"I don't understand. Why would they create children in a laboratory and then have me watch them if I'm their biological mother? Why not just tell me? I love them as if they're mine, but when you said Ginger looked like me, I have to admit, I had a few suspicions over the last year, but then I just..." She broke off, reaching for the needle in her arm. "I have to get up."
She had to do something. Anything. Not lie here like a lump while the world around her shifted yet again. She was tired of being exhausted and afraid. She needed to find some kind of balance, and nothing was making sense. Nothing at all. She could only blame her sluggish mind on the snake venom and her own raging hormones. Wyatt Fontenot was messing with her mind. He had to be.
He moved fast, pinning her hand, preventing her from removing the needle. At the touch of his hand on her bare skin, little tongues of fire flickered over her. The breath hissed out of her and her gaze jumped to his face.
"Don' be touchin' that, honey."
"Don't tell me what to do," she snapped, and felt childish for lashing out at him when it was only because she was beginning to panic.
"Get used to it. I'm like that. Bossy. I like things my way. Right now, the number one priority is to get those children out of that prison. To do that, I need you to be one hundred percent healthy. I know they're mine. I believe you're their biological mother, but I know they're mine and I'm not leavin' them there. You're goin' with me to get them."
She stared into his eyes, her heart beating fast. Even being a dominating jerk he was horribly handsome. She really detested that she was so drawn to him. If she wasn't, she could be in complete control of him in two seconds flat, but she didn't dare go that route with him. She would lose. She knew she could seduce him, that wouldn't be a problem, but she would lose. "You think I'm setting you up for them, don't you?"
"It crossed my mind. If you are, know this: I have three brothers and some powerful friends. They'll hunt you down, and eventually they'll find you and they'll kill you if you're a part of this and something happens to me. It won' matter how fast you are, or how lethal you can be. They'll get the job done."
"A part of what?" Pepper struggled not to cry, forcing back the burning tears. She didn't so much as whimper. Her lips didn't even tremble. She struggled to understand what he was conveying to her. She was intelligent. She was quick. But she just wasn't getting this. "Are you saying those three babies who have been through hell already are being used for some purpose? That they were given termination orders to draw you into this?"
She searched his face, trying to get past the masculine perfection and her attraction to him to see if he really believed what he said.
"Whitney knows our family. He knows we know just about everythin' happenin' in the bayou. The moment those men touched Grand-mere, he knew one of us would be comin' to read those men from the good book. Almost three weeks ago, I was in a firefight and was shot. We were ambushed, called to a location on a rescue mission that wasn't that at all. It was a setup. They attacked us, and our chopper went down. We had to fight our way out of there."
"Where were you?" The thought of him in a firefight, his helicopter going down left her weak. Shocked. Frightened.
"That doesn't matter. The point of this is, I was wounded and had leave comin'. Nonny suddenly contacted me and told me what happened to her."
"So you think because you were wounded and Nonny happened to call you home that this is some scheme, an elaborate setup. Do you have any idea what it would take to orchestrate something this complicated? To make all the pieces come together?" Pepper said. "Now you're just being paranoid."
It would take a brilliant man who loved games. Games like chess where people are being used as pawns.
She heard it. Or she thought it. She didn't know what came first, but his hand was still burning a brand through her skin straight to her bones, and all of a sudden his stupid conspiracy theory was actually beginning to make sense and that scared her all the more.
"Really?" Wyatt straightened up, taking a step back from the bed to lean against the wall. "Not when you think about it. He used my sperm and I suspect your eggs and enhanced them in vitro. They were planted in surrogates there in France where they had you in their little laboratory. He gave the babies to you to ensure a bond. He knew your maternal instincts would kick in and that, because you're highly intelligent, you might even figure it out."
"But I didn't," Pepper denied.
"Yes, you did. You know you did. You suspected they were yours, and you let yourself love them because you couldn' help yourself. You played right into his hands, not that any normal person could have resisted three innocent babies. He waits for the right moment, and believe me, Dr. Peter Whitney is a master at creatin' right moments."
"I told you, he was there only a couple of times. It was Dr. Thomas Braden who was in charge of the laboratory there in France." She didn't want any of it to be true. If it was true... she was in far more trouble than she could ever handle alone. How could she possibly keep her daughters safe from such a madman?
"It doesn' matter who was in charge. Whitney can' possibly be in ten places at the same time. He has to have men who run the various laboratories for him. Others have to conduct the experiments. He has a network now, a large one, but it's Whitney at the helm, and this is classic Whitney."
"What is this?" Pepper demanded, feeling like her head might explode. She raised both hands and covered her ears as if that could drown him out. "Because I still don't understand."
She didn't want to understand. If she understood the actual scope of the forces against her, she might give up and she had three little girls depending on her. She felt terrified and exposed. Vulnerable. Never ever show that to the enemy. That had been drilled into her.
"Sugar." Wyatt caught both her wrists in a gentle but unbreakable grip and pulled her fists to his chest.
Sugar. That was all he said. It was the way he said it. Soft. Whispery. Into her. Sugar. Who would ever want to be called sugar? It was bad enough that her name was Pepper. But Sugar? She couldn't believe she melted inside when he said it, but she did.
"You always forget to breathe, baby. This is just a fact. Nothin' huge goin' on here. Nothin' we can' figure out together and beat. A little over four months ago I received orders to go to Afghanistan. It was my third tour, so I didn't think anythin' about it. We're usually sent into the hottest zones because we're enhanced. We always run the night rescues. The last one resulted in taking heavy fire. No one should have known we were comin'. No one. We knew they had to have been tipped off."
She was horrified. The thing was, she didn't know if she was horrified at the thought of Whitney betraying soldiers that way, or by her reaction to the thought of Wyatt in such danger. Her entire body rebelled at the idea, and what did that mean? If he kept holding her hands against his chest, they were both going to be in trouble. Snakebite, IV and gunshot wound aside.
She licked her lips and forced herself to try to carry on a conversation while subtly pulling at her wrists. "This Whitney would work against the United States for the enemy? Do you really think he has the power to know your orders and to get word to the enemy that you were in the vicinity?"
Wyatt acted like he didn't even notice she was in a small struggle with him for possession of her hands. She sighed and gave up, curling her fingers into his shirt. Into that heated rock wall. She felt the definition of his muscles behind the thin material and it did things to her body she hadn't expected.
Wyatt smiled down at her, a cocky, masculine grin that might have meant he knew he wasn't only curling her fingers but also her toes.
"Absolutely he does. He's still workin' for the government, or some covert branch of it. We can' uncover who has his back. We chop off one head and two more seem to grow. I was wounded. Several of us were, and around that time, probably the moment Whitney heard we were safe and back in the States, he issued a termination order on the babies so you'd grab them and escape. The timin' is just too coincidental f
or me to stomach. He brought you here, created a reason for you to escape and a reason for me to come home."
She closed her eyes briefly. He was making sense. She was so screwed. How could she fight alone against a man who could set up an ambush of a rescue helicopter in Afghanistan? The thought was absolutely, utterly, terrifying.
"How could he know your grandmother would go out to harvest plants at the precise time the sirens went off?"
"Why did they go off? Were you spotted?"
She shook her head. "I heard the sirens and rushed to the laboratory hoping the other two babies had made their escape. I wanted to help them."
"So all he did was wait for Grand-mere to go to the swamp to harvest and then he set off the alarms. His idiot guards did the rest for him, and she called me just like she knew he would. The question is, why did he do this? Is there a trap inside that laboratory waitin' for me?"
His thumb slid over the pulse beating rapidly in her wrist. The brush alone sent her pulse rate up and blood rushing through her body. If he thought to check if she was lying that way, he would never get an accurate reading.
Chapter 6
Wyatt looked around the table at the two men and his grandmother, the people who would be most affected, other than Pepper, with his decision to try to get the other two babies out of the laboratory. Ginger sat in the hand-carved high chair that had been his, the only thing left of his grandfather's, before the man had passed away leaving his wife to care for the four young boys alone.
"I'm lucky to have all of you," he said. "But we have to be realistic. Ginger, honey, I'm goin' to talk in front of you, and hope you can understand most of what I say."
"Wait." Pepper staggered into the room, her skin covered in tiny beads of sweat. "I'm not going to miss this."
She carried the bag of fluids with her. Clearly she'd been to the bathroom already. She'd tried to tidy herself up, but she looked as if she might fall over any moment. Wyatt had felt her determination, and several bursts of pain, but he hadn't realized she'd gotten out of bed - and he should have. She just didn't seem to give off the GhostWalker energy - or she was very adept at shielding herself.