Hunter's Need (19 page)

He nodded and lowered his eyes, studying the carpet. The helpless anger in his gut seethed, an ugly, nasty poison. Driving him insane. A girl dead, because he hadn’t felt the call to act. Try as he might, he could only figure out one plausible explanation.

He hated to let himself think it. Hated that he was sitting there, staring at her and wondering.

But it was the only thing that made sense.

“Are you blocking things, Ana?”

She didn’t look startled. That was the first thing he noticed. Just resigned.

The second thing he noticed was that all of a sudden, she was afraid. Very afraid. Although the calm expression on her face didn’t waver, he could feel her fear. It hung in the air around her like a summer storm, thick and choking. It made him edgy and it showed in his voice as he demanded, “Are you?”

She shot him a look. Pushing slowly to her feet, she rested a hand on the doorjamb of the closet and frowned. “Why?”

Duke came to his feet as well and closed the distance between them. Leaning in, he whispered into her ear, “Because a girl died last night and I didn’t know a damn thing about it until this morning.”

“People die all the time. You don’t feel every death,” she said, her voice wooden.

“But I would have felt this one . . . and I think you know it. I
should
have felt this one. She was raped. Beaten. Tortured. The kind of thing that draws my kind in like moths to flame. I should have sensed it, sensed
her
and helped her before it was too late. But I didn’t. Why didn’t I feel anything, Ana?”

She brushed by him, keeping a careful distance between them. Out in the hallway, she glanced at him over her shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“Is it you?”

She stopped, staring straight ahead. When she didn’t answer, he circled around and stopped in front of her, watching her. She’d changed clothes at some point in the day, unless of course she’d worn those skimpy shorts and a thin tank over braless breasts to work. The tank was damp now, clinging to her sweat-slicked flesh, outlining hard, tight nipples.

His mouth was watering but he wouldn’t let himself reach and touch. Right now, he didn’t trust himself. He needed to hear her say it, needed her to tell him he was wrong.

You going to believe her?
some bitter inner voice demanded.

Duke didn’t know. But he needed the answer.

“Ana . . . is it you? You blocking things out again?” he whispered again, skimming his fingers along her shoulder.

“No.” She shivered and brought her arms up, crossing them over her chest. From the corner of her eye, she watched him and he could see nerves and fear jumping in that gaze.

“You sure?”

A terse nod.

He smirked and said, “You don’t look too sure. You look kind of nervous. Guilty. Worried. If you aren’t doing anything, why are you feeling nervous, guilty or worried? If nothing’s wrong, how come you’re hiding in a closet in the middle of the day?”

“I wasn’t
hiding
,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “I was in there working on my shields and I needed someplace dark and quiet. A closet is about the best I’m going to get for dark and quiet.”

“Why in the middle of the day?”

“Because it couldn’t wait.” She turned away from him and sighed, reaching up to link her hands behind her neck. She twisted her head one way, then the other, working out the kinks that came from sitting too still for too long. “I woke up this morning feeling like something was off, but I couldn’t explain what. Still can’t. My shields feel weird, but they aren’t broken. It’s like they’ve been dented, but if I was doing a broadcast block all over the place, my shields wouldn’t be viable at all.”

“If you’ve got a weak spot, that can be a problem. You can’t be sure you’re not bleeding through.”

Ana gave him a withering look. “I know how psychic shielding works, Duke. Better than you. It’s not the kind of weak spot that would let me go around broadcasting a block. Besides, I can
feel
it when I’m doing it, or at least I sense it trying to come to life in me and it hasn’t happened.”

“At all. You haven’t done any blocking. At all.”

The doubt in his words stung. She’d be damned if she let him see, though. Mentally, she squared her shoulders.

“No. I haven’t.”

That
much, she was confident of. Despite her knee-jerk instinct earlier, wondering if she had been slipping, Ana knew better. Her chameleon trick wasn’t the most active power, but it was the one she had the best control over—she was either blocking, or not. There was no in-between. It was too unpredictable, too much potential to cause harm—controlling it was her only option.

Duke continued to study her, his eyes hooded and grim. He’d pulled his dark, golden blond hair back into a queue at his nape, leaving the stark, masculine lines of his face unframed. His mouth was a harsh, unsmiling line.

Hard to believe this was the same guy that had cuddled up against her last night, kissing the scars on her back and holding her close as she slept. Instinctively, she withdrew. The cold, angry man in front of her was the man she’d dealt with in the years before she left Excelsior. It was no less than what she’d expected when he’d shown up here in Anchorage, but this wasn’t who’d she spent the past two days with.

It hurt. Like a punch right square in the gut, it hurt. But it only got worse when he sighed and reached up, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Something’s not right, Ana.”

“I’m quite certain that’s what I told you when I called Excelsior,” she said icily.

He frowned. “That’s not what I was meant. Yeah, I realize something’s going on up here, but what I wasn’t expecting was a big, gaping void. Even before the Council recruited me, I could feel disturbances—with a big disturbance last night, I should have felt it, and I didn’t. That’s not right.”

Some of the tension spiking the air around him eased, but when he reached out to touch her, she deliberately took one slow step backward. She needed that distance just then.

His lashes flickered and a muscle jerked in his jaw.

Keeping her voice flat, she said, “I need a shower.”

Actually, what she really needed was to get her head examined.

Without waiting another second, she brushed past him and locked herself in the bathroom. She hadn’t seen this coming, and while she was surprised as hell that neither of them had sensed any sort of upheaval last night—especially Duke—what really caught her by surprise was the fact that he seemed to think she had somehow interfered.

What did you expect
?

The guy that had been waiting for her two days ago, hard, cool and distrustful—that man she would have expected this from. But from the man who’d held her through the night, it came as more of a surprise.

He’s the same man. You slept with him—that doesn’t change anything
.

Logically, she knew that. It just . . . well, it felt like things had changed.

Standing in front of the mirror, she stared at her reflection as she reached up for the band that held her hair. She tugged it loose and dropped it on the countertop, watching as her pale blonde hair floated down to her shoulders. Her scalp was still wet with sweat, her damp clothes clinging to her body.

She was cold. Cold all the way to the bone, but it had nothing to do with the sweat drying on her flesh. Cold and humiliated, sick with it.

She’d slept with him, even knowing it was a mistake, she’d slept with him. She’d told herself she hadn’t expected anything from it, other than pleasure, other than finally having something she’d been wanting, needing, craving for years.

She was a fool, though. An idealistic fool, and that didn’t set very well. Somewhere, deep inside, she’d expected something . . . or at least
hoped
.

Duke had just made it painfully clear that she wasn’t to be trusted, though. He couldn’t have made it clearer than if he’d dragged her back to Excelsior and put her under lock and key.

“What did you expect?”

 

 

S
HE emerged from the bathroom an ice princess.

Duke was familiar with the ice princess. She’d made her presence known shortly after arriving at Excelsior five years earlier and she was the woman most of the people at the school knew. Cool, distant, unaffected by damn near everything around her.

He fucking
hated
that ice princess routine. He hadn’t realized just how much he hated it until now.

He sat at the breakfast bar, her laptop open in front of him, but the news articles he’d pulled up couldn’t hold his attention. After she’d disappeared into the bathroom, he’d almost gone in after her, and now he wished he would have.

She’d used that time to rebuild the walls between them, and while he understood, mostly, he’d be damned if he let her pull back like that. He’d spent the past five years living with those walls in between them, and he’d been content with it. It had been easier.

He wasn’t interested in easy anymore. Not if it kept him from her.

She was hurt—he understood that, too. Once he could manage to speak without snarling or grunting like a fucking caveman, he’d apologize. He had to get the anger under control first. It was clouding his head, interfering with his thoughts. If he had tried to cool down earlier, taken a few minutes to think things through while he sat on his ass and waited for her to come out of the trance, he could have avoided hurting her—a fact he was seriously kicking himself over.

It didn’t make sense that Ana would call for somebody to come and help, and then interfere. No logic to it. One thing Ana had in spades was logic.

So the natural conclusion, now that he’d thought it through, was that Ana hadn’t done anything. Something else had kept him from sensing what had happened last night, but he didn’t like the implications there, either.

As she walked past, she glanced at her open laptop and then at him. He smiled, but he knew it looked every bit as fake as it felt. “I’m trying to see what information I can find out about the man who killed that girl.”

She lifted a brow. “Then I’d suggest you start trying to find who killed her, and I don’t think you’ll find the answers on who did it anywhere on my laptop.”

Unspoken were the words,
Get out
.

Want me gone? Tough luck, sweetheart. I ain’t going anywhere.
But instead of telling her that, he just leaned back on the barstool and said, “I don’t need to go digging for those answers. After he killed her, he killed himself. I’m looking up stuff about him.”

Ana sneered. Curled her lip at him and sneered. It was so fucking out of character, that for a minute, all he could do was sit there and stare—and think about grabbing her, hauling her into his lap and kissing that look off her soft, pretty mouth.

Instead, he laid his hands on his thighs, opened, closed, flexed. The itching didn’t fade, and neither did the need to touch her. Hell, all it did was get worse. The longer he looked at her, the more he needed to touch her. All the blood in his head drained south until his damned dick was as hard as a pike.

Her words, though, served as an effective bucket of cold water. “I don’t care what the paper said, what reports say, what the police will say.
He
didn’t kill that girl.” She edged past him into the kitchen, keeping that careful, cautious distance between them, and Duke saw red.

Coming up off the barstool, he stalked after her. She went to open a cabinet and he slammed a hand on it, shutting it. She stiffened, her breath hitching in her throat as she shot a look at him over her shoulder.

“Do you mind?” she said coolly.

“Explain.”

She turned around in his arms, staring at him as though he’d lost his mind. “Explain what? I’m thirsty. I’d like a drink of water. You’re in my way. Do you mind?” As she spoke, she arched away, trying to increase the distance between them.

Screw getting his head on straight. He banded an arm around her waist and hauled her up against him.

“Stop pulling away from me.”

Ana squirmed, shoved against his chest. For about fifteen seconds. Then she went stiff and stared straight ahead. “Let me go, Duke.”

“Not happening.” He caught her face in his hands, cradled it and gently, but inexorably, forced her to look at him. “I’m sorry. Okay? I didn’t mean to hurt you and I’m sorry. I didn’t have any reason—”

She tensed. “Bullshit. You have plenty of reasons not to trust me and I understand them all perfectly well.
Perfectly
well. You reacted just the way any other Hunter would have and I’d be a fool to expect otherwise.”

“I’m not just any Hunter,” he said softly. Yeah, any other Hunter would probably instinctively doubt her.

She just stared at him.

He could still feel her hurt. Actually
feel
it, like a knife piercing his heart. It hurt . . . her pain hurt him, infuriated him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, dipping his head to brush his lips across her cheek. “I had
no
reason, Ana. I was acting on instinct and anger. I’m fucking pissed right now, frustrated as hell and I don’t handle it well. That doesn’t give me a reason to take it out on you, and that’s exactly what I did. I’m sorry.”

“Fine. You’re sorry.” The words were hollow, empty.

“It won’t happen again.”

“Yes, it will. You have no reason to trust me. You have plenty of reasons to doubt me. It
will
happen again. You may not be just any Hunter, Duke, but you
are
a Hunter. You’re going to react in the way you were trained. About all things.”

“You’re wrong,” he said, staring at her.

“Am I?” She sighed and closed her eyes. “Duke, let me go.”

“No.” He gathered her closer, threaded his free hand through her damp hair and brought her head against his chest. He kissed her shoulder, stroked his hands up and down her back, tried to ease the cold knot of pain he could feel inside her. Tried to ease his own pain. Tried to warm them both.