Redeeming Rue AP4 by R. E. Butler Page B

lips.  She tasted like heat and sweet woman, a heady combination that made his cat yowl in anticipation.
    She pulled from his mouth and turned away from him, and he heard the soft moan in her throat as she began to kiss his brother again.  James chuckled inwardly as he thought about how quickly things had changed for them.  He didn’t have a shred of jealousy in him at the thought of John touching her.  It made him happy in a way, to know that she would be twice as loved, twice as pleasured, twice as protected.
    She felt petite.  He and John were both just taller than six feet, and judging what he could in the darkness, he thought she was perhaps five-foot-five or maybe a little shorter.  She was curved in all the right places, as clichéd as that sounded in his head.
    He pressed his forehead to her shoulder and inhaled the strange chemical smell again.  Alarm bells went off in his head as he cataloged what he knew right now – she’d been hiding and watching the ceremony, she was wearing a wig, and she was covering up her scent.
    He gave John a push to separate him from the woman, and both John and the woman protested the motion.  James gripped her shoulders and stared down at her.
    “Who are you?”  He wished like hell he had a light source so he could see what she looked like.
    She immediately scented of fear again.
    “James, what the hell?” John demanded.
    “She’s hiding something.  I want to know who she is and what she’s doing here.”  James thought of the kids at the boarding house, including his own grandkids, and niece and nephews.  He didn’t want to think about the female lions spying on them like this, but they’d been doing exactly that in their old hometown of King.
    “I’m no one,” the woman said, her voice sharp and panic-laden.  “Let me go.”
    “I don’t think so.  Tell us who you are and what you’re doing here,” James said.
    There was a long enough pause that James began to think the worst.  Yes, they’d followed her out here, but what if she was spying on the kids?  He didn’t think she was actually a female lion, but with all the chemical scents covering her up, what else could she be?
    John seemed to feel the same tension and said, “If you won’t talk to us here, then you’ll talk to us at the house.”
    James let go of her shoulders as John tugged on her to get her to follow him.
    “No!  No, please!  Not the house!  No!”  The sheer terror in her words brought James up short.  His cat howled in worry, and he reached out and put his hand on John’s arm and wrapped his free arm around the woman’s shoulders.  Tears scented the air, and she trembled hard against him.
    John stopped pulling on her, and James felt that his brother was worried about her.
    “Tell us who you are, sweetheart,” James said.
    “Please,” John added.
    She sighed in defeat and James grinned.  “My name is Rue.”
    “Rue what?”
    “Just Rue, okay?  And I wasn’t watching you.  I was just wandering through the woods and happened to see the lights from the party.  I was curious.”
    Something about her words didn’t seem quite right.  He didn’t think she was lying, but she didn’t seem to be telling them the whole truth.  As a cop, he was used to ferreting out the truth from people, but he didn’t want to treat her like a criminal.
    “All right, Rue.  My name is James Fallon.”
    “I’m John Fallon.”
    “Brothers?”
    James hummed in agreement.  “Rue, please tell us what’s going on.  We’ll keep your secret, whatever it is, but don’t ask us to just let you leave because we can’t.”
    Her fear seemed to diminish.  “You can’t?”
    “Hell no,” John said.  “We followed you from our backyard.”
    “How did you follow me?”
    James smiled as she seemed to relax further.  “I felt you.  You were watching us.”
    “Not you, exactly, I…oh hell, would you let me go, please?  I need to leave.”
    “You’re not going anywhere, right