lean body. She wasn’t curvy. She didn’t have mounds of cleavage busting out of a lacy push-up bra. She was lean and toned. Her skin didn’t sport a dark coppery tan but was almost as pale as his undead relatives’.
And warm, as he ran his hands over it. From her shoulders to her wrists. Underneath her arms and down to her lithe waist and then to the barely flaring hips. From her soft belly over her rib cage and all around her breasts, all the while trying not to touch the breasts themselves. Then he turned her and examined her nape, her shoulder blades, her lower back. He stopped where the underpants began, crouching down to begin checking those long, lean legs of hers.
He found the telltale bump, no bigger than a mosquito bite, in the delicate crease where buttocks met thigh, and she jumped when he ran his finger over it.
“Hey!”
Her voice was raspy, a little bit breathless. She was either humiliated or as turned on as he was, and then he wondered if it might be a little bit of both.
“Sorry. It’s right here.”
“What’s right here?”
“I’ll show you in a sec. Grab hold of the tree, this might pinch a little.”
She did as he told her, and he squeezed the tiny bump like a blackhead. It popped like one, too, except that the object that came out of it was tiny and metal.
To her credit, she didn’t squeal. She flinched hard and sucked in a sharp breath, but that was all.
He said, “All done,” and held the thing on the tip of his forefinger as she turned.
She frowned at it, wishing for her glasses. “What is it?”
“A tracking device. It sends out an electronic signal so that someone on the other end knows where you are at all times.”
Lifting her eyes to his, she said, “They put that in me?”
He nodded at her clothes where they were hanging over a nearby limb. “Better get dressed. Now that we’re rid of this, we can be on our way.”
“But why?” she asked, grabbing the jeans and stepping into them. “I mean, if they wanted me, why let me go? And if they didn’t want me, why implant that…that thing in me?”
“So you could lead them to me,” he told her.
She stopped with the shirt in her hand and studied him for a long moment, then resumed dressing. “Why are they looking for you?”
“Because I’m different. And with the DPI, that’s pretty much all the reason they need.”
“What’s the DPI?”
“A government agency,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. Instead, he refocused on the device, already thinking up ways to get rid of the little unit. “You ready?”
“Yes. Ready.” She looked at his hand. “Are you going to crush it under your shoe, or bury it, maybe throw it into a stream or something?”
“Or something,” he told her. And then he started walking back toward the car. As they reached the winding road, he waited. Two other cars went by, followed by a pickup, all headed in the direction she and James had come from. When the truck passed, he tossed the tiny unit and it landed right where he intended it to: in the bed.
“Now they’ll be looking for us in the opposite direction.”
“You’re brilliant.”
He smiled at her and opened her door. “You can barely keep your eyes open, can you?”
“No.” She got in, leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
“Maybe you can relax enough to sleep for the rest of the ride. They can’t follow us now, and I think you’re finally convinced that I’m one of the good guys.” It was a real shame he was going to have to prove otherwise to her when they reached their destination, he thought grimly. But in this case, the ends justified the means. And he couldn’t be sure she would refuse to help his cause, once they got there, so maybe she could go on thinking he wore a white hat.
But if she did balk, then he would have to force her cooperation.
For a moment he went still, stunned by his own train of thought. That was not the kind of thing James Poe ever did. Force someone to do something they didn’t want to do. Much less someone like her. Innocent, frightened, delicate.
Beautiful.
He wondered what was happening to the moral code he’d lived by for his entire life. But he didn’t really have a choice in the matter. The existence of his entire race was at stake.