BlindHeat (29 page)

When she turned around she was annoyed to find Marcus
quietly a few feet away. Sorrow turned to frustration. The bars of her current
cage might not be as rigid as the one Eddie created, but it was still a cage.

“Worried I’d run away?” she snapped.

He winced. “Allie, you’re not a prisoner here. If you don’t
want to stay, I’ll help you work out something else. I never intended to take
charge of your life.”

He turned away, had started back toward the house when she
exploded. “What a load of crap. Everything you’ve done since we met was an attempt
to control me.”

Marcus stopped but didn’t turn around. “I wanted you. I
won’t say I didn’t screw things up trying to persuade you to want me. That
isn’t the same as controlling you.” His tone was like winter, cold wind and
cracked ice. It didn’t cool her off.

“Explain to me why you never told me what I was? Give me one
good reason you had to keep that secret from me. You must have known what I was
before the night it all unraveled. Isn’t that why you were hanging around? You
had everyone in on it. Jake. Maya. Seth! Why not tell me?”

He whirled to face her.

“I didn’t tell anyone. I know how it must look, but I was
the only one who guessed at your true nature before you shifted in front of
them. I didn’t tell you because I wanted to leave you with a choice. I wanted
you to be free to live as the person you’d grown up believing you were.”

He stalked off toward the house then. He was mad.

Seriously? He thought he had the right to be mad at her? He
had leveled the new life she’d built for herself in one night.

She ran after him, catching up as he stormed though the back
entrance to his basement lab. In time to see him kick the cardboard carton
teleporting Pantherians discarded their street clothes in. She’d like to kick
it herself. Kick it right through the damn mirror portal.

“Now look who wants to run away,” she fumed. She slammed the
door behind her.

A black rabbit dove from desk to floor and through the door
that led upstairs. Allie didn’t recall seeing him before. She was in no mood to
let bunnies distract her.

Marcus threw up his hands and dropped into his chair. “I’m
sorry. You’re right. You deserve to be heard and I will stay here until you’re
finished.”

“I need to know things, Marcus. I want you to stop keeping
secrets from me for my own good.”

He picked up a pencil, tapped the eraser against the desk
blotter. “What do you want to know?”

“Where we’re moving to might be a nice place to start.”

“I’m sorry. I wanted to discuss it with you first, but I
just got the confirmation that Ben’s pack agreed to swap houses with us.”

“Are there any other details you are planning to discuss
with me and haven’t gotten around to yet?”

Marcus looked away, gazing through the tall windows at the
other end of the lab, tapping the pencil faster.

“That’s what I thought.” She was already heading for the
same exit the rabbit had taken when she said it.

He grabbed her wrist as she stalked past.

“Allie, please, some of this is difficult. I’m trying to
figure out where to start.” He gave her arm a tug. She relented, allowing him
to pull her closer. She sat on the edge of his desk. When he let her hand go,
she folded her arms across her chest.

He cleared his throat. “Jake will be gone for a while.”

From the way Marcus said it, she could tell it hadn’t been
the friendliest of partings. “Why? Where? Did he go back to those dragon
islands you told me about?”

“It’s the Dragon’s Triangle and the Pantherian Islands are
located there. But no. He couldn’t go home without risking someone figuring out
something unusual is going on with me and my family.” He started tapping that
pencil again. “He went looking for your sister.”

Allie pinched the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes, then
opened them to escape the visuals her brain served up. She wasn’t sure she
wanted to know, couldn’t let herself think about what had happened to her
sister. A child thrown away and not lucky enough to wind up with Eddie.

“He can’t possibly find her. Where would he even start?
There has to be some other reason he left, Marcus.”

He looked out the window again.

“Marcus?”

“He feels guilty about your father, thinks you blame him.”

“I don’t.”

“I know. But let’s leave him to this for a little while. We
all have some adjusting to do.”

She sighed, got to her feet and paced the length of the lab
and back, thinking aloud as she did.

“There is so much I don’t know. I feel alien. Like a freak.
And I’ve always been different. I’m used to it. Being the daughter of the guy
everyone fears doesn’t win you many friends.”

“You’re not a freak.”

She turned and paced back toward the windows. “I finally put
together a life where people treat me like I’m your average Jane. And you just
gotta love this punch line. Turns out I’m not even human.”

“Allie, come here.”

She lifted her head but didn’t turn around. It had gone
completely dark outside. She could see his reflection in the glass. She was
tempted to refuse. It wasn’t an order, not how he’d said it. More a plea. But
it was the look on his face when she finally turned, a look of vulnerability
she’d never imagined she’d see in Marcus, which compelled her to go to him. He
patted his knee and she sat.

“You may find this hard to believe, but I understand exactly
how you feel. Maybe not how it is to think you’re human and later discover
you’re not. But I know how it feels to be different from everyone else, feel
like an alien.”

“Why would you feel like an alien among your own kind?”

“I’m going to tell you. I have never shared this with
anyone. In telling you, I place my well-being, and the well-being of my child
and his children, in your hands. It’s my last secret from you. I share it with
you now because I can’t expect you to trust me with your future if I don’t
trust you with mine.”

She put her hands over his, the rapid tick of his pulse beat
where her fingertips curled around his wrist. She waited.

“I’m not sure I’m a Pantherian. I wasn’t born to the tribe.
My mother found me abandoned and passed me off as one of her cubs. She even
lied to her mates about it to protect me. She knew the tribe would reject me if
they discovered how different I was.”

“But you’re a shifter. Just like them. I’ve seen you.”

“I’m not like them. I can shift into any species I choose.
Pantherians can only shift from human to one other species. And there are no
Pantherian Snow Leopards.”

“But I’m a leopard.”

“I think you’re like me, Allie. I think you can be what you
choose. Eddie may not have seen many leopards, but a young leopard is hard to
mistake for a common kitten. I could be wrong, but I think you shifted to a
domestic cat as a child because there would be plenty of stray cats to model
yourself after in the back alleys. When you shifted the other night, it was
your connection to me that decided the form you’d take.”

She couldn’t speak. The information wouldn’t compute.

“I think, given the genetic anomalies you and Marie share,
that there may be more like us in this area.”

“More? I don’t know what to do with this information,
Marcus. Are we going to go hunting for stray cats?”

“I don’t think we need to go hunting. In the short time
Pantherian males have been in the area, two females have found their way to us.
The attraction may be subliminal, but I believe it’s there.”

She knew where his logic was leading. “So you think moving
Ben and his gang here will turn up the volume on that signal?”

He nodded. “Are you up for that, Allie? Are you ready to
find out the truth about where we came from?” He ducked his head when he asked.
His pulse quickened.

“Why do I get the feeling you aren’t?”

“I don’t know that I’m not. I just don’t know if I’ll like
the answers. I find it ominous that there are three of us and none with
parents. What are the odds that all three known members of a species were
orphans? I don’t want to do anything that you’re not ready for.”

“I don’t know what I can handle. Everything I knew about
myself was either a lie or a misconception. Keeping Eddie off my trail and
staying out of trouble with the law weren’t easy, but I managed.”

“Then I came along and wrecked everything.”

“Eddie had a hand in the wrecking.”

“I know you’re mad at him, Allie. I know there are many things
not to like about Eddie. But there is one very big thing to love about
him—you.”

“He wasn’t my father.”

“And yet he raised you. And he raised you knowing you
weren’t human. Can you imagine how he felt the first time you shifted? That
simple act demolished everything he believed about reality. A smaller man might
have demolished you.”

“I earned my keep.”

“You did and you do. He raised a smart, fiercely independent
young woman. You will always find a way to land on your feet. In that respect,
you are your father’s daughter. And he was your father in all the ways that
count.”

“He wasn’t a good guy, Marcus.”

“I know. It’s still okay for you to love him and grieve for
him.”

She sniffed. Her eyes burned. “It hurts less if I stay mad.”

Marcus pushed her hair back from her face. “Sweetheart.”

She tried to push his hands away. “Don’t.”

“Shh.” He cupped one hand around the back of her neck, used
the other to stroke her hair.

A tear escaped. He would turn her to a puddle if she let him
keep going.

“You miss him,” Marcus said. “You have to feel it to get
past it.”

“I hate him,” she insisted and several more tears ran down
her cheeks.

He urged her toward his shoulder, but she wouldn’t go there.

“It was my fault,” she whispered. “I don’t know how to get
past that. If I had listened to Jake, waited until you could go with me, you
could have stopped him. You would have known what to say.”

“The way I hear it, Eddie took a
shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to your lovers. My powers of
recovery may be exceptional, but they’ve been heavily taxed since I met you.”

She swiped at runaway tears with her shirtsleeve. “Sorry.”

“Not your fault. I doubt you would have learned as much from
Eddie if I had gone along. And while I would have tried to stop him from
shooting himself in the head, I would have helped him die. He was way past
curable from what Jake told me. I think he might have killed himself sooner,
but he was just holding on until he was sure you’d be fine on your own.”

Marcus kissed her cheeks. Caught fresh tears on his tongue.

“Stop,” she said, putting her hand over his mouth. Pushing
him back.

“You can cry in front of me, Allie.”

“It’s weak.”

“It’s beautiful and brave to share tears with someone you
love.”

“I can’t. Don’t you get it? I can’t.” She grabbed for anger
as if it were a life jacket. “I have to hold something together. All that’s
left is me.”

“I have you. I won’t let you come apart.”

She knew she should resist, but the shoulder he was offering
was broad, and the heart he trusted in her hands so generous and loving. Her
arms went around his neck and she found his lips. He didn’t pull back from her
kisses even though tears spilled from a well that felt bottomless. He kissed
her back.

“Make love to me,” she murmured between kisses. “Make me
feel something good.”

He carried her upstairs to his bed.

He had a king’s bed, as big as the future he’d handed her
when he explained she would live centuries and not decades. He tossed back the
comforter and laid her down on white linen. The canvas where they could start
painting that future.

The last time they’d made love, she’d thought he was an
ordinary guy with a flair for drama. Now she could appreciate how understated
he’d been. It was as if she’d made a date with a guy who drove a taxi and
discovered later he was the president. And all those “friends” that magically
materialized to help him—his secret service agents.

The last time they made love, he’d broken laws of physics
and biology to be with her when she needed him. That shouldn’t surprise her.
Marcus drew exclusively from a law book of the heart. Do what’s right, even
when it’s wrong. Do what’s kindest, even when it hurts. Do the impossible, even
if it isolates you.

The last time they’d made love, Marcus had been a man. Now
she knew what lurked beneath his skin, what drove the feral side of their
couplings. She knew what had happened until now was tame and controlled
compared to what could be. What would be.

This was the first time they would make love in a bed. The
first time they would make love. Everything else had been training, rituals.
Fucking.

He was standing beside the bed when she looked up into those
silver eyes of his, contemplated the leopard lurking behind that gleam. A
hungry leopard.

She licked dry lips. Wondered if he could taste her fear in
the air.

He sat beside her on the bed, unbuttoned the oversized
flannel shirt she wore, taking his time, planting a moist kiss on her skin,
moving lower as the sides of the shirt parted.

“I’ve been waiting to meet the real you, Allie. I’m sorry I
slept through your coming out.”

“I’m not really sure how I did that. I don’t know how to
make that happen.”

“That’s okay.”

Relieved he didn’t expect her to shift on the spot, she sat
up so he could help her slip out of her shirt.

Then he said, “I know how to make it happen.”

Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t swallow.

He untied the drawstring on her sweatpants. She raised her
hips. He pulled. She was naked. More naked than she’d ever been. From the skin
out, nothing had changed. From the skin in, he knew more about her than she
did.