Tempted by the Jaguar #3: Ramification (Riverford Shifters)

by Cristina Rayne

  Lana returned, fully clothed, with the aforementioned zip ties as well as a roll of duct tape and a stack of clothes for Maxim.

  “We’ll stay behind and watch her as well,” Karren said.

  The older woman was currently sitting on the floor examining the inside of a now-conscious Mitch’s mouth.

  He still had a couple of trails of drying blood leading from his mouth and down his chin and a swollen lower lip. Kylie instantly felt guilty. In all the excitement and her worry for Paul, she had forgotten completely about the other two.

  “Are you okay, Mitch?” Kylie asked anxiously, remembering hearing a crack at some point.

  “Jus a fat rip an a itten tongue,” Mitch slurred with a dismissive wave.

  “Don’t you worry about us Kylie,” Karen said firmly. “We’ll take care of things here. You just focus on your dad.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Kylie sat at her father’s bedside, holding one limp and clammy hand between both of hers and listening to the steady beep of his heart monitor. They had just brought him into this private room from surgery twenty minutes ago, the lioness’s claws having gone deep enough to nick the corner of his liver.

  She had sat alone in the waiting room throughout the surgery, her worry and self-beratement interrupted only by the occasional update from the nurse and a call from Karen. She had been escorted there by Hunter, and after she refused to talk to him until after the surgery was over, he agreed to leave her to her lone vigil.

  Although most of her attention was focused on Paul’s sleeping face, Kylie could feel the presence of the silent figure leaning against the wall beside the door as keenly as if his body was pressed firmly against her back.

  “I’m an asshole,” Hunter abruptly said, breaking the tense silence.

  Kylie stilled. Of all the things she thought he would say, that hadn’t even entered her realm of possibilities.

  “Yes, because only an asshole would save my father’s life,” she replied stiffly without turning around.

  “You know what I mean.”

  If anything, she became even more rigid. When Kylie had given him her ultimatum hours earlier, she had never imagined their inevitable conversation would begin like this. He was supposed to demand answers. He was supposed to be cold. Her heart clenched. He wasn’t supposed to apologize, dammit!

  When she remained silent, Hunter said, “I—we just want to talk. Okay?”

  His tone was neutral, giving no hints to what he was thinking. It made Kylie more nervous than she wanted to admit.

  “We?” she asked with an edge to her voice.

  “Don’t worry. Only Maxim and I know about your true heritage. He’s waiting outside the door right now.”

  Kylie finally turned around and fixed Hunter with a hard stare, trying to ignore the way her heart skipped a beat now that she was allowing herself to look at his face properly. One look and her heart was already betraying her. This was bad.

  “You didn’t even tell Mr. Gaither?”

  “Only Maxim. I—the way I behaved—it was obvious that my judgment was too questionable to leave something so potentially dangerous in my hands alone,” he admitted.

  Kylie blinked at him in surprise, not expecting such honesty right out of the gate. First an apology and now this. What exactly was he playing at?

  “And what do you think now?” she asked before she could stop herself.

  Idiot! You’ve been down this road before, and look where it’s gotten you. You already know what you have to do. You absolutely can’t lose your focus now thinking about all the maybes!

  “That’s what Maxim’s here to answer, if you’ll let him,” Hunter finally replied after studying her for a long, tense moment.

  His answer gave her pause. It was true that this whole mess started because she hadn’t been honest with him, even when Hunter had proven that he was more than trustworthy and their relationship had grown from wary friendship to something much more intimate. Yet, the fear of what her Polyshifter heritage represented to the shifter clans was ingrained in her so deeply that she wondered if it was even possible to ever lose it completely.

  Maybe he was right. Maybe the best thing to have here was someone who would consider her words a little more objectively. That way, if she pled her case just so, then maybe Paul and she still had a chance of continuing on with their original plan of fleeing to London once he was healed.

  It seemed that Hunter wouldn’t be so quick to judge her on the clans’ past prejudices about her people this time, and she was disturbed to find that the thought soothed the wounded part of her that still cared for him.

  Despite her rising discomfort, Kylie did her best to erase the wariness from her expression. She could do this.

  “Okay.”

  Some of the tension in Hunter’s shoulders eased, making her wonder what he would have done if she’d said no and glad she would never have to find out.

  Hunter reached over and lightly rapped on the door three times. The door immediately opened, and Maxim slowly, cautiously, stepped in, his body language like a cat entering potentially hostile territory. His nostrils flared as his eyes darted quickly from her to Hunter before he flashed her a tentative smile.

  “So you’re a ‘human’ this time.”

  Kylie stiffened briefly before she nodded towards the tiger shifter in acknowledgment. She had dipped a finger briefly in Paul’s mouth on the way over, figuring that it was better to smell like a human rather than a cougar. If she had stepped foot inside the clinic smelling like a cougar then there would have been no hiding that she was a Polyshifter. At least if she smelled human, she could explain it away as a Returner thing, a reversion brought on by all the stress. It had been an extreme amount of stress that had caused her awakening, after all.

  She waved a surprisingly steady hand towards the two empty chairs next to hers. “You should sit. It’s been a long day, and I have a feeling it’s about to get even longer.”

  “I’m sorry to make you do this now,” Maxim began. “Hunter wanted to wait until tomorrow when you’ve had some time to rest or at the very least, your father had woken up from the anesthesia, but things have gone too much to shit today that time is a luxury we no longer have. We just need to be sure—for everyone’s sake.”

  Kylie’s eyes inadvertently flickered over to Hunter, but his expression was still as unreadable as before.

  She nodded, and then took a deep breath to steady her nerves. She had a fleeting thought of her father, wondering if he had felt this anxious when he had first revealed himself to Paul.

  “I’ve lived in fear my entire life of being discovered. You see, my birth parents are both Polyshifters, from two different clans, in fact.”

  “Two different clans…” Hunter repeated, his tone startled. “I thought the Polyshifter clans had all been either destroyed, scattered, or—”

  “—enslaved?” Kylie finished for him, unable to keep the bitterness and anger from her voice.

  Hunter and Maxim exchanged a heavy look before Hunter fixed his eyes back on her. “That night in the forest when we first crossed paths—for a moment, I smelled two humans.” He looked at her expectantly.

  Kylie frowned. “What are you trying to ask me?”

  “You were human,” Hunter emphasized. “I had never heard that a Polyshifter could become fully human.”

  “Not many of us can,” Kylie admitted, “but that’s not why you smelled two humans that night.”

  Hunter’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “You smelled two humans because before that sicko abducted me, I was one hundred percent a Deadend. I wasn’t lying when I told you this earlier this morning.”

  Silence. Then both men began talking at once, and Kylie held up a hand sharply. “Wait! Let me finish. Why do you think I’ve managed to avoid notice for twenty years? I was a Deadend living with a human. How many times does a shifter even look twice at a human crossing their path? However, that wasn’t even the best part of
my protection. After all, what better way to protect a Polyshifter child, even a Deadend one, if no one knows that the child exists in the first place?”

  Maxim abruptly leaned forward. “Is Paul Moore really human?”

  “He is,” she confirmed, willing them both to see the truth in her eyes. “I know what you’re thinking, but Paul really is just my adoptive father. Paul and his wife, Laura, met my parents while they were all in medical school.”

  “Where is she now?” Maxim asked. “Should we have called her?”

  “She died of a brain aneurism a while back,” Kylie replied softly.

  “Oh, sorry,” Maxim said, shifting uncomfortably.

  “So your real parents decided to hide you with a human couple?” Hunter asked. When she nodded, he shook his head, looking perplexed. “Why didn’t they just go back to live within one of the Polyshifter communities? If those clans managed to keep themselves hidden even in the Age of the Cyber Snoops, then I would think there would be no place safer for you. Hell, why did they even leave in the first place?”

  Kylie sighed. “It makes sense if you know some of the Polyshifters’ history as well as my parents’ history. Understandably, both my father and mother’s clans lived within isolated, self-sustaining—villages for lack of a better word. It’s only within the past thirty, forty years that some of the Polyshifter clans have allowed their kids to go out into the word in order to attend college, not only to modernize, but to search for other Polyshifters in the hopes of widening the gene pool.

  “My parents met as college freshman, and my mother soon realized that the ‘human’ she had befriended was a Polyshifter the first time she got a good whiff of my father’s skin. You see, we Polyshifters have a unique scent that gives us away to shifters when we’re masquerading as human, but it’s hard to detect unless you know what to look for.”

  “But if they were in a completely human form, then how could your mother even pick up this scent?” Maxim asked. “Or does a Polyshifter retain the heightened senses of a shifter even when they’re in a completely human state?”

  “No, you’re right. The enhanced senses do disappear when we’re completely human. My mother, on the other hand, wasn’t one of the Polyshifters that could become fully human. Though it was more dangerous for my father, because of this, once they’d graduated and married, to avoid scrutiny, they made the choice to attend med school as cougars. They all even did their residency at the same hospital. Then one night when everyone had been drinking more heavily than usual, Paul let slip to my father that he used to play with a wolf shifter kid back when he was in elementary school. Thinking that having a human friend in the know might come in handy, my father took Paul into his confidence about not only being a shifter, but a Polyshifter and why that was significant.

  “By the time my mother became pregnant with me, the lions had somehow discovered my father’s clan in a remote part of Canada, killing all but the youngest children.”

  Hunter growled, his lips twisted in disgust. “The ones that could still be molded.”

  Anger surged potently throughout her body until she began to tremble with it as it always did when she thought of the fate of her father’s clan. “They’ve been hunting Polyshifters like my father, those who had been away from the village when it was attacked, ever since. With the lions now breathing down their necks, my parents went into hiding.”

  She smiled thinly at Hunter. “Like you, my father knew that the only place we had a chance to be safe was among my mother’s clan, and he pleaded with my mother to take me and go. She flat-out refused. I think she’d had a falling out with both her Elders and parents and had left without permission. Because of that, she didn’t think they would accept my father, and she didn’t want to leave him behind.

  “When I was eight, my parents were forced to leave me with Paul and Laura. Both Sniffers and one of the lions’ assassins were close on our heels, and they were desperate to keep them from knowing that they’d had a child. They promised to come back once they were certain they’d shaken their tail but then soon after seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. Paul and Laura adopted me. We moved to Riverford, and we’ve been trying to find out what happened to my parents ever since.”

  “It’s no wonder you were so interested in what I could tell you about the lion clans,” Hunter said.

  “Yeah.” Kylie paused, and then added hesitantly, “That’s why Paul and I didn’t make a run for it after I became a Returner. It had been over a year since we’d discovered anything like a clue, and Paul thought well of Riverford’s jaguar clan. He thought maybe you, like Karen and the cougar clan, might be able to help us someday, and the thought of belonging to a community for the first time…”

  Kylie trailed off, suddenly unsure if she should have revealed that kind of weakness at this point of the game.

  Hunter’s eyes were suddenly golden pools of intensity. “Then—you were planning to tell me eventually?”

  “Despite how much trouble I caused you, you bent over backwards to help me without batting an eye. I thought maybe, just maybe I had found someone within the shifter community that I could someday trust with this horrible secret, a friend around my age who could understand me at my core better than my human friends because it was a core we shared. I never expected—” She looked down at her hands and swallowed against the huge lump that had suddenly formed in her throat. “I never expected last night,” she finished softly.

  “And that’s my cue to leave,” Maxim cut in dryly. He stood and looked at each of them with a hint of amusement. “I think the rest you two need to sort out alone.”

  Then before either one of them could say a word, he hurried out of the room, leaving Kylie and Hunter to choke on an atmosphere that had suddenly become unbelievably thick with tension.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Thanks a lot, buddy,” Hunter muttered under his breath as he raked a hand through his hair in agitation. “Though I suppose he has a point. The last hour has shown me just how much I let my hatred of those lion bastards fuck up my common sense. After what we shared, I should have at least had the decency to hear you out.”

  “Sooner or later, Polyshifters always cause chaos,” Kylie whispered, still unable to look at him. “My mother used to say this all the time. Her voice always sounded so sad. It used to scare me a lot because normally she was always so incredibly cheerful and full of life. This morning proved she was right.”

  Kylie forced herself to look up, to capture and hold his gaze. What she said next was the hardest thing she had ever had to say, every word shattering the last of the small hope of the possibility of love she just now realized she had been clinging to by tooth and nails despite everything.

  “Last night should have never happened.”

  Her words hung in the air like a toxic cloud ready to suffocate her. Yet, Hunter didn’t so much as blink as he looked back at her with that same unreadable expression he had held before as he had stood in the back of the room staring at her back. One minute, two, then five, and the silence that had fallen between them still stretched on, broken only by the steady beeps of Paul’s heart monitor, until Kylie had to struggle hard not to look away.

  Then Hunter’s eyes inexplicably softened. “I can see it in your eyes, you know,” he said finally, “that you really believe that, but not for the reason you want me to think. You want to run, and I can understand that given everything that’s happened, my fuck-up playing a not-so-insignificant part.”

  Kylie looked away, then lowered her eyes to Paul’s still-sleeping face. “You don’t need to keep apologizing. I wasn’t exactly a complete innocent in all this.”

  She could feel Hunter’s eyes boring into the back of her head, making some deep remnant of her shifter side still present in her psyche want to turn around and snap her jaws at him.

  “He’s going to need some time to recover,” Hunter said. “In the meantime, my clan can protect him here.” He was gazing intensely at her when she reluctantly
turned back to him. “And I’ll protect you, if you’ll let me.”

  Kylie’s heart clenched. “Please don’t say that,” she said softly. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be. You’ve already seen what having a Polyshifter suddenly pop up in front of you can do to upset what you thought were strong ties. Even if the lions haven’t found out about my true heritage yet, I have no doubt that assassin told others about me.”

  Kylie laughed humorlessly. “The rogue lion. That’s almost as bad as being a Polyshifter. I don’t think they’ll ever stop coming after me. That’s why it’s better for me to leave now before things become much worse. Paul almost died this time trying to protect me. The next time he might not be so lucky to survive—or it might even be you that’s killed—”

  Hunter was out of his chair in an instant, and then his mouth, hard and demanding, abruptly silenced the rest of her words. One hand held the back of her head in place and the other snaked around her middle in order to draw her up out of her chair and flush against him. Kylie let out a muffled sound of shock and tried to pull away, but Hunter’s arm was all curved steel.

  Then she found her mouth opening for him of its own accord, and suddenly his hot tongue was sliding sensually against her own.

  Idiot! Idiot! she berated herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to fight against the kiss seriously, especially when it was something her wounded soul wanted so badly.

  The warmth of Hunter’s firm body acted like a balm, and soon Kylie was closing her eyes and wrapping her arms around his waist, all but melting against him.

  Hunter made a noise of pleasure against her lips, and the kiss deepened to something more frenzied and passionate.

  “It seems I missed quite a lot,” a raspy, amused voice suddenly broke through the loud drumming of her heart what could have been equally minutes or hours later.

  Kylie immediately broke away from the kiss, feeling a surge of both guilt and joy and looked down at the mildly smiling man with the oxygen tubes up his nose. “Paul! You’re awake!”