Primal Cravings by Susan Sizemore Page B

her fault. No reason to resent that her lust was impersonal. Although he did.
    “Go, woman.”
    He was gratified when the usually argumentative witch gave him one more shocked look but still did as she was told. She scampered from the little room. Both of the towels were tied around her, but they were short and thin and did more to enhance her hips, thighs, and bosom than hide them.
    Jake waited in the wet bathroom, taking deep, calming breaths as he listened to McCoy move around in the bedroom. He heard the bedclothes turned down, the creak of mattress springs as she got into bed, the soft slide of a sheet covering her body. He listened to her breathing, her heartbeat, the blood flowing through her. He felt the warmth of her skin from even this distance, and her normal seductive scent beneath the musk of arousal and earthy hint of herbs.
    He could breathe her in forever.
    Which was not a commitment of any sort to this female, no matter how much she fascinated him.
    He walked into the bedroom and watched with eyes that saw shades of heat and the tracery of blood beneath fragile flesh. He ached to touch her. But there was nothing new in this longing, he was long-practiced at avoiding any contact with Dee McCoy. Though it was getting harder with every moment they spent alone together on this op.
    He wasn’t stupid enough to not realize that was exactly what Tobias Strahan had had in mind when he sent them to look into some unknown magical danger.
    I’m only nominally one of the good-guy Primes, boss, Jake thought. I do not understand how you Clan and Family boys can let your guard down enough to be led around by the nose—and dicks—by females, vampire or mortal. I don’t get it. I’m not able to get it.
    He couldn’t help but look at the sleeping McCoy with emotions he supposed were tenderness and concern.
    Weakness.
    “I don’t want to get it.”
    He walked out of the motel room and closed the door firmly behind him.

Chapter Seventeen
    Jake walked outside, trying to concentrate on anything but his jumbled non-relationship with Dee McCoy.
    Dee was an odd name for a mortal, wasn’t it?
    Someone had told him Dee was short for Delilah, which seemed even odder to Jake than Dee. In mortal mythology, wasn’t Delilah a seductress and traitor?
    As if females needed names.
    Jake jolted in shock at his own thought.
    Where was this backsliding come from? He was hungry. He was horny. He was on his own when he was used to the support and camaraderie of being with the Dark Angels. The security of being one of the Crew meant a lot to Jake. Maybe these things, or lack of them, made him weak, prey to doubts.
    “You’d think I hadn’t passed all my ‘how to be a Family Prime’ tests from the way I’m thinking lately.”
    His mind flipped over and over in too many directions. He looked around to get his bearings. The sunlight on his skin told him it was late morning. The sky overhead was clear. The air was still. Yet there was an energy in the atmosphere, under the parking lot concrete beneath his feet.
    A storm was coming.
    All his psychic senses said so.
    A storm centered on him? On McCoy?
    He fought the urge to run back into the motel room, scoop up the sleeping woman, and take her back to the shelter of the Crew.
    He recognized this as a protective urge.
    “Now, that is Family Prime behavior. Closer to Clan.” He gave a mock-shudder of distaste.
    He also took a seat on a bench against the wall outside the bedroom. It was time to get organized, to get things done. Time to report in. His thoughts and emotions were a little too raw right now to make telepathic contact with communications back at the Dark Angels base. Telepathy might be simpler, but he took out his cell phone instead. And got no signal.
    He supposed it was just as well, as he recalled he still hadn’t gone over the packet of interrogation data from Laurent Wolf blocked off in a corner of his mind. Might as well absorb what had been learned from the