Wild. More wild than she’d ever dared to be. And alive. The dry, layered scents of tiger and man, perfectly blended.
The deer in her wanted to jerk away. The human in her fought envy. And the rest of her wanted to succumb to the allure of the powerful and wild.
Maks opened his eyes, his gaze latching straight onto hers. She froze—feeling the hitch of his breath, seeing his mouth just barely move...waiting for the words.
But this was Maks, and there were no words. His eyes simply rolled back and then closed.
Katie straightened. She took a breath, let it out, and slid into her healer, diving through his dissonant static to focus on the throb of life beneath her hands—fingers running across flannel but feeling the flesh and bone, the belly of the biceps muscle, the strap of the triceps, the groove between them and the hollow of his elbow below.
She barely touched the torn flesh of the entry wound; she didn’t have to. She followed the bullet’s dark tunnel toward bone and nerve and artery, seeing it raw and ragged, seeing the acute nature of it—feeling the hot pain he’d been ignoring and, for an instant, catching her breath on it.
Even as she shook off the distress of the connection, she understood. Whatever had diminished his natural rate of healing—his Sentinel rate of healing—had left him without the resources even to initiate healing on a wound so raw. She’d underestimated that factor, and so he had lost all the ground she’d gained for him earlier.
She gently moved energies; she manipulated blood and tissue and life. Just as she so often did with her massage, when the animals reveled in her touch and the owners had no clue. The bleeding stopped; the ragged feel of the injury faded, the torn fibers and vessels knitting, however tentatively, into a whole.
Enough.
Any more, and she might just kick up a reactive irritation. And then, since he lay quiescent, she went looking around. Looking deeper and wider. Into the throb of shifting color and hazy darkness she’d cut through to reach this healing place. Hunting the core of it and finding—
Maks! Run, baby, don’t look back!
A woman’s cry of despair, a big cat’s wild snarl—
The echoing soprano snarl of a youngling, shifting to a child’s cry—
And then a ripple of darkness, a shift of color...the cough of a tiger’s warning, clamors for help...the weight of a responsibility she couldn’t quite discern.
And finally, the sudden understanding that she’d stumbled into the past. That she glimpsed, in jagged shards, that which had formed the man in her arms.
That which somehow still haunted him, whether he knew it or not.
She eased away from it. She’d meant to explore a healing, not invade his deepest privacy. At least, she meant to ease away from it.
But the intensity of his past wrapped itself around her, startling her with the vivid overlay of intertwined determination, territorial protectiveness...the willingness to do battle. The remembered helplessness of being caught, the utter relief of realizing that he was no longer alone, the fear of change...
That new intimacy came with a lightning surge of physical desire—initiation, the impact of which lingered, as it did for them all. It struck echoes of Katie’s own initiation—the first union with another Sentinel, so carefully matched, the coupling that released every Sentinel to full potential.
Not everyone experienced significant transformation. Katie had simply emerged much more synced to her deer, and had quickly chosen her reclusive way of life. Caught in Maks’s whirlwind impression of the past, she felt him emerge on the other side of initiation to settle back into what he’d always been—always that determination; always that purpose, with the matter-of-fact physical prowess, physical awareness...lingering physical want.
It was the want that rose between them now, pushing back at Katie until she jerked herself free, head rattling back against the security screen.
No. Not free. Just looking at it from inside her own awareness instead of his. But hunger still washed over her skin, a flood of warmth and fluttering sensation. It left her in thrall, aware of every whisper of air across her skin, every tingle of sensation. Maks lay heavy against her.
He was so big. He was tiger. What had she even been thinking, to haul him into her lap for healing?
What had she been thinking, to linger and to explore the whispering fugue of confusion clinging around him?
What the hell was she thinking, to look down into those open green eyes and lower her mouth to his?
* * *
Maks awoke from the tangle of the past and found himself in Katie’s lap. He knew it for hers even before he fully opened his eyes—he knew it from the sensation of her, the long and graceful limbs, the infinitely gentle touch.
Not only in Katie’s lap, but kissing her. Tired and sore, but flushed with her healing touch—and with her gentle nip, the scrape of a pointed canine, a kiss less fierce than it was intimate. A kiss so totally Katie.
He did more than return it. He brought his hand up to thread through her hair—and then, without breaking their connection, he pushed himself up, finding his way to his knees. Her arms crept up to the sides of his face, fingers restless in his hair as she deepened their kiss. His hand found her breast, cupped it, running a thumb across a pebbling nipple. He groaned deeply at her squirming response.
Not until her crossed legs fell open, not until he found her waist and jerked her up to straddle his hips, did she so much as hesitate.
But Maks had woken to the taste of her, and he didn’t care that she was deer and he tiger, or that this wasn’t what he was here to do at all. He cared about Katie, sweet in his arms. He cared about the responsive tremors running through her body and the crush of her breasts between them. He cared about the fiery hot promise surging down his spine and clenching through the core of him, and he cared about the call of something—something—
Katie squirmed against him, her head falling back, a gasp of startled pleasure in her throat. Her hands slid down to clench over his shoulders; she moved against him as if there were no clothes between them at all.
He thrust back at her, all instinct and response, and she cried out as he laid his teeth against the long arch of her neck, scraping skin. He pushed her up against the door, rattling metal and not caring or heeding, only possessing—slapping his hands against that door with fingers digging into metal screening that should have been immutable to his touch.
Fire gathered within him, turning heightened pleasure to a startling intimation of pain, fire inexplicably curling around nerve and bone. It was nothing to be heeded in the face of his need, of her need—of the way she clenched strong legs around him, her pleasure crying free and unfettered and complete. Her eyes had gone huge and glazed, and whatever had taken hold of him had swept her up in its wake, turning a lurking attraction into a burst of sensation.
Maks cried out, too, a harsh sound, his body tightening with hot need, everything within him reaching, reaching—
And suddenly slapped back by a sudden punch of shifting energy, his raging physical need ambushed by an internal whirlwind of something bigger, something greedy, something wanting...
Something so much stronger than he was.
At the startling bolt of pain, he fell out of the exquisite whirlwind and twisted back into himself.
And there was Katie, sagging in his lap, panting—her expression befuddled, confusion quickly coming to the fore.
But even as he struggled with the wash of sensations, the dizzy combination of assault and heady desire, he stopped her when she would have shifted away.
“No,” he said, and his voice reflected his conflict, leaving it rough, and harder than he’d meant to speak to her at all. “No,” he said again, as her eyes widened—as she realized how quickly she’d responded to him, there on the dark porch. “There is no running from this thing between us.”
He saw it right away, the rise of the deer, the deer’s panic in the grasp of the tiger—the struggle impending. He didn’t tig
hten his grip—but he didn’t ease it, either, his hands flattened on either side of her head, her back against the door, no room to disentangle from him.
“No,” he said again, more evenly this time. “Katie Rae, this is the safest you will ever be.”
It startled her. She looked straight at him, the deer-panic receding, her focus returning. “Maks,” she said, and touched his face, her fingers brushing his mouth, lingering there. “But I don’t... But...”
“There is no but,” he told her. “There is what is.” Maks had spent too many years living with what was to doubt it when he saw it. “This—” he closed the insignificant gap between them to kiss her, the merest brush of his mouth over hers “—is.”
She shook her head. “This—” she looked down at her rumpled shirt, her sprawling legs, and the lap in which he held her “—is probably only a reaction to the healing—the connection I established. Or it’s part of what’s going on here, or part of what’s going on with you. It could be not us at all.”
He gave her a gentle tiger’s smile, feeling the predatory nature of it. Possessive. “It’s still what is. Whatever pieces make it that way. Let it be.”
She relaxed against the door, her head tipped in thought, her gaze going inward. “You,” she said. “You’re so close to the tiger. There’s more of your other in you than I’ve ever seen in anyone else. In me.”
He frowned, wondering how she could think of the deer side of herself as other at all.
“I wasn’t trying to pry,” she said, reaching to touch his face again, not quite completing the gesture—as if it might somehow be more intimate than the way she still sat against him. “I did look, but I was trying to help, to see this thing that happens to you. The dissonance.”
He growled a little—just a little, and not at her. One hand rested on her thigh, the thumb straying into intimate territory...casual and possessive.
“I felt it at the station, where I first saw you. And just now, when I found you. But I can’t separate it out from the rest of you. I can only feel—” She shook her head. “So close to the tiger. So unfettered.”
He gave her his most deadpan look.
She pulled back her loose hair, realized the mess of the whole, and gave up on it; the strands fell back around her face with casual grace. When she looked at him, it was with a compassion that startled him. “What happened to you, Maks? There was...something. I saw glimpses... I felt it. I—” She hesitated. “I’m sorry. I really wasn’t there to pry. But I think it matters.”
Not to Maks. “Now,” he said, “is now. This is what is.”
But she was a stubborn deer. “Sometimes then makes us who we are now.”
He felt a low, disgruntled rumble in his chest. “Katie Rae Maddox,” he said. “You see what I am. It is only what I told you, when I first got into your car.”
“Maks Altán,” she said, and touched his face again. “You told me what you do. It’s not the same thing.”
* * *
She’d said something he hadn’t expected to hear, Katie knew that much. She’d known enough to give him space after that, too—disentangling, still full of her own hot confusion.
He’d barely touched her. And yet, there she’d been...sated on the front porch, in the arms of a tiger.
One who’d known how to tame the deer, fear and all.
Later, wandering her loft bedroom while Maks slept in that cluttered first-floor bedroom—she had no idea how to put it all together. Unlike Maks, she couldn’t just accept without understanding. She needed to know that he’d come to respect her seeings and her healing, in the wake of so many little subtle indications to the contrary. She needed to know why her vision had grown so intense...and her body so needy. And she needed to know how—and why—Maks figured into the other things she’d seen. Because it was her job to understand what the warnings meant.
Pretty full of yourself, Katie Rae. Her job was—and always had been—to report what she saw and let brevis sort it out. She might have more practice at that if she hadn’t been looking aside from herself for so long. Squelching herself.
She couldn’t quite blame her neglected talent for failing to fall into line, but it meant she had nothing to work with but disparate pieces. Maks. Glinting metal and splashing blood, a blur of startled green eyes, a muted roar and a cry of pain. The Core at the back of her house, leaving an amulet of silent menace. Images of oppressive dark space and terror, a deep stabbing awareness of wrong...
Nick Carter had no doubt hoped there was nothing amiss here at all—no doubt hoped this assignment would be an easy reintroduction to the field for a recovering Sentinel. But she didn’t imagine he knew just how deeply compromised Maks had become.
And no matter how many times she put all the facts together in her thoughts, rolled them together and tossed them out again, they didn’t fall into any neat pattern. They didn’t tell her what to do next.
They didn’t let her sleep.
Then again, maybe that was for the best. It let her watch while her wounded tiger slept.
Chapter 8
Morning found Maks back on the couch, and Katie at the end of her rope.
She didn’t know where he’d spent the night after she’d left him, or how—whether it had been indoors or out, man or tiger. She only knew his misery was obvious.
But he wouldn’t talk to her. And while in some part of her mind she understood that he’d been through too much in the past twenty-four hours, the rest of her thought she deserved better.
He lay slanted across the couch, his arm cradled and his breathing too uneven for him to be asleep. His brows drew together briefly even as she watched; his breath hitched.
Definitely not asleep.
The yellow cat stropped past Maks’s shins; Maks cracked his eyes open in a kind of bleary surprise.
Katie leaned against the door frame between the living room and the kitchen, her hands wrapped around a mug of early-morning hot chocolate. “You should eat something.”
How she understood that infinitesimal shift of his head to be a refusal to do any such thing, she wasn’t sure. She raked her eyes over the length of him, taking up more room than the couch had to offer, and didn’t even have to delve into her healer’s perceptions to see what the day before had taken from him. “If you’re hurting—” If. Right. “—I can help you.”
She barely heard his response, a raspy murmur that added up to another shake of the head. She set the mug down on the little entertainment stand and took a frustrated step in his direction.
His eyes widened, the tiger looking out with alarm; he lurched to his feet and headed for the door, ragged words in his wake. “Can’t risk it.”
Her temper flared at the implication of those words. The previous evening’s events had been unexpected, but she was ready for them now—and he’d been the one who’d said to go with the moment. Unless he simply didn’t understand—didn’t believe—the healing that had come with their connection the previous evening. “Maks, this is stupid. I can make things so much easier for you—”
He’d been aiming for the door. He walked right into the frame, groping for the handle a good six inches away. Katie froze, horrified—ashamed at herself for driving him to leave when he could barely navigate, startled at his condition in the first place. “Maks—!”
Maks froze, his hand falling slowly back to his side—as if he, too, had been confronted with his own weakness. He stood that way for a long moment, swaying slightly. When he shifted, it changed the entire nature of his stance—turned it from wild-in-flight to curiosity-got-the-cat. His head lifted just enough so she knew he’d caught the scent from her mug. “Is that hot chocolate?”
“Yes,” she told him. “Would you like some?”
* * *
Maks needed help back to that couch—and he knew without a doubt that she wouldn’t have left him there to heat more milk if she’d allowed herself to listen with her healer’s skills. Then, she would have heard the buzz of dissonant energi
es bouncing around within him; she might have guessed that his vision throbbed with color and echoes.
She might have realized that he was totally screwed up—and if she hadn’t immediately called brevis, she would have tried to fix it all.
Not again. Not until he understood more about it...not until he was sure he could control it.
But he was grateful for the hot chocolate. And he was grateful when she pressed a hand to his shoulder and said she had an equine house call, and a stop to make on the way home...but she wouldn’t go unless he promised he’d rest right there until she got back.
She didn’t repeat her offer to help. For that, he was most grateful of all. For as much as he wanted the intimacy of her healer’s touch, he couldn’t expose her to his own unpredictable nature.
It didn’t bother him that he’d almost taken her on the porch. But that she’d lacked intent...that she’d had doubts...
Yeah, that bothered him.
It was up to Maks to figure out Maks.
But mostly he just slept, right there on the couch with the sweet dregs of the hot chocolate soothing his mind. He slept until the yellow cat—which had claimed a tight little spot between his hip and the back of the couch—leaped down to the floor.
The movement woke him from a dead sleep full of fears and portents and pain, mixing energies and confusion. He leaped from the couch in a fever dream of fury, landing as tiger...claws digging into the plain pine planking of the living room floor. The world whirled around him, a cacophony of sensation, and he flattened to a crouch, ears against his skull—the tiger armed and dangerous and completely out of control, driven by the need to strike back at that which struck from within.
The yellow cat, back arched and tail puffed huge, froze against the screen door like a Halloween silhouette, hissing fiercely—but only until he bounced out on his toes to smack Maks soundly across his whiskered muzzle. Then he dashed off, back still arched and tail stuck up in defiance.
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