ROMANCE: SHIFTER: Shifter to the Max Collection (Dragon, Bear, Wolf and Panther Shifter Romances) (Paranormal Fantasy Romance Collection) (42 page)

Kira, you're a werewolf.

              The revelation was more startling than the kiss. Of course, the kiss had been
her
idea, as much as you could call a frustrated impulse an "idea". She wasn't sure what possessed her to lock lips with Professor Donovan, but it wasn't an expectation of having her heated kiss returned—that was for damn sure.

              But he had her backed against the door of his office, which was exactly where Kira Bentley needed to be. As brown-gold eyes met his in disbelief, her shaking fingers groped behind her for the door handle. His gaze shot to her hand, but he was too late—in the next instant she was out the door and running down the hallway of the English building.

              Kira's need to escape was all-encompassing, especially now that he had revealed to her what he knew. Professor Donovan
knew.
She had to get away before fear overwhelmed her. Whenever strong emotion overwhelmed her these days, she—

              Kira felt the change already starting. Her spine was shifting and bowing, and as she took the stairs of the fire escape down, she could see that the hand she used to brace herself on the railing had twisted into a claw. She trapped a low sob of despair in her throat and pushed herself to run faster. The English building was right on the edge of campus near the woods. If she could just make it to the safety of the trees…

              She was out the door and sprinting. She had arrived early that morning to speak to Professor Donovan before classes, and she didn't encounter any other students or staff as she ran for cover. She made it about thirty paces into the woods before a larger body brought her down.

              Kira tried to scream, but all that escaped her was a strangled noise as her attacker carried them both to the ground and knocked the wind from her lungs. She overturned herself to kick and slash at the body atop her, but felt her limbs slammed back into the dirt; the person astride her had driven her legs down beneath him until he was pinning her with his knees. She felt strong hands manacle her wrists and restrain them.

              "Get
off
me!" Kira sobbed aloud. The fact that she could still find her voice was a good thing, even if she was too hysterical to recognize it—it meant that the change hadn't advanced as far as she thought. Not yet, anyway. Who knew if the wolf would still decide to rear its ugly head, and with someone forcing themselves so close to her, she had no hope of concealing the change before it was too late. "Please," she begged.

              "Look at me." Professor Donovan's face resolved above her. Kira blinked. She hadn't realized who it was before who held her pinned. Shafts of early morning sunlight that penetrated from the canopy above darkened his handsome silhouette. Wisps of brown hair hung in his face, and he was breathing as heavily as she was from their run. How had he managed to catch up to her? She had always been fast, but ever since the bite, she had been almost superhumanly so…

              Donovan leaned down, and Kira finally saw what he was trying to show her. The familiar silver of his irises had vanished completely; in their place, she gazed into a pair of inhumanly gold eyes. The pupils were still black, but reduced to thin, vertical slivers. She could see her own stricken expression reflected in them.

              "Please don't make me spell it out for you," Professor Donovan said to break the silence. "I already have a lecture on
Jane Eyre
I have to give in the next hour."

              "You're…" Kira struggled with the words as she struggled to raise herself off the ground. Perhaps still wary of an escape attempt, the man didn't budge. "You're like me! You're a werewolf!"

              "The clinical term for it is
lycanthropy,"
Professor Donovan said. "If there was a clinic established for this sort of thing. And yes, it's an affliction we both share."

              "You knew," Kira said in wonder. "You knew all along. All those stupid detentions and manufactured excuses for me to come to your office after class…"

              "You earned every one of those yourself," Donovan clarified in a low murmur. Kira suddenly became aware of just how closely their bodies were positioned. It reminded her a little too much of their brief entanglement in the doorway to his office—only out here, the handsome professor asserted complete control of her capture by using gravity and superior strength to his advantage. Professor Donovan had an animalistic side. She felt her face heat at the realization. It was a side she had become all too familiar with when she baited him with a kiss.

              Why had she done that, anyway? To throw him off? To force his hand into letting her go? Or was there another reason?

              She felt his weight shift atop her, and her heart slammed heavily against her ribcage. But Professor Donovan wasn't looking to resume whatever it was that had happened between them earlier. The older man pushed himself off her, and Kira sat up, absently bringing a hand up to feel for leaves tangled in her hair.

              "Am I…?"

              "You're fine now," he confirmed for her. "But you weren't when you left my office. Your eyes were the first thing to visibly give you away, and I have a feeling it didn't stop there."

              "No." Kira blushed harder. "I… I could feel the transformation coming."

              "It's flaring up in public because you haven't learned to control it yet." Donovan sat back effortlessly on his haunches as he considered her. She saw that his eyes were back to their usual gray, and Kira couldn't help but envy how easily he had managed to banish the wolf back down inside him. She would give anything to be able to exercise the same control.

              "I know," she said quietly. "It keeps coming on when I least expect it. I feel like I'm living in hell." The hand combing the leaves from her hair was shaking now. She dragged the other through her scalp and hung her head, staring hard at the forest floor to prevent herself from giving over completely to exhausted tears. "I don't know what to do, professor."

              "Sawyer."

              Kira looked up. Professor Donovan was gazing at her intently.

              "Sawyer." She repeated his first name. It felt like a strange expression of trust, and it flooded her with relief. She wasn't alone. There was one person who understood what she was going through, even if it was the one person she had least expected.

              "I want you to believe me when I say I'm here to help you, Bentley. I've been in your shoes before. I was once young and uninformed and falling on my ass in the middle of the woods with my knees bent back the wrong way."

              "You tackled me!" Kira exclaimed. "I didn't fall on my—"

              "All I'm saying is, at the time I would have given anything for someone to be there to help me through it," Donovan continued. He rose and offered his hand to her. After a moment's hesitation, Kira accepted, and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. "I'm offering my help now, but you have to do something for me in return."

              "I knew it," she muttered. She blew a strand of tousled blond hair out of her face and waited impatiently. She could affect indifference all she wanted, but on the inside she was apprehensive about Donovan's ultimatum. What would it be? More sandwiches?
More
blackmail?

              "You can't drop out of school. Give it another semester." Professor Donovan's eyes shone with conviction. "Give
me
another semester. And if we can't work together to find a way for you to balance your dual lives, then you have my permission to give up school and seek out something else."

              "I don't believe I asked for your permission to begin with," Kira muttered. Their hands were still linked, however, from him offering her help up from the ground, and she gripped his fingers a little harder in silent agreement. Professor Donovan gave her a shake of approval before withdrawing. The terms of their arrangement were set.

              But what did he have to gain from helping her? Kira studied the man's back as he turned away. "Wait a few minutes before you follow me out," he advised over his shoulder. "Wouldn't want to give anyone who might see us the wrong impression."

              Kira was glad her professor exited the woods before her, because he would have seen the expression on her face if he had waited up. She ran a hand through her hair out of nervous habit and shook the remaining leaves from her tresses as she contemplated his words.

              "The wrong impression?" she repeated under her breath. She could still feel the possessive heat of his lips on hers. "What would the
right
impression be, professor? Please tell me, because even I don't know."

When he had told Kira Bentley "a few minutes", he hadn't meant
an hour and twenty.

              Sawyer Donovan watched as Kira walked through the door to his classroom late and navigated her usual route along the wall to her desk. He had left her alone in the woods an hour before the start of class, and now he was already a third of the way through his lesson. He knew firsthand that she had no excuse for being tardy today.

              Kira sat down, crossed her long legs, and… Jesus, he hadn't realized what a knockout smile the girl had, she expressed it so rarely. She was grinning right at him, and Donovan momentarily forgot where he was or what he was doing. The students in the front row shifted uncomfortably, and several shot looks over their shoulders to see what had distracted him from his lecture. But Kira folded her smile back up like an origami crescent moon, and she was now idly flipping forward through her copy of
Jane Eyre
to the pages he had specified on the whiteboard.

              He wanted to call her out. The class would be expecting it from him—his dynamic with Kira Bentley, their almost constant friction, was well-known at this point. But all he could think about in that moment was
another
kind of friction they had shared against the closed door of his office, with only a taped window and a panel of wood screening them from anyone who happened to pass by in the hallway…

              So no, he couldn't think of anything funny to say at her expense, and Kira spent the remainder of his lesson jogging the ankle crossed over her knee beneath the desk and looking pleased with herself. Well, he supposed she had a reason to smile. She had just found out she wasn't alone in what she was going through.

              He'd let her off easy today.

"You know, it isn't necessary to come late to my class just to keep up the pretense," Donovan said when she rejoined him in his office after English. Kira crossed to her usual seat and sat down. It almost amused him to see how readily she entered his domain now, when she had always been so reluctant and mopey to do so before. He sat back and rotated his pen between his fingers as she set a brown paper bag down between them.

"Don't you ever have other students stop by?" she inquired with a raised eyebrow.

"So far this semester it's been only you."

"I guess I wasn't sure if I still needed an excuse." Kira watched as he unwrapped his usual roast beef sandwich. "I mean, not that
I
needed one before to… see you. But I'm guessing that's why you called me in here so often. The whole lycanthropy thing."

"Guess again." Donovan brandished his sandwich at her, and watched as she recoiled a bit. "I call you in here because I need to make sure you stay caught up with the material. It wouldn't be any different if you were any other student." His claim was partially true, at least. "I hate to say it, but you didn't miss much in my lecture this morning, so your trip to my office today is at least unnecessary in that regard. Want a bite?"

He offered the sandwich to her, mainly to see if she would retreat from it again. She did, and put her hands up to rebuff his offer.

"No thanks. I'm a vegetarian," Kira said.

Donovan choked. He actually had to turn his head aside and pound a fist against his sternum to dislodge the piece of food that had gotten stuck there on his incredulous intake of breath. Kira watched him suspiciously, as if uncertain of whether or not he truly needed help. Once he had recovered himself, Donovan took a quick swig of coffee, slammed his mug down on his desk, and leaned forward.

"You
cannot
be a vegetarian," he emphasized.

Kira crossed her arms and scowled at him. "Of course I can. I've been a vegetarian my entire adult life."

Donovan gave a sharp laugh at this, and he could practically see the girl bristling at his amusement. Her flashing eyes demanded the unvoiced question:
you don't think I'm an adult?
Donovan knew a little too well that Kira Bentley was an adult, but that was beside the point.

"You cannot be a vegetarian," Donovan repeated, "because it is physically impossible for you to be so. Have you ever heard of a wolf surviving on fruits and veggies in the wild? Of course you haven't." His eyes raked her as this latest revelation sank in. No wonder Bentley had lost so much weight these past few weeks. If all she was attempting to put down was herbivorous fair, there was no way her changing body was
keeping
it down; she was essentially starving herself to death without realizing it. It horrified him to think of what might have happened to her if he had waited any longer to confront her on the subject.

The look on her face said it all. The girl was devastated. Donovan sat back and ran a hand through his hair as he considered how to proceed with the situation. There was so much he needed to go over with her before the next full moon, it was probably best that they start with the basics.

"All right, I get that this is a major life change for you," he said. "I'm not unsympathetic, Bentley, believe me. And I'm not trying to be an asshole."

The blonde snorted.

"But you're going through a
lot
of major life changes right now," Donovan continued. "So we'll start from the beginning. You need meat in your diet, and you're going to need a lot of it. Your body is going to be burning a lot more calories from here on out, and it's important for you to stay healthy. Not only that, but having excess energy to burn is going to help you remain in control of your shifts. There's no fighting the wolf and winning if you're running on empty. I'm willing to bet the reason your symptoms keeps flaring up is your body is trying to shift into a form better suited to feeding itself. That's a nice way of saying your biology is wigging out, Bentley."

"Ugh." The girl dropped her head into her hands. "There's nothing
nice
about this! There's nothing nice about eating meat!"

"You don't have the luxury of being human anymore." Content that there were no more surprises in store for him, at least for the moment, Donovan took another enormous bite out of his sandwich. He couldn't imagine ever purposefully
choosing
to be a vegetarian, but he had been a werewolf for much longer than she had.

"It just feels like every choice has been taken away from me," Kira muttered miserably. "I never asked to be bitten."

Donovan stilled at this, but she was so caught up in her own emotions that she was beyond noticing.

"I feel like I'm losing myself," she said finally as she raised her eyes to look at him. "I know it sounds stupid."

"It doesn't sound stupid," he replied. "Not to me."

They sat in silence for a moment. It would have been easier to endure if they hadn't locked eyes before Donovan said the words; now, he found that he couldn't look away from her. Kira's beautiful hazel eyes searched his for something more, some unvoiced meaning behind his words, but he couldn't allow her to find anything there. His sandwich was long finished, so he used his free hand to pluck his glasses off the desk and push them back up his nose. The move broke the spell, and Kira looked away.

"Have dinner with me." He surprised them both with the invitation. He followed up quickly so she wouldn't have time to read between the lines. "I cook for myself every night, and I can show you the basics of how you should be eating now. In exchange, you can help me grade quizzes."

"Do you even remember how to grade them yourself at this point?" Kira asked as she arched an eyebrow. They both rose in unison and headed for the door. His intention was to hold it open for her, but Kira stopped dead in her tracks, and Donovan realized his error too late. The last time the two of them had been in the doorway to his office together…

He gazed down at her and wet his lips; his mouth felt suddenly dry beyond words. In the wake of everything that had happened that morning, he thought Kira's stunt—and his guileless reciprocation—could go unacknowledged, but he saw now this wasn't the case. The kiss weighed heavily on Donovan's mind, almost every time he looked at her, and he could tell by her reluctance to join him in the doorway that it was the same for her. Maybe he should say something—but what was there for him to say that wouldn't make it more awkward? What words, and in what combination, would succeed in releasing them both from the memory?

It occurred to Donovan that maybe he didn't want to be released, and that was the worst realization at all. If that truly was the case, then he wasn't fit to call himself her teacher. No matter how similar their situations were—no matter how fired up Kira Bentley got him—he couldn't let himself be more than a mentor to her. Thinking about her in any other way betrayed all that he stood for.

"I'll come."

Donovan blinked. It took him a moment to remember the thread of their conversation. Kira was gazing up at him, and looking more vulnerable than he had ever seen her. Her pale, upturned face had managed to regain some of its usual color in the few minutes they had spent together in his office. Why? Surely it wasn't on account of something he had said? Unless the renewed flush to her cheeks was due to frustration…

"To dinner," she reiterated. "I'll be there. What time?"

"I haven't even given you my address yet," Donovan said, an amused smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

"I'll meet you back here after classes. You're driving." She shrugged beneath his outstretched arm, and allowed him to continue to hold the door open for her as she left. Donovan leaned his head out of his office to watch her trot back down the hallway. When he turned, he noticed one of the older male professors had paused in coming out of the breakroom to scrutinize their exchange. Dr. Kilman, was it? Donovan flipped the other man a casual wave as he receded back into his office.

The invitation had probably been a good idea, all things considered. The frequency with which Kira visited his office was starting to get noticed, and not in a good way.

Donovan crossed back to his desk and unnecessarily straightened a stack of papers, whistling all the while. His pulse had started to speed the moment she agreed to have dinner with him, the same way it would have had a beautiful woman at the bar accepted his offer of a date. But this was
not
a date, and he was not meant to enjoy being in the company of his student this evening. Kira Bentley had a lot to learn about being a werewolf, and unless he wanted professors like Dr. Kilman hovering suspiciously outside his door, then this was the only conceivable way for Donovan to continue his lessons. They required complete privacy moving forward, like it or not… and Donovan was beginning to suspect that he liked it too much.

I never asked to be bitten.

The echo of her words yanked him from his thoughts, and his smile died instantly. Donovan threw the papers back down on his desk and dragged his hands through his hair. His happiness gave suddenly and viciously away to despair, and he crossed to the far side of the room. The calendar he had used to mark the days since the last full moon hung on the wall, right above where Kira sat, like a terrible clue waiting to be discovered.

He tore it from the wall.