Page 29 of Callen's Captive
“You got any computer geeks up there?”
“No.”
“Women who know what it is to be hit or called a whore when they look at a guy a certain way?”
His growl made her freeze in place, but then he grabbed her face between his hands before she could back away. “No one will touch you ever again, Kate, do you hear me?”
The intensity in his face actually felt reassuring, but he wasn’t going to be there for her after they escaped Riverview. Hearing and believing were two different things, but Callen didn’t get that.
“I don’t think I’d fit in, Callen. I’m different. I have. . . issues.”
“Jeez, Kate, everyone has issues.”
“That night in the bar, that smiley face t-shirt wasn’t something you bought, was it?” She needed to divert him from pressing her about going to his pack. She couldn’t go into the woods, even with her hunky shifter there to keep her safe.
“I broke into the thrift store on Main Street and took what I needed to blend in.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to take a go-bag, so you wouldn’t have to steal?” She patted the bag sitting beside her.
He frowned, as if she’d accused him of criminal activities, which she had not. After all, she was far from innocent when it came to stealing.
“A backpack would hinder our wolves in too many ways. I remember everything I take and the addresses I take them from,” he said, all serious again. “I have access to money at home. When I can, I head back into a nearby town and mail them the money for what I took, plus extra for their trouble. And a note of apology.”
“Take it easy. I’m sort of feeling my way through this. No judgment attached. For the record, I think it’s great that you repay everyone. Most people probably wouldn’t bother.”
“We’re shifters, not people.”
His words cut through her. Callen didn’t think much of humans, and she hadn’t given him reason to change his opinion. She’d stolen from the WSSO and others. She had repaid everyone she’d ever been forced to steal from to survive when she was a kid, but she had used WSSO money to do it. It felt like a cheat compared to Callen, and it was. He’d said it plain and clear. Shifters, not people. As a human, she was prone to all the faults of her species, including the propensity to hurt others for no reason, to take revenge and to hold grudges.
“I have to get some sleep.” Kate shrugged his shirt off and handed it to him before walking to the back of the unit. Like it or not, she and Callen came from different worlds.
He slipped the shirt back on, not thinking anything of it, but he hadn’t stopped watching her, scrutinizing her, as if she were some newly discovered species he had yet to figure out. “Why are you avoiding my questions?” Callen asked.
“I’m not avoiding anything.” She tucked her left arm under her as a pillow. The floor was hard and cold, and nowhere as nice and cozy as Callen’s lap had been. Sitting with her head in his lap, with his hand petting her hair had been too distracting, heating places she didn’t want heated. Well, she did, and she didn’t. God, she was so conflicted.
“Then tell me what’s wrong with going to the woods? To my pack.”
“Nothing’s wrong with it, for you. I’m not an outdoor type of girl,” she lied. She loved the outdoors, the majesty of the trees and the unending beauty everywhere. That’s what she loved most about hiking, the scenery. However, she never made it far into the woods before the trees seemed to close in on her and she found herself in a full-blown panic attack. Even this week, when she’d made the five-mile hike to the cabin, it had been touch and go there the entire time. More than once a panic attack had brought her to her knees, and that had nothing to do with the mercenaries on her tail.
“Give it a try. Come with me.”
“I have work to do.”
“How will you eat, Kate? You have no money, and you can’t go online again without risking them finding you. You can steal, but that’s risky, even if you are practiced at it.”
Practiced at it?Yeah, he thought very little of her, and he assumed a lot, too. But in the end, he wasn’t far off the mark. She stole for a living. Even though it was from the WSSO, it didn’t make her any less of a thief.
“I’ll figure something out. Always do.”
“I’ll go with you,” he said in that commanding, no-questions-about-it sort of way.
“Don’t you have a pack to protect or something?”
“You need me more than they do right now.”
Somehow she doubted that was true. The way he kept pushing for her to return with him had an air of urgency, but she had more pressing problems at the moment such as the fact that he was laying down behind her, as in close enough that she could feel the heat coming off his body.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
