by Vivi Andrews
She made a face. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking of it like that.”
“No. You were too busy being offended that I would try to protect you.”
“It’s just not something I’m used to.” She was independent. It was in her blood.
He stared at her for a long, silent moment then said, “Sometimes I want to beat the living crap out of every man you’ve ever dated for not taking care of you.”
She ignored the little frisson of pleasure his words conjured. “Do I look like I can’t take care of myself?”
“I know you’re capable. That has nothing to do with it.”
She understood that. It was him. His need to be the lord protector of the entire world. “How did Whiskey put up with all this macho alpha bullshit?”
He went strangely still. “I didn’t know anyone knew about Whiskey.”
“Hard to keep something like that a secret.” A fact she should remember. They would never be able to keep this secret. She needed to end it now.
“It’s been over with Whiskey for a year now.”
“I wasn’t trying to pry.” Though she was glad to know. More glad than she wanted to admit that his heart wasn’t otherwise engaged.
Which was wrong. So wrong.
Lila was the one who should be happy he was through with Whiskey. It was none of Patch’s concern. She couldn’t keep forgetting that game-changing detail.
“It wasn’t like this with Whiskey,” Roman admitted, his dark gaze tracing the planes of her face.
“Why? Because she’s a big bad tigress and can take of herself?”
“Because I never wanted her the way I want you.”
He said it so baldly. Fact. Pure and simple.
She blinked and blushed, looking away, liking his words entirely too much. He couldn’t say things like that. Not to her. But she didn’t want him to stop. “Okay then.” She spun away before he could say anything else to rattle her. “Shall we climb?” She bolted up the path at top speed.
Chapter Eighteen
Roman was in good shape. He was a shifter in his prime. But Patch was killing him.
She’d been taking it easy on them, he realized as he struggled to keep up with her quick, sure steps. She’d slept just as little as he had last night, but she was charging up the steep slope like their nighttime marathon hadn’t tired her at all—while he panted in the thin air and forced leaden legs to keep hauling his ass up the incline.
She paused before a particularly steep section of the trail and he came to a stop beside her, barely stopping himself from bending at the waist to suck in oxygen, his lungs working like a bellows.
“You okay there, champ?”
“You’re punishing me, aren’t you?”
“Don’t be a pussy. We’re just getting to the fun part.”
Roman felt his eyebrows fly up incredulously. “I don’t think anyone has ever called me a pussy before.”
“New experiences are good for you.” She eyed him over her shoulder, a gamine little flicker of a grin playing around her mouth. She loved this. The climb. The outdoors. It was written all over her. Even the reason they were here couldn’t dampen her passion for this place. It was hot as hell.
“Come on, you big pussy.”
He growled and lunged for her, but she was already above him, scrambling up the slope that was so steep she used her hands as well as feet to scale it. He climbed after her, rocks skittering down the trail to mark his passage while her steps seemed to float over the top of the uneven scree, barely shifting it.
He burst out into the clearing above where she waited, hands planted on her hips, face tipped to the wind as she surveyed the expansive view. He didn’t spare a single glance for the mountains and valleys laid out around them—he couldn’t look anywhere but at her.
Crossing the clearing in two great strides, he hauled her into his arms and slanted his mouth over hers. She met him—ready, willing and so damn eager his hands were already burrowing down the back of her jeans before she twisted out of his arms.
She held up a palm in the universal symbol for stop-right-there-you-horny-bastard when he came at her again. “I can’t lead us all back to the car with your scent all over me.”
Shit. He’d completely forgotten about the others. He shouldn’t have forgotten—pride first—but somehow she’d driven all awareness of where they were right out of his brain. His decision-making had migrated south—which was something he’d never allowed to happen before, no matter how hard up he’d been.
He raked a hand through his hair and turned away from her, trying to get his fucking cock to behave, thinking of anything other than the way she felt against him. He shouldn’t want her like this. Not after he’d sated himself inside her half a dozen times. But the memory of each of those times only made the ache in his balls that much worse. He closed his eyes, focusing on breathing in and breathing out, filtering the scents on the breeze. Thank God she’s downwind. “Do you smell him at all?”
“No.” Her voice came from the opposite side of the clearing, giving him space. “But I’d be more surprised if I did. It was two days ago and he wasn’t even up here—just a scent on the breeze at the time.”
“And you’re sure it was coming from that valley.”
“Reasonably. I was guiding a group of tourists at the time. It didn’t occur to me then that I’d need to track down one stray shifter—no matter how strange his scent.” She hesitated. Then, “Maybe we should stay away from each other in public.”
“I can handle it,” he snapped, barely recognizing the feral snarl of his own voice.
He would handle it. He wasn’t a slave to his body. Though five minutes ago he would have taken her right there on the mountaintop and to hell with anyone who happened to come by and find them.
“Maybe—”
A shout from the valley below interrupted whatever Patch would have said. Roman turned toward the sound. “They must have found something.” He eyed the sheer face directly between himself and the shout. “How do we get down there?”
“This way.” Patch took off down a slightly less vertigo-inducing drop, surefooted as ever as he struggled to keep up. Before long he was panting from more than just lust, and he had no time to catch his breath when they reached the floor of the valley and Patch took off across it, leaping from boulder to boulder when the path disappeared.
The others were clustered together around one boulder when Patch dropped down beside them, Roman on her heels. She was relieved none of them looked at her too closely, not wanting to think about what they might have seen on her face. The boulder did look remarkably like a bear’s tooth, and the dirt around the base had clearly been disrupted recently. The scent of the hawk shifter was strong here—as if he’d spent a long time lying on the ground, which he must have done if he’d tried to bury the pack in his weakened, disoriented state.
“No scent of explosives,” Xander commented, though it was Kye who knelt closest to the burial site, sniffing and poking at the dirt.
“He’s right,” Dominec admitted, continuing to scan their surroundings warily. “The area smells of desperation, not malice.”
Roman turned to the man with his face inches from the ground. “Kye?”
“No sign of booby-traps. Looks like our birdie was telling the truth.”
“Dig it up.”
Five minutes later Kye yanked a mud-caked backpack from the ground, shaking off clumps of dirt before handing it up to Roman.
“Shit, it’s soaking wet,” Roman cursed, flicking mud off the zipper.
“How?” Patch shook her head. “It hasn’t rained in days.”
“Dumbass hawk probably swam through something to destroy his scent trail and didn’t think of the fact that he might be damaging the precious cargo,” Dominec supplied with his usual optimism.
“Maybe he ziplocked them before he took a dip,” Xander suggested.
Roman unzipped the bag and gingerly peeled back the sodden material. Looking inside, he rel
eased a low curse. “They’re drenched. Looks like three hard drives and what used to be a bunch of papers.” He briskly zipped the bag again. “We’ll take the lot of it back to the pride. See if the computer techs can do anything with this mess.”
“It’s probably riddled with tracking devices,” Dominec said. “Serve us right if the whole damn thing was a set-up so they can track us back to the pride.”
“The hawk knew how to find the pride. If he wanted to lead them there, he could already have done so.”
Dominec glowered. “Doesn’t make this smart.”
“We’ll have Mateo check it for tracking devices.” Roman flipped the backpack onto his back amid Dominec’s continued mutterings about plants and being murdered in their sleep and turned to Patch—sure, in command, all Alpha. So damn hot.
“Patch? Which way to the car?”
She jerked out of her momentary lust-daze and pointed behind Xander. “There’s a trail over there.”
Roman nodded and gestured for her to lead the way. Patch turned her body sideways to avoid brushing against his as she slipped past him to take point, trying not to notice the long, slow look Kye gave her, trying not to give in to the paranoia inspired by two little words: He knows.
She glanced over her shoulder as she scrambled up the trail, past Roman and Xander, to catch Kye watching her, a small frown on his face. She hoped he was frowning about the backpack and nothing else.
That hope was short-lived.
When they arrived back at the pride lands, Roman and Xander piled out and immediately took off for the operations building that housed the pride’s computers—and its resident computer savant, a wry, mild-mannered leopard named Mateo. Dominec climbed out of the car and drifted off to do whatever the hell Dominec did when he wasn’t lurking around trying to intimidate the world, but Kye lingered.
Patch hopped out of her car and slammed the door. Maybe if she just ignored him he’d keep his mouth shut.
“Patch.”
No such luck.
She paused, waiting as his footsteps closed in, but not turning to face him. “Yeah?” Maybe this was just about the backpack. The mission. Her parents.
“What are you doing?”
Her luck really did suck.
There was a weight to the words. Too much weight for him to be asking her where she was going or what her plans for the afternoon were. Still, she played dumb. “What do you mean?”
“Patch.” Her name was a soft scold. “You know what I mean.”
She really, really hoped she didn’t. “Listen, Kye, I’ve got to go—” Shit. Think of something. Anything. “Find Lila. She needs help with—” Crap. Why did she try to lie? She could never think of the details quickly enough to make them sound true. “This wedding stuff. Bridesmaid colors and all.”
“Does Lila know?”
“Know what?”
A soft, irritated sigh. “Patch.”
She finally met his gaze. It was a mistake. She saw a certainty there that was entirely too sure. And something else she really hadn’t wanted to see. Pity.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she said, the words turning into a whisper on the way out.
“You sure about that?”
“What gave it away?” She very carefully didn’t say us. There was no us. And even if there had been, she wouldn’t admit as much to Kye or anyone else.
“You did,” he said, not unkindly. “You always used to stare at Roman like he was the sun or some kind of glowing god, only looking away when he would look toward you—which was almost never. Now you avoid looking at him as much as possible and every time you do, you blush.”
“I do not.”
“You do. And so does he.”
He does?
“You’re jumpy around him, but comfortable at the same time. Too comfortable. I don’t know what the hell the two of you think you’re doing, but you need to be more careful. It doesn’t take much for gossip to start in this pride.”
“I won’t let the gossip hurt Lila,” she promised.
“It isn’t Lila I’m worried about.” He wasn’t much taller than she was, barely two inches, so he didn’t have to lower his head much for his serious eyes to meet hers. “We aren’t lions, Patch. We’re guests here. Tolerated. How long do you think that tolerance will last if we start trying to edge our way into their precious traditions?”
“That isn’t what I’m doing.”
“What are you doing? Do you even know?”
She didn’t have a fucking clue, but she wasn’t about to admit that. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over.”
“You sure about that? He wasn’t looking at you like he knew it was over.”
“It is.”
Kye frowned, obviously not comforted. “You’re a good friend, Patch. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“I won’t. It’s over and it didn’t mean anything to begin with.” Just a fling.
But Kye didn’t look like he believed that any more than she did. Any more than she ever had.
It meant too much. It had from the start. Which was why it had to be over, because it could never be just a fling and there wasn’t room for anything else. Not in this lifetime.
Chapter Nineteen
She was hiding from him.
Roman’s day had royally sucked. The backpack didn’t contain any tracking devices, but Mateo wasn’t optimistic about the state of the hard drives, though he promised to do his best to retrieve as much of the data as possible. The papers were a lost cause, completely soaked. The hawk had fallen back into a coma—which the doctors found promising because it was some kind of healing trance, but Roman found annoying as hell because he couldn’t ask the damn bird what was on the damn hard drives.
He’d met Lila for another excruciatingly uncomfortable “date”—during which he hadn’t been able to stop having flashbacks of doing unwholesome things to Lila’s best friend. Especially because his office seemed to be saturated with her scent. He couldn’t believe Lila didn’t smell it, but then she’d never been particularly in touch with her animal side.
Roman’s animal side had never been more demanding. He’d been half-hard for hours from just the lingering scent of Patch and the deliciously graphic memories of the night before.
Then he’d opened the bottom drawer of his desk.
Thank God he’d been alone at the time. The sight of her no-nonsense cotton panties draped over the neatly folded stack of her clothing had incinerated all his higher brain functions, flooding him with visions of her splayed out for him on the sideboard, making those incredible sounds of helpless need as he stroked her.
He’d hooked the panties over one finger and lifted them, unable to resist inhaling the spicy tang of her lust. Fuck. His cock swelled, pressing hard against his zipper—as if he hadn’t had her every way imaginable the night before.
If they hadn’t been interrupted he’d have had her the previous afternoon too. Right there on the sideboard. She’d ridden his hand so eagerly. He knew now she was just as enthusiastic, just as tight and wet when her pussy gripped his cock.
Cursing softly, he’d locked the door to his office and unzipped his jeans. With her panties wrapped around his fist, he’d worked himself to a quick, spine-jerking orgasm, visions of Patch vivid in his mind.
He’d wanted nothing more than to seek her out and act out every one of those fantasies, but he was responsible. He had duties. So instead he’d cleaned himself up and headed up to the main house.
Where he’d argued with the Alpha. Again.
Greg flat out refused to see reason with regards to this human threat. They’d been a sanctuary for frightened shifters for two decades and that was valuable, but it wasn’t enough anymore. It was time to be more than a refuge. It was time to become a force to be reckoned with. It was time to take the fight to the humans and show them that predators did not make good prey.
Greg insisted it wasn’t their fight, but if not theirs whose? They were all shifters. They were all
targets. And if Lone Pine—the biggest, strongest pride—didn’t step up, how could they expect anyone else to?
It wasn’t just time for them to act; it was past time.
But the Alpha wouldn’t budge. Hugo and the rest of the advisory council had backed him up and Roman had left the meeting so frustrated he’d had only two thoughts on his mind—shifting shape and running until his paws bled, and finding Patch.
He hadn’t seen her since they got back to the pride with the backpack. It was past nine and the pride was dark and starting to quiet for the night. He knew if he could just see her, talk to her, this wild frustration would ease. This need. Which had nothing to do with chemistry or her heat or a sex-only last fling, but he pointedly ignored the little voice in the back of his head that tried to tell him that.
Finding her place without looking like he was searching for her place was a much bigger pain in the ass than he’d anticipated. He chased three stray scent-trails and had to abandon his hunt four times to avoid suspicious glances from his pride mates. By the time he climbed onto the porch of a small, secluded bungalow, his already-frayed temper was hanging by a thread.
His fist landed a little too hard on her door as he knocked.
He could smell her inside—that lemon spice scent he’d already become addicted to—and hear her moving. She had to know it was him, but there were no footsteps racing to the door to let him in. It sounded like she was hovering on the other side of the door, waiting. He leaned close to the wood. “I’m awfully conspicuous standing out here on your porch at night, Patch.”
The door popped open and he slipped past her into her bungalow.
It was nicer than his. Bigger and homier, somehow, though he knew she rarely lived here. Only the bed was smaller—though it was big enough to send his imagination down a heated path. He distracted himself by turning his attention to the desk shoved against the wall opposite the bed. Obviously never used as a workspace, it supported a television, a DVD player and stacks of completely unorganized DVDs that spanned dozens of genres. More clues as to what made Patch tick.