Tiger Bound (10 page)

“Dammit,” she said, as close to a snarl as she ever came. “While I was
singing.
” But she didn’t try to push her way out. Instead, she raced through the darkened house to the double doors off the guest room, and flung herself outside to run, fleet and barefoot-agile, through the tufty grama grasses along the side of the house. “Maks,” she said, taking the porch steps in a heedless bound and coming to rest beside him, a single fluid motion. “What happened?”

It should have been obvious. She smelled the blood; she saw it. Her first touch on his arm landed on sticky, clammy flannel, dark and ominous against the cheerful plaid. But the flood of sensation she received from him...that wasn’t about blood loss, or pain, or any injury at all. It was static turned loud, energy churning against itself. Her vision pulsed and doubled; her skin tingled with a vague fuzziness; it
dissolved,
leaving her gasping.

She wrenched herself away, closing herself off, and for a moment could do nothing but gape at him. “How did brevis even let you
go?
”

Just as well he couldn’t answer. She had a feeling that the brevis medics knew nothing of this. And though she frowned in instant frustration at the understanding that Maks had concealed such a weakness from them, she stiffened when truth hit; she had done nothing less.

In truth, she’d done
more.
She’d hidden herself so brevis wouldn’t put her in the field or assign her to the city. Maks had merely hidden himself so he could come here and help Katie.

“God, I suck.” She drew her hands over her face, pausing to press the heels of her palms against her eyes. “Suck, suck,
suck.
” What’s worse, she was wallowing in it when he needed her.

Oh, she didn’t want to do this. She didn’t want to make herself open to him, to the tooth-and-claw strength of him. She didn’t want to make herself vulnerable to the visions. She didn’t want to reveal those parts of herself that he would surely perceive, given how deep this would take her.

Being deer doesn’t mean being weak.

Maybe being deer meant being stronger than they ever suspected she’d been.

Which is how Katie found herself wedged up against the stout metal screening of the security screen, Maks’s weight tugged onto her lap. It took awkward moments to prop his lolling head, to shift him so she could reach the injured arm, and so her crossed legs kept the rest of him stable and her hands free.

And then, just for a moment, she indulged. She bent over his neck and breathed in the scent of him—the scent of a man after a day of work, tinged with stress, overlaid with blood, but nonetheless...

Wild.
More wild than she’d ever dared to be. And
alive.
The dry, layered scents of tiger and man, perfectly blended.

The deer in her wanted to jerk away. The human in her fought envy. And the rest of her wanted to succumb to the allure of the powerful and wild.

Maks opened his eyes, his gaze latching straight onto hers. She froze—feeling the hitch of his breath, seeing his mouth just barely move...waiting for the words.

But this was Maks, and there were no words. His eyes simply rolled back and then closed.

Katie straightened. She took a breath, let it out, and slid into her healer, diving through his dissonant static to focus on the throb of life beneath her hands—fingers running across flannel but feeling the flesh and bone, the belly of the biceps muscle, the strap of the triceps, the groove between them and the hollow of his elbow below.

She barely touched the torn flesh of the entry wound; she didn’t have to. She followed the bullet’s dark tunnel toward bone and nerve and artery, seeing it raw and ragged, seeing the acute nature of it—feeling the hot pain he’d been ignoring and, for an instant, catching her breath on it.

Even as she shook off the distress of the connection, she understood. Whatever had diminished his natural rate of healing—his
Sentinel
rate of healing—had left him without the resources even to initiate healing on a wound so raw. She’d underestimated that factor, and so he had lost all the ground she’d gained for him earlier.

She gently moved energies; she manipulated blood and tissue and life. Just as she so often did with her massage, when the animals reveled in her touch and the owners had no clue. The bleeding stopped; the ragged feel of the injury faded, the torn fibers and vessels knitting, however tentatively, into a whole.

Enough.

Any more, and she might just kick up a reactive irritation. And then, since he lay quiescent, she went looking around. Looking deeper and wider. Into the throb of shifting color and hazy darkness she’d cut through to reach this healing place. Hunting the core of it and finding—

Maks! Run, baby, don’t look back!

A woman’s cry of despair, a big cat’s wild snarl—

The echoing soprano snarl of a youngling, shifting to a child’s cry—

And then a ripple of darkness, a shift of color...the cough of a tiger’s warning, clamors for help...the weight of a responsibility she couldn’t quite discern.

And finally, the sudden understanding that she’d stumbled into the past. That she glimpsed, in jagged shards, that which had formed the man in her arms.

That which somehow still haunted him, whether he knew it or not.

She eased away from it. She’d meant to explore a healing, not invade his deepest privacy. At least, she
meant
to ease away from it.

But the intensity of his past wrapped itself around her, startling her with the vivid overlay of intertwined determination, territorial protectiveness...the willingness to do battle. The remembered helplessness of being caught, the utter relief of realizing that he was no longer alone, the fear of change...

That new intimacy came with a lightning surge of physical desire—
initiation,
the impact of which lingered, as it did for them all. It struck echoes of Katie’s own initiation—the first union with another Sentinel, so carefully matched, the coupling that released every Sentinel to full potential.

Not everyone experienced significant transformation. Katie had simply emerged much more synced to her deer, and had quickly chosen her reclusive way of life. Caught in Maks’s whirlwind impression of the past, she felt him emerge on the other side of initiation to settle back into what he’d always been—always that determination; always that purpose, with the matter-of-fact physical prowess, physical awareness...lingering physical want.

It was the
want
that rose between them now, pushing back at Katie until she jerked herself free, head rattling back against the security screen.

No. Not free. Just looking at it from inside her own awareness instead of his. But hunger still washed over her skin, a flood of warmth and fluttering sensation. It left her in thrall, aware of every whisper of air across her skin, every tingle of sensation. Maks lay heavy against her.

He was so big. He was
tiger
. What had she even been thinking, to haul him into her lap for healing?

What had she been thinking, to linger and to explore the whispering fugue of confusion clinging around him?

What the
hell
was she thinking, to look down into those open green eyes and lower her mouth to his?

* * *

Maks awoke from the tangle of the past and found himself in Katie’s lap. He knew it for hers even before he fully opened his eyes—he knew it from the sensation of her, the long and graceful limbs, the infinitely gentle touch.

Not only in Katie’s lap, but kissing her. Tired and sore, but flushed with her healing touch—and with her gentle nip, the scrape of a pointed canine, a kiss less fierce than it was intimate. A kiss so totally
Katie.

He did more than return it. He brought his hand up to thread through her hair—and then, without breaking their connection, he pushed himself up, finding his way to his knees. Her arms crept up to the sides of his face, fingers restless in his hair as she deepened their kiss. His hand found her breast, cupped it, running a thumb across a pebbling nipple. He groaned deeply at her squirming response.

Not until her crossed legs fell open, not until he found her waist and jerked her up to straddle his hips, did she so much as hesitate.

But Maks had woken to the taste of her, and he didn’t care that she was deer and he tiger, or that this wasn’t what he was here to do at all. He cared about Katie, sweet in his arms. He cared about the responsive tremors running through her body and the crush of her breasts between them. He cared about the fiery hot promise surging down his spine and clenching through the core of him, and he cared about the call of something—something—

Katie squirmed against him, her head falling back, a gasp of startled pleasure in her throat. Her hands slid down to clench over his shoulders; she moved against him as if there were no clothes between them at all.

He thrust back at her, all instinct and response, and she cried out as he laid his teeth against the long arch of her neck, scraping skin. He pushed her up against the door, rattling metal and not caring or heeding, only possessing—slapping his hands against that door with fingers digging into metal screening that should have been immutable to his touch.

Fire gathered within him, turning heightened pleasure to a startling intimation of pain, fire inexplicably curling around nerve and bone. It was nothing to be heeded in the face of his need, of her need—of the way she clenched strong legs around him, her pleasure crying free and unfettered and complete. Her eyes had gone huge and glazed, and whatever had taken hold of him had swept her up in its wake, turning a lurking attraction into a burst of sensation.

Maks cried out, too, a harsh sound, his body tightening with hot need, everything within him reaching, reaching—

And suddenly slapped back by a sudden punch of shifting energy, his raging physical need ambushed by an internal whirlwind of something bigger, something greedy, something
wanting...

Something so much stronger than he was.

At the startling bolt of pain, he fell out of the exquisite whirlwind and twisted back into himself.

And there was Katie, sagging in his lap, panting—her expression befuddled, confusion quickly coming to the fore.

But even as he struggled with the wash of sensations, the dizzy combination of assault and heady desire, he stopped her when she would have shifted away.

“No,” he said, and his voice reflected his conflict, leaving it rough, and harder than he’d meant to speak to her at all. “No,” he said again, as her eyes widened—as she realized how quickly she’d responded to him, there on the dark porch. “There is no running from this thing between us.”

He saw it right away, the rise of the deer, the deer’s panic in the grasp of the tiger—the struggle impending. He didn’t tighten his grip—but he didn’t ease it, either, his hands flattened on either side of her head, her back against the door, no room to disentangle from him.

“No,” he said again, more evenly this time. “Katie Rae, this is the safest you will ever be.”

It startled her. She looked straight at him, the deer-panic receding, her focus returning. “Maks,” she said, and touched his face, her fingers brushing his mouth, lingering there. “But I don’t... But...”

“There is no
but,
” he told her. “There is what
is.
” Maks had spent too many years living with what
was
to doubt it when he saw it. “This—” he closed the insignificant gap between them to kiss her, the merest brush of his mouth over hers “—
is.
”

She shook her head. “
This—
” she looked down at her rumpled shirt, her sprawling legs, and the lap in which he held her “—is probably only a reaction to the healing—the connection I established. Or it’s part of what’s going on here, or part of what’s going on with you. It could be not
us
at all.”

He gave her a gentle tiger’s smile, feeling the predatory nature of it.
Possessive.
“It’s still what
is.
Whatever pieces make it that way. Let it be.”

She relaxed against the door, her head tipped in thought, her gaze going inward. “You,” she said. “You’re so close to the tiger. There’s more of your
other
in you than I’ve ever seen in anyone else. In me.”

He frowned, wondering how she could think of the deer side of herself as
other
at all.

“I wasn’t trying to pry,” she said, reaching to touch his face again, not quite completing the gesture—as if it might somehow be more intimate than the way she still sat against him. “I did look, but I was trying to help, to see this
thing
that happens to you. The dissonance.”

He growled a little—just a little, and not at her. One hand rested on her thigh, the thumb straying into intimate territory...casual and possessive.

“I felt it at the station, where I first saw you. And just now, when I found you. But I can’t separate it out from the rest of you. I can only feel—” She shook her head. “So close to the tiger. So unfettered.”

He gave her his most deadpan look.

She pulled back her loose hair, realized the mess of the whole, and gave up on it; the strands fell back around her face with casual grace. When she looked at him, it was with a compassion that startled him. “What happened to you, Maks? There was...something. I saw glimpses... I felt it. I—” She hesitated. “I’m sorry. I
really
wasn’t there to pry. But I think it matters.”

Not to Maks. “Now,” he said, “is now. This is what
is.
”

But she was a stubborn deer. “Sometimes
then
makes us who we are
now.
”

He felt a low, disgruntled rumble in his chest. “Katie Rae Maddox,” he said. “You see what I am. It is only what I told you, when I first got into your car.”

“Maks Altán,” she said, and touched his face again. “You told me what you
do.
It’s not the same thing.”