CONCEPTION (The Others) (3 page)

“She’s about played out,” Harley murmured, not taking his
eyes off the slow-moving figure. Snowflakes caught on his hair, collecting on
the shelf of the deep blue bandanna he used to keep the long brown hair out of
his eyes.

Deuce watched as Eden slogged through the heavy, knee-deep
snow with muscles long since exhausted. She slipped, went down on one knee, and
caught herself on a sapling. Her “Son of a bitch” reached them clearly on the
crisp evening air. One hand clasped her middle protectively. For the space of a
minute, she stayed bent over, slight shoulders heaving beneath the huge parka
with the effort to draw a breath.

Deuce strained, but he could not detect her energy or that
of the baby.

Harley smiled slightly. His canines gleamed in the purple of
twilight. “She’s got quite the colorful vocabulary when she gets going.”

“She has a tendency to do everything well.” Including
setting him up. “You saw a baby?”

“I can’t sense it any more than I can sense her, but yeah,
she’s packing a little one.”

Deuce absorbed that information as Harley continued. “Got it
in one of those little chest carriers.”

Deuce could feel the wolf’s eyes on him as he asked, “What
do you want me do with her?”

That was a loaded question. What did he do with a ghost?
Deuce sighed and ran his hand through his hair. Every instinct in him demanded
that he protect her, shelter her from harm, while his baser self remembered all
that she’d been part of and demanded vengeance. In spades.

“Damn it!” The woman threw her head back as if she sensed
him. The blue pom-pom on her knit hat bounced with the gesture. “Dusan Knight!
If you don’t show yourself in the next three minutes, I am going to fall down
here in the snow and die. Come the thaw, you’ll find my body, but by then it
will be too late. Not only will I be stinking up your precious mountain, I’ll
be a spirit, and by God, if you let that happen, I’ll haunt you from here to
eternity.”

From what he knew, she was a spirit now.

Harley interrupted his thoughts. “Hard to tell with the way
she’s bundled up, but is she the type you want hanging round your neck through
eternity?”

Deuce shrugged and straightened. “At this point, I am not
sure.”

“So what do you want to do with her?”

Eden heaved to her feet. The thin wail of a hungry infant
pierced the cold silence. A forlorn, painfully sad sound. Deuce stepped through
the flakes toward the woman and child. “I will go see what she wants.”

* * * * *

He comes.

The whisper drifted through her weary mind in that female
voice she neither trusted nor understood. A warning or an alert? Not that it
mattered. She’d been following that voice’s instructions since she’d hauled
herself off the operating table five minutes after they’d finished the
C-section. It had gotten her this far. She just needed it to guide her a little
longer. Deuce was coming.

She glanced up. In front of her was row after row of tall
pines rising starkly from the smooth white blanket of fresh snow. The trunks
blended with the shadows of the approaching night, standing as dark sentries to
the fathomless corridors burrowing between. Eden dragged her foot out of the
snow and moved it forward, heading toward the one set just off of center.

She didn’t even know if she was going in the right direction
anymore. She just kept her head down, slogging forward, believing somehow, some
way, this harebrained plan of hers was going to work for the simple reason that
it had to work. She wouldn’t let those monsters have this baby. Hers or not,
Deuce’s or not, she wasn’t going to let it be part of the Coalition’s hellish
pursuit of immortality. Her foot snagged on something, and she went to her
knees again.

“You are exhausting yourself.”

The simple statement resonated deep in her being. Beneath
her exhaustion, beneath her fear, a tiny flutter of excitement pulsed to life.

“Deuce.” It was more of an exhalation than a word. Still,
she shouldn’t have been surprised he heard. His hearing was extraordinary.

“Yes.”

“You’re alive.”

“I believe that should be my line.” Nothing in his voice let
on how he felt about her, about the past, and what he had to believe she’d
done.

She looked up. He stood twenty feet away, separate from the
gloom, yet somehow part of it—lean hands on his hips, his long black hair
blowing about his shoulders, his shirt pressing against his torso outlining
muscle cuts a bodybuilder would love. He looked as wild and untamed as the
wilderness around him. She blinked. She’d forgotten how big he was. “I’m
sorry.”

With
a short incline of his head, he acknowledged her apology. He started toward
her. She took a breath and held it. Dusan didn’t look happy. The flat evening
light played across his high cheekbones, shadowing the slant to his black eyes,
accentuating the thrust of his square chin, lending a hard edge to a face
already devastatingly masculine. She took a breath as he got closer, dropping
her eyes, staying where she was, ignoring the instinct to run. The only thing
running would accomplish would be to release against her all that seething
energy shimmering around him. And she so wasn’t going there.

His boots came into view. Black like his shirt and pants,
they were strangely bereft of the snow accumulating on everything else. The
breath she’d been holding rushed from her lungs. Her pulse pounded in her
veins. One heartbeat, two, three. He didn’t move and didn’t speak. Just stood
there. She clenched her hand into a fist, forced a ragged breath into lungs too
tense to accept it, and made herself meet his eyes. If he wanted revenge, he
was going to have to look her in the face while getting it.

It was a long way up and when her gaze got to his face, his
expression didn’t give her any clue as to what he thought. His eyes, however,
said everything. They glittered with red flashes of emotion, belying his calm.
In their depths, where she’d expected to see anger and hatred, she
saw…reproach?

“Why did you not contact me?”

She almost collapsed into the snow with relief. At least he
was going to give her a chance to explain. She tugged at her foot. Instead of
freeing herself, she wedged it deeper. Damn! Her day only needed this. “Things
were complicated.”

“How complicated?”

“Very.” She yanked harder. The pull on her abdomen sent pain
knifing through her gut. Without thinking, she doubled over, squashing the
infant. The baby wailed a protest.

Immediately, Deuce was on his knees beside her. “You are
hurt.”

It wasn’t a question. He paused before clearing the snow
from her short boot with an elegant wave of his hand. “You bleed.”

She rubbed the baby soothingly through her coat with numb
fingers. “Right now, that’s the least of my problems.” She shot him a wry glance.
“Unless it’ll send you into some vampiric psycho moment?”

His hands were huge against her ankle. He could snap her leg
with a flick of a finger. His strength had always drawn her. Along with his
gentleness. He carefully extracted her foot from the fallen tree limb. There
was no change in his expression as he said, “I will endeavor to resist.”

She bet he didn’t have to try hard. The last year had been
hell, pure and simple. She no longer looked the pretty little naïve thing he’d
claimed to be in love with.

“Where are you injured?” he asked, those sharp black eyes
running over her body, head to toe. Even though his examination was clinical,
her nipples tightened and her pussy clenched in anticipation.

She waved away his concern. “It’s not important.”

She touched his shoulder before he could stand, refusing to
let her gloved fingers linger on the hard muscle like they wanted. He wasn’t
hers anymore and never would be again. “I need your help.”

“We will talk of that later.”

She shook her head as she took the hand he held out. She
didn’t know how long she had. She just knew that the foreign sense of urgency
that came from
her
—that unknown woman who spoke to her—remained strong.
“We need to talk now.”

He eased her to her feet. “Later. When you are well, I will
have explanations.”

She was as good as she was ever going to be. The constant
experiments her grandfather had performed in the pursuit of immortality had
made sure of that. His hand stayed on her elbow. She leaned on it, needing the
support. He seemed to understand, because his other arm slid around her waist.

At least one thing hadn’t changed. The old-fashioned manners
that had first entranced her still existed. She could only hope that the
old-world chivalry did, too, and if this wasn’t his daughter that he would
still feel compelled to offer protection to the child.

The muscles in Deuce’s forearm shifted against her coat as
he frowned. “You are too thin.”

It sounded like an accusation. She shrugged. “I prefer to
think of myself as fashionable.”

He stared harder at her, his frown deepening. “I thought you
dead.”

She shoved her hat back on her forehead. “You and me both.”

“But you live.”

If you could call it that. She batted the snowflakes away
from her face. “You sound disappointed.”

“I am confused as to how you could live, and I could not
know.”

She bit her lip as the baby kicked her incision, breathing
through her nose until the urge to cry out had passed. “Just chalk it up to one
of the great mysteries of life.”

“I think I would prefer to simply know how you have managed
this.” He eased her forward with the same calm with which he spoke, for which
she was very grateful. Just standing upright was taking all her strength. She
couldn’t ever remember being this weak. Even at the beginning of her
grandfather’s tests.

She tightened her grip on Deuce’s arm, feeling a pang of
envy. If she had half his muscle, the success of the second part of her plan
would be a given rather than a huge question mark. She dragged her foot out of
the snow. “Do you mean how did I survive the explosion?”

He nodded, supporting her. “That would be a start.”

She caught her breath and her balance, gathering her
strength for the next step. “My grandfather came up and took me down the stairs
as soon as Dak left the room. There was some sort of bunker down below.”

Another one of her grandfather’s Plan Bs.

“I am grateful.”

“I wasn’t.”

The bitterness in those two words pulled Deuce up short. He
looked down into Eden’s set expression and the lines of strain etched into her face.
Her features were as familiar to him as his own, from her big blue eyes to the
softly rounded cheeks beneath. Everything about her was soft. Giving. At least,
it had been when they’d first met. She was outwardly harder now. Wherever she’d
been the last year had changed her.

Another wail came from the depths of her coat.

“Sssh, baby,” Eden whispered in her soft voice, ducking her
head to peer inside the coat so all he had to look at was the bedraggled
pom-pom flopping on the top of her knit cap. He suppressed an urge to snatch
the hat off her head so he could see the bright yellow curls he knew were
hidden beneath. He didn’t like the changes in her. The mystery that shrouded
what once had been clear. She was his. There could be no secrets between them.

She rubbed her hands over the bulge in her middle. “It’s
going to be all right,” she whispered to the fussing baby. “We’re here. You’ll
be safe now.”

Deuce did not need a psychic connection to hear the
desperation in her voice. He doubted the baby did either as it continued to
wail. Anguish and guilt clouded Eden’s scent as she stood in the frigid night,
rubbing the baby’s back, collecting snowflakes and bravado with every second
that passed, managing to look fragile and strong in the same breath. His path became
clear. She was his, given to him by the Maker. His to protect. To cherish. To
pleasure in this life and the next. He could not turn away from her any more
than he could stop his next breath. She was his mate, and she needed care.

Deuce forestalled Eden’s effort to walk by simply sliding an
arm under her knees and lifting her up. The scent of fresh blood immediately
intensified. As she threw an arm around his neck for support, the underlying
taint of infection mingled with the soft scent of woman. He frowned, gliding
quickly over the snow to where Harley waited. Before all else, her injuries
needed to be tended.

The wolf said nothing as he approached, though the amused
lift of his brow had Eden stiffening in Deuce’s arms.

“He’s one of yours?” she asked, blinking at him as a
snowflake landed in her eye. Her weight shifted as she reached into her pocket.

“Yes.” He tipped her against his body, using her imbalance
to remove the small handgun from her grip. He tossed it to Harley who caught it
easily.

Eden glared at Harley as he deftly emptied the bullets out
of the chamber and tucked the gun into his pocket. “I should have aimed
higher.”

Deuce forestalled Harley’s response with a slight shake of
his head. “I would have been displeased had you hurt him,” he advised her
softly, turning slightly to shield her from the wind when she shivered.

Eden’s wry “As if that would ruin my day”, dry with sarcasm
and weariness, was muttered into the pad of his chest. The words breathed
through the silk of his shirt melted hot and sweet against his skin, triggering
memories of when she’d teased him with her wit as well as her body. After a
year of deprivation, his flesh welcomed the incidental caress. He shifted her
higher in his arms, so her next breath drifted past the open collar of his
shirt, gliding across his throat in a moist promise of what could be.

Beneath the veneer of civilization, all Chosen were prone to
baser emotions. He more so than most, apparently. He wanted nothing more than
to lay her down in the snow and stake his claim, despite her injury, the baby,
or Harley’s assessing gaze. Maybe more so because of the other male’s presence.
There was too much admiration in the wolf’s eyes when he looked at Eden.