Taming the Lion Read online

  “I knew the rules. The traditions. I knew that nomads weren’t usually allowed to join prides without fighting their way in. Especially not dominant males who were going to grow up to be big bastards who think they know how to run the world. I’d heard of Lone Pine, but I still expected to be tossed out on my ass as soon as I got here. And then a miracle occurred.”

  Her hand stilled, resting on his shoulder blade.

  “Greg saw something in me. Saw more than the beaten animal I was. He saw a commodity instead of a threat. He gave me a chance to be honorable. To be his heir. He made me part of this pride when tradition told him I was too dangerous to be allowed in. He believed in me when even I didn’t know whether I was capable of being tamed.”

  “Are you tame now?” It was the first time she’d spoken since he began to speak and there was a catch in her voice.

  Roman rolled onto his back, catching her hand when she would have pulled it away. He placed it on his chest, resting his own on top. She knelt beside him on the bed, a towel wrapped snugly around her, her dark hair gleaming wetly in the golden lamplight. But it was her eyes that snared him. A tinge of sadness, but no pity, a trace of caution, fear of saying the wrong thing, awareness of how big what he’d just shared with her was to him, but dwarfing all that was a bottomless understanding. She got it.

  Was he tame?

  “No. I’m just better at faking it than I once was. Are you going to tame me, Patch?”

  “Now why would I do that?” She bent over him, brushing a whisper of a kiss across his lips. “The wildness is one of my favorite things about you.”

  He tangled his fingers in her wet hair and brought her back down for another, longer kiss.

  Patch sat up from the kiss, her fingers pressing into the warmth of his chest, staggered by what he’d shared with her.

  She hadn’t known. Hadn’t suspected for a moment.

  He’d always seemed so invincible to her. Yes, she’d seen the scars before—she’d certainly gawked at his shirtless body often enough over the years—but she’d never really thought about what must have happened to create them.

  Self-absorption. That’s what it was. The belief that no one had a tragedy in their past but her—and Dominec who reveled in throwing his damage into people’s faces. Roman was a lion—so of course his life had always been easy and wonderful. How stupidly ignorant she’d been.

  She felt…honored that he’d told her.

  And she owed him her own truth.

  She looked away, studying the blank wall behind the headboard. Roman had been on his stomach, his face turned away from her as he spoke, and now she had a sense of why. She didn’t want to see what was on his face when she spoke and she wanted him to be able to react without her eyes on him.

  “When I was ten, my parents and I were living in Colorado.”

  She didn’t tell this story. Some people knew. Most knew the short version—that her parents had vanished when she was a kid. A bare handful knew more.

  She didn’t have practice with finding these words, but they came remarkably easily because she was telling him.

  “I was going to the human school in town and we were living in a cabin in the woods. I came home from school one day and I knew immediately something was wrong. There was this smell. Medicinal. Wrong. I didn’t go inside. My parents had taught me that if something like this ever happened, I was to shift, climb up in a tree and hide until they came home. And if they didn’t come back within three hours or if anyone else came to find me, I was supposed to run all the way to Lone Pine and they would come find me there.”

  “How long did you wait?”

  That pulled her gaze off the wall. No one had ever asked her that before. He watched her, his expression comfortingly neutral. “Six days. I only got out of the tree to hunt. Eventually I realized they might never come back to the house, so I came to Lone Pine, thinking they would already be here waiting for me.”

  “Colorado isn’t close.”

  “I don’t know how long it took me. A couple weeks, I think. By the time I got here, it had been weeks since I was in human form. I was half-feral, but I remembered how to shift back so I could ask if my parents were here.”

  “But they weren’t.”

  “No. No, they never came back. I watched for them. Spent a lot of time as a cat. Didn’t try to fit in. I didn’t really know the first thing about fitting in with a lion pride. But then Lila happened. She decided we were going to be best friends—and she may seem like she’s all sweet and malleable, but when she puts her mind to something, there’s no changing it. She talked her father into taking me in—and I think it would have been awkward, but Lila wouldn’t let it be awkward. And Greg and Lucienne never tried to be my parents. They always seemed sort of puzzled by me. I know they love me, in their way, but I’m not their daughter. Not like you seem to think.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have thrown that at you earlier.”

  She shrugged. “We both said things we probably shouldn’t have.” Her hand was still on his chest, trapped beneath his. His heart beat strong and steady beneath her fingers.

  “No. I’m glad you said what you did. I should have seen that our non-lion members feel like second-class citizens.”

  “You weren’t looking for it.” And maybe she had been looking for it too much, seeing a double standard even when it wasn’t always there. “I owe a lot to this pride—I probably owe them my life—but I’ve never really felt like I was a true pride member. Maybe that’s my own doing.”

  “We both owe this pride our lives,” Roman said softly, and she heard a weight behind his words. It was a debt they’d never be able to repay.

  “Pride first,” she murmured.

  He met her eyes, still holding her hand. “Pride first.”

  And everything else second. Sometimes the good of the pride had to trump what they wanted. It was why he would marry Lila. And why she would watch him do it and try to be glad.

  “I just wish pride first didn’t mean listening to the Alpha when he’s got his head up his ass,” Roman grumbled.

  Patch laughed softly, relieved to feel the mood lighten. “He’ll come around.”

  “Not if everyone else on the advisory council is agreeing with him. It’s me against all of them. If there was one other person on my side…but there isn’t.”

  “None of your lieutenants are backing you up?”

  “Grace thinks we should wait until we know more from this hawk shifter before we make any plans and Xander wouldn’t disagree with the Alpha if he said the sky was purple with green polka dots. The others are all the old guard, determined to cling to the old ways at all costs. Except Hugo. Who seems to favor hibernation at the moment.”

  “And who couldn’t publicly disagree with the Alpha anyway. He isn’t an official lieutenant.”

  “He’s official enough to sit in on the meetings, but you’re right that he won’t speak out against Greg.”

  “Did you expect him to? They’ve been best friends for a million years.” Patch tipped her head, studying the gorgeous man spread out on the bed before her. She tried to picture him kicking back and having a beer with a buddy, but the image failed to materialize in her mind. “Who’s your Hugo?”

  A frown pulled at his brow. “What?”

  “Who’s your best friend? Your Lila. The one who will always have your back.”

  “I don’t know. Greg, probably.”

  “No, it can’t be the Alpha. He’s your mentor, but he’s not your buddy, your confidante, your partner in crime. You know?”

  There was a momentary pause, while the awareness of how alone he really was seemed to hang in the air between them, then he moved, so fast she barely had time to gasp. He caught her around the waist, dragging her across his body and rolling her beneath him, caging her with his arms.

  He teased, “You wanna be my best friend, Patch?”

  Luckily, he kissed her before she said yes. She couldn’t be Lila’s husband’s anything
—not his best friend, his confidante, his lover or his partner in crime—but she wanted to be everything to Roman. All that and more.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The door to Roman’s office flew open right as Lila was telling him some story about Kelly Mather and a dairy cow. Grace burst in, her blue eyes so wide the whites were showing.

  “Sir. He’s awake. You’re gonna wanna hear this.” It was a sign of how excited Grace was that her muttered “Sorry, Lila,” was an afterthought.

  Roman surged up out of his chair. “Adrian? He’s talking?”

  “Clear as a bell. He woke up twenty minutes ago and he’s totally coherent this time.”

  Roman turned to his fiancé. “Lila, can we…”

  “Go. I’ll see you later.”

  He dropped a perfunctory kiss in the general direction of her cheek and ran all the way to the infirmary, Grace keeping pace beside him.

  “What has he said?” he asked as they ran.

  “He knows what’s on the hard drives.”

  They separated to veer around a cluster of cubs playing on the path. When she was once again at his side, Roman asked, “So we don’t need Mateo to salvage the data? The hawk can give it to us?”

  “No, sorry. He doesn’t know all the information, but he knows what information we’ll find.”

  “If we can salvage them.”

  “Yeah. If.”

  They’d reached the infirmary then and slowed to a more sedate pace to pass the nurses and doctors on the way to Adrian’s room. Dr. Brandt was inside.

  “Fifteen minutes, no more,” he told Roman sternly as he stepped aside to let him and Grace into the narrow room. “No tiring the patient.”

  As soon as the door clicked shut behind the doctor, Grace turned to Adrian. “This is Roman. Tell him exactly what you told me.”

  The hawk’s yellow eyes fixed on Roman. “You need to recover that data. One of the hard drives has the location and schematics for every cell the Organization has.”

  “What Organization?”

  “That’s what they call themselves,” Adrian explained. “Just the Organization.”

  Adrian’s first words detonated like a time-delayed bomb in his brain. “Their entire operation? Every cell?”

  “At the time of my escape, anyway. They’re always moving—opening more, closing others. They’re paranoid about being found.”

  “And the other two hard drives?”

  “One is financial records—bank accounts, that kind of thing. If we cut off their funding…”

  “We cut off their operations,” Roman finished. “And the third.”

  “Dossiers on every shifter they know about. Who they plan on picking up, who they’re tracking, who they’ve captured, where they’re being held, and who has died in captivity. All of it.”

  “Holy shit.” With that information, they could not only rescue those who had been taken, but also warn those who might be and give closure to loved ones. Like Patch. She could finally know what had really happened to her parents.

  Too good to be true.

  “How did you get all that?” Roman asked, not bothering to keep the suspicion out of his tone.

  “I stole them when I escaped.”

  “And they were just lying out where a stoned-out shifter would trip over them on the way out?”

  The hawk hesitated, his pupils disappearing in a strange partial-shift. “There was a doctor. A woman.”

  “She helped you?”

  “I think so. It’s hard to be sure. My memories are all jumbled up.”

  “But you remember what’s on the hard drives.”

  “She kept repeating it.” His eyes returned to human—or as close to human as the yellow ever got. “You checked my body for tracking devices?”

  “Before we brought you back here.”

  “And the hard drives? You had the backpack checked as well.”

  “It was clean.”

  Adrian frowned. “I wondered if she was setting me up. Tricking me into escaping so I would lead them to Lone Pine. But I wanted so badly to get out of there, I didn’t even care if I was endangering all of you by coming here.”

  Roman couldn’t blame him. “We’ve heightened our security. So far there has been no indication that you were followed.”

  “There won’t be,” Adrian said darkly. “They’re good at what they do.” He swallowed with difficulty, reminding Roman that he was still recovering, even though the healing coma seemed to have done him a world of good. “If they aren’t using me to try to get into Lone Pine, the information on the hard drives could be legitimate, but if they know I took it, they’ll begin moving people. If we want to have any chance of rescuing them—”

  “We would need to go fast,” Roman finished for him.

  “I want to go with you.” He tried to sit up higher in the hospital bed and managed it. Barely. “Even if we can’t get any of the data off the hard drives, I might be able to lead you back to where I was held.”

  Roman nodded. “I’ll pass that along to the Alpha.”

  “I just have one condition.”

  Roman cocked an eyebrow questioningly.

  “The doctor. Rachel Russell. I don’t want her hurt.”

  “She works for them?”

  “I’m not sure she has a choice.” He grimaced and sank back down onto the bed. “She wanted to leave with me. I thought she was lying. That she couldn’t be trusted. So I left her behind.”

  “And now you want us to endanger our people rescuing her?”

  “No. I just don’t want her killed when we’re rescuing our people. Make her a prisoner here. I won’t object.”

  “We don’t usually hold prisoners.”

  Adrian didn’t back down. “That’s my condition.”

  Roman bowed his chin. “I’ll pass it along.”

  Roman left the Advisory Council Chamber at a jog. He had fifteen minutes before his next meeting. Fifteen minutes to find Patch before he was sucked back into arguments and strategic planning. Because he needed her to know and he needed to be the one who told her.

  He caught her scent quickly and followed it toward the dining hall—and she stepped out of the building just as it came into sight. The gods were smiling on him. He picked up his pace, wove through the cluster of shifters she’d evidently just eaten with and caught her upper arm. “Excuse us.”

  She didn’t resist as he tugged her around the corner into the shadows of the dining hall, but he could see a tirade brewing in her eyes. He spoke fast to head it off. “I shouldn’t even be telling you this because the information could be a plant, a trap, but the hawk shifter says the hard drives contain dossiers on every shifter the Organization has ever captured.”

  Her eyes widened, jaw dropping.

  “I just needed you to know that.” He wanted to kiss her. It was instinct to lean down and brush his mouth over hers—but he didn’t. They were too exposed. Anyone could come by and see. “I’ve gotta go.” He contented himself with a squeeze of her arm, then he was off at a run, back to being good again. Obeying the rules.

  Patch watched Roman disappear around the corner of the dining hall and sagged against the exterior wall.

  She would finally know what happened to her parents. No more wondering. No more vague, directionless guilt. Provided they could recover the information.

  She shoved off the wall, the muddy mélange of unidentifiable emotion snapping hard into a single purpose. She had to talk to Mateo. She jogged around the front of the building, waving a half-hearted goodbye to the shifters she’d had lunch with. They were mostly outliers who’d been forced to come in and were trying to adapt to pride life, to the crowds and the constant weight of lion tradition hanging in the air around them. She’d talked to them, tried to ease their transition as much as possible, but they were on their own now.

  Mateo’s bunker wasn’t far. It used to be the pride school, but when a new one was built, the boxy two-story cement block was converted into offices—and event
ually completely taken over by Mateo and his team of tech nerds. It was here that Mateo and his people employed all the high tech tricks and counter-measures necessary to make sure Lone Pine and the existence of shifters remained a secret, invisible to the eyes of all the cameras and satellites now making the world into a giant fish bowl.

  Patch didn’t pretend to understand even a fraction of what he did, but she liked Mateo. He was a sweet kid—which was all she’d ever been able to think of him as, even though he was a good three years older than she was—and she wanted him to know what was at stake with the hard drives.

  The bunker was one of the few buildings on the pride with actual security—even most houses didn’t have doors that locked in the community-centric pride—so she announced her desire to speak to Mateo into the intercom and waited on the front stoop for a good five minutes before the door clicked open and the slim leopard shifter himself let her in.

  Mateo was boyishly good looking—emphasis on boyish. He probably could have blended in effortlessly with any boy band in the world, even though he was in his mid-twenties. Soft gray eyes, black hair that flopped over his brow, a slim build that didn’t lack muscle, though it definitely lacked bulk, and a pair of heart-stopping dimples to complete the package. Today he wore snug jeans, flip-flops and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “The Angels have the Phone Box”—whatever the hell that meant. Typically, she didn’t understand half of what he said. He was the Grand High Nerd—and probably the sweetest guy in the pride. Patch had once desperately wished she could be attracted to a nice guy like Mateo rather than a big hulk of obliviousness like Roman. But if wishes were ponies, everyone would ride.

  “Patch. What’s up?” His dimples flashed. “Not that I’m not delighted to see you whenever you want to drop by, but I’m a little swamped today.”