Page 7 of Taken for Granite
A bitter laugh caught in her throat. She couldn’t even tell her boss what happened, but here she planned to file a workplace injury claim.
Best to keep everything as close to the truth as possible.
Breathing deeply, she mentally rehearsed her story. She heard a noise. The whole van shook. She thought she’d blown a tire and pulled over. Something jumped out of the back and knocked her down before running off.
Cell phone in hand, she just couldn’t bring herself to make the call. She stopped. She looked. She broke the rules.
Fuck, she was scared, as scared as she felt the morning after Valentine’s Day when she and Chloe found the house full of smoke.
What was the thing, anyway? Why was it crammed into the back of Mickey’s van?
The phone vibrated. The diner’s number flashed on the screen.
“Jack,” she said, the tremble in her voice real.
“You’re late,” a deep voice said. Not Jack.
“Um, Mick. The van… shaking… tires… what the fuck was that, Mick? It came right at me!” Her words tumbled out and her heart raced. The surprise of the gargoyle coupled with the sheer terror of Mickey’s displeasure would give her a heart attack.
“You let it get away?”
A chill settled over her. “No. I didn’t let it do anything! It broke free and knocked me down. It was huge.” And furious. She couldn’t forget the feel of him, hard and sharp-edged, his anger a tangible object, as he pressed into her.
Mickey said nothing, the sound of his breath distorted over the phone.
The silence unnerved her. Nothing good ever came from silence.
“Come get your sister,” Mickey said. “We’ll discuss how to make this right later.”
Juniper shoved the phone into her bag, her hand shaking. She had no idea how to make this right.
* * *
tas
Tas climbed to the highest girders in the building, his movement disturbing the thick layers of dust and mold. The abandoned building had a sorrowful air of neglect he recognized, kindred to his own. The coolness to the air told him he moved in shadows, out of the light of day. He would wait there until the sun set.
He picked at the flaking metal of the girder. Iron dissolved on his tongue, bitter and oxidized. Not the best quality, but his body desperately needed the mineral. As he picked at the iron, he reassessed what happened with the female.
The Rose Syndicate had been very clever to send in a lone female. He would not have hesitated to attack a group of males, but the female, alone and vulnerable, made him pause.
Not true.
His body had reacted to her before she opened the back of the vehicle. Perhaps his mating fever started the moment he had been transferred to the vehicle rich with her scent. When she opened the door and he sprang free, attacking her was the last thing his body wanted.
His captors had tried to entice him to mate for years. They would toss vulnerable, frightened females into his cell, females who mewled and cried at the sight of him. Sometimes they were willing participants, excited by the prospect of mating.
He never touched them. His kind had mated with humans over the millennia, but no amount of threats or cajoling by his captors could compel him to mount a human female. He would not make another slave for them. He endured the beatings, the agony as they found new ways to degrade him and strip away his pride, but he never wavered in this.
Until now.
His body burned with the fires of mating fever, pheromones and lust turning to a perfumed smoke that clouded his mind. His mate gland had swollen withdassa, applying pressure just under his jaw.
His fangs ached to sink into the female and release hisdassa.
It was just a biological reaction to the hormones his body produced and wanted to purge. Into a fertile female. Nothing more than that. Human females had triggered the response before but he ignored the slow burn until it extinguished itself. Pushing himself to exhaustion with physical activity had been his favored method as he endured the mating fever alone.
He had resisted all the other females the Rose had selected. He would not fall to the temptation of this one.
