Free Charlotte Boyett-Compo- Wyndsheer by Unknown

own--he laid her down and slid in beside her, gathering her tightly into his arms.
    “I can’t love you just yet,” he said for the pain was disabling him so badly it was all he could do not to groan.
    “Just hold me,” she said, her hand smoothing over his chest. “I’ll just play with your hair.”
    He laughed. “A woman obsessed,” he said with a snort.
    For a long time they just lay there in silence, content and at peace then his fingers began rambling over her arm, her shoulder, her waist and when one fingertip touched the scar beneath her right arm, he asked her how she’d come by it.
    “When Stephen found us at the Carlton that day and shot Cody, the bullet went through Cody at an angle and grazed my arm, burying itself in the mattress,” she replied.
    “It’s a wonder he didn’t kill you both,” he observed.
    “Steve is a piss-poor shot,” she said. “Always was. He told me he aimed directly over where Cody’s heart is but standing where he was above us and at that angle, all he did was put a deep furrow in Cody’s back--painful though it was--and nipped me. We had a hard time explaining how Cody got shot.”
    “Your husband wasn’t arrested?”
    “We didn’t want anyone to know about the affair. That would have been career suicide for all three of us,” she said.
    “He’s an agent, too?”
    “Was,” she said. “After the incident, he quit the agency.” She raised one shoulder. “I was going to leave him when I came back from that last assignment.”
    “And marry blondie?”
    “Not likely,” she told him. “Cody was pressuring me to do that, but I had no intention of tying myself to him. He’s too unpredictable and like I said, he’s just plain mean.”
    Jamie fingered the scar under her arm. “He hasn’t seen mean yet,” he said quietly.
    She moved back from him and looked into his face. “You said you wouldn’t hurt him or his men.”
    “I won’t.”
    There was something dangerous in his eyes but there was truth there, as well. She believed him when he said he wouldn’t hurt the men though she knew he was more than capable of doing things a human assassin would never dream of doing.
    She laid her head on his shoulder. “Tell me about the Warehouse,” she said.
    “No.”
    The one word was spoken with a finality that let her know he would not discuss the place where he and his kind had been created, their embryonic DNA spliced with that of their lupine dams. Since he was a full-blood, she knew his sire had been one of the first generation of Lycants that had to be destroyed because they could not be controlled. Though she’d heard horrible tales of the brutal training, the inhuman experimentation that had gone on at the Warehouse in the Highlands, she doubted he would ever enlighten her. Like most government agents she knew the Lycants had been produced as nearly-invincible, expendable warriors skilled in quick, savage killings meant to instill abject fear in the enemy. In their lupine form, Jamie’s kind could go where humans could not and accomplish inhuman acts only the warped minds of their controllers could conceive. Those who had been successfully re-conditioned after the war no longer posed a threat to mankind. Ones like Jamie were still dangerous.
    She changed the subject.
    “What do you do to pass the time when you’re not rescuing women from plane crashes?”
    He molded his hand to her breast. “You mean when I’m not ravaging them while I keep them drugged?”
    She looked up at him. “Did you do that to me?”
    “Aye.”
    “Bastard,” she said then kissed his shoulder. “Wicked, wicked bastard.”
    “I carve.”
    Her eyebrows drew together. “Carve what?”
    “Statues,” he said. “I sell them to a gallery in Doverton.”
    “What kind of statues?”
    “Eagles, wolves, mountain lions.” He ran his thumb over her nipple. “Naked woodland nymphs.”
    “Where did you learn to carve?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just found myself