Tiger turned his head on Carly’s shoulder to look at Connor. “I saw it. Helped her fix it.”
“Oh man,” Connor said in dismay. “You got to work on it? I have so much envy.”
“Tiger came to my rescue,” Carly said. “He performed a miracle.”
Tiger lifted his head, his eyes quieter now, and touched her face. “He hurt you.”
Carly shook her head. Ethan seemed unimportant at the moment. “He’s an asshole. What happened? How did you get shot, for heaven’s sake? I didn’t mean to run off and leave you. I’m so sorry. I was upset.”
Tiger cupped her face, rubbing his thumbs along her cheekbones. Not speaking, just gazing down into her eyes.
“Did Ethan shoot you?” Carly asked, her anger rising. She knew Ethan kept a gun, not because he shot for sport or anything, but because it made him feel superior to the rest of mankind.
“Doesn’t matter,” Tiger said.
It did matter. Carly’s rage surged like a tide to cover her hurt and grief. “I’m gonna kill him. He screws around on me, then he shoots my friend for trying to help me. Don’t worry, Tiger, by the time I and whatever lawyer I hire get finished with him, he’ll be happy he can scrape what’s left of himself off the sidewalk.”
* * *
Her warmth and strength flowed into Tiger like a bright light. He’d been buried in darkness and pain, the guards jabbing with the guns awakening memories he’d long wanted to bury.
They’d taken his mate, they’d promised to take care of her, and she’d died. When he’d demanded to see her, more and more frantic, they’d beaten him back and threatened to kill him.
The memories of the past had fused with the reality of now, and Tiger had known in his heart that Carly, his beautiful mate, was dead. Liam had lied, Sean had lied, the guards had lied. They’d taken her away, and she was dead . . .
Memories slid away. Tiger had Carly here, her scent like a bite of cinnamon, her face petal-soft under his fingertips. He leaned to her to inhale her again, exhaling to leave his mark on her. Mine.
“Tiger,” he heard Liam saying. Liam, the leader, the man he’d been told to obey.
Liam was a strong alpha, and the Shifters under his command felt the weight of his orders. Tiger had watched them all, even Liam’s father, become slightly lesser in Liam’s presence. Tiger was supposed to as well—if he obeyed Liam’s orders and showed fealty, he could live in this Shiftertown in peace. Any challenge, and Liam would have to take him down.
Liam hadn’t actually said all this specifically, but Tiger knew. Tiger knew everything Liam was thinking, because Liam’s body language, no matter how subtle, revealed every thought.
Carly’s body language showed only distress that Tiger was hurt. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about hierarchy, or who was alpha, or that she should bow her head and keep her gaze averted from Liam as a submissive must do.
Her entire focus was on Tiger, and Tiger alone. Everyone else was nonessential.
Carly’s warmth entered his body wherever hers touched his, and her breath on his face was like sweet summer air. Tiger’s pain lessened, and his breathing became easier.
The touch of a mate.
Carly moved in his embrace, trying to take a step back. Tiger wasn’t ready to let her go. He held tighter, but Carly wriggled, twisting her arm around to touch the slat that still dangled from his wrist.
“Can someone take this off him?”
Connor sprang forward, lifting the bar that hung like a lead weight. He chortled. “They made the cuff and chain to withstand Shifter strength, but not the bed. Good job.”
“Can you take it off?” Carly asked.
She was anxious, not afraid. The others wanted to bind him—Carly wanted to set him free.
“Get me a picklock, and I can open anything,” Connor said.
Spike, in silence, handed Connor a stiff piece of wire. Where he’d obtained it, or what it was for, Tiger didn’t know, but Connor grinned gleefully and started scraping at the handcuff. In a matter of seconds, the cuff loosened and fell from Tiger’s wrist.
“That’s got to feel better,” Carly said. “Now, let’s get you back into bed so the doctors can patch you up.”
More people filled the corridor outside. Tiger tasted their fear. They shouldn’t broadcast like that. A predator sensed a prey’s fear, the predator homing in on and taking out the weakest. Dangerous.
“If he can’t calm down, we need to chain him up again, ma’am,” one of the black-clad men said. He was the commander, the leader of his tiny band. He had a weather-beaten face, though he was still young, for a human, and scarred. He’d been in battles. The man had shorn off all but a blond stubble of hair, his eyes were a light blue, and he had an air of authority. Not as much as Liam or any Shifter, but for a human, he was strong.
“He’s calm,” Liam said. “See? Lass, if you can get him back to bed, and to stay still, we can fix him up in a trice.”
Tiger kept his arms around Carly. “I am healed.”
Carly ran her hand down the front of his torso. Tiger couldn’t stop his flinch of pain as she touched the raw wounds.
“Bullshit,” she said clearly. “You’re bleeding all over the place. Back to bed with you, mister.”
“Better step back from him,” the human leader said, his voice as hard as Liam’s. “He’s a danger to everyone in the facility and needs to be contained.”
Carly turned around, still within Tiger’s arms, to glare at the human. “What is with you? You need to leave him alone for two minutes. No wonder he’s so upset.”
She turned, sliding her arm around Tiger’s waist, and started guiding him to the bed. Tiger went without resisting. Now, if she’d get into the bed with him and snuggle up against his side, Tiger would be healed in no time. And he wouldn’t be afraid.
The other Shifters watched in awe as Tiger, calm and quiet, walked with Carly back to the bed. He’d stopped bleeding for now, but his gown was covered with blood, and blood stained the sheets.
He didn’t care. Tiger lowered himself onto the uncomfortable bed, then put his hand on Carly’s wrist and tugged her toward him.
Carly gave him a puzzled look, her gray green eyes red-rimmed with crying. Tiger tugged harder. Carly lost her balance and landed, sitting, on the bed next to him, her warm hip against his side.
She gave a little laugh. “They can’t work on you if I’m in the bed with you, silly. I’m flattered, but I’ll be in the way.”
“Need you,” Tiger said. He kept his voice soft, so only she would hear, but then, Shifters had good hearing.
“Let her go,” Liam said. “She’s done enough. Thank you, lass. I don’t know who you are, but you’re a bloody miracle worker.”
“She’s my mate,” Tiger said, his voice still not working right, but it grew firmer as he tightened his grip on her. “She stays.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Carly’s eyes widened. “What exactly are you talking about?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Liam said quickly, over her words. “It’s a bit different in Shiftertown, laddie. I’ve explained it to you.”
Tiger closed his eyes. Liam, Sean, and Connor had told him about the mating rules—the mate-claim signaled to all other Shifters that the female was off-limits to all other males. The subsequent ceremonies performed by the clan leader, one under sunlight, one under the light of the full moon, bound the mates together under the eyes of the Father God and Mother Goddess.
But the Father God and Mother Goddess had never found Tiger in the basement of the experiment station during his nearly forty years of captivity. Why should Tiger wait for them to acknowledge his mate?
Dylan, Liam’s father and a stickler for the rules of Shifters, had admitted to Tiger one day that the rituals were artificial, put into place at a time when Shifters had fought each other nearly to extinction. To avoid Shifter males battling each other to the death over every female, they’d come up with scent-marking and the mate-claim, and the s
un and moon ceremonies performed by the clan leader.
Tiger had listened, wanting to learn everything he could about who and what he was. But he knew—and Dylan knew—that the rules didn’t mean anything. A Shifter recognized his mate when he met her. He scented her, he saw her, he felt her heat, and he knew.
Carly was Tiger’s mate. No doubt about it.
With steady hands, Tiger ripped open his annoying hospital gown and tossed the shreds to the floor. The sheets around his waist bared his chest and abdomen, tanned from working shirtless on cars with Connor. Red circles of bullet holes pockmarked his chest and stomach, blood smeared around them.
The holes had already half closed. Tiger pointed at them.
“The touch of a mate,” he said to Liam. “Heals, you said. Iona said.”
“Shifters are good at healing themselves,” Liam answered, but with less conviction. “And you’re a very strong Shifter.”
A super Shifter, Iona, the woman who’d rescued him, had called him. Iona had been wonderful, and Tiger would always be fond of her. But she hadn’t been his mate.
“Stop this before you confuse me more.” Carly pulled away from Tiger and stood up. “You’re saying I closed that up?” She pointed at a wound, red and angry. “Those holes still look pretty bad to me.”
“They’re not.”
Tiger noted that everyone in the room stood a certain distance from the bed, as though an unseen barrier kept them back. They were afraid of coming too close to his mate, he thought in satisfaction. They were acknowledging her.
“I don’t believe you,” Carly said. “You look terrible, and I feel just awful for getting you hurt on top of everything else. So you let the doctors do their thing. Please?”
Tiger closed his hand around hers again. “Only if you stay.”
She gave him the perplexed look again, then she let out her breath. “Oh, why not? I’m sure I’ll be fired on top of everything else today. What the hell.”
“We’ll see you don’t lose by helping us, lass,” Liam said, in the reassuring way only he could. “Thank you.”
“Least I can do. My mama always said a person should acknowledge everything she’s responsible for, even if she didn’t mean it.” She paused. “Wish Ethan’s mama had taught him that too.”
Tiger felt her pain through her grip on his hand, and his anger surged again. He remembered the surprise and then outrage on Ethan’s face when Carly had bounded through the door to find him sexing another woman. The man had blamed Carly. But a male didn’t cheat on his mate. No matter what.
Which meant Carly had never truly been Ethan’s mate, not even in the human understanding of the bond. With Ethan’s act of betrayal, Carly was free of him. Free for Tiger to claim.
Another voice joined the throng. “Is he sedated?”
Tiger recognized the doctor who, through the first haze of Tiger’s rage and pain, had extracted what bullets remained in Tiger’s flesh. Tiger had come awake on the table and started to change in his panic, which had led to his being chained to the bed again.
Stupid clinic should have let Connor be there to calm him down. Then Tiger might not have flashed back to the sterile experiment rooms in what humans called Area 51, might not have been completely terrified.
“He’ll be all right,” Liam said, using his most charming, most Irish tones. “He just needed a bit of calming, as you can see.”
“Then I need him in the OR to finish.”
The doctor started to walk away, leaving the three nurses and another man in white scrubs looking unhappy.
“No,” Tiger said. Everything in him tensed again.
Carly’s brow puckered as she ran a soothing hand along Tiger’s wrist. “It’s okay. He just wants to sew you up.”
“He does it here. I don’t go back to that room.”
“Why not? It’s where he’ll have all the stuff he needs to put you back together, and sterilized so you won’t get an infection.”
She sounded so reasonable, so calming. And yet, she hadn’t seen the rooms they’d taken him to in the stone building in the desert, where needles and probes had pierced his flesh, where electrodes had crackled through his brain and under his skin. The experimenters wanted to see how much he could stand, so they put him through everything imaginable.
“It makes him remember bad things,” Connor said.
The cub, the youngest of them here, understood. Connor had always understood Tiger more than the others had.
Carly called after the doctor. “Wait. Why can’t you work on him in here?”
The doctor, looking harassed, turned back. “Because the light is bad, and I need my equipment.”
“Bring it in. It’s either that or have all these people fighting to get him to your operating room again.”
The doctor ran a practiced eye over Tiger. “If you guarantee he’ll sit there and let me finish, I’ll do it. I’ll give him something for the pain, but it’s still going to hurt. If not, I’m putting him under heavy sedation, very heavy, you understand? Most people die under that kind of sedation, even Shifters.”
“He’ll be good.” Carly beamed a smile at the man. “Promise. Right?” she asked Tiger.
Tiger closed his hand around Carly’s wrist, feeling it slender and fragile, bones covered with silken skin. “If you stay.”
“I’ll stay.” Carly turned her smile on him, and suddenly the world was right.
Tiger said nothing. He stroked his hand up and down Carly’s forearm, mesmerized by the softness of her, the sweet scent. The doctor walked away, still annoyed. The other Shifters remained outside a certain perimeter around the bed, as did the soldiers behind them.
It didn’t matter. Carly had said she’d stay with him. Tiger would make sure it was forever.
* * *
Carly watched the doctor clean Tiger’s wounds, medicate them, suture the biggest ones, and steri-tape the others, with bandages for all. Tiger lay quietly while he worked, making no noise, holding Carly’s hand but not squeezing it.
No way could Carly have withstood someone poking and prodding tender wounds without sedation. She’d have flinched, fought, cried out, or at least snarled some swear words. Tiger did nothing, said nothing, didn’t move. The commander of the soldiers watched him, but kept his men back.
When the doctor finally walked out, leaving the cleanup to the nurses, Tiger pushed the sheets aside and rolled out of bed, stark naked except for his bandages. Carly tried not to look, but it was sure hard not to. He was a big man, and not just tall and wide. He was big all over. All over. She averted her gaze, but she had to force herself. He was . . . mesmerizing.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked him.
“Home.” The word came out with strength, but also with a wistfulness.
“You can barely walk.”
“I can do it.”
Tiger looked stronger, that was true. But, crap, he’d been shot. In the stomach.
Liam, who apparently was Sean’s brother, started to put his hand on Tiger’s shoulder, then lifted it away before he touched him. He turned to the head soldier. “You can release him to my custody now. He’ll be fine.”
The soldier frowned, light-colored brows drawing down. “Give me a minute.” He turned away, signaling his men to keep watch, pulled out a cell phone, and made a call quietly in the corner.
“We can take it from here,” Liam said to the nurses. “He’s good at healing himself, truly.”
“He can’t do any lifting, bending, running, anything stressful,” the head nurse said in a severe tone. “He has to keep the wounds clean, the dressings changed, and he has to take all the antibiotics. Every single pill. Can you get him to do all that?” She looked at Carly.
“Me?” Carly said, touching her chest. “I don’t—”
“We’ll look after him just fine.” Liam took the piece of paper with the prescription and gave the nurse a smile that would make any woman melt. The nurse, middle-aged, hard-faced, experienced with dif
ficult patients, held out a few seconds before she thawed.
“All right, then,” she said, her tone softer. “You call if there are any problems.” Now she spoke to Liam and Liam alone.
The soldier turned back, his frown even more formidable. “My commander told me to let you take him,” he said to Liam. The man obviously disagreed—strongly—with his commander, but he didn’t look the type to disobey orders. “But if there’s any more trouble with him, I’ll have to take him in.”
“Right you are,” Liam said, not sounding worried.
Tiger was already heading out of the room, pulling Carly behind him. Connor stepped in front of them and held up an armful of folded clothes that smelled newly washed. “You’re forgetting something.”
The nurses didn’t hide their need to stare at Tiger’s body. They’d seen their fair share of naked flesh, but Tiger was different.
He was all muscle, with a liquid tan on his torso and arms, pale below the belt. Large all over, but not too bulging, tight and strong rather than overly bulked. Tiger wore his nakedness casually—Carly noticed that the other Shifters hadn’t seemed to remember he was unclothed until Connor had stopped him at the door.
Tiger slid on the jeans and T-shirt without bothering with underwear. Connor insisted Tiger put on the combat boots he’d brought instead of going barefoot, and Tiger growled impatiently as he tugged them on.
Tiger kept hold of Carly’s hand as they walked through the corridor, down the elevator, and out to the parking lot. Patients and hospital staff stopped what they were doing and stared as the contingent of Shifters moved through.
Liam led, giving a smile and a nod to everyone he passed. The tall tattooed man with the shaved head followed him, drawing more attention. Behind him came Tiger and Carly, then Connor and Sean bringing up the rear. Kids stared, women’s lips parted, men moved to stand protectively in front of women and children.
No one said a word, but again, body language spoke volumes. The Shifters were feared. Even tamed, controlled, and regulated, humans sensed the violence barely contained. Humans pretended to despise or be fascinated by the creatures, but the adult humans who watched these Shifters walk by and out of the building exhibited basic, watchful fear.
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