Help Wanted

Chapter Nine - Reincarnation

Dedicated to KaiKai PANTS


"Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them."

Sue Grafton

"Rin?" he rasped out thickly from the darkness. "Where are you going?"

Tenten went perfectly still. Her heart hammered beneath the hectic heave of her breasts, her teeth bit down hard on a trembling bottom lip, brown eyes wide and stinging with wretched tears, her voice locked inside her throat—unable to answer, not wanting to answer.

All she knew was that she had to get the hell out of here.

There was a short pause when no one moved. The silence filled with terrible foreboding on both sides, and then Tenten heard the sound of movement, as though he was stretching across the bed to drag something towards him. She exploded into action again, bending down to search the floor for the knife she had hidden just before he had tucked her in bed and settled himself beside her.

Her hair tumbled all over her face, getting in her way, irritating her and sending her temperature gauge shooting high as panic completely engulfed her. Her fingers trembled as they closed around the hilt of the weapon at the same time a hand came gently on to her shoulder and all hell broke loose inside her.

Panic gripped her.

He was fully awake.

Tenten rose up, turning on the balls of her bare feet, and blindly sliced at the dark bulk looming terrifyingly close. She stood stricken into stillness as the dark bulk on the bed gave a pained grunt and jerked violently in reaction.

Then an awful silence settled over the room when nothing moved, nothing but the slow lowering of her hand where the knife with its lethal blade still hung between limp, lifeless fingers. And that weird sense of unreality swept over her once again, trapping her in the centre of her own crazy nightmare.

"Have you lost your mind?" the violent hiss of words was preceded only fractionally but the full weight of his body landed against her own, sending them both tumbling to the floor with enough force to push the air right out of her lungs.

He was breathing like a marathon runner, heaving in deep, noisy gasps of air as he struggled not to completely crush her beneath his own weight.

"Where did you get that?" he wrenched the cutlery from her hand and hurled it cross the room. Keeping a painful grip in her shoulders, he dragged himself to his feet, yanking her up with him until they both stood swaying in the nullifying fall-out from their mutual violence. "What were you planning on doing with it?"

Her head came up, drawn by the hoarse thickness of his voice—by the tremors she could feel shaking him. She couldn't speak, was too shocked by her own violence to think, so she just stood there, just staring at him, through the thick curtains of hair, her mind a total blank.

He gave her another shake, his fingers biting into the tender flesh of her upper arms as he sent her unruly hair flying out around them so it clung to the clammy surface of his contorted face. A muttered curse had him dragging the fine long strands away, tugging the thick pelt back from her face with a cruel fist.

"You were sneaking off to go see Kakashi again, weren't you?" he snarled when she remained rooted to the spot, silent and numb. Another shake brought her alive at last.

"For the last time, I don't know anyone by that name," she pled desperately. "Please stop hurting me."

"Hurt you?" he choked in utter incredulity. "I ought to beat the life out of you, you stupid, crazy, deceitful witch!"

He seemed stuck on what else to call her. His fingers were still biting harshly into her, his teeth, pure white and sharply etched in the consuming darkness, were displaying a fury so palpable she could almost taste it.

Tenten threw back her head, defiance in every line of her trembling frame. Brown eyes blazed at thunderous black but she reassumed her stony silence.

He growled something deep inside his throat, the last threads of his control giving way as he dragged her roughly across the room and slammed her back against the door, ignoring her startled cry as he pressed a muscled arm across her throat, forcing her head back.

"I'll kill you myself if you ever leave me again," he told her, pushing her chin high and curving his hand tightly over one of her trembling shoulders.

She could feel his harsh breath against her face, warm and tormentingly flavoured with brandy, further stimulating fear.

Then he reached out to touch a switch, and Tenten squeezed her eyes tight shut against the sudden searing crash of light to her retina. And with her heart thundering against her ribs, she stood, tensed and ready for what had to come next.

It came.

The breath left her body on a stunned rush of air. Her eyes flicked open, timid hazel arrowing directly on to malicious charcoal.

Tenten was knocked to the ground. He reached for her throat and squeezed, sucking the breath from her lungs. She could feel the blackness encroaching.

"Answer me Rin, where are you going?" The hard black eyes demanded an answer.


She was going to run, Itachi realized with a sudden tensing of his spine. The urge to flee was literally pulsing in every tautly held muscle she possessed, and abruptly he jerked himself into movement, making her hesitate, bringing her flustered gaze fluttering up to clash with his own.

He locked it with a sheer superiority of will and used his eyes to lock her to the spot while he step towards her, as graceful as any supremely proficient cat mesmerizing its prey before it pounced.

"Disobedience doesn't warrant bragging rights Miss Momochi," he told her quietly, removing the empty glass from her hands, blindly setting it aside. She looked as if she had seened a ghost, he noted. His eyes strained as he watched the way she trembled; the way she struggled to draw steady breaths.

It was when she began sucking on the insides of her mouth that Itachi's brow furrowed. He only knew one other person who had a habit of doing that. And for a second it was like having that person reincarnated before his very eyes with that one gesture. Stifling the enervating memory, Itachi swallowed hard. His heart stopped beating for a moment and his porcelain-like skin chilled at the semblance of his younger brother that he saw in her expression.

It penetrated something—something he was not prepared to consider—something that made him want to flick her forehead and tell her she was behaving silly.

It was an uncanny.

The atmosphere was thick with sizzling undertones. It was not Tenten who collided with his stunning dark eyes; it was Sasuke. And unexpectedly the most giant surge of protectiveness surged through Itachi. The brown eyes had morphed so easily into onyx before his very own that his hands gripped together, white-knuckled, at the sudden pain of it—at the strength it took to suppress it—to stave the illusion.

Dismayed, he shook his head wearily, so agonized by the irrational likeness he saw between the two that it actually hurt like a physical pain.

Tenten stumbled, having to tilt her head back to keeping looking into his face. When he called her Miss Momochi she felt her heart shrivel a little inside her. It casted a slur on what transpired between them in the shower earlier. Her breasts heaved on a small, tight intake of air as a muscle deep down inside her abdomen writhed in recollection. Predictably she stiffened that disturbed muscle in rejection of her response.

Itachi saw and accurately read every single expression that flickered across her vulnerable face. The emotions still burning, the desire still clutching, the inevitable rejection and perhaps most heart wrenching of all, a pain still hurting.

He reacted to it from a place of deep shock and something that felt suspiciously like guilt.

Blood roared to his brain at what he had let happened—how far off base he'd gone. How far off base he'd let her take him, as if he'd had no control over the situation in the shower. He hadn't bargained on this, that he'd want her with such an irrational hunger that precluded anything else he'd ever felt in his life. His behaviour was shaming, shocking and all-consuming.

Perhaps his own exercise had done more of a number on him than Tenten and now he was desperately searching for some equilibrium, something familiar to cling on to.

His instinct was to lash out. He denied the response she was evoking with every fiber of his being and drawled easily. "I thought you would have learned your lesson."

Tenten blinked stupidly for a few seconds. She simply could not believe that he had just said that. Rage boiled upwards and she started to shake uncontrollably. The comment shouldn't have come as a surprise however; Itachi was the prince of bluntness.

But neither of them moved. For a long, timeless moment they simply stood there gazing at each other. Her evocative scent teased his nostrils. It was clean and had the unmistakable tang of musky rose.

He had to take a deep mental breath the instant a surge of testosterone-charged heat took a leap down his front to gather like a flaming knife in his groin. The provocative witch, he thought, letting his eyes shutter out the telling gleam he felt spark to life in them.

He wished he could adopt the same physical indifference to her that she dealt out to him whilst in the company of others. But he could not. He could not pretend to be cool and collected and indifferent to all of this excruciating attraction. He could not stop himself from responding—inwardly, at least—to that pure, feline magnetism that poured out of her in such hot, sinful waves. It made him feel somewhat breathless and snarled up by self-awareness he neither understood, nor could control.

The Uchiha grimaced at the dark sense of dissatisfaction that began to niggle at his nerves. Why in the world was it so easy for the damn girl to get beneath that protective layer of skin he wore?

It was ridiculous.

He blinked then, slowly lowering and unfurling those impossibly long lashes as if he was using them to wipe away the answering buzz of his body and put in their place a cool implacability.

"You did that on purpose," she snapped at him, scorn leaping to that magnetically attractive mouth.

"Shall I add a bra to the list of things we need to get you tomorrow?" his jaw line flexed, making her wretchedly aware that he was seeing exactly what she was seeing—and from a better vantage point than anyone else, including herself. "Because evidently, you don't own one," the rich deep tones of his voice made her insides quiver.

Tenten went white; her whole stance stone-still for the few stunning seconds it took her to thoroughly absorb the fact that he was actually teasing her.

In a delayed act of modesty she snapped her arms across her breasts at the same time her head came up and received the second stunning shock in as many seconds. She could see it now: his striking resemblance to him. It disturbed her. She'd noticed it before, but of course she had had no frame of reference for it.

Now she was filled with such strange, unsettling feelings—and she just stared at him blankly, her lovely mouth parted while her body quivered badly enough for anyone to see that she was suffering from a severe state of shock.

Could they be? What if they were? What did that mean for her?

Her nerve-ends reached snapping point. A tight, prickling feeling began to scramble its way up from her tingling toes to her hairline. She couldn't breathe, she couldn't swallow, and, worse than all of that, she felt like weeping.

"Rin Nohara?" she enquired hoarsely, a look of desperation etching across her face. She needed to know, the suspicion was killing her. "Does it ring a bell?"

Itachi studied her with cool condemnation, broad shoulders taut with savage tension beneath the fine cloth of his suit.

"Should it?" he demanded raggedly, his disconcertion over her emotional behaviour unconcealed. His dark, deep drawl was so constrained it screamed his tension.

"I don't know," Tenten mumbled, wishing a big hole would open up and swallow her. "Maybe…"

She had the faintest impression that the name had indeed struck something. But Itachi's silence hung like a giant weight ready to fall on her head if she pressed the issue further.

His eyes burned with annoyance. The pale flesh stretched tautly across his cheeks like alabaster. He stood unmoving, like a marble statue, staring at her with those disturbingly, distinctive empty, dark eyes.

The arrogant nose that ran in a straight sweep from his forehead to the nose tip, the strong jaw, the broad and high-boned cheekbones all resembled him. Itachi was practically an improved—in the physical sense—younger version of the man. But clearly his mentality and ideals were the exact replicas.

Slowly his hand came towards her with the intention of taking her by the arm. But she saw the tendon running along his jaw-line tighten perceptibly as he did so, and was dismayed to realize that Itachi was looking so tense because he expected her to flinch away from his touch in front of his friends.

She didn't flinch but felt the usual jolt of heat run along her arm in direct warning to her brain that someone had invaded her personal space.

Her brown eyes held his, calm and steady, and after a few tauter, telling moments, the tension eased out of his jaw-line and was replaced with a twist to his beautiful mouth that grimly mocked her small show of restraint, as if it offended him that she felt she had to protect his pride in front of his friends

"I knew you would disobey my orders," he gave a soft laugh deep in his throat, sardonically smirking in amusement at her. "You're very predictable."

Tenten held up an index finger and noticed absently that it trembled. But the words came, hot and hard and crucifying pungent, "Take your hands off me…" her voice trailed away, her mind flying off in another direction as she bit into her bottom lip on a fresh wave of light-headedness. Then, she spluttered, "Put them on Konan if you're looking someone to frisk tonight. I'm certain she wouldn't mind."

Suddenly he wasn't grinning, his eyes darkening into something that had her body stiffening in rejection, even as he arched her up against him and turned to lead her out of the sitting room. "Our contract is exclusive," he reminded her brusquely. "I can only frisk you."

Her feverish colour ebbed to leave her pale. She stared back at him with incredulous eyes.

Itachi snatched in a starkly audible breath, lashes lowering on his smouldering gaze. "And jealousy isn't a very good look on you."

Tenten found herself subsiding like a pricked balloon but found some strength under the laser-like gaze. "Me jealous? That would be the day," she retorted drily.

He shifted her beneath the crook of his powerful arm, and fitted her easily beneath his shoulder. Her hand pressed against the front of his white dress shirt where she was made forcefully aware of the accelerated pounding of his heart beneath the sticky dampness where her wetness had transferred itself to him.

"Hidan's staring at you," he clipped with a grimace. "We need to get you changed," was all he said as he tightened his grip on her then turned to steer her out into the silenced hall, arrogantly ignoring every set of curious eyes that followed them.

"I can change myself," Tenten whispered self-consciously. She quelled the urge to stiffen up warily, a fresh frisson of alarm stinging along her spine. The last place she wanted to be was alone with him.

As soon as they were out in the hall she tried to jerk out of his grasp in rising panic. "Don't touch me!" she snapped coldly.

Itachi drew in a harsh breath as he teetered on the edge of losing his usual self-control. All Uchiha man had a temper—red-hot temper that burned so deeply it became icy and steely—but that cold control often gave the impression that they were without emotion at all.

Tenten's lack of regard for his rules and their schedule was in serious danger of evoking that extreme reaction.

And Itachi would guarantee that she wouldn't like it if it did.

He looked angry, Tenten realized. Not hot, masculine angry but frozen, arctic angry. "By sabotaging tonight, you're only setting yourself back," he claimed raspingly. "But even I don't have all the time in the world to wait for an heir."

"I'm afraid of you," she confided wretchedly.

"I know." He loosened his grip on her, moving his hands along her spine to gently cup her nape beneath the fine silk fall of her hair. "It's silly to fear the inevitable. We have deadlines to meet."

"You'll hurt me," she swallowed tensely, still not accustomed to having him talk so casually about something so intimate.

His thumbs drew lazy caressing circles on the soft skin at her jaw line, his expression brooding as he looked down at her pale, anxious face. Then he let her go, sighing softly as he did so. "Did I hurt you this morning?" His voice was loaded with a sardonic whimsy that made her shiver.

Tenten flushed, her lips quivering a little. She could feel the heat creeping into her body as the memory moved across and into her. She was aware of the way her breasts had swelled and of the heat moving between her thighs. As if to indicate that her body had already capitulated.

It was the kind of surrender that only deepened her distrust of him, if the fury snapping in her eyes and the look of self-disgust on her face were anything to go by.

No one else could make her lose all her usually ice-cold self-possession as completely as he could. And he had been doing it since the first time she ever set eyes on him. A few short minutes of his undivided company, and he had always been able to turn her into a shivering, quivering wreck of a useless creature.

Sex.

That single telling word hit her with a hard, cruel honesty. The difference between Itachi and every other man she had ever met was the fact that he was the only one who could stir her up sexually.

And that was why she was standing here, a shivering, quivering wreck. Because in stirring her up sexually he also stirred up all the phobias that sent her into this kind of panic. Fear was the main thing; a stark, staring fear that if she ever gave in to the sex then her life would be over. Because he would see her mark then, wouldn't he? Know what she was and despise her for it.

No. Her heart was in her mouth. Her stomach plummeted. Such a scenario would be awful. She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and clenched her hands into two tight fists at her sides as an old clamoring reaction trapped her within a world of mindless dismay.

Itachi noticed, who wouldn't have noticed when she was standing there quivering with her teeth biting hard into her tense bottom lip?

"Did I?" he insisted huskily.

"No," she whispered, trying desperately hard to get a hold on herself. "But that's—that's not the point. You are significantly larger than your finger."

He laughed. It was a dry, brittle sound that in no way conveyed true amusement.

Upon realizing her slip of the tongue, his name came out in a near croak. Her lips shook as a heat of embarrassment lick over her with painful precision. "The bottom-line is, tonight is off. I broke the rule so you don't get to fuck me," she cut in quickly, hopefully hiding her inner discomfort.

To her shame all it did was further humiliate her.

Itachi stared grimly at her for a moment, studying the set contours of her mouth, the angry heat in her cheeks, and the determined tilt of her small chin. Then something flickered across his face, the merest hint of pain or was it irritation? Whatever, he stopped suddenly, the new look on his face was pure irony which seemed, oddly, to be aimed entirely at himself.

Then he said, quite flatly, "You broke the rule, that's precisely why I should—" he paused seemingly for dramatic effect before he added, "—fuck you," and watched, without any feeling whatsoever, all the colour drain from her face. "After all, the rules spoke against sex, not the aforementioned. And like I had pointed out Miss Momochi," he told her scathingly, "There is a difference."

He had to be bluffing, Tenten was thinking hectically. He wasn't that rotten, surely?


A/N: Okay, I said five to seven days updates and I kept my word. I'm sorry if nothing much happened in this chapter. While editing this chapter it got deleted and I had to start over from scratch, hence why it sucks—I was in a bad mood. I promise to make it up to you. I just had to keep up with my scheduled update.

I deleted a total of six anonymous flames :o SIX! Wow. Don't like, don't read, it'll save you (flamers) the trouble of having to swear at me and this... I quote "immoral" story. Anyways, I think after the 10th chapter the plot speeds up. I feel like the story is going half a mile a chapter and I freaking hate it. Review and I'll love you forever :)