Page 6 of Twice Bitten
“Jack and Jake. Your parents named their twins Jack and Jake?”
A dull red flush bloomed across Jack’s cheekbones, and he glared at me out of those pale blue eyes, a little flash of alpha gold seeping through. A shiver went down my spine.
“They thought they were having a boy and a girl,” he growled. Another shiver. Dammit. “We were supposed to be Jack and Jill.”
The laugh burst out of me at last with a force I couldn’t resist, a high-pitched cackle that didnotfit the image of a vampire enforcer.
“Sorry,” I gasped, still giggling. Because it might have been hilarious, but guilt hit me again nearly as hard as the laughter. “I’m sorry. He’s in a coma. But I can’t…”
I swallowed hard, the laughter dying away as Jack stared down at me, his cheeks going redder and his eyes glowing more golden by the second. Could I take him in a fight one on one? I didn’t know for sure, and that killed the last of my humor. I had decades of experience on my side, but he had sheer bulk, not to mention at least equal strength.
And then Jack sighed, the tension draining out of him and the corner of his mouth quirking up. “Yeah,” he said, still quietly. Still without any sign of the rage or violence I’d been expecting to erupt any second. And he hadn’t moved. If anything, he’d leaned a tiny bit closer. “I know. Everyone reacts that way.”
Well. Now I felt like arealasshole. What would it take to get under this guy’s skin? Maybe only his mate had the ability to do that, given that outburst of his in the bar earlier and his nearly unflappable calm before and since.
That thought didn’t give me any pleasure. Sympathy for the werewolf? Possibly, although that wouldn’t be my usual style. Empathy, even. And that gave me an even more uncomfortable feeling I had to shake off as quickly as possible.
I needed to find out more about this cheating, murderous mate of his, avoid feeling any more sympathy—or worse, empathy—in the process, and get Jack and his little bastard of a runaway werewolf the hell out of Lancaster as quickly as possible.
“I hate being a cliché,” I said as lightly as possible, clearing my throat to get rid of the lingering remnants of laughter.
Jack’s brows drew together. He leaned in the tiniest fraction closer. That faint glow behind the icy blue mesmerized me in a way I hadn’t thought werewolves could manage; mesmerizing prey was more of a vampire thing.
“You’re anything but a cliché.” His breath brushed hotly over my lips. Fuck, he’d really leaned down quite a bit, hadn’t he? I could’ve counted every stubbly prickle on his unshaven face.
I could’ve tilted my head a tiny fraction to the side and—
No, no I couldn’t have. Alpha werewolf.Matedalpha werewolf. I couldn’t stand werewolves as a rule, and making exceptions to well-founded rules always led to trouble. My tense muscles and too-fast breaths and the heat pooling in my abdomen needed to be thoroughly ignored.
I hadn’t gotten laid in far, far too long if some furry, glowing-eyed knothead could get me hot and bothered.
But Jack hadn’t moved away—
And then I jumped a foot in the air asI’m Too Sexystarted blaring out of nowhere, and Jack levitated away from me like a cat with its tail under a rocking chair and dived for his phone on the nightstand.
Chapter 3
Fucking Amateur Hour
Jack stared down at the phone in his hand, now telling us loudly that it was too sexy for its shirt, like he held a feral gnome. “Fuck,” he said. “It’s Brent. He blocked me on everything. Why the fuck is he calling me?”
“Answer it and find out,” I snapped, trying not to sound like I’d been hyperventilating. And suppressing the demand on the tip of my tongue about why the hell he’d have that as his cheating, brother-attacking mate’s ringtone. Maybe Brent had set it himself, and didn’t that give me a window into their relationship dynamic I didn’t want. “And put it on speaker.”
He grimaced, but to my surprise he did what I’d told him and poked the screen a couple of times. Right Said Fred cut off mid-lyric, and silence fell for a second.
“I know you’re there,” said a voice through the speaker. A deep, rumbling, hoarse kind of voice, not what I’d expected from someone named Brent. Stupid fucking name, anyway.
Jack stiffened, and his hand clenched around the phone. “Who the fuck are you?”
I straightened up from where I’d slumped back against the desk to catch my breath and my sanity. Not Brent after all.
A chuckle that couldn’t be described as anything but ominous rolled out of the phone. “I’m the person who has your mate, Jack Perez,” the unknown—kidnapper?—said in a way that he clearly meant to beveryominous. “And I’m going to hurt him badly unless you bring me the other half.”
The other half…? For a wild second, I thought he meant the other half of Brent, and my speculations about what fuckery was going on here went crazy.
Jack made a low, guttural sound, his eyes flashing pure gold and claws sprouting out of his fingertips in an instant. He somehow avoided spearing his phone, but he came close.
“It’s not yours any more than it’s his,” Jack snarled. “And I don’t have it anyway,” he added, a little too quickly.
