by Lora Leigh
He’d fallen so hard he’d moved into her house in the middle of a white man’s town. In the middle of a community who believed that the ghost of a steam train chugged through their little town every Christmas. The gods had to be laughing their asses off at him. Except Jamison hadn’t felt humiliated. He’d been happy.
Jamison crossed his hands over his chest and closed his eyes. He drew on the stillness he’d learned deep in drug-induced dreams, looking for the center of calm that nothing could breach.
He found the beast right where he’d left it. The beast had terrified Jamison the first time, and he’d been convinced he’d been put under a spell or cursed by a sorcerer. The Changers in Mexico had explained everything to him. Whatever else they’d done, they’d at least let him understand.
Jamison’s mouth always changed first. His flat human teeth enlarged and elongated, becoming sharp canines, top and bottom. His face pushed forward, his jaw and tongue re-forming to fit the new mouth. The strangest feeling was the whiskers poking out sharp and hard from the sides of his face.
The mouth took the longest, then the rest of his head followed rapidly. Ears pricked, his hearing sharpened, and his eyes became round and wide. His spine narrowed and lengthened, and claws erupted on his now huge feline feet. He fell to all fours, feeling a long tail twitching behind him.
He wanted to roar but stifled it; there was enough of his own consciousness left to realize what would happen if someone heard a wildcat snarl in Naomi’s bedroom. He lifted his gaze to Naomi, his world now black-and-white, the edges rounded and slightly concave. She stared back at him, her red-lipped mouth open, her blue green eyes wide.
His beautiful, brave lady didn’t scream or faint. She simply gaped at him for a moment then said, “Jamison, what the fuck?”
TWO
This couldn’t be happening. Naomi stared at the mountain lion that gazed back at her from the middle of her bedroom rug. A mountain lion. In her bedroom.
Jamison Kee had turned from a magnificently nude man into a mountain lion.
He looked back at her with the large dark eyes of a hunting cat, his lips parted to show huge, sharp teeth. She’d never seen a mountain lion this close before—never seen one at all, in fact, except in a zoo or through a pair of strong binoculars. She noted every detail—the light tawny color of his pelt; the black around his muzzle and the tip of his tail; the round, pricked ears; the heavy muscles of his shoulders and chest.
He looked bigger than she thought mountain lions were—his head would reach her chest if she were brave enough to go to him. And his eyes held intelligence. Jamison’s intelligence.
“Jamison,” she whispered.
The mountain lion growled softly. Then its face began to flatten as it rose on its hind legs. The transformation she’d witnessed happened in reverse, and in a few seconds, Jamison stood on his flat feet, naked in front of her.
They stared at each other in dead silence for a full minute. Then, as though to make sure she got the point, Jamison morphed back into the mountain lion.
“Jamison, why are you doing this to me?”
The mountain lion padded toward her. Naomi stood frozen, unable to run, unsure she wanted to run.
She was right, his head came up to her chest. He butted against her like a tabby cat, rumbling in his throat as he stroked his forehead across her breasts.
Naomi didn’t like how her body flushed with heat, how her nipples tightened. She tentatively pushed him away, and he turned his head into her hand, rubbing his whiskers against it.
She started to laugh. “That tickles.”
The mountain lion reared up and placed his paws gently on her shoulders. The look in his eyes was almost amused as he swiped a rough tongue across her cheek.
“Jamison.”
The cat morphed back into Jamison. Now she had his tall, naked body against her clothed body. He leaned down and licked her neck, his hot breath sending fire through every nerve. He gently bit where he’d licked.
“Please tell me that was a trick,” she said. “You’re playing a trick on me.”
“No, love. It’s what I am.”
Naomi ran her hand through his warm hair, which had come out of the braid when he’d changed. He lifted his head and looked at her, his dark eyes holding the edge of danger she’d sensed before.
“I can smell you,” he whispered. “So ripe and hot. You’re scared, but you want to fuck me.”
She nodded, her breath quick. Her blood was so hot she feared it would boil in her veins. She could smell him as well: aroused male, sweat, and dust.
Jamison pressed his thumbs to the corners of her mouth, opening her to take his deep kiss. He scraped his tongue through her mouth, his teeth catching on her lips.
The kiss in the greenhouse had been tame and tentative. This one contained wild animal strength. He snaked his fingers through her hair, pulling her head back, moving to bite her throat. She arched against him, the small pain of his bite arousing her like crazy.
She felt his penis pressing her abdomen as though Jamison wanted to crawl inside her clothes with her. He shuddered, mouth closing over her neck, sucking.
Naomi’s breasts hurt where they rubbed his chest, tips swollen and hot as fire. She pried at her shirt, trying to free herself, and Jamison yanked the shirt off over her head. He made short work of her bra, unsnapping it and tossing it aside, before his hand went to her pants.
Naomi helped him unbutton and unzip, shoving her pants down and then her panties. No slow seduction this time—Jamison could spin out lovemaking for hours, but that careful, sinfully lazy man had disappeared.
He growled, a real, rumbling wildcat growl as his hands went to her naked buttocks. The space between her legs was wet, hot, needy. He rubbed his tip there but didn’t enter.
“I’ll try to go slow,” he said. “I don’t know if I can.”
“I don’t care.” She touched his face. “I need you.”
Jamison lifted her, and she eagerly locked her legs around him. He took two steps to the bed, holding her firmly, and then he lowered her to the mattress.
That was the only thing he did gently. He grabbed her ankles and spread her legs, and then climbed on top of her.
She’d craved his warm weight for two years, had fought to forget what it felt like. But as he kissed her, she knew she hadn’t forgotten one fraction of him. She knew every touch, every pressure of him, the smell of his sweat, the heat of his body.
His eyes had changed. His look was fierce, possessive, where years before it had been only loving and tender.
“You’re mine,” he said with another animal growl.
She was too far gone to hear him. “Do me, Jamison. Please. I need you to.”
He smiled a triumphant smile. The lion shone out of his eyes as he collapsed onto her and entered her with one fast, tight thrust.
Jamison threw back his head as he slid inside her. Back where I belong. Images of what he’d been through flashed in his mind then fled, resolving in the beautiful face of Naomi.
Please. I need you to. Her words rang in the room, mixing with his own—You’re mine.
He drove into her, his cock aching as her walls closed around him for the first time in two years. He felt nothing except her sweet clench on him. She was hot and slick, and he slid in and out, hard and fast, no barriers between them.
Naomi arched, her mouth twisted in pleasure. He squeezed one of her nipples between thumb and fingers, liking how she cried out at the pressure.
Two years. Two damn, long, empty years without Naomi. He hated the people who’d caged him, who’d taken his freedom in exchange for knowledge. They hadn’t wanted him to return to Naomi, to take refuge in her.
The bed creaked and banged against the floor. Naomi lifted her legs and wound them around his buttocks, her heels digging into his back. She rocked her hips, taking him deep, deeper, and he groaned with the joy of it.
Damn, it had never been like this before. They’d had great sex in the p
ast, but now he wanted to pound into her, harder, harder, until she screamed. She was responding, her sheath so wet, her hips moving with his rhythm.
He wanted to come inside her, and then flip her over and pull her hips back against his and do it again. He wanted to do what he’d never done with her, press his finger to her anal star and ready her to take him that way.
He kissed her again, their lips swollen, Naomi nipping at him. His body dripped with sweat. It was hot in here, so hot, and she felt so fucking good. Fire spread from where they joined, and flared through every nerve ending until his entire body burned.
“I’m going to come,” he whispered.
She locked her hands around his shoulders, encouraging him with her hips and legs. “Yes. Please, please. I need it.”
He thrust into her five more times, groaning like a maniac with each one. His balls were so tight, his skin stretched until he couldn’t stand it.
Then the surge came, and he was pumping his seed high and hot into her. He snaked his hand between them, massaging her. She screamed and bucked, coming at the same time he did.
He wanted to stay inside her, but they were both so wet that he slid right out as soon as his cock slackened the slightest bit. Jamison landed next to her, his legs tangled in hers, both of them breathing hard.
He drew his hand across his forehead, finding his hair soaked with sweat. Naomi lay limply, her swollen breasts rising and falling. He stroked them, feeling her heart beating swiftly beneath her skin.
“Damn.” Jamison panted. He let his head flop to the pillow, his breath too ragged for speech.
Naomi nodded tiredly. “I know.”
Jamison wrapped his arms around her and spooned her back against him. “I missed you so much.”
“I missed you every minute,” she said. “Every second of every minute for two years.”
Pain twisted his heart even as his erection tightened, wanting more. “They wouldn’t let me come back to you. I tried so hard.” Even now, they hunted him. They hadn’t let him go—he’d escaped, and he knew the Alpha wouldn’t let him live for that transgression. “But I’m here to stay. I’m never leaving again. I promise.”
Naomi said nothing. He couldn’t tell whether she believed him or not.
Jamison stroked her hair. She had thick hair, silken and beautiful. She didn’t like to wear it long; she cut it when it reached past her neck.
“I want you again,” he said.
He expected her to say she wanted to sleep instead, but to his delight, she turned over and smiled at him. It was a wicked smile, one that made every blood vessel inside him heat.
“Please,” she said in a seductive voice.
“Damn, I missed you.”
He pulled her to her hands and knees and entered her. The lovemaking was faster this time, but just as intense.
Not long later, they fell again, landing together on the bed. Jamison had just enough strength to pull a quilt over their bodies before he fell into a black, untroubled sleep.
aomi was stirring tomato sauce on the stove not long later, when she felt Jamison’s arms come around her from behind. She closed her eyes briefly, enjoying the sensation of him.
Julie, perched on a stool at the breakfast bar, grinned at them both. Her hands started to move. “Mom and Jamison, sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”
“Where did you learn that?” Jamison asked her.
“My teacher,” Julie answered.
Naomi said, “She says that if Julie mainstreams in high school, she’ll need to know all the silly things hearing kids learn growing up.”
Julie was homeschooled because schools for the deaf were expensive and heartbreakingly far away. A teacher from Santa Fe, specializing in deaf children, came out to Magellan three days a week to teach Julie. In a few years, when Julie was ready to attend junior high, she’d be going to Tucson to stay with Naomi’s parents and attend the deaf day school there. Naomi wanted Julie to have the best education possible, but at the same time, she didn’t look forward to the day Julie would pack her things and leave.
Jamison kissed Naomi’s neck. He’d showered, and now smelled of shampoo and soap. He rummaged in the refrigerator to pull out soft drinks for himself and Julie. Jamison never touched alcohol; he said it clouded both his artistic and shamanistic abilities.
Caffeine must not, because he guzzled coffee, tea, and soft drinks by the gallon. Naomi suspected that another reason Jamison didn’t drink was because his father had been an alcoholic, and he’d died in a single-car accident on a lonely road in the middle of the Navajo reservation.
Jamison sat down with Julie and became the Jamison Naomi had known before. He told Julie stories and made her laugh while Naomi finished cooking. He helped clean up the dishes afterward, and then he and Julie settled in for some serious TV watching, Christmas special after Christmas special.
Naomi sat a little apart from them. Jamison’s lovemaking upstairs had been incredible, nothing short of explosive. Jamison had always been good, but that. God. Her whole body throbbed just thinking about it.
The intensity had been more than about going two years without sex. Jamison had turned into a live, dangerous animal right in front of her, slapping down her Unbeliever skepticism. Then he’d made love to her with animal wildness, showing her he’d changed more than just in shape.
Jamison put Julie to bed himself, and then he came downstairs and checked that the doors and windows were secure. He took Naomi by the hand. “Come with me. I need to show you something.”
“You mean there’s more?” she asked. “I don’t know if I can take more.”
“You need to understand.” Jamison pressed a brief kiss to her lips, one that told her his fires hadn’t been dampened at all.
She locked her fingers around his, and he led her outside, heading for the art studio that waited silently in the corner of the yard, away from the now-empty parking lot of Hansen’s Garden Center. Back here, in the private world Jamison had carved for himself, all was quiet and serene.
He unlocked the padlock on the door of the studio and ushered Naomi into his sanctuary.
THREE
Jamison loved his art studio. He’d constructed it like he J would a hogan, but the roof was copper sheeting with a huge skylight to let in the sunshine as he worked. The door faced due east, and he’d scattered corn to bless the studio before he’d moved in his sculpting tools.
In the middle of the room a table held the chisels with which he created the sculptures that for some reason people paid big money for. He sculpted what moved him, from stones nature put in his way—an abstract hawk, the stillness of a wolf watching his prey. He breathed a prayer and a bit of magic into every piece.
He also sculpted things from scrap iron, or custom designed decorative wrought iron for extra money. His iron-working tools stood against the north wall with an acetylene torch that he’d refilled when he cleaned up this morning and scraps of twisted iron he’d been working on before he’d gone.
Jamison led Naomi inside and jerked the cover from the sculpture he’d been working on the night he’d left. The head of a mountain lion peered out of orange red stone, its shoulders ending in a jagged line of reddish rock. Naomi reached out and touched it with one slender finger, her eyes filled with wonder.
Jamison had found the nearly smooth red sandstone in a wash near the Pink Cliffs and hauled it the twenty-five miles back here. He’d let the stone rest for a few months before he’d taken out his tools and carved what he saw inside it.
“I don’t understand,” Naomi said.
Jamison put his hand on the sculpture, the porous stone cool and rough. “I was working on this that night. It was freezing out here, but I couldn’t stop. The sculpture was coming—like magic. And then . . . ” He trailed off.
He couldn’t explain the terror, the feeling that he’d been choking, dying. Watching his hands and arms change before his eyes, suddenly finding himself on all fours thinking and seeing like a wildcat.
&
nbsp; Naomi’s blue green eyes were wide. “You were sculpting a mountain lion, and then you changed into one?”
Jamison caressed the stone. “It scared the shit out of me. I thought I’d gone insane. When I changed back, with my clothes all ripped, I was afraid a skinwalker had cursed me. Then I changed to the lion again, and again. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t control it.”
“Why didn’t you call for me?”
“And tell you what? That I kept turning into a mountain lion?” He shook his head. “I was so scared I’d hurt you, hurt Julie.”
“So you just left?”
“I didn’t trust myself to come back into the house and say good-bye. I had to go.”
“You told your family,” she said, hurt. “They knew you’d gone to Mexico, but they wouldn’t tell me anything more.”
“I called my grandfather on the way out of town. I told him to get word to you, but he decided you shouldn’t be told everything. He wanted to prevent you from coming after me, he said, which would have been too dangerous. He was right.”
“So he knew where you were the whole time?” Naomi’s voice rang with anger and outrage.
“He knew I’d gone to Mexico, but not exactly where. Even I didn’t know exactly where I was going.”
“He should have told me. I know he doesn’t approve of me. He says I bewitched you, which I always thought was funny, since I’m a notorious Unbeliever.”
“He isn’t wrong.” Jamison crossed to her, but he didn’t reach for her. If he touched her, he’d want to keep on touching her, to drag her upstairs and have sex with her again. Maybe have sex with her right here. He needed her every second.
“You did something to me, Naomi. You made this Diné boy leave the land of his people so he could lie in your bed. And I don’t regret one second of that choice.”
“Just tell me what happened in Mexico.”
Jamison walked away from her, around the other side of the half-finished statue. The mating frenzy still hadn’t left him, and if he was going to talk, he needed to be as far from her as he could be. “I went to Mexico to find people like me, other Changers. I needed to know what was happening to me.”
“How did you even know where to look for them?”
“Coyote told me.”
Her brows shot up. “Coyote, the drifter?”
The man who called himself Coyote was a Native American, from what tribe Naomi had never discovered, who liked to hang around the streets of Magellan. He didn’t seem to be homeless, but no one knew where he lived or where he went when he disappeared. He was a big man with black hair, youngish and amiable, always joking with the locals and entertaining the tourists.
Coyote always greeted Julie with a big smile and would crouch down on his heels to speak sign language with her. Naomi had once asked him where he’d learned to sign, and he’d shrugged broad shoulders and said, “Around.” The townspeople regarded him as mysterious, sometimes annoying, but harmless.
“Don’t tell me Coyote is—what did you call it?—a Changer too?” Naomi said.
“No, he’s Coyote.”
“Huh? I’m lost.”
“He’s Coyote the god,” Jamison said gently.
Naomi the Unbeliever gave him a skeptical look. “How could he be? He hangs out with bikers at the the Crossroads Bar.”
Jamison stifled a laugh. As though gods were above fraternizing with bikers.
“Coyote does whatever he wants, and he has fun at the Crossroads.” Jamison sobered. “I was standing in here, sweating and terrified, and all of a sudden he was at the door. He knew what had happened. He told me that other Changers could help me and told me how to find them. He drove me down to Nogales and across the border himself, in a ratty pickup. Then he disappeared. Literally. Truck and all.”
Naomi ran her fingers along the sculpted head of the lion. “How did you get the rest of the way?”
“Walked. Hitched. I found the other Changers in the mountain ranges in Durango—pretty much in-the-middle-of-nowhere Mexico. I thought some parts of the Navajo Nation were remote, but they’re roaring civilization compared to this place. The Changers were there, all right.”
“And they took you in?”
“They beat me up, stripped me naked, stole everything I had, and locked me in a cage.”
Naomi looked at him in shock. “Oh, God, Jamison. Why?”
“To teach me obedience. I threatened the Alpha.”
“Why did you threaten the Alpha? What’s an Alpha?” He gave her a wry smile. “I didn’t, not intentionally. But when I showed up out of the blue, the pack leader took it as an attack by a dominant.”
“Mountain lions have packs?” Her voice shook. “I thought they were solitary.”
“Natural mountain lions are, but not Changers. They have a hierarchy, like wolves or African lions, and my scent and my approach wasn’t submissive enough for them.” Jamison folded his arms across his chest, uncomfortable with the memory. “It was partly my fault. They kept telling me to yield to their power, but the Alpha pissed me off so much I wouldn’t. The Changers feared I wanted to take over their little pack, even though I told them I didn’t give a damn and didn’t even want to stay. They’ve become inbred and paranoid, though I can’t really blame them. There’s no place in the world for them.”