by Zoe Chant
Jack finished with her cheek and moved on to the graze on her forearm. An image flashed up in Toni’s mind, as though she was looking at the two of them from above – the two of them, together, dressing their wounds after fighting to save the two children. A day ago, neither of them had known the other existed; but today, they were a team. A unit.
Almost a family.
And, like a family, secrets boiled under their seemingly unified exterior.
Toni took a deep breath.
“Jack, I have to—”
“Tiger,” he said, almost at the same time.
Their eyes met, and a relieved smile burst across Jack’s face.
“God, it feels so good to actually say it!” He laughed. “I’ve been standing here like an idiot, trying to figure out how to say it. And before, in the car…”
He stepped forward and swept Toni into his arms in the same movement.
“I’m a tiger,” he repeated, his words muffled in Toni’s hair. “It matches, right? A big cat. Bigger than normal tigers, even, not that I found that out until I’d been shifting for a decade.”
“Right,” Toni mumbled. She could feel herself wavering, enfolded safely in his arms. It would be so easy to put off telling him…
She steeled herself. “Jack, I—”
“… I know not all shifters’ animals are bigger than the normal versions – like your family, right? I saw the kids. No one could tell they weren’t regular cats. And…” Jack had been talking, quickly, breathlessly, as though all the words he hadn’t said for the last few hours were rushing out at once. But when he felt Toni stiffen, he paused.
“Is everything all right?”
He loosened his arms around Toni, his hands slipping down to hold her gently by the waist. She looked grimly up at him.
“Jack … Felix and Lexi are cats, yes, like their parents. And they’re normal-sized. But, Jack, I—”
Toni could have screamed. Of all the rotten timing—
But as quickly as her irritation had flared, it disappeared. The voice – Lexi’s – hadn’t been scared, but it echoed with anxiety.
“You should go,” Jack said, and she realized he’d heard as well. She was surprised; usually the twins were more careful about keeping their shouts family-only. “We can talk later,” Jack added, lifting one hand to gently touch the edge of her grazed cheek. “Once the kids are settled in properly.”
“Yes,” Toni said absently, as inside her, her better self fought with her selfish side. Quickly, before she could change her mind, she grabbed Jack’s hand from her cheek and kissed it.
“We’ll talk later,” she promised. “And Jack – you know I, I care about you, right?”
She ran out of the room, before it became obvious just how much of an understatement those words were.
***
The bathroom was full of steam, bubbles, and puddles.
“Kids?” Toni called as she knocked on the door. “Everything okay?”
“Y-yeah,” admitted Lexi guiltily. She was perched on the edge of the bathroom counter, wrapped in a towel and studiously filling the marble sink with frothy bubbles. Felix was sitting in a pile of bubbles in front of her. Neither child would meet Toni’s eye. “I just, you know…”
“…just wanted to make sure I was still around,” Toni finished. “I understand.”
“And that you would come back,” Lexi added, her voice so quiet Toni could barely hear it. Toni felt a pit open in the bottom of her stomach.
“Sweetie, you know I’ll always come as fast as I can,” she managed to say, wrapping her arms around her niece’s slight form. Lexi wriggled around and hugged Toni back.
For about thirty seconds. Then Lexi flapped at Toni’s arms until she let go, and grabbed a heap of bubbles from the sink. Toni watched, waiting for the other shoe to fall, as her niece piled bubbles on top of her nephew until the black-haired boy almost disappeared under a pile of froth.
At the other end of the bathroom, the shower was still running. Keeping one eye on the twins – still not entirely trusting their apparent change of mood – Toni ducked underneath the hot cascade of water long enough to rinse off the worst of the day’s sweat and dirt.
It was like standing in a tropical rainstorm, hot water sheeting down from the ceiling and swirling around her feet. She bent her head forward and let the water wash over her neck and shoulders, pummeling her stress away.
When she looked at herself in the mirror, the graze on her cheek seemed far smaller than its sting made it feel, though that may have just been the steam obscuring her vision. She dabbed the broken skin carefully with the corner of her towel and decided to leave it to air-dry.
At least it wasn’t bleeding at all, since Jack had cleaned it.
Jack.
Toni’s mind whirled. Looking at herself in the mirror, she could see her face change even at just the thought of him – her cheeks pink, her pupils huge and black.
She groaned and let her head drop forward until her forehead clonked onto glass. What she’d seen in the mirror? It was the same expression she’d seen on Jack’s face. When he looked at her.
She couldn’t fool herself any longer. And she couldn’t let Jack be fooled, either. If he thought she was a shifter – if he thought, God forbid, after this afternoon, that they were meant to be together, that she could be his m—
She couldn’t even think the word.
Like so much else in her life, that – the m-word – was something Toni knew she couldn’t have. It was a shifter thing; she wasn’t a shifter; it didn’t take a genius to do the math.
It didn’t help that every new thing she learnt about Jack confirmed that he was a good guy, the genuine article. He’d run to save the twins without question, and brought them all back here to his home, despite the fact that doing so could mean putting himself in harm’s way.
And it wasn’t just the big things. While Toni was busy glaring at herself in the mirror, human foam-volcano Felix had cracked the door open to discover Jack had left a pile of clothes outside. And the house was beginning to fill with the most delicious smells…
He was the perfect man. And she had to tell him that she was far from the perfect woman for him.
Toni pulled an oversized shirt over her head, trying as she did so not to think of it as Jack’s shirt, of it sliding over his shoulders and chest. It was long enough for her to belt it into a shirtdress.
The adult-sized shirts and sweaters were long enough on the kids to be tunics, and the hems flapped against their knees as they followed their noses to the kitchen.
“Food’s up!” Jack called happily as Toni walked through the door. Like the rest of the house, the kitchen combined cutting-edge equipment with a focus on comfort. Jack was standing behind a tall bench, ladling steaming pasta onto plates. The twins were already scrambling up onto two of the stools that lined the bench, eyes fixed on the food. Toni walked up and took a seat beside them.
He looks like he belongs there, Toni thought. Like family.
She shook her head. That was the opposite of the sort of thing she needed to be thinking, right now.
Jack was smiling at her, though, and she couldn’t stop her own lips turning up in response.
“May I present my specialty dish: pasta with a sauce of whatever cheeses I could find in the fridge,” Jack announced modestly. “For the first course, pasta. For the second, pasta again. And so forth until you’re all either full, or we run out of food.”
Toni’s stomach rumbled and she realized how long it had been since that light lunch on the riverside. She wound her fork around a strand of spaghetti and lifted it to her mouth.
“Jack, this is delicious. Carbs and cheese, the best thing after a…” she glanced sideways at the kids and decided not to say scary or terrifying “…busy day.”
She tucked in as Jack pulled up a stool on the other side of the bench. Beside her, Lexi and Felix attacked their meals with gusto. Toni felt a tight knot i
n her stomach begin to relax as she watched the kids enjoy the meal.
A blinking light further down the bench caught her attention.
“Is that your phone?” she asked around a mouthful of savory sauce. “It looks like you’ve got a message.”
Jack frowned and grabbed the phone. “That’s – it’s nothing. Nothing important.” He stuck the phone in his pocket and turned to the twins. “You two want seconds?”
“Yes!” two voices cried happily.
***
The shower – or at least the bubbles – and the meals might have gone some way toward restoring the children’s sense of security, but the moment Toni suggested it was time for them to go to bed, that went out the window. Jack had made up a bed in a spare room for the kids but they clung to Toni, silently refusing to move. Toni couldn’t blame them.
In the end she and Jack hauled the blankets from the spare bed to the living room, and built a nest on one of the sofas. Toni sat between her niece and nephew, while Jack curled into a large leather armchair across from them.
Toni brushed her fingers gently over Lexi’s forehead. Neither of the twins was talking much, though she could feel the soft buzz of private mindspeak at the edge of her own mind. She wasn’t surprised; the twins had always talked big things over between themselves before involving anyone else, even before they were old enough to talk to anyone else.
Slowly, the buzz receded, and the two children’s breathing slowed and deepened as they drifted off to sleep.
“Will they be all right?” Jack had a searching look in his eyes, and it was all Toni could do to stop her own million questions from flooding out all at once. She took a deep breath.
“I don’t know,” she said softly, not wanting to wake them. She looked down at Felix curled up beside her, his hands tucked up under his chin. “Nothing like this has ever happened to them before. I don’t know whether that means this will hit them badly, or whether … I don’t know much about psychology. Or anything about it, really. But if they don’t understand how much danger they were really in … maybe that can make it easier for them to cope with it?”
“Maybe,” Jack agreed, but there was still a tension in his body. His eyes were flickering gold in the firelight. Toni knew what that meant, now: his tiger was close to the surface.
“I—” she began, then coughed, her throat dry. She tried again. “I was thinking … if they are traumatized, would it help them at all to transform? I know Ellie, my sister, when she was younger, she would sober up after a night on the town by transforming. Shifting helps her metabolize the alcohol, or something. And…”
She tried to claw up memories from college, from the health sciences classes she had taken with her vet friend Roxie before switching majors. “Sometimes trauma can have to do with the brain producing particular chemicals, can’t it? Is that a thing? If shifting can help metabolize alcohol, maybe it can help reduce other mental effects, too.”
A line appeared between Jack’s eyebrows. Toni licked her lips, suddenly nervous.
“I have to ask you. I can’t answer the question myself. Because I don’t know. All I know is, is what Ellie’s told me, or my parents, the rest of my family. I’m not a shifter, Jack,” and oh, it was so hard to keep her voice steady, not to disturb the kids. “I know there are more important things we have to talk about, like whatever the hell de Jager is up to, but – I can’t let you think I’m something I’m not.”
She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the shock and disappointment in his eyes as he realized she wasn’t who he thought she was. What he thought she was.
“Toni…”
She squeezed her eyes shut, but a tear still managed to escape. “Don’t, Jack. I know it’s not what – I’m sorry. I should have said something earlier.”
She felt, rather than heard, him stand up and walk slowly over to her, then the puff of air as he knelt down. When he spoke, his voice was gentle.
“The alcohol thing is true enough. I don’t know if it would work with other brain chemistry, though. I don’t know the science behind it, but personally…” He sighed. “Things stick with you regardless of what shape you’re in.”
He laid a hand on Toni’s knee. “Or what shape you are. Toni, darling … I thought you were human when I first started falling for you. When my tiger first noticed you. It doesn’t change anything.”
Toni hung her head. “Of course it does. Can’t you see? You just said it—” Her voice began to waver and she realized she couldn’t do this. Not here. Slowly, carefully, she manoeuvred her way off the sofa, away from the warm bundle of blankets and the sleeping children.
She pulled Jack with her out of the room and shut the door behind them both. He watched her, silent, his eyes golden and alert.
Toni ran her hands through her hair, despairing. “You said it yourself. Your tiger noticed me. I can’t – I can never do that for you. I don’t have a tiger, or a cat, or anything. I’m just me.”
Jack was still watching her, and she could feel it, the magnetic pull between their bodies. A sob burst out of her and she relented, let that force pull her in to his arms. He held her with one arm around her waist, the other buried deep in her still-damp hair.
He smelled like the forest, pine and rich soil over his own deep, masculine scent. And below that, she could sense his tiger, powerful, lean, strength in every coiled muscle.
“You’re all I need, Toni,” Jack whispered. “Just you.”
“It’s not enough,” Toni insisted. “I’m not enough. I never have been. Didn’t today prove that? De Jager took the twins, and there was nothing I could do.”
She pulled away from his embrace, even though every inch of her was wailing at her to stay. “I’m not who you need me to be, Jack. I’m not strong enough, or powerful enough. I can’t help. We need to figure out how to stop de Jager, but what part can I play in any plan we come up with? The only thing I can think of to do is call my family, but even my phone doesn’t work!”
The words tumbled out of her like bitter knives, all facing inwards. It was as though a dam had burst inside her, and years of insecurity were flooding out.
Jack reached out to her again and she thrust his hand away.
“Don’t, Jack. I – I can’t.” I can’t be with you. I can’t be with you, and watch you realize how pathetic I am. Watch you always one step ahead, faster, stronger, better.
Watch you leave me behind.
He stood back, pushing his hands deep into his pockets. Toni could feel his confusion, his need to touch her, to comfort her. But his touch couldn’t comfort her now, only distract her. The pain would still be there, waiting underneath.
At last he seemed to come to a decision.
“Follow me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
He led her to the mudroom where they had dressed each other’s wounds, and unlocked a cabinet.
“I don’t want you to feel unsafe here. It may not look like it, but this building is reinforced throughout. You’d need a tank to get in the front door, and the windows are bulletproof, as well as one-directional blackout. That means that we can see out, but no one can see in. You’re safe here. And if this makes you feel safer…”
Toni gasped as something gleamed oily gray in the back of the cupboard. A handgun.
“The man who kidnapped Lexi and Felix dropped this. He took two shots with it, but the rest of the clip’s still in there.” He reached out, then seemed to reconsider, and instead dropped the key to the cabinet in Toni’s hand. “It’s here if you need it.”
Toni’s fingers closed automatically over the key. Then she shook her head and placed it carefully on the cabinet.
“I don’t know how to use that,” she said quietly.
“I thought – if you felt you didn’t have to depend on me to protect you…” Jack sighed, bowing his head.
The thought of shooting a person with the same gun that had left that gash in Jack’s side made her stomach churn
. But the alternative…
“I’d be more likely to hurt someone than to help. Well,” she said, miserably, “hurt someone who I didn’t mean to hurt, I mean…”
“I understand.” Jack shook his head. “Well, you’ll be safe here, anyway.”
“With you,” Toni murmured.
And that was the problem, wasn’t it? He was a tiger shifter, strong and powerful not only in his shifted form but his human body, as well. And what was she? Just a human, who wasn’t even confident in the one body she did have.
Toni felt a lump grow in her throat.
“I’d better go and check on the kids,” she said hurriedly, and turned to leave. As she reached the door, Jack caught hold of her arm.
“Toni – you may not want to hear it now, but I meant what I said. I’m not going to give up on you.”
Too late, Toni thought bitterly. I’ve already given up on myself.
CHAPTER TEN
JACK
A hot wind rustled the treetops, sending shadows waving across the star-studded sky. A dark shape, rust-colored stripes barely visible in the moonlight, padded softly toward the treeline.
Jack hesitated just before the edge of the trees, looking back at his house – no, his home. Now that Toni was there, how could it be anything else?
Even if he wasn’t there.
Toni had exposed her secret to him tonight, ironic though it was that someone would have to admit to not being a shifter.
More than that, she’d revealed her true secret, her deepest fear: that being a shifter meant she would never be good enough. The revelation made Jack’s heart ache.
But it was what he’d left unsaid that made his gut clench with guilt.
Jack bit down on the roll of clothing he was carrying in his mouth, until he could just feel the hard surface of the van driver’s phone through the fabric.
He should have told her about it. Should have said something when she saw it on the kitchen counter – and hell, how stupid had he been, to leave it out in plain sight? Either of the kids might have grabbed it and read through the messages.
Those messages made it clear that the kids hadn’t been de Jager’s primary target. Jack had had his suspicions even before he found the phone; why else would the man show up here after all these years?