by Nara Malone
“You think you’ll forget this?” He shook his head, stepped back and pulled up his jeans. “I know I won’t.” When he had his pants fastened, he reached to help her up. “I want exactly what you want. I want more than you know how to want. But this is not the time or place.”
He took off his jacket, then his shirt. He helped her into his shirt, gave her a kiss that brought him right to the brink of stripping her naked again.
He leaned back, cupped her face between his hands, one thumb stroking reddened skin along her jawline where his morning stubble had rubbed her raw. He gazed into her eyes as if he might find the key to unlocking her if he just looked long enough. Allie’s shields were back up. On a sigh, he bumped his forehead gently against hers, rubbed cheeks with her, grabbed his jacket and walked way.
* * * * *
Marcus had to sit for a minute in his truck, rest his head on the steering wheel, rein in his lust-soaked mind with long, deep breaths. She hadn’t recognized him. He hadn’t learned a blessed thing more about her, or Hella. Strike that. He’d learned she could make him lose his mind. He’d learned she could rip through self-control he’d spent centuries refining. From the moment he’d scented her desire, felt the sweet humming sensation reach to pull him in, he’d been someone else. Not a side of himself he didn’t know, but a side he’d taken pride in mastering—the beast within. He might have been more successful controlling himself if Allie’s inner wild-child hadn’t chosen that moment to come out and play.
Marcus put the truck in reverse and mashed the gas, shooting backward in a spray of water and gravel. If he hurried he could make it to her street and assure himself she was safely home.
How could she not recognize him? Why in hell would she give herself to a stranger in the park at dawn?
It hadn’t struck him until he held her at the edge of orgasm, even at the height of passion with all her senses open to him, there hadn’t been a glimmer of recognition in those pretty green eyes.
So all those visits he’d made to the newspaper office to purchase and approve unnecessary ads were completely forgettable. He was forgettable?
He found a parking place close enough to observe, but far enough back to remain unobserved. He eyed the lopsided boardinghouse where she lived. New green gave life to the scraggly yard behind a sagging chain-link fence. Small daffodils poked their cheerful heads from among the weeds around a moss-speckled birdbath. It might be charming with some attention. He didn’t like the idea of her in a place so obviously neglected.
She was crossing the ball field, her dark hair whipped around her head like the tails of a flogger. His shirt reached to her knees. The rain came down sideways. She carried her clothes, a dark bundle, pressed to her stomach. Her chin was tucked to her chest and he doubted she noticed the storm. She had the slow dreamy gate of someone deep in contemplation.
At the curb, she stopped, turned and looked back toward the woods for a moment. Then she shrugged and jogged across the street and covered the remaining distance to her door. Her room was off a side porch. First floor. It made her such an easy target for prowlers. He tried to leash his protective urges, refocus on the original task. Where was Hella? In all his encounters with Allie there’d never been the slightest sign or scent of a cat. He scanned the yard. He and Jake had already inspected it and her apartment. The only way to discover what happened to Hella was to get closer to Allie. Casual encounters hadn’t produced anything useful so that had left no alternative but getting more intimately involved, use sex to part the curtain around her thoughts. But how could he have been prepared for his reaction to her reaction?
She pushed a key in the lock, jiggled the handle, kicked at the bottom and the door finally swung back. With a last thoughtful look across the field to the woods, she went in and the door slammed shut behind her.
What baffled him most was her willingness. Everything he knew about Allie told him she would never let a stranger past a handshake and yet he was certain she didn’t know him this morning. Something about the encounter was out of step, out of her control and out of his. As driven as he’d been to take, taking things further would have been dangerous. Not that he’d let that defeat him. He’d figure out what went wrong and fix it. Once he was back in charge things could move forward. Forward meant finding out what had happened to Hella. Forward meant exploring Allie more thoroughly.
He started the truck and smiled when he thought of her looking back to the park before going inside. Maybe he was not so forgettable now. Maybe. He didn’t like this uncertainty. One way or another, he intended to become the least forgettable male in her life.
* * * * *
Allie leaned against the door. A smattering of white paint chips sprinkled the floor. Back to reality, facing the grim existence she was trying to crawl out of, she couldn’t believe what she had just done, almost done. She didn’t have much, but she was a long way from the skinny girl who had shown up at Franny’s diner for a dishwashing job. She’d earned her way into her own place and using her talents from the old life one last time, had put together enough of a resume and documentation to land an entry-level job designing ads at the local paper. It didn’t pay much, but was more socially acceptable than creating documents to give people new identities. Socially acceptable and invisible were Allie’s only goals.
She was soaking wet and half naked, trembling. Shivering would be a reasonable reaction, but her skin was still warm and flushed with desire. Her trembling wasn’t triggered by cold, but emotion, something primal, nameless.
She’d thought the greatest threats were injury or death, but there were worse consequences than death. She couldn’t believe she’d let a stranger fill her mind so completely that there’d been no room for common sense. She winced at the thought of how close she might have come to throwing her hard-won progress away over the need to please a man. The memory of his eyes closing, that look of intense pleasure moving over his features had her catching her breath again. The power to make herself needed was her drug of choice. The sexual power she’d barely flirted with lit a craving so intense she didn’t dare explore it.
Her old life had ended over pleasing a boy and failing a man. That Jason had survived the wrath their teenaged explorations unleashed was a miracle. That she’d escaped before Eddie could exact a similar retribution on her was because a prostitute had taken pity on her and helped her get away. Allie had been too frightened at the time to consider that in saving Allie the woman had set herself up to take whatever special misery Eddie had intended for Allie. A vague awareness that the life she’d had before Eddie had been more horrific than life with Eddie didn’t lessen the shame. She squeezed her eyes shut against memories, pushing every image, every spark of color from her thoughts until only the velvet black of peace occupied the space behind them.
She pushed up to her feet, peeled out of the shirt, letting it fall to the scarred wood floor. Allie stepped over it and headed for the shower.
Under the hot spray she tried to wash away regrets. She turned the water as hot as it would go and still, she shivered. She picked up a yellow bar of cheap deodorant soap. She wished there was a soap that could permanently scrub her mind free of old memories. With shaking hands she rubbed the bar over her pussy and wished even more the soap could clean deep enough to make her skin forget the feel of the stranger’s wicked fingers between her legs.
* * * * *
“Advertising department, this is Allison.”
“I believe you have something of mine.”
Allie felt as if someone had snapped their fingers and time, breathing, heartbeat all stopped in that instant. Him.
“Hello?”
“Wrong number.”
“Is it?” That voice trickled in her ear, down her spine, soothing away tension like the sweet notes of a jazz piano. “Then why don’t you hang up?”
She tried to resist its lure and stay practical. “How do you know where I work? Are you stalking me? Watching?”
“I just want to talk
to you.”
She was silent. Something about his voice left her feeling fuzzy, intoxicated.
“Hello?”
She couldn’t decide what to say to him. What she should do was hang up. She didn’t.
“Why me? What do you want from me? Did you plan what happened this morning?”
“This is better explained in person.”
“Look, I don’t know you…” Her brain scrambled for an excuse.
“Don’t you?”
Cold so deep it hurt to breathe settled over her. She didn’t know. Could he be a business acquaintance of Eddie’s? Was he just a casual acquaintance? Did he work here at the paper, or frequent the diner? She didn’t know. It drove her crazy that she never knew. He wasn’t familiar enough that she recognized his voice this morning, or had she? She wasn’t sure. The paper under her right hand crumpled as her fingers curled into a fist. She took the offense.
“So you are stalking me.”
“Sweetheart, a lamppost could stalk you.”
Hang up! Hang up, her sensible side demanded. Her hand tightened on the receiver. She couldn’t resist the pull of his voice.
“I did wait for you this morning,” he said. “I didn’t intend things to get so out of control. When we go where we need to go, Allison, at least one of us needs to be in control.”
Warmth spread through her middle, tingling resonated through her pussy with every word that slid from his golden tongue into her ear.
“Tell me you haven’t been thinking of me. When you answered the phone it was in your voice. A sexy purr.”
“Advertising Department? That’s a sexy greeting? You just got out of jail, didn’t you?”
His heavy sigh had her trembling again, the image of him with his head tipped back, throat working, floated behind her eyes. She’d wrung a thoroughly different kind of sigh from him then. She fought to keep her voice from sounding anything close to sexy. “I’ll take that as a yes. I’ll report you if you keep harassing me.”
“I am not a criminal. Look, we’ll talk at lunch.”
“I don’t do lunch with strange men.” She didn’t do lunch with anyone, but she didn’t want him to know that.
“Do you do what we did this morning?”
She chewed her lip, glanced around the office, hoped no one could see the effect he had on her.
“Of course not.”
“We need to talk, Allie. I’ll meet you at the diner. The usual time. I know you won’t be late.”
There was a soft click and then a dial tone.
The use of her nickname unnerved her further. He knew where she went to lunch. He knew when. He knew she took pride in being on time. He knew too much, possibly much more than he’d revealed so far. The situation smacked of Eddie. He’d sent someone to find her and by the guy’s own admission things had not gone as he intended. What did he intend? To blackmail her into more sex if he kept her whereabouts to himself?
She didn’t want to run. She’d made a good life for herself in Greyville. Had friends. Friends who would be in danger if this man was the kind of trouble she suspected he was. It wouldn’t take more than ten minutes to pack what she owned. She opened her web browser and selected Greyhound.com from her favorites list.
Chapter Two
Marcus flipped the phone shut and before he could stow it in Jake’s desk drawer, Oliver—a liberated lab rabbit—increased the pressure to find Hella tenfold. Marcus’ guilt deepened. He was supposed to be watching over the shop and Oliver while Jake made a quick trip to his upstairs apartment in search of something or other he needed to fix a computer. Not that paying better attention to Oliver, or shooing him from Jake’s laptop, would have prevented this inevitable evolutionary milestone from occurring. Sentience confirmed.
As much as he hated the human practice of creating parahumans by implanting human neurons in animal brains, he had to admit that hybrids were endearing little creatures, at least the ones he’d rescued so far.
One long ear twitched and Oliver’s paw hovered a moment, then zeroed in on a particular key, and pressed a paw over the next letter. Marcus was trying to convince himself what he saw on the screen was random, coincidental. After all, it wasn’t an actual word.
bunnym
Oliver sat on his haunches, whiskers wiggling, paw hovering, head tipped sideways as he studied the screen. Mimicry, Marcus decided. Jake sat in front of the screen nearly every waking hour. Didn’t all young animals mimic their caregivers? Oliver’s paw descended again. The “m” vanished. A space appeared, followed by an “m” and an “e”.
Marcus slid a palm under the bunny’s ample middle and tucked him firmly in the crook of his left arm. Now, how to erase the bunny’s addition without wiping out the lines of programming code Jake had above them? Beyond the basic letters and numbers, several keys were labeled. “Esc” and “Del” meant nothing to him. “Enter” sounded ominous. “Backspace” sounded promising.
It was. He backspaced, erasing the statement letter by letter. He needed a backspace key for time, something to delete Oliver’s experiences minute by minute. He needed an undo button for the image branded in his brain—Hella caged somewhere, her bid to free herself and her little ones defeated. Confirmation that she might comprehend death or realize that her offspring were tortured in unthinkable ways had his frustration level rising like mercury in a thermometer. And now this.
bunny me
The concept itself was more of a feat than communicating with symbols. The concept of a “me”, that “me” in Oliver’s case meant bunny, was a level of self-awareness only attributed to Pantherians and—to a lesser degree, of course—to humans.
Marcus stepped back. His fingers found the special spot behind Oliver’s right ear, dipped into silky black fur and rubbed. Oliver tipped his head to get the full effect, his eyes closed.
“Don’t do that again,” Marcus whispered.
Oliver’s teleporting siblings had caused enough trouble.
“Besides, if you mess up one of Jake’s computers we’ll be back to finding you a new home.” Not that Jake had formally agreed to keep Oliver. Marcus had used the old “just until I find someone to take him” line.
Oliver’s eyes opened. He looked into Marcus’ eyes, a clear steady gaze Marcus assumed was meant to impart some knowledge, but he couldn’t find a connection the way he had with Hella. He had to rely on the inferior spoken words to covey his messages.
“Let’s keep this our secret. Okay?”
There was no sign of understanding, just the same steady gaze.
The heavy thud of Jake’s boots on the stairs ended the stare-down.
“Thanks for watching the shop, Magus. You’re not mucking around with my laptop, are you?”
Marcus turned. “Guilty.” He tried to hand Oliver off to Jake.
Jake backed away and folded his arms across his broad chest, shaking his head, a rusty mane of curls bouncing to give emphasis. “Sorry, Magus. You know I would follow you into the pits of hell. The place you found him probably qualifies, but if you’re going to insist on stealing these lab experiments, you can’t keep dropping them off on me.”
“It’s Marcus now, Jake.”
“I don’t see why I can’t address you with the respect you deserve in private and don’t try changing the subject.”
“I appreciate your loyalty, my friend, but you need to make using my first name second nature. If we’re going to avoid unwanted attention, we need to conform to local customs, blend in rather than stand out.”
Not one to dwell on errors, Marcus moved back to the problem in hand. He cradled the bunny and stroked its belly, watched it go limp with pleasure. At seven feet and more than two hundred and fifty pounds, Jake’s agitation seemed out of proportion to the size of the problem. “He’s barely as big as a bread loaf. How much trouble can he be?”
“Obviously there was trouble. Didn’t you give him to Ben? Why is he back with you? Or, more accurately, with me?”
Marcus shrugged, ke
pt his tone light. “Living in a house with a pack of Pantherian wolves made Oliver nervous.”
Jake pursed his lips, scratched at his beard. “And how did that nervousness reveal itself?” Jake knew him too well. But Marcus knew Jake better. The body of a giant but the heart of a marshmallow. Jake was drawn by the innocent trust of the tiny scrap of fur. He’d moved closer. Marcus offered again and this time Jake cupped the bunny in his palm. Oliver looked more the size of a honey bun in Jake’s big hand.
Marcus tucked his hands in his jacket pockets and moved away before he began his answer to Jake’s question. “He’s exceptionally bright and gifted. I don’t think Ben quite appreciated his talents.”
Jake looked up, one eyebrow cocked, waiting for more.
“He’s not a teleporter.” Rabbits that could vanish and reappear in a different location at will were not terribly popular as pets and Marcus had a hard time finding homes for the litter he’d rescued. The pockets of Pantherian males living among humans didn’t want to risk exposure, but they were the only reasonable adoption option. Taking them back to Pantheria would open a fierce political debate—as long as the governing council didn’t know about his rescue missions, they couldn’t forbid them.
Marcus moved the carcass of a computer tower from a chair to the workbench beside it and sat before sliding a glance Jake’s way. “He chewed things, electrical cord, shoelaces.”
Of course, cord-chewing rabbits and computer shops weren’t an ideal combination…
Instead of the rejection Marcus had expected, Jake’s hand tightened protectively around the bunny, a sheltering curve of fingers. The little one wriggled his ears when the movement rolled him back to his belly, but nestled there, unafraid. “They probably didn’t give him enough attention. He hasn’t chewed anything here.”
Jake’s shop was littered with the innards of a variety of electronic devices. Open cases spewed cables and circuit boards. A few showed signs of life through a spinning fan or blinking light. Marcus was tempted to ask how Jake could tell the bunny had kicked his cable-nibbling habit, but decided to shut up while he was ahead. Meantime, Jake was doing a fine job of painting himself into the corner of becoming Oliver’s permanent caregiver.
