The hook, caught on a rock buried by the debris, jiggled when Charlie grasped the rope and started up behind him. He took her hand and helped her from the hole. As soon as she was free, she tugged her hand away from him and bowed her head as she blinked rapidly.
Able to get a better look at her now, Jack admired the bridge of her narrow nose, high cheekbones, and enticing, wide mouth. Blood and dirt streaked her pale skin, and strands of her chestnut brown hair had straggled free of the knot resting against her nape. The loose hair fell to the middle of her back, and she brushed some of it aside before leaning back to undo the knot and retie her hair.
Jack’s fangs pricked when his gaze fell to the column of her pale, delicate throat. The chirp of the birds and the squirrels scurrying through the trees all faded away as he became focused on her pulse, and all he heard was the steady thump of her heart.
Yearning coiled within him as he imagined resting his mouth against that pulse and sinking his fangs into her while thrusting deep inside her. The image was so vivid he could almost taste her blood in his mouth and hear her exquisite moans as she moved beneath him.
Jack shook his head to clear it of the image and realized his fangs had lengthened, and his erection pressed against his jeans.
Get it together.This was not the time to make a return trip to his horny teen years, but there was something about this woman that made him feel like a fifteen-year-old boy again. Except that teenager hadn’t been stuck on an island with a bunch of vampires looking to kill him.
Annoyed with himself, Jack launched to his feet and walked around the small clearing. “Stay here,” he whispered. Pulling the branches carefully aside, he stepped out of the copse of trees.
Chapter Five
Jack circled the trees,scenting the air and straining to hear anything abnormal, but all the birds continued to sing, and the squirrels scampered through the branches. If anything threatening was out here, the animals wouldn’t be so active.
Feeling satisfied it would be okay to move, he returned to the clearing. Charlie was still kneeling with her head bowed, but she’d started gathering some of the broken sticks from the ground.
“You don’t see the sun much,” Jack whispered.
“No,” Charlie admitted as she placed the larger sticks over the hole.
“How long have you been living underground?”
“Since my hunt began.”
Jack almost asked,Your hunt?But recalling that she’d asked if he was hard of hearing, he bit the question back and rephrased it. “What do you mean by,yourhunt?”
Charlie hated being the bearer of more bad news, she still recalled how upset she was when Mal revealed everything to her and Dylan, but Jack had to know what he was facing.
“This island is an inescapable place for rich Savages to hunt the humans and vamps they capture and bring here for their entertainment. Those security vamps are here to make sure the prisoners are taken care of while in their cages and that no one breaks out. Sometimes they hunt with the rich pricks who are afraid to hunt by themselves. This island is a game for the Savages who pay for it.”
“Delightful,” he muttered.
“Look, I don’t think you’re one of them, but the hunt isn’t supposed to start for another week. What are you doing here?”
“My friends and I were taken from a bar by these Savages and put in cages in a barn.”
“I remember those cages,” she muttered.
“And we escaped them.”
Charlie’s hands froze on the sticks as she gawked at him. “Youescaped?”
“Are you hard of hearing?” Jack asked and smiled when she scowled at him.
Charlie had deserved that, but she still wanted to throw a stick at him. Instead, she settled it over the hole. “Howdid you escape?”
“I’m not entirely sure how my friend Mike got out of his cage, but once he did, he freed me and our friend Doug. We turned some of the others loose. We left some of the more starved vamps behind, we had no choice in that, but we let out as many humans and vamps as we could before we had to run.”
“So the hunt has been botchedthisyear,” she muttered. “I saw it coming…” Her voice trailed off as she bit her lip and tried to figure out what it all meant.
She’d seen this happening years before she ever came to the island. Of course, at the time, she had no idea what it meant as she’d never seen the place in her dream and rarely did she have visions while sleeping.
However, after they caught her and Dylan, the second she saw the men with the security patches, she recalled her dream and knew ithadbeen a vision. She’d seen a lot of death in that vision, but she’d also seen the security vamps struggling to control something usually within their control.
She’d seen… Charlie strained to recall the details of her vision, but because it came to her in a dream, she’d lost some of the details. She couldn’t remember precisely what she saw, but she’d known something was wrong and a hunt was botched.
