Page 40 of Brock’s Mate

He got up and went over to the table. Desi looked up as he sat down, but didn’t say anything.

Brock said, “I wanted to ask you some questions about this guy Jered. The one who Turned you.” He looked at the work in her hands. “Maybe this is a bad time, though.”

Desi was using a thin pointed tool to spread the glue on the raw edge of one of the pottery pieces. “Give me a sec—this is the last piece.”

She finished applying the glue, then pressed the broken piece carefully into place, making sure all the edges lined up perfectly. A little bit of glue oozed out of the crack, but that didn’t seem to bother her.

She turned the dish and ran her fingers over the cracks, making sure they were as smooth as possible. Too bad you could still see them—and there were some gaps where tiny fragments were missing.

It was a shame—the piece looked handmade, with a beautiful glazing pattern in shades of red. Desi said, “Can we turn the heat up? This needs to cure for an hour before I trim off the excess epoxy, and it really should be at seventy-five degrees or higher.”

“Sure,” Brock said. “The heat pump isn’t the best, but I’ll bring in some wood and fire up the woodstove.”

To his surprise, she came out to the woodpile with him to help. As they loaded up with logs, he said, “I know you don’t like to talk about your past or where you came from, but it would really help to know Jered’s last name and where you met him. It might help us track him.”

“His cellphone number would help more, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah. But I don’t want to fire up your phone right now—he could track it here. Let’s start with the location where you met and any names of other people who knew him. If he’s part of a group that’s making a habit of kidnapping women and Turning them against their will, they need to be shut down.”

She didn’t say anything more, but after they got back in the house she grabbed a pen and paper off the kitchen counter and sat down at the table to make a list while he put wood and kindling in the stove, and got the fire started.

Apparently she’d decided to trust him with some of her past. He tried to smoosh down how ridiculously good that made him feel.

When he went back to the table, she shoved the pad across to him. “This is all I remember.” He took it as he sat down and looked it over. Names, dates, locations. A phone number. Even vehicle info. Nice.

“How did he approach you?” he asked.

Desi sighed. “We hung out at the same bar in Denver,” she said. “Sports bar. A lot of regulars. We talked sometimes. Got to know each other. Hooked up one night. Thought he wouldn’t call after, but he did.”

Brock nodded, doodling on the pad while she talked so she wouldn’t feel so put on the spot. “And then you started dating?”

“We went out sometimes. Mostly I hung at the bar with him and sometimes his buddies, then went back to his place after.”

Not her place, he noticed. The habit of caution seemed to be ingrained in her.

“Then, after six weeks or so, he asked me to this Halloween party his friend was throwing at his lake house that weekend. He persuaded me it would be fun.” Her voice got hard. “It wasn’t.”

Brock waited, still doodling.

“I didn’t drink that much, but at some point I passed out. I learned later he’d given me some kind of drugs.” She shook her head. “I should never have let my guard down.”

He hated hearing her blame herself. “It wasn’t your fault he’s an evil traitorous douchebag.”

She didn’t answer that, just gave him a ‘you’re kidding, right?’ look. “I should have known.”

Without waiting for him to object again, she said, “Anyway, I woke up in the middle of the night—or at least, I think I did. Everything’s kind of hazy. I looked out the window—there was this full moon—and I saw what I thought was a pack of big dogs, milling around in the yard. And then I heard a sound behind me and I figured it was Jered, but instead this big scary dog—a wolf, I guess—was there. And its eyes—it was like a bad photo, they looked all red in the moonlight. It growled and lunged at me, and I put my arms up to defend myself and it bit me.”

She rubbed her right forearm absently. “And then I guess I passed out again.”

That fucking bastard. He’d drugged her, and then just gone in there and fucking bit her. Brock held out his hand. “Can I see?”

She looked into his eyes, and then slowly pushed up her sleeve and held out her arm.

Brock took her wrist, turning her arm over and running his fingers lightly over the scars. It had been a deep bite—it would have to be, to Turn her. No tearing of the skin, so it wasn’t a rogue attack. The bastard had known exactly what he was doing.

He laid his hand gently over the bite for a minute, trying to control the soft growl growing in his chest. He hated that someone had done this to her, and he wanted desperately to make it go away.

And he hated that another male had bitten her and put his claim on her.