by Vivi Andrews
She snorted. “Please.”
“Kye? Xander?”
“No.” What the fuck was with men that they all needed you to be mated? Like their puny masculine brains couldn’t comprehend the idea of a woman who might be enough on her own.
“But you have a mate?”
“Not that it’s any of your fucking business either way—”
“Answer the question,” he snapped.
Typically she would tell someone who made that demand where he could shove his question. She had no idea why she answered. “No. I don’t have a mate. Happy?”
“Yes.”
He lunged for her with that insane speed—no one moved like Dominec—too fast for her to get her guard up. His hand closed on the side of her neck, his thumb along her jaw. She threw up a hand in an instinctive palm-heel strike, going for his solar plexus to knock his breath out and send him back a step, but his other hand redirected her strike away from his body, twisting his grip, his fingers locking around her wrist. Her free hand lifted as he leaned in to attack—head butt? Fangs to her throat?—but before she could make contact his lips pressed against hers and—
What the HELL?
He was kissing her.
Shock froze her muscles.
Dominec CrazyAss Giroux was kissing her.
And he was good. His mouth moved over hers with expert ease and all of her other senses shorted out to make room for the overload of sensation coming through the kiss. She held herself perfectly still—until he made a little frustrated growl in his throat, stepping closer without breaking the kiss so her head tipped back and suddenly there was an aspect of dominance to the kiss that simultaneously made her knees melt and fired her will to push back. So she pushed back. Shoving her tongue against his. Sucking. Nipping. Trying to win the kiss.
His growl changed.
His hand fisted in the short hair at the base of her neck, the other still caging her wrist, and she lifted her free hand to grip his damp shirt at his shoulder, jerking him closer until their bodies connected—breast to chest, hip to hip. He was only a few inches taller than she was, but it was enough to make the fit perfect, pressure hitting her right where she wanted it.
A purr rumbled in his chest as the kiss went on and on.
She didn’t know how long they would have stood there, battling for sensual control, if the high-pitched laughter of some pride teenagers hadn’t cut through the night, startling her back to sanity.
Grace lurched back, shoving with her hand on his chest and twisting her other arm to free her wrist. He let her go and she froze two steps away from him, their heavy breaths forming puffy white clouds between them as she gaped at him.
Dominec calmly straightened his shirt where she had twisted it and nodded to himself.
“Right,” he murmured, as if something had been decided.
Then he turned and walked away without a backward glance.
Her jaw fell open like the hinge had come loose. She had no idea what the fuck had just happened.
Dominec, of all people.
The man was certifiable.
But damn. Grace lifted her finger to touch her bee-stung lips. Just…damn.
Chapter Twelve
Okay, then.
Dominec strolled down the paths of the main compound and for once the idyllic night wasn’t lost on him. The world was hushed and lovely—the inside of a snow globe, sparkling fantasy perfection.
He hadn’t set out to kiss Grace. He’d gone to her bungalow, cold in his human form, because he’d felt something unfinished hanging over him. He hadn’t liked seeing her with Kelly. Hadn’t liked watching her walk away. Hadn’t known what to do, but had gone to her place to wait until the incoherent drive of his instincts resolved into understandable action.
When she’d appeared, he hadn’t planned on revealing his presence, but she’d known he was there. He’d jumped down…and the rest had just sort of happened without any direction from his brain. He supposed, thinking back on it now, he’d wanted to see what would happen. To try it out. An experimental kiss.
It had been impulse. Instinct.
He wanted to do it again.
If she let him. She’d looked more confused than thrilled when she’d shoved him away. Hardly a good sign.
He might have to woo her.
Dominec stopped on the path, frowning. Fuck. What did he know about romance anymore? He was the poster-child for damaged beyond repair. Not exactly a romantic catch. Especially when Kelly—flawless, well-adjusted Kelly—was also in the hunt. Grace had said he wasn’t her mate, but something was going on there. The lion clearly felt he had a claim.
Dominec tried to remember how romance worked, but his old memories were rusty and out of order—and Ksenia had been the aggressor when they met. And then she’d gotten knocked up and been stuck with him. Or gotten pregnant on purpose to trap him—as he’d often suspected. She’d always treated him like a work in progress, something she had to fix.
Well he was really broken now.
Maybe Grace liked fixer-uppers.
Agitation and cold tugged at his skin and Dominec stripped down right there in the path, shifting form and shaking the snow from his fur. His thoughts were cooler and calmer in this shape—but the tiger wanted Grace too. It didn’t understand why he’d walked away. Didn’t understand being too broken to fix.
He couldn’t remember love, but he could recognize it when he saw it. Patch and Roman. Lila and Santiago. The doctor and the Hawk.
A scent teased his nostrils, muted by the snow, but still there for all that it was faint. A human scent. He was near the edge of the main compound. This must be the path the Hawk took the doctor along when he brought her down for questioning.
Acting on instinct he didn’t examine, Dominec set off into the woods, following the scent—all but smothered by the snow, but she’d passed this way frequently enough that he could pick it up in spite of that.
The cabin was small. Shades were drawn over the windows, but slivers of light broke through and the smoke from the chimney announced that it was occupied. Dominec lay in the shadow of a tree a hundred yards from the cabin and watched, though nothing moved and he was too far away to hear anything within.
The Hawk had been captured by the Organization as well, but he wasn’t broken like Dominec. He still remembered how to love. It was there in his face whenever he looked at the doctor. How did he do that? Had he forgotten what was done to him? Or had he escaped before it got to the point of no return?
Dominec didn’t know how long he watched the cabin before the door opened and the Hawk stepped out, fastening his pants and looping a tranq gun holster over his hip. He leaned against the exterior wall. Dominec stayed perfectly motionless, but after a few minutes Adrian seemed to sense him, scanning the night until his raptor-sharp vision locked onto the tree where Dominec lay.
The Hawk loosed the tranq gun from its holster, holding it casually at his side, staring Dominec down.
It was tempting to show the birdie just how useless that little tranquilizer toy would be if Dominec was of a mind to attack—but he was on probation and Grace wouldn’t like it. So Dominec rose, waving his tail behind him like a banner, and loped back toward the main compound.
He would figure out the mystery of how to woo Grace tomorrow.
Late the next morning, Grace jogged toward the infirmary, her pace slowed somewhat by the crowding on the few paths that had been cleared of snow. Rachel would be starting work as the newest pride doctor today and Grace had volunteered to watch over her for the overprotective Hawk. In part so she could hear about Rachel’s breakthroughs in shifter reproduction, but also so she could show the good doctor photos of the surviving Organization prisoners and get her intel on them—before any more of them wound up dead.
As soon as she’d gotten off the phone with Adrian, she’d
run out to the remote cabin where Xander had hidden the remaining prisoners and snapped some pics on her cell phone to show Rachel.
It was efficient. Killing two birds with one stone. Adrian would take a guard shift on the perimeter and Grace would hold down the fort at the infirmary. All in the name of efficiency. It had nothing to do with the fact that the infirmary was about the last place she was likely to run into Dominec.
Dominec, who had kissed her last night. And then afterward apparently tracked down Rachel at Adrian’s cabin and had done his creepy stalker thing outside, triggering the Hawk’s latest rash of protective paranoia.
Was that why he’d done it? To discombobulate her so she wouldn’t follow him when he went stalking Rachel?
But that didn’t make any sense. She hadn’t been watching him that closely. He was still free to move around the pride lands. She would never have known he was there if the Hawk hadn’t spotted him. And she wouldn’t have cared if Adrian hadn’t been so convinced Dominec was out to hurt Rachel.
But if he hadn’t kissed her to distract her, she had no explanation for what had happened last night in the shadow of her house.
Grace was comfortable with every pride member and wasn’t afraid to poke her nose in and fix everyone else’s problems—especially when people were being idiots over romantic matters—but she’d never really had romantic drama of her own to share before and she didn’t really know who to go to in order to share it.
She rarely felt the lack of female confidantes. She spent most of her time with the other pride security personnel—who were almost uniformly male—and it had never seemed like an issue before, but she could hardly walk up to Kye and Xander and say, “Guys, he kissed me! Help me figure out what it means.”
Yeah. That would go over well.
She just didn’t have any girlfriends.
She was friendly with Moira—though the bear shifter had such a mild temperament Grace sometimes worried she would offend her with her more colorful opinions. Moira’s dominant characteristic was kindness—a statement which could never be made about Grace.
She liked Patch well enough, but she’d only begun getting to know the cougar shifter. The age gap was wide enough—and Patch had been far enough outside the pride hierarchy for most of her life—that they’d never really talked before she and Roman had mated. Now their interactions, while friendly, were defined by their connections to the Alpha. Grace would always be first-and-foremost Roman’s lieutenant, which wasn’t exactly conducive to girl talk with his mate.
And while Whiskey might be a world-class listener—and probably the closest thing to a confidante Grace had—it didn’t feel right to tell her. It didn’t feel right to tell any of them.
Unfortunately, that didn’t help her figure out what the hell had happened—or escape the fact that it had. Dominec CrazyAss had kissed her. And not just a peck.
Could he be her new fuck buddy? The idea was insane. Yes, she’d frequently been tempted to throw herself against him to see which one of them would end up on top, but she hadn’t meant it like that. Though the thought was entirely too hot.
Suddenly the flush on her cheeks had to do with far more than the fact that she’d jogged halfway across the pride lands.
Okay. So there was an attraction there. Fine. That didn’t mean she had to act on it. Getting involved with Freddy Krueger wasn’t high on her list of life goals.
Though if he tried to kiss her again… Well. It wasn’t her fault if she let him.
Grace shoved through the back door of the infirmary and moved quickly to the tiny locker room next to the office they all shared—though Brandt tried to claim it as his own. She tossed her backpack into her locker and closed it before following the sound of voices toward the large front room. Adrian and Rachel were already there, chatting with Dr. Brandt amid the patient beds and exam tables.
Moira was nowhere in sight—though she had to be in the building. When Grace had called Brandt this morning to let him know Rachel was coming in, she’d been able to hear Moira’s yelp of excitement in the background. The midwife wouldn’t miss a shot at picking Dr. Russell’s brain.
Rachel had the beginnings of a black eye—which Grace fully intended to investigate as soon as Adrian left, though the good doctor wasn’t acting afraid of the Hawk. It had better have been an accident. Grace liked the Hawk. She’d hate to have to kick his ass into next week if she found out he’d been knocking around his girl.
As soon as she shooed Adrian off to his shift on the perimeter and Brandt went back into the bowels of the infirmary to find Moira, Grace made a point of putting the stiffly formal doctor at ease and then bringing up the shiner.
The good doctor was comfortingly irate that Grace would even imply that Adrian might hurt her—insisting with gratifying indignation that she’d gotten in the way of one of Adrian’s Organization nightmares the previous night—but Grace made a note to keep an eye on the couple, just in case. Lieutenants looked out for their pride mates, and Rachel was pride now, even if she was human.
Grace let the subject drop, Moira appeared—full of enthusiasm for the day—and they all got down to the business of showing Rachel Russell the pride’s medical facilities and digging into her knowledge of shifter DNA.
Time flew when you were talking about hormone therapies and cross-breed fertility. It felt like no time at all, but must have been hours later when the four of them wound up crammed into Brandt’s office and the conversation turned to her work at the Organization.
When she went into detail on the experiments, Grace forced herself to focus on the science, reminding herself that she liked the good doctor—and that Rachel had helped over a hundred shifters escape captivity. She certainly hadn’t lacked for test subjects.
“We had hundreds and hundreds of samples—every mature shifter brought through Organization labs was harvested for reproductive material.”
“Jesus.”
Every head snapped toward the doorway at that guttural curse. Adrian stood there, horror and hurt in every line of his face.
Grace had only a moment to marvel that it must be even later than she thought if the Hawk was already done with his perimeter shift before he bolted down the hall and Rachel leapt out of her chair to give chase. “Adrian!”
Grace, Brandt and Moira all clearly heard the pair dart into a patient room down the hall and slam the door—then politely pretended their shifter hearing couldn’t easily pick up the sound of raised voices coming from behind the door.
Moira frowned after them. “Should we do something?”
Adrian was doubtless one of those “samples” Rachel had mentioned. Grace figured she might have some choice words for the love of her life if he’d harvested her for genetic material too—not that she was ever going to have a love of her life, but she could imagine. “Give them a minute to work it out,” Grace suggested. “If it sounds like it’s getting worse, I’ll intervene.”
But the conversation only lasted a few seconds more before the sound of the Hawk storming out reached them. Elvis has left the building.
Brandt grimaced. “She did the best she could in a shitty situation.”
“He knows that,” Grace said. But the Hawk was still having violent nightmares about what had been done to him in captivity. Not surprising he’d reacted badly to the reminder that Dr. Russell had been a party to that. “He’ll come around.”
At least she hoped he would. Grace might not believe in true love for herself, but damned if she wasn’t going to fight for it for everyone she cared about.
Chapter Thirteen
Grace waited another few minutes to give Rachel time to pull herself together and then slipped down the hall to tap on the door. It swung open beneath her hand.
“I take it our little birdie left.”
Rachel, seated on the bed in the world’s most dejected pose, looked up at the words. He
r eyes were hollow with sorrow, but at least they were dry. That was something.
Grace slipped into the room and nudged the door closed behind her. “You okay, Doc?”
“I don’t know what I am anymore,” the doctor whispered.
Grace dropped onto the other bed, facing her. “That sounds like a good start. Like that whole the wise man knows first that he knows nothing bullshit.”
A whisper of a smile almost broke through the sadness on her face. “Something like that.”
Grace just waited, letting the silence fold comfortingly around them both until Rachel began to speak, unloading everything that had been building up with her for the last week. Her frustration that even when she’d tried to do the right thing, she’d wound up hurting the man she loved—though Rachel didn’t’ use the “L” word. Her relief at finally getting away from the Organization’s control over her life. Her frustration with Adrian who couldn’t seem to forgive her for the mistakes she’d made for the greater good. It all came pouring out.
Everyone buckles.
Grace frowned internally, remembering Kelly’s words, but kept her focus on Rachel, who was now bemoaning her lack of understanding of the man in her life.
Well, Grace had wanted girl talk, hadn’t she?
“I can’t figure him out,” Rachel complained. “One second he’s angry, the next he’s protective. He touches me so tenderly I just fall apart, then pushes me away and won’t even look at me.”
“He’s a man. He doesn’t know what to do with all the feels,” Grace said. But he loved Rachel. Grace believed that down to her marrow. “If it’s any help, he refused to leave you if I wasn’t personally guarding your cute little ass. So he’s clearly got a hard-on for keeping you safe. That’s something.”
And it was what Kelly had wanted too. Had she been wrong to brush him aside so harshly? He wanted her to be safe. He wanted to be the one she unloaded to. It wasn’t such an unreasonable thing to ask.
“Am I really in danger?” Rachel asked.