Runaway Vampire (Argeneau, #23)(14)

“No,” she said firmly. “Go make your call.”

Dante hesitated, but then said, “I will be quick,” and finally snatched up the phone, ripped off the top paper from the memo pad, and moved away.

“Take your time,” Mary muttered under her breath, and meant it. She needed a little breathing space from the man. He wasn’t her type—too big, too young, and just too damned sexy—but he hadn’t been the only one affected by the past few minutes. If women could have boners, she’d be sporting one too and that was just pitiful. Dante was young enough to be her son . . . maybe even her grandson. She had no business responding to him at all.

And she wasn’t, Mary assured herself. She was just reacting to the night’s excitement: the accident, and then the danger and excitement of finding herself with a man whose kidnappers were now hunting them. No doubt she was experiencing an adrenaline rush and was simply mistaking that for a response to the man—the only man—with her. She’d heard, or perhaps read somewhere, that high-risk adventures could lead to swift bonding and sexual attraction and that’s all this was, Mary assured herself. She just needed to keep her head on straight until this was all over and everything would be fine.





Four


Dante moved to the back of the RV and sat on the edge of the bed to punch in the number to the Enforcer House. Something cold and wet pressing against his leg drew his attention to the fact that the dog had followed him, and now sat on the floor at his feet, her head on his knee. Petting the beast absently, Dante glanced toward the woman in the driver’s seat. As he listened to the phone ring at the other end of the line, his mind was chasing itself around inside his skull like a dog chasing its tail. He needed to keep Mary safe from their pursuers, needed to save Tomasso, needed to pass on the information they’d learned, needed to . . . claim his life mate.

Christ, who would have thought he’d find her now in the middle of all of this madness? It hadn’t even occurred to Dante that Mary might be his life mate when he first hadn’t been able to read her. He’d just assumed it was a result of his injuries and lack of blood. But he’d had no problem at all slipping into the thoughts of the doctors and the others and taking control of them. In fact, he’d controlled several of them at a time and with ease, and yet when she’d stormed back into the RV after he’d fed and got his strength back, he still hadn’t been able to even peek into her thoughts, let alone control her.

His body’s reaction to her nearness was another rather telling point that suggested she was his life mate. Those brief moments when he’d held her on his lap, her intoxicating scent wafting into his nose and her warmth imprinting on his groin . . . He still had a damned erection from the encounter, and he was quite sure she’d felt something too. He’d heard her heartbeat accelerate and her swift, shallow breathing. Oh yes, he was quite certain Mary Winslow was his life mate. He just didn’t know what, if anything, he should do about it at the moment. There were so many things that needed tending just now.

“Yes.”

Dante glanced down at the phone in his hands with surprise at that abrupt word. It wasn’t the usual way Lucian answered his calls to him. Usually he answered with “Speak, Dante.” But then, Dante usually called from his own phone. This was Mary’s phone and Lucian wouldn’t recognize this number, he realized and cleared his throat.

“It’s Dante.”

“Thank Christ,” Lucian growled. “Where the hell have you been? And where is Tomasso? When the two of you went missing—”

“We were taken from the bar you sent us to,” Dante interrupted. “Both Tomasso and I were kidnapped. They used drugged darts. I was apparently out for two days and nights,” he added grimly, and wasn’t surprised by the silence that followed his announcement. No doubt, Lucian was as taken aback at this news, as Dante had been when he’d realized what had happened. Mortal drugs did not work on their kind. They were flushed from the system too quickly to do more than make them woozy or a little faint. They’d had to develop their own drugs to use on rogue immortals and even those only worked temporarily and had to be re-administered too quickly to be viable as more than a temporary stop-gap measure to get the rogue bound up. Yet he’d apparently been unconscious for two days. It suggested that an immortal was behind the kidnappings, or a mortal with information about them that they should not have . . . as well as access to their specialized drugs.

“You got away, obviously,” Lucian said finally. “Are you both all right?”

“They still have Tomasso,” Dante said quietly, and quickly related how he’d got free and why Tomasso hadn’t, finishing with, “We have to get him back.”

“Where is he?” Lucian asked at once.

“Do you have a pen?” Dante asked, glancing down at the piece of paper in his hand. Mary had lovely handwriting, he noted. When Lucian said he was ready, Dante read off the instructions Mary had written down. Once Lucian read it back to him, he added, “That is where I came out of the woods onto the road. The house was perhaps a five minute run east from there through the trees.”

Lucian grunted and then asked, “Where are you now?”

“In an RV, heading northwest on Interstate 10. The kidnappers are following us. I am hoping that means Tomasso is safe for now. But you need to get someone to him as quickly as possible. I can’t guarantee the kidnappers will continue to just follow us, and with the drugged darts they have—”