by V M Black
“No. Only until you learn to control your shifting,” he said lightly.
She searched his eyes for the source of confidence behind his words, hoping it wasn’t just bravado. “I don’t understand how I’m supposed to do that. When she—it—comes out, it wins. Every time. You can send it back, but otherwise, I just have to wait until she feels like leaving again. I’ve never won against her. And I don’t know how. You might as well be asking me to learn to fly.”
“You’ll figure it out,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”
Tara reached inside her own mind and tried to find something, anything that she might be able to use to fend the panther off if she came back again. But it was like looking for weapons in an empty room. “How long did it take you before you could win?”
She saw the pain in Chay’s dark eyes, and her stomach sank even before he spoke. Because she knew the answer in his reaction. And it held no hope for her.
“I never lost,” he said. “Not fully. For minutes together at first. But I always beat him back in the end.”
“What about the others?” she asked, hardly trusting her voice to speak. “Annie and Liam and Luke. What about them?”
“Luke is the only one of that group who isn’t natural-born,” Chay said.
“So what about him? And the others who aren’t natural-born? What about them?” she pushed.
“They all won, too,” he said. “They can lose themselves at times. Any shifter can. But in the end...the human always wins.”
“But not for me,” Tara whispered. “When I turned the first time, I shifted back because I got knocked out. And the second time and third times, I shifted because the panther decided to let me go. She...stepped back. I’ve never fought her off and won. What does that mean, Chay?”
“It depends on who you ask.” His arms tightened around her.
“What would most people say?” she pressed.
It was a very long time before he answered. “That you’re already lost. That, at best, I’m delaying the inevitable. At worst, I’m torturing you by not letting you go sooner and putting you out of your misery, and I’m deluding myself.”
Tara blinked back the tears that threatened to run over. She’d never been the pity-party type before, but then again, she’d never been told that she was terminal. “And what would you say?” she asked around the lump in her throat.
“That you’ll find a way. Somehow. We’ll figure it out, or maybe, Torrhanin will, or something,” he said.
“Why didn’t you just lie to me?” she asked. Dammit. One tear escaped her eye, overflowing down her cheek and making a pathway for another. “Why are you telling me the truth? No one at that Air Force base was ever going to tell me the truth, even if they’d let me wake up for more than a few minutes at a time.”
“I’ve done enough to hurt you already. I can’t lie to you, too.”
Those words just made the tears come more quickly, and Tara turned her head to the side. But Chay caught her chin, tilting her head back, and he softly kissed the tears away.
“Hush, now, bae girl,” he said, his lips so close to her skin that they brushed across it as he spoke. “It’ll be all right. You’ll make it right.”
She laughed through her tears. “Why do you call me that?”
He pulled back enough to meet her eyes. “I guess...I heard it in a song. Or maybe scrolling through Twitter. Or Instagram.”
“Snooping on people, you mean. Like you’ve snooped on me. Because you’re a...a spook,” she said, remembering the word.
“Yeah, that,” he said.
“Because I don’t think ‘bae girl’ is actually a thing,” she said. “Bae, sure. But not bae girl.”
He blinked, and for a fraction of a second, he looked a little offended. Then he blinked again, and it was gone. “You don’t like it, then?”
She smiled despite everything. “No. I love it. It makes it more special to me.”
“Because some out-of-touch old geek remembered something wrong?” he asked.
“No. Because I’m the only person in the world who gets that name,” she said.
A small smile tugged at the corners of his beautiful lips and lit his eyes. “Tara, I swear ....” He broke off.
“What?” she prompted.
“God, I don’t even know. We’re going to win. I promise you,” he said.
Tara shook her head. “You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“Whatever it takes,” he swore. “If I have to hold you every night for the rest of my life to keep you from losing yourself, I’ll do it.”
Tara was staggered by that thought—by what that thought meant. “You don’t even know me,” she protested.
“I don’t care,” he said.
“You don’t love me. Not that I want you to fall in love with me or anything,” she said hurriedly. Gah. That was, possibly, an even worse thing to say. “And not that I don’t.” Could she make this any more awkward? “I mean, you’d basically be giving up your life,” she finished lamely.
“I know,” he said simply.
She tried to read what he meant in his eyes. “You can’t do this for me. I’m just...not worth it for you. To give your life to. You seem like, you know, the kind of person who keeps his word whenever he can. An honorable man.” She stumbled over those words because they seemed so archaic. “But I can’t take that kind of commitment from you. You’ll start resenting me. Hating me. And I can’t live like that. It’d be better if you...put me out of my misery, like you said.”
“Bae girl,” he said softly, deliberately, “I could never hate you.”
“But why?” she asked helplessly. All of this was crazy talk, and his body still entwined with hers made it even crazier.
“I don’t know,” he said.
And then he kissed her.
Chapter Eleven
Tara had known since she had opened her eyes that the kiss was inevitable. Written in the stars or stamped in her flesh or maybe in the very rocks of the earth that covered his secret hiding place. There were so many reasons he shouldn’t kiss her and probably twice as many that she shouldn’t kiss him. The issues of dependence and power, of her confusion and vulnerable situation, and now of debt and payment were impossible to ignore.
So Tara didn’t ignore them. But she didn’t care about them, either. She wanted him not because of what he might do for her at that moment but because of what he was doing to her.
And as his mouth met hers, she realized that she wanted him more than she’d ever wanted anyone in the world.
Her lips parted, inviting him in. All the usual impediments were suddenly, spectacularly irrelevant. If it had been Tom kissing her—or Carter or Ryden or Tad—she would have rolled away from his morning breath and headed into the bathroom to pee and brush her own teeth.
With Chay, all she wanted was him. In any way. In every way. And she couldn’t fully understand why that was, because the connection that her panther felt was only part of it.
Maybe it was because he had put himself in the position of her hero. She’d never had a hero before. Maybe it was because he was so damned hot. Maybe it was because they’d already had the hottest sex of her life.
Maybe it was because of all of that, and maybe it was none of it. Tara didn’t care. At that moment, if she’d been told that the only way to save herself would be to push him away, she might not have been able to do it.
His lips moved across hers, his tongue pushing into her mouth in a rhythm that drove his body, her body, until she wasn’t sure whose rhythm it was. There was a throbbing line of need straight from her mouth down into her center—and from there lower, between her legs, which she ground against the hardness of his thigh, her hip stroking along his rock-hard cock with each rocking motion.
One of his hands caught the back of her neck, cradling her, while the other roved across her back, her ass, as if he were memorizing every dip and roll and curve. As if he were loving them.
Suddenly,
he broke away and used the leverage of his elbow against the mattress to roll them both over so that he lay on top of her, his weight on his hands that he braced on either side of her.
“Do you scream?” he demanded.
“What?” She looked up into the angular face above her.
“Do you scream?” he repeated.
“I...don’t think that I ever have,” she managed.
“You will this time,” he promised.
She gave a sputtering laugh, but he was already moving down, across her body, across her belly, his mouth skipping lightly over her skin.
“If you think you’re the first person to—” she began, but the sentence was cut off with a strangled sound as the flat width of his tongue met her folds without warning, sliding across them all the way up to her clit, which he gave a long, slow suck even as he reached up to tease her nipple with one hand.
The first jolt of reaction rolled over her and shifted into a throbbing kind of insistence that scattered her words and her thoughts. An electric current ran through her body from his mouth to his hand to her brain, sending little sympathetic shocks down into her arms and legs.
When he finally released her and Tara caught her breath and thoughts again, she said, rather breathlessly, “What are you going to do? Draw the alphabet with your tongue?”
There was no sting in her retort because her head was still swirling, and she issued the words as a challenge that she hoped he would rise to meet. Looking down across the curve of her own belly, seeing his face between her thighs and the wicked smile on his lips, she realized that as keyed up as she was, it wouldn’t take much.
He chuckled, and the sound sent a shiver through her body. “Not a chance.”
Then, still keeping his gaze locked with hers, he turned his head slowly, deliberately just enough to kiss her inner thigh. Tara would have sworn that doing it in the wrong order as he was, such a kiss would be anticlimactic.
She would have been wrong.
All she wanted was to have him back, back against her folds—no, between her folds, pushing deep into her. Sucking her clit again until she came ....
But instead, he made a trail of kisses along her thigh and down into the crease of her leg. Tara wriggled her hips toward his mouth, but he just took her hips firmly in his hands, his fingers sinking into the flesh, and pinned her in place. And then he kissed a line back up again, as if to assert his control.
He broke off, and Tara tensed, anticipating that he would repeat the treatment on her other thigh. But he surprised a tiny mewing sound from her as the tip of his tongue found the nub of her clit. And she made another sound as his lips closed around it, sealing against her skin, and he began moving his mouth against it, pushing the hood back with his tongue until it was bare to his attentions.
Tara’s hands closed over his wrists, her fingernails digging in as she tightened her thighs reflexively. But he didn’t even pause. It was too intense, almost unbearable, spiking up into her center, where the sensation coiled tighter and tighter until her breath made noises as she forced it through her lungs. She wanted him to stop—and she wanted him to keep going forever.
Now she was moving with him, rocking her hips against his mouth, not of her own volition but because the pressure of her need demanded it of her. She was swelling around his mouth—she could feel her tender folds grow suffused with heat, a feeling of fullness around her entrance even as she throbbed with her emptiness deeper inside.
Without warning, she shot upward, into a climax that was explosive in its violence. She had just enough presence of mind to clamp her lips closed before she abandoned herself to it so complete that she hardly felt Chay wrench his wrist out of her grasp.
She felt him thrust three fingers deep inside her, pulling downward against her clenching body with a suddenness that broke her all over again. That did pull a noise from her, a strangled cry as he stroked her with fingers and mouth in time and her thighs spasmed around him.
It went on and on, relentlessly, until she had nothing left to stay at the peak that she’d been propelled to. As she slid back down the other side, limp and panting, Chay raised his head.
Tara groaned. Oh, God, his chin was wet—glistening in the light with her wetness. And with his fingers still deep inside her, still stretching her just at the cusp of pain, she almost came all over again.
“That was a start,” Chay said, shoving her thighs apart with his shoulders as he slid his body up hers. His fingers slid down across the cleft of her ass up to her tailbone, his fingers sinking into her flesh as he skimmed up her pillowed belly to claim her mouth with his. She could taste herself on his lips, in his mouth, and she would have thought that it would disgust her, but not with him. Her thundering pulse raced even faster, her hands cupping his face and her knees coming up on either side of his body, clasping his hips as he entered her with one long stroke.
He broke his mouth away as he thrust into her again, so hard that she gasped, the reaction jolting and rippling through her. He looked down into her face, and whatever he saw written there made him smile. He did it again, deliberately, and she bit her lip.
“That’s what I thought,” he said, and then he was driving into her over and over, so hard that her head pushed the pillow into the headboard, and she grabbed the fitted sheet in her fists to hold herself in place. The rhythm of his body pounding into hers, rubbing against her clit at the end of every thrust, was echoed in the throbbing of her sex, her core, and her face and brain until her entire being felt flushed with it. The edges of herself, so recently come together, were tattering apart again—but there was no danger of the panther taking over now because never had she felt so entirely and completely herself, despite the preternatural intensity of her senses that honed everything to a painful edge.
When she came the second time, it was deeper and hotter, from the very core of her body, rushing out into every extremity. She let it take her in its dark but very human madness, surrendering to it until she drifted down and Chay came in turn. After a long, silent moment in which her entire body seemed stunned, he rolled to the side, pulling her with him.
“You do scream,” he said, and then he kissed her lightly on the lips.
“I don’t think I did,” Tara said, still a trifle breathless.
“I’m totally sure of it,” he retorted. “My ears are still ringing.”
Tara felt like arguing on principle. “I squeaked.”
“Squeaked,” he repeated. “That was not a squeak. No one would ever call that a squeak.”
“Well, I didn’t hear it, so it doesn’t count,” she shot back.
“Want to check the video?” He gave a feral grin.
“You—you said—” Tara sputtered.
His grin widened. “Kidding! Totally kidding. I just wanted to see your reaction.”
He rolled out of bed and stood up as Tara admired his broad back, narrow hips, and muscled flanks.
She decided that she could forgive his teasing, after all. She pushed off the bed and walked past him toward the bathroom. He followed, and she turned around in the doorway.
“Okay, back off for just a moment. I pee alone.”
He hesitated.
She pulled at the panic button that she still wore around her neck. “If I feel myself uncontrollably shifting into a panther in the sixty seconds that it takes me to pee, I swear I’ll hit the button, okay?” She shut the door gently but firmly in his face.
Though this bathroom was done in standard white four-by-four tile, it was twice the size of hers, most of the additional space occupied by a large shower with a frameless door. The sink was still a wall sink, she noted, though there was a narrow glass shelf to one side that held shaving accessories, a cup, and a toothbrush.
How would that even work? she wondered with a sudden giddy spurt. Could she shift while peeing? Certainly not while...well ....
She turned off her mind about that and flushed the toilet. She could feel the panther again, its mind distinct from
hers in the back of her head. Biological construct. What did that even mean?
After washing her hands, she opened the door again to find Chay standing inches in front of it.
“Human still, see?” she asked.
“I see,” he said, stepping inside.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said, nodding toward it.
“Don’t let me stop you,” he returned. “The necklace is water proof.”
“Of course it is.” She knotted her hair and stepped inside, and after a moment of staring at the various levers and spigots, she twisted one on, then another, holding her body out of the way of the sputtering jets until the steam began to rise.
Impressive. For a guy who didn’t seem to care about anything else, he sure had a fancy-pants shower.
Tentatively, she stepped into the blast of water—and instantly her muscles seemed to turn to Jell-O.
She closed her eyes, letting the water stream across her skin. She wished she hadn’t washed her hair the...day before, was it now? Whenever it was. With her curls, her hair would be a frizz bomb for days if she washed it again so soon, but she would bet good money that one of those jets would feel exactly like a scalp massage ....
She opened her eyes and realized that she could see the sink across from the shower and the closed door leading out to the bedroom, but she couldn’t see Chay. Frowning, she opened the glass shower door and stuck her head out. “Chay?” she called out tentatively.
There was a loud flush, and Tara’s jaw dropped. A moment later, Chay came around the corner from the toilet niche.
“You were—you were peeing,” she sputtered.
Chay just grinned. “I had to go, too, you know.”
“But I was in here!” she protested. She snapped the glass door closed against its magnetic catch and stepped back into the hot water.
“Were you peeing?” Chay opened the door and stepped in after her.
“No,” she said, not giving ground under the shower’s sprays.
He stepped so close to her that her belly and breasts nearly touched his body. Tara tilted back her head to meet his eyes, and he caught her cheek against his palm and ran a thumb across her lips lightly. She shivered even as heat trickled through her body again.
