Drive Me Wild (22 page)

“Turn over now. Your leg next.”

Tess obeyed with a lazy grumble and shifted onto her back even as she kept the sheet pinned to her chest. The gesture made Rafe smile.

“So shy,
gatita
?” he teased. “Do you not remember all the places I saw last night? All the places I touched? And tasted?”

He leaned close and nuzzled the sensitive hollow beneath her ear, which earned him a hunched shoulder and a slap on the chest.

“Hey, back off, Garfield,” she scowled, but he saw the flash of warmth in her eyes and knew she wanted him as constantly as he wanted her. “Between the mugging I got on the street last night and the workout you put me through when I got home, I think I’m entitled to a day of rest here, all right?”

A chuckle of delight escaped him. He took no offense at her words. He could see in the delicate color beneath her eyes and the pale tone of her skin that his Tess really was tired, but he could smell in her fragrance that she still wanted him. That knowledge satisfied him for the moment.

Still, if he needed to strip away her covering in order to tend to her wounds … well, anything in the name of good health, yes?

She clung to the cotton with the tenacity of a dog with a bone. “Hey, I said give it a rest!”

Rafe clucked at her and shook his head, but he couldn’t quite suppress his smile. “You wound me,
gatita.
I am simply attempting to care for your injuries. I would assume that this healing cream is less effective when applied through a layer of cloth. Am I right?”

She glared.

“Now, now, be a good girl,” he urged, tugging at the thin fabric covering. “If you behave and take your medicine, maybe you will get a special surprise later on. How does that sound?”

Tess snorted and dropped her gaze between his legs. “Less than surprising,” she grumbled drily.

He chuckled. He couldn’t help it. When he was with Tess, he always felt like laughing. She did that to him.

“Get your mind out of the gutter, sweet Tess. I had something more like ice cream in mind. But I suppose that if you insist…”

“Oh, just give me that,” she snapped, holding a hand out for the salve. “I can take care of my thigh without your help.”

He turned serious. “But it gives me pleasure to help you. If I could not be there to prevent your injuries, then I at least need to be the one to tend to them. Please.”

The
please
seemed to act like a key in a lock, doing away with Tess’s irritable expression and making her soften back into the bed.

“Fine. Do your worst,” she said.

“Only my best for you,
gatita.
”

She let him draw the sheet down to the foot of the bed, her only protest the rosy flush of color that stained her cheeks and her chest with heat. Rafe found the sight entrancing. He couldn’t stop himself from taking a moment to drink in her beauty, all soft and warm and spread out before him like a saucer of heated cream. With her fair skin, golden hair, and blue eyes, she looked so different from him, so much smaller and more delicate. Fragile, even. When he put his hands on her, he marveled at the contrasts between them, then marveled again at how right it felt to touch her. Like she belonged.

To him.

Tess cleared her throat nervously, and Rafe offered her a reassuring smile. Dragging his attention back to her wounds, he surveyed the damage to her luscious, curved thigh. The bruise there had come up sooner, so he’d seen more of it yesterday than he had on the one on her shoulder. He had to admit that while it still looked painful—and apparently felt that way, judging by the way she drew in a sharp breath when he touched it—the salve did appear to have sped the healing up a little. Rafe could see larger margins of yellow, green, and gray around the perimeter of the bruise, signs of later stages of healing. Grunting in satisfaction, he began smoothing the salve onto her skin.

“I am still not convinced you should not see a doctor,” he said, scooping up another dollop of goo.

Tess propped herself up on her elbows to watch his treatment. “I told you, I’m fine. Nothing is broken, and a doctor can do less for deep bruising than I can do for myself. I just need a few days for the swelling to go down, and they won’t even hurt anymore. Trust me.”

Rafe did trust her; he trusted her with his very heart, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel the urge to wrap her up in cotton wool to ensure no harm ever touched her. He never wanted to let her out of his sight.

He opened his mouth to speak, to try to tell her what she had come to mean to him, but the strident peal of the doorbell cut him off.

Tess frowned and glanced at the clock. “It’s barely nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. Who the heck is at my front door?”

She swung her legs to the side of the bed and stood, hurrying over to her closet to grab a long, cotton robe off its hanger. Rafe already had his trousers on and busied himself fastening the buttons.

“I’ll see who it is,” he said and left the bedroom before she could stop him.

He heard her protests but ignored them. Instinct, deep and primitive, made him determined to place himself between Tess and any intruder. He didn’t care if it was her best friend at the door; from now on, anyone who wanted to see Tess would have to go through him.

Unfortunately, the door opened not on Tess’s best friend, but on her grandfather.

“Mr. Menzies,” he said smoothly, or as smoothly as he could while standing half naked in the living room of the visitor’s only grandchild. “What a surprise. Would you like to come in?”

Lionel pushed through the door with little grace.

“I can’t say I’m surprised, unfortunately,” the old man snapped, planting himself in the living room so firmly, Rafe would not have been surprised to see roots growing into the carpet. “I was afraid this had happened. And to think I rushed all the way to this ghetto in the hope I could stop it before it was too late.”

“Granddad?”

Both men turned at the sound of Tess’s voice. She stood framed in the door to her bedroom with one hand clutching the sides of her robe closed in front of her. The pale blue material covered her from neck to toenails, but she didn’t appear comfortable with her appearance. Maybe because she and Rafe both looked as if they had just rolled out of bed.

Her bed.

“Tessa,” Lionel acknowledged coldly. “I would ask for the meaning of this, but it would only serve to insult us both. The evidence does, as they say, speak for itself.”

Rafe saw Tess flinch and lift a hand to smooth back her hair. Her grandfather’s words clearly affected her.

“Granddad, what are you doing here?” she asked, in a tone Rafe had never heard her use before. She sounded subdued, almost deferential. As far as he knew, his Tess never deferred to anyone.

“I hardly think why I came is the central issue, now that I’ve been greeted by this little scene.” Lionel gave Rafe an insulting visual once-over, then focused on his granddaughter with a haughty glare of disdain. “Really, Tessa. I’ve never credited you with much discrimination when it came to your personal life, but this? This is outrageous. You’ve given yourself to an animal. You couldn’t find yourself a man of at least the same species? Even an unmagical human would have been better than this.”

Tess must have heard Rafe growl, because she shot him a quelling look and gestured for him to stay where he was. “I didn’t think you had any interest in my personal life, Granddad. You rarely ask me about it anymore, after all.”

“Why should I bother to ask? I know the answers would only disappoint me,” the old man glowered. “I did my best to steer you you in the proper direction while you were under my roof. I raised you, I dressed you, I introduced you to all the right people. And how did you repay me? You did nothing to secure the proper sort of husband I tried to steer you toward. You could have been the wife of a councilor, and instead you chose to defy me and become some sort of hippie, selling herbs and potions like some medieval peasant woman. That was humiliation enough. But this?” He waved a hand toward Rafe. “This is too much.”

While he had decided long ago that people who threw around such nasty words were not worth listening to, Rafe now learned that hearing them spoken to his woman made him want to rip out the tongue that uttered them. Only Tess stepping forward to place a hand on his arm held him back.

“This? You might think it’s ‘too much,’ but you don’t seem surprised by it,” she said, her voice quiet but calm. Only through her touch on his bare arm could he feel the tension that gripped her. “In fact, you seem as if you already knew Rafe and I had formed a relationship over the past couple of weeks. How is that, Granddad? We haven’t exactly been painting the town red these days.”

“You can’t hide these things from me, Tessa. I always find out.” Lionel’s blue eyes speared into her, and Rafe had to fight back the urge to step between the two family members, to protect Tess from the man who had raised her. “As it happens, I began to suspect something when I encountered your animal friend here at the Vircolac Club. Your energy clung to his aura like dryer lint. I had intended to prepare him for his meeting with the council, but now I’m no longer sure that meeting should even take place. Not only has De Santos compromised his impartiality by consorting with a member of our community, such as she is, but from what I saw at the club, he can’t even control his own animalistic tendencies. As far as I’m concerned, I should go straight back to the Witches’ Council and advise them to rethink their request to meet with the Others. Especially with an Other like this.”

Once again, Tess held him back. His jaguar chafed at the restraint, at being asked to allow his mate to be insulted in his presence. The beast wanted to teach Lionel Menzies some manners, preferably through the judicious use of claws and fangs. The man, however, realized that violence would solve nothing. It would only distress Tess and prove Lionel’s point.

But that didn’t mean Rafe had to be happy about the situation.

Beside him, Tess drew a slow, deep breath.

“Grandfather,” she began, and he could hear how she had to strain to keep her tone level, “I doubt anyone cares whom I date enough to approve or disapprove. The only person who gets a say in how I run my life is me. Of course, I do try to take your feelings into consideration when I can, but—”

“You call
this
taking my feelings into consideration?”

“Maybe not, but I had no reason to believe you would have any feelings one way or the other. You’re not usually very interested in my life. I, however, am interested in hearing about when you two ran into each other and why I’m only hearing about it now.”

She cast Rafe a pointed look.

He raised her hand and brushed his lips over the backs of her fingers. “I am sorry,
gatita.
This happened yesterday afternoon, and it flew completely out of my head the moment I saw you again.”

“Very touching,” Lionel sneered. “And very smooth for a man I last encountered looking like an extra from a low-budget horror movie. Tell me, Tessa, do you find him equally attractive when his face is covered with yellow fur and black spots?”

Tess looked from Rafe to her grandfather and back again. “What is he talking about?”

“Nothing important. I was simply … not feeling well when your grandfather saw me—”

“What I saw was an animal walking on two legs. That might be something that you find attractive, Tessa, but I can assure you it will not appeal to the members of the Witches’ Council. If we’re going to throw our lot in with the Others, we would at least like to remain reasonably certain that they won’t lose control and turn on us at any moment.”

That was it.

Rafe bared his teeth at the older man. “Believe me when I tell you, Mr. Menzies, that if I were likely to turn on you, I would already have done so.”

Tess shushed him. “Granddad, I don’t know what you saw yesterday, because I wasn’t there, but I do know Rafe, and I can assure you that he’s not a threat to you or to any other member of the council. For pete’s sake, do you think the Others would let him lead their Council if he really couldn’t be relied on to control himself?”

“How should I know how those animals think?” Lionel demanded, stepping forward, his blue eyes shooting lasers at Rafe. “I can only base my opinions on what I can see, and what that tells me is that this man can’t be trusted.”

One more step and Lionel would be close enough to touch Tess, and that was something Rafe couldn’t allow, not when anger held such a clear grip on the man. When the old witch moved again, Rafe stepped forward to place himself between him and Tess, inadvertently jerking on the hand that still gripped his bare arm. He heard her gasp and looked down to see all the color draining from her face.

He froze, instantly forgetting about Menzies and focusing all of his attention on his mate. “I am so sorry,
gatita.
I never meant to aggravate your injury. How badly does it hurt? Do you need to see a doctor this time?”

“What are you talking about? What injury?” Lionel demanded, shifting until he could see his granddaughter’s face over the Feline’s shoulder. “Tessa, did this animal hurt you?”

Rafe gave a muffled roar at the very idea, but Tess was already shaking her head.

“No, Granddad, Rafe didn’t hurt me,” she said. “I was mugged last night coming home. The guy who attacked me hit me a couple of times before someone scared him off. I’m just sore, is all. Sore and bruised. I’m fine. And I don’t need a doctor,” she added, for Rafe’s benefit.

“You don’t need to lie to protect him, Tessa. If he injured you in any way—”

“Granddad!” Tess snapped, waiting until the man fell silent and frowned down at her. “I’m not lying. Rafe would never hurt me. In fact, he took care of me last night when I got home. That’s why he stayed here last night—so he could look after me.”

Rafe bit back to urge to clarify that it hadn’t been the only reason he had stayed. Somehow, he didn’t think Tess would appreciate the interjection.

“At this point, I don’t think it’s all that important what you believe,” she said with a frown of her own. “What’s important is that you have the courtesy to treat me and my guests with respect while you’re in my home. Now might also be a good time for you to answer my original question: Why are you here, Granddad? You’ve always told me you’d rather be shot than step foot in my neighborhood. In fact, you seemed to think that if you did, you would be. So to what do I owe this surprise?”