Then a cluster of people blocked them from view. I tensed, ready to spring into action, but in the next moment, feminine choruses of “You poor thing!” “Are you okay?” and “Let me help you!” rang out.

Ian’s other admirers had descended on the scene.

“Unbelievable,” I breathed. By merely walking down the street shirtless, he’d managed to round up a harem.

“Ladies, thank you, but I’m well taken care of,” Ian said. Barbara’s thoughts split between logic telling her to leave and pleasure over the handsome man’s confidence in her. When Ian continued to rebuff the other women in favor of her, her indecisiveness crumpled.

“Are all of you deaf?” she snapped, her authoritative voice rising above the others. “Leave, before he calls the cops for harassment, too!”

With a few final grumbles, the would-be harem dispersed, allowing me to see the look of gratitude mixed with sensual promise that Ian bestowed on Barbara.

That did it. She closed the last few feet between them without hesitation, holding out her cell phone. When his fingers curled around hers as he took it, “Cold hands,” drifted through her mind before his gaze locked onto hers and lit up with bright, mesmerizing green.

Oh shit, was her last conscious thought.

“I told you this would be easy,” Ian said, and he wasn’t talking to her.

Bones started the car. I looked away, not needing to see Ian climb into Barbara’s to know that the two of them would soon be following us.

“There’ll be no living with him now,” I said under my breath.

Bones grunted in amusement. “As always, Kitten.”

Ten

The good news was, after hours of questioning Barbara, we knew the location of the facility where Tate, Juan, Dave, and Cooper were most likely held since that’s where the vampire blood samples came from. Then, like the not-actor James Franco, Barbara was sent on her way with a lower blood count and a new memory.

Ian was going to throw in a bonus service (“I’m many things, but a tease isn’t one of them,” he’d stated), yet I stopped him before he could make good on his former, unspoken offer to Barbara. We didn’t have the time, plus, her previous attraction didn’t equate to current consent in my book.

The bad news was, I didn’t know how we could break into the facility without getting caught.

The McClintic Wildlife Management area in Mason County, West Virginia, was more commonly known as the “TNT area.” During World War II, it was a large manufacturing and storage center for explosives. In addition to the dozens of aboveground concrete bunkers that housed the aforementioned TNT as well as radioactive waste, there was also a network of tunnels and underground bunkers built to withstand a nuclear blast. After the war, the blueprints of the massive underground facility conveniently disappeared, though the topside bunkers were just sealed up and left to rot.

Today, a few hundred out of the three-thousand-plus-acre tract were off-limits to the public due to safety and environmental concerns. Even the airspace was closed over a section of preserve after one of the bunkers mysteriously exploded in 2010, but while the government owned and monitored the area, someone like Barbara could slip in and out without arousing locals’ suspicions. In addition to hunters who frequented the McClintic Wildlife Management area, it was also the original location of the Mothman sightings and thus drew paranormal seekers by the thousands.