Awakened (The Belladonna Agency Book 2) Read online

  She wasn’t going to bother to ask him how he’d gotten her address, either. “How have you been? Any more trouble?”

  Silence.

  “Nick?”

  He seemed to be weighing his next words. “You could say that,” he said.

  A chill settled over her.

  “I’ll explain when I see you, Barrett.”

  “Okay. I’m in 14-B.”

  “I know,” he said with a smile in his voice, and she wondered if there’d ever been a time in the past year that he hadn’t known where she was. Maybe it hadn’t really been over even when she was alone and missing him. Nice thought. Even if it was probably hogwash.

  She went to the door, then walked away from it. Pacing and thinking. Counting the minutes until he got there.

  One knock. Barrett was in her bedroom, smoothing the comforter. She didn’t want him to see the tangled sheets and get any ideas about how she’d slept—badly.

  She finished and went back to open the door. Nick filled the doorway.

  There was that grin. Higher on one side than the other. A flash of a dimple to set it off. He seemed really happy to see her. But there was a folder and a laptop under one arm and a tote bag with more papers and some books under the other. He was here on business.

  “Hi, Barrett.” His dark eyes gleamed as he took her in. She wore ordinary jeans and a loose, unstylish top. But he looked at her like she was coming down a beauty pageant runway.

  Her skin responded with a faint blush. What the hell. She hadn’t bothered with the powdered kind.

  “Hello, Nick.”

  Her gaze flicked downward. His brawny chest was encased in a dark T-shirt, an item of clothing that he’d always worn, even during his soldier days. He had on old jeans with frayed knees and scuffed work boots. So he hadn’t dressed up for her, either. Keeping it real.

  She’d seen him in everything from a full-dress army uniform to buck naked. What he was wearing now was probably her favorite. Purely Nick, being himself.

  “Come on in,” Barrett said. “Would you like anything?”

  “I’ll take a soda if you have one.”

  “Be right back.”

  She could feel his gaze on her behind as she walked away from him into the kitchen. The loose top didn’t make any difference. She could be wearing a swirling black chador that covered every inch of her body and he’d still check her out. Front and back. He never had been able to decide which was the best view.

  Barrett returned with two ginger ales on ice. Nick was examining the papers on the table.

  “What’s all this?”

  “Stuff from Malcolm Prescott’s car. I swiped it and I’m still sorting it out. Grunt work, but you never know. So why are you here, what’s in the folder and the bag, and does it have anything to do with the trouble you said you had encountered and were going to tell me about?”

  “Two reasons, lots of stuff, and yes, in a way.”

  “Let’s start from the top. You’re here for two reasons. And what are they?”

  “To fill you in and get filled in, of course.”

  “And?”

  “And this …”

  Striding up to her, he wrapped his hand around her neck and pulled her in for a kiss.

  Barrett didn’t fight him. He was too quick for that. Her body arched against his, not because she willed it, but because she’d been expertly positioned by him. Nick knew exactly how to get her off balance and keep her that way. In another few seconds, his hand slid over her thigh and lifted her leg, bending it to get her even closer. His lips smiled against hers before he really kissed her, claiming her mouth with deep thrusts of his tongue, then pulling back to nip at the sensitive cord of her neck. Barrett closed her eyes and tipped her head back, enjoying his sensual play, just rough enough to let her know who was boss.

  For the next few minutes, anyway.

  He wasn’t always this dominant. Which made her wonder what else was on his mind at the moment. For Nick, sex or the prelude to it had always been easier than talking about what was going on with him. His lips reached her ear, murmuring a few interesting suggestions not suitable for the workplace, and then he got back to kissing her. Even harder.

  “Whoa,” she said, pulling back. She touched her fingers to her swollen lips, loving the way his darkened eyes followed her movements. “What was that for?”

  “That was me being damn grateful you’re okay. And celebrating the fact that I am, as well.”

  “So what’s spooked you? Does it have to do with a certain something that tried to strangle me to death a few days ago?”

  “Yeah, it does,” Nick said. “And it has to do with some of the stuff I brought along. And stuff I need to tell you. Despite the fact I’m not supposed to. Despite the fact you obviously don’t have the security clearance to hear it. But you need to know.”

  So he told Barrett how he’d been hired by the FBI to eliminate vampires. How those vampires were former U.S. soldiers, soldiers who’d voluntarily been turned in the Turning Program but for unknown reasons had started to show signs of neuron-rage and physical deterioration. How those symptoms had progressed until the turneds had become violent. Unpredictable. Dangerous.

  And how he was afraid the turneds Barrett worked with might eventually suffer from the same condition.

  She was sitting there stunned, not knowing how to respond, when he said, “And that’s not all, Barrett.”

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. “What else is there?”

  “You know me. You know I wouldn’t take this kind of job unless there was a damn good reason. You know I wouldn’t just believe what the FBI was telling me.”

  “You did your own recon,” she said flatly. “Online?”

  “I accessed whatever I could. Enlisted friends to do the same. I didn’t get much. But I got enough to know that vampires might just be the beginning.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Nick turned and grabbed the bag. He pulled out reams of paper. “This is research I stashed in various places. Places the Bureau wouldn’t think to look. Read the highlighted words.” Barrett did and with each word her eyes widened in disbelief. The documents referred to paranormal creatures, vampires just being one kind of them. Rumors. Reports. Speculation. An occasional reported sighting. Her hand shaking so much the paper rattled, she weaved toward a chair and sat down hard. “Are you saying—You think there are other creatures out there? Others, like the vampires, that are born to another species. Not human?”

  “If vampires exist, why not more? I haven’t seen anything myself. Haven’t been able to find proof.”

  “So why are you telling me this?”

  “I’m telling you this because we have no idea what we’re dealing with. Even when it comes to vampires. Born vampires, Rogue vampires, turned vampires, turned vampires that are okay, turned vampires that are violent and shouldn’t be able to think too logically but still manage to leave me a piece of flesh where I live without leaving any other signs he was there …”

  Barrett’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know what to do with this information. You’re telling me our world, the world that has already gotten strange enough, might be even stranger. That everything we’ve believed is a lie. That everything we’ve fought for, all the good we’ve tried to do, could have been for nothing.”

  She heard the hysteria coming into her voice and obviously so did Nick. He took her arms and shook her. “That was always true, Barrett.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now we deal. We bury the information we don’t know what to do with or can’t do anything about and we work with the information we can do something with. We help who we can.”

  “My friends …” she whispered, thinking about Ty and Peter. And, God, Ana. The woman who’d just found love after years and years of suffering. Would she and Ty be torn apart by insanity and physical disintegration? It wasn’t fair.

  “No, Barrett. Don’t think about them. Not yet.”

&nb
sp; She shook her head. “Then who do I think of? Just who do you think we can help right now?”

  “Jane.”

  The single word was like a slap to the face. Her mind had been reeling, but as she stared at Nick and saw the resolution and an odd excitement on his face, her spiraling panic lowered several notches.

  “Jane,” she repeated.

  “Yes, Jane.”

  “You’ve found her?”

  He shook his head. “No. But I’ve found something. I’ve got a lead, and that’s something we didn’t have before, right?”

  She nodded and tried to swallow her disappointment. “Tell me.”

  He tapped the laptop he’d brought. “The stuff we need to be working on is in here.”

  “I have a flash drive. Copy it and transfer it to my laptop so I can have a separate record and analyze it if you’re not here.”

  His dark gaze moved quickly to where she pointed. His reply was blunt and immediate. “That thing? No way.”

  “It’s encrypted—” she started to say.

  “Barrett, if I didn’t personally do the encryption, I don’t trust it. And no system on earth is 100 percent safe from attack. Unless you want a blast of malware to shred your hard drive—and some character getting his jollies reading your files—you use a throwaway laptop with a dead-end URL.”

  “With everything you’ve told me, I don’t need a tech lecture right now.”

  “I think with everything I’ve told you, you’d want to focus on any mundane fact you can.”

  True. She stuck her tongue out at him.

  His brows lifted. “Don’t tempt me. Not yet. I’d love nothing more than to strip you naked and forget about everything else, but I think you’re going to want to hear what else I have to say.”

  “Okay, fine.” She made a wrap-it-up gesture with one hand, not wanting to admit how much she wanted to be in his arms, as well. “So you only trust your laptop. I get it.”

  “Yep. Only problem is this thing takes a little while to warm up,” he informed her.

  If he meant to be deliberately annoying, it was working.

  His grin told her he knew it was true. It also told her he was trying to keep her calm. Focused. She appreciated that more than he could ever know.

  He clicked open the lid of the laptop. It did look like an old one. “The information this contains comes from the NSA. Guaranteed to be true, accurate, and relevant to your investigation. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”

  A huge rush made her heart hammer because she knew he was speaking the truth. It hit her then. This was a man she could trust. She’d known she could trust him with Jane. Hell, with her life. Why couldn’t she trust him with her heart? With everything he’d just told her, including the fact that her friends might be—that they might be—

  She closed her eyes, refusing to think that way.

  The point was, life was crazy. To survive it, she had to grasp on to whatever she could regardless of the risk. That meant when she found a man who made her body sing when he touched her and her heart jump with joy just at the sound of his voice, she should grab him and hold tight rather than letting fear drive her away. “Now, I want you—” he started.

  She threw herself at him, causing him to stumble slightly before he caught her. Wrapping her arms around him, she kissed him with a loud smack and hugged him firmly. “Thank you, Nick. Thank you for always being there for me.”

  The strong hands that encompassed her upper arms held her fast for an unbearable moment. Then his fingers stroked her skin. Barrett wanted to melt. His head bent to hers, his gaze serious and intense.

  There were no other words. Just a sensation of nearness that blew her mind. She swayed in his gentle grip, taking a half step forward to balance herself. The move brought her close to his thighs. Nick drew her even closer. His belt buckle—army issue, flat metal, pressed against her middle, bare under the loose top. Everything that rounded out his worn zipper said hello and got hard as she leaned into him.

  The denim held the heat. She kicked off her slippers and stood on tiptoe to make the most of that fine erection. Nick pulled her against his chest, looking into her eyes one more time, sweeping her hair back over her shoulders, sliding a hand around the curve of her waist. Shamelessly, Barrett rubbed her breasts against him, her nipples instantly taut with the sensual friction.

  Then he kissed her. His soft tongue ran between her lips, then opened them. She tipped her head back, sliding her hands into his thick, dark hair, wild for what only he knew how to do. No one could kiss better than Nick Maltese. Deep, slow thrusts. Pulling back. A nip on the earlobe. Then another. A soothing lick and a tug with just his lips, taking the whole earlobe into his mouth, teasing it.

  Then more kissing. She writhed with pleasure. It had only been two days. Not that long. But unbearable without him nonetheless. Barrett gave in completely.

  Until Nick stopped all of a sudden. He held her flushed face between his hands, then let her go completely. He was breathing hard.

  “I want to, angel. Believe me, I want to, but let me tell you what I found first. I don’t want to be right in the middle of things when you remember Jane, okay?” When she didn’t answer, he shook her slightly and stared deeply into her eyes. “Okay?”

  “Yes,” she said quickly. “Of course. I just had to tell you. Had to show you …”

  She bit her lip, hesitating, and he cupped her cheek.

  “I know. Me, too. And I’ll tell you more. I’ll show you more. As soon as I get you up to date and the moment’s right. I promise.”

  She butted her cheek into his palm one last time and whispered, “Okay,” before stepping back. She took a deep breath, pushed back her hair, and said, “Tell me.”

  The white room was the same, except that it had stopped moving. The rumble of traffic had stopped, too.

  Jane felt different. She had slept, she knew that. There was no mirror, but she could feel the puffiness in her face she got when she’d conked out for hours.

  The strange dreams she’d had still hovered at the edge of her mind.

  Silent women dressed in outfits like maids’ uniforms had undressed her, commenting on how skinny she was and how undeveloped.

  Malcolm would say she dreamed that because she was anxious and conflicted about the developmental stages of adolescence. And then assure her that she was perfectly normal, just right in his professional opinion, quote unquote. Keeping that creepy smile on his face until his eyes glazed over.

  She wasn’t anxious about crap like that. Some girls she knew had been granted their three magic wishes by Mom and Dad and a plastic surgeon: giant boobs and weird little noses and butt-cheek implants to fill out their seven-hundred-dollar jeans.

  Jane had only ever wished to be even thinner than she was. So thin she could slip under a door. So she could get away. Where to, she didn’t know.

  She looked down at what she had on, realizing that the dream had been real enough. Her torn dress was gone. It had been replaced by a chemise made of flimsy plain fabric, almost see-through, trimmed with lace that itched.

  Her underwear was gone, too. She wore bras just to keep the nipple maniacs in homeroom from staring at her nearly flat chest. But the lightly padded one she’d had on had been taken away by the women. Her panties were nowhere in sight.

  After she and Dante had been separated, she sort of remembered her panties being dragged off and down her thighs. She had tried to fight back. Then one of the women had pressed a cloth over her nose and mouth. So much for that.

  They had left her some food. A sandwich cut in quarters, mayonnaisey glop on soft white bread. Ugh.

  But she did feel weak. She would eat some. Just to keep up her strength in case a door ever opened in the seamless plastic walls. Jane took a small bite and set the quarter sandwich back on the plate. No cutlery, she noticed.

  A vague recollection about getting a lecture on the subject of not hurting herself came back to her. It wasn’t allowed. A man had told
her that. He had some kind of accent. She hadn’t seen him—well, she had seen his eyes.

  On a little screen, high up in the wall. That was gone, too.

  Where in the fucking fuck was she? Shit. She was totally fucked.

  She never should have gone with Dante at night, never should have told him to follow Malcolm to that crummy club where he drooled over girls half his age wearing nothing but teeny G-strings. Her guardian was even creepier when he was off the chain. She’d snuck in by herself one night and watched from backstage. And he thought no one knew.

  Jane had intended to take pictures and post them online, then tell Ginny. The revenge had backfired. Someone had grabbed her. Dante had tried stop it, but others had moved in to take care of him. She’d blacked out and then …

  Jane crossed her legs just in case some voyeur—she’d found the word in Malcolm’s Encyclopedia of Sexual Dysfunction—was looking up her chemise. Staying in the sleeping alcove, she leaned back on her palms, troubled by a different memory. Before she’d ended up in this box.

  There had been another woman. Not in uniform. In one of those things that jacked up women’s boobs super high, with a ton of hair and red fish lips that looked like a gallon of collagen had been pumped into them.

  She’d shoved Jane around, pushed her in front of a video camera on a tripod. Told her to say something.

  Jane had refused to cooperate. Then something else had happened. She’d seen someone she knew on a screen in back of the camera, but only for a few seconds. She closed her eyes, willing the memory to return. Her mind was a blank.

  A collapsing sound made her open her eyes. The floor of an empty alcove was sinking. The surface of the walls changed, opening up into pores that oozed water. It was a bath. Hot and steamy.

  She was sore all over from sleeping on a hard surface. She didn’t care who might be looking.

  Jane stared down into the bubbling water, wondering if it would overflow when she stepped into it. There didn’t seem to be a drain.

  She peeled off the chemise and tossed it onto the floor, then lifted her hair and tied it in a thick knot. One foot in. Then the other. Jane squatted down.

  The foaming, surging water felt amazing. She splashed some over her shoulders, feeling it trickle down her spine and into the water that circulated around her, up to her waist.