Conception Read online

  Her struggles had reopened the wounds in her wrists. It didn’t matter. She craned her neck to see. “Is Dusan okay?”

  His gaze held hers, puzzlement pushing aside the anger. “I can’t tell.”

  There was a snap that had her flinching before she realized it was the heavy vinyl bag snaking out, and not the whip.

  Nick reached down for Deuce, bumping her legs as he did. “Damn,” he muttered as he hauled him out, grunting with the effort. “He’s going to be pissed at someone when he wakes up.”

  Dak got a better grip on the sides of her hips and lifted her out of the way. The agony wrenched the scream from her throat against her will. Hard curses from Dak and Nick swayed in tandem beneath the echo.

  The urge to succumb to the haze that immediately appeared was almost overwhelming, but she couldn’t take advantage of it yet. Not now. They had to understand.

  “Get her down,” Dak barked again, his grip on her hips tightening.

  “Who the hell did this to them?” bandanna man growled, stepping forward.

  She had, with her blind stupidity. But she wasn’t admitting that now, to these men. Eden forced her right eye open. The left lid refused to move. Across the room the lights on the panel started flashing in ever increasing patterns. The time for atonement was at hand. She met Nick’s gaze through his sunglasses as he zipped Deuce’s bloody body into the bag. She redirected his gaze to the panel on the wall. She forced her ravaged lungs to fill with air. With everything she had, she ordered, “Run!”

  She saw realization dawn in the men’s eyes as the last consonant faded.

  Nick threw Deuce over his shoulder. “Get the hell out of here. The whole damn place is going to go.”

  As one, the sea of khaki made for the exit. Eden was only concerned with Nick’s progress.

  Her body was jerked relentlessly as Dak and the other man tested the metal restraints holding her in place. Bandanna man pulled out his gun and fired. The agony of the percussion tore through her wrists and down her arms, so intense she could no longer scream. Dak’s curses came as fast as her heartbeat, just as frantic and just as useless. The chains held.

  Her gaze followed Nick as he cleared the door, his image blurring out of clarity. As he passed through with his burden, she turned her attention to Dak and the other man. She knew the instant he recognized what she’d known from the moment she’d chosen to save Deuce. She wasn’t getting out of here alive.

  “Get out of here,” Dak ordered bandanna man.

  “Just as soon as you do.”

  “You’re in charge of getting Deuce to Bohdan.”

  Bandanna man glanced at her, at the chains, and finally at Dak. With a sharp nod, he sprinted for the door, long hair whipping behind him.

  “You need to go, too,” Eden told Dak. She couldn’t have any more lives on her conscience.

  “Just as soon as I have you down, I’ll do that very thing.”

  “There’s no time!”

  Dak’s expression turned to stone and his eyes glowed with defiant determination. She shook her head as he picked at the locks with a piece of metal. With the last bit of strength she had, she pulled up her leg, placed her foot on his chest and pushed him away. He stared at her, fangs showing, face morphing as she swung in the chains, past pain. Past everything.

  Explosions began in the outer compound, the impending violence vibrating down the chains straight to her soul. She was going to die, but he didn’t need to.

  “You can’t save me.” The gold of his eyes changed to deep amber with uncertainty, and then regret. His fingers brushed her cheek with the lightest of touches. She closed her eyes against the reality and found the strength to do one last thing right. “Get out of here.”

  Chapter Two

  “This had better be good,” Deuce growled, tossing his battered backpack on the chair in the main security room. “If I do not leave soon, Dak will have all the fun rousting those spies by himself.”

  “Oh, it’s good.” Nick leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “And I don’t know what the hell to do about it.”

  “Do what we always do with journalists.” He shrugged. “Scare them off.”

  “Tried that.”

  “And?”

  Nick fiddled with the camera controls. “She didn’t scare.”

  She? Deuce’s curiosity piqued. Not many women came this far into the wilderness. Let alone in the bitter cold following a raging storm. “Who did you send?”

  “Harley.”

  He moved toward the screen. Harley was a big nightmare of a werewolf and one of his top security experts. “Hell-bent-for-leather Harley didn’t send her screaming?”

  Nick’s chair creaked beneath his shifting weight. “Nope.”

  “Did he forget his biker regalia?”

  “Nope. He even took along Luke and Shiva.”

  Which meant the three had been hanging around waiting for him to get back, and boredom had driven them out to scare off the pretty little journalist.

  He looked at the monitor. In the darkening twilight, there was only a faint stir of movement. At times, the limits of human technology frustrated him.

  “She’s between cameras,” Nick apologized.

  Deuce scanned with his senses. The only people on the mountain, according to his senses, were those who were supposed to be there. Which was impossible. He was staring at evidence to the contrary. A prickle of unease went down his spine.

  “What happened when Harley performed his badass biker routine?”

  Nick’s smile was full of admiration. “She shot him.”

  “What?”

  “She warned him to get out of her way, and kept on walking.” Nick laughed.

  “What did he do?” Deuce leaned his hip against the desk and watched the screen as the woman trudged closer.

  “Harley went full testosterone and dared her to make him.”

  “And she shot him?”

  Nick tilted his head to the side, his long brown hair falling between Deuce and his view of the screen. “Didn’t even break stride.”

  Deuce stepped to the side, keeping the woman in view. “Was he hurt?”

  Nick snorted. “It’d take more than a flesh wound to the thigh to slow Harley down.”

  That was true. Deuce studied the screen more closely. There was a familiarity in the way the woman moved. A bone-deep determination in the way she held her body that he recognized. He touched the screen, his fangs surging into his mouth, fury summoning his power. “Did Harley retaliate?”

  “Hell no.” Nick fiddled with the zoom, sharpening the focus. “But Luke and Shiva hightailed it down her back trail to make sure she wasn’t being followed.

  “Good.” He would hate to have to kill the Pack leader. Deuce fought back the darkness beating at his calm.

  “Said he wasn’t having any part of scaring a momma and her baby,” Nick added with a flick of his brow.

  “What?”

  He motioned to the screen. “She’s got a baby under that coat.”

  Anger mixed with hope. She’d betrayed him. That he could deal with. But she’d let another touch her. That he would not be forgiving. “Where is Harley now?”

  “Keeping an eye on her.”

  “Tell him to wait on my arrival.”

  Nick murmured into the transmitter. Deuce did not need to wait for a reply to be relayed. Harley’s “If she falls one more time, I’m just carrying her and to hell with the rules and that peashooter she’s packing” reached his ears just fine.

  Nick arched a brow at him. “You get that?”

  “He will not touch her,” Deuce stated calmly, as he left the room.

  No one but he would ever touch her for as long as it took for his demons to exhaust themselves.

  * * * * *

  Deuce dropped silently to the ground beside Harley. As if part of the increasing storm he slid between the flakes. To anyone but an Other, he would have been invisible.

  “She’s about pla
yed 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 pom­pom 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 y
ou 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.”