Walk on the Wild Side

by Christine Warren

"It can, but the pain injection Martin's doctor gave her at the house numbed the arm enough that she couldn't tell him where it hurt and he wanted to make sure the bone was properly aligned before she shifted," Max explains. "It's her right arm, and Liv is right-handed. If she shifted while the bone was out of alignment, she could have ended up with a permanent misalignment that would give her trouble in the future."

  Kitty made a face. "I guess the Lord really does look after idiots, then, 'cause heaven only knows how many broken bones I had when I shifted that first time. I'm lucky I don't look like the hunchback of Notre Dame."

  Max's scowl deepened.

  "What about Maisie?" she rushed to ask before he could scold her for something that had happened weeks ago. Ever since he'd rescued her and the little girl behind Martin's house, Max seemed to have made scolding her his new mission in life.

  "Her pediatrician already sent her home with her parents. She didn't even really need the examination. That was mostly to make John and Heidi feel better." Max reached out a hand and plucked the tea from Kitty's hand, setting the paper cup on the table beside her chair. "Come on. It's nearly seven, and you've had a long day. Let's go back to the Savannah and have that steak we talked about earlier."

  "Sounds good to me," Kitty said, rising. "But I have to tell you, steak was enough when I'd only had to deal with a few insults. After being shot at, bruised, and scared half to death, I think I definitely qualify for chocolate."

  SETTING HER FORK DOWN WITH A WEAK CLINK, Kitty slumped a little in her chair and placed a hand over her chocolate-stuffed belly.

  "Now that has what I call medicinal value," she sighed, grinning at Max across the china-littered table. "Nothing can improve the attitude or soften the memory like good dark chocolate."

  He chuckled at her over the rim of his wineglass. "I'm glad you enjoyed it, kitten. I'll have to remember to give your compliments to the pastry chief."

  "Compliments, schmompliments," she muttered and reached for her cappuccino. "If he makes that for me every night, I'll head back to the kitchen and kiss him smack on the lips."

  "Her."

  Kitty froze, her eyebrows shooting toward her hairline. A second later she pursed her lips and shrugged. "Then I'll let her make the call. But if she wants tongue, she has to throw in raspberry Napoleons on the weekends."

  Max laughed at her cheeky grin and drained the last of his very nice cabernet. God, he couldn't remember the last time he'd smiled this much, and considering the day they'd had, that was saying something. He didn't think he'd ever forget the way his heart had leapt into his throat when he'd rounded the corner of Martin's house and seen her fall to the ground just as the gunshot sounded.

  She'd lain so still at first that he'd feared the worst until she'd opened those brilliant green eyes of hers and tried to struggle to her feet with little Maisie Theron clutched to her chest like the crown jewels. Relief had driven him to his knees and he'd wanted to hug her to him and keep her safe for the rest of her life. Then he'd wanted to turn her over his knee and beat her ass cherry-red for scaring him that way.

  As it turned out, he hadn't gotten time for either reaction. The sound of another gunshot and the news that Olivia had been injured and the assassin killed had yanked him back to his duty to the pride. Cleaning up the mess that the late Billy Shepard had caused for the Red Rock had taken several hours to accomplish, but now it felt like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. From what Nick and David, the pride's other belangrik, had been able to uncover, so far it looked like Shepard had been working alone. Max would have them do some more checking, but he had no reason not to think the threat to the pride had finally passed. The threat to Kitty, on the other hand, still had him concerned.

  All evening he'd been unable to quite put a finger on the reason why the hair at the back of his neck continued to prickle even after the Shepard matter was settled. It wasn't until he'd been driving Kitty back into the city that he'd begun to count up the times she'd been in danger recently. Taken separately, each incident, from the car accident in Tennessee that had prompted her first change, to the airport mugging and the shooting this afternoon, appeared unrelated. In each of them, Kitty just seemed to have been in the wrong place when fate and bad luck converged into disaster. If there hadn't been three separate close calls within the space of three weeks, Max himself would have dismissed each of them as nothing more than an accident. But no one, his instincts growled at him, was this accident-prone.

  When they had reached the hotel, Max had escorted Kitty to her suite to change for dinner and taken advantage of the time it took her to head up to his own apartment on the hotel's top floor and make a couple of calls while he cleaned himself up. One call had been to David to request that the belangrik poke around into Kitty's car accident, and the second had been to Nick to order protection for Kitty anytime he couldn't be with her himself. He intended those times to be few and far between, but he wasn't a man to leave things to chance. Just because he ran a casino didn't mean he liked to gamble.

  Everything had been arranged before he reappeared at the door to Kitty's suite in time to escort her downstairs to the Savannah's acclaimed French-African restaurant for dinner. He trusted Nick and David completely and knew that each one would carry out his orders to the letter, which meant that until one of them gave him renewed reason to worry, he could turn his attention to more interesting matters. Many of which, coincidentally, prominently featured Miss Kitty Sugarman's very luscious backside.

  "Are you finished?" he asked, setting aside his glass and pushing away from the table. "You saw the Strip in the daytime, but now is when it really comes alive. I thought we could take a stroll."

  "That sounds great. I need to walk off at least three of those courses."

  She didn't protest when he took her hand and tucked it into the crook of his elbow. In fact, she seemed to lean against him as they stepped out into the cool night air.

  "Tired?" he asked.

  She smiled. "A little. But mostly, I'm just trying to figure out how to walk in these shoes without killing myself."

  He glanced down at the sexy, black heels and noticed they seemed to have almost more strap than sole. While he appreciated the view it gave him of her slender, delicately arched feet and delectable little toes, he understood her dilemma. "I see what you mean. Would you rather I hailed a cab and took us straight back to the hotel?"

  "No. I'll be fine. Just keep to a nice, level sidewalk and I should be able to avoid serious injury. It's been a while since I've worn party shoes is all."

  "And why is that?"

  He watched her watching the city around them, her eyes wide and glittering. The neon lights of the signs and billboards all around them seemed to glint off her bright red-gold hair like a crown of fairy lights as she turned back and forth in an attempt to take in everything.

  "Probably because it's been a while since I've been to a party." She laughed. "Librarians don't tend to be the first ones on most people's guest lists."

  "I don't see what your job has to do with it. Unless you spend so much time hiding between the stacks that people don't get a chance to meet you anywhere else."

  "I go out, but my idea of a good time isn't what gets most folks excited. I like bookstores. And old movies. And hikes and museums and tours through historic sites and buildings. Most people look at an afternoon doing any of those as one step above working on a chain gang. But I've always been good at entertaining myself, ever since I was little, so I don't usually mind."

  Max heard the assurance in her voice, as well as the wistful note behind it. "Since you were little? Didn't your mother or your grandparents like to do things with you?"

  "Mamaw always tried to do things with me," she said, sounding a little wistful, "but there was always so much to do as the farm. We had to sneak in time when we could. My grandmother is the reason why I fell in love with books almost before I could read, because she was always reading to me. And whenever Papaw had any time, he'd take me
out walking with him and tell me stories about our ancestors who settled the land and the people who'd been there before them or we'd go fishing down at the creek. I had a great childhood."

  "And your mother? What about her?"

  Kitty shrugged. "Misty had her own priorities, and entertaining a kid wasn't one of them. By the time I was in school, I'd figured out it was better when she wasn't around too much, anyway. When she was, she was always picking fights with Mamaw and Papaw and alternately cooing over or whining about her latest boyfriend."

  "She had a lot of those?"

  "Misty goes through men like I go through sticky notes," Kitty snorted. "If I'm not losing whole stacks of them in the clutter on my desk, I'm sticking one to something every time I have a new thought."

  She sounded amused, but Max had a hard time imaging that kind of woman as a mother. "You approve of her social habits?"

  "Of course not. They make her miserable and don't seem to do much for anyone else, either. Misty is a grass watcher. She's always looking over the next fence to see if it looks a little greener. The trouble is, she doesn't seem to realize that in the end, grass is just grass. To make it green, you have to water it. But that's way too much work for her. She'd rather take over someone else's lawn, and move on again when it starts to go brown on her."

  Max fought back a smile. "That's a heck of a metaphor, kitten."

  She chuckled. "I suppose it is. But you know what I mean. I'm sure you've met people like her. They always want what they don't have, but when they get it, they're not interested in doing what it takes to keep it. Sometimes I think she'd be better off if she just stopped wanting things so bad."

  Keeping his gaze on the path in front of them, Max digested that little tidbit. No wonder Kitty seemed to dote on her grandparents and hadn't seemed all that enthusiastic about meeting Martin; she'd seen her grandparents as her real parents and hadn't felt like she needed any others.

  Beside him, Kitty tottered a little, and his arm went around her automatically. He pressed her against his side to steady her. "You all right?"

  "I'm fine," she said, "just clumsy. You should be glad you didn't decide to take me dancing."

  The image of holding Kitty in his arms, pressing her small, sweetly curved body to his as they swayed to a seductive rhythm, filled his head, and Max gritted his teeth against a surge of arousal. The idea sounded lovely to him.

  "I think you're about as clumsy as your namesake, kitten," he murmured, unable to stop his fingers from stroking the soft curve where her waist flared into an inviting hip. "I'd like to dance with you one of these days. I have a feeling we'd fit well together."

  He heard the swift hiss of her indrawn breath and felt the subtle tension of awareness stiffen her body. Breathing deeply, he caught the sweet, spicy smell of her, and his nostrils flared as he detected the change in her scent. It deepened suddenly, growing rich and dark and compelling.

  He caught himself just as his other hand began to reach across his body to grip her more securely and tug her feminine form against him. The beast inside him wanted her to feel his arousal, to know that neither of them was fooling the other. Desire sparked between them like an electric current, making Max curse himself for suggesting their evening stroll. He'd have given anything in that moment to have had her alone in the privacy of her hotel room, where he could show her exactly what it did to him to know she couldn't stop herself from responding to him.

  Kitty straightened, attempting to put distance between them, a move that had his beast snarling. He had to physically bite his tongue to keep from echoing the sound.

  "Look, I can see the Savannah up ahead," she said, her voice sounding suddenly quiet and nervous. "I want to thank you for a wonderful evening. I really enjoyed myself, especially after everything that happened today. I mean, I am sorry that man died, but I'm glad that threat to the pride is gone—"

  She never got a chance to finish. He didn't give her one. His beast didn't give her one.

  It sprang free with a muffled growl, turning on her and herding her backward into the shadows of an alley at the side of the building. It saw the way her eyes widened, saw the mingling of surprise and want in their depths, but it didn't care. It crowded her out of the crowd, out of the lights, and pinned her against the cool, rough stone of the wall behind her. It made a prison of its arms, a barricade of its body, and with a rumble of hunger and domination, it dropped its head to feed.

  Her lips tasted like paradise and felt like home. Max groaned against them, wanting to savor them and battling against the compulsion to plunder. He lost.

  His teeth nipped at the plump, sweet flesh and felt it tremble. Her mouth opened on a gasp, and he stole the sound, burying it in a growl of satisfaction. She yielded to him slowly, trembling and moaning in thin, high tones. Her hands clutched his shoulders, wrinkling the fine wool of his suit jacket, digging into the muscles beneath. The pressure made him imagine how it would feel with no fabric between them, just skin against silky skin, so that her nails would bite into him and urge him on.

  As if he needed urging.

  He took her mouth like a marauder, leaving no corner untouched, no recess unexplored. Lips, teeth, tongue, body, he used every part of himself to get closer to her. The way she sank into him was driving him crazy. The way she responded to every touch as if she'd been made for him. It threatened to shatter his tenuous hold on reality, to shatter his control like so much glass. He had to get ahold of himself.

  Instead, he took ahold of her. One hand gripped the back of her head, angling her for a deeper kiss, holding her in place. The other slid down the sleek curve of her side, her waist, her hip, curling around the soft weight of her thigh and hooking it over his hip. The adjustment seated him firmly against her center, and he groaned into her mouth at the incredible, agonizing way their bodies fit together.

  Her hips cradled him as if he'd been made to rest there. Nothing in his life had ever felt so perfect, but he knew that being inside her would be even better. If only she weren't wearing so many clothes.

  Sliding his hand up the back of her thigh, he paused briefly to knead her plump ass before reaching for the zipper at the back of her dress and giving a tug.

  She tore her mouth from his with a muffled shriek. "Stop!"

  Max shook his head, trying to clear the fog of lust that filled it. "What?"

  "Sweet baby Jesus and lawsa mercy!" She pressed both palms against Max's shoulders and shoved, hard. He forced his hands to release her and stumbled backward. "We're in an alley, for heaven's sake! Oh, my God, I can't believe I almost forgot where we were! I almost let you…" She shuddered and repeated, "Sweet baby Jesus."

  Max struggled to catch his breath. His mind still felt like it was operating at the speed of winter molasses, but even in that state, he understood what Kitty was saying. He'd been about five seconds away from shoving her dress and her panties down to her ankles and fucking her up against the side of a building where the two of them being arrested for lewd conduct and indecent exposure would have been the least of their problems.

  Holy shit. What the hell was the matter with him?

  "I'm sorry," he bit out, shoving a hand through his hair and wondering if maybe she should have just slapped him. Maybe that would have cleared his head a little faster. "I shouldn't have done that."

  "Agreed."

  "I got carried away."

  "I noticed."

  "We should probably go inside—"

  "I should think so."

  "—and talk about this."

  "Alone?"

  "Of course alone."

  "Um, I'm not sure that's a good idea." She sidled away from the wall until she stood in the open alley and could fix her eyes on an escape route. "I think I should just… not."

  "Kitty," he began, but she just shook her head and began to edge back toward the hotel entrance. "I just want to talk. I promise."

  "No, I think it would be better if we didn't." She smiled a little wryly. "I've already got e
nough to think about. Like you said before, it's been a long day."

  Grimacing, Max admitted she might have a point. One that his libido certainly didn't want to hear. With a sigh and a half smile of his own, he shoved one hand in his pocket in an attempt to keep it off her and used the other to wave Kitty before him.

  He escorted her to her door and left her with a quiet goodbye, turning away before she could close the door in his face. A man's pride could only take so much, after all. Instead of taking the elevator back downstairs or up to his own apartment, Max headed toward the stairwell at the end of the hall and the bottle of bourbon in the bottom of his desk. It wouldn't change what had just happened, but if he was really, really lucky, it might make him drunk enough to render the topic a moot point. After all, with enough alcohol in him, he wouldn't be able to make love to Kitty even if he remembered how.

  At the moment, he really wanted to forget.

  * * *

  Chapter Sixteen

  KITTY EXAMINED THE MAP AS SHE WALKED, TRYING TO get her bearings and plot her route at the same time. She didn't want to stay out too long, since at some point today Max would take her back to see her father, but she needed a distraction. Bad. If she sat around in her room all morning, she would have nothing to do except brood about kissing Max Stuart. And wrapping her leg around Max Stuart. And nearly letting Max Stuart have sex with her in an alley like she was some kind of cheap hooker.

  Feeling the heat of embarrassment stain her cheeks yet again, Kitty forced the memories aside and focused resolutely on her sightseeing plans. None of those other options boded well for her sanity.

  Smiling at the attendant who held the hotel door open for her, Kitty stepped outside and glanced up from her map. She didn't plan on getting lost, and her sense of direction wasn't bad, but even if she had gotten confused, she didn't imagine it would be difficult to find the Savannah again.

  The hotel's rich, earthy stone façade stood out among the whites and grays and reflective glass surfaces of the other buildings, and its landscaping made an even more striking contrast to the other hotels. She hadn't noticed so much yesterday, but then she'd been with Ronnie and that had made her a little nervous. Today, she could really appreciate the resort's unique beauty.