He swung his gaze on the bastard who shot him, pinning the human with the fiery amber light of his eyes, which had transformed from their normal dark brown to the molten color of his other, more lethal nature.
Brock curled his lips back off his teeth and fangs and bellowed in rage.
There was a high-pitched shriek as the man holding the gun turned tail and ran.
"Oh, Christ!" wailed the wheezing human whom Brock still held fast by the throat. "I do nothing to her--I swear! Bitch broke my nose, but I didn't touch her. G-Gresa," he sputtered, lifting his hand to point in the direction his buddy had fled. "He shot her, not me."
At that unwelcome newsflash, Brock's fingers tightened around the fragile human windpipe. "She's been shot? Tell me where the fuck she is.
Now!"
"T-the chiller," he gasped. "Oh, shit. Please don't kill me!"
Brock squeezed punishingly harder, then tossed the blubbering son of a bitch against the far wall. The human cried out in pain, then dropped in a sniveling heap on the concrete floor. "You'd better pray she's all right,"
Brock said, "or you're gonna wish I had killed you just now."
Jenna huddled on the floor of the large walk-in refrigerator, her teeth chattering, body shivering in the cold.
Outside the sealed steel door, loud noises sounded. Heavy crashes, men shouting ... the abrupt crack of gunfire and the bright clatter of breaking glass. Then a roar so intense and deadly, it jerked her head upright just as it was starting to become too weighty to keep lifted, her eyelids growing too difficult to hold open.
She listened, hearing only silence lengthening now.
Someone neared the cold cell that held her. She didn't need to hear the thud of approaching footsteps to know that someone was there. As chill as it was inside, the blast of icy air coming from the other side of the locked door was arctic.
The latch gave a snick of protest in the instant before the entire steel panel was ripped from its hinges on a deafening metallic squeal. Steam poured out of the opening, shrouding a massive, black-clad mountain of a man.
No, not a man, she realized in dazed astonishment.
A vampire.
Brock.
His lean face was so stark, she hardly recognized him. Huge fangs gleamed white behind the broad mouth that was drawn grim and furious. His breath sawed in and out between his lips, and behind a dark pair of wraparound sunglasses, twin coals blazed with a heat Jenna felt as surely as a touch when he scanned the fogged space and found her slumped and shivering in the corner.
Jenna didn't want to feel the rush of relief that swamped her as he strode inside and dropped down onto his haunches beside her. She didn't want to trust the feeling that said he was a friend, someone to help her.
Someone she needed, in that moment. Maybe the only person who could help her.
She started to tell him she was okay, but her voice was thready and weak. His ember-bright eyes seared her through the veil of his dark shades.
He glanced down and hissed when he saw her wounded thigh and the blood that had soaked the leg of her jeans and formed a small pool beneath her.
"Don't talk," he said, stripping off his black leather gloves and pressing his fingers against both sides of her neck. His touch was light but comforting, seeming to warm her from the inside out. The chill drifted away from her, taking the pain of her gunshot wound with it. "You're going to be all right now, Jenna. I'm gonna get you out of here."
He stripped off his black duster and wrapped it around her shoulders.
Jenna sighed as the heat from his body and the scent of him--leather and spice and strong, deadly male--enveloped her. As he leaned back, she noticed that a bullet hole had torn through the beefy round of his shoulder.
"You're bleeding, too," she murmured, more alarmed by his injury than by the thought that her rescuer was a vampire.
He shrugged off her concern. "Don't worry about me. I'll live. It takes more than that to slow down one of my kind. You, however ..."
The way he said it, the grave look that ran across his face as his shaded eyes drifted to her bleeding thigh, seemed almost accusatory.
"Come on," he said, reaching out to gently scoop her into his arms.
"I've got you now."