Shifter by Lora Leigh
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She followed him into the room, then stopped. “It’s very…elegant,” she finally said.
He laughed. “Smooth and diplomatic, I’ll give you that. It’s a damn bare room.”
He looked around, trying to see the room through her eyes. Devoid of furniture except for a bed covered by a plain blanket, the space was huge and barren.
“Why does the prince of cats lead such a stark existence, I wonder,” she murmured, but she wasn’t mocking him. She’d spoken with concern and warmth in her tone. Two emotions he’d never expected to find in his bedroom.
He’d found lust there. He’d found callous indifference, spite, and—finally—hatred from Fallon. After she’d been murdered, he’d returned to the room in a killing rage and taken it out on the furniture. Every rug, painting, or piece of furniture she’d touched. He’d destroyed it all, clawing it to shreds in a towering fury. No matter what a heartless, cold woman she’d been, she’d been under his protection.
He’d failed Fallon.
He wouldn’t fail Marie.
“I got rid of anything she’d touched. Couldn’t stand to see it,” he admitted, walking away from her. Anything so she couldn’t see his face.
“You loved her that much?” The sympathy in her voice was like salt on the bloody wounds of his conscience.
“No,” he confessed, the words wrenched from a black and twisted place in his soul. “I didn’t love her at all. That’s why I couldn’t stand it. Maybe if I’d loved her, I’d have found a way to protect her, even from herself.”
Marie stepped up beside him and placed her hand on his arm. “Bastien told me of Fallon and her plot to work with the vampires against you and Kat. As a leader, you must know that you cannot save everyone. Some are destined to walk a dark path.”
Ethan stared down at her hand on his arm where it burned through his sleeve to his skin. To his nerve endings. “I don’t need your sympathy, Marie. I made my choices, and I have to live with them. But you don’t. Call Alaric, and let’s get you out of here.”
She jerked her hand away from him as if stung. “I did not offer my sympathy but my understanding. I see, though, that you require neither.”
Whirling around, Marie walked to the center of the room, graceful even in her anger. He wanted to race after her and yank her into his arms and never let go. Inside him, his panther purred its agreement with that plan.
Instead, he stood his ground and watched her retreat. She closed her eyes and lifted her face toward the ceiling, raising both hands, palms up, at her sides. A faint silvery blue glow whispered around her still form until she was bathed in light. A nymph rising from the sea in starlight.
He suddenly wanted her with a painful urgency. His body hardened to the point of pain. He scrubbed his face with his hand, disgusted with himself.
I’m nothing if not the king of bad timing.
After nearly three full minutes, Marie opened her eyes. She bit her lip and shook her head, then stood there heaving in deep breath after deep breath.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“This has never happened to me in three centuries,” she said, visibly trembling. “Alaric’s mental pathway is shut down. I cannot reach him. For good or ill, I cannot return to Atlantis.”
Marie sat alone in the vast, gleaming steel and stone kitchen, toying with the remains of a sandwich. She’d eaten nothing all day, but worry and concern had robbed her of what little appetite she’d been able to muster. The mug of hot tea failed to soothe her, as well. The abyss gnawing at her insides had nothing to do with food or drink but everything to do with her inability to contact Alaric or Bastien. Granted, her mental reach did not extend far enough to contact Bastien if they were more than a few hundred landwalker miles apart. But Alaric was so powerful that even the suggestion of contact from a fellow Atlantean was sufficient for him to receive the message.
Always in the past the high priest had immediately opened the pathway between them at her call. Now there was nothing. No sense of being blocked, simply nothing at all. As if…
As if Alaric no longer existed.
But she refused to even countenance that thought.
Ethan’s voice came from the doorway in that lazy drawl that he turned on and off seemingly at will. The mere sound of it shot liquid lightning through her.
“You hold that mug any tighter, and you’re going to break it.”
She refused to look at him, afraid her face would betray her reaction to him. “Then I will go to the mug store and purchase you a new mug. Conlan made sure I had some of your currency before I left Atlantis,” she said lightly.
“Really? How much do you think a special mug like that would go for?” He walked over to where she sat on a high stool, not stopping until she could feel his breath in her hair. “That’s a unique, genuine Miami Vice commemorative mug from 1985. Probably irreplaceable.”
She lifted the mug and examined it. “Who are these men with the oddly laquered hair? Are they heroes among your people?”
He threw his head back and laughed, and Marie watched him, fascinated. “Do you know that I have not seen you laugh like that before now? You become a different person when you laugh so freely,” she said, lifting a hand to touch the dimple that had appeared on his cheek.
The smile faded from his face. “I haven’t had much to laugh about, beautiful. I think, under different circumstances, being around you might change that.”
The room closed in on her, making the simple act of breathing difficult, but she decided to be bold, no matter the consequences. She would soon leave, never to return, more than likely. Her duties would not allow frequent or extended absences.
“I would enjoy the opportunity to bring you laughter. Under different circumstances, as you say,” she whispered.
Calling on the Goddess for quite a different kind of courage, Marie stood and took his face between her hands and drew it down to her own. “I’m going to kiss you now,” she said.
“I’m going to let you,” he replied.
Then she lifted her face and kissed him, but it was vastly different from the kisses they’d shared before. She touched her lips gently to his, coaxing and then persuading his response. He stood rigidly in her grasp, hands clenched at his sides, as though afraid to touch her and break the moment.
She reveled in the power of taking the lead in their caress and lightly licked the seam of his lips. He groaned in the back of his throat and immediately opened his mouth, tilting his head to more fully meld his lips to hers. She twined her fingers in his thick, silky hair and pulled him even closer, making a quiet humming sound of contentment as the kiss deepened.
The tiny sound seemed to unleash something in Ethan, because he burst into fervent motion, clasping her waist with his hands and lifting her back onto the edge of the kitchen table. He thrust one muscled thigh forward to part her legs, then moved so that he was wedged between them, all the while still kissing her. One of his big hands shifted down to her bottom and pulled her still closer so that her dress rolled up and he pressed firmly against the heat at the juncture of her thighs, nothing but his trousers and the silk of her underclothes between them.
She put her arms around his neck and murmured some sound that meant, Yes, definitely yes, oh please yes, and he wrapped his other hand around the nape of her neck and deepened the kiss.
When they finally broke free to catch their breath, Ethan wore the same shocked expression he’d had before when they kissed, and she hiccupped a little as her laughter fought its way out past her gasping breaths. “You look like I feel, shape-shifter. Did the world tilt on its axis a little for you, too? Or does my penchant for drama, as my brothers call it, overtake me?”
His sensual lips curved into a smile, and she tried to stop thinking about how she’d like to feel those lips all over her body. She had to focus. They were in crisis from all sides, and thinking about how good all that lean muscle would look—totally nude—was not helping.
Heat rus
She flashed a seductive smile at him, filling it with the promise of everything she wanted to do to him. She knew the timing was bad. She knew the adrenaline response might be responsible for his reaction to her.
She wanted him anyway.
“If circumstances were different, as you say, I might take you right here on the table,” she whispered.
His eyes gleamed, then narrowed, and his hands tightened on her. “Just what am I? Some kind of vacation fling?”
She blinked, dumbfounded, then began laughing helplessly. “Vacation fling? What does that even mean? This is the first occasion on which I have ever left Atlantis in the more than four centuries of my existence, so that would not say much for my powers of attraction, would it?”
His jaw dropped open. “Four centuries? You’re more than four hundred years old?”
Her laughter died in the face of his obvious disbelief. “I have four hundred and seven years. Are you disgusted with the idea of kissing one so much older than yourself?”
“I suddenly find the idea of doing it with an older chick quite appealing,” he said, an evil grin lightening the planes and angles of his face.
“An older chick? That cannot be an appropriate term, young man. Perhaps you should learn to respect your elders.” She tried for a stern voice, but the fact that she couldn’t seem to stop running her fingers through his hair may have ruined the effect.
He put his hands on the bottoms of her thighs and lifted her up off the table, still grinning. “Can I respect you while you’re naked?”
She heard the wildness in her laughter and realized she walked the edge of hysteria. “Ethan, please. We need to figure out what to do.”
He gently let her down, still holding her so close that she had to slide down the length of his body. Both of them were breathing hard by the time her feet touched the floor. But he stepped back from her, evidently agreeing with her assessment. “You’re right. We need to figure out our plans. The first thing we need to do is get you out of here.”
They both turned toward the kitchen doorway at the sound of pounding feet approaching. Ethan pushed Marie behind him and pulled a very lethal-looking dagger from a sheath at his side.
William burst into the room. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Ethan, but we’ve got trouble. Travis called for reinforcements. He sent a message that the representatives of all the prides in the western region are on hand to make sure we follow the ancient rules of alpha challenge. Nobody gets in or out of pride lands until only one of you is left alive.”
NINE
Ethan held the phone a good six inches away from his ear. “Kat. Kat. Kat!”
On the other end of the line, Kat finally quit yelling and took a breath. “Yeah. Sorry. But this ignorant fool says they aren’t going to let me back onto Big Cypress for two days! He actually had the nerve to knock me aside when I tried to get my Jeep past him. What exactly is going on?”
Deadly rage raced through Ethan at the thought of one of them harming Kat. “Are you hurt?”
“What? No. No, it was nothing. He just kept telling me to ‘phone home,’ for whatever that’s worth. What is going on, Ethan?”
He filled her in on the attack on Marie, the alpha challenge, and the rules about any of them leaving or entering pride lands. Kat started swearing. In spite of everything, he had to laugh. “Kat, those are words I didn’t even know you knew.”
There was a silence on the phone. “Do you really want to discuss my language right now?”
The brief flicker of amusement died, and the alpha in him took command. “No, I don’t. But here’s what I want you to do. Can those thugs hear my side of this conversation?”
“No,” she replied. “In fact, I’ve been walking back to my Jeep while we talk. What’s up?”
“I want you to find somebody impartial. Maybe Jack. We need a witness who doesn’t belong to any of the factions that have wanted to take over pride lands in the past.”
“Jack the weretiger? The one Bastien knows?” Her voice cracked on her mate’s name. “Oh, Gods. Bastien. When he finds out I allowed his sister to come to harm…”
Ethan snarled. “I’m the one to blame, and I’ll take any punishment he wants to dish out. I deserve it. But believe me when I say that no one else will lay so much as the tip of a claw on her skin and live.”
There was another silence on the line. “Ethan? I’ve known you since I was a child, and I’ve never heard that in your voice. What exactly is going on between you and Marie?”
He turned his gaze toward the chair where Marie sat wrapped in the blanket from his bed, and she looked up at him at that instant, as if his thoughts had called to her. She was so beautiful it almost hurt him to look at her—art made flesh and infused with grace.
He’d failed her.
He could never deserve her.
“Ethan?” Kat’s voice in his ear yanked him back to more pressing matters.
“Find Jack,” he repeated. “I want a neutral observer. They’ll be forced to let him in. You’ve got less than twenty-four hours, Kat. Do your best.”
“I’ll find him,” she promised. “If you hear from Bastien—”
“Marie hasn’t been able to establish contact with him or with their priest. When she does, I’ll get a message to him to contact you.”
He could almost hear through the phone lines her battle to focus on what needed to be done. “Fine. Call me if you can. I’ll get Jack here if he’s anywhere on the eastern seaboard, Ethan.”
“I know I can count on you. You’ve always been one of the strongest of the pride, even before you discovered your ability to shift, Kat Fiero.”
“Take care of her for me, Ethan. She’s my sister now.”
He looked over at Marie again. “I will protect her with everything I am, Kat.”
As Ethan clicked his phone closed, he repeated his promise. Turned it into a vow. “With everything I am.”
Several hours later, Marie struggled to wake from a dark and terrifying dream in which bears battled panthers, and the strange lizardlike creatures the landwalkers called alligators snapped at the flesh of the vanquished. She abruptly sat up on the couch where she lay, realizing that it would not take a dream-speaker to translate that dream for her. She was caught in a battle between opposing predators, and her gentle gifts of healing wouldn’t be of any assistance at all to him.
To Ethan.
She watched as he stood at the table in his starkly furnished strategy room. Other than the couch where she’d finally dozed off, only a few scattered chairs, a desk, and a large table covered with charts and papers decorated the spacious room. He’d called it his office, but she’d been in the palace war room and recognized this place as its twin in purpose. Ethan’s men surrounded him, discussing strategy and plans for the upcoming challenge. As if he felt the weight of her gaze upon him, he turned those golden eyes toward her, and his heated stare pinned her in place, stealing the very breath from her lungs.
He’d spoken truly when he named attraction a tame word for what lay between them. If attraction were a single hearth flame, this was a conflagration. An inferno of raging desire. It made no sense at all, and yet it made all the sense in the world.
Some attractions defied logic. Isn’t that what the women who came to the temple had told her time and again? Even her brother, when he’d described his newfound love for Kat, defiance mingled with hope that she might understand and embrace her new sister.
Bastien, who’d always underestimated himself, finally came fully into his own when he found a warrior woman to stand at his side. But she, Marie, was no warrior. The best she could manage was a few simple tricks with the calling of water.
Her gift was to h
A noise alerted her to movement, and she looked up to see the pride members filing out of the room, nodding as Ethan issued last-minute instructions.
“William, take a team and relieve the first watch,” Ethan said.
William nodded. “Get some rest. You’ll need it. The intel says Travis is one of the most powerful alphas in the central part of the country.”
Ethan bared his teeth in a terrifying mockery of a smile. “Then maybe he’ll offer some sport before he dies.”
Marie gasped at the overt ferocity in his voice, and he stood, head bowed, for a long moment before he turned to face her. As he crossed the large room toward her, she shivered at the intent plain on his face. He wanted her and was prepared to lay siege to her defenses.
She was unsure if she had any defenses left to raise against him.
He sat next to her and lifted a hand to twine in her hair. “Did you get a little rest?”
“I think I must have slept for a while. It has been a very long day, and I did not sleep well last night, with the excitement of the journey ahead of me.”
His lips tightened. “Not exactly what you thought it would be, is it? I’m really sorry, ocean girl. Once we get this little problem out of the way, I’ll wine and dine you in the very best restaurants.”
She considered the leap for a moment before deciding to brave it. Life was fraught with potential danger. This courageous man would fight for his pride members, his lands, and even his life in fewer than twenty hours.
In the end, the leap was really only a very small step. She leaned her face into his hand and pressed a kiss to his palm. “I don’t need the best restaurants, Ethan. Right now, I would be honored simply to be alone with you.”
A crystalline moment stretched between them, lasting so long that she was afraid her offer had been misguided. Then something in him seemed to snap, and he lifted her onto his lap, pulling her to him so tightly that she could barely take a breath.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying, Marie?” he said, rasping out the words. “That you will be mine, if only for this night?”
The moment was too huge to comprehend; too crucial to some inherent need in her soul to acknowledge. Instead, she found refuge in levity. “Well, perhaps. But only if you will respect me while I’m naked.”
He shouted out his laughter and jumped up with her still in his arms, as though she weighed nothing at all. Then he bent to kiss her and poured so much longing and hunger and need into the kiss that she was dizzy long before he released her to stand on her feet.
“I want you right now, ocean girl. But I won’t take you here in my office. I want you in my bed.”
She nodded, and he caught her hand in his own and pulled her, half running, down the hallway to his rooms. When they arrived, he kicked the door shut behind him and then locked it. She caught her breath, transfixed at the predatory cast to his face as he stalked her across the room.
“Wait,” she said, breathless with anticipation, with longing, with a trace of fear. “I want…” She ran to her bag and dug in the bottom for the colorful scarves of Atlantean silk she’d brought with her, thinking perhaps she would wear them to some event with Bastien and Kat.
She tossed the scarves, rich with gold, silver, turquoise, and so many other jewel colors, onto his bed and spread them on his stark white pillows and sheets.
“Let me bring some color to your life, Ethan of Florida, as you have brought heat and desire to mine.” Her words were brave, but she stood trembling. Afraid the flames that ignited in her body whenever he touched her would consume her.
Afraid that one night would never be enough.
Knowing that one night was very likely all they could ever have.
But desire triumphed over fear, and she held up her arms to him. “Be mine for this night, Ethan. Let Atlantis meet the dual-natured, and both be the better for it.”
He did not say a word but started toward her. Slowly, stalking her. Letting her see the full weight of his hunger on his face. He pulled his clothes off as he came, so that by the time he reached her he was entirely nude, his enormous erection jutting up between them. Her eyes widened at the sight of his powerful body sculpted into lean muscle.
“It’s time, ocean girl,” he whispered. “I want to kiss every inch of your skin right this minute. In fact, I may very well die if I don’t get my hands and my mouth on you in the next sixty seconds.”
She leaned forward and traced one finger down the planes of his chest and abdomen, and he shuddered. She bit her lip and took the leap over the precipice.
“Then perhaps you should remove my dress.”
Ethan stared at Marie, unable to believe his ears. Unable to believe that the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen was offering herself to him with the same courage she’d shown when she’d questioned his authority. When she’d defied him. When she’d laughed at his attempt to order her around.
Somehow, this gentle healer had displayed greater strength than the meanest and baddest of his pride-brothers. Maybe it was her gentle touch that had stolen its way into his heart.
“Your dress. Right. I might be able to manage that.” He reached out for her, hoping she didn’t notice that his hands were shaking. Touched the silken folds of her dress and, underneath, the silken curves of her skin.
“I love this dress,” he said. “But it has to go.”
He bent to grasp the hem of the dress on both sides of her endless legs and then stood, pulling the fabric with him. She moved to make some adjustment, and the top of the dress fell open, helping his clumsy fingers complete the job. In seconds, the dress was up and over her head, and she stood in only a few tiny scraps of dark blue lace.
The sight of her sent all the blood in his body rushing to his cock, which jerked and strained toward her. His inner cat agreed with the sentiment, growling its hunger and need.
“Holy crap,” he said, grinning like a damn fool. “If that’s the Atlantean version of ladies’ underwear, I bow down to your superior race.”
She tilted her head and flashed a smile filled with the power of ages-old feminine seduction and newly discovered heat. “Do you like it?”
“It makes me want to purr.”
Marie laughed. “I’d like to make you purr, warrior. But first, I’d like to feel you touch me.”
He didn’t need to be asked again. Ethan swept her up and onto the bed, rolling with her as they fell so that she landed on top of him, trapped by his arms. “I plan to touch every part of you,” he promised.
“Less talking, more touching,” she said, and then she nipped at his bottom lip. The sharp touch of her teeth ignited the flames that had been stirring in his