by V M Black
Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Tara had every reason in the world to be angry. She had a right to her feelings. But that damned panther had gotten into her freaking head, and now—
Her thoughts broke up as the panther pushed them out. Tara was still mad—mad this time at the panther, but it wasn’t helping because the panther was taking her anger and making it her own.
The door flew open, and Tara spun around uncertainly on legs that wanted to become a different shape. Chay. There was someone else with him, someone with bright blue eyes and the smile of a movie star. The second man came first and grabbed both of Tara’s hands.
“Tara,” he said in a clear voice, staring straight into her eyes. “Tara, can you hear me?”
Tara nodded and swallowed, but she didn’t dare to speak. Her voice wasn’t obeying her anymore.
“You need to stay human, okay, Tara?” he said. “You can work on shifting later, when you know you can shift back at will. Right now, though, you need to be people-shaped. Can you do that for me?”
For him? Why should she do it for him? She wanted to do it for herself—because she needed to get out of this room. She needed to know that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life trapped in a prison because she was too dangerous to let out.
But none of those thoughts were strong enough against the panther, and she felt her face changing shape, her nose and mouth pushing into a snout, whiskers sprouting—
“Tara.” Now it was Chay who grabbed her, pushing the other man back.
And Tara suddenly had something to hold onto in the seething confusion that was in her head, something that didn’t give way under the storm of her change. She grabbed his arm back with fingers that were suddenly hers again, and she breathed through a throat that was the right shape.
She was still pissed, but it was her anger, not the panther’s, and she glared at Chay with all of her very human fury.
“A sex tape, Chay?” she snapped. “Are you freaking serious?”
Chapter Six
Well, that wasn’t the response that Chay had expected.
“All the rooms on the base are usually monitored,” he said. “There are ways to request privacy, and there are also censorship programs in place to automatically provide privacy at times, but the surveillance in the intake rooms is the most complete for your own safety.”
Her hand around his arm went so tight that for a moment, he wondered if she was considering slapping him. But she took several slow, deep breaths.
“You didn’t tell me,” she said finally, her voice tight with anger. “I had no idea. No warning. I thought I at least had privacy in here.”
“You don’t remember my voice over the com system?” he asked.
Tara’s eyes flashed. “Hearing your voice doesn’t automatically make me assume that you’re spying on me. Maybe I’m just naïve, but I’m just not used to worrying about whether somebody’s got hidden cameras pointed at me.”
He gestured to the nearest small black dome on the ceiling with his chin. “You’re right. I could have told you. But they aren’t hidden. I wasn’t trying to trick you. I swear.”
Her jaw clenched visibly, and she gave a tight nod. “No more. Okay? You can turn the damned things off. I’ve got a panic button now. If I need you, I’ll hit it.” She let go of his arm slowly, as if experimentally.
“Actually, we can’t,” Chay said. Maybe he should lie to her. Annie certainly wouldn’t have any compunctions about that, and neither would Luke Ford—in fact, out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Annie was giving him the most disgusted look that a fox could manage. Chay didn’t often have hang-ups of that sort himself, to be perfectly honest.
But he didn’t want to lie to Tara. He wouldn’t say that he wasn’t going to, but if he had another viable option, he’d prefer to avoid mendacity as far as she was concerned. Whatever else the sex between them meant, it definitely made lying to her much worse.
Which was pretty much exactly why he shouldn’t have done that.
“You can’t,” she repeated, outrage mounting in her voice.
“Can you hit the panic button while you’re asleep?” Chay asked. “You can shift in your dreams, you know. It’s the one time when most of us who weren’t born shifters never quite learn to control our shifting. It’s not a huge problem for most of us—as soon as we’re truly awake, we can shift right back again. But if you wake up in panther form, are you sure that you’ll be able to change back again?”
Her mouth was a hard, angry line. “So turn it back on when I go to sleep. I’ll tell you when that is.”
“It’s not that simple,” Chay returned.
“Actually, I think it is,” she shot back. “I think it’s entirely that simple.”
Chay felt as if he were balanced on the edge of a knife blade. He’d created this situation with his honesty, but honesty in this case was as dangerous as a live grenade cooking off in his hands. It was better that Tara not know that the greatest risk of all wasn’t that she wouldn’t hit the panic button in time but that she wouldn’t want to.
There wasn’t a simple way out. So instead, he took what was probably the stupid way.
“All right. Fine. You can’t be alone right now. So you have a couple of choices. You can either deal with being watched , or you can stick near people who can help you if you start to shift again. Which will it be?”
Tara looked at him for a moment, then at Luke Ford behind him, and finally at Annie, who had shifted back into her human form and was lying diagonally across the cramped acrylic box, her heels snugged up her completely naked ass, staring through the clear plastic at the ceiling with an utterly bored expression on her face.
“I can get out of here?” Tara finally asked.
That was what he’d offered, wasn’t it? And it wasn’t like the spook shop couldn’t be made just as secure as the intake rooms.
But Chay wasn’t in the habit of letting just anyone into the spook shop. And he was going to be doing a whole lot of poking into Tara’s background, which would only be made more awkward by her presence.
“Yeah,” he said despite his reservations. “You can get out of here.”
“I won’t hurt anybody?” she asked.
“Oh, don’t worry about the little fox.” Annie’s voice drifted out of the baffled slot. “I love sitting in safe cubes. Yep. That’s what I want to have where I work. A safe cube, just in case the crazy woman in the room turns into a panther and tries to eat me. I’m sure it will increase my productivity to never before seen levels!”
“That’s a low benchmark to beat,” Chay shot back before Tara could do more than recoil.
Annie just laughed.
“She’s joking,” Chay added for Tara’s benefit.
“Mostly,” Annie corrected.
“I’ll make sure you don’t hurt anyone,” Chay promised.
“How?” Tara asked bluntly.
“You’ll stay with me,” he said. “In our...office, I guess you’d call it, and my quarters. I’ll have another bed brought in—”
“Not that you’ll use it,” Annie muttered so softly that only Chay’s preternatural hearing caught the words.
Tara, of course, had preternatural hearing, too.
Chay pushed on, ignoring the spirit fox. “—and you can stay there for now. Food, clothes, whatever else you need will be brought to you, and there will be no one you might hurt because Annie will have her safe box, won’t you, Annie?”
“Just as you say, Beany baby,” she grumbled.
“I can walk there?” Tara asked. “You’re not going to knock me out again, are you?”
Luke patted his pocket. “Not unless you start shifting on us. Dr. Torrhanin gave me a dose, just in case, but I don’t think that I’ll have to use it, do you?”
Tara’s eyes narrowed at the slightly condescending tone. “No,” she said in a chilly voice. “I don’t think you will.”
“Let’s go, then,” Chay said, taking advantage of her change in mood. As lo
ng as she was annoyed at Luke, she was distracted from her fears of shifting. And that meant that the panther would have less power over her. He opened the door to the hall. “After you.”
Tara hesitated only for an instant before stepping into the corridor, and Chay followed, Luke at his heels. She licked her bottom lip and looked around nervously before squaring her shoulders.
Chay knew what she saw—a straight battleship gray corridor running into the darkness in either direction, with only three bulbs a few yards apart illuminating a short stretch immediately outside Tara’s door.
“Looks dreadful, doesn’t it?” Annie said in a cheerful voice as she stepped into the corridor behind the men. She had retrieved the towel and had it casually wrapped around her body again. “Like something out of a horror film.”
“It’s practical,” Chay said shortly, catching Tara’s elbow and gently leading her down the hallway. In front of them, another light flicked on before they moved into the darkness. Tara looked back, and Chay knew what she would see—the rearmost of the three lit bulbs flicking silently off.
“Practical?” Tara repeated.
“We don’t have to turn switches off and on constantly as we walk anymore, and no one can leave lights on by mistake,” he explained. “I also have to keep fewer generators running, and I don’t spend as many resources on replacing burnt-out bulbs.”
“Yeah, that’s practical. It’s just a little ....” Tara trailed off.
“Creepy?” Annie piped up helpfully. “Depressing?”
Tara looked sideways at Chay and gave a half-shrug. “Aren’t there any windows? Like, anywhere?”
“It’s underground,” Chay said. “The whole of Black Mesa is underground.”
“You said I wasn’t in jail,” Tara said dubiously.
“It’s not a prison. Once, it was an Army base. Now it’s mine. It wasn’t built for beauty,” Chay said.
“So...you live here?” She looked between the three of them. “All of you? Don’t you miss...sunlight?”
“I go out every day,” Annie said loftily.
“As do I,” Luke added.
Chay said nothing. The last time he’d been out was, of course, the rescue operation the day before. Before then, how long had it been? Two weeks? A month? No wonder his panther self was getting so restless. But there was always so much to do and so little time to do it in ....
“Why underground, though? Why don’t you live in regular houses?” she pressed.
“It’s hidden,” Chay said. “Safe. Do you think you’re the only one the government would want to have its hands on?”
She stopped so suddenly that Chay took another step before he realized that she wasn’t with him anymore. “I thought you were with the government. You took me from the Air Force base, you said. They let you take me.”
“I didn’t say?” Chay asked, reviewing their conversations quickly in his mind. “Oh. Guess I didn’t. Hey, Tara? I’m not with the government.”
“Who are you, then?” she asked, walking again. “All of you? And why do you have an old underground Army base?”
“I took it,” he said.
“And they let you,” she said dubiously.
“I didn’t ask,” he said. “Don’t worry, though. The government and I have an understanding. I get to keep what I want, even if they aren’t too happy about it.”
“And you wanted me.” There was a slight tremor of a question in the words.
He shot a look at her even as Annie made a small sound of disgust behind them. “Yeah, bae girl. I wanted you.”
Her bright green eyes went wide for an instant before she cast them down at the floor in front of them, a pink stain visible under her olive cheeks.
They reached the entrance to the spook shop, and Chay opened the door. Tara hesitated, suspicion written on her face, before stepping cautiously in.
“Welcome to my lair,” Chay said.
Chapter Seven
Tara stepped up onto the raised white-tiled floor and took the room in quickly with a single, sweeping gaze. She hadn’t really had any expectations, but somehow, the room still threw her. It looked a lot like one of the basement labs the mechanical engineering grad student that Tara had once dated had shown her.
“Okay, then,” she said, edging out of the way to let the others in behind her. “You’re like some kind of secret group of...what? Because I’ve got nothing.”
Luke and Annie stepped past her, Luke flopping down into one of the nicer desk chairs while Annie grabbed a silk robe and slithered out of the towel and into the robe before taking her seat near a third man who seemed vaguely familiar to Tara. The man didn’t even look up from his computer screen to acknowledge Annie or anyone else. Luke and Annie were soon immersed in the text flowing across their screens, ignoring Tara as if she were irrelevant.
Which, to them, she probably was.
“We’re the people who’re called when something with a little more subtlety than a platoon of Marines or a mob hit is required,” Chay said.
She threw a glance over her shoulder at him. He’d let go of the door, and it was swinging shut under the power of an automatic safety closer.
Shutting her in. But shutting him in, too.
He’d let go of her elbow when he’s stopped to open the door. Up until that moment, she’d almost felt completely like her old self again, the panther driven into the far reaches of her brain. It was back now, pacing at the edges of her awareness. Deciding when to pounce.
“Computer stuff,” she guessed to distract herself. “Like hacking?”
“I prefer to call it intrusion engineering,” he said, a dark smile playing around his lips. “We’re black hat and white hat and every hat in between.”
“My mother got a purple hat when she turned fifty,” Tara said reflexively under her breath, then shook her head. More loudly, she added, “I don’t think that’s quite the same, but...cool, I guess. I thought you were like some kind of super undercover agency or something.”
“I am the freest agent there ever was,” Chay said, sitting at one of the chairs and resting his feet on the desk, legs crossed at the ankles. “And this is where I spend most of my time most days.”
“When you aren’t off rescuing women from Air Force bases. Or was it kidnapping?” Tara couldn’t help that small challenge.
“Depends on who you ask, but I’d definitely call it a rescue.” He raised his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you?”
Tara gave a little giggle, and she realized as she relaxed that it was the first laugh she’d had that wasn’t tinged by hysteria since she’d gotten to Chay’s Black Mesa. Whatever this place was, it definitely looked a lot less like a jail cell than her first set of rooms. “I guess we’ll see. Not that I’m not glad to be out of that room, but why the hell am I here?”
“So I can keep an eye on you. Without the cameras. That’s what you wanted, right?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, but he’d already said that it couldn’t be quite that simple. “When I go to sleep...?” She trailed off.
“Unless you want to crash on the couch out here, you’ll need to have video feed live for that,” he said. “Sorry.”
“All right,” she said. “I guess I can handle that. But in the bathroom—no video.” It was a demand, not a question.
“As long as you take an escort when you shower,” he said.
“Not you,” she said flatly, crossing her arms across her chest even as she felt the flush creep up her cheeks. Dammit, but she wished she was immune to him. Or rather, she wished that she wished that she was immune to him, because she couldn’t even wish the first. She had a flash of an image in her head—his mouth on hers, his hands on her body, in her body—
She bit off a groan.
Humor glinted in his dark eyes, humor and a sharper light that made her think that maybe he guessed what was going through her head only too well. “Good idea. Annie can escort you. Or you can ask for another woman. Don’t worry—she won’t have to be i
n the shower with you. Just the same room is good enough.”
“You can stop volunteering me for dealing with your psychotic panther lover at any point, thank you,” Annie said in a singsong voice from across the room.
Tara turned to shoot her back a withering look. “I’ll work something out.”
“Take a seat,” Chay said, probably to distract her. He started to reach for the nearest rolling chair, then hesitated. Instead, stood up and offered the chair he’d been sitting in—the sorriest, most battered chair out of the bunch.
Tara gave the chair a skeptical look. It had a visible butt grove in the cheap fake leather, which was cracked to reveal the fabric backing below. Silver duct tape kept part of one rubber arm rest in place.
“It’s mine,” Chay said by way of explanation.
Was it? That was interesting. Tara sat, too aware of the fact that the groove her rear was settling into had been created by his narrower hips and ass.
Chay quickly bent next to her, so close that she could have leaned against the length of his torso, and began to type on one of the keyboards, navigating through the menus so fast that she couldn’t follow.
“I’ve ordered you a bed,” he said. “And a chair of your own. Your clothes, too.”
Bed. The word conjured up way too many inappropriate thoughts with his body so close to hers. Dammit, the panther in her had screwed with her head in a permanent way, because she could smell him in a way that she never could before. It wasn’t the products that he used—in fact, as far as that was concerned, she could only smell the faint, sharp scent of plain castile soap. It was him, and the scent of him, his flesh, his body itself, that was making her insides go to jelly like she was a stupid sixteen-year-old.
“All right,” he said, pulling back and taking the chair next to hers. She repressed her disappointment. “So you’ve already met Annie Liu and Luke Ford. That’s Liam Mansfield over there.”
Liam grunted in acknowledgement.
“I think I recognize him,” Tara said.