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“Are you a doctor?” he asked.
“No, I’m not.” Her dark eyes narrowed on him. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”
“We just got here, really.”
“Not tonight. For all these months.”
Over on the driver’s side, a car door opened and there was some flapping and shuffling as Lydia covered her body. He supposed he should have been uncomfortable that she’d been naked in front of a total stranger, but if she wasn’t bothered, why should he be?
“So what changed your mind, Alex?” He hobbled to the rear door of the Suburban and opened the back. “I’m going to have to sit down. ’Scuse me.”
When he pivoted and tried to pop himself up onto the lip of the cargo hold, he fumbled—and was caught by the stranger with the weapons. But the woman didn’t give him a lot of fussy sympathy or simpering compassion. She just hitched him up by the armpits, set him on the edge as he’d wanted to be, and stepped away. No muss, no fuss.
“So how long have you been in the military,” he asked her.
Her eyes were gray, dark gray. Like her guns.
“I’m not. Well, not in the sense you mean.”
“Me, either.” When she cocked a brow, he figured as a dead man walking, he could afford to be more honest than he usually was. Ever was. “I’m also not in a formally recognized arm of the government.”
“So how long do you have,” she asked quietly.
When Daniel just cocked a brow back at her, she shrugged. “Running out of time means different things to different people.”
“Two months,” he answered. “Maybe. So why did you change your mind about meeting us.”
Not a question, a demand. Because if she could walk around in his mental garden of delights, he expected some quid pro quo on her end.
“My husband, as you’d call him, almost died last night.” As he recoiled, she nodded. “It was a reminder.”
Lydia came around. “Of what, exactly?”
The woman, soldier—whatever she was—looked back and forth between the two of them. “That things can be taken away in the blink of an eye.”
Lydia took Daniel’s hand and squeezed it.
“Does she know what you are?” he asked in a quiet voice.
“Yeah,” Alex Hess said. “I know she’s wolven.”
“But you’re not one of them.”
“No.” Before he could ask her how she could help or what her connections were with Lydia’s other side, the woman cut him off. “Exactly how did you get my number?”
She’s a vampire, Lydia thought.And something else.
As she stood by Daniel and held his hand, she tested the air with her nose, teasing out and disregarding the scents of shampoo, deodorant, and fabric softener… so she could focus on what was under all that artificial surface stuff.
Vampire. Yes.
Since the spring, Lydia had run into them on the mountain from time to time—although rarely, because like wolven, they preferred to keep to their own. They always recognized her, however, just as she noted their presence, and invariably, there was eye contact over the heads ofHomo sapiens.
But there was something else to the female. Something she had never sensed before.
“I got your number from a source,” Daniel said in response to the question that was floating around them.
“What kind of source.”
