Mark of the Wolf; Hell's Breed by Madelaine Montague Page B

about the time Basil decided he’d made his point and Kane was
going to drop it, he spoke again.
    “ Good point. Guess it
would be better to ask her than to surprise her. I suppose it won’t
hurt to wait a few days anyway. We definitely need to wait until
Lucien cuts us back to eight hour shifts.”
     

Chapter Nine
    Laurie was pretty sure she would’ve
gone stark raving mad if she hadn’t had books to keep her mind
occupied. Except for the books, there wasn’t a lot else to do
beyond lusting over the guys. She wasn’t allowed outside. She
wasn’t even allowed to stand at the window and stare at the
greenery and whatever wildlife decided to wander close to the
cabin. Not that she would’ve been all that entertained with that
sort of thing for long, but it would’ve beat the hell out of
sitting on the couch staring at the floor.
    A week went by without a word from the
DA.
    Laurie didn’t know if they’d even
finished picking the jury. The waiting without a word was nerve
wracking in and of itself!
    She got used to the routine, as
accustomed to it as she could given the fact that it wasn’t
‘normal’ in any sense of the word.
    She got used to the guys, enough that
she could actually relax around them as if they hadn’t all been
every woman’s dream of a hot, high testosterone male!
    When they finally relaxed their high
alert vigil, she discovered they were actually a lot of fun to be
around. She’d never been in the middle of a group of males and
gotten the chance to interact as if she was one of the guys. She
hadn’t had a clue that they could be so interesting!
    There was another plus to the
situation that she hadn’t considered. She’d had time to think about
the murder without being scared to death, too upset to try to
figure out things.
    And the more she thought about it
calmly and rationally, the less sense it made to her.
    Not that she had all the facts. She
didn’t actually have any beyond what she knew and had experienced
herself. She’d been asked not to read about the murder or listen to
the news about it so that she couldn’t be accused of having become
‘tainted’ by what she’d seen and heard since.
    As it happened, that wasn’t really a
problem for her. She’d never been inclined to keep up with the
news. It was seriously depressing. She didn’t see much point in
watching and/or listening to things that were just going to upset
and depress her, particularly when, for the most part, there was
nothing she could do to change things and/or however bad it was it
didn’t really affect her personally.
    Living under the
protection of the guys might chafe—well, did. She wasn’t used to
being idle unless she was on leave or vacation and this wasn’t even
close to either one. But the guys made her feel safe, safer than
she’d felt before she became an eye witness to murder.
    They’d been hired. She knew that, but
they still made it feel as if she was important and nothing was
more important to them than keeping her safe. They made her feel
absolute confidence in their ability to keep her safe.
    That was what finally gave her the
courage to take her memories out and really look at them when
before she’d merely taken quick glances because she couldn’t handle
more than that. Like peaking at something from between her fingers
so that she didn’t have to see all of the ugly at one time, she’d
avoided remembering some things that were crucial. And when she
calmly summoned the memories and looked at them with the distance
of having her fear removed, the story didn’t play out the way she
thought she’d remembered it happening.
    Smith, the murderer, hadn’t attacked
the federal agent that had been killed. It was the other way
around.
    Now she recalled that she’d caught a
glimpse of the fatal confrontation as it happened. Smith had been
heading toward her, walking briskly. Randal, the man she now knew
was a federal agent, had seemed to come out of nowhere and two men
had collided.