by Nalini Singh
Over time, he’d become better at controlling that hunger. The fact that he was a DarkRiver sentinel spoke to that control. But it was inside of him, a pulsing need. He knew that Tally was his greatest vulnerability, the trigger that could push him over the edge. What he felt for her—protectiveness, rage, affection—it was all tangled up in a caustic stew. Each time she flinched, he came one step closer to going rogue. But today she had leaned into him and that had had an even more unpredictable effect.
Extreme, blinding, violent sexual attraction.
He’d been drawn to her as a man is drawn to a woman from the instant she’d walked back into his life, but with her small act of trust, that attraction had ratcheted up into a craving that scratched at his gut, made his cock hard with the need to claim, to brand. But he knew Tally. She had been sexually betrayed by the very people supposed to protect her. For her, trust and sex were incompatible. If he pushed her in that direction, it might equal her last straw.
Then there were the other men. So many she couldn’t remember their names.
He roared again, the sound vicious.
Why? Why had Tally sold herself so cheap?
Lost in the coils of sleep, Talin frowned, turned, then settled back down. A few minutes later, she did it again. And again.
Fear twisted the sleeping peacefulness of her face, shuddered over her body, locked around her throat. Gasping for air, she sat straight up. She didn’t scream. She never screamed. Never had. Not even as a child.
For five long minutes, she sat there, adrenaline pumping, as she examined every corner of her well-lit room. Only when she was satisfied that no one had opened the trapdoor, that no one had entered while she’d been sleeping, did she get out of bed and pull on a cardigan over her sweatpants and tank top combo.
Walking into the bathroom off the room, she threw some water on her face, then tucked her hair behind her ears before walking back out. The bedside clock told her it was four a.m. The hour of nightmares. The time of night a terrified child’s bedroom door had creaked open for so many years.
Shaking her head to clear the vile memories, she went to the security panel and turned off the lasers. She wanted a cup of hot chocolate. Maybe the Larkspurs hadn’t been able to banish her demons, maybe she hadn’t let them love her like they had wanted to, but they had helped her sometimes. Ma Larkspur had been a light sleeper—even with Talin’s quiet creeping about, she’d noticed. Those nights they had spent sitting in the kitchen drinking hot chocolate were some of the best memories of Talin’s life after Clay. Before, he had been the only good thing, the only wonderful thing, in her life.
Pulling open the trapdoor, she glanced down. Clay had left on a light, but she couldn’t see him from where she was. She made her way down on silent feet. Once she reached the bottom, she scanned the room. There were a couple of cushions on the other side, below the window, but the room was otherwise empty. She realized Clay must have bunked downstairs. She frowned. The cushions on the first level were huge but he was a big man. It couldn’t be comfortable sleeping on those. Maybe he had a collapsible mattress.
Her curiosity almost made her open the second trapdoor but she stopped herself. Turning up the light from soft to super-bright, she headed to the kitchen alcove and began to search for the ingredients. She found milk and sugar but no chocolate.
“Idiot,” she muttered under her breath. Clay had never liked sweets. For his eleventh birthday, Isla had given him a box of knockoff Godiva chocolates. He’d given the whole lot to Talin. She’d made herself sick gorging on them. And loved every minute of it.
She stared at the milk, thinking about simply having a warm glass of it. But she wanted hot chocolate! Tears pricked her eyes. Stupid. Stupid. But the emotional reaction kept gaining speed. She was in a house she didn’t know, with a Clay who was almost all stranger, someone had crushed her cherished photographs and splashed blood on her walls, and her kids were dying. All she’d wanted was a moment’s respite.
Something moved below, snapping her out of her bout of self-pity.
She rubbed at her eyes and waited, back against the counter, as Clay climbed up. His hair was tousled and he didn’t look in a particularly good temper. He’d pulled on his jeans before heading up, but the top buttons were undone, the denim perched perilously low on his hips. That was another confusing thing—this sudden sexual attraction to Clay.
Intellectually, she could understand it. He was a prime example of beautiful male. Women probably begged to be allowed to crawl all over him. Add in that brooding sexuality and it was no wonder her body reacted. But…this was Clay. Her friend. Well, when he wasn’t furious with her. She fisted her hands, dreadfully aware that if he yelled at her right now, she might just burst into tears. “Sorry if I woke you.”
He thrust a hand through his hair and yawned, the act full of a lazy feline grace that held her spellbound. “You walk like a cat. I was already awake.”
“Oh.” She bit her lower lip when it threatened to tremble. “You don’t have any chocolate.”
“Christ, you never grew out of that sweet tooth?”
She shook her head, still feeling a little fragile.
He closed the distance between them with three long strides. “Move.”
Eyes wide, she shifted to the side as he leaned up and opened a high cupboard she hadn’t been able to reach. Her eye fell on his right biceps, on the tattoo there—three slashing lines, they reminded her of the markings on Lucas Hunter’s face. “When did you get inked?”
A grunt was his only response. Curious, she peered at his back to check out the tattoo she’d glimpsed earlier. There it was, on the back of his left shoulder, an exquisitely detailed leopard curled up in sleep. Animal and human in one, she thought, understanding his need to acknowledge the leopard as he had never been allowed to do as a child. “I like the cat,” she said, watching him close the first cupboard and open the one beside it. “Who did it?”
“A guy I knew from juvie—turned into a hotshot artist,” he muttered. “Where the hell did I put it?”
Hopes rising, she stood on tiptoe beside him, trying to peek inside. “Chocolate?”
He reached deep into the space. “Chocolate.” Pulling out his hand, he put a bar of luscious dark chocolate in her palm.
She could’ve kissed him, growly face and all. “Do you like chocolate now?”
“Hell, no. I can’t stand the stuff.” He closed the cupboard and leaned his hip against the counter. “Sascha, however, has a love affair with it. She gave it to me.” He sounded puzzled.
“Maybe because she likes you?” Talin suggested, setting the milk to warm on the small heating unit she guessed was powered by an eco-generator. Everything in Clay’s house seemed to have been designed with the forest’s delicate ecology in mind. “She wanted to make you happy and probably figured that everyone likes chocolate.”
“I guess.” He yawned again but didn’t move from where he stood only two feet from her, all dark masculine beauty. “You do this a lot?”
“Most every night,” she admitted. “I don’t sleep much.”
“I’ll need to get more chocolate, then.”
“No.” She looked up from peeling open the bar. “I can’t stay here.”
His eyes gleamed. “Why not? Afraid I’ll bite you?”
“You already did,” she reminded him with a scowl.
“You survived.” He sounded very much like a cat at that moment.
“You know why I can’t stay. We keep setting each other off. It’s not exactly a peaceful environment.”
“When did you get so hung up on peace?” He nodded at the milk. “Put in the chocolate.”
“What? Oh.” She broke off several chunks and dropped them in. “This kind makes good hot chocolate. Some of the others end up tasting weird.”
Reaching into a drawer in front of him, he gave her a wooden spoon. She began to stir, inhaling the rich scent into her lungs with a sigh. “Heaven.”
When Clay didn’t sa
y anything, she looked at him. He was watching her with a stare that was frankly assessing…and very sensual. Her heart kicked and she broke the searing eye contact, tucking her hair back when it twisted out from behind her ear. “Don’t.”
A hint of steel entered his languid pose, as if with her rejection, she’d pushed one of his damn male buttons. “Why not?”
The arrogance in his question put her back up. “Because!”
“You’re a clearly sexual female. I’m a male. You want me. I want you. What’s the problem?”
Her hand trembled as she turned off the heating unit. “Who says I want you?” She pointed the dripping spoon at him.
He winced as a drop of hot chocolate hit his chest but didn’t move. “I can smell arousal, Talin. You get hot every time you see me half-naked.”
The erotic need that flared through her body was mortifying. Perhaps that explained the stupidity of her next words. “Maybe I get that way for every half-naked man.”
He stilled, becoming so very motionless that she felt like some tiny forest creature in front of a beast of prey. “So you’ll have no problem spreading your legs for me, will you?”
CHAPTER 14
Putting the spoon very carefully on the counter, Talin picked up a mug from the stand. “Go away.”
Clay had expected anger. This calm distance left him flatfooted. She sounded so focused, so controlled, she might as well have been Psy. “Talin, look at me.”
She picked the pot up off the stove and poured her drink into the mug. He waited until she’d put the hot object safely into the sink before grabbing her wrist. Her skin was damp, cold. “Talin?”
“What?” She looked at him, face serene in a way he’d never before seen. Tally had too much energy, too much emotion, to ever be that quiet.
His beast sniffed at her, found something terribly wrong. “Talin, who am I?”
“Clay,” she said, but didn’t tug at his hand, didn’t display any of the reactions he’d already come to expect from her. Her calm was eerie, unnatural. “Can I go now?”
He frowned at the childlike question. Her tone had shifted, as had her rhythm. She sounded like a six-year-old version of herself. “Tally, sweetheart, are you in there?”
“’Course I am, silly.” She smiled and it was that sweet, innocent Tally smile. The one she had stopped smiling a very long time ago. “I want my hot chocolate.”
“Go sit on those cushions. I’ll bring it to you.”
She followed his gaze to the other end of the room. “Is this your clubhouse?”
“Yeah.” Cold fear squeezed his heart. “Go on, baby.”
Smiling with absolute trust, she went to a cushion and sat, one of her legs tucked under her. He picked up her drink and took it to her. She accepted it with a smile. “Yum. Did ya learn to make hot choccie, Clay?”
His rational mind noted that her enunciation and syntax were also regressing, but all he could see was the look in her eyes. He’d seen that look before, those eyes. This was Tally as she had been over twenty years ago. Raw terror made the leopard pace in bewildered circles inside his mind.
“You made it, Tally,” he said, gathering every ounce of tenderness he possessed in an effort to be gentle for her. “Don’t you remember?”
She frowned at him. “No, silly! Not allowed—” Her eyes glazed over. She took a sip of hot chocolate, then…nothing. She didn’t move. If he hadn’t been able to see her breathing, he wouldn’t have known she was alive.
“Tally?” He touched her cheek. No response. Desperate, the leopard starting to panic, he cupped her face. “Tally, wake up!” The last word was a growl.
She blinked. Then again, as if it took great effort. Her hands started to shake. Grabbing the mug before she dropped it, he put it to the side. “Tally, damn it, you come back to me right this second.”
Lines appeared on her brow. “Don’t…give…me orders.” She shook her head, reminding him of a kitten shaking off wet. “Clay?”
“I’m here.” He wanted to hold her but was terrified of her reaction. “I’m right here.”
Her eyes were scared when she looked at him. “How did I get here? I was at the counter.” Panic edged her words, jagged shards that bit into his skin.
“Something happened.” He shifted position, sitting down in front of her with his legs bent at the knees, effectively bracketing her curled-up body.
“An episode?” She reached up as if to push back her hair, stopped, curled her hand into a fist, and pressed it to her stomach. “What did I do?”
“Do you remember what we were talking about?”
A pause, then a red flush high on her cheeks. “We didn’t—” Her tone was reedy.
“No!” he said immediately. “No, baby. It’s only been two or three minutes at most. Look, your chocolate is still hot.” He pushed the mug into her hands, needing to do something to get that anguished look off her face.
She closed her fingers around it, sighing in relief. “Sometimes I do things when I’m—” Her face scarred over with the most cruel pain. “Sometimes I wake up in strange rooms. Then I have to go to the clinics and make sure my vaccinations are all up-to-date, and the doctors look at me like I’m a whore.” The last word was a broken whisper.
Protective fury clawed at his vocal chords. He fought back the roar by focusing on Tally. “You’re safe here. From that kind of abuse at least.” Her hurt, lost look was tearing his heart to pieces, the leopard shuddering in pain as the man fought to find the tenderness she needed. “Tell me you know that, baby.”
A jerky nod. “I just get so scared because I wake up and there’s this black gap where my memory should be. Please—tell me what I did so I don’t have to imagine.”
“Nothing so bad. You talked like a kid.”
That seemed to startle her. “What?”
“You sounded like you were six-years-old.”
“Something bad happened that year.” Her voice dropped, became a whisper.
He swallowed the leopard’s scream of rage—if Tally could live through it, then he could damn well hear it. Because no matter what she said, he’d failed her then. “Have you had this kind of regression before?”
She shook her head. “Not that I know of. One of the specialists had me wear a tracker when the episodes started getting bad. Most of the time—” She swallowed and drank some of her chocolate. “It’s sexual. Most of the time it’s sexual. Not always sex but acting out. Acting different. Dressing different.”
His claws pushed out slowly through his skin. He had to force them to retract. “Is that why all those men?”
Her face was sad. “Don’t try and make me innocent again. I’m not. I never was.”
“You were a child then. You weren’t responsible.”
“But I was responsible for my adult actions. And I did sleep around. You can’t erase that!” she cried. “These episodes have only gotten so bad in the last year and a half. The doctors call them dissociative states. There are lots of psychological words to describe what just happened but most people recognize it as a fugue.”
He knew less than nothing on this subject, felt as if he were scrambling in the dark. Making it worse was that mixed in with his need to protect was this agonizing, vicious fury. God, but he was mad at her, at how she’d mistreated herself. Didn’t she know that no one—not even she—had the right to hurt what was his? And Talin was his, had been since that day twenty-five years ago when she’d first dared tangle with a wounded leopard. “Tell me about these fugues,” he grit out. “Tell me so I understand.”
“I don’t know if I do.” She gave him the mug to put aside.
He stopped himself from crushing it by the thinnest of margins. “Start with what you do know.”
“Okay.” She took a steadying breath. “A person in a fugue is on autopilot, that’s how the doctors explained it to me. They can walk, talk, even do complex things like drive, but with no conscious control.”
He wanted to hold her so bad it hurt, but h
e kept his distance. “What brings one on?”
She shrugged. “No one really knows definitively. For some people it’s a brain imbalance—hormonal, biological, a tumor. For others, it seems related to stress.”
“Which is it in your case?”
“I don’t know. But the more the disease progresses, the worse they are, so it’s probably biological.”
“We were fighting pretty hard, Tally.” He was disgusted at how he’d stoked the sexual heat between them when he had known it would be too much for her. But the second she had ordered him to back off, the leopard had taken over, furious and so damn possessive he couldn’t fight it. He was getting too close to the edge, becoming dangerous. So fucking dangerous. “Enough to stress anyone out.”
“Yes.” She swallowed, took another deep breath. “The doctors said it might even be a mix of things. The biological problems making me more vulnerable to the psychological—my brain is already compromised so it takes less pressure to effect a fugue.”
It was an effort to remain logical. “Were you able to isolate any triggers when you wore the trackers?”
“Not really.” She drew up her knees and rested her chin on them, looking strangely childlike. It was unsettling after the regression he’d witnessed only minutes ago. “Sometimes it’s nothing. Or it feels like nothing. I once fugued in the middle of a jet-train with people all around. I went shopping like normal, then sat in Central Park for an hour.”
“That’s all?”
“Yeah. Weird, huh?” She shook her head. “I wish all the episodes were like that. But I guess you know they’re not. Once I woke up in a bar in Harlem about to get into a taxi with two strangers.”
The red glazing his vision was starting to burn, but he knew that if he walked away from her tonight, he’d break something very fragile. “Go on.”
“Beds, sometimes I wake up in beds. Beside men I don’t know.” Tears trailed down her face. “I hate it! I hate myself! But I can’t stop it!”
“Shh.” He ran a hand over her hair, shaking with the need to hurt what had hurt her. But this disease, it mocked him, hiding in the body of this woman he would never so much as bruise.