Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  And so she held her ground as he prowled to within touching distance. He stopped there, studying her from his golden eyes, and blinked slowly.

  Peri held out a cautious hand.

  Noah looked at it and then delivered a swipe of his huge, raspy tongue.

  "What!" Peri squeaked. She hadn't realized tigers could look amused, but his eyes were laughing. "You licked me!"

  She wiped her hand on his fur, then had to sink her fingers into the softness of his pelt. It was like petting a cat ... the world's biggest cat.

  Noah made a low rumbling sound. Her heart jumped instinctively, but then she realized it wasn't a growl. He was purring.

  "You big softie." She went on petting him, digging both her hands into his fur. Noah leaned against her, not enough to knock her over, just enough that she could feel the pressure as his body inclined in her direction—for all the world like an oversized house cat.

  "You're amazing," she said, laughing. The rumbling purr got louder.

  It felt so unreal to be standing here in one of the few places she'd truly loved as a child, petting an actual, honest-to-God tiger. Her past wasn't very happy, and her present was frightening and uncertain—but there was magic in it, real magic, and she suddenly felt so happy she could fly.

  Or run.

  "Hey, Noah." The big cat twitched his ears and turned his head to look at her. "Until bad guys came after me, I went jogging almost every day. I have my running leg in the back of the car, and there's a hiking trail that goes down the mountain from here. Want to run with me?"

  He looked dubious, but followed her back to the car, his enormous orange and white paws nearly silent on the rocky ground. Peri retrieved her running leg from the backseat.

  This would be the first time Noah had seen her take off her prosthesis, and she felt suddenly shy. He was going to have to see it sooner or later, though.

  "I guess it's only fair, since I got to see you naked," she told him, and unfastened her jeans, pulling them down. She didn't need to take them all the way off, just below the knee where the stump of her leg ended, so she could detach her everyday prosthesis and then pull it out of the pants leg. Her shoe would stay on.

  Her prosthesis had two parts. A silicon sleeve went over the stump of her leg with a pin at the tip, which locked into the shin and artificial foot. She disengaged the locking pin, detached the foot, and then peeled off the silicon sleeve and cotton stump sock inside it. Leaning on the car, she supported herself on her left leg while rubbing the stump, massaging it before switching to the running leg; the skin was imprinted with indentations from the stump sock, like wearing a too-tight bra.

  She had to force herself to look up and see how Noah was taking this. It would be easier to read him if he wasn't still a tiger, but he was just watching quietly. When he noticed her looking at him, he leaned forward to bump her hip with his head. The impact almost bowled her over. Noah followed it up by giving her bare thigh a quick swipe with his tongue. It wasn't sexual; it was more of a gesture of acceptance.

  "Didn't I tell you to stop licking me?" But tears sprang to her eyes. She blinked them fiercely away.

  She usually put a little baby powder on her stump before putting on the prosthesis to help absorb sweat—even more important when jogging—but since she didn't have any, she pulled the stump sock back on, and fit her shin into the cradle of the running leg. Her everyday leg was designed to pass for a normal leg, which it usually did. This one operated under no false pretenses. It was a springy carbon-fiber blade that resembled a wide, steeply curved ski.

  After pulling her pants up, Peri rolled up her jeans leg to the top of the blade and secured it with a hair clip from her pocket. Hanging down, it would only get in the way. She left her jacket in the car and did a couple of test steps, jogging in place to get a feel for the running leg again. It felt very different from her everyday prosthetic, and for that matter, very different from her left, flesh-and-blood leg. She could take longer strides with the running blade, and she sometimes wondered what it would feel like to run on two of them, like double-amputee athletes she'd seen on TV. Having to keep stride with unmatched legs made her gait uneven, but if she had two springy, high-tech "feet" to run on, she thought it must feel like flying.

  "Ready?" she asked Noah, bending over to stretch out her hamstrings.

  Noah gave a little grunting tiger-cough, which she took to be affirmative.

  She kicked off with the carbon-fiber blade and jogged toward the place where she remembered the hiking trail. With Noah's tiger loping smoothly along behind her, she ran past a blackened stone fire circle with trash scattered around it—empty potato chip bags, rifle shell casings, old beer cans. Some of the labels were weathered to indecipherable gray, and Peri wondered if they were the very same cans she used to kick around, back when she had two legs to kick with.

  The trail started just beyond the fire circle. Someone had dumped an old mattress here, its decaying fabric drooping over box springs. Peri ran past it and her stride began to lengthen as she hit the downhill slope.

  She'd expected the trail to be overgrown and abandoned, but to her pleasant surprise, it still appeared to be in active use. She had, however, forgotten how steep it was. Each step became a bound, leaping and catching herself and springing off again. She was all too aware that she was courting disaster with every leap. She couldn't have stopped if she'd wanted to; gravity would have caught up with her and she would've wiped out. But she didn't want to. Her hair streamed back and she squinted her eyes against the wind.

  Beside her, Noah kept pace in long flowing strides. Girl and tiger ran in perfect sync, step for step, his lazy loping strides covering each of her leaps effortlessly.

  Nothing she'd ever done in her life could match this.

  When the ground began to flatten out, Peri slowed from wild running steps to something closer to a medium-speed jogging pace. Her breath came in sharp gasps and her heart battered against her ribs. She jogged for another few minutes, cooling down. The path dipped to a creek that she remembered, though it looked much smaller now than in her childhood memories. At the water's edge, she slowed to a halt.

  Noah wasn't even breathing hard, the jerk. He bowed his beautiful head to lap at the water.

  "Are you sure you want to do that?" Peri panted. Most of her hair had come out of its ponytail. She dipped a hand in the water and slicked it back before twisting it back into the hair tie. "Can tigers get giardia?"

  The expression he gave her looked like the tiger version of a grin. He shook his head and the fur rippled all down his spine.

  "Right, tigers are too cool for giardia. Got it."

  Noah jumped lazily onto a large, flat boulder, sank down, and shifted. Suddenly there was a naked man sprawled on the boulder where there had been a tiger a moment before.

  And just when her heart rate had started to settle down. "Don't do that to a girl!"

  He grinned. "Hey, my face is up here."

  Peri blushed and wrenched her eyes from the direction they'd started to wander. "You have to admit it's distracting."

  "Not to me."

  "Nudist. Are tigers really giardia-proof?"

  "Have you ever seen a tiger with giardia?"

  "Good deflection, but not an answer. Take it from someone who knows how that game is played."

  Noah smiled. "Shifters in their animal form can eat whatever the animal can eat. And most animals are a lot tougher than humans about things like food poisoning and parasites and whatever."

  "Okay, I'll grant you that, but when you change—er, shift back, don't you have a stomach full of tainted water? Or raw meat, or whatever you were eating." The more she thought about it, the more awful the possibilities. "What if you were an elephant and you shift back with like three tons of grass inside you? Er, are there shifter elephants?"

  "Yeah, there are. Honestly," Noah admitted, "I'm not sure exactly how it works. A tiger's stomach is a lot bigger than a human's, but I don't usually feel hungry as a tig
er if I'm not hungry as a human, or vice versa. I do sometimes feel a little weird when I shift back after eating as a tiger, but I think that's mostly just because I know I ate a whole rabbit, and my human mind is having trouble dealing with it, not my body."

  "What about the mass? Where does the extra mass go? Or come from?"

  He laughed. "I couldn't tell you. That's a question for the boys and girls in the lab." He patted the edge of the rock. "C'mere, sit with me."

  She did. The rock was warm from the sun, the air balmy and fragrant with the smell of pine needles. "You seem to be feeling a lot better. Food helped?"

  "Calling the SCB helped more. I know there's a lot of rough stuff going on out there. A lot of dangerous stuff. But at least I know my friends are okay, and I've done everything I can to help them for now." He cupped her face in his hand. "How are you feeling?"

  "Okay, I guess. It's all still down there, and maybe I'll fall apart later, I don't know. But ... I'm not scared here. Maybe I should be, but I'm not." She tipped her head back, lips parted. "I feel safe with you."

  He leaned down and kissed her gently.

  She still couldn't believe this was happening. The past few days had caught her up in a whirlwind, and now she felt like a windblown leaf skimming from one brief haven to another.

  Where will this all end?

  She didn't know, but what she did know was that she'd found a shelter here, in Noah's arms. And she planned to stay here as long as she could.

  Their kisses started out soft and grew more heated. Peri felt her body responding, rising against him as he explored her mouth and nibbled at her lips. With Noah stark naked, there was absolutely no question about the way his body was responding.

  He pulled back but not away, resting his forehead against hers, one hand against her cheek. "Gotta tell you, I haven't got a condom on me. Back at the car, maybe—"

  She shook her head. The last thing she wanted right now was to go all the way back to the car. "I'm on Depo. And my last boyfriend was seven or eight months ago and we were always careful, so I guess I can't be a hundred percent sure but I don't think I'm gonna risk—you know—"

  "Shifter immune systems can deal with STDs better than human ones. It's not something we usually have to worry about." He grinned and brushed at the corner of her mouth with his thumb. "Not the sexiest topic of conversation, I know, but I'm fairly confident you don't have to worry about catching something from me, and I'm not gonna catch anything from you."

  "Then why are we talking," was Peri's breathless response, and she suited action to words, scrambling into his lap as her lips found his.

  Her need for him was like an itch growing under her skin, desperately seeking an outlet. Pressing against his naked body, the lean muscular length of him, drove her half mad. She'd had lovers and boyfriends, but no one had ever excited her like this. She wrapped her bare arms around his neck. Her nipples hardened beneath her T-shirt, rubbing against his chest.

  Noah kissed her lips and chin and neck. He slid his hands under her T-shirt and fumbled with the clasp to her bra. Before she could reach back to help, he got it, and the straps loosened.

  Peri pulled away from him to worm quickly out of her T-shirt. The bra followed, flung carelessly on the sun-warmed rock. A forest breeze lifted the fine hairs on her arms. She felt it all the way down her back, to the point where the waistband of her jeans covered up her skin.

  "Whoa," Noah whispered. He ran his hands over her shoulders, brushing across the tattoos. One shoulder had an explosion of roses with thorn bushes twining among the petals, the other a complex rosette around the motto ad astra per aspera.

  "To the stars?" Noah asked, tracing the letters with fingers that sent shivers through her.

  "A rough road leads to the stars."

  He pressed his lips to the tattoo, and his breath ghosted across her skin as he whispered, "You deserve the stars, Peri."

  The last of her inhibitions fell away, and a wild energy surged through her. Strange, to be naked in the woods—strange and wonderful. She felt like a wood nymph, like a model in one of those artsy photo shoots of nude women posing in sunlit meadows. This made her laugh, which made Noah look up from kissing her tattoos, smiling.

  "What?"

  "Stray thought. Tell you later." She rose up on her good knee, with her other leg stretched out behind her. She didn't care if the position was awkward; she just wanted Noah's mouth on her aching breasts.

  And he was more than happy to oblige, cupping her breasts in his hands and tonguing across her nipples. Pleasure shivered through her, adding urgency to the hot throbbing between her legs.

  She wanted him—wanted him desperately, wanted him now.

  As Noah mouthed her nipples, flicking his tongue across the sensitive tips, she fumbled with the waistband of her jeans, got it undone and worked it over her hips. It wasn't going to go easily over the bulky knee of her running leg, but she hardly cared. The important thing was getting all these unnecessary clothes out of the way. Easier by far to start out naked, as Noah had done.

  He was breathing fast, his breath hot against her chest. "You smell so good ..." His hand moved down across her belly, cupped over the mound of curls between her legs. She jerked her hips against him with silent urgency as he stroked over her clit.

  "I want ..." she gasped. "You. In me."

  He was fully erect, his hard cock rearing from a nest of tightly wound dark curls. Peri spread her legs with the jeans shoved down to her knees, sinking down to take him all the way. Pleasure merged with the tight, rewarding ache of stretching to accommodate him.

  Noah leaned back on the boulder to better raise his hips, and Peri thrust against him, hoisting her bare butt to the sky as Noah wrapped an appreciative hand over it.

  I'm fucking my weretiger boyfriend on a rock in the forest, she thought dazedly, with the part of her mind that still could put a coherent thought together. What the heck is my life?

  Whether it was Noah's natural intuitiveness or some sort of shifter thing, he seemed to instinctively match his pace to hers, slowing as the intensity started to overwhelm her, then speeding up again with hard thrusts—keeping her hovering crazily on the edge of orgasm. It was too much—it was not enough—it was everything she wanted, pleasure so intense that her head spun and she had to hold onto him with sweat-slick arms to anchor herself down. Noah gripped her hips, bracing her above him, while she dug her sneaker-clad toes into a crack in the rocks and snapped her hips to match each of his thrusts.

  A cry escaped her. She'd never made noise during sex before, stifling her gasps, always conscious of thin apartment walls and too-close dorm neighbors. But there was no one to hear them now, and the heat growing inside her couldn't be denied. Noah gave a low, huffing cry, and as he drew back for another thrust, she could feel him shaking with the effort of holding back his own orgasm.

  "Noah," she gasped and bore down on him. She could feel it coming, a deep anticipatory tingling spreading through her hips and thighs, all the way down to her toes.

  He thrust again, lifting his hips off the rock and pushing her up, and the wave of her orgasm broke over her in a tremendous rush.

  Dimly, as the waves pulsed through her, she was aware of Noah's hitching gasps and his body shuddering with the force of his release. Heat filled her, Noah's heat, and she thought as she sank limply down onto him that she couldn't actually remember the last time she'd had a guy inside her without a condom. None of her other relationships had lasted to the point where they were ready to take that step. Neither of them had trusted the other enough.

  But she trusted Noah. Trusted him in a way she couldn't remember trusting anyone before—especially not when just about everyone she knew was an unpredictable flake. Running a site like Tell Me More! didn't help her meet very many ordinary, well-adjusted people.

  I think this is the first time in years that I've gone this long without updating the blog or checking my Twitter, she thought as she draped in limp bliss on top of Noah, th
eir breathing slowing in sync. People are going to think I've died.

  Let them.

  It must have been a few minutes later when Noah squirmed under her. She roused herself from a dazed bliss coma.

  "Nggghhh?"

  "Sorry." He huffed a soft laugh against her ear. "Rock's digging into my back."

  "Oh. My bad." She clambered off him, discovering in the process that she was sticky and pleasantly sore. She found a tissue in her pocket and wet it in the creek to clean herself with before pulling her panties up.

  "Having sex outdoors isn't all it's cracked up to be," Noah remarked, brushing sand off his back and rubbing at the dents the rock had left in his skin.

  "I assumed you did this all the time."

  He laughed. "Hardly! I'm a city kid. This is the first time I've ever made love under the open sky."

  "Really?" She shot him a coy grin as she adjusted her breasts in the bra cups. "I'm your first?"

  She expected a flippant response, but his answer was serious, the heat in his eyes unmistakable. "You might as well have been. No one else compares to you, Peri."

  She wasn't prepared for her visceral reaction to hearing those words. The emotional rush when she was already in a pliant, sentimental state from sex hormones left her weak-kneed. For an embarrassing moment she almost burst into tears.

  Coming from someone else, it might have seemed like empty words. But not from Noah. She recognized the core-deep sincerity in his voice and face and eyes.

  "You're pretty great yourself," was all she could manage, not looking at him. The low angle of the sun, slanting through the trees, provided a distraction. "We'd better get back to the compound. Dinner's soon. Plus, I left ice cream melting in the car."

  "Hate to break it to you, but it's probably melted."

  "Pessimist."

  Noah grinned and stretched, and in mid-stretch he flowed from man to tiger. Peri's breath caught; she couldn't get used to how beautiful he was in either form.