Nalini Singh - The Magical Christmas Cat

Despite her fear at how quickly he'd gotten under her skin, she couldn't help but be delighted that he wanted to spend more time with her. Hard on its heels came disappointment. "I have to be back by six," she said. "Family dinner."

Zach shot her a quick glance. "You don't sound too enthusias­tic."

She understood the surprise in his voice. All the DarkRiver cats she knew had one thing in common—family was the bedrock of their world. And Pack was one big extended family as far as they were concerned—she'd had senior pack members turn up to parent-teacher conferences more than once when the parent was ill or un­avoidably delayed. "My mom keeps trying to set me up with men."

Zach's expression changed and, for the first time, she saw the ruthless soldier in him. "What kind of men?"

"Academics." She shrugged. "Mom and Dad are both professors at Berkeley—math and physics respectively."

"Are academics your type?"

"No."

He glanced at her again, and those eyes had gone leopard on her. "Are you sure?"

"Quite." She found herself refusing to be intimidated by the sense of incipient danger in the air. If she gave an inch, Zach would take a mile. And while she might not be a dominant female, it was important that he respect her. She frowned. Of course it was impor­tant, but that thought, it had been so vivid, so strong, so visceral —as if her mind knew something it wasn't yet ready to share.

Then Zach spoke again, breaking her train of thought. "So you'll be skipping the dinner." It was an order plain and simple.

Annie opened her mouth. What came out was, "No, I'll take you."

Zach's grin was openly pleased. "What's the blind date going to say?"

She couldn't believe she'd just done that, ordered him to do something. More, she couldn't believe he'd agreed. "Probably, 'Thank God.' "

"Huh?"

"My cousin Caroline works at the university, too. The men come in expecting a statuesque, intellectual, blond beauty and get me."

"So?"

She scowled, wondering if he was teasing her again. "So, I'm about as opposite Caro as you can get."

"If they ignored you, that's their loss. Too damn bad for them." He shrugged. "Do you want to put on some music?"

She blinked at the way he'd swept aside the disappoint-ments of the past with that simple statement. If she hadn't already liked him, that would've done it. "No, I need to tell you something about my mom." She swallowed, realizing she'd made a mess of things. If she hadn't mentioned the dinner, she could've avoided this altogether.

Zach groaned. "Don't tell me, she's a vegetarian?" he said, as if that was the worst thing possible.

She supposed for a leopard changeling, it was. "No." For once, he couldn't make her smile despite herself. "My mum is a little"— she tried to find an easy way to say this and failed—"biased against changelings."

"Ah. Let me guess—she thinks we're only one step up from animals?"

She felt very, very awkward discussing this, but she had to warn him about what he might face if he went to dinner with her. "It's not so blunt. She has no problem with other humans, and she ad­mires the Psy, but she's never wanted me dating, or getting friendly with"—she raised her fingers in quotation marks—" 'the rough changeling element.' "

"What about you?" A deceptively soft question.

"That's an insult, Zach," she said as softly. "If that's what you really think of me—"

He swore. "Sorry, Annie, you're right, I'm being an ass. My only excuse is that you hit a hot button."

"I know." She couldn't blame him for his reaction. "It makes me really uncomfortable, but I've tried to change her mind, and it's never worked."

"What does she think of you teaching in a school with such a big changeling population?"

"That it's my version of acting out." She laughed at his expres­sion, awkwardness dissipating. "No, she doesn't seem to realize I'm a grown-up, as the kids would say."

"Why do you let her get away with it?"

She was beginning to expect the straight-up questions from him. "My mom was on that train with me. She tried and tried and tried to get me out even though I was pinned under so much wreck­age, she didn't have a hope of shifting anything." Her throat choked with the force of memory. "Her arm was broken at the time, but she didn't cry a single tear. She just kept trying to get me out."

Zach reached out to run his knuckles over her cheek. "She loves you."

She found comfort in the touch, and when he returned his hand to the steering wheel, she realized he'd somehow given her strength. "Yes. That's why I let her get away with so much." She leaned her head against the seat. "This thing she has for the Psy, the way she almost deifies them, it has its roots in the accident, too."

"How?"

"There was this boy—I don't know where he came from, but he was small, my age or younger. Cardinal eyes." She shivered at the memory of the chill in those extraordinary white-stars-on-black-velvet eyes. Psy lived lives devoid of emotion, but she'd never seen a child that utterly cold. "He lifted the wreckage off me."

"Telekinetic." Zach whistled. "You got lucky."

"Yeah." The Council didn't release its telekinetics for mundane rescue work—especially not when an incident affected mainly hu­mans and changelings. "The medics told me he'd saved my life. My internal organs were close to collapse—a few more minutes, and I wouldn't have made it."

"Did you ever find out who he was?"

She shook her head. "He disappeared in the chaos. I've always thought that he teleported in from another location, after somehow seeing me in the live coverage. I remember there was a remote me­dia chopper flying overhead, and if he was strong enough to lift the amount of wreckage that he did, he was strong enough to teleport." She couldn't imagine the strength of will it took to harness that much power. "He can't have been on the train—his clothes were spotless, and he didn't have so much as a smudge on his face."

"Psy aren't born lacking emotions," Zach told her, "they're con­ditioned to it. So it could be that he was still human enough to feel the need to help when he saw what had happened."

"How do you know about the conditioning?" She answered her own question a second later. "Your alpha's mated to a cardinal Psy." The news of that mating had sent Shockwaves throughout the country.

"Sascha," he said, nodding. "Vaughn, one of the sentinels, is also mated to a Psy."

She couldn't imagine a member of the cold Psy race embrac­ing emotion. But changeling leopards mated for life, and the bond between mates was a dazzling beacon apparent even to a human observer. If these women had mated with DarkRiver cats, they were undoubtedly as radiant and as strong as the other women she'd seen. "Will I meet them today?"

"I know Luc and Sascha are coming. Likely Faith and Vaughn will, too." He turned down a quiet road lined with trees. "I'll try to get you back by six so you can get ready for dinner, but we might cut it fine."

She bit the inside of her cheek. "I think I should cancel. I really don't want my mom to . . . I would hate for you to feel that—"

"Hey," he said, shooting her a glance that spoke of the soldier within, "I'm a big boy. I can handle it. Promise."

Promises are for keeping.

Deciding to trust him, she dug out her phone from the pocket of her jeans. "I'll tell Mom I'm bringing someone and that we'll be late."

"Yeah. It'll give your date time to find another partner." That lethal edge was back in his voice.

Her stomach muscles tightened. "Zach?"

"Might as well get this out in the open." He pulled the car into a small layby and turned to brace his hand against the top edge of her seat. "I'm not real good at sharing."