Obsession Untamed (Feral Warriors #2)(50)

A smile pulled as his mouth as he kissed her hard and slid a single shaking finger deep inside her tight, wet sheath.

He needed to be inside her.

A movement in his peripheral vision had him pulling back, his head jerking to the corner of the building. Foxx stood there staring at him, one hand loaded with hot dogs, the other with a massive drink, his eyebrows shooting into his hairline.

“Dude.”

Paenther growled low in his throat, tempted to yank off the cub’s ears.

With a small sound of dismay, the woman pulled out of his arms and fled.

Paenther curled his damp finger into his fist and let her go. His brilliant plan to get her out of his mind had failed. Spectacularly.

Chapter Nineteen

Delaney sat up slowly in the strange bed, logging her surroundings. Unfamiliar bedroom, daytime.

Tighe stood at the window, his back to her, in a pair of black leather pants and nothing else except the gold armband tight around his upper arm.

With a rush, she remembered what had happened. Or what her mind was trying to tell her had happened. Her pulse began to pound as she saw in her head again, the man turning into a tiger. Then morphing into a were-tiger or…God. He’d sunk his claws deep into her shoulders until she was soaked with blood.

She struggled to calm her racing pulse. It hadn’t happened. It was just a nightmare…or an hallucination thanks to the drugs he’d pumped her full of.

Just to reassure herself, she shrugged and rolled her shoulders. No pain, just as she’d known there wouldn’t be. But when she glanced down at herself, at the unfamiliar gray tee shirt dotted with bloodstains all over the shoulders, her eyes went wide. Cold washed over her scalp.

“Oh, crap.” Her mind began to buzz with disbelief, even as goose bumps rose on her skin.

“You’re safe, Delaney,” Tighe said without turning around, his voice cool and sharp. “Calm down.”

“Right. Like I didn’t just step into the Twilight Zone.” Her gaze slid around the large, well-appointed, and decidedly masculine room with its jungle green walls and heavy wood furniture. One wall held an assortment of framed photos of airplanes. The others, a vast assortment of knives and swords interspersed with paintings of tigers.

Tigers. She struggled to contain the fear trembling deep inside her, afraid what might happen if she didn’t. How many times had he said, Don’t fear me? And look what had happened when she had.

Dear God. “Where are we?”

“Feral House.” Tighe turned around slowly, his hands clasped behind his back, his mouth tight. Sunglasses, as usual, covering his eyes.

A small bubble of hysteria tried to rise up her throat, but she swallowed it down, hard. Either she’d gone insane, or her world had. And if it was the latter?

Even as she shuddered, she squared her shoulders. One way or another, she had to deal with it.

She watched him warily. “Are you…did I really see you…?”

“Turn into a tiger?” He bit out the words as if daring her to accept them. “Yeah. You did.”

She sat up straighter, pressing back against the headboard. “How do you do that? Change…like that?”

“I think about shifting, and I shift.”

Shift. From a man to a tiger. Her head rushed with cold. Ants crawled across her skin. “Have you…always been this way?”

Tighe scowled. “I’m not a science experiment. I’m a shape-shifter. I have been for more than six hundred years.”

Her eyes widened. “Six hundred?”

No way. No way. No way.

“My people are not human, Delaney. We’re immortals. We’ve roamed this earth since the dawn of time, but we stay under the human radar for survival purposes.”

Shape-shifters. Immortals. The words banged around inside her head, finding no purchase. They weren’t real. Men did not turn into tigers. They didn’t live forever. They didn’t.

No wonder he hadn’t died when he’d been shot.

With sudden clarity she realized everything she’d believed about him was wrong. Everything he’d told her was a lie. She felt a pinch in that part of her heart that had softened toward him. A spreading ache.

Am I really believing any of this?

God, I need to get out of here.

Delaney dug her fingers in her hair, raking it back from her face as her heart raced and her mind spun.

“Do you eat people?”

His mouth tightened. “No. We don’t kill unless someone needs to be killed.”

“Your brother does.”

“He’s not my brother. He’s a clone, an unnatural creation that’s not even flesh and blood. He was made several weeks ago from half my soul, which is what’s causing my anger-management issues. My soul’s disintegrating. If I don’t destroy him soon, I’m going to die.”

She gripped her head in both hands, closing her eyes against the barrage of information her mind refused to process. Six hundred years?

How did he expect her to believe that? Yet how else could she possibly explain what she’d seen?

With perfect clarity, she understood why he was so determined to catch the scumbag. The clone. After more than six hundred years, his life was in serious jeopardy.

If she believed him.

Did she have a choice?

A thought occurred to her, a wicked irony. The serial killer she’d been pursuing, the one the press had semihumorously dubbed the D.C. Vampire, actually wasn’t human.