Page 36 of Callen's Captive
Chapter Eight
KATE
Kate was sure that after he heard her story about trying to avenge Janie that he’d leave. He’d tangled with the WSSO once and nearly died, and she’d committed herself to a battle that could take years, longer. He was eager to return to his pack to check on his friends. She wouldn’t hold it against him if he left, not really. At least it was a good excuse. After all, he was just one in a long list of people who’d left her. Her parents, that cousin who always protected her against that bully who had called her names, and of course Janie. All gone, through no fault of their own, but still gone.
“Where are we headed now?” he asked.
“Are you sure you don’t want to return to your pack?”
“Of course, I want to return, but you need me.”
“I don’t need you.” Want and need were two different things.
The sullen look he gave her shocked her. Her sweet shifter who had braved Briggs’s torture was easily wounded by her words. “I meant I don’t need you for what I do, Big Foot. I only need a laptop. I have a few hidden around town.”
“Hidden?”
“I believe in redundancy. Backups, secondary backups, and so on. Things happen.”
“Like the WSSO finding your safe houses?”
“Yes, that, and like leaving a laptop behind in a coffee shop as part of a ruse. Flexibility and the ability to leave without warning is everything in this life. I’ve learned nothing’s permanent.”
“The important things are. Like family, friends, and pack.”
He was one of the lucky ones if he could say that. “I stashed a few laptops in out-of-the-way places long before the WSSO started tracking my movements. Getting one of my backup laptops is our next stop.”
He was smiling again, and she realized why. She’d used the term ‘our’. The big lug was growing on her.
After a few hours of dodging WSSO patrols, they finally reached the First Church of Anti-Shifters. Callen, who was already tense from weaving through the city and the near encounter they’d had with one of Briggs’s men, stopped short when he saw the church’s name.
Her shifter didn’t say a word; his tight-lipped expression spoke for him. Callen wanted to leave Riverview and all the hate here.
“I chose this spot for its location, nothing more,” she explained.
“I assumed as much.”
“When I found this place, I thought it was perfect and poetic.”
“Poetic?”
“Sure. I was hiding a backup laptop that I had used against the WSSO in a church that the hate-mongers supported.”
“This isn’t a game,” he said, stone-cold serious.
She caressed his upper arm, luxuriating in the sense of calm that washed over her when she touched him. He relaxed at her touch as well. They both needed a break from running.
“I never said any of this was a game, Callen. Just the opposite,” she added in her most serious tone. He needed to understand what taking the WSSO meant to her. “But a girl has to have fun where she can find it.”
“Oh, Princess, I need to introduce you to a different type of fun. One that doesn’t involve a laptop.”
She grinned, loving how much fun Callen could be, even when he was on edge. They wound their way through the quaint prayer garden to the garbage bins in back. Kate removed a loose stone from the privacy wall that surrounded the garbage bins and withdrew her plastic-encased laptop from its hiding place. Callen stared into the woods with that long-lost look of his again.
Once she replaced the stone, she curled her hand around his left forearm to get his attention. She ignored the need that pulsed through her, the one that said to keep walking her hand up his arm, or better yet, to his chest. From the way he looked at the woods, with that sense of home, she knew she’d never be able to give him what he needed, and she wasn’t quite ready to let him go, not when she was just getting to know him.
“Come on, bear.”
“Bear? What happened to Big Foot?” he asked as he followed her.
