They lay like that for quite a while, his cock slowly deflating inside of her, their juices blending together as they dozed off to sleep.CHAPTER TWENTY-ONEFergus
“What’s the news?” Fergus asked when Olcan called later in the morning.
Eimear had gone to take a bath and he’d planned to join her, but the phone had held him up. He stood, half-dressed, listening to Olcan as he spoke.
“He’s given us a list of names and locations. There are a lot of them.”
“How does it gel with the list from our people?” Fergus asked.
“About eighty percent, I’d say. There are a lot of women still unaccounted for, but there’s no way to say whether he had anything to do with them. Women go missing for other reasons than having a bad man after them.”
“Very few of them. There’s always a bad man; it just might not always be Ciaron Doyle.”
“What do you want us to do?”
“Has he cleared the way for retrieval?”
“He says he has. Only way to know for sure is to go in and get them.”
“What does the auld fella say?”
“He says go.”
“Well, he’s the Alpha. Do it. I’m not giving Ciaron back his girl until we’re sure we can get these women back. Any kids on the list?”
“Some teens, all girls.”
“Of course. Go find them first. Pick them up, take them home, or if that’s not a safe place, take them to our clubhouse. We’ll find them a place to be on our own when I get back. We’ve got room at the emergency bunkhouses for them.”
“Aye. Got it. What will you do?”
“Stay here with our leverage. How long do you think it will take you to retrieve them all?”
“I don’t know. At least a few days, maybe a week or more.”
“All right. I’ll contact Doyle from my end. This is only the beginning, but I want the women back before I go after him about shutting the drug business down again. He’s been careful to skirt around it in our communications, but he’s going to take that shit off our streets.”
“Just let me know what needs done.”
“Aye. Talk soon.”
Fergus hung up the phone and finished getting undressed, making his way to the bathroom to step into the shower behind Eimear. She seemed to have already finished showering but didn’t bother to get out. Instead, she picked up the soap and made a lather in her hands, washing him with them, her hands running across his body and slipping through the crevices to clean him as if he were a small child in the bath.
“Mmm. That feels really nice.”
“Can’t have you being all dirty and smelly,” she said, her hand pausing as it fell upon the scar from the gunshot wound. “When did this happen?”
“When you were in the back of the van waiting to come to our clubhouse with us.”
She looked at it, puzzled.
“Our healing is advanced. I heal faster than humans. If I shift into bear form, then it’s accelerated even more.”
“Oh, God. It was you in the van!”
“Aye.”
“I thought there was some big wet dog beside me. It was a bear. It was you.”
“Aye.”
“But the bullet. Is it still in there?”
“No. It went straight through. See?”
He turned to let her get a better look at his back, and she ran her fingers over that one too. She seemed fascinated by the scars, not that she hadn’t probably already seen them, but just that he’d healed so quickly from a gunshot wound.
“My friend, when I was younger, a teen, he got shot by some low-level mob wannabes for talking shit to them in a bar. They waited for him and hit him when he came out. They didn’t kill him. I don’t think they wanted to. They wanted him to hurt and to remember what they did to him. They shot him in the stomach. The bullet went through the lining and lodged in his back. It’s still there.”
“At least he survived.”
“Yeah, with half a stomach and a colostomy bag, always in pain. Just because he had the balls to tell some guys to lay off a girl.”
“You were the girl.”
“Yes,” she said, looking down.
“Why were two teens in a bar in the first place?”
“We knew the doorman. He was used to us coming in. Todd—that was his name—he always went with me to look for my mother when she didn’t come home.”
“I’m sorry. That must have been hard for you, all of it.”
“At least I survived,” she said, mimicking his earlier words.
“You must really hate guys like me.”
“I did. I thought I did. I thought I could smell one of you from a hundred yards away, but apparently not. Ciaron completely fooled me. I had no idea who I was marrying.”
“I’m no better than Ciaron in a lot of ways. I’ve done horrible things to people.”
“Innocent people?”
“Honestly, yes. Not knowingly, but it’s not always easy to know if you’re getting the truth from someone, and then, there’s you. You are innocent, and I charmed you right out of an aquarium and into the back of a van.”