Tiger Bound (11 page)

* * *

She’d said something he hadn’t expected to hear, Katie knew that much. She’d known enough to give him space after that, too—disentangling, still full of her own hot confusion.

He’d barely touched her. And yet, there she’d been...sated on the front porch, in the arms of a tiger.

One who’d known how to tame the deer, fear and all.

Later, wandering her loft bedroom while Maks slept in that cluttered first-floor bedroom—she had no idea how to put it all together. Unlike Maks, she couldn’t just
accept
without understanding. She needed to know that he’d come to respect her seeings and her healing, in the wake of so many little subtle indications to the contrary. She needed to know why her vision had grown so intense...and her body so needy. And she needed to know how—and
why
—Maks figured into the other things she’d seen. Because it was her job to understand what the warnings meant.

Pretty full of yourself, Katie Rae.
Her job was—and always had been—to report what she saw and let brevis sort it out. She might have more practice at that if she hadn’t been looking aside from herself for so long. Squelching herself.

She couldn’t quite blame her neglected talent for failing to fall into line, but it meant she had nothing to work with but disparate pieces. Maks.
Glinting metal and splashing blood, a blur of startled green eyes, a muted roar and a cry of pain.
The Core at the back of her house, leaving an amulet of silent menace. Images of oppressive dark space and terror, a deep stabbing awareness of
wrong...

Nick Carter had no doubt hoped there was nothing amiss here at all—no doubt hoped this assignment would be an easy reintroduction to the field for a recovering Sentinel. But she didn’t imagine he knew just how deeply compromised Maks had become.

And no matter how many times she put all the facts together in her thoughts, rolled them together and tossed them out again, they didn’t fall into any neat pattern. They didn’t tell her what to do next.

They didn’t let her sleep.

Then again, maybe that was for the best. It let her watch while her wounded tiger slept.

Chapter 8

M
orning found Maks back on the couch, and Katie at the end of her rope.

She didn’t know where he’d spent the night after she’d left him, or how—whether it had been indoors or out, man or tiger. She only knew his misery was obvious.

But he wouldn’t talk to her. And while in some part of her mind she understood that he’d been through too much in the past twenty-four hours, the rest of her thought she deserved better.

He lay slanted across the couch, his arm cradled and his breathing too uneven for him to be asleep. His brows drew together briefly even as she watched; his breath hitched.

Definitely not asleep.

The yellow cat stropped past Maks’s shins; Maks cracked his eyes open in a kind of bleary surprise.

Katie leaned against the door frame between the living room and the kitchen, her hands wrapped around a mug of early-morning hot chocolate. “You should eat something.”

How she understood that infinitesimal shift of his head to be a refusal to do any such thing, she wasn’t sure. She raked her eyes over the length of him, taking up more room than the couch had to offer, and didn’t even have to delve into her healer’s perceptions to see what the day before had taken from him. “If you’re hurting—”
If.
Right. “—I can help you.”

She barely heard his response, a raspy murmur that added up to another shake of the head. She set the mug down on the little entertainment stand and took a frustrated step in his direction.

His eyes widened, the tiger looking out with alarm; he lurched to his feet and headed for the door, ragged words in his wake. “Can’t risk it.”

Her temper flared at the implication of those words. The previous evening’s events had been unexpected, but she was ready for them now—and he’d been the one who’d said to go with the moment. Unless he simply didn’t understand—didn’t believe—the healing that had come with their connection the previous evening. “Maks, this is stupid. I can make things so much easier for you—”

He’d been aiming for the door. He walked right into the frame, groping for the handle a good six inches away. Katie froze, horrified—ashamed at herself for driving him to leave when he could barely navigate, startled at his condition in the first place. “Maks—!”

Maks froze, his hand falling slowly back to his side—as if he, too, had been confronted with his own weakness. He stood that way for a long moment, swaying slightly. When he shifted, it changed the entire nature of his stance—turned it from wild-in-flight to curiosity-got-the-cat. His head lifted just enough so she knew he’d caught the scent from her mug. “Is that hot chocolate?”

“Yes,” she told him. “Would you like some?”

* * *

Maks needed help back to that couch—and he knew without a doubt that she wouldn’t have left him there to heat more milk if she’d allowed herself to listen with her healer’s skills. Then, she would have heard the buzz of dissonant energies bouncing around within him; she might have guessed that his vision throbbed with color and echoes.

She might have realized that he was totally screwed up—and if she hadn’t immediately called brevis, she would have tried to fix it all.

Not again.
Not until he understood more about it...not until he was sure he could control it.

But he was grateful for the hot chocolate. And he was grateful when she pressed a hand to his shoulder and said she had an equine house call, and a stop to make on the way home...but she wouldn’t go unless he promised he’d rest right there until she got back.

She didn’t repeat her offer to help. For that, he was most grateful of all. For as much as he wanted the intimacy of her healer’s touch, he couldn’t expose her to his own unpredictable nature.

It didn’t bother him that he’d almost taken her on the porch. But that she’d lacked intent...that she’d had doubts...

Yeah, that bothered him.

It was up to Maks to figure out Maks.

But mostly he just slept, right there on the couch with the sweet dregs of the hot chocolate soothing his mind. He slept until the yellow cat—which had claimed a tight little spot between his hip and the back of the couch—leaped down to the floor.

The movement woke him from a dead sleep full of fears and portents and pain, mixing energies and confusion. He leaped from the couch in a fever dream of fury, landing as tiger...claws digging into the plain pine planking of the living room floor. The world whirled around him, a cacophony of sensation, and he flattened to a crouch, ears against his skull—the tiger armed and dangerous and completely out of control, driven by the need to strike back at that which struck from within.

The yellow cat, back arched and tail puffed huge, froze against the screen door like a Halloween silhouette, hissing fiercely—but only until he bounced out on his toes to smack Maks soundly across his whiskered muzzle. Then he dashed off, back still arched and tail stuck up in defiance.

Maks released a chuffing breath of surprise, slapped right out of his inward obsession—and only then heard Katie’s car door close outside the house. He clawed his way back to the human...and got no further before she took the steps to the porch. Her car keys hit the porch floor with a jangle; the soft thump of a cloth shopping bag landed beside them. “Maks!”

Panic flared all over again—the awareness that he wasn’t himself, that he didn’t have the control he should. “Stay...
back,
” he told her, desperate words through gritted teeth that she never had the chance to hear.

“I’m such an
idiot!
” she said, throwing herself down beside him, one gentle hand landing on his shoulder, the healing already flowing—gentle, soothing...skilled.

Or meant to be. It collided with the turmoil within Maks, skidding instantly out of control; it flared hot and wild and surged into something too big for a human body to hold. Blue-white energies cut through the room, shards of light and shadow that left the tiger behind.

For that instant, Katie froze in stunned fear; for that instant, Maks faced her with all the wild and none of the tame, his whiskers bristling and fangs exposed in a snarl. An instant long enough for Katie’s deer to flash terror and for her breath to stutter on a shriek of fear and reaction—for Maks to feel that fear slam into the already roiling energies that burned inside his chest.

He threw himself away from her, finding his human even as he rolled up against the couch and to his knees, to his feet—and this time he made it as far as the porch before he ran into the post that subsequently held him up.

But not alone; not for long.

Katie’s hand shook as it landed gently on his back—none of her healing touch, all her energies tucked inside. “I am so sorry,” she said. “I should never have intruded that way. I was just so frightened for you—”

“Not your fault,” Maks managed, scraping to find words at all. “I just can’t—”
Can’t do that again. Can’t risk you.

He heard understanding on her sudden intake of breath. “This is what you were afraid of earlier.”

“Can’t risk you,” he said.

“Because that’s not who you are,” she said, and her hand pressed with gentle persistence between his shoulders. “That’s not what you do.”

He snorted without any strength behind it. “Right.”

“This
is
my fault, Maks. Please let me help.” She must have felt his instant resistance, the stiffening of his back and shoulders. “Please. I’ll be careful. I won’t intrude. But you relax...if you just let it...” She hesitated, and he saw it coming.
“Be.”

He said nothing, but he lifted his head slightly, looking out into the blur of the woods, and she took it for the assent that it was.

To his surprise, he felt nothing from her. Instead, after a deep breath, she said, “On the way home this morning, I talked to my neighbor. Larry Williams. He hunts a lot, and I know his friends run with Akins sometimes.” It didn’t make sense to Maks, but he listened, her calm tone pushing away his earlier fear. “Larry’s a good guy, and the way he dotes on his own dog, I figured he’d talk if he knew anything about Akins. I was right, too—except, like me, he only suspects. But maybe with two of us keeping our eyes open...” She let her words trail off, and after a moment, asked, “Better?”

Maks lifted his head, surprised to find the woods in sharp focus. He looked at his hands on the porch rail as if they might be someone else’s; he looked back to Katie, his mouth open on words that didn’t come.

“I got smart,” she told him, somewhat ruefully. Her hand still rested on his back. “What you need right now is
less,
not more.”

Less.
He sighed with the relief of it.

“I couldn’t do that much,” she said. “I’m just—”

He shook his head. “Katie,” he said, stopping whatever she had to say next. “It’s
everything.
”

She flushed slightly and moved away from him—looking, as he had, off into the woods. “I cleared away what I could—what was coming from you. I can’t go get anything, not without—” She glanced aside at him, made her fingers into claws.
“Rawr.”

Maks choked on a laugh.

“Seriously,” she said. “You need to take it easy. We’re waiting for someone to come for the amulet, right? Well, I’ve got clients this afternoon, too—I don’t need babysitting. So just rest. And buffer yourself. From that amulet, from incoming stuff, from...me.” And she was already flushing, but she bit her lip with that canine peeking out and managed to give the impression of doing it again.

As if he, too, wasn’t thinking about the previous night, waking in her lap and in the thrall of something far more primal than either of them had been able to resist.

But it didn’t make him flush. It made him want. Regardless of how the wanting had ended last night on this porch.

* * *

Katie dropped another roll of elastic sticky bandages into her shopping tote and eyed a green tin of antibiotic ointment charmingly illustrated with a cow.

It had, in the end, been Maks’s suggestion to come here for supplies. “Small town,” he’d said, and she had understood. If she stocked up on first aid supplies at the drugstore, how many people would check on her before the day was out?

But shopping at the local farm store would raise few questions for someone who spent so much of her professional time with dogs, and who often came here for bird seed.

Maks looked much improved
in the two days since his injury. He’d spent the time sprawled on her couch, sleeping fitfully, waking to prowl the grounds and grumbling when she backed him down every time he wanted to set rudimentary wards. Recovering as well as a restless tiger could.

He kept the arm close to his side but the weakness wasn’t obvious. Maks himself looked rested but still wan, his color less robust than normal...his energy quiescent.

Katie should have felt the same. Deep healings often took a toll on her, but this morning...no. This morning she found herself smiling, as if in being needed by Maks—
challenged
by him—something within her had remembered how to reach out to the rest of the world...and liked it.

Old Mike at the counter didn’t miss it as she spread her items on the counter to be rung up. “You look fine and happy this morning, Katie Rae.”

Katie looked out into the bright sunshine through the open door and then back to Mike’s lined face and shock of thick white hair. “I suppose I am.”

Not that she didn’t still have the visions to deal with—to understand. Or that Maks didn’t have mysteries dogging him, and a worrisome tangle of energies eating at him from within. But for the moment—
this
moment—she would smile and enjoy the day.

She glanced over at Maks, found an echo of her smile at the corner of his mouth...found him breathtaking. Tall and powerful even in repose, flannel shirt sleeves rolled up far enough to obscure persistent blood stains but not so far as to reveal the bandage, rugged features with an honest gentleness around those green eyes—