Then I realized what I was thinking and how ridiculous my possessive feelings were. Dani wasn't mine and never would be. She hadn't called me once since I had left her at home in her bed on Sunday night—hadn't even changed the ring tone on my cell phone. If I hadn't been sure of where I stood with her, the continued silence between us would have let me know without a doubt.
When I got to the last building on the block I saw that, sure enough, the door was standing open, and I could hear rustling and the low murmur of voices inside. So she wasn't alone. I felt the short hairs on the back of my neck begin to prickle. Who was she in there with and what were they doing?
“…fascinating. I mean, uh, he really seemed to believe that he was going to be able to change people into wolves.” Dani's voice floated out to me as I stepped into the darkened hallway that led to the lab.
“He was crazy all right,” agreed a male voice that sounded vaguely familiar. “I can't understand half of this crap. This one report especially—'Lunar Cycles in the Adult Male Were.' What the hell is that supposed to mean, anyway?”
“Just put it in the pile,” Dani told her male companion, whoever he was. “I'll go through it when I get a chance. Or, no, wait. Here—let me see it.”
I rounded the corner to see her standing in the middle of the lab almost knee-deep in a drift of paperwork. The shiny, obscure equipment was still in place, but Dani had obviously dug into the stacks of filing cabinets that were standing at the back of the room. Apparently Doctor Locke had been a big believer in having a hard copy of his work—or else he was just computer shy.
She had her back to me and there was a man standing close to her—much too close in my opinion—with his hand on the small of her back. They were facing away from the doorway, and both of them were bent over something he was holding.
“Find anything interesting?” I said, or rather, growled. The sight of the man's hand on her back had sent a possessive fire through me that was completely irrational but utterly undeniable. I wanted to rip his arm out of his socket for daring to touch her, but I forced myself to hold my ground instead.
They both jumped and Dani turned to face me, a look of guilt stamped on her delicate features.
“Ben?” She put a hand to her chest as though to still her heart. “God, you scared the crap out of me.”
“Uh, hi, Mister Davis,” her companion squeaked. It was Pete the copyboy, I saw, and his fair face was flushed dark red with embarrassment. I looked pointedly at the placement of his hand on Dani's back, and he yanked it back abruptly, as though he'd been burned.
“What are you doing here?” I took a step toward them, and Pete backed up so quickly he nearly tripped over a pile of papers.
Dani's green eyes flashed. “The same thing you are, presumably. Covering the disappearance of Doctor Locke, the prominent research scientist. Only I got here first. This is my story, so back off, Davis.”
Davis? Since when did she call me by my last name instead of my first? I crossed my arms over my chest. “Your story, huh? And what are you doing out working on your story when I know damn well you called in sick today?”
Dani flushed. “Craythorne knows I'm here,” she said. “I just thought it would be easier if you didn't.”
“Oh, I see.” I strode forward, and Pete gave another squeak and backed up again. I could feel the rage bubbling up inside me and from the terrified look on Pete's face I must have looked fairly scary, but Dani held her ground.
“You don't see a Goddamn thing,” she said flatly, crossing her arms over the tight red sweater that covered her full breasts. Breasts I had caressed and stroked until she gasped. Breasts I had sucked on until she moaned for more. I shook my head to get rid of the thought. She hadn't really wanted more. She had wanted me to get what we had to do done and then leave her the hell alone.
“I see you're here alone with Pete.” I jerked my head at the cowering copyboy who looked almost green by now.
“He's here to help me go through all this.” She gestured around at the stacks of papers. “When I came down here yesterday, I realized there was no way I could do it alone.”
“So you were here yesterday too?” I frowned at her. “Have you been sick at all this week?”
“For your information, Monday and Tuesday I was so weak I could barely get out of bed,” she flared. “Not that you called me to see how I was doing.”
“You didn't call me either,” I pointed out. “I thought you didn't want to talk to me after…” I broke off and stared pointedly at Pete.
“Pete, go wait for me by the car. Mister Davis and I have a few things to say to each other in private.” Dani dug in her jeans pocket and tossed the wide-eyed copyboy the keys to her Infiniti. He snatched them out of the air and fled, giving me a wide berth as he went out the door.
“I hope you're happy,” she said, staring after his retreating back. “You scared the crap out of the poor kid.”
“That 'poor kid' was touching you,” I said. I could hear the possessive, accusing note in my voice, but I was helpless to stop it. “What were you teaching him besides research methods, Dani?”
“You son of a bitch!” She stepped forward and drew back her hand to slap my face. I caught her wrist in mid-swing easily and held it firmly despite her struggles to be free.
“I'm a werewolf, Dani,” I said. “That means supernaturally fast reflexes—which I don't have to hide from you anymore now that my secret is out. What did you tell Pete about that, by the way?”
“Nothing,” she said through gritted teeth. “He thinks werewolves are mythological creatures and that Doctor Locke was crazy.”
“So you're going to prove otherwise?” I asked. “Are you doing an expose on me and my kind? I can see the headline now—'I Worked with a Werewolf.'”
“How about 'I was Fucked by a Werewolf?'” she hissed. “How's that for a headline?”
I dropped her arm abruptly, feeling sick. This wasn't how I'd wanted my first meeting with her to go at all. Why had I accused her like that? As if I had any room to accuse her of anything.
All the anger I had been feeling dissipated like a cloud of smoke on a windy day. “Dani,” I said. “I…oh, God, I'm so sorry about that. About everything that happened. Everything I did.”
She had turned so I couldn't see her face but her voice was choked. “You don't have to say anything, Ben. That's…it's all in the past now.” I saw her swipe at her face with quick, angry motions, and when she turned back to me her cheeks were dry even though her eyes were red. “I came here to try and find a way to turn McKinsey Cullen from a wolf back into a girl. She's still technically missing, you know. That's what started all this in the first place. Remember?”
“I remember,” I said heavily. Apparently Dani didn't want to talk about what had happened between us any more than she had before. She wanted to put it out of her head and pretend none of it had ever taken place. In a way, that was worse than if she'd accused me of hurting her and demanded that I give an account of myself and my actions. I wanted to say that I was sorry again, wanted to tell her that I loved her so much it was like a knife in my heart and that I would pay for the rest of my life for what I had done to her. But she obviously didn't want to hear it—didn't want to talk about it.
“Ben?” Dani was frowning at me.
I sighed deeply. “Okay,” I said. “So what did you find?”
“Some pretty amazing stuff, actually.” Dani was clearly making a great effort to sound normal. She took a deep breath and began digging through the piles of paper. “Did you know,” she said, keeping her eyes glued to the report she had unearthed instead of looking at me, “that the cause of lycanthropy is a gene that's carried on the X chromosome? It's recessive unless a female carrier gets pregnant by a male with the same gene on his X chromosome and then any male child they have is bound to be a were. Doctor Locke seems to think that there are lots of women who have no idea that they're carriers because none of the males in their immediate family are weres. An
d according to his notes, a male were can sense it in some way—maybe by a certain smell a woman with the gene gives off—and he's only attracted to women who carry it.” She glanced up at me, her face turning red and went on hurriedly. “It's always dormant in the female carrier but somehow he found a way to activate it. He just couldn't get it to, uh, deactivate so that he could turn McKinsey back into a girl.”
“Fascinating,” I said dryly. “Does he happen to mention how he turned himself into a wolf? I thought that was impossible for a non-were.”
“He does, actually.” She shuffled through another pile of papers. “It was the last thing he ever did and the notes are kind of hurried, but…” She squinted at a piece of crumpled paper she held in one hand, then looked up at me. “Did you give him a sample of your hair, Ben?”
I remembered Locke's bizarre request and nodded. “Yeah, it was the only way I could get him to tell me where Thrash Savage had taken you.” I took a step closer to her so that we were shoulder to shoulder, touching lightly. “Can I see that?” I asked, nodding at the report.
“Uh, sure.” Dani sounded unaccountably nervous as she handed the report over to me, but she didn't move away or break contact with me. I wished like hell that I could figure out what was going on in her head. Did she hate me? Was she scared of me? Did she still care for me, on any level?
“It looks like he used the DNA from hair I gave him to give himself some kind of radical gene therapy,” I said, frowning at the paper and trying to concentrate on anything besides Dani's warm, curvy body beside my own.
“Yeah. The same way he used Savage's DNA to help turn McKinsey in the first place—probably from that same lock of hair that was stuck to the back of her picture.” She gave a little laugh. “Crazy, isn't it? I wonder how he intended to turn himself back?”
“Maybe he didn't,” I said, remembering the fatalistic way the gray and black wolf had thrown itself at the Lead Wolf. Locke had to have known that was suicide, and yet he had done it anyway.
“What do you mean?” Dani looked at me with wide eyes.
“I mean maybe he saw himself as a failure and realized he was never going to achieve his goals. Realized he would never be able to claim what he loved more than anything else in the world as his own.” I looked Dani in the eye as I said it, and she turned away, blushing fiercely.
“Maybe,” she almost whispered.
I cleared my throat. “Well, the main question is—can we use any of this to turn McKinsey Cullen back into a young woman again, or will she be stuck as a wolf forever?”
“I don't know, but I'm afraid it's beyond me.” Dani waved a hand in despair at the piles of paperwork. “I mean, just look at this mess. It would take half a lifetime to get through.”
“It's a mess, all right,” I agreed. “Maybe if we could get someone else in here—a scientist who has some kind of background in genetics or something like that?”
“And tell them what?” she asked reasonably. “That we're looking for a cure for partial lycanthropy? That the missing girl we've been looking for just happens to be stuck in wolf form and could they please help us change her back? That would go over big with the scientific community, I'm sure.”
“Well, have you got a better idea?” I snapped.
“Maybe…I don't know.” Dani began pacing back and forth among the piles of paper. She had the look of intense concentration on her face that I knew so well, with her full bottom lip caught between her white, even teeth. “That poor girl is just…just stuck,” she said at last. “There must be a way. There's more to lycanthropy than just science—there's a mystical element as well.”
I snorted. “You think?”
“I do,” she said seriously. “Don't you?”
“No,” I said flatly. “I don't care about all the Pagan ritual crap—I think it's the same as any other manageable disease. Well, not exactly the same, but—”
“But it can be controlled?” Dani made a face at me. “Ben, please don't start that again. You need to stop denying what you are. You need to embrace the other side of your nature.”
“You sound like that crazy priestess, Molly,” I said angrily. “And what the hell do you know about it, anyway? How can you ask me to embrace my nature after what I did to you?”
Dani bit her lip and I wished I could call back my hasty words almost immediately. I decided if she tried to slap me again, I would let her. I deserved that much and worse. But instead of slapping me, she walked over to stand directly in front of me. Hands planted on her hips, she looked up into my eyes.
“Ben,” she said softly. “Let's get one thing straight: you didn't do anything to me that I didn't want you to do.”
“Bullshit,” I said harshly. “I practically raped you, Dani. Don't think I don't know it. And don't think I don't regret it.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to drive back the tension behind my eyes. “I'd do anything in the world to take it back,” I finished in a low voice.
Dani looked like she might cry, but she took a deep breath instead. “I understand if you want to forget everything that happened between us, Ben,” she said in a brisk, back-to-business voice. “And, as a matter of fact, I totally agree with you. We should put our past behind us and start working on getting McKinsey back into her rightful shape.”
“We should?” I raised an eyebrow at her and she nodded decisively.
“We should. That's exactly what we should do.”
“So—” I looked at her uncertainly. “You want to just go back to working together like nothing ever happened? Just try to forget this whole weekend—put it out of our minds?”
Dani lifted her chin. “Absolutely. We should concentrate on the matter at hand and leave the past in the past. I mean, really, if you could have seen McKinsey's father crying…the poor man just broke my heart. And…” She went on and on, her voice growing stronger and more impersonal as she talked.
I stood there and stared at her, feeling that I had missed something vitally important somehow. I wanted to reach out and cup her cheek and tell her that I loved her, but I couldn't. We were right back where we had started.
Nowhere.
Chapter Seventeen
Dani
I lifted the last bite of chocolate chunk brownie ice cream to my lips, then changed my mind and put it back. Then I changed my mind again. I had already eaten almost the whole gallon of premium ice cream—enough calories for ten women my size. So why stop now?
“Hold it right there, Dani.” My little sister's voice stopped me cold, and I put down the spoon loaded with dripping chocolate guiltily.
“What do you want? I thought you were having a permanent slumber party over at Jeremy's place,” I said.
“Jeremy is old news. I've been spending most of my time with Patrick lately.” She sat across from me at the tiny breakfast nook table and grabbed for the mostly empty ice cream container. “Besides,” she said, peering inside and frowning at the lone melted spoonful that was left, “I didn't come to talk about me—I came to talk about you.”
I shrugged, trying to appear unconcerned. “What's there to talk about? I get up, go to work, come home, go to bed and repeat the whole process the next day.”
“Except when you mysteriously disappear for the weekend and show up later naked and looking like death warmed over,” she said.
Damn. Tara had been at my place the Monday and Tuesday I called in sick, and I had been hoping she would buy the story that I had just had a terrible bout of the flu. But she seemed to have seen right through me.
“I was here sleeping in the guest room when Ben brought you in,” she said. “I woke up and watched him put you to bed. And by the way, why was he naked?”
“It's none of your business,” I said, avoiding her eyes. “That was a personal matter between Ben and me. And anyway, it's all been resolved now.”
“Resolved how?” Tara raised one eyebrow skeptically. “By you two never seeing each other again? He used to be over here twenty-four/seven/three-sixty
-five, and now he is, as my Lit professor would say, 'conspicuous by his absence.'”
“Did you switch majors again?” I snapped. “I thought Clinical Psychology suited you better.”
Tara held up her hands. “Look who's so defensive. I just want to know what happened to Ben, you don't have to bite my head off.”
“All right.” I sighed fretfully and looked down at the table. “Ben and I…this weekend we…well, we sort of…” I was trying to think of a good way to say, “Ben and I participated in a Pagan ritual this weekend in which he turned into a werewolf, fought the Lead Wolf in the local pack to a draw, then claimed me as his woman by having rough, public sex with me on top of a stone altar under the full moon.”
But Tara summed things up more neatly by saying, “You finally did the nasty.”
I gave her a frown. “Well, in a manner of speaking…yes.”
“In a manner of speaking?” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Either you did it or you didn't.”
“All right, all right.” I rolled my eyes. “We did it, okay? We had sex. Are you happy now?”
“Happier than you, apparently.” She got up and went to check in the freezer for more ice cream. “Well, can he bone?”
“Tara,” I said, shocked.
She shrugged, unperturbed. “Well, can he? I mean, did the earth move, did you see fireworks? Or was it really bad? Is that why you two aren't seeing each other any more?”
“We weren't 'seeing each other' that way to begin with,” I reminded her. “And no, it wasn't bad.” I thought of the tsunami orgasm I had experienced and the way it had drained me. “It was actually pretty amazing. Just kind of…different.”
“Different? As in kinky different?” Tara dug out a pint of rocky road and rummaged in the silverware drawer for a spoon. “You mean plain old vanilla Ben is into extreme sex? I mean, he's definitely hot—don't get me wrong. But he just doesn't seem like the type to crack the whip and yell, 'Who's your daddy!'”