Taming The Shifter

“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.

So what could a monster be...but a monster?

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