Out of Chances (Taken by the Panther, #2) (7 page)

She made a face—directed inward, Chay thought. She said, “And now
I’m
not making any sense. But what I’m trying to say by this whole long-winded thing is that even though this thing in my head, this panther is new, maybe something like it has been there as long as I can remember.”

Chay’s mind reeled at the thought. She was absolutely, without a doubt not a natural shifter. Could it have been lurking in her body not months or a few years but many? It was an old strain. That would make a kind of sense, even if it was impossible according to everything he knew about shifters.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’ll have to do some research—”

“Some more research into me, you mean,” she said.

“That, too.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and he repressed the urge to shift his weight. If he were in his panther form, he’d be pacing now. He could feel the same kind of restlessness rise in her, in the expressions that flickered ever so briefly across her face.

“So, in your research, I bet you’ve seen my pictures with Tom Howe.” Her tone was as inscrutable as her expression.

Frak. He hadn’t seen that one coming. The video feed in his private rooms had switched off when he entered, and now he half-wished that it was on because that would have at least provided some kind of digital chaperone.

As much good as it did last time ....

But he was too acutely aware now that he stood far too close to a very desirable woman in his hands, a woman whose needy body had sent him into madness before, whom the panther within him immediately recognized in a way that Chay still didn’t want to think about.

“I’ve seen your photos with everyone,” he managed to say, his voice perfectly level.

“He was older than me, too,” she pointed out.

Chay didn’t care to talk about that man—more to the point, the panther didn’t. It bristled at the mere mention of his name. But he just said, “That was pretty obvious.”

“It was easier to be with him,” Tara said. “Than someone my own age, I mean. Because...well, he didn’t expect that we were more or less the same. And he didn’t notice that I wasn’t. He wasn’t my first boyfriend, you know. Or my last. There was this Scottish guy that I met in Bhutan of all places—”

“Right,” Chay agreed, cutting her off. This conversation was making him think the kind of thoughts that would get him into serious trouble. It made him want to silence her mouth with another kiss, to push her down on the bed—

He stopped himself.

“Anyhow, I don’t make a habit of seducing older guys,” she said, her breath coming a little faster. “I just wanted you to know. What happened with you and me—it was spontaneous.”

“It was definitely that.” Spontaneous—and amazing. Dammit, but the panther was well roused now, driving Chay’s sense of smell to a higher peak. He could smell the soap and shampoo that she’d just used and the smell of her hair and her skin. He could even smell her sex—and the scent of it, as faint as it was, was like a spike driving slowly through his brain.

She tipped her head back slightly more. “And it definitely won’t happen again. I mean, the cameras are recording right now, right?” There was a light in her eyes that was pleading—but for what, he didn’t know and didn’t want to think about.

“No, they’re not,” he said. He didn’t dare to move because once he did, he knew he couldn’t control the outcome.

She swore softly even as her body inclined toward his.

Chay looked down at her, and he hit the button on his smart watch that set his status to “do not disturb.”

“I really am an irredeemable bastard,” he said. And then he closed the distance between them and kissed her.

Tara seemed to turn to liquid at Chay’s touch, and she opened her lips under his, begging him with it, with the softness of her body against the hardness of his chest. He gathered her ample body to his, one hand snug against her ass, the other sliding up her arm, up her neck until his thumb found her chin and urged her teeth apart.

A shudder ran through her frame as she surrendered, and the panther in him roared up at the thought that she was utterly and completely his now, that he could do anything to her, anything at all, and she would give herself over to it. To him.

Her hands were already under his shirt, sliding against his skin. He let her peel it off, and she took advantage of the freeing of her mouth to say, “This is really a bad idea.”

“Entirely,” he agreed even as he helped her pull her own shirt over her head.

“I’m going to be so mad at myself.” She dragged his head down to meet her lips again even as she toed off her shoes. Her mouth was hot and hungry under his, and she shuddered as he pushed his tongue between her lips, stroking the inside of her mouth, tasting her, taking her.

His need for her was like a hammer in his brain, drumming away, pushing him in only one direction. She’d just said a lot of things, many of them possibly crucially important—but nothing that couldn’t wait for a few hours.

Which was good, because right at that moment, the only thing he wanted to do was Tara. And it wasn’t to stop her from shifting. There wasn’t even a pretense of that thought left any longer. It wasn’t because he was taken unawares, because he’d felt this coming from the moment she stepped into his bedroom—maybe even before.

It was because he wanted to, plain and simple.

Her bra followed her shirt, and then he did drive her back to his bed. It had been too damned long since he’d been with a woman. That must be it.

“I’m abusing my position of authority,” he said aloud. “You could feel coerced. Confused.”

“Definitely no on the coerced,” she said firmly even as the backs of her calves came up against the edge of the platform. She went over backwards—and dragged him with her.

Deftly, Chay twisted in midair so that he fell alongside her instead of on top of her on the bed.

“Definitely yes on the confused,” she continued, and she planted a feather-light kiss on one corner of his mouth as his hands skated over her hips and down, taking her pants with them. “So this is probably even more stupid than the first time.”

She kissed the opposite corner of his mouth, her hands roving lower, across his belly to the waistband of his pants, and his already rock-hard cock ached with the need to be inside her. “But just now, I don’t care.” And she kissed him full on the mouth just as his hand slid across her curls to find her clit among them.

She moaned at his touch, and he kissed her harder. He wanted to do so many things to her, to hear her hot and begging, to do things to her body that she’d never imagined before and no one would ever do again. She writhed against his hand, her own coming down over his, but he grabbed them both in one of his, pinning her wrists together above her head.

She struggled against him—not to stop him but to make him do what she wanted, when she wanted it. But his hold on her was secure, and he kept stroking her with his other hand, setting his pace to what made her face pull taut with need, her increasingly rapid breaths making her small, apricot-tipped breasts heave tantalizingly.

“Oh,”
she said in a tone halfway between outrage and pleasure, tugging against his hold.

“I’ll stop,” he promised. “One word, and I’ll stop.”

“Don’t...you...
dare,”
she said through clenched teeth as a shudder went through her.

The shudder turned deeper as she came for the first time, an orgasm that twisted her face and caused her hips to push into his hand with the rhythm he set with his fingers. She wanted him inside her—her expression of near-pain and the bucking of her hips told him as much. And he throbbed to be inside her, to bury himself as she screamed out his name.

But he held back, held back even as she slid down the other side of her climax. And he suddenly felt like a god.

“Please,” she said breathlessly. “Please, please.”

“Please what?” Chay demanded.

Her bright eyes flew open, meeting his.

“Please save me.”

The words went through him like a knife, twisting in his guts. Asking him the impossible, the one promise he knew he couldn’t keep.

The one promise that he’d keep at all costs.

“I will, bae girl,” he swore. “You know I will.”

And with that, he let go of her wrists to drag her leggings off the rest of the way, kissing her mouth, her chin, her neck, until he reached her pert, delicious breasts.

He took her nipple in his mouth as her hands moved across his shoulders, his neck and face, urging him on even as she shifted under him to straddle her body. He lavished it with attention, rolling it against his tongue, stroking it again and again until her body shook in time to it. He moved to the other breast, and one of her hands moved to the one that he had just abandoned, stroking it in time to his motions as she ground her pelvis against his undone fly.

It was the work of moments to shed his pants, leaving them in a pile on the floor, and then slide into her wet heat all at once. Tara made a strangled noise deep in her throat as her muscles clenched around him, calling a twist deep in his groin that ran up through his gut into his brain. He wasn’t going to last long.

But soon after he began to thrust, she came around him hard, begging, making pleas that hardly made sense, that ran together in a strangled kind of moan. He knew in his bones and his muscles and his heart what she wanted—not just this release but a release from the tyranny of the panther, forever.

And that Chay didn’t know that he could give her, so he did what he could then, driving her into her orgasm until even her pleas died out from lack of breath. As she eased back down again, he let himself come, pumping so hard into her that he saw lights behind his eyes, her body moving with his as if they were one.

After a few moments, Chay rolled away to the side, pulling Tara snug against his body so that her cheek rested against his chest. Her hand stroked his shoulder and the curve of his neck, and she was so quiet and so still that if it weren’t for that light caress, he would have thought that she had gone to sleep.

Finally, her hand stilled.

“I was wrong,” she said.

“Oh?” he asked.

“I’m not sorry at all.”

He looked down at the top of her curly hair. “Neither am I,” he said, and he was surprised to realize that he meant it.

T
ara soon fell into a deep sleep, and Chay freed himself from her limp body, which he covered with a blanket before getting dressed and turning on the video feed. He stepped into the spook shop to be met by the gazes of three of his team members. Annie’s expression was merely amused—she was always interested in any kind of drama, even the catastrophic kind. But Luke Ford’s face was a study in neutrality, and Liam Mansfield didn’t bother to hide his frank disappointment.

“Just like the good old days, huh, Beane?” Luke offered in a perfectly noncommittal voice.

Chay snorted. He’d done more than his share of partying when he’d first gotten out from under the thumb of his government keepers. The fact that he’d been only eighteen hadn’t even slowed him down—with the kind of resources he’d amassed through his various legitimate and not-so-legitimate contacts, getting a fake I.D. for himself and his buddies had been trivial. And as soon as they were out of basic training and free from the shifter induction program, he had cut loose.

Dives just outside of American bases, upscale clubs in San Diego and Norfolk, and taverns and bars and pubs in half the port cities across the world—he’d hit them all, indiscriminately, for a solid year every time he got leave. Those months were nothing but a blur of missions punctuated by alcoholic hazes in between. Being drunk quieted the panther—and it also, in his stupid, teenage mind, established his own independence from everyone and everything that had bound him in for the last six years of his life. And he hadn’t restricted himself to alcohol, either. He’d stayed away from the hardcore stuff, like crack and meth, but he’d dipped his toes into many illegal waters.

It was only his shifter resistance that had kept him from brain damage or worse, given the amounts he’d consumed. It also kept him from contracting any number of diseases from his other, indiscriminate activities. His changed metabolism insured that he’d pass any drug screening, and even if he failed, at that point in his life, he’d stopped caring.

He’d stopped caring about pretty much anything.

Chay had been handled, bullied, cajoled, lied to, and manipulated for years, and he was tired of it. He knew that the Navy had put too damned many resources into the members of the Indigo Squadron to do more than slap his wrist. So he’d called their bluff, and he’d walked away without a smudge on his record even though he was damned sure that his superiors had a very good idea what he’d been up to.

He had proven his point, and the partying had quickly proven tedious. But he hadn’t let up until one night when an incident with a drunken brawl and a speeding cab had almost ended in catastrophe for one of his teammates.

“It’s not hurting the team,” he said to Luke, remembering that episode. “And I don’t see as it’s any of your business.”

“Seeing as she might turn into a huge cat at any moment and try to eat me, I think it’s
my
business,” Annie said, jabbing a finger at the acrylic safety cube that had appeared while he’d been gone. There was a pile of clothes on top of it—Tara’s clothes. “I kept them from bringing in the other bed. You had your ‘do not disturb’ status on, and anyhow, I didn’t think you’d need it. Will you?” She raised her eyebrows innocently.

Chay was too damned tired to rise to the bait. “I think we’ll be able to manage without. Annie, will you excuse us for a moment?”

Annie’s lips turned down in a small moue of a pout. “If I have to.” She shifted as she stood and slipped out of her robe, the white-tipped brush of her tail held high like a flag as she trotted to the door.

There, she shifted back just long enough to pull the door open. Casting a coy look over one naked shoulder, she said, “Later, boys,” and shifted back to her fox form as she trotted through, the door swinging shut behind her.