The Panther's Rival

by Emilia Hartley

  Clary giggled on the other side of the table. She slipped out of the booth, clinging to the arm of a man with a buzzed head. Dakota lost sight of them as they slipped away from the table. Her eyes fell back on the gray eyed man at the bar. He had turned in his seat and their eyes met. Dakota felt a flare of fire jump through her body.

  She’d made a mistake in walking away.

  The man beside her smiled and she could see that he was missing a tooth towards the back of his mouth. One in the front was chipped. Her eyelids started to feel heavy and as her lids drooped, his smile grew wide.

  Chapter Seven

  Wesley told himself that he should move on, that there were other women in the bar that he knew were throwing glances in his direction. Yet, he spent much of the night glaring in the direction of the charcoal haired woman and her friend. She had quickly downed several drinks after turning away from him and he could tell that she was beginning to feel it from the way she was acting. Her movements were sluggish and her words were slurred.

  Her friend wasn’t nearly as incapacitated as she was, but her friend didn’t seem to care. She was wrapped up in the man that sat beside her. Wes watched as the blonde and her male friend slid from their seats and slipped out of the pub. The man sitting beside the charcoal haired woman slid an arm beneath her moments later and pulled her from the seat.

  She staggered and her eyes drifted closed for a long moment. Wesley felt his stomach hit the floor as he watched them leave through a separate door. Fire burned in his stomach. He left his seat at the bar and moved to their now empty table before a server could clear it out. He raised the glass that he’d watched the dark-haired woman drink from to his nose and sniffed.

  His nose picked up the faint chemical smell that she hadn’t. One of the men had slipped something into the blonde’s drink, yet it had been the charcoal haired woman who stole it from her friend and chugged it in one go.

  The silver band around his forearm ached as heat roiled inside of him. Wesley stormed out of the pub. He caught the dark-haired woman’s scent in the air and ran. He hoped that he would make it in time to help her. If not, he was going to rip the man apart limb from limb, his honor be damned.

  His honor meant nothing when her safety was at risk.

  The sound of small whimpers reached his ears and he darted around the corner. The man had her shoved up against the brick wall and had lifted her short dress up over her hips. The man didn’t hear Wes as he closed the distance between them. His fist closed around the back of the man’s neck. His body soared down the alley and crashed into the dumpster.

  Beside him, the woman slumped toward the ground. He ducked beneath her and caught her before she could fall to the dirty pavement. Wes took a moment to pull down her dress as the fire in him burned. Her underwear was still in place. He’d been just in time.

  Yet, now he had an unconscious woman in his arms and no idea what to do. He could call the authorities, but he shouldn’t even be in the city. If he was caught, then his father would have his hide if he found out that Wes went against the dragons’ agreement. Getting caught would not only dishonor him, but his father, as well. It would drop his family in rank, removing them from their leadership roles.

  He looked down at the woman in his arms, completely slack and unable to help herself. He was glad that he’d come out, that he’d risked as much as he had. If not, then surely, she would have been hurt. Distantly, he hoped that her friend was okay, if only because he felt he should care. He tucked the woman in his arms close to his chest and turned back toward the road.

  Wes tucked her into the cab of his truck, not knowing what else to do with her. She could sleep it off someplace safe and the only place he was absolutely sure was safe was his tower. Part of him wanted to go back and finish what he’d started with the man in the alley. Luckily for him, it wasn’t too honorable to kill a man after he’d already passed out. It was in no way a fair fight. The honorable thing to do was look out for the comatose woman before him. So, he fisted his hands until his knuckles turned white and heat radiated around his form. He swallowed the roar that was building in his throat and went around his truck to get behind the wheel.

  Chapter Eight

  Dakota woke in an unfamiliar place with her head pounding. She rolled onto her side slowly. The room was huge, the walls curving around her. At the other end of the room was a hearth blazing with flames. Worn rugs covered the stone floor, displaying all kinds of mismatched colors and designs if only to keep the cold of the stone at bay. Someone had thrown a soft blanket over her form after laying her atop the bed.

  She pushed it aside and felt her hips protest. She was still wearing the red dress that Clary had stuffed her into, but the night was a blur. No matter how much she tried, she couldn’t remember what happened after she’d left the man at the bar.

  Her heart thumped and panic rose inside of her. Had her drink been spiked? It would explain the fuzzy memories, but she didn’t know why her hips hurt the way they did. The panic created a lump in her throat. Tears burned her eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself.

  Someone had put a drug into her drink and kidnapped her. She prayed that nothing else had happened while she’d been out, but she had no way of knowing. That terrified her.

  The sound of footsteps approaching made fear rush through her. The door ahead of her cracked open and she instinctually scrambled to the head of the mattress. The man from the bar appeared in the doorway, his hair mussed with a mug in one hand and a white bottle in the other. She stared at the bottle, fearing that he was going to try to drug her again. Fear wasn’t going to get her out of here alive, she told herself.

  “You’re awake,” he said with clear surprise. “You must feel like absolute shit.”

  “Where am I?” Her voice trembled despite her attempt to control her fear.

  “You’re at my home,” he said, softly. “Would you like a cup of coffee? I also brought some pain killers. Nothing strong, just the stuff you can get at any drug store.”

  She shook her head. She pulled the blanket over herself as though it was some kind of shield. He ran a hand through his mussed hair. She realized at this point that he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  “Oh, right. You have to be really confused right now.” The man sat down on the floor across from her. “My name is Wesley, if that helps you at all. Wesley Taniff. We met last night.”

  “I remember that,” Dakota snapped.

  He nodded, surprisingly patient with her. “After you accused me of lying you went to your friend’s table and took her drink from her. I think one of the men she was flirting with had spiked her drink. Instead of giving up, one of the men took advantage of the situation and carried you out of the bar. I found him…” She watched his jaw clench as he looked past her. He was angry, she thought. “I found him… trying to hurt you. I put an end to it, but I didn’t know where to take you that you would be safe other than here.”

  “And where is here?” Dakota asked nervously. She glanced around again, taking in the cozy setting that the room really was. It would have been a lovely place had she come in on her own terms. Now, she marked where the door was, where the windows were and readied her body to run. Still, a little voice in the back of her mind told her that there was no threat. It whispered to her that she was as safe as she would ever be.

  “This is my home,” he said before standing. His jaw was still clenched tight and he fisted a hand in his hair. She noticed that he fought to look anywhere but at her.

  “What is wrong with you?” Dakota asked, inching forward, off the bed.

  He closed his eyes before turning to her. When they opened again, they were no longer the soft blue that had entranced her the night before. Instead, she looked into golden eyes, the pupils narrowed into slits. He dragged in a breath through his nose.

  Dakota’s blood ran cold. She couldn’t be here. This was absolutely the last thing that she needed. Her future was ruined. Once she set foot out of here, the school would hav
e her on a plane back home and her grant to study abroad would be lost.

  Her life was over.

  His eyes changed again. The gold swirled away and the blue flooded back in. The tension that had been gripping his jaw dissipated and a look of concern flashed over his face. He stepped forward before stopping himself.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said, his voice unusually small.

  “You don’t understand,” Dakota snapped. “Do you have any regard for the lives of others? What you’ve done has ruined my life.”

  “I saved you from being hurt, from being used and left in an alley,” he roared.

  Dakota didn’t flinch. She didn’t back down. She stared the man that was really a dragon in the eye. Anger burned inside of her. It consumed her, a better feeling than the lost desperation that had flooded her a second ago. She wanted to be angry at this beautiful man, Wesley, as he called himself.

  Instead of arguing, he took the wind out of her sails by spinning around. He left, slamming the door behind him. She was suddenly alone in the room. She let herself fall down onto the mattress. She hadn’t believed that dragons liked to kidnap women. She thought of the dragon that she’d run across the day before; how playful it had seemed. She hadn’t been afraid of that dragon, hadn’t thought that it would run off with her. It had made her stupid. That dragon had come back for her.

  Her eyes fell on her small purse, leaning carefully against the side of the bed. She reached down and found that her cell phone was still inside of it. If she really had been kidnapped, wouldn’t he have taken her cell phone? It seemed logical. Why would he have left it with her?

  There were several messages and missed calls waiting for her when she punched the home button. Nearly all of them were from her new roommate, Clary. They told a story of how Clary realized the man she intended to bring back from the dorm had been a sleaze ball. The man had tried to push her into a cab with him and she very luckily managed to score a well-placed kick before running to safety. Her roommate asked where she was, expressing concern because she realized that her drink had been drugged.

  She opened a message to reply to her roommate. Once her fingers hovered over the screen, she realized that she may have over reacted. Wesley hadn’t lied to her about how he’d found her, how he’d rescued her. The night may have been a blur to her, but now she knew there was a reason why. She remembered grabbing Clary’s nearly full drink and throwing it back.

  Instead of asking for help, she told her roommate that she was safe and okay. She moved on to the messages from her mother. What would Bea think if she knew where her daughter currently was? Her mother would lose her mind. She sent her mother a vague update, leaving out many of the large events of the day before.

  After the messages were sent, she sat on the edge of the mattress and stared at the screen. If she called for help now, the school would know where she’d been. They would know who she had been with. Dakota found that not only did she not want to lose her chance to study abroad, but she didn’t want Wesley to get into trouble.

  So, she tucked the phone back into her purse and stood up.

  Chapter Nine

  Wes had hardly been able to control himself in that room. Just the sight of her on his bed had drove him mad. Without the band of silver to drive his dragon back, the beast inside of him roared to claim the young woman as his own. He demanded that Wes take her at once, to make her scream their name, to mark her as theirs.

  He worried that he knew exactly what was wrong. If he learned anything from her fear it was that she did not feel the same way about him. The moment that she had learned what he really was he had smelled her spike of fear. She practically scrambled away from him. In a flash, that fear turned into anger that he did not understand. She directed it at him and it stabbed him through the heart.

  Using what little control, he had left, he forced himself out of the room. He couldn’t bear to feel his mate’s wrath.

  Mate.

  That was the only explanation for the emotions that he was feeling. A growl rumbled through him. His mate had nearly been raped and he hadn’t killed the man responsible. It was tempting to give her space and go back into the city to hunt the man down. He shook his head.

  Inside of him, his beast agreed. His beast wanted blood or sex.

  Not right now. We need to convince her to trust us.

  Wes went outside to his work space. The pieces of the bed frame he had been working on the day before lay in a pile. It was a project that he didn’t foresee truly needing when he worked on it. The project had only been a way to busy his hands while his mind went off on its own path. Now, he looked down at it and he yearned to see Dakota laying beneath the branches.

  Which, he may never actually be able to do. She likely hated him for whatever reason she felt she couldn’t share. It was likely that she would only come down from his room to ask him to take her back. And he would. He would do whatever she asked. He only wanted her happiness, even if that meant a life without him.

  He gripped a piece of metal. The beast inside of him lashed his tail at the idea of giving up their mate. Behind him a shelf of tools clattered to the floor. He heard the crack of the wall breaking. Beneath his hand, the metal started to melt. He was about to turn and throw it when a small voice startled him.

  He spun to find Dakota standing in the doorway to his workspace. She was barefoot and her hair was mussed as she leaned in the doorway. Inside, his beast growled appreciatively. The urge to take her into his arms was overwhelming. The beast pushed him forward, but he tried to hold his ground.

  “I may have over reacted earlier,” she said, looking at the ground. “You have to understand why I was so angry. I wasn’t mad that you saved me from a dangerous situation. In fact, I’m forever in your debt.”

  “It was no problem,” he choked out.

  She raised a hand for him to stop. “I am a student at the University. Their policy for students from abroad states that if any foreign student is so much as sighted by a dragon, they are to be sent back home. They take dragons very seriously. The fact that I’m here…”

  Her voice trailed off, the fiery emotion from earlier dying with barely a fizzle. He hadn’t known. He had no idea that he was risking something that she seemed to hold so dear. He knew someone that could help, should it come down to that. He wasn’t about to admit to anyone that he left the territory last night. Not if there was any other way to help her.

  Dakota looked up at him finally. “I guess, since I didn’t know what you were at the bar last night, people aren’t likely to recognize you if you take me back. I should be… I should be okay.”

  Wes let go of the breath he hadn’t realized that he was holding.

  Never let her go. The beast whispered demands into his mind. Wes swallowed hard.

  “Would you like breakfast first?”

  She looked up at him, his heart stopping for a brief moment, and nodded. She would stay just a little while longer. Maybe he could earn her trust over pancakes and bacon. The least he could do was learn more about her. Just because his beast had laid claim to the woman didn’t mean that mates were always compatible. His great uncle had loved an evil woman and when her evil deeds got her killed, it had driven him mad.

  If this woman wasn’t the love of his life, then maybe letting her go was best for both of them. Inside of his head, his beast thrashed with an intensity that made his skull throb. It was almost unbearable. The beast urged him toward Dakota, urged him to take the woman in his arms and press her against the wall.

  “Are you alright?” she asked, her hands touching his arms.

  He looked up and gave her a lopsided smile and watched her face falter. His pants grew tight when he realized what kind of effect he had on her. “Just a splitting headache is all.”

  “I thought that your kind were damn near impervious to everything.”

  “Not to silly girls who can’t make up their minds on how they feel,” he teased.

  Her lips cur
ved into a frown and she slapped his arm, but he could see the spark that was in her eye. This close, he wanted to lean forward and take a deep breath of her. The smell of irises was driving him mad. Instead, he reached out and ran his fingers through a knot in her hair, detangling the strands. They felt like silk over his skin.

  She froze for a second and the air between them was charged. His heart thumped inside his chest. It would take little effort to capture her chin in his hands and press his lips to hers. Would they feel soft and pliant? Or would she be filled with fire?

  Before he could decide, she ducked away from him. She wrapped her arms around herself and turned back toward his tower. Inside his head, his beast thrashed once more. The metal pieces of the bed rattled beside him.

  Before his beast could do any more damage to his work space, he followed Dakota back to the tower. Inside, she stood in the center of the room, her arms still wrapped around her body. She looked around nervously. Wes realized that she was still wearing the meager dress from the night before. While it wasn’t too cold outside, the stone of the tower made his home chill.

  “I’ll start a fire then grab you some clothes. I don’t think anything I own will fit you properly, but it will cover you much better than that little slip of nothing does.”

  She turned slowly. “I appreciate it.”

  Wes didn’t tell her that the idea of her wearing his clothes made him hard. Instead, he quickly turned away from her to hide his growing cock and set about getting a fire going in the hearth. He didn’t know how she was going to feel about it, but using his breath was the quickest way possible to get a reliable fire going. He hunched over and felt the fire stirring inside of him. How it didn’t burn his human body from the inside out was beyond him. He didn’t look at things too closely. He tended to try to enjoy what life had to offer.