BlindHeat (16 page)

“Time for your lesson,” he said.

Her eyes widened. “I haven’t recovered from the one we just
had.”

“Sweetheart, that wasn’t your lesson.”

“What was it?”

“A reminder of why you love to do your lessons and will do
them faithfully in the future.”

“Oh.”

While she contemplated the warning behind that last comment,
he got up and went searching for what he needed. It took a minute, but he found
her clothes in the grass near the altar. He extracted her tank top from the
pile, aware of her attention lingering on his body. Seeing with his skin was
second nature to him. He always knew when he was being watched, could feel her
gaze slide over his ass as if it were a physical touch.

He shook leaves and blades of grass from her shirt. It
wasn’t ideal, but it would suit his purposes. Turning back toward her, savoring
the sensation of heat gliding along his fully erect cock, it seemed a shame he
had to blindfold her.

“Tonight’s lesson is learning to see with your tongue,” he
said as he rejoined her.

“My tongue? This doesn’t sound sexy.”

“I don’t recall promising the lessons would be sexy.”

“You did,” she insisted.

He rolled her shirt into a narrow strip that would just
cover her eyes, and pulled her up to sit beside him. “Perhaps a blindfold will
make this sexier.”

The material was just stretchy enough to cover her eyes and
tie behind her head. Her breath went shallow.

“What are you going to do?”

He got a mental image from her then, a candle in his hand,
wax dripping over his fingers. They were making progress. She might not be able
to imprint his face, but an image of his hand was seared in her memory, right
down to the crescent scar above one knuckle. “As I said, I’m going to teach you
to see with your tongue.”

“Wonderful. When I’m not sure who someone is, I’ll just run
up and lick him.”

He pushed her long hair behind her shoulders, coiled it
loosely in one hand.

“You have my permission to lick me whenever you want.”

She was trying not to smile. One corner of her lips tilted
up, giving her away.

He had to kiss her then, softly brushing his lips over hers,
before he said, “Start with a kiss, sweetheart. Let your instincts guide you
from there. Don’t think about what to do. Feel it. You draw with pencil and
paper every day. Tonight use your tongue to sketch me in your mind.”

He stretched out on the robe she’d abandoned, drawing her
down with him.

She pressed her lips to his. Her tongue snuck out, hesitant,
the tip gliding right between the slight parting of his lips. She lingered and
he knew instinct was already taking hold, teaching her the mating of breath and
body, entwining their energies before she pressed deeper.

Her tongue ran over his teeth, then his tongue, even
venturing a swipe along the sensitive roof of his mouth. She was going to make
a thorough job of this.

She gave his bottom lip a little nip when she finished
exploring his mouth. His cock twitched and her lips, curving into a smile
against his, told him she noticed. How could she not with her thigh draped over
it?

She didn’t lick his face in the traditional Pantherian way,
with full-tongued swipes. Her tongue barely protruded past her lips. It made
him think of her clit, the way it just parted her plump pussy lips, peeked
between dewy folds.

Her lips swiped over his cheekbone, then his eyelid. A
dainty rasp of tongue here. Tickling breath there. She was driving him
senseless and she wasn’t below his chin.

Her body straddled his now, breasts brushing his chest, her
pussy wet and hot against his belly.

She sank her teeth into his earlobe and he twisted her hair,
trying to haul her back. Centuries of disciplined training broken within a
minute.

“Let me,” she murmured, her words a humid caress. “Let me
finish.”

He eased his grip, determined to be what she needed if it
killed him.

She didn’t make it easy. Settling into a lick, nip,
kiss-it-better pattern that set him on fire one cell at a time. Down his neck,
across his chest. His nipples turned to burning coals under her talented teeth.
She outlined each rib. He tensed, giving in to the vanity of wanting to be firm
under her tongue while she spent extra time licking away every drop of the
sweet female perfume she’d drenched him in.

Then she started on his cock, tongue encircling the flared
head, lips closing over it, the gentle vise of her teeth capturing him.

He didn’t dare try pulling her back by her hair now. He
shuddered. So much for the belief he’d have more control this time than he’d
had the last. He unclenched his teeth long enough to beg, “Please…” She smiled
around his cock, dipped her head, taking him deep. The head of his dick wedged
against the back of her throat.

He groaned. The sensation of a swallow squeezed him.

“Allieee…” Her name escaped on a growl. How could a female
raised in a world so alien to her nature discover the wildling inside so
quickly?

“Please,” he said again, aware that for the first time in
centuries he was not the one in charge. Had he ever pleaded or begged for
anything?

She released him and before she could draw breath to speak,
he had her under him.

“I haven’t finished sketching you,” she teased.

He moved between her legs, poised there, the head of his
cock pressed against her tight opening. She made a squeezing motion that
snatched her name from him again.

“Allie…” It was the only word he could remember.

Her playful smile faded, replaced by something more feral.
Lips pulled back over her teeth, as if she dared him to back down again. Her
eyes never left his. Not even when his first thrust had her back arching and
her fingernails raking down his back. They fucked like beasts. With teeth and
nails and snarls. They devoured each other with frantic kisses. He pounded her
and she drove him to it, begged him to fuck harder. Faster.

He would forever have an image of this moment burned in his
memory—Allie with her dark hair fanned out in the grass, head tipped back,
teeth bared.

“Say my name,” he demanded, wanting to brand himself in her
mind as well. “Say it when you come.”

As if she’d been waiting for his command, her pussy
tightened around him, unlocking his seed as she cried out his name, again and
again.

Would this be enough?

Would she remember him now?

When he could stand again he carried her into the house and
tucked her into his bed.

“Rest,” he said.

“Don’t leave, Marcus. Please—”

He bent, silencing her plea with a kiss. “I have to go,
precious. I promised to help someone.”

Her arms went around his neck and she was clinging. “Not
yet. Hold me a little longer.”

He relented. He snuggled in next to her, stroking her back,
murmuring a soft string of endearments in Russian. In five minutes sleep, with
a little help from an entrancement, won out and she was deep enough in a dream
world that he could slide from the bed.

He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. Pain, a sharp,
physical squeeze around his heart, tightened his hand in her tresses. He forced
himself to let go, brush his lips over her forehead. A chorus of howls from
near the river tugged at him.

They had a rescue to make. He welcomed the danger. He needed
something that would demand all his skills and attention, give him distance.

Chapter Eight

The scent of wolves entwined with the scent of sex and
females. The women the pack had been playing big bad wolf with were gone. The
pack gathered in the dwindling light cast by the fire in the moon garden. The
lean bodies of the wolves threaded between columns as they approached.
Marcus—while tempted to shift to a wolf body and join the bumping play and
nipping—stayed in his human form. Why stir up more trouble for the family line,
when the tribe already found his son’s unusual coloring disturbing. If they
knew he could shift across species, fear of genetic mutations might permanently
bar his male descendants from obtaining a mate.

He could take the shape of his tribe, a tiger Pantherian,
but as tigers weren’t common in Virginia, he didn’t want to risk some unseen
observer seeing anything more alarming than a wolf pack. He conversed with the
others telepathically.

Your playmates all off the compound?

Ben, a black wolf and leader, moved away from the group and
stood beside Marcus in the shadow of a pillar.
Yes. And yours?

Jake will be along to collect her. She’s under a
suggestion and shouldn’t wake up before sunrise. I’ll just need you to show me
where the hybrid is and I’ll take it from there.

We can get close to the lab through the portal downstairs
in Adam’s lab.

Marcus shook his head. The high council had been monitoring
portal traffic lately.
Let’s not leave any traceable aura trails that will
link this place to what we do there.

It’s a three-hour drive from here, Magus.

Perfect. We’ll get there about four a.m. The night watch
should be bored and getting tired. There’s rarely a researcher in a lab at that
hour.

Ben stretched and gave his shaggy coat a shake.
Drive it
is.
He shifted from wolf to man.

* * * * *

Black vans with light-warping shields that could make them
invisible to security cameras were handy. Marcus decided he was going to have
to get Ben’s crew to put one of these together for him. They parked in the most
heavily shadowed end of the lab’s parking lot. The light-warping device had to
be turned off before any of them could leave the van. The pack moved out in
wolf form, while Marcus and Ben went as men. Ben had changed to black jeans and
a black shirt, but Marcus stayed as he was, wearing the black robe he’d wrapped
his lover in hours ago. With the hood up it would reveal less about his
physical features to cameras. If he had to shift, getting out of clothes would
be that much faster.

Ben prepared the way, disabling security and locks from a
laptop inside the van. He waved Marcus toward a door near the loading dock as
rain started to fall.

Marcus didn’t need the room map Ben had shown him to find
the snow leopard. Her distress reached through the walls and down the halls.
Her misery hit and rippled through his cells in the same way a stone dropped in
a puddle sent ripples across the surface.

The fact that he came in human form didn’t throw her at all.
She recognized him as the answer to her longing. He could feel the tension
drain from her body when he opened the door and stepped into her line of sight.
Snow leopards were an endangered species—the experiments performed on her
should see someone thrown in jail. She lifted her head, licked his hand when he
reached into the cage and pressed his palm to her swollen middle, tuning into
the energy of the litter she carried. He supposed the researchers might insist
they were trying to save the species with their hybrid experiments, but the
mutants in her belly would not survive. One was already dead. Their oversized
bodies crowded her organs. They’d implanted more fetuses than her small frame
could support. She was bleeding internally, too weak to stand.

There wasn’t as much as a blanket in the cage for padding.
He took off his robe, intending to wrap her in it, wanting to keep her as warm
and dry as he could. The leopard turned her head, attention caught by
something, blew breath out her nose. Marcus glanced around but didn’t see
whatever had spooked her.

“There’s my sweet girl,” he said softly. She looked at him
with such trust when he held out the robe, trust she may not have shown in her
own land, healthy and standing proud. It was a sign how beaten down she was that
she would so easily trust a stranger, Pantherian he may be, but he’d done
nothing to earn her trust at this point. It worried him. As a being reached the
end of life, the sense of the true nature of others was heightened in the
extreme.

“You hold on, sweetheart. You’ll be back in the wilds before
you know it.” He lifted her and could feel the babies twist and turn in her
belly, a sharp cry from her nearly made him drop her. He thought something
fluttered against the back of his hand.

Ben’s voice in his mind called out.
Someone’s coming to
check. Abort.

No. He would not, could not put her back in the cage. “Shh,”
he murmured, his own heartbeat conveying the danger. She went still, limp as a
kitten in her mother’s jaws and he hefted her. He guessed she weighed near
seventy pounds. Underweight for a female. He tuned his mind to the presence of
humans in the building. He had time, one was close, but he could do it. He
swung out the door and down the hall to the stairwell near the service elevator
and ducked through the door.

I’m in the outer stairwell, Ben. Guide me out of here.

You’re three flights from the bottom.

We’re on our way. Move the van closer.

He had one more flight to go and had his mind trained on the
directions Ben was giving.

Shit.
Ben’s curse coincided with the door to a
hallway being swung open and a blonde woman in a lab coat looked him right in
the face.

What he hadn’t calculated was that the heavy doors between
stairwells attenuated sound enough that he wouldn’t hear someone coming.

Sorry, Magus, I was watching the guard upstairs, didn’t
spot the woman until it was too late.

Sensing threat, the leopard snarled and swiped with a paw.

Confronted by a naked man carrying a leopard, the
woman—probably not any older than Allie—opened her mouth in a silent scream.
Marcus blocked the cat’s swipe, catching a forearm full of knifelike claws.
Blood sprayed. The woman fainted. All he could do was shift the leopard over
his shoulder and try to catch the woman before her head connected with the
concrete landing. Catching her with his good arm and enduring the reflexive dig
of the leopard’s claws into his back and belly, Marcus dropped to his knees,
pain stabbed up his spine as he tried to balance two shifting weights. Had the
leopard been stronger, Marcus doubted he or the woman would have survived her
panic.

Talk to me, Magus.

Marcus lowered his human burden to the floor and fought to
balance the leopard once again, folding his wounded arm against his chest as
blood welled. He was aware of blood dripping, but he didn’t have time to do
anything to cover his trail.

Magus?

I’m here. Where now?

There’s a fire exit just before you reach the southwest
corner of the building. The van is there.

An alarm trilled and a light in the basement strobed.

They have their security up. Tell everyone to get out,
Marcus said, straining to hold on to the shifting weight of the cat. She
writhed in his grasp, agitated by the flashing lights and noise.

No one’s going anywhere without you, Magus, so you better
get out here before they corner us.

Cursing the lack of respect of the younger generation,
Marcus broke into a wobbling run. He found the fire door and hit the red exit
button. Outside cold air revived him enough to keep him on his feet. Ben
scooped the leopard from Marcus’ arms.

“Careful.”

“We’re fine. I’ve got her.” She didn’t protest her new
rescuer. Perhaps any hell was better, in her opinion, than the one she was
leaving behind.

One of the pack, Lobo, still naked from a shift back to
human form, grabbed Marcus when he stumbled. The leopard screamed and the sound
of the emergency door banging open sent them all hurtling toward the van. The
side door was open, but a shot rang out and Lobo collapsed under Marcus before
they got there.

A male voice demanded they stop. Marcus shouted at Ben to
leave, but Ben stowed the leopard and came back with a pack mate. Ben grabbed
Marcus and tossed him over his shoulder. His companion grabbed Lobo. Hands
reached from the van, pushed from behind, snatching, yanking, pulling. His
wound drooled. Bullets pinged and tires squealed, but they were moving.

The van swerved and Atka screamed at Ben to shut the door
and engage the light-warping cloak. That done, they all breathed easier.

“They’ll have cops after us,” Atka grumbled from the
driver’s seat.

“The cat’s a parahuman. Illegal to have in some states,
maybe not this one, but she’s controversial enough to get them shut down,” Lobo
said. He thought it was Lobo. But hadn’t Lobo been shot? Marcus’ mind fumbled
the task of trying to attach names to speakers. His vision blurred. Now that
they were safely in the van speeding away from danger malaise settled over him.

“Besides, she’s endangered—which I believe means they can’t
use her for medical research. You don’t call cops when someone steals illegal
property.”

Carlos. The name floated up and he latched on to that bright
bit of clarity. It was Carlos.

Marcus crawled to the leopard’s side, let his head rest
against her heaving flank. She licked the wound she’d left on his arm. He
rubbed his cheek against her flank and darkness floated up to take him.

Ben shook him. “Stay with us, Magus.”

“I’m fine,” Marcus mumbled, trying to force his eyelids to
lift. They weighed a hundred pounds apiece. “Fine.”

“Yeah? Well, your fine blood is spilling all over the van. Can
you shift?”

He could, but in his weakened state he wasn’t sure he could
shift into the tiger form they’d all expect. Funny, even now he couldn’t bring
himself to reveal that he wasn’t quite like all the others. “It’ll frighten the
leopard to face a male tiger in her vulnerable state. Get something to tie off
the bleeding. I can make it to your place.”

* * * * *

Lila and Franny had their heads together over the lunch
counter when Allie stopped by the diner for breakfast. The evidence of her hard
night was reflected back at her in the smirks they exchanged after looking her
way.

“Don’t start on me until I’ve finished two pots of coffee,”
she warned, dropping onto a stool next to Lila.

“This will cheer you up,” Franny said, pushing a stack of
photos toward Allie and planting a clean mug beside them. Allie flipped through
the photos while Franny poured coffee and added just the right amount of cream.

Despite her grumpiness and a tiredness that ran bone-deep,
Allie couldn’t stop the smile that spread across her face. “Awww.”

Lila leaned closer, rested her chin on Allie’s shoulder.
“Cute little buggers, aren’t they?” The bells on the door jingled.

“Ah, there’s my new helper,” Franny said, wiping her hands
on her apron.

Allie looked up as Maya moved behind the counter. “Hey,”
Maya said. She held up a black hoodie. “Jake said you left this when he dropped
you off.”

Allie dropped the pictures on the counter to catch the
jacket Maya tossed.

“Jake?” Lila asked. “Is there more to last night than I
know?”

“I worked late.” When Lila smirked she added, “I was taking
pictures. You knew that.” Truth was there was more to last night than Allie
knew. She woke up in her own bed, her camera and her equipment neatly arranged
on her desk. Her clothes folded on the desk chair. She was still wrapped in a
sheet and blanket from Marcus’ bed. No Marcus. No explanation of how she got
there. She wasn’t thrilled by the idea Jake had taken her home. If he had. He
probably had. She’d let Marcus know just how unthrilled she was when she saw him.

“Oh what cute kittens. They look like furry snowballs.” Maya
had joined them and was tying on an apron.

“They do,” Franny agreed. “Come on back and I’ll show you
how to set up for breakfast.”

Allie gave the photos back to Lila. “Thanks for bringing
these by. That’s a nice way to start the morning.”

“Aunt Lil sent them for you. You keep them.” Lila slid the
stack back to Allie. “You doing okay? You look wrung out.”

“It’s been a little hectic the past couple of days.” Allie
covered a yawn and chased it with scalding coffee.

“Is that obvious lack of sleep for good reasons or bad?”

“Depends on your point of view.”

Lila laughed. “Translation—I had a great time and I don’t
think I should have. Lighten up on yourself, honey.”

Allie smiled. “I did enjoy a portion of the evening—make
that seriously enjoyed.”

“Well, coming from you that’s high praise.” She pointed to
the clock. “I hate to rush you, but we’ll be late. Get a to-go cup and a bagel
and let’s hit the road.”

Franny was already ahead of them, bustling out of the
kitchen with a bagel already wrapped up and a cup for Allie’s coffee.

“You make sure you get back here come lunchtime and sit down
for a proper meal.”

Allie hugged her. “Yes ma’am.”

Franny’s mouth was still hanging open when Allie glanced
through the window as she hustled down the sidewalk after Lila.

* * * * *

Light hovered just on the other side of his eyelids and
Marcus struggled to reach it. There was something important he had to do. The
sound of voices went from whisper to normal. Closer to consciousness, he still
couldn’t recall the reason for his urgency.

“How’s Lobo?” Adam’s voice.

“Ean says he’ll be fine. After you shifted him he started
improving.” Ben’s voice answered.