by Nalini Singh
“I can’t take any more.”
“Sure you can.” It took every ounce of willpower he had to chain the beast more than willing to take Sascha—she wasn’t ready yet. Using the leverage he had, he began to rock against her vulnerably parted flesh.
“Lucas!” It was a scream. Her hands fell to the sheets, clutching wildly as she tried to ride the pleasure.
“Shh,” he gentled, stopping to give her a little tenderness. “I like hearing you scream my name.” He kissed her brow, her eyelids, the tip of her nose, her cheeks, and finally her lips. Soft, slow, undemanding. Until her breathing was easier and those night-sky eyes were no longer blind with desire. Then he started moving again.
Her eyes fluttered shut and reopened as if by force of will, her exotic skin shimmering with a layer of perspiration. Rich and heady, the musky scent of her was a carnal invitation. She lasted a couple of minutes this time before he had to stop and bring her back down until she could handle it again.
Each time she lasted longer and his control grew more fragile. He wanted this female with a hunger he’d never before felt. He wanted to ravage her, adore her, mark her. But even the panther knew she had to come to him willingly. There could be no doubt between them, no boundaries and no hesitation, because when the panther shattered its bonds and animal hunger took over, she had to trust him absolutely. Otherwise they’d both break.
Somewhere during the teasing, he got off her bra and feasted his eyes on the beauty of her breasts. She was too dazed by pleasure to protest the kisses he dropped on the upper slopes or the caresses he bestowed with one of his hands. He kept everything easy, getting her used to her own sensuality.
It threatened to drive him to madness.
He could be like this in bed but it was usually after he’d sated himself in his partner’s body and drunk deep of her screams of pleasure. The panther wasn’t selfish—it merely liked to quench the edge of its thirst before it started to play. But today Lucas was with a woman who needed the play before anything else.
“Don’t you stop this time!” she snapped, when he started to slow the rocking motion. Her hands rose to lock around his neck as she tried to pull him down.
“I’m too heavy.” He leaned down far enough that his chest rubbed against her breasts, far enough that they could tangle their tongues in a heated mating of mouths. “And,” he said as the kiss broke, “you still have on these.” He ran the fingers of one hand along the bottom edge of her panties, stroking at the tender skin he found.
Her tongue flicked out to wet her lips. “I don’t know if I can handle skin to skin.”
It was his nature to push. “Then we finish it this way.” But it wasn’t his nature to force. He could show her pleasure without feeling the silky softness of the tight, wet heat between her legs. Pressing hard against her, he started grinding in slow circles.
She screamed out scant moments after he’d begun, her neck muscles standing out in sharp relief. He felt the pleasure ripple through her and it was enough to have him fighting his own release. Barely capable of rational thought, he slipped one hand under her nape to hold her in place for his kiss… and froze.
Her eyes were no longer night-sky. Sparks of color fountained where the white stars usually resided, spectacular fireworks on the most miniature of scales. Neither man nor panther had ever seen anything more beautiful.
Lucas woke up feeling supremely sated. He wondered what his efficient Psy would say if he told her she’d brought him to orgasm twice now. He grinned. She’d probably ask him the technical details and note them down on that slim computer she carried everywhere. Why did he find that image cute as hell?
Whistling as he exited the shower, he headed into the bedroom and glanced up at the wall calendar. Suddenly there was no more music in his soul.
How could he have forgotten?
Never before in two decades had he failed to remember—never before had anything or anyone distracted him badly enough to wipe this day from his mind.
After pulling on a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt, he drove to the office, glad to find that Sascha hadn’t yet arrived. He couldn’t deal with his puzzling reaction to her today. On this day he needed every one of his faculties to patch up a scar that refused to stop bleeding.
“I’ll be back after nightfall,” he told Clay. “If Sascha turns up, take care of her.”
Clay nodded and didn’t ask any other questions, well aware why he was taking off during such a critical time. Some loyalties had prior rights over Lucas.
Leaving the sentinel in charge, Lucas got in his car to make the same trip he made once every year. His first stop was a florist.
“Hello, Lucas.” A small, bespectacled brunette smiled at him from the other side of the shop as he entered.
“Hi, Callie. Is it ready?”
“Of course. Stay here. I put it out back.”
He watched Callie go to fetch his standing yearly order and wondered at the difference between them. The florist was near his age but she was so innocent that he felt a thousand years older. He knew it wasn’t because she was human and he was changeling. No, it had been blood and death that had aged him.
A minute later, she emerged, a huge wildflower bouquet in her arms. “Special order for someone special.”
He’d never shared who the flowers were for, the wounds too deep to subject to casual scrutiny. “Thanks.”
“I charged it to your account.”
“See you next year.”
“Take care, Lucas.”
The second he got in his car he felt cold, chilled, alone. It was always this way on this one shadowed day, as if his childhood desolation resonated through time to torment him.
It took him over three hours to head out of the city and deep into the forests. Leaving the car on a hidden track, he traversed the remaining distance on foot. Nothing marked the spot where his mother and father had been buried, but he found their graves as if they’d been flashing welcoming beacons. He’d chosen a hidden grove surrounded by trees for their last resting place.
“Hey, Mom.” He laid the flowers on the thick grass. He never tidied here, never stopped the forest’s advance. His parents had both been leopards at home in the wild. “I bought you the flowers that always got Dad out of trouble.” In this place he was a child again, watching the two people who mattered more to him than any others, laugh and live. He should’ve never had to watch them die. A fist clenched around his heart as memories cascaded through his mind.
His mother’s scream.
His own helpless, tortured shouts.
His father’s cry of black despair as his mate’s life was stolen right in front of him.
Something in Carlo had broken at that instant, but he’d stubbornly held on to life until his son was safe. Only then had he taken the step that would reunite him with his slaughtered mate. A black panther like her son, Shayla had been the reason for Carlo’s heartbeat.
“I miss you, Dad.” He put his palm on the earth on the other side of the flowers. His mother had been found and buried first but when the time had come to bury Carlo, Lucas had insisted on a reburial. They’d been put to rest in each other’s arms. In his heart, he hoped that that meant they’d found each other again.
“I need you to guide me.” He should’ve never become alpha at barely twenty-three years of age but it had been inevitable. When the previous alpha, Lachlan, had died unexpectedly two years after stepping down, Lucas had lost even that source of support. “I need to know if what I’m doing is right. What if this leads to more death? The Psy aren’t going to stand back and let us tell the world they’ve been running interference for the worst kind of killer.”
The tree branches whispered in the wind as he spoke and he liked to think it a sign that his parents were listening. They were the only ones. None of his sentinels ever followed him here. No one asked him where he was going. No one asked him where he’d been.
He stayed for hours, speaking to two extraordinary people who’d b
een deprived of their love and their lives in the most brutal fashion but hadn’t broken. Carlo and Shayla had fought to the end like the courageous changelings they’d been. They’d fought not for themselves but for the life of their son. For him.
“I won’t let you down.” He wiped away tears that came from the heart of the boy who’d almost died with his parents. Only his hunger for vengeance had kept him going when no one thought he’d survive.
That bloody day and the ones that followed had shaped him, scarred him, and strengthened him. No one hurt the people Lucas cared about. No one took those who were his. He’d proven that he’d kill anybody who tried. Anybody.
Sascha had been feeling odd since the moment she’d woken. Worried that the changelings would pick up on the strange sadness weighing her down, she’d canceled her meetings with DarkRiver and occupied herself at Duncan headquarters, trying to keep under the radar so that Enrique wouldn’t track her down.
It was a relief to come home and shut out the probing eyes of the other Psy. The heavy darkness in her had increased through the day until it was a sharp pain in her heart. Not sure if it was an effect of her rapidly deteriorating mental state or something physical, she considered going to Medical.
A second later, she ruled that out. She didn’t know what the M-Psy saw when they looked inside a body. What if her mental patterns were so aberrant that they showed up and the medics demanded further tests? Sleep seemed the best option. If she wasn’t feeling better by tomorrow, she’d try to find some way of getting treatment without exposing herself to deep scans.
Another wave of thudding pain rocked through her body. She winced and rubbed her temples. Her eyes went to the communication panel. Maybe Lucas would know a medical person who would be discreet. Almost immediately, she shook her head. What was she thinking? Lucas clearly considered the Psy to be heartless automatons—why would he help her?
And why couldn’t she stop thinking about him?
Lucas met no one on his way home. Parking his vehicle in a distant spot, he ran the rest of the way on panther feet, feeling the pounding earth like an extra heartbeat. The climb up the tree to his lair was as easy as breathing.
What wasn’t easy was coming back from the animal. He wanted to retreat into the panther’s mind and wipe away the human’s pain. The temptation was dangerous, a lethal seduction that could turn him rogue, unable to remember his humanity but retaining enough human intelligence to do far more damage than a normal leopard. That was why rogues were hunted down—they were far too dangerous to be left to roam. Often it was their former packmates who became their targets, as if some broken part of them knew what they’d once been… and could never be again.
Driven by his instinctive need to keep his people safe from harm, he pushed past the enticing voice of decades—old despair and gave his body the command to change.
Ecstasy and agony.
Part pure pleasure and part ripping pain, the change took only seconds but seemed to last forever. He knew that from the outside it looked like his body was turning into a thousand particles of brilliant light and re-forming itself into another shape. It was quite beautiful.
But from the inside it felt as if his skin was being torn from him as a new form tried to emerge. Melting heat sizzled through every part of him from fingertips to toes. When he opened his eyes, he was human again, his beast caged behind the walls of his mind.
Naked, he padded to the shower and turned it to cold. The brutality of the sharp needles succeeded in removing the last vestiges of temptation from his mind. Usually, he had no trouble switching between the animal and human parts of his psyche but today wasn’t a good day.
Today, he could almost understand the Psy need to banish emotion. If he didn’t feel, he wouldn’t remember. If he didn’t feel, he wouldn’t mourn. And if he didn’t feel, he wouldn’t hurt with every beat of his very human heart.
CHAPTER 8
He was beginning to expect her in his dreams. When she touched his shoulder, he rolled away to look up at her. His intention had been to tell her that he had no heart to play with her tonight, but when he saw her, he stopped. Wearing what looked like old cotton pajamas, her hair in two simple braids, she appeared about sixteen.
That was when he realized that he was dressed in a pair of dark gray sweatpants identical to his favorite pair. “What’s the matter, kitten?”
A kind of confused vulnerability swirled in her eyes. “I don’t know.” She wrapped her arms around herself.
Opening his own arms, he said, “Come here.”
After a small hesitation, she laid her head down on his chest and stretched her legs out along his side. “I feel so… heavy.” One fine-boned hand rested beside her head, palm-down on his skin.
“Me, too.” The rock that sat on his heart would be gone by morning but its memory would linger.
Her hand stroked over his heartbeat. “Why are you sad?”
“Sometimes I remember that I can’t always protect those I love.” Under his fingers, her hair was soft and silky.
She didn’t try to tell him that he wasn’t God, that he couldn’t protect everyone. He knew that. But knowing and believing were two different things. What she did say succeeded in stopping his heart. “I wish you’d love me.”
“Why?”
“Because then maybe you could protect me, too.” Haunting sorrow whispered through her tone.
“Why do you need protecting?” His male instincts were rising past the dark burden of memory.
She cuddled closer and he wrapped his arms tight. “Because I’m broken.” Her hand kept smoothing over his heart and he could feel a melting warmth invade his body. “And the Psy don’t allow broken creatures to live.”
“You feel perfect to me.”
No answer. Only that smoothing hand over his chest. With each stroke he felt more at peace. A different form of heaviness infiltrated his bones. It felt strangely as if he was going to sleep again. As darkness closed over him, her quiet statement circled his mind like an endless river.
Because I’m broken.
And the Psy don’t allow broken creatures to live.
Sascha was waiting for him when he arrived at the office the next day. Troubled by the disquieting intensity of the dream, he tried to draw her into conversation but hit a brick wall. It was as if she’d retreated deep within herself, so deep that she’d almost ceased to exist.
“Are you all right?” He could feel the shadows around her, feel her… as if she were Pack.
“I’d like to suggest some alternatives to the materials you’re planning to use,” she said, instead of answering. “My research tells me this type of wood will weather better in the site environment.” She slid across a sample and an accompanying inch-thick report.
Frustrated by her intransigence, he fingered the sample. “This stuff is cheaper.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s no good. Please read the report.”
“I will.” He put it aside. “You look like hell, Sascha darling.” No way was he going to let her push him away, not after last night. She was Psy and he’d been dreaming some pretty odd dreams. He could do the math.
Her hands tightened on her organizer before she got herself under control. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping.”
Every instinct he had told him it was time to press hard. “Dreams keeping you awake?”
“I’ve told you, the Psy don’t dream.” She refused to meet his gaze.
“But you do, don’t you, Sascha?” he said softly. “What does that make you?”
Her head jerked up and he glimpsed something very lost in her eyes in the second’s window before her computerized security-blanket chimed. “Excuse me.” She walked out of the room and he knew it was because of him, not the call. He’d finally reached her. If that call hadn’t interrupted them…
“Damn it.” His claws sliced out of his hands, an indication of just how much control he’d lost. Forcing them back in, he went to hunt down his elusive prey.
/> She was gone.
Ria, his administrative assistant, gave him the message. “Said she had to leave to take care of something but that she’d be back for the two o’clock with Zara.”
Lucas took the message with an ill-hidden frown. “Thanks.” His tone said otherwise.
“Sorry. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to let her go.” Ria screwed up her pretty human face into a scowl. “You’re supposed to warn me about things like that.” Mated to a DarkRiver leopard for the past seven years, she had no problem talking her mind with Lucas.
“Don’t worry about it. She’ll be back.” Where else could she go? If he was right about her, then her very uniqueness might get her rejected by her own people.
What worried him was that rather than calculating how he could use her weakness to further his own goals, he was concerned for her. The unexpected development was enough to disturb both man and beast—how had one of the enemy gained a slice of his loyalty?
She didn’t turn up for the meeting until a minute before two. “Shall we go in?” were her first words to him. Her suit was black, her shirt white, and her tone as chilling as the most brittle of frost.
In spite of his concern at what she made him feel, he wanted to reach out and kiss her until she purred. He’d seen beneath the shell and he was never going help her bury the woman he’d glimpsed. Sascha Duncan might be Psy, but he was a Hunter.
“By all means.” He waved his arm, willing to let her believe she’d defeated him. Sometimes an unexpected ambush worked better than a full frontal attack. “Zara should be in there with Dorian, one of the other architects. Kit’s asked to sit in. Fine with you?”
“Of course. I learned business the same way.”
The second they walked into the meeting room, he knew there was going to be trouble. Dorian was standing with his back to the window, the lines around his mouth white with strain, his shoulders so taut that the muscles were almost vibrating.
“Kit.” Lucas chose to greet the juvenile next to Dorian, giving the sentinel time to get himself under control.
