BlindHeat (12 page)

She saw, thought she saw, the wax go liquid in his hand
before she turned to mist, a glittering cloud rising up into a dark void.

“Shh.” He kissed her lips, smoothed her hair. “I’ve got you
now. You’re okay.”

“Marcus? I’m sorry, I can’t think. I blacked out in the
middle of things.”

“Later. None of that’s important. We’ll talk later. Sleep
now.”

He’d vowed there’d be no sex between them tonight. A
wriggling naked female in his arms was not making it easier to keep that
promise. But the memory of what had just happened to the candle reinforced his
decision not to go further.

He put a hand to the side of her head, keeping his voice
calm, sleepy sounding. “Sweetheart, lay your head down. Be still with me a
minute. I just want to hold you.” She looked confused. He bumped her nose with
his, pressed lips to hers and set the softest of purrs resonating through their
bodies.

Tension eased from her muscles and she snuggled in for a
cuddle. He moved from touching her temple, to stroking his fingers lightly down
her spine, sending a mental stream of soothing images, the two of them curled
by a fire, a sheet of stars above them, the babble of a creek nearby.

She finally gave in and slid into a deep sleep. Marcus
wished he could find the comfort of sleep, escape the swirl of thoughts chasing
each other around in his head. He’d never felt so disconcerted.

Well after midnight, he slipped carefully from her arms and
into his clothes. He sat at her desk, writing out instructions for her between
pauses to watch her sleep. She wouldn’t follow them. That wasn’t important. She
would read them, carry them in her thoughts all day. Knowing what he wanted of
her would make her want it herself in the end, would make her ready for the
next step. Now he just needed prepare himself.

Chapter Five

Allie hooked one bag over her shoulder and pulled a rolling
travel bag behind her down the sidewalk. The wheels of her bag clacked over
cracks with a sound reminiscent of a train going over tracks. Just above the
haze of streetlights, starlight was fading into the silver of a predawn sky. It
made her think of small blue flames winking out.

“Don’t even go there,” she said out loud. Her mind went
there anyway, to the fuzzy bits she could remember. And her memory, not
trustworthy at her most alert, was a jumbled mess when it came to last night.
She was supposed to make something disappear, but she thought she’d
disappeared. Or maybe the world had disappeared. She recalled floating in
darkness, the sensation of being lighter than air and so perfectly at peace.
And then a building panic when she couldn’t wake up. Marcus had called her
name, over and over, louder each time, and the world had reshaped itself around
the sound of his voice.

She walked faster, as if that could take her away from
needing the sweetness of being curled in his arms. Or craving the soft purr
that traveled from his body to hers, lulling her to sleep. The guy was a potent
drug. Not that she’d had any drugs, but she recognized addictive qualities when
she felt them. A craving for his presence burned in her blood like fever. Even
now the ache to hear his voice, just one more time, was almost too intense to
endure. And sex that could do that to you should probably be illegal.

She was grateful he was gone when she woke. Glad she was
alone to face hardened wax drippings on the sheets and a letter of handwritten
instructions for her day on the desk.

Escape was the first coherent thought she could conjure. The
only task that made sense.

She breathed the cool morning air and told herself a fresh
start would be a good thing, and would keep Eddie off her trail too.
Greyville’s bus station was a bench in front of the drugstore. Allie went
inside and purchased her ticket at the prescription counter in the back. She
checked one bag at the counter and kept the smaller shoulder bag with her.

Then there was nothing to do but wait. She killed some time
walking up and down the aisles, looking at vitamins and toothpaste and
magazines. Finally she went outside to wait. She’d thought she’d be the only
one from town leaving that morning, but a big guy with rumpled dark hair and an
unusually bushy beard joined her in the wait. He leaned against a lamp post
next to the bench, a duffle at his feet. He was a giant. Allie was certain she
didn’t know him. She never had trouble identifying bearded men. She wished she
could make a law requiring all men to have beards.

It made her wonder if she should have delayed her exit plan
a little longer, learned more from Marcus before fleeing. But she’d known when
she woke up that morning, bits of wax still clinging to her skin, the apartment
smelling like candles, that she couldn’t stay. Her ache for Marcus scared her
enough that she had even considered going back to Eddie, return to the safe
bubble of isolation he maintained around her.

When Eddie sounded like a good option, it was time to find
more options.

The big guy left his lamp post and settled on the bench
beside Allie. “Looks like a good day for a bus ride,” he said.

“Mmm.” Allie scooted a little farther away and dug in her
bag for her cell phone. She wondered what constituted good bus-riding weather.
She wasn’t going to ask. She’d pretend to read while she waited, hoping to cut
off any further attempt at conversation.

“Where you headed?”

“North,” she said, pulling out her phone.

“I’m headed anywhere but here,” he said.

She slid a glance his way. He was staring at her, intent.
She couldn’t think of a good response, and turned her attention back to her
phone with a shrug.

“Don’t seem to do much good though…”

She tapped the screen and it lit. “What doesn’t?”

“Movin’. Seems like every time I move, I just pick up more
problems.”

Allie bent her head, tapped a newspaper app. He wasn’t
taking the hint.

“Last place I was, it was women. Not that there weren’t any,
but not the right kind—if you know what I mean. Now, they’re the right kind,
but not right for me.”

“Hmm,” Allie said, scrolling through the list of articles.

“There’s one, she wants me to help take care of all her
kids. Seven of them. All girls.”

“Really?” Allie didn’t have to fake the surprise in her
voice. The guy didn’t look like the sort you’d be dragging home to take on a
family.

“Another one wants me to give her a job where I work, but
she doesn’t know how to do anything. And then there’s my boss, not a woman, but
loves rescuing females in trouble and he makes their trouble my trouble.”

“Well it sounds like you have your hands full.”

“Yeah. I think most guys in my place would do the same
thing.”

“Mmm.”

“But I can’t help thinking it doesn’t ever change. I move to
a new place. It’s like the same problems all over again. They just show up
wearing different dresses.”

That stalled her. She could see her own pattern, trying to
dodge a man who had too much of a hold on her. A man who scared her. Replacing
him with the same thing.

The bus pulled up. The big guy grabbed his bag, waved Allie
ahead.

She picked up her bag and boarded.

* * * * *

Coffee sloshed over the rim of his cup, leaving a burning
track across his knuckles. The mental control that allowed him to hold his skin
impervious to molten wax couldn’t shield the simple scald of diner coffee.
Marcus put down the cup, his hand still shaking, but not from the burn. He
dabbed at the mess on the table with a wad of napkins, letting the burn linger
on his fingers, any distraction from his internal inferno was welcome.

“Here, let me.” Franny batted away the wad of soggy napkins,
but rather than wipe the table she wrapped his hand in a white towel she’d
apparently soaked in ice water. The burning faded under her capable hands.

Marcus didn’t want help, or company, but he had no energy
for the witticisms and one-liners that usually made up their conversations.
Franny however was bubbling over with energy.

“So, she didn’t invite you in for coffee last night. Smart
girl.”

“Does nothing that happens in this town escape the diner
gossip mill?”

“We got better things to talk about than your sex life,
sugar. But you got one of the worst cases of coffee withdrawal I’ve ever seen.
And running a diner I see plenty. I might take it to mean you cared enough not
to pressure her. But knowing your kind, it’s probably just a prolonged dry
spell giving you the shakes.” She let his hand go.

He put his hand under the table to conceal tremors. “Not
this morning, Franny. I have a headache.”

“You hurt that little girl and you’ll have worse.” As if to
emphasize the threat, Franny dispensed the muddy puddle on the table in one
vigorous swipe. “It may not look like she’s got much to a guy like you, but
she’s worked hard to get what she has. She showed up here looking for work with
nothing but the rags on her back. She doesn’t need some smooth talker looking
for a tumble to knock down what she’s built up.”

Marcus stilled Franny’s hand with one of his. “I know. I
know more about where she came from and how to protect her than you do. I know
more about Allison than she knows about herself.”

Franny jerked her hand from under his. “How? That girl’s as
closed as a book can get.”

“Because we came from the same place and we’re hiding from
the same thing. And if I didn’t care what happens to her, I wouldn’t be in need
of
your
coffee.”

Franny chewed that over while she folded her soggy towel
into a square. With a satisfied nod she left him to his misery.

He should be with Allie, but he didn’t trust himself around
her another second. After hundreds of years resigned to the knowledge that he
would never have a mate, having one land suddenly in his lap pushed even the
supreme self-discipline of a high magus beyond its limits.

His thoughts skipped and hopped from one thing to the next
like links on a webpage. How had a human male, one of Eddie’s caliber, gotten
hold of a female Pantherian child to raise? Was the male human? Was Allie
Pantherian?

Around him the murmur of customers, the clink of tableware
and plates acted as a shield, white noise, to keep him focused within. Well,
not focused, directed inward was more like it. He plucked one thing he knew for
certain from the midst of his whirling inner dialogue—Allie could shift. To
what he didn’t know. She’d projected herself onto the shifting plane and then
she’d gotten stuck. Marcus pulled her back, not daring to shift up himself.

By sheer force of will, like a distance runner in the last
mile, Marcus had held off the shift that threatened to consume him, the wild
male unleashed by the call of a mate. She wasn’t ready to see herself for what
she was, let alone him. If he didn’t go carefully he’d scare her away. Before
he could guide her into discovering her true nature, before he could teach her
pride in her uniqueness, he needed to get himself in hand.

Allie wasn’t a stand-out-from-the-crowd kind of girl. She
liked uniformity, conformity, blending in. Understandable, since she was
hiding. But the need to blend in was rooted in something deeper. He’d suspected
the truth when she mentioned sleepwalking and her dreams at dinner. He knew
when they’d played the candle game, had watched her control the light as if
she’d been born to it, in minutes rather than the months it took him to teach
young males who apprenticed with him to learn mind games.

Marcus was sure Allie had recognized a difference in herself
and had the survival instincts to know the difference would never be accepted.
Her sense of self-preservation pushed her to fit into the norm designated by
the society she’d landed in.

He knew she was a shifter and she recalled being a white
kitten. What kind of kitten, he wondered. Tiger? Leopard? And among a species
whose offspring couldn’t shift until puberty, what did it mean that Allie could
shift as a child? Allie could be the key, a missing link back to the tribe
where Marcus originated.

A saucer of glazed doughnuts skidded across the table. A
paper package, a single-dose packet of headache tablets slid to a stop next to
his coffee. He looked up, startled that he could be so lost in his own thoughts
as to not hear Franny approach.

She didn’t stay to chat. He hadn’t asked for more than
coffee, so he couldn’t turn away the peace offering. He swallowed the aspirins
and tried one of the doughnuts. It was soft, fragrant with warm sugar, still
hot from the fryer with stickiness that clung to his fingers, reminding him of
Allie and the stickiness of her heat.

The diner door opened and closed with a jingling of bells as
customers shuffled in. It was still early enough that Franny worked the counter
and tables alone, her voice, bold and brassy as she called out visitors’ first
names, traded insults and delivered the “usual” to some fifty individuals
without mistake as the clock counted down the minutes until Allie’s normal
arrival time.

He could not face her. Not yet. Not until he knew more about
her. He had two goals—find the source of the Pantherian females who had
appeared in this area and keep Allie safe from the thug who had raised her.

For now, he would leave Allie to Jake’s capable guardianship.
He couldn’t trust himself with her until he had some time, distance to rein in
his primal response and behave responsibly. That left Marcus the job of
figuring out where the females were coming from. And find Hella. Once again
he’d been distracted from his original goal.

He decided to leave before Allie’s imminent arrival broke
through his resolve to stay away. He had to do what was best for her and for
his family.

* * * * *

Jake crammed himself into the seat beside Allie. His knees
and feet stuck out in the aisle. He’d hoped to avoid having to go this far.
He’d already purchased a bus ticket he didn’t want and then had to purchase a
duffle bag to go with his journey, filling it with toiletries and new
underwear, a size too small, that he hoped he wouldn’t need.

There were other seats on the bus, so he didn’t ask Allie if
she minded him sitting next to her. Her tight-lipped grimace when he hunkered
into the tiny space told him what she thought of company. He pretended he was
oblivious, and even allowed her the temporary escape into whatever she was
reading on her cell phone.

The bus doors slapped shut. The driver droned on over the
intercom about rules, destinations and expected arrival times as the engine
revved and air brakes released with a hiss.

Jake shut his eyes when the bus rolled backward. Humans
really needed to master teleporting. His stomach went queasy with the twist and
lurch of changing directions, and he had to look. His mind grappled with
keeping visual balance while being conveyed down the street in a vehicle he
didn’t control, by someone he didn’t know well enough to trust.

Gingerly he adjusted his bulk and his seat to a position
that produced the least discomfort. Then he contemplated how he might talk the
young lady at his side into going back home. It would be really nice if he
didn’t have to kidnap her.

He watched her attention stray from the screen in her hand
to the window. Watched her grip on the phone tighten and saw they were passing
the diner. The magus—Marcus—he reminded himself, was there. Jake didn’t relay
the situation. He’d never seen Marcus act this way over a human female. He’d
never known him to be unsettled by anything, staying calm and controlled even
when he fought to save his son’s life.

The scrap of a female in the seat next to him didn’t have
any outward feature that could explain Marcus’ distraction. But in the few
minutes they’d spent chatting he’d felt something beneath the standoffish
surface reach out and grab him, ignite his protective instincts to a degree he
once believed only a mate could inspire. Not that he knew that experience
firsthand. Not that it was an experience he’d ever expected to know
firsthand—there were no females left in the Yeti tribe. Yet something about
this female, a vibration that seemed to emanate from her like an aura, aroused
and soothed at once.