by Nalini Singh
Surprised by her shyness with him—no matter their years apart, they had never been strangers—he ran his lips along her jaw and nuzzled gently into her neck. Her hand rose from his shoulder to push into his hair. It was tempting to take his other hand off the back of her chair and stroke it down to her breasts, but he kept it where it was, his grip white-knuckled. Slow. This had to be a seduction not of the body alone but of the mind, too. He’d lost Tally once. Damn if she was ever leaving him again.
“Why not?” he whispered against her neck, flicking out his tongue to taste the lush femininity of her skin.
She jerked but then, to his shock, nipped at his ear with sharp little human teeth. He’d never before had to worry about spilling in his jeans. “I haven’t forgotten the question.” But he had realized that Tally was going to drive him insane in bed. God, he couldn’t wait.
“It’s just so…well, the whole thing seems very embarrassing and undignified.”
It was the last thing he’d expected to hear. The leopard wasn’t quite sure how to react. “Well, now,” he said after getting his voice back, “that’s a challenge if ever I heard one.”
Her hand clenched in his hair. “I didn’t mean it to be.” She sounded very young and very honest.
Unexpectedly, he felt the same way. “How about you let me? Once?” Right then, he could’ve been a teenager trying to talk his date into the backseat. But only if that date had been Tally—he’d never flirted this way with any other. Neither had she. He knew that in his gut.
“Clay.” Her face was hot against his cheek, the tendons of her neck stretched taut. “We aren’t going there. I told you.”
He began to kiss his way up her neck. “Just once,” he said, pressing a kiss below the curve of her ear and drinking in her responsive shiver. “You can even set a time limit.”
“Stop it.” But she made no effort to halt him as he nibbled his way along her jaw and back up to her mouth. “We aren’t going to sleep together.”
“Fine, we can do it with you on the kitchen table,” he murmured, drowning in the rapid beat of her pulse. It echoed the thunder of his own. “Or maybe on the cushions with you on your hands and knees. I like that one.”
She moaned and the kiss this time was open and hot and wet. When they broke apart, her eyes were huge, her lips bruised. “No.”
He gave in to the leopard’s urge to bare his teeth. “Why not? We’re good together.” And she sure as hell wasn’t going to be touching any other men. A growl built up in his throat.
“You’re my friend.” She scowled. “Sex will mess that up.”
He looked at that stubborn mouth, those expressive eyes, and suddenly understood what she couldn’t say. Sex had ruined her childhood, scarred her so badly that she’d used it as a weapon to hurt herself. For her it was nothing good, nothing that could be allowed into this relationship.
Because, he understood at last, this relationship was important.
His beast calmed. It wasn’t the calm of surrender but that of a predator sizing up his prey. “I’m a healthy adult male,” he began.
“And you have needs.” All softness leaked out of her face. “Spare me the lecture—if I don’t give it to you, you’ll get it from somewhere else. Do I have it right?”
CHAPTER 21
Clay decided it would be impolitic to laugh. If she’d been a leopard, she’d have been showing him her claws about now. “Not quite.”
“What, there’s been a new development?” she snorted. “Men are all the same.”
“As a healthy adult changeling male,” he continued, ignoring her glare, “touch is part of my life. I won’t turn into a raving lunatic if I don’t get it—living without a pack for so many years taught me how to go without the kind of touch most of DarkRiver takes for granted.”
She continued to watch him, eyes narrowed.
“But,” he said, “it’s important to me.” He was known as a loner but that had never meant exclusion. Not in DarkRiver. “Same as when I was a kid.”
She folded her arms. “You just said you got used to not having it so much when you were young.”
“No, I said I got used to living without the kind of touch the pack takes for granted,” he corrected. “I had another kind of touch to keep me sane. I had you.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, arms falling to her sides.
But he could see she did remember. All those times when she’d crawled into his lap, neither of them saying a word as he held her and they watched the sun set over the broken edges of the city. All those hugs she’d given him without guile. All those days she’d held his hand as he led her safely through the junkyard.
“That was friendship.” Her eyes filled with memory. “You were my best friend.”
“I still am.” He always had been, in spite of what he might’ve said in anger.
“So, why…?”
“Is that all you want? That we be friends?”
A hesitation, then she nodded. “Friends.” Talin needed this relationship to be something pure, unsullied by lust and the evil it spawned.
“And if I need the touch of a friend from you, will you give it to me?”
Wary of the cat’s nature, she looked into his face. “Friends don’t kiss.”
“Actually, a small kiss given to a packmate is considered normal,” he told her, “but I won’t ask that of you if it makes you uncomfortable. I’m asking about the things you did before.”
The hugs, the friendly contact, without expectation, without the dark stain of sex. “Yes.” She smiled and wrapped her arms around him. “Yes.”
His own came around her. “Good.”
Her smile threatened to crack her face. This would work. Without desire to sully up the waters, maybe they could forget the mistakes they had both made and go back to the innocence of what had once been between them.
Clay hoped to God he knew what he was doing. Sitting there on the carpet in Nate and Tamsyn’s living room, his legs sprawled out in front of him, it was all he could do not to groan aloud in frustration. A few hours ago, Tally had agreed to a friend’s touch. What if she never took the step into accepting a lover’s? And he would try to become her lover, of that he was certain.
By leopard logic, he was her friend, therefore any touch of his was a friend’s touch. That bit of feline reasoning gave him space to play with her and slowly, oh-so-slowly, convince her that sex between them didn’t have to mean the loss of everything good. What he refused to consider was that he might fail in that endeavor.
“Sorry I’m late,” Mercy’s voice broke into his thoughts.
With her arrival, all the sentinels—Clay, Vaughn, Nate, Dorian, and Mercy—were there. Lucas sat on the floor opposite Clay, Sascha curled up on the sofa behind him. Vaughn’s mate, Faith, usually attended, too, but had decided to sit upstairs with Tamsyn and Tally today. Clay was a little worried about that. Then again, he thought with a burst of possessive pride, Tally was more than capable of looking after herself.
“Okay,” Lucas said, “this is about the Rats.” He laid out the facts. “Do we accept their offer and give them free run of the tunnels?”
“Would they be reporting back to us?” Mercy asked from her armchair.
Lucas nodded. “The pact equals a formal acceptance of our rule.”
“Big decision,” Nate said, “letting another predator, even a weak one, in on our patch.”
“They get aggressive, the pact’s nullified.” Lucas’s face was icily practical. “They’ll be dead within hours.”
“Strategically,” Vaughn said, “their range is one of our most vulnerable spots-our beasts don’t like it down there. If the Psy learn enough about us to take advantage of that, they could do a hell of a lot of damage.” He turned. “Clay?”
“I agree.” Oddly enough, despite the aggressive lure of his beast, this was what he brought to the sentinels—a perspective shaped by his humanity. It was less because of his genetic inheritance than t
he fourteen years he’d spent pretending to be fully human. That human side could look beyond the leopard’s territorial instincts. “Teijan’s solid—that’s why it took him so long to decide. He won’t break the deal if we don’t.” There was a streak of honor in the rat that might’ve surprised those who judged him on the nature of his beast.
Dorian began to play his ever-present pocketknife in and over his fingers, the absent movements smooth as white lightning. “I’ve dealt with Teijan—trading info. His people aren’t the best fighters, but they’re excellent spies. Human members included.”
Lucas raised an eyebrow. “Takes one to know one?”
Dorian’s grin was quicksilver. “Something like that.”
“At our initial meeting to discuss a formal pact, they struck me as honest though wary,” Sascha said, speaking for the first time. “Teijan won’t give his loyalty lightly, but I don’t think he’d betray an alliance either. There’s something very proud about him.”
“That a professional opinion?” Dorian asked. “Did you read him, Sascha darling?”
Sascha scowled at the blond sentinel. “That would be unethical. My instincts say he’s trustworthy.”
Dorian shrugged. “Your instincts are those of an empath.”
Clay agreed. Sascha might not have done a conscious reading, but she had to have picked up something that had led her to make that statement. “Maybe you need to have another meeting with Teijan and his people.”
“I’m not reading them.” Sascha’s scowl grew deeper.
Lucas reached up to tug at the end of her plait. “Damn ethics.”
“I’ll go to the meeting,” she said, slapping away his hand but with a smile edging her lips, “and I’ll let you know what I think, but it’ll be my opinion, nothing else.”
“Jeez, Lucas,” Dorian muttered, “I thought you said you were corrupting her.”
Sascha threw a cushion at him. Laughing, Lucas caught Dorian’s return volley. “Stop teasing my mate. She’s in a temperamental woman mood.”
Mercy’s low growl filled the air.
Dorian snorted. “You’re just mad because you drew the short straw.”
“Why do I have to be the liaison with the wolves?” Mercy demanded. “Riley is such a damn stick in the mud, I want to—” She clawed her hands and made feral sounds.
“I’ll lend you a knife,” Dorian drawled. “That way, you won’t get your girly nails dirty.”
Mercy tackled him in a pounce that Dorian fielded with expert grace. He still failed to keep her from pinning him to the ground—because he was laughing too hard.
Clay looked around at his grinning packmates and knew Tally belonged in this circle. She was his now. No one and nothing—not her fears, not that damn disease—was going to keep her from him.
Talin had thought of Sascha as a tough sell, but Lucas’s mate had nothing on Faith. While the small, curvy redhead had the same night-sky eyes as Sascha, the similarity ended there. Faith’s smile was rare, an indefinable darkness to her that Talin recognized—because she held echoes of the same thing inside herself.
“So, you knew Clay in childhood?” Faith asked as they sat in the large rumpus room upstairs. “He’s never mentioned you.”
Talin felt a stab of hurt followed by irritation. Who was this woman to question her about Clay? “Unsurprising, really. We were very young the last time we saw each other.” But he had walked in her soul every day of her life.
“I knew about you,” Tamsyn said from where she sat in an armchair between Faith and Talin. She was knitting something using a green wool that reminded Talin of Clay’s eyes. “‘My Tally,’ that’s what he called you.”
“You knew?” Faith frowned, the expression so subtle it was as if she hadn’t yet learned to share her emotions without shields. “Of course, you’ve known him much longer.”
Tamsyn continued to knit as she talked. “Yes. But he’s become good friends with you very quickly. You must have some kind of magic.”
The jealousy that hit Talin was a vicious creature, tearing and ripping and violent. “I guess he must’ve developed a thing for helpless women.” The bitchy comment was out before she could stop it.
Tamsyn’s knitting needles paused, then resumed. Faith raised an eyebrow. “What makes you think I’m helpless?” Her smile was ice.
Talin wasn’t backing off, not after the cracks Faith had taken at her. “You look like a touch would bruise you.” The other woman’s skin was a creamy gold with not a freckle in sight. “The word that comes to mind is fragile.”
Tamsyn laughed. “Sorry, ignore me. You two go on.”
Talin glanced between the DarkRiver women, felt a flush creep up her neck. “Clearly I’m missing something.” The sense of exclusion hurt all the more because she’d thought Tamsyn liked her.
“I’m sorry, Talin.” There was no laughter in Tamsyn’s gentle voice. “I was only thinking of what Clay would say if he heard you two.”
Talin kept her attention on Faith. “What are you, a telekinetic or something?” she asked, very aware of being outside the closed circle of Clay’s new family.
Faith’s eyes were intent, eerie in their focus. “I see the future.”
“You’re an F-Psy?” A being so rare that Talin didn’t know anyone who had ever actually met one. “A cardinal F-Psy?”
“Yes. Believe me when I tell you—the things I see, they’re not for the weak.”
“I take back the crack about you being fragile then,” she said. “But friend or not, you have no right to get between me and Clay.” She might be a puny, powerless human, but just let anyone, even a cardinal, try to keep her from Clay.
“You and Clay. So there is a relationship?”
“Yes.” With that single word, Talin felt a fundamental shift inside of herself. “If you have something to say about that, say it to my face instead of dancing around it.”
Tamsyn’s needles stopped completely, but Faith didn’t flinch. “I see the future. Sometimes, I see things about people who matter to me.”
That destroyed Talin’s anger as nothing else could have done. “What?” she whispered. “What do I do to Clay?”
“I don’t know.” Faith’s response was quiet, her voice so crystal clear it reminded Talin of Jon’s. “But what I do know is that the future hasn’t yet changed.”
“What does that mean?” She wanted to shake the foreseer, make her stop talking in riddles.
“It means that whatever you are, you’re not yet the woman who’ll stop him from crossing the final line…from losing his humanity.”
CHAPTER 22
Max turned to block the attack an instant too late.
They fell on him in a sadistic swarm, kicking and punching. They didn’t yell, didn’t scream, and their utter silence was a threat in itself. He fought back, but there were too many. After a while, his world narrowed down to a repetitive chorus.
The thud of flesh on flesh, the rasp of skin against the asphalt, heavy, pained breaths. A trickle of warm blood down his face.
The sound of a gun being fired. Then…nothing.
CHAPTER 23
Clay took one look at Talin’s face when she came downstairs into the kitchen and knew she’d gone head to head with Faith. She stopped with a good foot of space between them. Scowling, he closed the distance and took her stiff, cold hand. When she tried to pull it away, he had to remind himself to act civilized. “I thought we were friends.”
That made her press her lips tight, but she stopped fighting him.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Silence. “Fine. I’ll ask Faith.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you in love with her?”
Where the hell did women get ideas like this? “She’s Vaughn’s mate.”
“So?”
“So, what?” Clay shoved a hand through his hair. “Meddling in each other’s business is what packmates do. I don’t like it much, but you learn to live with it.”
“She thinks she has right
s over you.”
Now this was interesting. “Your possessive side is showing again, Tally.”
“Stop it.” She tugged at her hand.
He refused to let go. “She does have rights over me,” he said. “Just like I have rights over Sascha or Tamsyn. It’s about looking after your own. They’re Pack.”
“And I’m not.”
“Not yet.” Wanting to possess her until his scent was a permanent marker on her skin, he pulled her toward the door. “Come on, we need to get to this meeting on time.”
They were there in plenty of time as it turned out. Entering the restaurant, Clay let Talin talk. She’d been quiet on the ride over and he knew her well enough to know she was working things through in her own head. That could be dangerous, but he was playing for keeps and he wasn’t going to lie to her. Distract while he persuaded, but never lie.
“We’re here to meet someone,” she told the maître d’.
The rigid man looked first at Talin’s jeans and the thin V-necked sweater she’d pulled on over her top, before moving to Clay in his jeans and white T-shirt. “I believe you have the wrong establishment,” he suggested, his nose so high, it was a wonder he was able to see them over it. “The nearest bar is two blocks over.”
Clay waited to see what Talin would do. He could almost see the steam coming out her ears. “Where’s the nearest unemployment office?” Saccharine sweet and oh-so-innocent. God, she turned him on when she got all pissy like that.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.” A sniff.
“You will pretty soon if this is the way you treat your guests.” Her voice turned to steel. “I could be anyone.”
The man smirked. “Your clothes give you away, my dear. If you’re going to play in grounds above your station, I suggest you get a better costume. And,” he sneered, “a more refined companion.”
That last made Tally narrow her eyes. “Why, you stiff-necked prick. My companion is worth a thousand of an arrogant snob like you.”
