Tiger Bound by Doranna Durgin

Author:Doranna Durgin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780373885527
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-07-24T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

As pain faded, the fugue driven away and all the questions still lingering, Maks stayed outside to check the wards and to lay his own thin, fine security wards. Katie stalked gracelessly into the house with every intent of starting the dinner they hadn’t yet had.

Instead she detoured upstairs to wash her face, tuck her hair back up and try to flush the sound of Marie’s accusing voice from her ears.

She’s upset. People said things when they were upset—striking out, no matter how unfair. No matter how they knew better.

Oh, please, let Marie know better.

The problem was Marie had a point.

How could you have known, and not told me? How could you not have known?

And Katie didn’t have an answer. It had been only a day earlier...and she’d seen the dog two weeks earlier, at that. For Rowdy to be dying of gangrene today...

How could she not have known?

She found herself on the bed, curled around a pillow...trying to make sense of it all.

She found herself...

Asleep.

Splashing blood, a blur of startled green eyes, a muted roar and a cry of pain.

She grabbed at the moment, even in her sleep—sinking her will into it, looking for details—grizzled fur, a bright, laughing eye, a dark scent of corruption—refusing to let it go. The glint of an amulet, the glint of a thousand amulets, piled one atop another and spilling out in an inescapable mountain turned to quivering unformed flesh and the dank smell of damp dirt and underground stone. Present and future, tangling together, pooling into disaster...

And then something different, something more distant and yet more intense, a bigger place underground, a woman’s low voice singing in her ear...a child’s lullaby. Her exhortations. Live. Stay tiger. Stay strong. Be my son, always.

“Katie.”

That voice was comfort...warm breath on her ear, a nuzzle of a kiss on her neck. The press of strength around her body.

She started awake.

“Ssh,” he said. “Wake slowly. And then come and eat.”

She realized that he’d cooked—the scent of broiled steak filled her house, along with the tang of sauce. It clung to him, homey and comfortable. She raised a sleepy brow at him. “I should be glad you cooked it first, huh?”

He made a noise in his throat; it sounded like amusement and reproval both. “Salad for you,” he said, as though it were a punishment.

What it was, she discovered, was a good salad. Tofu, snow peas, carrots and nuts, sesame dressing. “Since when have you cooked vegetarian?” she asked, balancing the generous bowl in her hand while she took a stab with her fork, having discovered that he’d already eaten.

She found herself wishing he hadn’t—thinking that it would have been nice to sit down at the table together. Companionable. And that while she hadn’t hosted a non-vegetarian meal in her household for a very long time, she couldn’t imagine asking Maks to put aside his nature for hers.

She found that she didn’t want to.

“You have cookbooks,” he said quite reasonably, opening her refrigerator as if he’d become

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