Carnival of Hearts: BBW Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance (10 page)

The tamer’s whip would leave permanent scars and Max knew that. No doubt it was designed to, given its silver edge. Though the tamer had only had him for a quarter of an hour before the girl had intervened, Max felt even weaker. Between the wound in his side and now the marks left by the whip, he could barely lift his head. He needed time to heal, to recover, so that when his pack returned to destroy the carnival, he would be ready to join them in the fighting. The girl had just bought him some time, and he was only slightly ashamed of himself for having been rescued by a human girl. Kat; her name was Kat. And he could smell her again, in the cage with him this time. He could feel the human heat coming off her skin even though she’d backed herself up to the other side of the cage from him.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said after a while, when his throat had stopped throbbing from the pain of the whip.

“Oh, well, that’s comforting,” she muttered.

“He wouldn’t have left you in here with me if he thought I was physically strong enough to hurt you.”

She frowned. “I’m not actually sure that’s true.”

“You’re the Ringmaster’s daughter, but you’re human.”

He finally felt like he could sit up, so he shoved himself up with his arms and more or less collapsed back against the bars of the cage across from her. She looked at him, as if she expected him to lunge at her, but then he realized she was
staring
at him. She must have realized it too because she looked quickly away, and he saw color climb into her cheeks. She was blushing. He couldn’t help but smile a little.

“And you live amongst shifters, but you’re uncomfortable with nudity. I don’t know which is weirder.”

She lowered her eyes to her lap. “Yes, great, I’m weird. Never heard that before.”

He found that he couldn’t look away from her profile. “How did you end up in a place like this?”

“I was abandoned. He found me. He didn’t abandon me.”

“Why did you stop your tamer from torturing me?”

She lifted her eyes and looked at him. In the warm lantern lights strung along the lane above the cages, her eyes glimmered, brilliantly emerald.

“Because I think it’s wrong,” she told him simply. “I think it’s wrong to hurt someone. I hate that shifters fight like this. It’s—it’s—”

He smiled sharply. “Inhuman. But we’re not human.”

She sighed. “I was going to say that it’s barbaric. And humans can be barbaric too. It isn’t that you’re not human. It’s that you all care so much about power and not at all about people. My father cares about people; that’s why this place exists. But then
you
come in, and others like you, and he has to care about power more. And we suffer. And you suffer. And none of it is for
anything
.”

Max growled. “It is too for something.”

“What?” she asked. “What’s it for?”

“You’re
human
, you could never understand.” He folded his arms and shifted slightly away from her in his slouch against the side of the cage.

“Yeah, never heard
that
one before either.” She shifted away from his as well.

Exhausted and annoyed by this conversation, Max curled up on the straw again instead of sitting upright. She seemed as uninterested in talking to him as he was in talking to her, and so he decided it was better to sleep and heal than tolerate her. But even when he closed his eyes, he saw her profile illuminated by the lamplight in his mind, and found it impossibly appealing, which only annoyed him more. He’d never been so drawn to a human before. He’d never found one even remotely attractive. He preferred his own kind. The females in his pack were proud and strong and fierce; he had yet to choose a mate, but it would be one of them. He’d rutted with each of them already. Now it was just a matter of determining which of them would best suit him, and which he suited best.

But even as he thought of them, of wild Mirela and pale Anabelle, of pushing Sierra up against a tree in the woods and shoving himself inside of her to the hilt, the memory of her impassioned cries could not overshadow the picture of Kat in his mind. In fact, the memory contorted into a fantasy in which it was Kat he was driving his cock into, Kat who bucked against him and begged for more. It was Kat who clawed at his skin and pulled at his hair and fought him as hard as she fucked him, and it was the thought of Kat’s warm body tangled with his that saw his cock hardening in anticipation right there in the cage.

He curled in on himself, burrowing deeper into the straw on the cage floor to hide it, and cursed his own body. And his mind. And the two for working against him together. She was
human
. She would never have been able to satisfy him the way another wolf could. And, he told himself, he wouldn’t have wanted her to. Except his erection told an entirely different, and achingly painful, story.

Eventually, he slept. But she plagued him even in his dreams. Maybe it was that intoxicating smell. None of the wolves smelled like that. They carried scents of blood and earth, not brightness like Kat. Max felt like he was losing his mind. He was trapped in a fucking cage with a human girl, the
daughter
of the man who’d put her in the fucking cage, and all he could think about was ripping her clothes off and kissing her until she moaned and begged him to take her.

And he was absolutely sure that he didn’t even
like
her. Did he? She was human; she was inherently weak. And she didn’t even understand the people she’d grown up with. She didn’t understand shifters and the constant internal battle they fought between the person and the beast that shared their hearts. He could no more turn from the instinct to protect his own territory than he could stop himself from
thinking
about her, imagining her laid out beneath him, wanting her. In his dreams, she wanted him too.

Kat got maybe an hour or two of sleep that night. Every time she started to drift off, she remembered the
wolf
across the cage from her and came back awake with a start. He never came closer to her, and she couldn’t have said that she was actually
afraid
of him, but remembering that he was right there still made her heart flip-flop in her chest.

And, inevitably, when she remembered that he was there, she looked at him. At the dark fall of his hair against the pale straw he slept on. At the strong muscles in his back, the gorgeous dip of his hips towards his ass, and below, which he’d politely covered with straw when he’d caught her embarrassment. It was true, and kind of ridiculous, that she’d grown up with shifters but was so unaccustomed to male nakedness. Her father’s fault, again.

Whenever she looked at Max, she imagined touching him. She tried not to, but she thought of drifting her fingertips over the slopes of his back, over the muscles in his arms. She wondered what his skin felt like. She wanted to touch his hair. She thought about what kissing him would be like. Was it because he was attractive or was it because he was dangerous? Or was it because she touched so few men in her life, and certainly none that had been like him?

She didn’t know, but she couldn’t get those thoughts out of her mind. And they led inevitably to what was going to happen to Max down the road. The carnival and his pack would go to war. Either he’d escape or he wouldn’t. Either he’d be orphaned or she would be, again, if she survived. She knew her father and Baptiste were holed up at that very moment, planning.

Since the war with Marcus’s den, D’Orfeo had been less interested in overpowering other shifter colonies. He’d gone out of his way to avoid it, and Kat suspected that her presence had something to do with that. He’d realized how easy it would be for her to get caught in the crossfire. But since Max’s pack had attacked them first, he’d feel he had no alternative. Kat saw nothing but tragedy and blood ahead of them, and she wanted desperately to change that somehow.

But the only way she could think of that might work was if she could get Max on her side. Maybe together they could put this conflict to bed. But Max didn’t seem even remotely interested in helping her, or the carnival. He must have thought that his pack would easily overpower them. Kat didn’t know how to convince him to help her, but she was sure that even begging wouldn’t work. He’d have to
want
to help her, and at the moment he had no reason to.

She was the reason he’d been caught, the reason he’d been hurt, the reason he was locked in a cage. Of course he hated her. She’d have hated him too if their positions were reversed. Well. She was the reason
she
was locked in the cage, too, but that didn’t count. She thought through it all over and over again in lieu of sleeping, and came to no conclusions whatsoever, save for the sad surety that Max was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, and that he must have hated her.

By the time the first rays of the morning woke her from the doze she’d finally fallen into, her foot had stopped hurting. That was something. She looked over to see that Max was in more or less the same place, curled up amidst the straw, still sound asleep from the look of him. She cracked her neck, stiff from having been sitting all night in the same spot, and once she’d rubbed the sleep from her eyes, she caught sight of Mabel walking down the lane towards the cage. She was dressed in high platform sandals and her floral silk robe, her pale blond beard in curlers, and carrying two trays. Kat brushed the straw from her jeans and crawled to the bars of the cage as Mabel arrived.

“How’s your foot?” the bearded lady asked her.

“Feels better.”

She nodded to the still-sleeping Max. “And him?”

“He’s been like that most of the night.”

“Good sign. Means the drugs I gave him worked.”

Kat blinked at her. “You gave him a sedative?”

Mabel smirked. “You think your father would’ve left you in there with him if I hadn’t? Tsk.”

“Are you going to let me out of here?”

Kat slid one of the trays under the lowest bar of the cage. It was breakfast. Oatmeal, some melon, coffee. Then she slid the next under. Medical supplies.

“Change his bandages for me,” she said.

“Me?”

“You’re already in there, and it’d be bad for my knees to be stooped like that. He’s still out. Just change the bandages while I go get the keys from Baptiste.”

She backed up from the bars.

“Is Liam okay?” Kat asked.

Mabel hesitated, but nodded. “He should be. We still don’t know for sure about the arm.”

“Mabel, we have to stop this from happening. More people will get hurt.”

Mabel sighed. “From your lips to the Ringmaster’s ears, Kitty-Kat.” Then she turned to head back down the lane towards the common mess, where everyone would be eating breakfast together. Kat grabbed the fresh bandages and the cleaning solution from the tray and carefully approached the sleeping wolf, pausing on her way a few times to be sure he was still unconscious.

Once she was satisfied, she sank down to her knees beside him and gently laid her hands upon his shoulder, trying to roll him lightly onto his back. He tipped at her touch, easing over, exposing his bare chest and exquisitely carved abdomen, and…well. Kat stared at it for a minute, couldn’t help it, and then she shook herself and started removing the blood-soaked bandage that Mabel had applied to his side the night before.

His hand snapped up and he caught her by the wrist.

She jumped, and then went still.

“I’m changing your bandage,” she said quickly.

He grimaced, but didn’t yet open his eyes. His grip on her wrist was tight, but it loosened a little. “I feel sick.”

“You’ve been given a sedative so that you don’t kill me.” She tugged a little and he finally let go of her wrist. She pulled away the dirty bandage and lifted the cleaning solution and a fresh linen. “This is going to sting.”

“I told you I wouldn’t hurt you,” he mumbled.

“Well, now you just
can’t
, which makes everyone more comfortable.”

“Not me.”

“You’re the prisoner.”

“You’re in the cage with me.”

“We’ve been over this.”

“Morning makes you beautiful.”

Kat froze, one hand splayed against his side, cleaning the wound, and she stared at him. He’d just said she was beautiful. It had to have been whatever Mabel had given him.

She blurted, “Well, I have morning breath.”

And then of all things, Max
smiled
. “Prove it. Kiss me.”

Kat redirected her eyes immediately to the bandage she was smoothing over the wound in his side. “You’re high. There’s breakfast for you.”

“I dreamed of you.”

She grimaced. “Stop talking.”

“I dreamed of making love to you.”

She felt her face heat up. “You don’t even know me.”

“I know your smell. I hate that I want you, but I do. Let me out of this cage, Kat.”

“So
that’s
what this is.” She sighed. “You’re trying to seduce me so I’ll set you free. Well, it won’t work. And you probably can’t even walk right now anyway. There.”

He reached for her again, but she leaned sharply back, grabbing up the dirty bandage and the cleaning solution. She kicked some straw onto him, covering up his
business
, and then backed up to the door of the cage. To her relief, she saw Mabel coming back down the lane with Baptiste, and the keys to the cage.

Max groaned. “Don’t leave me in here.”

“It’s not up to me,” she told him.

He tried to lift his head but he couldn’t, and Kat felt a preposterous combination of relief and regret. She was sorry that Mabel had drugged him so that he couldn’t focus, or even get up. But she was relieved because she knew her face was bright pink and he was naked and she just needed to get out of the cage before she humiliated herself further.

Morning makes you beautiful.

She almost slammed her forehead against the bars, like maybe that could just knock those words right out of her memory. Fortunately, Baptiste arrived at the cage door and unlocked it, reaching in to take her by the arm and lead her out and down the steps to the grass. Her foot twinged a little, but she shifted her weight and ignored it. Mabel took the first aid cleaner and bandages from her and tucked them into a plastic bag she’d had stuffed into her brassiere, and Baptiste urged Kat down the lane, away from the cages. She glanced back over her shoulder, once, but Max was still lying on his back and hadn’t moved.

Morning makes you beautiful.

Kiss me.

I dreamed of making love to you.

Don’t leave me in here.

She blushed again.