“Don’t pull that aristocratic blizzard tone on me. I’ve known you too long.” Graham crunched up a napkin and tossed it onto his bare plate. “Look, none of us was looking for a mate when the right woman came along. Sometimes this shit just happens. There’s nothing wrong with admitting you’re ready to settle down. It happens to the best of us. And quite frankly, there are certain consolations, if you know what I mean.”
Rafe tried to ignore the contented purr of his inner cat at the idea of settling down with Tess. Or better yet, on top of Tess. Pinning her down offered the distinct advantage of preventing her from trying to leave him.
And that was the craziest thought he’d ever had. Where had an idea like that even come from, for God’s sake? He was a cat, not a canine. His sort didn’t do the “settling down” thing.
He sent his friend a glare and drained the last of his beer. “I still have no idea what you might be talking about. I cannot even be sure that you know. Perhaps all those years of being led around by your nose have finally rotted your brain. I am a jaguar, not a puppy dog. I am not looking for a warm bed and a snug-fitting leash. I leave that to your sort.”
“Yeah, that would be a lot more convincing if my nose wasn’t telling me that you crawled out of a very specific warm bed this morning. Again. The same one that you’ve been crawling out of for more than a couple of days now.”
Rafe felt his brows draw together. Yes, he had managed to convince Tess to allow him to stay at her apartment last night, but he had returned to his own home to shower and change hours before he had met Graham for lunch. He should have smelled of little more than his own brand of soap.
“Once again, I do not know what you are talking about.”
Graham gave a small, impatient growl. “Cut the crap, Rafe. I can smell her all over you. If you want to keep lying to yourself, fine; it’s no fur off my hide. But you’re an idiot if you think you can keep lying to yourself.”
“What do you mean, you can smell her? I haven’t seen Tess in hours. You should be able to smell nothing.”
“Tell that to the pheromones that are clinging to you like dry burrs. It smells like she’s the one with the Feline tendencies, and that she spent the last four or five hours stropping up against you like her own personal scratching post. If you two were Lupine, I’d say you’d already marked her.”
Lupines staked a permanent physical claim on their mates by biting them during sex. The mark gave visual proof of the partnership as well as leaving an indelible scent mark to warn others that this particular person had been taken out of the potential mating pool. Some Felines had a similar tradition, but it wasn’t one Rafe had ever performed. In fact, he’d never even considered it.
Of course, until he’d met Tess, he’d never considered he might meet a woman he couldn’t get out of his head.
“But we are not, and I have done nothing of the kind,” he snapped, throwing a few bills down on their table and grabbing his coat from the empty chair beside him. “Your nose must be mistaken.”
Graham followed him out of the restaurant and had to stretch his long legs to keep pace with his friend’s angry strides. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger, all right? I’m just saying what I think. If that’s pissing you off, I guess I’ll keep my mouth shut. Happy?”
“Ecstatic.”
The baring of his teeth somewhat blunted the effect of his response, but Graham had finally seemed to take the hint that this wasn’t a subject Rafe wanted to discuss, and he fell silent.
Hell, it wasn’t even a topic Rafe wanted to think about, but now he couldn’t seem to think about anything else. What the hell had happened to him over the course of that last week, and where had it left him?
The answer to the first part of the question came to him in a single syllable: Tess. Tess had happened to him.
She had popped into his life like the clown out of a jack-in-the-box, completely unexpected and, frankly, a little bit frightening. To be honest, it would have been much easier for him if his stalker that night had turned out to be a hired assassin. That sort of threat he could have neutralized and moved on from without even a second glance. He’d dealt with similar in the past, and he’d always managed to come out on top. A threat to his life didn’t scare him, but the threat Tess Menzies represented to his heart had him terrified out of his wits.
What man in his right mind would not be frightened of the prospect of his entire life turning upside down? Tess represented just that sort of monumental shift to his reality. Before meeting her, he had known what his future would hold. He would continue to make his merry way through the world as he had always done. He had plenty of wealth to make his life comfortable and a number of close friends to keep him entertained. His work—both in the world of business and in the world of the Others—kept him engaged and challenged, and he had never found any difficulty in acquiring a female companion to satisfy his more basic needs. There had been no reason why he could not have continued indefinitely in such a manner. Of course, at some point he would have liked to find a female with whom he might sire a cub so that he could rest easy in the knowledge that his mark in the world would live on after his own death. He was a man, after all, and a proud man at that, and most men wanted sons.
Now that he had met Tess, though, his wants seemed destined to take a backseat to his needs.
He needed her.
He almost winced at the thought. Rafael De Santos was not the sort of man accustomed to needing anyone. Like the jungle beast that lived inside him, Rafe considered himself independent by nature, the sort of man who preferred to live, to hunt, to be alone. Crowds often made him uneasy, the press of bodies making him want to snarl and snap and slink away to somewhere still and quiet. He enjoyed the company of his friends, people like Graham and Dmitri and, these days, even their ever-growing circle of spouses, mates, and acquaintances. He appreciated lively conversation and enjoyed the opportunity to laugh with those whom he respected and understood. All of that felt natural to him and fit neatly into the world he had already made for himself.
Nowhere in that world had he envisioned making room for a mate.
It went beyond his isolationist nature, however. Part of the reason Rafe had never envisioned choosing a mate had lingered in the back of his mind since his earliest childhood. He had never spared it much thought, never brooded over it or questioned it; it had simply always lurked in the background, like a dark mist obscuring corners he hadn’t cared all that much about exploring. Why worry, after all, over something he could never change?
Why think about the curse?
He had told Graham he didn’t believe in the legend, that it was nothing more than an old wives’ tale. Who believed in things like curses and legacies and the actions of a distant ancestor reverberating down through the ages anymore? It made no logical sense to imagine that there had ever been a witch who fell in love with a jaguar, or that, having been spurned by a faithless cat, she would remove the ability of his entire species to thrive and multiply. Was such a thing even possible? Rafe had never believed so. He had never believed that the actions of some kind of great-great-great-great-grandfather were the reason why his kind never bothered to find mates. Jaguar cats never took permanent mates, so why should the shifters who shared their forms?
But then, it was hard to ignore certain facts. Cat species had never been known for their fidelity to the opposite sex, but they also rarely had trouble conceiving or bearing young. In the wild, jaguars mated and then went their separate ways, but four months later the female would give birth to a litter of cubs. In the animal kingdom, after all, fidelity had never been a requirement for reproduction.
The same was true of all the spotted cats, from leopards to cheetahs to lynxes and ocelots. In the wild, mating resulted in kits more often than not, but in their shifter counterparts, conception had become a hard-fought struggle. In modern times, only one in every fifty female spotted-cat shifters would conceive. Most never bothered with birth control because the chan
ces of accidental pregnancy were so small. The females also tended to conceive later in life—after thirty-five was not uncommon—because it took years of concentrated effort to achieve a pregnancy. The least optimistic among his kind predicted that spotted-cat shifters would die out within the next two to three hundred years. The most superstitious blamed those problems on the curse, but Rafe had never been a superstitious man.
Hell, he barely believed in Fate. He supposed he had accepted in a sort of general way that there might be some kind of higher power at work in the lives of those on earth. When he thought about life and death, about wars and rescues, about natural disasters and people who survived extraordinary events, that kind of idea made sense. What he wasn’t certain he believed was the idea that every man and woman had a mate they were destined to be with. For pity’s sake, he barely believed in fidelity, and he was supposed to believe in love?
Because he had to face it: Love beat like a heart at the center of everything. Love had created the curse after it had been betrayed and cast aside; love was the reason shifters took mates, the reason why Dmitri had turned Regina and Graham had marked Missy. Love was even what Graham alluded to when he talked about the way Rafe seemed unable to keep his mind off Tess—but could love really be what he felt for his maddening little witch?
He liked her with no question. He liked her spunky attitude and her sharp tongue, her tendency toward grumpiness and her oddball sense of humor. He especially liked the way she felt against him, and over him and beneath him, but what did that really mean? That he should take her to mate? What would be the point? He was a Feline; eventually, he would grow restless and drift away, the way his kind always did, and Tess would be left behind with a bunch of broken promises just as the witch in the legend had been. If he never made promises, wouldn’t that be better? Wouldn’t she rather not have that betrayal on top of all the rest when she was free to move on to other relationships? To men who would be able to stay beyond that first flush of passion.
Men who wouldn’t be Rafe.
“Hey, you all right?”
Rafe jerked his attention back to the present and caught Graham’s frown of concern. He must have snarled out loud.
The thought of another man putting his hands on Tess dropped a red curtain of rage across Rafe’s field of vision. Every cell in his body roared in outrage at the idea of any man but him seeing her creamy curves, touching her soft skin, tasting her rich, intoxicating flavors. His heartbeat thudded fast and loud in his ears and his breathing grew sharp and shallow. He felt his skin tingle and crawl the way it did before a shift, and his animal fought with claw and fang for the freedom to hunt and kill the rival threat.
Christ. He had to get ahold of himself.
“Rafe.”
Graham halted in the middle of the sidewalk and reached out a hand. Rafe batted it away with a rumble of warning.
“Do not touch me,” he gritted out, stepping to the side to lean against the wall of the adjacent building. He closed his eyes and fought hard against the beast within him. “Just give me a moment. I will be fine. A moment.”
He felt the wolf’s shadow pass over him as Graham positioned himself at his side. Even that seemed like a challenge to his furious inner jaguar. Graham might be one of Rafe’s closest friends, but all his beast knew was that the wolf was a mature, Alpha male, and it wanted to kill the potential rival for his witchy mate.
What the hell was happening to him?
Rafe concentrated on the feel of the concrete at his back, the warmth of the sun on his face, and the monotonous drone of pedestrians and car traffic that filled the air around him.
Deep breaths. Out and in. Out with tension. In with relaxation.
In.
And out.
“Uh, don’t take this the wrong way, buddy,” Graham hissed, his voice dully penetrating Rafe’s intense concentration, “but get a fucking hold of yourself. It’s two in the afternoon and you’re standing on the corner of Lex and Eighty-Seventh growing fur. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Rafe’s eyes flew open, and he followed Graham’s glare down to his own hands. Hand that currently sported long, black claws and a light, dense coating of golden fur punctuated with irregular black spots.
Fuck.
Hastily, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat and ducked his head into his chest.
“What else?” he growled, wincing when he heard his own voice. It had gone low and gravelly, sounding more animal than human, and feral at that.
“Your eyes have changed completely,” Graham murmured, turning him toward the less crowded cross-street and urging him forward. The Lupine set a brisk pace back toward Vircolac. “A cabbie would have a heart attack the minute he caught sight of you. Your nose is also flattened, and I can see your facial markings bleeding into your skin. You’re goddamned out of control.”
Graham was right, and Rafe knew it. Damn it, this was what that witch did to him. She stripped away his control and turned him into an animal for the whole world to see.
And if any of the world noticed, Rafe would find himself in a steel cage being dissected while the rest of the Other world tried to deal with the collateral damage of a very unexpected and abrupt Unveiling.
“Keep your head down, and for God’s sake get a grip, furrball.” Graham snagged a fedora from the sidewalk display of a tiny shop with one hand and tossed cash at the protesting vendor with the other. Hurriedly, he crammed it on his friend’s head and lengthened their strides even further.
Rafe obeyed the first command and struggled with the second. At least the fear of imminent discovery was serving to distract him somewhat from thoughts of Tess. Or more specifically from thoughts of Tess with another man.
A roar of challenge caught in his throat, and Rafe cursed silently. He hadn’t had this much trouble controlling his beast since puberty, damn it. He should be able to do this.
Risking a quick tilt of his head, Rafe turned his gaze toward the sign on the corner and realized they had reached the street that housed the club. Thank God. Just a few more yards, and they could get inside where it would be safe. Then Rafe could beat himself into unconsciousness if that was what it took to put his jaguar back to sleep.
At this point, he feared that might be necessary.
The only bright spot at the moment was that at least Tess wasn’t around to see this. First, he couldn’t guarantee his jaguar wouldn’t leap right on top of her, take her neck in its jaws, and carry her away to its lair for a rough and thorough claiming. But even more than that, he didn’t quite feel comfortable with the idea of her seeing him like this, so out of control.
Even if it was all her fault.
Fifteen
Graham hustled Rafe up the steps and into the club as if the sidewalk were on fire. Not that Rafe felt inclined to protest. Out of sight would hopefully be out of mind for any human passersby who might have gotten a glimpse of his partially shifted features. If they were very lucky, the traditional human coping mechanism would come into play and any observers would find themselves remembering not a half-human half-jaguar man practically jogging through the streets of the city, but a man in strange pre-Halloween makeup, or someone with an unsightly skin disease at whom it would be impolite to stare. Usually, humans came up with some sort of explanation for any Others they sighted that involved nothing remotely supernatural, and that was exactly the way the Council of Others hoped to keep it. At least for the moment.
As soon as they stepped into the club’s entry hall, Graham turned them away from the areas frequented by the members and straight into his private offices. Rafe felt grateful for that. Having a human see him in his current condition would prove disastrous for the secrecy of the Others; having an Other see him this way would prove disastrous for his reputation and for his authority as head of the Council. The inability of a shifter to control his change counted as a sign of weakness, and Rafe couldn’t afford to appear weak, especially not in the current uneasy climate. Everyone knew
the Unveiling was coming, but it would take a strong leader to take the community smoothly through the transition. A leader perceived as weak could never hold them together.
Graham shut the office door behind them and leaned against it for a moment, looking exhausted. Rafe couldn’t blame him. He felt pretty tired himself, mostly from struggling against his shift. Now, though, in the calm of the quietly furnished room, he could feel some of the tension beginning to drain from him. Reaching up, he removed the hat Graham had pressed on him and ran his fingers through his hair.
“Any better?”
“Better than what?”
The female voice made both him and Graham turn toward the large desk that blocked the door to Graham’s inner sanctum from the outer office. Rafe hadn’t even thought about Samantha, Graham’s assistant, who occupied her usual spot in front of her computer.
“Long story,” Graham muttered, raking his gaze over his friend’s face. “Some, but not completely normal. And I have to say, you’re freaking me out with this. Frankly, I think I need a damned drink.”
Pushing away from the door, Graham stalked toward his inner sanctuary, jerking his head for Rafe to follow.
“Hey, wait,” Sam called, jumping from her seat and moving to block the entry. “You can’t go in there.”
The brunette Lupine might be strong and toned, but she presented no sort of threat to her pack Alpha and very little to Rafe, whose jaguar form outweighed even her wolf by at least a hundred pounds. She didn’t appear to consider that, though, as she tried to prevent the men from moving into the inner office. She at least had the good sense to do it while keeping her eyes cast toward the floor, thereby making it clear she had no intention of actually challenging her Alpha.
Nevertheless, Graham didn’t appear to be in the mood to wait out here by Sam’s desk. He growled and reached out, grasping the woman by the shoulders and physically moving her out of his way.
“Not now, Sam. It’s already been a long day, and it isn’t even three o’clock. Tell anyone who stops by that I’m not in, and hold all my calls. I’ll return messages later.”
Drive Me Wild Page 13