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His eyes were all spacey and bleary as he murmured, “You stay with me.”
“I don’t stay with anybody,” I told him. “I’m leaving.”
His fingers curled around my arms, and he pulled me close, trailing his nose along my hairline and caressing the spot where he’d tried to bite me. “No.”
“Hey!” I pulled at his grip, but damn it, this guy was strong. My hand snaked into my purse for the slapjack I carried, thin layers of leather surrounding a heavy lead ball that hurt like hell when it connected with a sensitive joint. “Let go of me.”
“No.”
“Stop now!” I said in the most commanding tone I could muster. Shoving him away from my body, I brought the heavy weight of the slapjack down on the wrist that held my arm. And I stomped on his foot, hard.
“Ow!” he yelped. He seemed to come back to himself; his pupils were less constricted. He blinked a few times and cleared his threat. “Ow,” he said again, almost absentmindedly, rubbing his wrist. “Who are you?”
“Anne McCaffrey,” I blurted out, hoping that he didn’t spend a lot of time reading carefully crafted science fiction. His realizing I’d just used my favorite author as an alias would prove . . . awkward. The werewolf frowned at me, as if he could sense the lie, but before he could comment, I added, “I helped you out last night when you were hurt. And now I would like you to back away from me very slowly, so I can open the door and get the hell out of here.”
Where was I going? I had no clue. More important, I had no vehicle. But it had to be safer than hanging around werewolf shooting victims with toothy tendencies.
His glance shot down to the slapjack in my hand, and he took a careful, small step back. “That was you?”
“Yes.”
“Who are you?”
“I thought we covered this. Did you bump your head?”
“What were you doing in the parking lot last night?” he demanded.
“What does it matter? I bandaged you up, borrowed your shirt. I figure that makes us even. So I’m going to be on my way.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head and clamping his hand around my arm. “I owe you. You stay with me.”
“Well, it’s lovely that you’ve moved on to using definitive sentences, but I think you’ll find that you are not, in fact, the boss of me. Now, let go of my arm, or I reintroduce you to Mr. Slappy.” I waved the slapjack in his face. A guilty expression slipped across his features, and his fingers loosened their hold.
He scrubbed his hand over the respectable growth of stubble on his cheeks. “Look, I’m sorry. This is all a little too much for first thing in the morning with no coffee and a gunshot wound.”
I glanced down to his middle, which he didn’t seem to be babying all that much. He’d had a few hours for his tissues to knit themselves back together. But the stupid ingrained medical training had me blowing a long breath from my nose as I asked, “Are you in pain?”
He rubbed his hand over the gauze absently. “It’s fine, no big deal.”
“Being shot is no big deal?” Before he could stop me, I was peeling the bandage back from his skin, making him yowl as the adhesive caught tiny dark hairs of the little happy trail down his stomach.
“Ow!” he exclaimed as I attempted to examine him. He batted my hands away.
“Oh, don’t be such a baby. I just want to make sure you’re OK.”
“I’m fine,” he grumbled, pressing the bandage back into place and angling his wounded side away from me. He didn’t want me inspecting his wound, I realized. He didn’t want me to see that it was now fully healed, barely distinct from the rest of his skin. Because he wasn’t sure how much I knew about the whole werewolf thing, and he didn’t want me getting extra clues.
Right. This was my cue to exit, before he could pull me into some other bizarre werewolf bullshit or vice versa. “OK, then, well, if you’re feeling all right, I’ll just toddle along.”
I had just managed to get the door open when he yanked it closed again.
I glared up at him. “This is becoming really annoying.”
“Where are you going?” he asked.
I wanted to keep that information to myself, to be able to walk away from this situation feeling some dignity about the way I’d handled myself. Also, he just wasn’t entitled to know. So all I said was “South.”
He smiled. “Just ‘south’?”
