of them were behaving as if they'd staked a claim on her?

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Chapter Eight

Maybe, Abby thought uneasily, she was just such an emotional wreck after all she'd been through before and since she'd arrived in Ajax—and maybe she was imagining things?

Struggling to shake the thought, she got up. Deciding to take Adrian's advice once she recalled it, she grabbed a robe and headed into the bathroom to take a long, hot shower. While she waited for the water to heat, she dug through the boxes until she found extra strength pain reliever, took a dose, and then got into the shower. The hot water didn't exactly tame her raging hormones, but it did relax her muscles and the discovery that Seth and Cameron had been an audience to Adrian's kiss had already gone a long way toward cooling her ardor.

When she'd dried off and wrapped in her robe, she opened the door cautiously, peered down the hall and darted across it and into her room. Discarding the robe at the door, she headed to the bed and climbed in. Sprawling face down with a pillow clutched to her, she resolutely closed her mind to all the worries still swarming around in her mind like a stirred beehive and finally dozed.

The smell of cooking food emanating from the kitchen roused her before the voices did. Still half asleep, she tensed, listening more keenly to try to identify the voices. Relieved when she finally did recognize them and it banished the brief, unpleasant, belief that she was back in one of the many ‘safe’ houses she'd stayed in over the past year, she sat up and looked at the clock. That confused her, too. Between the dimness in the room and the time displayed she couldn't decide whether it was morning and she'd slept through the afternoon and night, or if she'd only slept a couple of hours.

The smell of the food wasn't much of a clue. Her stomach rumbled in appreciation, but that still didn't tell her if she was smelling breakfast or supper. Eventually, she decided to get up and investigate. Unearthing a pair of thongs, a comfortable pair of jeans and a knit top, she struggled into them. She'd already headed toward the door when she recalled that she'd just gotten out of bed and her hair was probably standing on end.

The steam from the hot shower had produced a riot of wispy curls around her face, she saw. Grabbing up her brush, she pulled the band out of her hair, raked the snarls out then tossed both the brush and the hair tie on the dresser, leaving her hair loose.

She wasn't exactly surprised to discover all four men in her kitchen, but she was a little disconcerted.

"Feeling better?"

Glancing at Adrian when he spoke, Abby felt her face warm with discomfort. “Yes, thanks. Between the shower, the pain killer, and the nap I think I just might live to battle dragons another day,” she said with an attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

Adrian didn't look to be sporting any bruises, but there was no getting around the fact that the moment she'd entered the room the tension had mounted.

Under the circumstances, she decided not to voice her sentiments regarding the fact that the four of them seemed to have made themselves at home or ask them if they had some particular reason for camping out at her place. Truthfully, although she found it mildly annoying, there was no getting around the fact that she felt safer, and far more relaxed, with them in her house than she'd felt in a very long time.

She supposed she should've felt the same way with the agents that had ‘babysat’ her, but they'd been so alert to possible threat that it had kept her on edge, not made her feel protected.

She wondered if Seth had deputized them to help him keep watch over her until Milner came to collect her, or if they'd just volunteered.

Or maybe they were just bored?

"Rough first day?” Seth asked gruffly.

She discovered she hated to admit that she'd had such a hard time keeping order in her class that the principal had popped in twice to make the children settle down. “Oh, it was fun!” she said wryly. “Please tell me there's enough of whatever it is you're cooking for me, too! I'm starving."

His gaze flickered over her face. “There's plenty. What did you have for lunch?"

Abby looked at him blankly and then frowned. “You know ... I'm not sure.” She wasn't certain she'd had anything at all. She distinctly remembered the trip to the lunchroom—how could she forget!—but she'd been so busy monitoring her class she didn't remember if she'd actually managed to eat anything or not.

Apparently, Seth decided she hadn't eaten. He served from the stove, passing out plates and settled one in front of her that looked like it had enough on it to feed three people. She stared at it with more than a little dismay despite her assertion that she was starving. Shrugging mentally when she saw the plates he'd fixed for the others had even more on them, she dug in with everybody else.

The topic of conversation was ‘how to handle rug rats.’ As instructive as it no doubt was, she found it mildly annoying, too, mostly, she thought, because all of them seemed a lot more knowledgeable than she was about children. As she had with Adrian, she couldn't help but wonder about their experience. She decided not to ask, though. It had been disconcerting enough that Adrian had instantly known it wasn't just idle curiosity when she'd asked him.

In any case, she didn't have to ask. With far more subtly than she'd managed, they made it clear the experience had been gathered through friends and relatives. They all seemed to hail from fairly extended families—not really surprising considering they were all southern born, evidently, and southerners tended to be clannish. Her own family hadn't really followed tradition, or at least she hadn't, in maintaining distant family connections. Her grandmother, however, had not only been able to recite first, second, and third cousins, and cousins once and twice removed, but the family lineage back four or five generations from her own.

She began to feel a little freakish that she barely even knew her first cousins on both sides of her family. Fortunately, due to her circumstances, they didn't pump her for that sort of information and she didn't volunteer it.

When they'd finished eating and kitchen clean up, they all moved to the living room to sprawl in front of the TV and talk instead of either watching or listening to the ‘background ambience.’ She finally got the opportunity to ask them a few of the questions that had been nagging at her, most particularly how it was that they all seemed to know each other so well. She supposed she shouldn't have been really surprised to discover they'd served together in the military, but she was. She'd known they had to have some sort of connection, besides the biker affiliation. They worked too well together for people who didn't know each other really well.

The shock was the growing suspicion that they were younger than she'd guessed them to be. Not that they didn't
look
really young to her, but she knew men tended to, particularly the under thirty crowd. They
seemed
mature and since most of the men she'd known that were under twenty-five behaved like kids, she thought that it was the way they behaved that had given her the impression that they just looked really young and weren't. She didn't ask. She didn't want to be put in the position of either having to answer similar prying questions about her own history or being rude by refusing.

It wasn't as if it mattered in the scheme of things. Even if any of them were interested in pursuing any kind of relationship, she couldn't. Regardless of what had been said on the subject, she thought the Feds would decide to move her. It might take time to make other arrangements, but she wasn't likely to be around long, and since none of the four lived in Ajax but Seth, they weren't even going to be around as long as she was.

Under other circumstances, she might at least have considered a ‘fly by’ with any of the four. She had needs that went beyond survival. Those needs hadn't actually crossed her mind in forever, not until she'd been set down in the middle of ‘hunk wonderland', but it had certainly crossed her mind several times since—no red blooded woman could
help
but think about it with guys like them around. Getting laid might not satisfy her on every level, but it beat the hell out of nothing at all.

Unfortunately, shy of simply brazenly offering, it didn't look like the opportunity was going to arise. She thought any of them would be perfectly willing to accommodate her, but she hadn't been around
one
long enough to attempt a seduction, and she a bad feeling that was going to continue to be the case.

If Seth and Cameron hadn't been standing between her and the bedroom when she'd gotten home, she thought—no, she was sure—she would've dragged Adrian into her bedroom and had her way with him. That kiss had had her primed—
still
made her feel warm and weak all over every time she thought about it. He was so damned good at it she couldn't help but fantasize about what else he was good at—everything, she suspected.

She wanted to know, damn it!

Seth informed her when it finally grew so late that she had to call it a night that Cameron and Adrian would be keeping inside watch during the night—the first that he'd said outright that they were guarding her.

Even though she'd suspected it, being informed irritated her. “Inside?” she echoed questioningly.

He nodded. “Jerico and I will watch the outer perimeter tonight."

Alright, so that explained why she'd run into Seth in the kitchen that morning. He and Jerico must have spent the night watching the ‘inner perimeter.’ She was more dismayed to discover that Adrian and Cameron had, evidently, spent the night outside watching her house—and that Seth and Jerico planned to do so that night. “Do you really think that's necessary? I mean, you guys know about me, but I can't think of a single reason why anyone else would. The Feds were very careful about checking everything out before they brought me."

"Not careful enough,” Seth said grimly, “or they would've waited until after the festival. I'm not worried about the people who have a legitimate reason for coming, but we have a lot of strangers in town right now. If any of the people after you managed to discover your whereabouts, it would be way too easy for them to slip into town unnoticed."

Fear instantly replaced her concern for their comfort, selfish thing that she was. “But ... isn't it dangerous for y'all? I mean—I know you were all in the military, but this is different and ... they're not even armed."

To her surprise, he lifted a hand to brush his knuckles caressingly along her cheek. “Who says they aren't?” he asked with a faint smile. “Don't worry about it. I've got complete confidence in them."

Undoubtedly, she did, too. She spent maybe twenty minutes lying awake worrying about them and then was out like a light. She dreamed, though, erotic dreams that warmed her enough to arouse her almost to complete wakefulness several times. What disturbed her when she woke the next morning was that the dream began with Adrian kissing her and making love to her, and then progressed through Seth, Cameron, and even Jerico. It wasn't that she dreamed of each—four individual dreams. The man she was with kept changing. When it began, she was sure it was Adrian, but when she looked at him, it was Seth, and then Cameron or Jerico.

If dreams were wishes, she obviously couldn't make up her mind. Or maybe she had, she thought wryly. She wanted all of them. As different as they all were in both looks and personality, not one of them fell below a ten on the ‘made her wet’ scale. It really sucked that she wasn't likely to actually experience what it was like being intimate with any of them.

As groggy with sleep as she was when the alarm rolled her out of bed, she recalled that Seth had told her Cameron and Adrian would be staying in the house all night. It occurred to her that they might already have gotten up and left, but she decided not to take any chances on another nude encounter, grabbing her robe and pulling it on before she headed to the bathroom.

Not that she wasn't tempted in spite of Seth's arrogant command that she not flash any of the others. Contrary to what he obviously thought, though, both incidents had been accidental and wouldn't have happened if they hadn't been camping on her doorstep. She hadn't been expecting to run into anybody or she would've dressed.

In spite of the temptation to ‘troll’ for a little piece of tail, though, she couldn't bring herself to be that brazen.

Cameron was standing in the shower, dripping water, when she opened the bathroom door. It took her a full minute to register the fact that she'd just walked in on him and he was naked. Mumbling an apology, she whirled and dashed back into her bedroom. She was wide awake, though. Ten cups of caffeine couldn't have set her heart to galloping half as fast.

There was a tap on her door. Abby answered it cautiously. It was Cameron, she discovered. He'd pulled on a pair of worn jeans, but he hadn't fastened them and they rode low on his narrow hips. The bare upper torso was enough by itself to give her a jolt. Neither his tattoos or his pierced nipples detracted one iota from the beautifully sculpted muscles of his chest, arms, and belly. In fact, they seemed to enhance nature by adding contrast between perfection and art. His long, blond hair, darkened from the water and still dripping an occasional rivulet, hung across his shoulders and brushed the tops of his male breasts.

With a will of their own, her eyes skimmed downward, following the gleaming trail of a droplet of water over hard, bulging pecs, the washboard of his abdomen, and over the flat belly exposed by his open jeans until it disappeared in the thatch of hair she could just glimpse above his cock. She was almost certain, in fact, that she could see the root, although that might have been wishful thinking.