Huntress Unleashed

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

When I chose to start working for Dakota, I made one firm rule for myself—no bringing pack nastiness home for the weekend. And that resolution held up. Even though there were only eleven cupcakes present inside my tupperware bin instead of the full dozen, my wolf eased us back into TGIF by the time we exited the freeway and pulled to a halt in front of Sebastien’s welcoming abode.

Too bad the voices emanating from that cozy interior didn’t match the cheer of my newly rejuvenated mood.

“...there’s something wrong with that girl.” I winced at the sound of Sally Sugar’s voice, even before gathering that I was the one being referred to in such a roundabout manner. Because our neighbor was nowhere near as sweet as her name suggested. And I’d rather face down a dozen scary enforcers than stand up against one meddling human whose age required her to be treated with kid gloves.

When faced with octogenarian bluster, I usually either growled back or ignored her entirely. But Sebastien somehow managed to toe the line of propriety while still getting his beliefs across.

“Ember has proven herself a quality addition to the neighborhood,” my not-quite-mate countered, his words so quiet that I had to emerge from my car in order to hear even with full lupine senses alert. “Her cookies made the school’s bake sale an unadulterated success,” he continued as I padded up the sidewalk toward the closed door that hid both him and our neighbor from view. “And you saw how good she was about getting the Henderson’s cat out of the tree...”

The latter point was actually one of the lapses I preferred not to think about. Glancing up at the branches above my head, I recalled the joy with which I’d climbed after the stranded kitten...then my mistake of baring lupine fangs while chinning up onto a distant limb. The poor critter did get out of the tree, but it also scurried back home with its fur puffed out so severely the kitten appeared to be four times its actual size. No, that wasn’t the way an ordinary human being would have achieved the feline-rescue feat.

Sally Sugar, of course, had been privy to the entire episode. How could she not be when she spent her entire day at the window waiting for something to go wrong? The busybody had seen first-hand that I wasn’t an ordinary human, not just that time but several others also. Which made it even much more difficult to counter accusations grounded so firmly in fact.

Sure enough, our neighbor wasn’t willing to let the issue go now that she’d cornered Sebastien alone in his home. “That girl doesn’t belong here,” the older woman griped as I hovered on my own doorstep, trying to decide whether I should get back in the car and drive around the block a few times to give Sebastien time to soothe the neighbor’s ruffled fur before sending her away. “The s**t should go back where she came from.”

This time I winced, and not because of the four-letter word either. Instead, it was the twin scents of anger and frustration drifting through the c***k between door and jamb that counteracted my planned retreat.

Sebastien was about to say something we’d all come to regret. For his own sake, I needed to prevent the upcoming lapse.

So I pushed open the door with tupperware bin in hand and fake smile on my lips. Sometimes, it was better to take the offensive, even against the world’s oldest busybody.

“Who wants cupcakes?” I asked all and sundry. Chocolate, I was sure, would sooth even Sally Sugar’s ire.

***

AN HOUR LATER, OUR neighbor had snagged a cupcake then beat a hasty retreat to her observation post across the street. Which left me alone with Sebastien...and his all-important data.

And while I would have liked to talk about something a little more personal, Sebastien’s eyes kept drifting toward his tablet no matter how much I angled my neck to waft pheromones in his general direction. So, after a few moments of frustration, I gave in to the inevitable. “How’s the experimentation going?” I asked, pulling the battered tablet toward me so I could look over the numbers for myself.

“The results are problematic,” Sebastien answered, running one hand through already rumpled hair as I scrolled through columns of information taken over the last week. The mere existence of this data should have been a triumph—after all, the professor had moved on from testing on rodents to testing on humans only ten days earlier. It was miraculous to me that he’d managed to take the one small pill I’d brought back from our summer tussle with Dakota and tweak it to create a proposed antidote. Still, my companion’s current body language suggested that the results weren’t panning out as expected.

So I squashed my own libido and hummed absently as I assessed the data more keenly. Five months earlier, I wouldn’t have understood any of this, but now regression analyses, P-values, and ANOVAs were as familiar to me as the proportion of baking soda to cake flour. And as I assessed, the meat of the week’s experiments gradually became clear.

As best I could tell, Sebastien’s test subjects were acting just as expected despite the extremely low doses of experimental pharmaceuticals being imbibed at this early stage of the testing. Cooperation was trumping competition, students were displaying stronger than average reactions to emotionally charged words like “love,” “kiss,” and “terror.” I wasn’t seeing the problem....

“There,” Sebastien said, leaning closer to highlight a column I’d previously overlooked. He was right—that was distressing. Three out of thirty students willingly taking part in this unofficial experiment had noted trouble sleeping. Two reported lower grades than expected on their midterms. One was dealing with strange outbursts of rage hours after the medication should have worn off.

“I must have missed something in my chemical analysis,” the professor continued, his breath hot against the top of my head. “And I don’t have any of the original sample left to test against. Do you think your father...?”

I shook my head, hating the fact that I’d had three pills in my possession less than an hour earlier...then lost them all as easily as they’d initially come. “The pipeline from Dakota to Haven dried up the instant she hired me. And none of the other packs will admit to having accepted her drugs in the first place, so we can’t get samples there.”

And while the werewolf inability to work across pack lines was incomprehensible to someone like Sebastien who made a living building on the work of other scientists, he accepted my word as gospel. “So I’ll keep tweaking,” the professor agreed, pulling me in a little closer as I continued to poke at the tablet screen, hoping something my brilliant partner had missed would pop out to my far-less-trained eye.

“The problems might just be random,” I noted, trying to cheer us both up. “It’s a tough time of year for students. And the ones having trouble are all sophomores. Didn’t you say they only have a week left to declare their majors?”

“Mm-hm.”

I only realized Sebastien had lost the thread of our argument when his front fused with my back, strong arms cupping my shoulders as he quite literally breathed down my neck. Closing my eyes, I bit down on my lower lip and counted to ten very, very slowly. I’d made us both a promise...but I didn’t have to act on that promise quite yet.

Because twelve hours was a long time to spend apart even for humans. For a packless werewolf, the separation had seemed like an eternity.

So I relaxed into Sebastien’s embrace, soaking up the warmth, the strength, the attraction that flitted between us as easily as if we were fully bonded mates. Sebastien’s fingers skimmed over the bare skin of my forearm and sent shivers cascading up my spine. His ever-changing scents enfolded me, wrapping me up in a blanket of bliss before whipping me free to spin effortlessly through the air in the emotional equivalent of an ice skater’s pirouette.

Or so it seemed. In reality, I remained as frozen as a cornered rabbit, hoping not to be noticed by the larger being in the room.

But, of course, I couldn’t simultaneously indulge and disappear. Eventually, my lack of response broke through the haze that surrounded us and spoke as eloquently as any words might have done.

“Ember, I’m sorry.” This time when Sebastien ran long fingers through his unruly hair, all I could think about was how much I wished the appendages in question were still touching my shoulders instead of his scalp. How much I ached to be stroked and aroused and bonded to a human who really should have already been my mate.

But I’d promised Sebastien six months of agonizing separation before requesting what I craved. So I pasted a fake smile onto my lips and changed the subject. “No worries,” I said with forced cheer. “How would you feel about a game of Monopoly?”