The Better to Hold You (35 page)

I, on the other hand, obviously smelled like a leader. That, or they wanted to eat me.

I ran faster, nervous laughter bubbling up in my throat. I ran all the way through the park, up to Third Avenue, and back to Lilliana’s apartment, where I had trouble getting my key in the lock.

The dogs went wild, barking, yipping, the shepherd managing a low approximation of a howl as I finally got the door open and slammed it in their eager faces. I ran up the stairs, still energized; well, I ran up the first two flights. At the door to the apartment, I stopped, trying to catch my breath. I braced my hand against the door, which I had locked not forty-five minutes earlier, and it opened.

The fear lasted only a moment, because I didn’t have to look to know who had invaded my apartment. I could smell him. But I still couldn’t believe it when my eyes located him, straddling a chair, regarding me with that familiar lazy smile.

“Did I wait long enough, Doc? I figured, April—she’ll feel it by then. But I missed you too damn much.”

I stared at him, conscious of being sweaty and unmade-up, my hair falling in a lank ponytail down my back. “How did you get up here?”

“Fire escape.”

“But the windows were locked!”

“Jackie never told you? Right before I apprenticed with that shaman, I spent some time with a master thief.”

I walked closer to him. He’d lost weight again, and there was grayish-red stubble on his chin. He was wearing a backwards baseball cap and a perfectly hideous green sweatshirt with a picture of a stag on it, and if I’d never met him before I’d have figured him as the type to hunt from the back of a pickup truck. But my stomach was coiled tight with excitement and fear, and I had to concentrate on my breathing. In and out, that’s how it’s done, I reminded myself.

“I’ve been calling and calling you, Red. But you never called back, and all Jackie would say was that you were out of town.”

He unhooked his leg from the stool and stood up. “I know. Jackie told me that you’d talked to her a couple of times when I got back from Canada.”

“How long since you got back?”

“Three days. It was easier to stay far away, you know what I mean? Since you sounded so damn sure of yourself on New Year’s, I figured I’d better wait till it was really spring to come after you. Not that this feels like spring, but hey, it’s coming. You can almost smell it on the wind.”

I touched his face, tanned from a winter sun, and the shock of the contact raced all the way down my arm. “So what happens in spring?”

Red wrapped his arms around me and kissed me so hard my teeth hurt. Then he pulled back, laughed at my expression, and kissed me again, harder, his hands cupping the back of my head.

“How about this for a proposal: Come live with me and be my love and if you’ve got insomnia, hell, we can go chase sheep till dawn. No more lonely nights. That’s my proposal.”

“I’ve been pretty stupid about men up till now.”

“I’ve been pretty stupid about women. Kept chasing after the ones who wanted to run away.”

“I don’t want to run away.”

“Sure you do. But you also want to be caught.”

And he grabbed my wrists and held them behind my back and we kissed again, till I could feel the rapid beat of his heart against my chest.

“Are you ready for a little adventure, Doc?”

“What kind?”

“Let me see. How about something that calls for you to hang on to the back of a motorcycle. We spend some time exploring out west. I’ll show you where I grew up in Texas. Then, when it really warms up, we head for northern Canada, where my grandfather lived.”

“And then what?”

Red traced my mouth with his thumb. “And then we go home.” He kissed me again, and this time, his tongue found mine.

Maybe somewhere between complete surrender and total independence I could find a middle path. Maybe there was a way for me to forge a veterinary career that could bring me closer to Red, not distance me from him.

Maybe I was thinking below the waist and had completely lost my ability to reason.

But really, when you think about it, Manhattan is no place for anything on four legs. And certainly not for something the size of a wolf.

I pulled apart from Red, wanting to find the words to reassure him that my answer to all his questions was a most definite yes. But then Red growled and began circling me, and I let out a nervous laugh.

“What am I supposed to do now? Say, My, what big teeth you have?”

Red just smiled and didn’t answer. And suddenly I really was a little frightened. For the first time, I was seeing Red with his guard down. Not careful because I was new to the change. Not cautious because he didn’t want to frighten me off with his intensity. This was a man secure in himself, and as he moved deliberately around me, I could feel the balance of power between us shift and reconfigure.

I didn’t know the name of this game, or the rules. In all the years that Hunter and I had made love, we had remained bound by certain unspoken guidelines. I like this kind of touch, not that; touch me here, not there. We were like those people who go on vacation the same time each year to the same room in the same hotel in the same place. When Hunter had first come back from Romania, he had crossed our unstated boundaries a little, but only a little. Maybe, deep down, Hunter had known that if he’d pushed too far, he’d have discovered the surprisingly deep reservoir of cruelty in himself.

But this was different. Red was different. I stood my ground as he closed in, forcing myself to hold eye contact, that primitive, dangerous intimacy which provokes all manner of animal desires. A shiver of anxiety raced through me and I recognized it for what it was: that age-old fearful longing to surrender and let passion consume you.

Red’s teeth closed over my shoulder. I had finally met my fate, and it was delicious.

The Better to Hold You is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Del Rey Mass Market Original

Copyright © 2009 by Alisa Sheckley

All rights reserved.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-345-51273-4

www.delreybooks.com [http://www.delreybooks.com]

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