Lisa Childs - Taming The Shifter

“You’ll be able to help her?” he asked the surgeon for his assurance.

“I won’t be able to go home if I don’t save Kate,” Davison replied. “Now get out of here. She can’t see you like that.”

A moan emanated from Kate’s throat as she shifted on the table, reaching for her head.

It was too late for Warrick to hide.

* * *

Images flitted through Kate’s mind. Bright lights and searing pain and dark alleys and sterile rooms...and a man who wasn’t a man. Her head pounded as she tried to sort out those brief images. But they were like old photographs, the colors faded and washed-out, so that she could barely make out the subjects.

Like old dreams that she could barely remember...

Dreaming. She had to be dreaming. Her eyes were closed; the lids so heavy she could barely lift them. After some effort she managed to blink them open and blink away the grit of deep sleep.

Then she focused on the room. Sunlight streaked through the blinds at the window, casting a warm glow onto the hardwood floor where her clothes lay in a heap. She fought against the sheets tangled around her, but as she sat up, the room spun. Her head lightened and the bright glow dimmed.

“Easy,” a familiar deep voice murmured. “Not so fast...”

He was back .

Instinct had her reaching under the other pillow but her palm skimmed across the satin sheet to the edge of the bed. The gun was gone.

“You don’t need it,” he said as he approached the bed. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Someone hit me...in the alley.” That had happened, hadn’t it? She’d been in the alley, searching for... him . But he must have found her first.

“It wasn’t me,” he said and just as he had that first night, he settled onto the bed beside her—as if he was familiar with her bedroom. With her.

She snorted. “As if you’d admit it if it was... I would arrest you for assaulting an officer.”

“You’ve tried once to arrest me for assault.”

But he had disappeared, like those images from her mind. She couldn’t remember now exactly what she’d seen. What had been real and what a dream. Was he a dream?

“How did I get here?” she wondered. Not just in her apartment and in her bed, but naked beneath her sheets. Just how much of the night before had she forgotten? Had he taken off her clothes? What else had he done to her? She shivered as she imagined him touching her and more...

“I found you in the alley,” he said. “I got you some medical help then brought you back here. Don’t you remember anything?”

She reached a trembling hand toward her head, and her fingers skimmed over a gauze bandage. Stitches tightened the skin beneath it, which throbbed with a dull ache. “No...” she murmured. “I don’t remember anything after I got hit.” At least she didn’t remember anything that seemed real—that could have actually happened.

“You have a concussion,” he said as he gently trailed his fingers along the edge of the gauze. “Someone hit you really hard. Did you see who it was?”

“Only the bright light...” And the shadow behind it. The tall, broad-shouldered shadow. It could have been him.

But then why was there so much concern in his eerie topaz eyes? “Your pulse was so weak...” He shuddered. “I thought you were dead or nearly dead.”

“Why would you care?” she asked. After all, she had shot him. Or so she’d thought...

He shrugged those mammothly broad shoulders. “I don’t know...”

“You’re mad at me for not letting you kill that man,” she reminded him. He certainly had seemed more upset about that than her shooting him.

“Yes, I am,” he freely admitted.

“Was that really you?” she asked. “That man in the alley?”

“I told you I didn’t hit you—”

“Not tonight...” She glanced to the sun-streaked blinds. “Not last night. That night a couple of months ago. The man in the alley—the one that I shot. It couldn’t have been you. Was it your twin?”

He reached for the buttons on his shirt, undoing them so that the dark gray material parted and revealed the hard muscles of his chest, dusted with silky-looking black hair. But something marred the masculine perfection—a jagged scar over his heart. He shrugged off the shirt and revealed two more puckered, nasty-looking scars in one of his broad shoulders.

She gasped and reached out, running her fingertips over first the scars on his shoulder and then the one on his chest. The scars weren’t makeup or theatrics but real skin—so warm that her fingers tingled from the contact. The very air between them heated. Her breathing slowed and grew shallow, so that she nearly panted. Her pulse raced, pounding harder and faster than that faint ache in her head.

“It was you.” She swallowed the rush of emotion and desire. “I shot you .”

“Yes, you did.”

So he’d had every reason to want to hurt her back, every reason to have struck her in the alley. But he touched her gently now, his fingers trailing from her bandage down the side of her face and along her throat. “Are you sorry?”

She shook her head, but pain reverberated inside her skull with the motion and she winced and whimpered.

“Shh...” he said. “Take it easy. Go back to sleep.” He reached for his shirt again.

But she grabbed his shoulders. “Don’t leave...”

His body tensed, and his topaz eyes dilated. “Kate...?”

“Don’t leave without telling me your name.”

His mouth, with those sexy sensual lips, curved into a slight grin. “Warrick.”

“Warrick?”

“Yes. Warrick James.”

“Warrick James,” she repeated, loving the sound of it—the feel of his name on her lips.

He leaned closer, as if she’d drawn him nearer. “Yes, Kate?”

“You’re under arrest for assault—”

He laughed at her now. “You never quit.” He moved to stand up.

But she clutched at him, holding him down on the bed. Holding him to her. “You’re not disappearing again.”

She needed to bring him in to the department, needed to prove her sanity to her coworkers. Especially the one who had been most vocal with his disdain for her story about what had happened that night.

“How are you going to stop me, Kate?” he asked. “You have no gun. You’re hurt. You’re weak.”

She winced—not in pain but in self-disgust. “I’m not weak.” She wasn’t that same scared woman she’d once been. She was older, wiser and stronger now than she had ever been. And to prove it, she launched herself at him, wrestling him down to the mattress.

He sprawled on his back without a fight, his arms wrapped loosely around her waist. Her breasts nestled against his hard, scarred chest. “You’re not weak at all,” he assured her. “You’ve overpowered me.”

“Because you let me,” she suspected.

He nodded. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You did.”

“Not anymore,” he said, lifting his head to close the distance between his mouth and hers. His lips skimmed across hers. “Now I just want you...”

And she wanted him, her skin heating and tingling everywhere they touched. The sheet had slipped down, so that her breasts were bare against his chest. His hair, which covered his impressive pecs, tickled and teased her nipples, bringing them to tight, sensitive points.

“And I want—” she struggled free of his loose grasp and grabbed up the sheet again, holding it between them like a shield “—to arrest you.”

“I’m not a monster, Kate.”

One of those dreamlike images rushed back to her mind—of a man that wasn’t a man. Of a man who was a monster—a mammoth, heavily muscled, hairy beast.

She didn’t believe him; she didn’t believe anything Warrick James said. She had been fooled once before and had believed a man to be a hero when he was really a monster.