Chapter 13 #2
He stared at her, seeing her anger and frustration.
Jesus, she believed what she was saying, which set off all sorts of reactions inside him.
Flushed pleasure was the most obvious. Hell, the idea that his high school crush couldn’t help herself sexually around him had him sporting a thick chubby of pubescent delight.
But the rest of him felt a dark anger churn in his belly.
She’d chained him to the floor, for God’s sake.
He wasn’t sure he could forgive her for that.
“You’re wrong,” he said again. And he turned away, heading for the stairs.
She was on him before he’d realized she’d moved. She was at his side, gripping his arm and whipping him around to face her. And then when he was still snarling at her, she grabbed his ears, holding him steady as she slammed her mouth against his.
God, he didn’t want to react. He wanted to shove her away from him with all his monster strength. But when he gripped her arms, he couldn’t do it. She was pressed against him. Her tongue was pushing at his lips and teeth. And when he opened to bellow at her, she invaded his mouth.
Well fuck that.
No kissing. No touching. No...
He arched her back and pushed her tongue aside as he thrust into her mouth. He devoured her mouth like the animal he was. And she fought with him with the ferocity of any she-bear. Tongue to tongue. Breasts to chest. Pelvis to dick.
He didn’t want this. And yet, he so obviously did.
He tried again to shove her away from him, but he ended up pushing her up against the wall instead.
And once there, she wrapped a leg around his hip, opening her crotch to the hard ridge of his cock.
Jesus, basketball shorts did nothing to dull the sensation of her softness.
Of the way she cradled him between her thighs.
“No!” he bellowed as he tore himself away from her. He stumbled sideways, his breath heaving in and out like a great bellows. He wasn’t a beast to be controlled by his lusts. To take a woman against a wall.
Except, of course, he was. He wanted to. And it was taking all his willpower to stand gripping the handrail to the stairs.
“See?” she gasped, her voice flat. “See?”
“No,” he lied. Because he did see her problem. This wasn’t the Tonya he remembered. The one who kept bears and cops in line with a single icy stare. This wasn’t the girl she’d been, either, the one who seduced him mercilessly at fourteen, then headed straight for his brother.
“Don’t be an asshole,” she snapped. Then she took a rasping breath. “Mark said it was the same for him the minute he saw Julie. It took her longer, though.”
He’d heard the story, but he still didn’t fully believe it. “It’s too soon,” he said. “It might not last.”
“He says it’s real.” She lifted her chin and turned to face him. He couldn’t match the gesture, but he watched her out of his peripheral vision. “I believe him because I feel the same way.”
He took a breath, finally doing what she’d demanded and brought his brain online.
He didn’t know much about the bonding process except that it was one of the few ways to save a feral.
He knew that when grizzly-shifters locked in on someone, it was usually for life.
He’d known a few bad marriages where the woman hadn’t been worth the shifter’s devotion, but the grizzly hadn’t let the poor SOB end it.
He supposed it was possible that Tonya had landed herself in a similar situation.
Bonded to an unworthy man. Which really sucked for her, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“You’ve got to find a way to break it,” he said. “This isn’t going to end well for you.”
She dropped her head back against the cheap wood paneling. “Don’t you think I’ve tried?”
He straightened off the railing, doing his best to attack the problem logically. Problem was, he was rusty on using his logic circuits. He’d been one raw nerve of impulse and fury since the day he’d been abducted.
“When did it start?” he asked.
She sighed. “When we were going to rescue you. I couldn’t breathe. I was so afraid for you that it nearly crippled me.”
Ugly hatred twisted in his gut. It was the cold shot he needed to kill any sympathy he had for her. “You mean when you were going to rescue Julie. You didn’t even fucking know I was there.”
She shook her head. “We knew. We were trying to get a hold of you and we heard.”
“You were looking for Julie! The rescue was for Julie!”
She didn’t flinch from his bellow and her gaze remained locked on his. “Not me. Not from the very first second we realized you were there.”
He didn’t want to believe her. The rage inside him was that strong.
It wanted to hold on to his fury at his abandonment by everyone who’d ever pretended to love him.
But she didn’t waver and she didn’t lie.
Which left him speechless with an incoherent rage that kept flaring and dying beneath her steady regard. Hatred quieted into agonizing pain.
“I’m a monster,” he said.
She shrugged, the gesture filled with defeat. “If so, it doesn’t matter.”
He stared at her, finally allowing everything she’d said to sink into his brain.
It made sense, in a twisted way. The things she’d allowed him to do to her at the hotel.
Here. And even before that, she’d gone without food or sleep as she chased him all over Michigan.
Any normal woman would have cut her losses long ago, but she’d Tasered him, drugged him, and even chained him to the floor.
“Jesus, Tonya, you’re a fucking train wreck.”
She gaped at him, but then her lips began to twitch. A moment later, she was chuckling, though there was an edge of hysteria to the sound. Soon her knees went out and she slid down the wall to squat on the floor. And still she laughed. He did, too, because, really, what else could he do?
She stopped first, wiping the tears away with the back of her hand.
And then when she had sobered enough to draw breath, she looked up at him, her heart in her eyes.
He saw desire and fear, swirling in those misty blue depths.
And then he watched her tuck the emotions away as she squared her shoulders and pulled out her cop persona, though she remained squatting on the floor.
“One more thing,” she said, her voice firming with every word. “I know you want to kill Elisabeth. We all do. But you’re not trained for this. You’re a vigilante running on rage and it’s going to get you killed.”
Her voice broke on that last word. He’d expected her to go the other way.
To tell him that a scorched-earth policy destroyed the innocent as well as the guilty.
That was his only fear right now. That his suicidal rampage would have collateral damage.
But the tremor in her voice told him she’d just voiced her greatest fear.
That he’d die as part of his kamikaze mission.
But she didn’t understand the truth, so it was up to him to tell it to her as baldly as possible.
“I’m dying anyway,” he said. “Not one of Einstein’s creations has lived a month.”
“That’s because we shot them.”
“Because they were insane.” He looked at her, trying to force her to accept what he’d felt on a subconscious level from the very beginning. “I’m going feral, Tonya. You said it. Weeks, not years, remember?”
“We’ll suppress it. We can—”
“It doesn’t work that way. Even if I can’t shift, the mind…” He gestured vaguely at his own brain. “I’m still going crazy.”
“Every shifter goes through this at adolescence. They all have to learn to control the beast. It’s just compressed for you. All happening at once.”
He glared at her, not wanting to feel hope that he could survive this.
It was an insane reaction. Who didn’t want to believe?
But he’d accepted that this war in his mind would end soon.
The idea that he would have to conquer it was like ripping the Band-Aid off a mortal wound.
At least before he couldn’t see it, he didn’t have to face his inevitable loss or try to battle against overwhelming odds.
But she wasn’t letting him get away with that.
She was forcing him to gird up and face the war again.
Part of him hated her for that. Almost as much as the part that adored her.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked, honestly wanting to know. “Elisabeth has children with her. I can’t let her do this to someone else.”
“I know. But can we do it smart? Can we hunt her together?”
He snorted. “I don’t intend to let her live. You’re a police officer—”
“I’m off duty.”
“Like that makes any difference to you.” Tonya was a cop through and through. No one was surprised when she went straight from college into the police academy. They only wondered what had taken her so long. “You have the law written on your bones.”
“Says the lawyer.”
He thought, really thought, about what she’d just said.
He barely noticed when he sank down onto the lowest stair step as he processed it all.
Once he’d revered the law. Once he’d pledged himself to uphold the truth of it even when he knew “truth” and “legal” were often entirely separate things.
Where had that gone? He didn’t even like comic books because the heroes operated by their own code instead of the law.
In the end, he only had one explanation.
“I’m a monster.”
“I’m so sick of hearing that.” She pushed up from the wall but she didn’t approach.
She just used her superior height to emphasize her words.
“Really hear this, okay? You’re off balance because you’ve lost control.
You’ve been so fucking smart your whole life that you’ve never felt this wild.
You think you’ve become a monster and I even believed you for a while.
But what if this is you going through normal shifter adolescence?
Just speeded up. Then it’s all you, Alan.
It’s just the dark side that everyone has but that you’ve never let yourself see before. ”
He gaped at her. Did she really think that was true? That deep down was the same old Alan that she’d always known? “Bullshit!” he said as he exploded upward. “Alan’s gone. I keep telling you that—”
She slapped him. Hard and fast enough that his head whipped around. And while his ears were still ringing from the impact, she pushed up on her toes so she could bellow straight in his face.
“Alan’s changed, you moron. He’s not gone. He’s different.”
Which brought them right back to where they were before the conversation began. His face stung and his blood pounded with adrenaline. He grabbed her arms before she could hit him again. And when she tensed, he slammed her back against the wall.
Was she attacking him to get to this place again? This wild, violent place of lust? God help him, he kind of liked that about her. He watched her nostrils flare and in that thin tank top, he could see the hard tight points of her nipples.
“Is this what you want?” he rasped. “Are you goading me into this?”
Her expression tightened, shifting rapidly through emotions he was too pissed off to read. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Yes, you do.” He lowered his head until they were nose to nose. Until their breath heated the space between them to nearly boiling. “You know exactly what you want.”
She did. He could see the realization in her eyes.
He knew when her conscious mind latched on to the truth of her actions.
She was doing anything to keep him here.
Anything to get him inside her. And God help him, as angry as he was, part of him knew that he was holding on to fury as a way to keep away from her.
Better to hate her than complete the bonding process.
To tie her irrevocably to the monster he’d become.
Then she proved that she was braver than he was. More honest than he could ever hope to be. She looked him in the eye and said the words aloud.
“Make love to me, Alan. Please.”
Her words hit him low and deep. Not just his gut but his soul, so deep inside him that he hadn’t even known he’d needed those words.
She wanted him. He’d been nothing but brutal and cruel to her, and she still wanted him.
He didn’t know whether to worry about her sanity or be eternally grateful for her insanity. Both. Definitely both.
“I don’t have a condom,” he said, startling himself with his own words. When had he decided to do this? Or perhaps, when had he stopped fighting the inevitable? He’d never been able to refuse her anything since the day he turned fourteen.
“I don’t care,” she said, though her voice shook.
He did. He wouldn’t saddle her with his child. Not when he had no idea what was going on with his biology. But before he could say anything, an image flashed through his brain. It was of her toiletry bag. The one in the bathroom that was stocked for all possibilities including thing one.
“You have condoms in the bathroom,” he said.
She nodded. “So go get them.” That was it. No hesitation, no coy girlishness. Not from Tonya.
He eased off her slowly, straightening as he watched for any doubt in her expression. She remained as true to her word as ever. And so with a weird kind of satisfaction, he headed for the six neatly folded foil packets. Given the way he felt, they were going to need every single one.