Taming the Lion Page 6

  Even knowing it was stupid.

  Roman hadn’t been a monk, but he’d always been discrete in his affairs—he’d had to be as the perennial betrothed of the pride princess.

  Somehow banging the maid of honor three months before the wedding didn’t strike him as the height of discretion.

  Not that he had much likelihood of getting into Patch’s pants, given the way she’d been hissing and snarling at him. Though if cougars were anything like lionesses that could be foreplay.

  Fuck. He did not need to be thinking of his fiancé’s best friend in terms of foreplay.

  The path back to the north boundary stretched ahead of them, dappled in starlight and completely abandoned, giving them a false sense of privacy in a pride where no one was ever truly alone.

  “Lila isn’t coming back, is she?” he asked when caught up with Patch.

  She grimaced and tossed him a look that might have been guilty, but he couldn’t quite read it. “Probably not.”

  “I told her earlier I’d meet her back at the Den,” he admitted—though if he was honest with himself, he didn’t want to go back. He wanted to stay here. With a cougar whose ass he should not be noticing as she lengthened her stride to pull ahead of him again. “She’s probably looking for me there.”

  “Sure she is.”

  Roman frowned. He couldn’t quite tell if she was being sarcastic or not. “I should probably head back.”

  “You should,” she agreed, the words tight and irritated.

  He should. They both agreed. But somehow he just kept following the determined gait of a certain cougar deeper into the pride lands. “Why aren’t you back there, toasting our happy union with the rest of the pride?”

  She shot him an are-you-an-imbecile? look over her shoulder. “I’ll toast your happiness when I’m convinced you can make Lila happy.” She veered abruptly off the main path, onto a smaller track into the woods on their left. “Besides, that isn’t really my scene.”

  Twigs crunched softly beneath his boots as he trailed her into the forest. “I thought you and Lila were in there almost every night, stringing the poor cubs along.”

  “Who told you that?” She shot him another icy look, slowing to emphasize her glare. “Never mind. I can guess. Whiskey, right? I suppose just because you never deign to have a beer with the unwashed masses doesn’t mean you don’t have your spies. But for your information, those poor cubs, as you call them, are grown men who can take care of themselves, Grandpa. And Lila and I haven’t made a habit of drinking at the Den since college. You should get more current intel.”

  It was almost impressive how many ways she found to shove his words down his throat. The shitty thing was, she wasn’t wrong. He’d never been a partier, never one to be comfortable sitting down with half the pride at the end of the day for a beer. He preferred quiet discussions with one or two people in the privacy of his office rather than the spectacle of the Den.

  But he’d never thought badly of Lila for going there. He’d always been a little relieved that she was so social, actually. It meant he didn’t have to be. But he still liked to be informed. So yeah, he’d ask Whiskey who flirted with whom, who left with whom, and who started a fight with whom on any given night.

  He’d never thought of it as spying. And his reluctance to join the party at the Den had nothing to do with an unwillingness to deign to have a beer with pride members lower in the hierarchy. Shit.

  “Is that how people see me? Do they think I think I’m too good to drink with them?”

  Patch was silent for a moment then admitted, almost grudgingly, “No. People respect you.” She slanted a look at him out of the corner of her eye. “They respect you, but they love Lila. She’s everyone’s sweetheart and they’re protective of her. If you’re seen being a jerk to her, you’re going to lose a lot of that respect in a hurry.”

  Roman almost growled. This was all the politics of perception bullshit he hated about the pride. He was the best for the job. Why did it matter who he married or whether he treated her like a goddess or as the political alliance she was? “Being a jerk how? Like disappearing after the announcement to see to pride business?” Because there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about that. The safety of the pride would always come before all the touchy-feely perception bullshit.

  “I was thinking more the no proposal thing. Or the fact that you haven’t bothered to learn a damn thing about her. People understand the running off to take care of pride business part. They like that you always put the pride first, like a true obsessive workaholic.”

  “Our safety isn’t a part-time job.”

  “Right. And we all feel safer when you’re obsessing over our protection. But you’ve gotta make time for your bride, Roman.”

  “I already said I would.”

  “Yeah.” Patch grimaced, looking oddly sour at getting her way. “What was the big emergency tonight anyway?” she asked. “If you can tell me what called you away. It isn’t confidential, is it?”

  “The way gossip spreads in this pride, nothing stays confidential for long. We found an unconscious bird shifter just beyond the north boundary.”

  “Crashed?”

  “No, fully clothed. And drugged.”

  Her posture stiffened, but she remained silent.

  “We brought him back to the pride doctors and they say he’ll be fine as soon as it works through his system. Hopefully, when he wakes up, he can tell us more.”

  “Lila said you’re planning a hunting party.”

  “If the Alpha decides it’s wise.”

  “It’s a good idea,” she said, stating the opinion with as much firm confidence as she said everything. “We need to take the fight to them. Show them we won’t stand passively by anymore. Who will you send?”

  Who would he send. Always the assumption that he wouldn’t be going. That the pride’s future Alpha sent others to do his work for him. It rankled, but as with so many battles of perception, it wasn’t worth fighting so he swallowed his irritation. “I’ll ask for volunteers among the guards and those with combat training.”

  “Just lions? Or can anyone volunteer?”

  “You want to go chase down the Big Bad, Patch?”

  “Of course I do. Just like you want to personally rip all their throats out, but you’re too valuable to the pride to go.”

  Roman’s head turned sharply, studying her profile. He hadn’t anticipated that level of understanding from Lila’s little friend. “So you want to rip out those throats for me?”

  “I’m not combat trained. But yeah, I wouldn’t mind.” She tipped her head, lost in thought as she walked, surefooted even as the branches overhead grew thicker and the path darkened. “Kye is a good choice. And Dominec.”

  Kye would have been among the first he suggested, but Dominec wouldn’t even have made his list. The surly, scarred Siberian tiger was the antithesis of a team player. “We can’t be thinking of the same tiger.”

  “I know he doesn’t play well with others, but then most of us independent cats don’t go in for the there-is-no-I-pride-first-last-and-always bullshit that you lions get off on.”

  “You love the pride.”

  “Not more than my independence.”

  “So you won’t be coming in? Defying the Alpha, Ms. Fontaine?”

  “I’ll be coming in like a good girl. But we weren’t talking about me. We were talking about Dominec. And the fact that he has the best sense of smell in the pride and can kick ass six ways from Sunday, even if he doesn’t always bow down to the lions the way you’d like.”

  “Did I ever do or say anything to make you think I don’t think the other shifters are as much a part of this pride as the lions?” Irritation pushed him to crowd her until he was practically walking up the back of her heels. Her scent coiled up around him, lemon spice.

  “I thought you were going back to the Den,” she snapped, not backing down and yielding the space to him as any less dominant cat should.

  “I am
.”

  “So why are you still following me?” She stopped so abruptly he would have crashed into her if he hadn’t been acutely attuned to her every move. “I’m a big girl. You don’t have to protect me on the pride lands.”

  He knew that. He was pretty sure Patch Fontaine didn’t need his protection anywhere—pride lands or no. But he wasn’t here to be her bodyguard. He was here because he literally couldn’t make himself walk away. There was fire in her and he wanted to warm himself against it. Cold for so long…

  She’s in heat.

  The thought was salvation, an explanation he could latch on to. Hormones, instinct, animalism. They were all reasonable excuses for this drive to chase her down and make her submit to him in the most basic way. It wasn’t insanity; it was instinct. Chemistry. A purely natural compulsion.

  He reached out, catching a lock of hair that had gotten loose and bobbed next to her ear. Her breath caught and she went still, her eyes, dark stars in the night, widening just a millimeter.

  “How close are you to the peak of your heat?” he asked, hearing the gravel roughness of arousal in his own voice.

  Her lips parted. It was invitation enough.

  Chapter Nine

  Bad idea. Worst idea ever. Epically atrocious idea.

  She shouldn’t be here with him. Roman. Lila’s Roman. She should have run back to the Den at top speed. She should have stopped walking the second she realized he was following her. It should never have gotten to this point. The two of them. Alone. In the dark. With his strong, callused hand raised almost as if to cup her face, one lock of her hair caught around his finger. With his body so close to hers she could just lean a little and fall against all that delicious, rock hard strength. With his gaze locked on hers—Holy Hades, his eyes. No man should look at a woman like that unless she was beneath him and moaning. Which didn’t sound like a half bad place to be.

  “Roman.” She was going to tell him no. Tell him to leave her alone. To walk away. Hell, she was going to walk away herself. She was. But then he lowered his head and her hands were suddenly, of their own volition, splayed on the glorious firmness of his chest, and she was kissing him.

  Or she thought she was. It was so soft, so fleeting, so indescribably inadequate that it was hard to know for sure that she’d been properly kissed before he lifted his lips away from hers, and cool air washed away the fleeting sensation of warmth.

  No. If this was it, if this was what she’d been waiting for and dreaming about for the last decade it was not going to end like that. A peck. A brush. A tease. Fuck, no.

  A growl ripped out of Patch’s throat as she lurched up into his arms, nails raking into his hair, grasping his skull to hold him steady as she yanked his mouth to hers, their bodies colliding hard as she devoured his mouth. An answering growl rumbled against her body from Roman’s chest and the kiss caught fire—teeth and tongues and lips tangling wantonly. The iron bands of his arms pressed hard into her back, pulling her in closer than close, until she lost track of where she ended and he began. It was all heat and friction and a symphony of hungry growls.

  Her feet left the ground and she barely noticed. Who needed the ground when she had this?

  One of his hands plunged into her hair, angling her head for better access, as the other gripped her hip and ground her harder against the long, delicious length of his erection. Oh my. Her thighs clenched involuntarily. Yes, please.

  His teeth found her lower lip, the bite just shy of too hard, and she heard herself making noises she’d never heard before—high, breathy and feminine pants of need. Then his teeth were skimming the side of her throat and she tipped her face back to stare up at the lattice of black branches above, exposing her neck to him in perfect submission. She who had never submitted to anyone but the Alpha. His teeth scored deeper at the junction of her neck and shoulder and a rough gasp wrenched between her lips. Holy Hades, that spot. It was like a one-way ticket to her G-spot. If she hadn’t already been wet and aching, that bite alone would have done it. She was ready, so unbelievably ready…

  Then he was spinning them, pinning her back to the coarse bark of a nearby tree, the scent of crushed pine bark rising up to mix with the tangled scents of lust, Roman’s shaved-cedar-sunshine musk…

  …and beneath it all the faintest echo of scent on his clothes, barely-there traces of a cloying, medicinal sweet-and-sour tang…

  A tang that triggered something violent and terrified deep inside her. No.

  She threw out her hands, struggling with more panic than skill or finesse, but as soon as Roman sensed her resistance, he backed away, probably scenting the sudden surge of fear on her, his hands over his head in a gesture of innocence that was five minutes too late to be believable.

  As soon as she wasn’t drowning in his scent, the panic fled—replaced by a heavy weight of realization.

  Holy Hades. She’d kissed Roman. They’d almost done a lot more. If she hadn’t come to her senses, God only knew what they’d be doing now. What part of her he’d be nibbling on, caressing…

  Not a helpful line of thinking, Patch.

  She didn’t know what had triggered her freak-out—that scent, the horrible wrongness of it—but she was damn glad something had woken her up to what she was doing. Sure, she’d wanted to kiss Roman since she’d discovered boys, but he was Lila’s. She would never betray her best friend like that.

  Except for the fact that she just had. Shit.

  “Patch…” From the expression on Roman’s face, he was just as horrified by what they’d done as she was.

  “The heat,” she blurted, insanely grateful for the excuse. It couldn’t have just been her wanting him like she wanted to keep breathing. Not if she ever wanted to be able to look her best friend’s husband in the eye. “It was just the heat. My bad. No hard feelings.”

  He lowered his hands from his stick-em-up stance, shifting uncomfortably, and she realized he probably had some very hard feelings left over from their little bout of insanity.

  Don’t look. Do. Not. Look.

  She looked. And he was just as big as she’d felt. Just as deliciously hard. Oh, have mercy.

  “I—” She didn’t know what she would have said. I have to go? I-need-you-take-me-now? I can’t ever see you again? I want to lick you like a lollipop and swallow you whole? Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. The words clogged in her throat and she gave up on pushing them past the shame.

  She couldn’t meet his eyes. Didn’t want to know what color they were when they were drenched in need.

  Taking a page out of Lila’s book, Patch ran.

  Do not pass Go. Do not look back. Do not shift because the cat will say yes, no matter how badly she needs to say no. Patch ran.

  Thank God he didn’t follow her. She didn’t know what she would have done if he’d tried to come after her. To chase her down. If he’d caught her…

  Images crashed against one another in her brain, half-baked fantasies springing instantly to life. Roman catching her, those muscled arms sweeping her off her feet, taking her to the ground, his weight riding her down, hands stripping away her clothing, caressing, always just on that perfect borderline of too rough. So strong. So dominant. Leaving no question of whom she belonged to, body and soul.

  Holy Hades.

  Patch ran, but she couldn’t run the arousal out of herself, that shuddering, aching need. Her entire body felt wrong. Too tight, too hot, too heavy. She gave the Den a wide berth and dodged a cluster of juveniles lurking behind the Pride Hall. In no state to drive, she didn’t even flirt with the idea of getting in her car and escaping to her cabin, no matter how tempting the idea of putting some distance between herself and the scene of her shame was.

  Instead, she made a beeline for the little bungalow that had been hers whenever she chose to use it for the last five years. It wasn’t much—an older two-room house with none of the bells and whistles of the new apartment complexes that had recently been built on the pride compound—but it was set a bit a
part from the rest of the residential areas and offered about as much privacy as anything could in a community where everyone was always in everyone else’s business.

  She needed that isolation tonight. At least as much of it as she could get.

  She’d kissed Roman.

  She’d betrayed Lila. Even if Lila didn’t particularly want Roman, that didn’t change the fact that they were bound to one another. Bound in the eyes of the pride, if nothing else.

  Patch had always respected the pride ways—even the ones she thought were idiotic lion traditions. This pride was her sanctuary. Her salvation. She might be annoyed now and again by the way the non-lions were second-class citizens, but she knew how lucky she was to have this safe haven and she wasn’t about to rock the boat. She loved this pride. This was her home. It was her security. Without it, she would never have been able to live as freely as she did.

  And she’d spat all over that tonight. All because of some stupid girlhood crush.

  Thank God she’d come to her senses.

  She sat down on her bed, a little puff of dust rising up from the duvet to remind her how long it had been since she slept here. The memory of her panic came back. That scent… She’d known it. On some visceral, instinctive level it was familiar. And terrifying.

  What was it? Medicinal. Cloying.

  She’d caught it on the breeze this afternoon. That tainted shifter scent that had tickled her nose on the mountain. It had to be the drugged shifter Roman had mentioned. Had something about his tainted scent rubbed off on Roman and she’d smelled it when they were, ahem, close? He must have been the one she smelled in the mountains. Which meant he’d come a long way today, for a bird shifter who couldn’t shift.

  She probably ought to tell Roman that she’d smelled the bird shifter in the mountains. It might be important. But she couldn’t bring herself to talk to him tonight, to hear his rich deep voice. Not when her nerves were raw with lingering desire.

  She stripped the bed and pulled out fresh linens, giving the tiny house a quick cleaning to make it livable again, then jumped in the shower a second time to rinse off the cleaning dust and the lingering traces of pine bark on her skin.