by Seere, Diana
Oh God. Not again. Of course he had human teeth. He was human, as was she. As would be her husband someday and their not-yet-conceived children.
She drained her glass and got to her feet. “Excuse me for a moment. I need the restroom.”
“Why are you taking your purse?” he asked, gesturing at the clutch in her hand.
Instead of snapping at him to mind his own business, she managed a coy smile. “You know, girl stuff.”
He rolled his eyes. “Right.”
Faking another smile, she turned and sauntered to the back of the restaurant, feeling his gaze on her ass as she turned the corner to the dark hallway that led to the bathrooms.
She locked herself inside the women’s room, took the phone out of her purse, hands shaking, and hailed a ride. A car would be there in three minutes.
Glad she’d worn flats, she slipped out of the bathroom and pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen. Ignoring the surprised exclamations and frowns from the staff, she darted around them and the steaming pots, platters, and pans to reach the back door.
A warm spring evening, the door was already propped open, and with a wave at the guy chopping vegetables at the counter near the back, she hurried outside into a dark alley, past two men in white aprons who were on a smoke break, and broke into a jog.
Her ride would pick her up on the corner. Hopefully Tim expected women to take too long in the bathroom and wouldn’t be watching the street. Then again, if this whole date was what she was afraid it might be—
“Where are you going?” A man’s voice. A strong hand seizing her arm.
She gasped, heart in her throat, and tried to break away. But the grip was too strong, and another hand rose to capture her other arm.
“Let me go!” She drew in her breath to scream, but the hand clamped over her mouth.
“Dr. Baird,” the man said. “It’s me.”
She drove her heel into his instep, this time regretting her lack of heels.
“For God’s sake, Samantha!” Now his bossy, irritable tone was familiar. “It’s Asher Stanton.”
Her panic left her in a flood of relief, and she relaxed. When he removed his hand, her relief turned to anger.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she hissed, fear making her heart stammer, some other emotion making it gallop as she met those cold blue eyes.
Gorgeous, long-lashed, intelligent—dare she say, worried?—eyes.
“I beg your pardon, don’t ever do what again?” Eyelids dropping, he put his mask back on. The man was a walking ice cube, radiating chill.
“Grab women in dark alleys!” Her heart was still pounding. “God, you scared the hell out of me.”
“It’s past time you realized your danger,” he snapped. “I’m getting you out of here.”
Although she’d been thinking exactly the same thing, his arrogance was unacceptable. He wasn’t her boss—and never would be. “I’ve already got a ride.”
“Timothy Schmidt, your date, is working with Tomas Nagy, and if he ever touches you again, I’ll break every one of those fingers on his soft, pink hands.” He pulled her with him into the depths of the alley, the opposite direction of where her ride was going to meet her.
“Where are you taking me? I’ve already called a car. I don’t need you rescuing me.”
“Apparently you do. The car you requested is being driven by Tomas Nagy himself.”
“He’s an Uber driver? I don’t believe it!”
“I trust it isn’t his usual occupation,” Asher said, roughly pulling her along with him into the darkness. Up ahead was a roaring sound, and the garbage at their feet tumbled past them, blown by a strange wind coming down the alley.
Shocked by the idea of Tomas getting her into a car alone, she stopped struggling and began to match his pace on her own. “Tomas is in Lincoln? Are you sure?”
Asher wrapped an arm around her shoulders and swept her around the corner. The alley had opened up onto a side street, and across them in an empty lot was—
A helicopter. Its blades were spinning, ready to take off.
Waving at the traffic to stop for him, which it did, Asher pulled her across the street and into another pair of arms, those of Manny, the Stanton family bodyguard.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Sam flung her hands over her hair, its strands flying wildly about her head, turning her into a human tornado.
“Never,” Asher said. “I never joke about safety.”
His words should have been drowned out by the roaring blades, but she heard every word as if spoken in her own mind.
Which was the only possible explanation for why she obeyed him and got into the damn helicopter, the whirlybird wildly out of place in her hometown.
Just like her.
Chapter 2
Seeing her again weakened him.
Surely that was all.
Ignoring the dull throb at the base of his rib cage, directly above his left hip, Asher crawled into the helicopter, her protests meshing with the auditory chatter of the chopper’s blades. As Manny helped Samantha into her seat belt, then deftly climbed in next to the pilot, Asher breathed her in.
Then breathed even harder.
Drawn to look out the open-air door, he saw the dark SUV across the street, idling in front of the restaurant he’d just spirited precious cargo from.
Tomas.
The passenger window lowered slowly just as the helicopter lifted, a crowd of bystanders milling about, a few smartphones snapping flash pictures. Manny was already on it, finding ways to create a cover story that would make all the media whispers disappear.
A rock star in town. A celebrity movie director. A dominant, hardcore billionaire with a fetish for danger.
One of them might even be close to the truth.
“Asher!” Samantha screamed above the sound, the wind turning her into a fiery witch, a specter, a goddess beyond compare, as if she controlled nature, the wind, the world. “Are you listening to me?”
No, he wanted to tell her as his old friend locked eyes for just a second, a fraction of a life, long enough to erase all of Asher’s childhood, short enough to make him want to shift and jump into thin air, to fly, to rip Tomas into tiny shreds of cat skin.
No, he needed to shout back as she grabbed his arm and jerked him away from the hypnotic memory of those eyes, eyes that Asher understood better and better by the day.
No, he hoped to explain as her mouth moved and all he could think about was kissing it to make her words stop, to give her more to think about than her own anger, to give himself what he had restlessly considered every waking moment and a few in slumber as her full thigh moved against him, the close quarters giving him hints of her perfume, a sweet scent that made him want to lick it off her like a cat giving her a bath.
Like a cat.
“How did you know Tomas was driving the car I called for?” she demanded. The words throbbed inside him, shaking him out of his stupor, his hand moving to his belly, discreet under his suit jacket. Long fingernails, so close to claws, receded.
“I just knew,” he said in a voice that was not his. Clearing his throat, he tried again. Her expression pinned him in place. If she weren’t so damn good at being a scientist, she’d make a killer prosecutor. Those eyes. That fierce determination. That stable, penetrating demand for the truth.
Oh, how he wished to penetrate her in return.
Frowning, she followed the length of his shoulder, down to elbow and, finally, hand.
“Are you hurt?” she asked, urgency changing, her focus now on his. “Did you fight Tomas before you found me?” Alarm rang out in her shocked question, her outrage at being interrupted and overruled transformed into a dawning understanding.
“I—” How could he explain? The helicopter lifted them above the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, past an art house theater with people queued up to immerse themselves in hours of entertainment, over large sports fields and enormous dormitories, the state’s flagship university so embedded i
nto the city itself it may as well have been home grown in the soil, like Nebraska corn.
He knew he should answer her. Knew she would not relent, her piercing need to be told the facts never quelling even if there were a higher purpose to keeping her ignorant.
“I—” He tried again, the word coming out clipped, the deep breath he took afterward accompanied by the bizarre change in his sight that happened with increasing frequency. Closing his lids, he shoved it back, his pulse settling into his hip, his body unraveling in ways his mind did in those somber days after his wife and baby died so many years ago.
This was no death, though.
In many ways, what was happening to him was worse.
Of all the people in the world who might have an inkling of what was happening to him, Samantha Baird was it. Eminently qualified. The perfect person to examine his body thoroughly, and his mind even more, in order to set him back to being whole.
Perhaps in more ways than one.
He’d hidden the strange change in his body that had started after his skin had fully healed from his injuries in the mortal battle with Mason Webb and Tomas Nagy. Mortal for Webb, at least. Declared fully healed by the family’s doctor, Asher had assumed that pronouncement to be true.
Until he began having dreams of being a cat.
And then of seeing through a cat’s eyes.
Until he’d been in the restaurant, he hadn’t sensed Tomas at all, but the intensity of it stole every heartbeat from him, turned oxygen into a thief, and Asher’s usual sense of awareness to a blank slab of stone.
Perhaps proximity was like kryptonite. What had Tomas done to him?
What, indeed, was Tomas doing to him?
“You’re white as a ghost!” Sam gasped, unclipping her seat belt, moving over to him as he fought to find the words to shout her down and force her back to the safety of her harness.
“Dr. Baird!” Manny shouted. “Get your clip back on!”
“Yes,” he said softly, grateful for Manny’s words, his hand pressing hard against his side as she ripped open his buttoned coat and pulled his fine bespoke shirt out from his waistband.
The cool press of her expert fingers against his bare belly sent eternal shivers through him.
“My God, Asher! Your scar! It’s infected and—” Concern altered her face as she narrowed her eyes and palpated his belly, a fire blazing in him, her features so sharp his tongue came out to lick his lips.
She flinched, but continued her probing, his body reacting with an arousal he had not felt in—
Ever.
He had never felt this before.
“How long have you had a scar in the shape of—” Wide eyes met his. “How did you know it was Tomas in that car?” Narrowing, those green irises fixated on him, demanding an answer he could not give.
“Put on your seat belt,” he growled, the words coming from a different throat.
“I am not the one in danger right now, you ass,” she said in a voice more grave than his. “Manny, we need a hospital! Now!” she called out.
“NO!” Asher thundered, panting with the effort. “We need to go to the ranch,” he instructed Manny, who huddled quickly with the pilot.
Two nods.
“What? Absolutely not,” Samantha protested. “You can’t—”
Mercifully, before Asher even tried to answer, he lost consciousness, his final sight her face coming closer, closer—
Like a lover’s kiss gone horribly wrong.
* * *
“Take us to the hospital!” Releasing Asher for a moment, Sam reached forward to grab the pilot’s arm. “He needs a doctor now!”
Manny pinned her back in her seat, clipping the belt over her chest as she tried to protest. “Stay in your seat, Doctor! We’re about to land.”
“At the hospital? I don’t see a hospi—”
“At the airport. The Stanton plane is waiting for us.”
“That’s too far! He needs a doctor immed—”
“Dr. Santino is on the plane. With a full medical team.”
“What? Already?”
“Mr. Stanton’s idea,” Manny said, glancing at the unconscious figure with respect, then back to Sam with a hint of a smile. “For your sake.”
“My sake? But why—” She stopped herself.
She knew why. Oh, that man. That more than a man. Asher Stanton would have taken every precaution to protect his family and… those they felt responsible for, like her… from danger, even going as far as bringing his own private doctor, a shifter himself who specialized in their kind.
She sank back into her seat, twisting her fingers through one of Asher’s motionless hands, reluctantly agreeing to the plan to allow Santino to attend to Asher’s horrifying wound. A mainstream hospital wouldn’t know what to make of that mysterious scar, let alone his shocking biology. But they would have the means to treat his infection, and if Santino displayed the slightest hint of incompetence or lack of supplies, she would fly Asher to a regular hospital herself.
How would she explain the man’s body to them? She would cross that bridge if it came to it.
As she gripped Asher’s hand, enjoying the sensation far more than she should have, they landed in an airfield and were immediately met by Dr. Santino, two assistants, and a stretcher. Manny jostled her out of the way to lift Asher in his arms and move him out. Sam felt helpless, for once wishing she’d pursued a clinical practice instead of laboratory research. The urge to help was overwhelming. She was dizzy with it, reminded of an old childhood tendency to contract chronic ear infections that left her temporarily deafened and blind with pain.
She climbed out of the helicopter, her head spinning like the blades overhead. Flying always gave her a headache. It made sense that under such stressful circumstances her old weakness would be triggered. And that noise! She clamped her hands over her ears as she jogged alongside Asher on the stretcher, vowing to never ride in a helicopter again.
At the entrance to the Stanton jet, the pain in her left ear became so intense she stumbled on the bottom stair. Manny and the others were busy carrying Asher through the doorway to the plane and didn’t notice her pause, gasp, and clutch the side of her head.
But Asher, rousing himself from unconsciousness, opened his eyes and looked directly at her over Manny’s shoulder. “Dr. Baird! Assist Dr. Baird!” he shouted, his voice as loud and commanding as ever, dark hair covering one eye, giving him a rakish, battle-weary look.
One of the medics turned to her in surprise, and she hurried to reassure him. “I’m fine,” she said, forcing a smile. “Just a little headache. It’s nothing.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Asher said. “She almost fainted. Something’s wrong. Something—” He groaned and seemed to slip into unconsciousness again. A medic rushed over and helped Manny carry him to the medical bed that was already laid out in the back of the plane.
Dr. Santino appeared behind Manny, arms wide. Sam was relieved to see he wore surgical gloves and scrubs, apparently ready to take over.
“The infection—” Sam began, ignoring the pounding in her ears.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Dr. Santino said. “I know all about it. Now please, Dr. Baird, you and the others, please sit down. I need to do what I can for Mr. Stanton without interruption. It’s a four-hour flight. You’ll have plenty of time to see him after he’s stabilized.”
The medics pulled a curtain across the center of the plane, separating them, and someone, she was too worried about Asher to notice who, guided her into a seat and snapped the belt over her lap. In moments the plane was accelerating and then airborne.
Manny sat just behind her, as if to make sure she didn’t try to run to the back of the plane and interrupt the physician.
“I’m satisfied for now,” she told Manny as the plane leveled off, “as long as Dr. Santino is here.”
Seeming to relax, Manny nodded. “I respect your concern.”
“Did you know he was ill?” she demanded.
A
longtime, loyal employee of the Stanton family, Manny didn’t give anything away. “I’m sure the doc can fix him up.”
“But fix what?” she asked. “How long has his scar been… looking like…” She couldn’t say it aloud. The scar had puckered, darkening the skin around it in the shape of—
No, she must’ve imagined it. The individual shifters she’d studied had been biological marvels, but nothing could explain why a flesh wound would heal—poorly, incompletely—in the shape of a large cat.
A wild cat, like a lion.
Like Tomas Nagy’s other form.
She unfastened her seat belt and darted past Manny to see Santino. No, to see Asher. She had to see Asher. Compulsive behavior was never part of her repertoire, but when it came to Asher Stanton, apparently she was acquiring an obsession.
One she felt in her blood.
Before Manny could stop her, she shoved aside the curtain to see the eldest Stanton, gloriously naked, laid out on the narrow bed in front of Dr. Santino, who was applying an ointment to the impossible scar. Asher remained unconscious but seemed to be breathing normally, his broad, muscled chest rising and falling with easy, unlabored movements.
How she’d dreamed of that man, that more-than-man. How she’d dreamed of the moment she first saw him transform from human to wolf, more beautiful, more holy, than she’d ever imagined from her microscope.
In some ways it freed her to know why she’d never seriously desired any man before she’d met him. If this is what she craved, then she was fated to be alone. It was a relief to permanently disavow the traditional goals—the nice guy, the church wedding, the suburban tract house, the minivan—that she’d never wanted anyway.
When you lusted after a god, you became a nun.
Asher wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t human, and she had no illusions about his hopes for a future with any woman, let alone a human.
Let alone her. She’d always loved science, and now she had a reason to give it even more of herself than she had already.
She would give it everything. She would give it her life.
Because Asher—
