Under a Rogue Moon

Chapter 6

Chapter 6By the time tea was over, Helen had fallen for Jason’s charms hook, line, and sinker, leaving Flanna feeling like the odd woman out as they retired to the lounge to watch the telly and continue their conversation. She cleared the dishes, listening to them laugh and chat in the next room, all the while wondering how it was possible for a veritable stranger to just show up on the McRae doorstep and throw everyone off-kilter. It just wasn’t…right.

When she was done, Flanna hung in the doorway and watched the pair for a long moment. Helen was sparkling, laughter rich and hands dancing as she spoke, while Jason seemed to have a permanent smile etched on his face. Watching him interact with her nan, Flanna was reminded yet again of just what an attractive man he really was. It wasn’t just the sharply drawn features or his sensual mouth. It was the way he seemed so animated, like he’d seen the worst life had to offer and laughed in its face. Something lived beneath his skin, an energy that was almost infectious, and it sucked in those surrounding him until they had no choice but to enjoy the ride with him.

She was still standing there when he glanced at the doorway during one of Helen’s stories. Their eyes met, held, and something in his smile softened. For a second, Flanna thought he was going to say something to her, but when his gaze flickered over her body, returning to her face warmer, darker, she turned on her heel and fled, through the kitchen and into the back garden, the door slamming shut behind her. She wasn’t convinced of what she’d seen. She couldn’t be.

* * * *

It was over two hours later before he showed up in the door of the barn.

“Who feels like a run?” he said brightly.

Flanna paused to look at him, the knife she’d been about to throw for practice still poised between her fingers. He wore an aged grey t-shirt, stretched tissue-thin across his muscled chest, with heavy sweats and running shoes completing the ensemble. It was obvious he meant to do as he said, but something in the way he leaned against the jamb suggested it could be even more, under the right circumstances.

She tore her gaze away, ignoring the flaming of her cheeks. “It would look like you do.”

“Don’t want to join me?”

“Can’t.” The blade she was holding went sailing through the air, embedding itself in the wooden target against the wall. “I need to focus on other skills tonight.”

“You can’t let the man go out on his own, Flanna.”

Her father’s voice from his workbench made her stop in mid-step from retrieving her knife, and she turned a bewildered stare in his direction. “It doesn’t take two to run,” she argued.

“True, and it only takes one to get lost as well.”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t want me getting lost, now, would you?”

Her head whipped back toward the door. Jason’s tone had been all innocence, but the gleam in his eye said otherwise.

“It’ll help you learn the lay of the land,” she said tightly. “I can give you a map, if you really think you’ll get lost.”

Jason shook his head. “You’d be wasting a perfectly good map. I’m more of a hands-on kind of learner.”

Yeah, I bet, she thought.

“Just go, lassie. You’ve done enough for the night.”

She should’ve known she wasn’t going to be able to get out of it. Holding her chin high, Flanna marched to the doorway of the barn, refusing to completely meet Jason’s eyes. “I need to change,” she said. “Give me ten minutes.”

His voice drifted out to her as she stepped into the brisk night air. “I’ll be waiting.”

* * * *

Thick dark clouds blanketed the sky, blocking out most of the night’s ambient light. In the middle of nowhere Kent, with the earth shrouded in an unnavigable velvet fog, the only aids Jason and Flanna had for moving across the countryside were their own eyes and her sense of home.

Still, it was more than enough. Together they cut through the bracing air with matching grace, their breath forming gossamer clouds that floated along behind them.

They didn’t speak. When she had first come out of the house and found Jason doing stretches in the damp grass, Flanna had been sure that he was using this as yet another opportunity to goad her. She’d taken off at a dead run, much faster than she would normally start, and pretended not to notice when he very quickly showed up at her side.

But he never said a word. He just matched her pace, regardless of whether she sped up or slowed down. Every step took them farther away from home, every meter traveled calmed the anxiety knotting Flanna’s stomach. She let the wind whipping past her ears carry with it the questions of the past few days, and just reveled in the freedom.

Her initial intent was to take him on the most arduous path she knew, to try and discourage him from asking her to come along on his next run. But when Jason cleared the small creek without catching his ankle on the rocks that lined the edges of the bed and didn’t complain about the route she had chosen, Flanna let even more of her anger go and angled him away from the steeper hills. Instead, she chose the path that took them through the nearby meadows. Though it was dark, the earth was softer, easier on the instep. He might not appreciate the pretty view, but he’d at least like the softer run.

The cloud cover began to break when she turned them back toward home, allowing patches of midnight blue to start peeking through by the time they were a mile away. Flanna slowed to a walk, lifting her eyes in order to savor the simple beauty rolling above. At her side, Jason did the same.

“Did I mention this was my first trip to England?” he said quietly. “It’s a lot more like home than I thought it would be.”

“Oh? And where’s that?”

His eyes were black when he turned them toward her, and Flanna wished that there could have been just a little more light so that she could see their expression.

“These days,” he said, “I move around too much to really have any place to call home. But what I meant was from before. Where I grew up in Florida.”

Her brows shot up in surprise. “You did not just compare Florida to the southeast of England.”

“What?” His teeth gleamed, exposed by his half-smile. “They’re both wet, they both have humidity up the wazoo, and they’re both filled with tourists.” He chuckled when she pointedly looked around at the empty field surrounding them. “Well, maybe not here,” he amended. “But in London. I hear they show up in droves there.”

Flanna shook her head. “You’re a very odd man.” But she said it with a small smile, and she accompanied it with a small kick of dirt across his path to let him know she was teasing.

They fell quiet again, though they kept their pace slow. In spite of being sweaty and desperate for a shower, Flanna wasn’t all that eager to be quit of his company just yet. It had been comfortable having someone running at her side, even if it was only for recreational purposes. It almost reminded her of when she used to go hunting with her father, though the feelings she had for Jason were far from familial. She wasn’t sure exactly what those feelings were, but they were growing, and they weren’t as terrifying as she’d originally feared.

“So, Florida?” she asked, curious now that the door to his past had been opened. “Is that where your family is?”

“According to the Christmas card I got last year, it is.”

“My father said…they’re not demonhunters as well.”

This took longer for him to respond to. “No,” Jason said. “They’re not. Dad’s in real estate development and Mom’s in how-to-spend-his-money development. The only demons they see are the sharks who swim the proverbial waters.”

He didn’t want to talk about it; that much she could tell. But until he outright stopped answering her questions, Flanna was going to keep on trying to get the information she wanted. If this man was going to insinuate himself into her life like this, she needed to understand what made him tick.

“How did you get involved with hunting, then?” she asked. This time, she looked into his face as she spoke, fervently wishing again for more light.

At least he looked back at her, though the solemnity she saw made her wonder if that was really what she had wanted.

“I met a woman at Mardi Gras two years ago who changed my life,” he said simply. “I haven’t looked back since.”

A woman. Something squeezed around Flanna’s stomach at the mention, but she shook it off and pressed on. “She must not be thrilled with you traveling around so much.”

“Who?”

“Your girlfriend in New Orleans.”

He laughed, shattering the calm. “She’s not my girlfriend. That would just be…scary.”

“Oh.”

Before she could ask another question, Jason’s hand curled around her arm and gently pulled her to a halt.

“You can trust me, you know.” His thumb had started that stroking thing again. She wondered if he was even aware that he did it. “I’ll answer anything you want me to, but you’re not going to hear anything that isn’t going to come back to the simple fact that I’m here for one reason only. To kill Dominic Romm before he kills you. I’m not sure what your father found out about me, but hopefully his sources told him that I don’t give up. Ever. I did it once, and…someone I cared about died. So, now I bulldog it. You can count on that.”

She believed him. This wasn’t one of his lines to get her to like him. He made his declaration with such conviction, such sincerity, so little of his usual flippant nature that it was impossible not to trust every single word he said.

“I want to apologize for my attitude before,” Flanna said. “I don’t react well to strangers. I’ve been fighting on my own for so long now that I forget…well, I’m not used to being on the peril side of the danger. Usually, I’m the one saving everybody else. It’s weird being the one needing to be saved this time.”

“Funny, but I have this distinct feeling that you’re not going to need too much of my help.”

“Then why stick around?”

His tongue darted across his lips, his gaze falling for a fraction of a second to her mouth before he replied. “I told you. I don’t give up. Even when I know the damsel in distress can probably kick my ass.”

Letting her go, he began walking again, glancing back with a small smile when she didn’t follow right away. Flanna shook herself from the daze he’d managed to create and raced to catch up, staying at his side for the remaining mile back to the house.

“Do you want the shower first?” she asked at the front door.

Jason stood at the top edge of the drive, head tilted back as he stared up at the sky. “You go on,” he said without looking at her. “I’m probably going to be up for hours yet.”

“The jet lag can be awful, but really, you should try and get onto a normal schedule.”

This time, he shot her a wide grin. “This is my normal schedule.” Thrusting his hands into his sweats pockets, he began wandering off through the garden, inhaling the crisp night air while resuming his survey of the sky. “Good night, Flanna,” he said. “Sleep well.”

Her murmured good night floated on the wind, and she wondered as she let herself back into the house whether or not he had actually heard her. A bridge had been crossed during their run. She was still unsure of what to make of Jason Randolph, but she no longer had any lingering doubts about whether she could trust him with her life. At least she had that.

A small, secret smile curved her lips as she climbed the stairs to her room. In a world as closed as hers could be, it was good to have another person who understood even part of what she was going through.

* * * *

He went back to Rage every night for a week, hoping she would dare to show her face there again. Every night, he searched the pulsing crowds for Flanna McRae, and every night, he walked back to his shithole hotel room disappointed that he hadn’t found her. He wasn’t overlooking her; there was no way he could miss a six-foot redhead with a body that made women go scattering for plastic surgery to look even half as good. She just wasn’t there. Which meant, if she wasn’t in New York, she’d likely gone home to lick her wounds until the next full moon.

Well, f**k if he was going to wait for her to come to him. The b***h had killed his brothers without batting an eyelash. Dominic was going to make her hurt for stripping him of his pack.

He’d meant to do it in the back of Rage. When he had caught her scoping him out, Dominic couldn’t resist the idea of f*****g the b***h’s brains out before slitting her open from neck to cunt. Then she’d gone and hit him, and that silver ring of hers had sliced open his face. The pain, even from such a small wound, was staggering, and she’d gotten away before he could finish the job.

If she had been alone out on the sidewalk, he would’ve tried again. He wasn’t scared. Being bigger and stronger gave him an advantage, and he would use anything he could to win.

But she hadn’t been alone. She’d been with Randolph. And seeing the bastard’s knowing eyes almost glowing as he stood behind the McRae b***h had forced Dominic to reconsider his plan.

He wasn’t stupid. There was no way in hell he could take both of them. Separately, sure. Hell, he’d come close to killing Randolph more than once. Dominic still didn’t know how the bastard had walked away from the fall in Toronto.

This time, though, with McRae all riled up and Randolph poised to toss his hat into the ring, he did the only thing he could. He walked away. This was a fight for another day.

Another day was fast approaching. If the b***h was gone, it was time to go after her. It might be her territory, but he’d fought and won outside of his own turf before. He could do it again. After all, he had vengeance on his side.

And a full moon not too far away.