Out of the Darkness: Taken by the Panter #1 (Taken by the Panther, #1) by V. M. Black

Author:V. M. Black
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: shapeshifter, billionaire shifter romance, curvy interracial bbw romance, Navy SEAL, genes, coming of age, elven wizard
Publisher: Swift River Media Group
Published: 2014-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Door. The word pushed through the panther’s brain. It wasn’t an impression of a word or a feeling of a thing, but an actual English word that came as she stared at the shape in the wall. Door. The door and...the man.

Tara, yes, she was Tara, and she was waiting for the man to come through the door.

To help her.

Her tail lashed, and the panther inside her head fought back, understanding with an animal’s instinct that what was meant was that she’d be tamed, caged, contained.

But Tara clung to every thought that gave her purchase in the panther’s head, behind the panther’s eyes. She spun out new thoughts as hard and as fast as she could, as if each were a lifeline that held her mind together and apart.

She thought about her friend Sylvie, her best college friend, and the crazy fling she’d had with Tom Howe in South Sudan. She thought about her parents and about her sister Sara. She thought about Saturday morning cartoons and ice cream and any stupid human thing that she could summon up. She built the thoughts into a net—no, not a net, a life raft of a thousand tiny pieces that constantly tried to scatter on the waves as she scooped them together underneath her, over and over again.

Because beneath it all was the mind of the panther, which insisted that she, as Tara, did not exist at all.

Tara fixed her eyes on the lever handle of the door, willing it to move. And it did, slowly, easing over inch by agonizing inch, the system of pivots transferring the motion to the flat bolts the held the door closed until they slid free and the door swung open.

A blunt head nosed the door open, then sleek, high shoulders eased past. A moment later, the lean, muscular body of the other panther was through.

Past him was freedom, a way out of this cage. A growl rose in her throat—the panther’s growl, not Tara’s, even though she felt its distrust as her own. She fought it for control of her throat, for control of her lashing tail, but when she did, the precarious raft from which she was viewing everything began to scatter dangerously, and it took all her strength not to lose herself in the waves.

The other panther cleared the doorway, his tail flicking free, and there was a hiss as the door swung shut under some invisible power and a clunk as the lever twisted the bolts home again. At that reminder of her captivity, Tara’s panther brain went mad, surging past the other panther to the door, pulling up an inch away from striking it, and then turning to the side to do a frantic dash around the room, churning up clouds of feathers in her wake.

Walls, cage, trapped, trapped, TRAPPED!

The feeling battered over her, a drumming, panicked beat that set up in her blood, her head throbbing to it, everything closing in until she couldn’t even breathe.

The other panther, the big male, simply sat and, very slowly, raised a paw to his mouth and began licking it clean.

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