Shifter by Lora Leigh
So would someone tell her, please, why she could feel herself being charmed rather than irritated? Why it was becoming so damned hard to maintain her distance and not smirk at his antics?
She was pissed, she told herself. It was all a game—she could feel it, sense it—but his efforts to get her attention were beginning to draw much more than her interest. She was beginning to like him. No, not just like him, and that was the scary part.
She’d been in Buffalo Gap less than two months, and she had tried, she knew she had tried not to be charmed with the arrogant, conceited, smirking Jaguar Breed that Jonas Wyatt had saddled her with, but God help her, it was getting harder by the day.
She should be angry with him, because to tell the truth, there were times she just didn’t know what to do with him.
Such as the time he had followed her to the doctor. Had he stayed in the waiting room? Of course not; he had tried to breach the examination rooms. Had become so threatening that Natalie had been forced to ask the nurse to allow him to stand in the hallway.
Not so much because of his protective determination to be there, but because of his eyes. She almost sighed at the thought of that. The shadows in his eyes had been bleak, and Natalie knew if she had forced him outside the doctor’s office entirely, then the animal DNA that had somehow decided she needed protecting would have pushed them both over a line they were delicately balancing on, even then.
It was distracting though, even a little embarassing. Even her ex-husband hadn’t attempted anything so forward as to try to horn in on her examinations.
That had just been the first week. The first week. It had been one frustrating episode after another.
She understood that they were still acclimating themselves to the world. She really did. It had to be hard, even now, ten years after the Breeds were first discovered and adopted by America and all its enemies and allies. They were the unknown element in the world now, a different species, kind of like aliens. There was speculation, rumor, prejudice, and pure human spite. It couldn’t be easy functioning normally. But this…this was impossible.
She needed groceries, but after less than ten minutes in the store, she was ready to leave her cart sitting, the Breed standing, and forget about eating. He had her hormones racing in arousal and her frustration level rising as she fought to ignore his surprisingly endearing antics.
“I believe you need more meat,” he whispered from behind her, his voice suggestive as he leaned toward the cooler and picked up the thick, rolled roast from inside. “This one looks promising.” He held the meat up for display, and she felt her face flame as the butcher smirked at her from behind the cold display case.
Natalie jerked the roast out of his hand, thumped it in her cart, and kept going.
“Boo, surely you aren’t gonna continue in this silent campaign,” he sighed behind her. She could hear the amusement, wicked and insidious, vibrating in his voice as thick as his accent. His Cajun accent.
She really wished he wouldn’t call her boo or cher or chay or petite bébé. He could call her by her name, just once, couldn’t he? So her heart wouldn’t thump so hard in excitement.
Except, the few times he had, the syllables had rolled off his tongue like a caress and sent a shiver spiking through her body. And she liked that too damned much.
She continued through the aisle, picked up milk and eggs, a package of processed cheese, then watched as he picked up a package of Monterey Jack. She managed to glare over her shoulder at him.
“I’ve never tried it,” he said softly, suggestively. “But I’ve heard it’s quite good.”
Saban Broussard was wickedly handsome. Too damned handsome for his own good with his long, black hair, gleaming emerald green eyes, and patrician features. He looked wild and wicked, and he was irritating, frustrating, and driving her insane.
He refused to give her a moment’s peace, and Jonas Wyatt, the director of Breed Affairs, flat-out refused to give her a different bodyguard.
Not that she had really tried too hard for that one. She restrained her sigh of self-disgust. She kept putting off forcing the issue, afraid she would miss him if he was gone. Even if he was driving her crazy, there was something about him that drew her. And she hated that part the worst. She could have handled the rest if she could be assured that she could handle the forceful personality she knew he was holding back.
As the first teacher for Breeds in a public school, Jonas said he considered her a resource and a liability, so he gave her the best to protect her.
A Jaguar Breed. A Cajun who had been buried in the swamps for most of his life, a Jaguar that he had promised was as antisocial as any Breed living. She wouldn’t even know he was around.
Fat chance.
“You shouldn’t eat that.” He took the TV dinner that she had picked up out of her hand and replaced it in the freezer. “Fresh meat is much better for you.”
Her teeth clenched tighter as a young mother giggled across the aisle, and her dimple-cheeked baby waved shyly at Saban. Evidently, he was social. The young mother blushed prettily, and the little girl’s smile widened as Natalie jerked the dinner back from the shelf and plopped it in her cart before moving on.
This wasn’t going to work. She was going to end up jumping his bones, and if she did that, she might as well shoot herself. Why wait for those sneaky Council soldiers she was told still lurked in the shadows? She’d take care of it herself.
“That boxed food will give you a heart attack before you’re forty,” he murmured as he followed her. “Are you always so stubborn?”
She clamped her lips tight and moved on.
All she wanted to do was buy some groceries, go about her business in relaxed comfort, and get ready for the coming school year. She didn’t want to deal with a Breed who didn’t have an antisocial bone in his tall, hard, handsome, too-damned-arrogant body and made her heart race, her lips tingle for a kiss, and her thighs weaken in need.
“You are going to hurt my feelings, boo, if you keep refusing to talk to me.” He sighed as she moved into the checkout lane and began lifting her purchases to the counter.
He moved to her side and began taking items out of her hand and placing them himself with an amused quirk to his lips and laughter gleaming in his dark green eyes.
That laughter was almost impossible to ignore. Bodyguards were to be seen, not heard, she told herself.
Who could have known that the normally taciturn, sober, somber, quiet Breeds could have a complete anomaly in their midst? This breed was a maniac. He drove a twenty-year-old four-by-four black pickup that sounded like a monster growling. She couldn’t even step in it by herself for God’s sake.
He flirted. He cooked food so spicy hot the fire department should be put on call, and he watched cartoons. He didn’t watch action movies or the news, hated the world events channel, and flat-out refused to watch any of the documentaries concerning the Breed creation.
If he wasn’t watching cartoons, he was watching history or baseball. He watched baseball with such complete absorption that she wondered if he would notice a Council soldier walking in front of him.
He was taking up more room than her ex-husband had and invading her life more fully. It was going to have to stop before she lost her heart.
As her cart emptied, she moved forward, paid for her purchases, and smiled at the young man bagging and loading them back into the cart. That smile froze on her face as she heard a growl behind her. The lanky young man loading the bags paled, fumbled the bag that held her eggs, and swallowed tightly, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.
Yeah, that was something else he did. He growled. He growled at the delivery guy, he growled at the mailman, and he actually snarled when one of the other Breed males had stopped to talk to her while she was in a department store in town.
Natalie wiped her hand over her face and took her cart after paying for her purchases. She stalked outside to her car, fury pumping through her system.
This w
“Here, boo, let me.” He took the keys from her hand as she pulled them from her purse and moved to open the back of the compact SUV the Breed Ruling Cabinet had given her to drive while employed to teach their children.
She was the first teacher to be allowed to teach Breed children who wasn’t a Breed. This was also the first year a Breed child had been allowed in a public school. And she was going to have a nervous breakdown before the news of it ever hit the world.
“I’ll follow you back to the house. I have one of those barbecue grills that I saw on television the other day. I could fix steaks tonight.” He gave her a mocking yet hopeful look.
“You didn’t buy steaks.” She broke her silence, it was just too much. A Breed who was going to grill steaks, and he hadn’t even bought any.
He smiled, satisfaction curving lips that were too damned eatable for her peace of mind. She wanted to take a bite out of them. Taste them. Devour them. And there wasn’t a chance in hell she was going to allow that to happen.
“They’re in the cooler in the truck.” He nodded to the black behemoth parked beside her little dove gray front-wheel-drive SUV. It gleamed, black and sinister. She almost smiled, almost softened.
Natalie shook her head, jerked her keys from his hand, and stalked to the driver’s door of her own vehicle. She hit the lock release on the key and pulled the door open before stepping into the sweltering confines of the interior.
She didn’t check to see where he was; checking meant she cared, and she wasn’t giving in to it. She drove back to the little two-story house just outside town, pulled into the driveway, and stormed to the house. She didn’t bother with the groceries; he was just going to beat her to them anyway.
Instead, she left the door open and entered the house, aware of the disapproval that followed her inside. She wasn’t supposed to enter the house without him; she wasn’t supposed to breathe without him testing the air first; and by God, she was not supposed to melt inside because he did it with such subtle moves that she felt cuddled rather than smothered.
“Chay, you and I are gonna have a talk.” Just as she suspected, he stomped into the house, six feet four inches of irritated male, decked out in denim and boots as he plopped the groceries on the table.
Natalie stared at the bags and wondered if her eggs had a hope in hell of having survived intact. Anger surged inside her, but it was at herself more than at him. Anger that she was letting another man close, risking her heart and her independence on a man she knew would be impossible to get out of her system.
“You know,” she finally said carefully, “I do have a name.”
She lifted her gaze to him, adopting her most severe expression. The one she reserved for the most difficult of children. And it didn’t even seem to faze him.
He glowered down at her, his head bent, his shoulder-length, straight black hair falling around the face of a fallen angel. Green eyes glittered with sparks of irritation, and his expression was too damned sensual to be scary in anything but the most primal of ways.
Oh yeah, Saban Broussard terrified her. She was scared to death she was going to lose control and jump his bones one night when he was parading half-naked around her house. Wouldn’t that look good on her résumé?
“I know your name, boo,” he growled. “As well I know who your bodyguard is. Me. You do not run from me like a scared little rabbit scurrying from sight. I won’t have it.”
“You won’t have it?” She widened her eyes in amazement. “Excuse me, Mr. Broussard, but you do not have a leash around my neck or ownership papers with my name on them. I do as I please.”
“You do not.” His head lowered, his nose nearly touching her, as anger sparked inside her like wildfire flaring out of control.
Her hands pushed out, flattening against his chest and trying to push him back. Trying, because he wasn’t budging an inch.
“You’re fired,” she snapped.
“You can’t fire me; you can only quit.” He smirked. “Until that time you will obey the precautions made for your safety, or you will deal with me.”
“I’m just real scared of you!” Her hands went to her hips, her lips flattened. “What are you going to do, growl me to death? Make me watch baseball until my eyes fall out of my head? Oh no, wait, you’re going to take all my TV dinners.” Mock fear rounded her eyes. “Oh, Saban, I’m so scared. Please don’t.”
He growled. It wasn’t a hard vibration of sound, rather a subtle rumble that had the more cautious part of her brain urging wariness. And she might have paid attention if she weren’t so damned mad.
“You are in my way.” She lifted herself until her nose touched his. “Get out of it.”
His expression changed then, shifted. His eyes narrowed, and the savage, remorseless determination she’d heard all Breeds possessed flashed in his eyes.
She should have run then and there. She should have turned tail and run as fast as those rabbits he’d mentioned earlier.
The minute his hands latched on her upper arms, the second she realized his intention and his head lowered, she should have slammed her knee into his groin and had done with it.
If she’d had time.
Between one second and the next his lips covered hers, his tongue pushed between her lips as they parted in surprise, and oh hell in a handbasket, she was lost.
Those eatable, kissable lips were devouring hers. His tongue stroked inside her mouth as the taste of heated spice filled her senses.
His kiss had a taste. Not the normal tastes a kiss had, but the taste of a wild promise, a desert afternoon, heated and filled with mystery and hunger.
Natalie found herself melting against him. She shivered. That hard, luscious body braced her weight as his hands cupped her rear and lifted her closer. His head slanted, the kiss grew deeper, a hard growl rasping his throat as she let her lips surround his probing tongue, and she sought more of his taste.
It was there, each time she caressed the tongue twining with hers, subtle, urging her to consume more, to hold him closer, to devour this kiss.
And it terrified her. She felt her independence, hard-won and imperative, fighting beneath the claiming she could feel coming, screaming out in warning until she jerked back, struggled, stumbled from his grip as she stared back at him, panting from the need suddenly tearing through her.
She lifted her hand, touched his lips. Lips that mesmerized her, left her aching, a miracle of pleasure, just as she had known they would be.
“You’re mine.” There was no sexy teasing in his voice, no flirty seductiveness. His dark eyes glittered with predatory awareness and with triumph.
Her hand dropped away from him.
“You’re insane,” she gasped.
“Mine.”
TWO
Saban watched as Natalie’s eyes grew wider, a hint of fear flashing in the molasses depths, mixing with the anger and the arousal.
He knew what he had done. Knew he had spilled the potent mating hormone to her system in that kiss, and he knew he should feel guilty. He should feel remorse pounding through his head rather than satisfaction.
“You feel it now, don’t you, Natalie.” He drew her name out, tasted it on his tongue and relished the sound of it.
He had kept himself from using it, held it back, knowing he couldn’t say it without the breath of ownership in his tone, as it was now.
And she heard it, as he had always known she would.
“I feel your insanity.” She moved quickly away from him, wariness tightening her body.
Saban watched her, letting his gaze track each movement as he inhaled the scent of her, tasted her against his tongue. He could still taste her; beneath the taste of the
His Natalie, as intelligent as she was, as softly rounded and sensual as the feminine core of her was, was disillusioned, hurt, all because of one weak-minded, inept man that hadn’t the good sense to see the gift God had given him.
And now he faced that woman, knowing he had committed the ultimate crime in her eyes once she learned what that kiss actually meant. He had taken her choice from her. He had begun something which tied her irrevocably to him and thereby took away the control she so highly revered.
“I’m not insane,” he finally sighed. “At least no longer.” He swiped his hands through his loose hair and stared around the kitchen.
Damn, he should have known better than to listen to Cassie and her lectures on women who did not possess Breed DNA. He had taken advice from an eighteen-year-old, had seriously considered every word she had said, and now he’d pay for it.
“What do you mean? No longer?” Her eyes were narrowed, and her body was burning.
The sweet, spicy scent of her desire wrapped around his senses and had him clenching his teeth at the need to taste it, to taste her.
“What I mean doesn’t matter now.” Saban rubbed at the back of his neck before lowering his hand and staring back at her.
She had the width of the kitchen between them, the scent of her coffee mixed with the soft fragrance of the apple pie she had baked yesterday morning and the scent of the woman herself. It was as powerful an aphrodisiac as the mating hormone.
She watched him closely, perhaps too closely. He could see her mind working, see her sorting out the odd heat that came from his kiss, the taste of the hormone in her mouth and her need for more. And he watched as she began to suspect the truth.
His chest actually ached, and regret shimmered in his soul as his Natalie swallowed tightly, and her eyes darkened.
“The tabloids aren’t all bullshit, are they?” she whispered. “There is some kind of virus that you spread with a kiss.”
Saban snorted at the simplicity of the statement.
“The tabloids are the ones who are insane.” He shifted his shoulders, uncharacteristically nervous in the face of this explanation. “It’s called mating heat,” he finally said softly, wishing he was holding her, that he had just taken her, that he had bound her to him more fully before he had to explain this. “There’s no explanation for it, and so far, it seems it happens only once. Only one woman was meant to be my mate, and that woman is you.”
She crossed her arms over her breasts, her lips pouting with instant denial, though she only said, simply, “Go on.”
Go on. Hell, he was no good at this.
“Simply put, you are my mate. The mating hormone ensures that you won’t deny me or my claim instantly. It’s rather like an aphrodisiac. Like an addictive aphrodisiac.”
Her lips flattened. “It’s not a sickness? A virus?”
“You will not become ill,” he snapped, more to distract her from this line of questioning than for any other reason. “Merely aroused. Very aroused.” Damn. He growled that last word, his anticipation thickening in his voice as he felt the need inside him burning hotter than before, flaming across his nerve endings.
She was his. She may as well resign herself to this now. He would give her as much explanation as he had been cleared to give, but no more.
“And if it’s not what I want?” Slow and precise, the words dripped from her lips like a death knell. He was very certain this was not what she wanted. And in ways, he couldn’t blame her, but unlike those who did not carry the Breed DNA, Saban had a very healthy respect for Nature and all her choices.
“Once the heat begins, it can’t be reversed.” It could be eased, but he didn’t have to tell her that yet. There were many things he couldn’t tell her yet.
“So anyone you kiss—”
“No! Only my mate. Only one woman, Natalie, only you.”
“I knew this was a bad idea!”
Saban almost jumped back at the sharp, furious words and the sparks that lit her molasses eyes.
“What was a bad idea?” he asked carefully.
His senses were already prime to claim her, his teeth ached to mark her, and she stood, her angry, defiant, slender hands propping on her hips as her expression became outraged.
“Letting you stay here. Listening to that insufferable, arrogant Jonas Wyatt, and allowing, for even one second, for your impossible, frustrating, completely insane ass to stay here.” Her voice rose, but it was the flush on her face, the scent of heat, both anger and arousal that whipped through the room that held him mesmerized.
She was like a flame burning with incandescent beauty; even her dark, nearly black hair became brighter, shinier.
Damn, there went his chest, clenching again, those emotions he hadn’t yet figured out rioting through his system.
“So it would appear you were right.” He inclined his head in agreement. “But I wouldn’t have left, and Jonas knew it. Now, we can deal with this.”
“Deal with this?” Her brows arched in angry mockery. “Oh Saban, we’re going to deal with this all right. Right now.”
She stomped to the phone, jerked it off its base, and her finger stabbed at the button programmed to ring in Callan Lyons’s main office.
Saban frowned. “Callan has nothing to do with this.”
The look she flashed him would have silenced a lesser man. Hell, it almost silenced him.
“Mr. Lyons.” Her voice was sugary sweet and lifted every hair on the back of Saban’s neck. He could only imagine Lyons’s expression and the frustration that would be twisting his savagely hewed features.
“Oh yes, we do have a problem,” she said politely, her smile tight. “You’re going to have a dead Breed in, oh, I’d give him twenty minutes, if someone from Sanctuary doesn’t pick him up. I do believe he’s rabid. Someone needs to save him, or I’m going to put him out of his misery.”
As she listened, the sides of her nose began to twitch, and Saban had to restrain his grimace.
“I don’t care if Coyotes are swarming Sanctuary with grenade launchers. Get some of those badass Breeds you prize so highly out here to collect him, or I’m going to kill him. And after I kill him, I’ll hang his mangy, worthless hide in my front yard to show everyone else exactly how it’s done. Twenty minutes.” She slammed the phone down.
“One of your handlers will be here to pick you up soon. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass, and don’t find yourself anywhere near me after that.”
She stalked across the kitchen, her pert little nose in the air, her face set in lines of rejection, denial, and fury.
His mate was denying him. Not that he had expected anything less, but with a spirit as strong as his Natalie’s was, there was only one way to combat it.