Obsession Untamed (Feral Warriors #2)(40)

Yes, he’d kidnapped her. And drugged her.

Good grief, was she really trying to convince herself he’d done all those things for the right reasons?

Yeah, maybe she was. He hadn’t hurt her. He’d never hurt her. In fact, he’d gone to great lengths to keep her from being hurt. He’d saved her.

And she’d set him up again to be captured. What if he tried to escape and wasn’t as lucky this time?

The knots in her stomach cramped.

She’d made Phil promise no one would shoot him, but even if they didn’t intend to kill him, they absolutely meant to apprehend him. Too many people had died for them to let him get away.

She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t let them shoot him again. It was a mistake. A horrible mistake.

Delaney started running through the trees, toward the road. She had to keep Tighe from making that turn. She had to stop this.

But she’d barely gone ten yards when a car swung into the parking lot. A midsized sedan with one halogen headlight.

No.

A large bird of prey flew low over her head, but she barely noticed. She watched the car come to a slow stop not ten spaces into the lot, too far away for her to see Tighe’s face. Immediately, half a dozen SWAT surrounded the car, weapons drawn. If he tried to get away this time, he was a dead man.

“Oh God, Tighe. What have I done?”

A large hand clamped around her mouth, as an iron arm pinned her against a hard chest.

“You did exactly what he expected you to,” a deep, vaguely familiar voice said against her ear.

Chapter Fourteen

Paenther turned at the sound of the blinkers to find Foxx preparing to pull the Mustang into a small, run-down convenience store set into the side of a steep, heavily wooded hill. An old sign hung above the single door. MARKET, it read. As if it were the only place to buy anything in this middle-of-nowhere deep in the mountains of western Virginia.

It probably was.

At the corner of the old brick building, a doe and a spotted fawn watched curiously until Foxx pulled into the nearly empty parking lot with a spray of gravel. The pair took off for the woods.

“Your gut telling you something?” Paenther eyed the redheaded Feral with a razor-sharp hope.

Foxx snorted. “Yeah. It’s telling me I’m hungry.”

With a thinly masked groan of disgust, Paenther tipped his head back against the headrest. Soon after the meeting at Feral House, Foxx announced that his gut was telling him they’d find Vhyper in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the narrow range that ran parallel to the East Coast from Georgia to Pennsylvania and met up with I–66 a little over an hour’s drive west of D.C.

With nothing better to go on, he and Foxx had hightailed it out there and been driving aimlessly around this pastoral outback for the past seven plus hours. They’d covered nearly two hundred miles of country roads and so far found nothing.

Damned useless intuition. How was the cub supposed to read his gut when all it seemed to do was rumble with hunger?

The dust kicked up by Foxx’s assault on the gravel covered the car in a light fog that wafted in the open window, making Paenther’s nose twitch.

“Want anything?” Foxx swung his long, broad-shouldered frame out of the car.

Yeah, he wanted something. Several somethings. Vhyper, the Daemon blade, Tighe’s clone. Not to mention the whereabouts of the Mage stronghold. None of which were likely to be found inside the Market.

With a growl of frustration, Paenther climbed out of the car and followed Foxx. For the moment, a hot dog and a Coke would have to do, but his always razor-thin patience was fraying fast. If that intuition of Foxx’s didn’t kick in soon, Paenther was going to turn into some seriously bad company.

He strode across the narrow parking lot, his gaze constantly on the move. There were five cars scattered across the small parking lot, none of which looked like it was less than fifteen years old. None of which was Vhyper’s. Across the rarely traveled two-lane was a small farmhouse set in the middle of a large pasture dotted with horses.

Not a mansion in sight. The Mage never lived in groups of fewer than thirty or forty, and there’d been no sign of any large residences around there. They were wasting their time.

Paenther pushed through the twin glass doors, spying Foxx in the middle of a narrow aisle, his hands already half-filled with junk food. How he could stand to eat that crap, Paenther didn’t know. He grabbed the closing door as a harried-looking woman approached, pushing a crying baby in a stroller.

“Thanks,” she said, smelling of stale milk and cigarettes as he held the door for her.

At the cash register, an elderly man bought a six-pack of beer. And at the magazine stand…

Paenther’s gaze slowed, lingering with appreciation over the slender, feminine form of a young woman flipping through magazines. Her hair was very short and dark, her bone structure delicate. Ethereal.

Lovely.

As if she felt him watching, she turned her head and lifted sweeping, dark lashes to reveal eyes the bright blue of a summer sky. Their gazes caught, snapping together like two pieces of a puzzle. He felt the contact like a physical jolt. His pulse lifted. His blood began to run thick and hot, racing to the juncture of his thighs.

Goddess, when was the last time he’d reacted to a woman like that? Years ago. Years ago.

A soft gentle smile lifted her mouth, stealing his breath, causing his heart to do a slow tumble in his chest.