Chase, Zara - Tigers' Temptation [Impulse 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (9 page)

Layla’s eyes were drooping by the time they got back to the apartment. She thanked the guys for a good time, wished them good-night, and headed for her room. She fell asleep almost at once, and woke again less than an hour later. She’d heard something—a noise, a strange sound like cats fighting. She shrugged, turned over, and thumped her pillows into a comfortable nest, but it was no good.

Damn it, she was awake now, bone weary but too tired to sleep. She got up, thinking a hot drink might help. She passed the room that she knew the guys shared. The door was wide open, and so, too, was the window. And the bed was empty. It was well past midnight, but it was obvious that they hadn’t even tried to sleep. So where were they?

Her curiosity piqued, Layla stepped into the room, drawn toward the open window. Moonlight spilled through it, highlighting muddy marks on the sill.

“What the hell?”

A shiver went down her spine. Unless she missed her guess, those marks had been made by an animal.

A very large animal.

On emotional overload after everything that had happened to her that day, it was one discovery too many. Layla’s head spun with unthinkable possibilities. No, she refused to go there! She cursed the inquiring mind that had made her such a good journalist.

“Darn it, I don’t wanna think what I’m thinking.”

She was almost relieved when her brain shut down and she crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.

Chapter Seven

Mikael abruptly stopped loping through the national park, holding up a paw to halt Philo and the other shifters following in his wake.

“Layla’s in trouble,”
he said, an urgent edge to his pheromone.

“Yeah, I’m getting the vibes, too,”
Philo agreed.
“Something ain’t right.”

Vadim joined them.
“Problem?”

“Not sure.”
Mikael shook his massive tiger head.
“Layla. She’s found something she shouldn’t have and it’s too much for her.”

“What did she find?”

“Not sure. Her mind’s stalled.”

“Get on back,”
Vadim pheromoned.
“You need us to come?”

“No,”
Philo replied.
“You guys carry on collecting the herbs. Archie will supervise.”
He beckoned to one of the beta tigers.
“He knows what we need. Don’t forget that new patch of ragwort over on the northern perimeter. It oughta be ready about now.”

“Gotcha,”
Archie replied.

“I’m pretty sure Layla’s problems haven’t been caused by our enemies,”
Vadim pheromoned.
“No one’s heard anything about an imminent attack, and no strangers have been caught lurking. None of my patrols have reported anything out of the ordinary, and you know they always pick up something if there’s anything about to go down.”

“Yeah, thanks.”
Mikael turned away from the pack.
“We’ll catch you later.”

Mikael and Philo extended their powerful legs and loped back to Impulse in a matter of mere minutes, cutting across country and making it far quicker than they would have in a truck. Running free, it was what they lived for and what they would have to survive without if their powers got any weaker. Mikael didn’t want to think about the living hell that would entail. To have his feline instincts trapped permanently inside a human body would be worse than death itself.

They slowed to a trot when they reached the bridge that would take them into Impulse, careful to keep to the shadows. It was the early hours, but it was still possible that the odd human might see two large tigers sauntering about the neighborhood and bring all sorts of shit landing on Impulse. That’s why they usually took the truck to the park and shifted when they arrived. Tonight they’d shifted in the apartment and used the window escape, rather than risk Layla hearing them leave and coming to investigate. They’d checked on her and she’d appeared to be sound asleep, but Mikael wasn’t prepared to take any chances. She suspected something wasn’t right about the setup in Impulse, and faking sleep so she could snoop on them was just the sort of stunt an enterprising hack would pull.

“You know she’s the one for us,”
Philo pheromoned as they crossed the bridge.
“Why are you still fighting it?”

“If she was right for us, she’d be more open.”

“We’re not exactly being open with her.”

“That’s different, and you damned well know it.”

“Okay, so if you’re indifferent toward her, why did you come back here like a tiger with his tail on fire the moment you sensed there was something wrong with her?”

“I didn’t say I was indifferent.”

Philo chuckled.
“After the way you sucked her pussy, buddy, that would be a hard line to sell.”

“Shit, Philo, just leave it!”

“C’mon, man, you can tell me.”
Mikael said nothing, but that didn’t stop Philo from baiting him.
“If you don’t give a damn about her, why have you been like a Bengal with bad breath ever since she showed up?”

“You don’t give up, do you?”

“It’s important.”

Mikael opened his jaws and expelled a silent roar of frustration.
“I think she’s sex on legs, if you want the truth.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“I think she’s intelligent, spirited, brave, determined…and a liar.”

“Only by omission.”

Mikael wagged a huge front paw at Philo.
“Still counts as a lie.”

“But you’ve got the hots for her.”
Philo bumped his haunch against Mikael’s.
“You wanna screw her every bit as much as I do. And you want her as our permanent mate.”

“Shit, yeah!”

Philo punched the air with one of his own front paws.
“Knew it!”

“I don’t wanna feel that way about her, damn it, but it hit me like the claws on a bad-tempered bear the moment I walked into the interview room and saw her sitting across from you.”
Mikael flexed his whiskers and twitched his nose, alert for any anomalies in Impulse, even though he knew the perimeter was heavily patrolled by Vadim’s team of security guards.
“But it’ll never work.”

“Why not? I feel the same way you do. We’ve always said we’d only choose a mate that we both felt good about. That we could love, cherish, and die for, if necessary.”
Philo was uncharacteristically somber.
“You know how I feel about relationships and why.”
Mikael nodded.
“Sometimes things happen for a reason, and you just have to go with the flow. Besides, I don’t know about you, but I’m already half in love with Layla. I’d certainly go that extra mile for her, no matter what the cost to me.”

“She has a job, a life, in Boston.”

“She’s freelance. She can move anywhere she likes and still work.”

“We don’t know who else is in her life.”

“Only one way to find out.”
Philo stopped beside the shade tree that grew in the Institute’s yard.
“Let’s go see what’s wrong with our prospective mate.”

Without pheromoning another word, Mikael put his powerful front paws on the trunk of the tree and pulled himself effortlessly up into the branches. Philo followed him. Mikael was about to step over the window ledge but stopped at the last minute.

“She’s in our room.”

“Shit, we’d better shift back here in the tree.”

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

The branches shook as the guys shifted back to their human form.

“Er, just one problem,” Philo whispered, glancing down at his naked body and grinning.

Mikael shrugged. “Nothing she ain’t seen before.”

“I daresay she’ll wonder what we’ve been doing, running around Impulse stark naked in the middle of the night.”

“If that’s the only question she has for us,” Mikael said with a wry grin, “I shall be one happy tiger.”

“Okay, let’s face the music.”

They stepped into the room together, so light on their feet that they barely made a sound when they made the six-foot drop onto the wood floor.

“Where is she?” Mikael glanced around, his anxiety growing. “I can sense her here somewhere, but I don’t see her.”

“Over here!”

Layla was flat out on the floor, unconscious. In his professional mode, Mikael knelt beside her and checked her vital signs. Her heart was beating evenly and she had a strong pulse.

“She’s fainted.”

“What brought that on?”

“Who knows?”

Mikael lifted her up and laid her gently on their bed. She didn’t stir. He put several pillows beneath her feet, elevating them above her heart, and sat beside her, holding her hand. She reacted almost immediately to her changed circumstances, opening her eyes and blinking as though to clear her vision.

“Welcome back,” Mikael said. “How do you feel?”

“What happened?” she asked in a dazed voice.

“You fainted.”

“I can’t have done. I never faint.”

“You did today,” Philo said from her opposite side. “Must be the thin air.”

“And you two came to my rescue in the nude,” she said, appearing to have gotten them in proper focus and sharing a caustic glance between them.

“You
are
in our room,” Mikael pointed out, “and we sleep in the buff.”

“Ah, now I remember.” She pulled her hand out of Mikael’s and sat up. “I saw—”

“Best not to move until you’re fully recovered.”

“Thank you,
Doctor
,” she said, with heavy sarcasm on his title. “I feel fine. But I’ll feel a whole lot better once I get some answers.”

“Answers about what?” Philo asked, earning himself a scowl from Mikael. The last thing she needed was encouragement, and Philo well knew it.

She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed with no discernible signs of faintness. “About what’s really going on in this town.”

“So you can write about it and bring hordes of people down here to check us out, like we’re some sort of freaks just because we have thin air?” Mikael scowled. “No thanks.”

“Ah, so you admit that something
is
off about the place.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then how do you explain this?”

She walked across the room and pointed to a muddy paw print on the window ledge. A very large, muddy paw print that couldn’t be explained away as being left by a domestic cat.

“Shit, Philo, how did that happen?”