by V M Black
“He was with the group who came and got you,” Chay said. “He’s got two brothers, Niall and Seamus, and they don’t talk much more than he does.”
“I talk whenever I have anything to say,” Liam rumbled.
“There are about a dozen people who work in the spook shop regularly,” Chay continued. “The rest of my A-team aren’t spooks. They join us in the rec room, but they don’t have much of a reason to be here.”
“Spooks,” she repeated, unfamiliar with the word.
“People who work in signals intelligence,” he clarified. “And the technical support for them. Spooks are the techies. The rest are...field agents of different sorts. Spooks and spies, you know?”
“Okay,” she said, as if she did. “So what do I do here?”
Chay chuckled. “Like Solitaire? Angry Birds? Candy Crush?”
She swiveled her chair with one toe to glare at him squarely. She hadn’t missed the slight note of condescension in his tone. “I’m more useful than that.”
“Of course you will be,” he assured her. “Just as soon as you have your shifting under control. Until then, that’s your only job.”
He started typing rapidly on the keyboard in front of him, and one of the monitors in front of her blanked for a second. Then her name appeared with a button below inviting her to log on.
“No password. Go ahead. Sign in,” Chay urged.
Distrustfully, she clicked the button, and the screen switched swiftly to a desktop view with a handful of simple icons in it.
“You’ve got almost as many movies as Netflix here, a library of tens of thousands of songs here, and bunch of games over here,” Chay said, tapping the various icons on her screen. “There’s an app with a few thousand books—every USA Today and New York Times bestseller for the last twenty years, along with all the classics. Oh, and a few hundred games on the Steam account right there.”
“So I’ve got an electronic babysitter,” she said. Her face felt hot again but for a far different reason. She felt like a child being fed a video while the grownups went away and did the work, and she wasn’t accustomed to being useless.
But Chay didn’t respond to her tone. Instead, he pushed away from the table hard enough to shoot his rolling chair across the aisle to one of the white tables in the middle of the room.
“I’m giving you something to do,” he said mildly, digging among the clutter on the table until he snagged a pair of headphones. Another shove sent him skating back again. “Here you go,” he said, holding them out to her.
Tara pressed her lips together briefly before she took the headphones. “Okay then. You guys will watch me not turn into a panther, and I’ll watch...I don’t know, reruns of NCIS or something.”
“That’s about right,” Chay said evenly. “And when you don’t turn into a panther for long enough, then we’ll reassess.”
“And then I’ll go home?” she asked. She hadn’t even spoken to her mother since that terrible incident in her lecture. How long had it been now? Two days? Three? Her mom would be beside herself after what had happened at the school.
“That’s another thing that will be reassessed,” Chay said calmly.
Tara looked at him for a long moment, studying his face for any meaning behind those words. But his expression was perfectly bland—too bland, but it didn’t help her understand what he meant any better for that.
Her head was hurting, she realized, not the panther kind of ache but the tired kind, and her eyes felt gritty.
Finally, she sighed. “Actually, I’m really tired. I don’t know what time it is, and considering how much time I’ve spend knocked out recently—and thanks for your part in that, by the way—you’d think I wouldn’t be, but somehow, apparently, it’s not the same as sleeping.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Chay admitted. “You’ve got your choice of places to crash, though. Bedroom with video feed or couch without.”
She gave the couch in the corner of the room a long, hard look. She’d slept on far worse in her year of traveling, but a real mattress with real sheets and a real pillow were far more attractive right now—even if it did come paired with being recorded. “I’ll take the bedroom.”
“Right this way,” he said, standing up and leading the way to the only other door in the room.
Tara followed. There wasn’t anything else to do.
Chapter Eight
He opened the door and was surprised that he felt slightly self-conscious. It wasn’t like there was anything private about his quarters, not really. His rooms had more or less just silted into their current state rather than being the result of any kind of planning.
His team saw the front room of the suite often. In fact, it was more of an overflow of the spook shop than anything else, filled with the same white tables that dominated Black Mesa’s nerve center with their various projects in different stages of completion. The huge flat screen TV on one wall had a couch pulled up a few feet back from it with a few of their favorite gaming systems underneath, and there were four different PCs set up in different parts of the room for LAN parties.
“Not what I expected,” Tara said as she stepped down into the room off the raised floor of the spook shop, looking around the chaotic scene.
“What did you expect?” he asked.
She cocked her head at him, her eyes narrowing consideringly. “You know, I’m not sure. Something austere, maybe. Or ultra sleek and modern.”
He smirked. “We’re pretty short on interior designers specializing in ultra sleek and modern.”
“No kidding. Bedroom?” she prompted.
“Other door.” He motioned.
She preceded him, picking her way through the furniture. The door swung open to her touch, and she stepped inside.
“Damn,” she said under her breath. “Are you sure that this isn’t a prison?”
He saw the room through fresh eyes, and he had to admit that it was completely utilitarian, almost brutally so. The queen sized bed was the closest to a luxury that he had, but the mattress sat on a plain IKEA platform frame with the sheets and a brown comforter tumbled over it. There was a dresser in one corner and a closet that had been framed out with studs and drywall. The closet’s metal doors had been added after one unfortunate incident when he’d sleep-shifted and the panther had felt like his wardrobe would be an excellent addition to the nest of blankets he already had—and even better if shredded.
Other than that, the room was empty, the sheer size of it making the few furnishings seem even more sparse.
“I’m a busy guy,” he said lightly.
“This is...depressing,” she said, moving toward the center of the room before she turned back to face him.
“The bed sleeps just fine.”
She looked at the tangle of blankets. “I guess so.”
“There’ll be another brought for you,” he added. He checked his smart watch. “Two hours, tops.”
“So you said.” She shook her head—not at his words, he realized, but at the space.
“I’ve been doing a background check on you,” Chay said abruptly. The words surprised him. He hadn’t had any intention of telling her anything about it.
She didn’t look alarmed. “Trying to find out when someone injected me with...panther?”
“Basically, yeah,” he said, wanting to know if she could add any more than she’d already said.
“I don’t know what you’ll find that can help you,” she said, looking a trifle annoyed. “I’m not hiding anything.”
“Sometimes a fresh perspective can see things that you take for granted,” he offered.
She looked around the room again, frowning. “This is all so new to me. Having this creature inside me. It’s just so...angry,” she explained. “I don’t know why. I don’t know what I’ve done to make it mad. But it is. Yours doesn’t seem angry like that.”
“We’ve worked things out,” Chay said. “We have an understanding now. Most of the time, at least.” Because right
now he was far too acutely aware that he was alone with Tara—not just in any room but in a bedroom, his bedroom.
He concluded that either his judgment was impaired or his self-control was, though he wasn’t sure which.
“Is he always there?” she asked softly, and Chay knew exactly who he was. “Looking out through your eyes? Hearing with your ears?”
“I don’t remember what it’s like to be alone in my head anymore,” he admitted.
He hadn’t ever said that aloud before. His former Indigo Squadron teammates had never talked about it, and even now, when his private crusade was the rescue and rehabilitation of troubled shifters, he left all that talk to the counselors he’d brought into Black Mesa to deal with the traumatized and the ill-adjusted.
Chay hadn’t even asked anyone else if they felt the same way. He’d just assumed they did, and it was one of many things about himself that he preferred to ignore.
For her, it must be a hundred times worse.
“The elves—they said that the panther’s not real. That it’s a biological construct.” Tara looked dubious.
“That doesn’t mean it’s not real,” Chay said.
“I can’t shake this feeling,” she continued. “I don’t know. But I feel like...I’ve always felt kind of like this. Like, this was what was wrong with me all along.”
“Wrong?” A trickle of alarm went through him. “What do you mean, wrong?”
“I’ve always felt different, you know?” she asked. She was looking at him, but her gaze was unfocused, far away. “Like I’m really someone else. Everyone else always seems to know who they are, but not me. That’s why I went to Sudan. You can say it was because I was a good person and I wanted to do great things or whatever...but really, I was just hoping that maybe I’d figure out who that person was. And I didn’t. I mean, I did stuff that I was proud of. We fed people, and we gave them shelter, and we made sure everyone had their shots and clean water and latrines and things.” She shrugged. “And when the government’s army came near, I hid the children with two of the other girls, and Tom and Hobart and the other guys got every gun they could find, and they shot at them until they went away.”
“Shot at them?” Chay repeated.
“Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever been that scared. At least not before I...shifted the first time. There were so few guns and so many people.”
Her gaze was clear and direct. “They killed some, too. I found one of them two days later, out in the bush. There were flies all over him. I’d seen a pretty good number of bodies before then. You know, people running from the war who ended up dying anyway after they got to camp, maybe because they were injured or too weak or just too damned old to make it.”
She took a breath. “But it was the first time I was glad to see that somebody was dead. But it was weird because he looked just like everyone else. I mean, you couldn’t tell that he was one of the bad guys, that he’d probably raped women and hacked children apart with the machete in his belt, when he was lying there, dead. You’d think it would leave some kind of mark, but it doesn’t. And you’d think that I’d look different, somehow, if there was a panther, a killer inside me, but I don’t look any different either.”
“You’re not like them,” Chay said firmly, closing the space between them. He’d seen more than his fair share of bodies—he’d caused far more than his fair share of deaths. But he’d seen the profiles of some of those he’d been sent to kill, and whatever kind of beast he had inside himself, they were the real monsters, not him.
“Are you sure about that?” she asked. She crossed her arms defensively across her chest. “Even then, even at that moment, when I was glad that he was dead, there was a part of me that...didn’t feel it. That always felt everything differently. Wrong. I’d get these headaches when I was a kid, you see, because I was seeing everything two ways, and the other way didn’t make any sense at all.”
She made a face—directed inward, Chay thought. She said, “And now I’m not making any sense. But what I’m trying to say by this whole long-winded thing is that even though this thing in my head, this panther is new, maybe something like it has been there as long as I can remember.”
Chay’s mind reeled at the thought. She was absolutely, without a doubt not a natural shifter. Could it have been lurking in her body not months or a few years but many? It was an old strain. That would make a kind of sense, even if it was impossible according to everything he knew about shifters.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’ll have to do some research—”
“Some more research into me, you mean,” she said.
“That, too.”
She looked at him for a long moment, and he repressed the urge to shift his weight. If he were in his panther form, he’d be pacing now. He could feel the same kind of restlessness rise in her, in the expressions that flickered ever so briefly across her face.
“So, in your research, I bet you’ve seen my pictures with Tom Howe.” Her tone was as inscrutable as her expression.
Frak. He hadn’t seen that one coming. The video feed in his private rooms had switched off when he entered, and now he half-wished that it was on because that would have at least provided some kind of digital chaperone.
As much good as it did last time ....
But he was too acutely aware now that he stood far too close to a very desirable woman in his hands, a woman whose needy body had sent him into madness before, whom the panther within him immediately recognized in a way that Chay still didn’t want to think about.
“I’ve seen your photos with everyone,” he managed to say, his voice perfectly level.
“He was older than me, too,” she pointed out.
Chay didn’t care to talk about that man—more to the point, the panther didn’t. It bristled at the mere mention of his name. But he just said, “That was pretty obvious.”
“It was easier to be with him,” Tara said. “Than someone my own age, I mean. Because...well, he didn’t expect that we were more or less the same. And he didn’t notice that I wasn’t. He wasn’t my first boyfriend, you know. Or my last. There was this Scottish guy that I met in Bhutan of all places—”
“Right,” Chay agreed, cutting her off. This conversation was making him think the kind of thoughts that would get him into serious trouble. It made him want to silence her mouth with another kiss, to push her down on the bed—
He stopped himself.
“Anyhow, I don’t make a habit of seducing older guys,” she said, her breath coming a little faster. “I just wanted you to know. What happened with you and me—it was spontaneous.”
“It was definitely that.” Spontaneous—and amazing. Dammit, but the panther was well roused now, driving Chay’s sense of smell to a higher peak. He could smell the soap and shampoo that she’d just used and the smell of her hair and her skin. He could even smell her sex—and the scent of it, as faint as it was, was like a spike driving slowly through his brain.
She tipped her head back slightly more. “And it definitely won’t happen again. I mean, the cameras are recording right now, right?” There was a light in her eyes that was pleading—but for what, he didn’t know and didn’t want to think about.
“No, they’re not,” he said. He didn’t dare to move because once he did, he knew he couldn’t control the outcome.
She swore softly even as her body inclined toward his.
Chay looked down at her, and he hit the button on his smart watch that set his status to “do not disturb.”
“I really am an irredeemable bastard,” he said. And then he closed the distance between them and kissed her.
Tara seemed to turn to liquid at Chay’s touch, and she opened her lips under his, begging him with it, with the softness of her body against the hardness of his chest. He gathered her ample body to his, one hand snug against her ass, the other sliding up her arm, up her neck until his thumb found her chin and urged her teeth apart.
A shudder ran through her fram
e as she surrendered, and the panther in him roared up at the thought that she was utterly and completely his now, that he could do anything to her, anything at all, and she would give herself over to it. To him.
Her hands were already under his shirt, sliding against his skin. He let her peel it off, and she took advantage of the freeing of her mouth to say, “This is really a bad idea.”
“Entirely,” he agreed even as he helped her pull her own shirt over her head.
“I’m going to be so mad at myself.” She dragged his head down to meet her lips again even as she toed off her shoes. Her mouth was hot and hungry under his, and she shuddered as he pushed his tongue between her lips, stroking the inside of her mouth, tasting her, taking her.
His need for her was like a hammer in his brain, drumming away, pushing him in only one direction. She’d just said a lot of things, many of them possibly crucially important—but nothing that couldn’t wait for a few hours.
Which was good, because right at that moment, the only thing he wanted to do was Tara. And it wasn’t to stop her from shifting. There wasn’t even a pretense of that thought left any longer. It wasn’t because he was taken unawares, because he’d felt this coming from the moment she stepped into his bedroom—maybe even before.
It was because he wanted to, plain and simple.
Her bra followed her shirt, and then he did drive her back to his bed. It had been too damned long since he’d been with a woman. That must be it.
“I’m abusing my position of authority,” he said aloud. “You could feel coerced. Confused.”
“Definitely no on the coerced,” she said firmly even as the backs of her calves came up against the edge of the platform. She went over backwards—and dragged him with her.
Deftly, Chay twisted in midair so that he fell alongside her instead of on top of her on the bed.
“Definitely yes on the confused,” she continued, and she planted a feather-light kiss on one corner of his mouth as his hands skated over her hips and down, taking her pants with them. “So this is probably even more stupid than the first time.”
She kissed the opposite corner of his mouth, her hands roving lower, across his belly to the waistband of his pants, and his already rock-hard cock ached with the need to be inside her. “But just now, I don’t care.” And she kissed him full on the mouth just as his hand slid across her curls to find her clit among them.
