Rogue Rider

Four

Jillian took her time cleaning the kitchen, allowing Reseph a chance to unwind. He’d seemed so sad and confused, and while she might not know him very well, her heart had broken for him.

The TV blared from the living room, and when she finally finished in the kitchen, she found Reseph lounging on her couch, feet up on the coffee table, with Doodle purring in his lap. He’d been eyeing the pictures on the wall, skimming over the nature artwork and focusing on the photos of her skydiving and skiing. She used to be good at those things before the demons came.

Jillian nodded at the cat. “He likes you.”

She stood there, hesitant to take a seat next to Reseph, but the couch was the only place to sit. She’d moved her father’s ratty old recliner down to the cellar a few months ago. Her mom had, for years, complained about the thing, saying it was fit only for the local landfill, and while Jillian agreed, she couldn’t bear to part with it. Not yet.

Reseph ran his hand over the cat’s spotted brown fur in long, even strokes. “What’s his name?”

“Doodle.”

“Doodle?” He winced. “No wonder he’s so friendly. He’s begging me to call him something like Fang, or Chaos, or Styx.” He patted the empty cushion next to him. “Have a seat. I won’t bite.” A cocky smile accompanied a waggle of his brows. “Unless you like that kind of thing.”

Her cheeks burned at the unbidden image of him nipping at her sensitive spots. “Do you like that kind of thing? I mean, do you think you do?”

His voice turned smoky. Rich. Decadent as hell. “I know I do.” He scratched Doodle’s chin. “See, I know some stuff.”

Now she was burning all over as she sank onto the couch, putting as much space between them as she could without looking like she was trying. Still, he knew, shooting her an amused glance before turning his attention to the TV.

“So what’s going on in the world?” He gestured to the CNN news anchor talking about recovery efforts in Sydney. “What happened in Australia?”

Oh God, he didn’t even know about that? How could he be a blank slate? Was that even medically possible?

She tucked one leg under her and got comfortable, because this was going to be a very uncomfortable conversation. “What’s the last thing you remember about the world?”

Doodle nudged Reseph’s hand, clearly not happy that his new best friend had stopped petting him. “I don’t remember anything before the snowbank.”

“Okay, what’s the last thing you know?” she asked. “Like, do you know who the president is?”

“Of what country?”

“The United States.”

He frowned. “I have no idea.”

“Who is the last one you remember?”

“Washington.” He sounded proud of himself for remembering something, and she hated having to crush him.

“You couldn’t remember him,” she said faintly. “He’s been dead for more than two hundred years.”

Throwing his head back, Reseph lowered his lids and concentrated. “I’ve got other names in my head, but I can’t place them. Like Napoléon and Hitler and Azagoth. It’s like I have all these puzzle pieces in my head, but I can’t fit more than two together.” Azagoth? He uttered a mild curse and opened his eyes. “I give up. So what’s up with the news showing destroyed countries? And why have they been blathering about economic meltdowns and recoveries? And apocalypses.”

“Because up until three months ago, the world was under siege by demons.” The last word came out as a broken whisper. It still didn’t seem real, and all at once, too real.

Reseph’s hand stilled on Doodle’s shoulders. “And now it’s not?”

“Thankfully, no. All of a sudden, demons all over the world were burned to ash or disappeared. People are calling it WV-Day, for World Victory Day. Every government is taking credit for the WV-Day, but no one can say why or how it all went down.” Conspiracy theories were off the charts, though. There were as many rumors floating around as there were trees on her property.

“All the demons are gone?”

“That’s the story.” God, she hoped it was true. Sightings were still reported, but authorities claimed that no demon sighting since WV-Day had been substantiated and that most likely people were just seeing things.

He cocked his head at her. “Did you see any demons?”

A chill slithered up her spine at the memory she could never quite get away from no matter how deeply she buried herself in the forest. “Too many.”

She started to get up, but Reseph’s hand snapped out to circle her wrist. “Is that why you live out here in the middle of nowhere? So demons won’t find you?”

Jesus. Had he seen through her so easily? Very deliberately, she peeled his fingers off her arm.

“I have to check on the animals.” She practically ran to the door and shoved her feet into her boots. It was dark outside, but as much as she hated the night, she hated the subject matter more.

“Jillian.” The soft but commanding tone froze her as she reached for the doorknob. “It’s weird, isn’t it, how I don’t remember anything, and you remember too much.”

“I think,” she said quietly, “that maybe you got the better deal.”

Reseph sat with the cat for a few minutes after Jillian went outside. He was still trying to process what she’d said about the demons. It wasn’t that he found it difficult to believe—on the contrary, it felt disturbingly familiar. And almost… casual. As if demons were part of everyday life, but that couldn’t be the case, because even with his lost memory, he was certain that most humans hadn’t been familiar with demons before their appearance.

And why the hell was he thinking about humans as if he wasn’t one of them?

Frustrated at the direction of his thoughts, he gently nudged Fang-Doodle off his lap and headed to the barn to see what Jillian was up to. Didn’t matter that he didn’t have shoes or a coat. He just went. The cold hit him like a million tiny icicles, but he ignored the sting as he trudged through the snow, following her tracks toward the barn, which was outlined in faint streaks of light that escaped from between the wood slats and tiny windows.

Felt good to get out of the house and into the open. Jillian’s cabin was cozy but confining, way too home-and-hearth for him. Which made him wonder how he normally lived.

The crack of gunfire shattered his thoughts. Jillian. He sprinted down the path, heart racing as fast as his feet. He skidded around the side of the barn and nearly did a body slam into the fencing surrounding a chicken coop. Jillian stood a few feet away next to a bloody scatter of feathers, a rifle in her hand, staring into the woods.

“What happened?” He came up behind her, his senses on high alert as he focused on the forest around them.

“Marten,” she muttered. “Damned thing got one of my chickens.” Cursing, she swung around to him, her windblown hair whipping at her cheeks. Her breath, visible in the cold air, blew out like steam when she looked down at his bare feet. “Get back in the house! You nearly froze to death, and now you’re out here with no clothes? What are you thinking?”

He snorted. “I have more clothes on than when you found me. Besides—” He broke off as a tingle of awareness skittered over his skin. Something flitted in his peripheral vision, a dark shadow melting between the trees where the marten tracks disappeared.

A nasty growl rumbled as if coming from all around them, the sound of a boulder rolling down the side of a mountain. Without thinking, Reseph tore across the yard, his focus narrowed and honed, his heart pounding, his body hard and primed for battle.

And, he realized as he was running, sex.

Holy shit, he was jacked up, as if he’d just spent half an hour engaged in foreplay and was now on the verge of sinking into a hot, willing female.

Jesus, what kind of sicko was he that gearing up for a possible fight made him horny?

“Reseph!”

Jillian’s voice throbbed through him, adding fuel to the burn in his veins, but he couldn’t go back to her, not now, when violence and desire were both warring just under the surface of his skin.

The metallic scent of blood slammed into him, and that fast, the violent urges beat down the sexual one.

There. Movement. With a snarl, he ripped a fallen branch off a stump and snatched the beady-eyed creature behind it by the scruff. The demon hissed, its sharp teeth snapping, blood spattered on its fur.

“You little—” Reseph stared. “Marten.” Not a demon. The weasel stared back, fear glinting in its dark eyes.

Overreact much?

“Reseph!”

“Shit.” He dropped the critter into the snow and watched it scamper off, wondering why the hell he’d sensed danger.

Feeling like a fool, he jogged back the way he’d come. He’d run a good third of a mile in pursuit of the weasel, and for what? Jillian was going to think he was nuts. And she might be right.

At least the maddening lust had eased. But then, humiliation had a way of deflating the dick, didn’t it?

She was standing at the edge of the woods, her expression veering from worry to anger when he emerged. “What the hell? Why did you take off like that? You scared me half to death.”

His cheeks heated. “Ah, yeah… sorry. I saw something.”

“What was it?”

Probably not a good idea to admit he thought he’d been chasing a demon. “An animal. Turns out it was the marten.”

“You caught up to the marten?” Her gaze dropped to his hands, which were smeared with blood. “You killed it?”

Squatting down, he wiped his palms in the snow. “I let it go. The blood on its fur was probably the chicken’s.”

“You released it? You do realize it’s killing my chickens.”

Reseph understood Jillian’s frustration, but he’d felt sorry for the creature. It had been trapped and afraid, and somewhere inside, Reseph understood that even more. “It’s just trying to survive.”

She shook her head. “Reseph, you can’t go running off into the woods like that. Especially not without shoes.”

“Shoes are overrated.” He headed into the barn, ignoring her curses. If she wanted to get serious about letting the four-letter words fly, she really needed to work on her vocabulary. “Whatcha got in here?”

“Reseph.” Behind him, Jillian huffed with annoyance. “I’m serious.”

“So am I. I want to know what you keep in the barn.” It was warm—relatively. Two single lightbulbs lit the six-stall building, and as he strode through the clean straw, he inhaled the familiar scent of horse. For some reason, his tattoo itched. Was he allergic to horses? Ahead, from the last stall, a big sorrel and white draft horse looked over the divider at him.

“Obviously, I have a horse. I also have goats.” Jillian sounded all irritable, which was kind of cute. “They’re in the first two stalls.”

Sure enough, he peeked inside at the four goats in one, and three in the other. “Milk or meat?”

“Milk. I sell the kids to a local farmer. They also keep my property cleared of brush.”

“And the pigs?” He peered over the rails of the third and fourth stalls. One of the black-and-white sows oinked at him.

“Same thing. Well, without the milk.”

Reseph eyed Jillian, noting that her hair was still adorably tousled. Damn, she was attractive. He was pretty sure he hadn’t ever been drawn to women who didn’t wear makeup and who dressed in farm clothes, but something about Jillian’s fresh, natural beauty had him wanting to go organic.

Speaking of which… “Do you eat any of these things?”

“Some of the chickens,” she said with a shrug, “but they’re mostly for eggs.”

“And the horse?”

“I would never eat a horse.” Her voice was laced with a teasing false indignation.

He thought about the tattoo on his arm and shot her a wink. “Do you lick them?”

“Lick?” Confusion put a soft frown on her face for half a heartbeat, and then she rolled her eyes. “No, I don’t lick horses or tattoos.” She gestured to her gelding. “Sammy helps me with heavy hauling and riding the fence line.”

Sammy? And Doodle? She was determined to make all of her animals run away, wasn’t she? A horse needed a majestic name, like Conquest or Battle. “How much property do you have?”

“Two hundred acres.” Jillian scooped some grain out of a storage bin. “We used to have more, but my parents sold three hundred just before they were killed.”

He closed the lid on the grain bin as she walked to Sammy’s stall. “By demons?”

“No, thank God.” She dumped the food into the horse’s hanging grain bucket. “My dad was a pilot. He and my mom were flying their plane around the mountain when he had a heart attack. The plane crashed about twenty miles from here.”

“I’m sorry. That must have been hard.”

“It was.” She glanced down at his feet. “You really need to get back to the house. I didn’t save you so you could get frostbite by walking around barefoot in the middle of winter.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll help you with the animals. Then you’ll be done sooner, and I can get back into the house faster.”

She slammed the grain scoop into its holder with a little more force than required, and he could practically smell her frustration. “No.”

“Come on,” he cajoled.

“No means no.” Bending, she gave him a nice view as she picked up the rifle she’d propped against the wall.

He swallowed hard, and every drop of blood in his body went south in a hot rush. How long had it been since he’d had loud, sweaty, mind-blowing sex? Hell, when was the last time he’d had any kind of sex? Felt like forever, as if sex was more than a good time for him. This deep-seated primal urge was something that went to his very core. Sounded insane, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that sex was a necessity, maybe to his very survival.

He took a slow step toward her, his libido tugging at him as if he was on a leash and Jillian was holding the handle. But at the second step, she stiffened. He halted, though every instinct was screaming at him to keep moving toward her.

“Do I scare you?” he asked roughly.

There was the slightest hesitation as she hung the weapon in a bracket near the first stall. “If you did, I’d have had the police here by now.”

She was lying. The police couldn’t make it up the mountain through this snow. She’d said as much when she mentioned getting to the nearest town.

An owl hooted somewhere in the night, and Jillian’s gaze darted to the darkness outside. For a split second, shadows of fear flitted across her expression, and then, as if she was giving herself a pep talk, she threw back her shoulders and opened a bin of what he thought might be goat food.

“I won’t hurt you, Jillian.” Sensing she needed a moment to chill—and hell, so did he—he strode toward the door, the straw crunching under his feet. “I promise you.”

She said nothing as he stepped out into the snow and headed toward the cabin. Man, he wished she had beer. He could use one right now. Or a margarita. Or a piña colada, or—

He came to a stop so fast that he slipped and nearly landed on his ass.

Something was watching him. Again. This time, though, the feeling of being watched was accompanied by a disturbing internal stirring, as if an inky, oily cloud was billowing up from out of his soul.

Pivoting, he tracked the external sensation, and there, deep in the shadows, red eyes stared at him from out of the trees. It wasn’t the marten—these eyes were level with his.

They stared, unblinking, for another second, and then they were gone, taking with them the weird darkness inside him. What the hell? And why the fuck was the skin on his forearm rippling? Startled, he looked down at the horse tattoo peeking out from under his rolled-up sleeve. He’d sworn only one of the front legs had been straight, the other lifted in a stationary prance. Now, both legs were straight, as if the horse had stomped its hoof.

First the thing in the woods and now the horse. Was he losing his mind?

“Reseph?”

He didn’t turn to Jillian. What if the crazy he was feeling showed in his face? “Yeah?”

“Why did you really take off into the woods?”

He shrugged. “I thought I heard a growl. I must have been hearing things.”

“No, I heard it, too.”

“You did?” Thank God and Oh shit collided. He wasn’t going crazy, but there really might be a malevolent presence lurking nearby. “Go inside. There’s something dangerous out here.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.”

Finally, he swung around to her. “Why not?”

There was a moment of silence, and then Jillian said something that chilled him to the bone. “Because it was you, Reseph. The growl came from you.”