She woke up because someone was rubbing her all over with a warm, wet, and extremely rough washcloth.

“Hey,” Samantha muttered as whoever was washing her dragged the rough wet fabric over her cheeks and throat. “Hey, what are you . . . ?”

She didn’t finish the question because the washcloth was dragged over her sensitive right nipple, making her flinch in pain.

“Hey, that hurts!” she muttered, trying to roll away from the insistent washcloth. Something heavy and soft at the same time pressed down on her shoulder, keeping her in place, and the washing resumed, with the rough cloth rubbing between her breasts. “Haven’t you ever heard of fabric softener?” Samantha complained. “Why don’t you just let me take a shower and wash myself? It would be—”

Her voice died in her throat as her eyes finally flew open.

Leaning over her, his eyes still shining like pale-green lamps, was the immense cougar that had saved her from the snake. He was holding her down with one huge paw and lapping her all over. In fact, what she’d thought was a warm, rough washcloth was actually his tongue.

Samantha held her breath as the deadly jaws opened again, baring those incredibly long fangs. They were only inches from her throat, and so sharp she was certain the cougar could bite off her head with one chomp.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, her heart jack-hammering in her chest. “Oh my God . . . Keller?”

The Cougar looked up at her for a moment, then went back to the business of washing her with his tongue. Because that was what he was doing, Samantha realized when her heart finally stopped trying to pound its way out of her chest. There was nothing sexual or lascivious in the way the big cat was licking her—he was simply washing her, the same way a mother cat might wash her kitten.

He even seemed to be trying to be a little more careful. The tongue dragged much more gently over her left breast than it had over her right. Though it still stung her sensitive nipple, Samantha felt a new sensation as well.

Looking down, she saw in the dim moonlight that the itching, stinging welts that had covered her body were gone. At least they were gone from the places Keller’s Cougar—she was reasonably sure it was his anyway—had licked her. From her belly button down, though, she was still sticky and sweaty and covered in bug bites.

Not to worry, whispered a worried little voice in her head. He’s getting there. . . .

Indeed he was. The washing continued as the Cougar made his way, with long, methodical swipes of his rough tongue, down her hips and lower belly.

“Keller?” Samantha whispered uncertainly. “Um, you can stop anytime. I’m awake now.”

But the big beast showed no sign of stopping. He ran his rough tongue over the tops of her thighs and all the way down her sticky calves.

By this time, Samantha had clamped her thighs closed, determined not to let the huge Cougar anywhere near her most sensitive area. It was one thing to let him tongue wash the rest of her, but some things had to remain off-limits.

Right?

Apparently the big cat didn’t think so. After he finished licking her all over, he returned to her inner thighs and nudged his nose right into her crotch.

“No! Huh-uh—no way.” Samantha sat up and glared at him, shaking her head firmly. “Sorry, buddy, but that area isn’t up for grabs. Or licks. Or whatever.”

The huge Cougar lifted his head and stared at her with unblinking eyes, shining pale green and implacable in the moonlight.

“No!” Samantha repeated.

The Cougar nudged the juncture of her thighs again and a low growl began to rumble in the back of his throat.

The message was clear—apparently she didn’t have a choice.

“But I don’t want to,” Samantha told the Cougar in a wavering voice. “It’s embarrassing. And . . . and scary.”

Without meaning to, she let a tear slip down her cheek. And then another and another. Soon she was flat-out crying, as the whole awful experience she’d been through in the past two days suddenly came down on her at once.

Being kidnapped and held at gunpoint for hours and hours . . . locked in the ice-cold cell . . . being “harvested” by Lounds’s horrible machine . . . the fight for her life and then barely escaping the lab only to find herself lost in the wilderness . . . wandering for hours, lost and alone while her body underwent a strange process that made her feel sick and horrified and frightened . . .

It was suddenly too much. Too, too much. Though Samantha considered herself to be one tough cookie, hours of pent-up emotion overwhelmed her, and she sobbed as though her heart would break.

The cougar seemed to understand her distress. To her surprise, he stopped poking his nose around her thighs and came up to nuzzle her face instead. He lay down beside her, wrapped his huge forelegs around her waist, and butted his immense furry head against her cheek.

“Oh . . . ,” Samantha whispered, and threw her arms around the massive neck. Burying her face in his ruff, she let the tears take her, crying her pain and misery and fear into the comforting furry pelt, which smelled like sunlight dappled through the trees and some warm, masculine spice she couldn’t name.

The warmth of the big cat comforted her, and after a moment, she felt a rumbling running through his huge frame, a thrumming vibration that seemed to shake her entire body.

She sniffed and pulled back a little, looking into his glowing green eyes.

“Is that . . . are you . . . purring?” she asked the big creature.

In answer, he butted his head gently against her cheek again and wiped her wet cheeks with a swipe from his wet, rough tongue.

“Oh!” Samantha rubbed at her wet face, but she wasn’t really upset. The gesture was comforting, like a lick from a favorite house cat, only on a much larger scale. And at least the huge cougar didn’t have tuna breath like the cats she’d owned in the past. In fact, his breath was scented like cinnamon and some other exotic spice she didn’t know the name of. It was nice . . . warm, just like his fur.

Also, the places where he licked her were immediately healed. Her eyes, which had felt swollen and hot from crying, were soothed, and her flushed cheeks felt cool. Best of all, the horrible headache that had been throbbing in her temples for hours was magically wiped away, leaving her with a clear, pain-free head for the first time in what felt like ages.

“You’re taking care of me, aren’t you?” Samantha whispered, looking up at the huge cat. “You just want to heal me.”

The cougar regarded her with his pale-green eyes and nodded his head once. It might have been an incidental gesture, but somehow Samantha didn’t think so. It felt deliberate to her, as did the way the cougar was looking at her.

“All right,” she whispered and took a deep, shuddering breath. “All right then. As long as you promise to heal me, and that’s it.”

Disentangling herself from the heavy paws, she lay back on the damp, sandy grass and opened her legs.

The cougar rose and paced around her body twice, as though giving her time to get used to the idea of what he was going to do. Then, after giving Samantha a long, searching look, he started at her inner right knee and began dragging his tongue upward.

Samantha stiffened and had to fight to keep her legs open, but the cougar didn’t do anything indecent. He simply licked along her inner thigh, and after a moment she realized he was lapping away the sticky nectar that had been leaking from her steadily for hours, and healing the stinging bug bites, just as he had on the rest of her body.

It felt so good to be clean and healed of the itchy welts in her most sensitive area that she sighed and let her thighs fall wider apart, even bending her knees to give the cougar greater access.

To her surprise, the big cat avoided the mound of her sex and moved down to drag his tongue up the inside of her other knee and thigh. He worked for several minutes on both upper legs, his rough, warm tongue healing and bathing her at the same time, until Samantha felt like her skin was silky soft and brand-new all over.

Well, almost all over.

The spot between her legs still felt swollen and hot and sticky, as fresh nectar continued to well up and coat her inner thighs. Samantha didn’t know if she wanted the huge beast to lick her there or not. On one hand, it still didn’t feel sexual—which was a good thing, she thought. But on the other, it was embarrassingly intimate, especially knowing that the cougar was almost certainly Keller in his other form.

It was hard to admit that she was leaking some strange substance and couldn’t stop it. It felt dirty and wrong, and the last thing she would have asked any man she cared for was to have him lick up the mess she was making.

She had almost decided to try and close her thighs again when the cougar put his head directly between them, making it impossible to shut her legs.

“Keller,” she protested, rather breathlessly. “Look, I’m really messy down there and I don’t think—”

The cougar cut her off by bending his head and taking a long, wet lick between her thighs.

Samantha gasped as she felt the wet, rough tongue bathe the outer lips of her sex. It was shocking, even though she’d been expecting it. Shocking and embarrassing and . . .

And it felt really good.

Again, not in a sexual way, although there was no denying the tingle she felt when the warm, rough tongue lapped her pussy. But the main sensation she felt was relief. From the time Lounds had clamped the suction cup over her sensitive mound, the lips of her sex had felt swollen and hot. In addition to that, the constant flow of nectar had made her feel dirty and sticky and awful during her long trek through the Everglades.

It was such a relief not to feel that way anymore. To feel clean and cool, to have a respite from the constant throbbing ache that had settled in her sex like a second headache.

“Yes,” Samantha whispered, not even sure what she was saying. “Oh, God—that feels so much better.”

She spread her legs submissively and allowed the cougar to lap her some more, cleaning and healing her thoroughly. Finally he stepped back and nodded his head again, as though to tell her she was finished.

“Okay. I get it.” Samantha rose on shaky legs and would have fallen if the big cat hadn’t come to her side. She stumbled and fell against his tawny flank, leaning against him with her head against his warm pelt.

“Sorry,” she muttered into his fur. “Just so . . . damn . . . tired.”

The cougar turned his head and seemed to regard her anxiously. Or at least Samantha thought she saw worry in his pale green eyes. Maybe she was reading into it. Maybe—

Her thoughts were interrupted when the cougar lay down abruptly beside her, all four feet tucked neatly under him like a gigantic house cat.

“Hey . . .” She looked down at him, though she didn’t have far to look. He was so big that even with him lying down and her standing they were almost on the same level. “Hey,” she said again. “What are you doing down there?”

In answer, the cougar nudged her legs with his head. Then he pointedly looked over his shoulder at his own back.

“What?” Samantha wasn’t sure she was understanding him. “What do you want?”

The cougar nudged her and looked at his back again. Then he looked directly at her, his eyes blazing steadily in the darkness.

“Do you . . . do you want me to . . . to ride on you?” Samantha asked hesitantly.

The cougar nodded once, very firmly, and nudged her once more.

“Really?” Samantha still wasn’t quite sure about riding a huge apex predator from the Ice Age. But she also wasn’t sure about continuing the long, arduous trek through the Everglades on foot. She was already so tired she didn’t think she could walk ten more feet—let alone miles and miles through the marshy wasteland.

What the hell, she told herself. Might as well try it.

She and Sadie had both taken riding lessons in high school, so she knew the proper way to mount a horse. Mounting a giant cougar was a little scarier, though. Gingerly, she threw a leg over the cougar’s broad back, hoping he wouldn’t mind her clumsiness. He stayed still as a stone, giving her confidence to get settled and cling to the slightly longer ruff of fur at his neck.

“I hope this is what you had in mind,” she told him. “I’ve never ridden anything but a horse before, so—”

The cougar rose smoothly to his feet, and she suddenly found herself an alarming distance from the ground. He really was huge, much bigger than a modern lion or tiger that you might see at a zoo. Not that you would try to ride one, Samantha thought dryly. The cougar paused for a moment, as though to let her get her bearings, and then began to make his way through the marshy terrain.

It didn’t matter that Samantha was out of practice because, as she soon found out, a cougar has a completely different gait from a horse. There was no trotting or galloping or really much jolting of any kind. The big cat moved smoothly and steadily, seeming almost to flow across the landscape like silk unspooling. The only uncomfortable thing about riding him was the sharp ridge of his spine, which pressed against her unprotected bottom mercilessly.

Finally, Samantha partially solved this problem by leaning forward until she was lying rather than sitting on the big cat’s back. He was so big this was perfectly possible to do, and soon she found herself almost dozing as he traveled, pouring himself along the ground smoothly in the inky darkness.

The ride lasted for what felt like hours, with Samantha draped wearily over the cougar’s back as he went tirelessly on and on. The moon moved overhead but the night remained the same, murky and humid and thick with the rotten-ripe scent of the swamp. At last she was jolted awake when the cougar came to an abrupt stop.

“Wha—?” Samantha looked up groggily to see that they had stopped in the bushes, just outside a house.

Well, house might be too strong a word for it. It was more like a shack, built by the side of one of the waterways that cut through the Everglades. In fact, there was an airboat—the kind with a huge fan propeller in the back—bobbing quietly beside it, moored to a nearby tree.

There was a porch light burning in front of the shack. It was nothing but a naked yellow bulb, which seemed to have drawn every moth in a ten-mile radius, but to Samantha, who had almost begun to despair of ever seeing civilization again, it looked like heaven.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed, sitting upright on the cougar’s back. “You found people. And maybe a place to stay. They’ll have water—I’m so thirsty. And food, and maybe I can even get a shower! I’d kill for a shower right now.”

She scrambled off the cougar’s back, letting herself drop to the ground, and was about to go knock on the front door of the shack when the cougar got in front of her, putting himself between her and the possible shelter.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Samantha complained, trying to go around him.

The cougar glared at her, then lowered its head and butted her gently but firmly in the chest. The message was clear—Stay here.

“Why?” Samantha demanded. “They’re much more likely to let us in if I do the knocking. You think they’re going to open the door and see a horse-sized cougar and say, ‘Oh, look honey—we have an enormous apex predator at the front door. Let’s invite it in for tea.’ No way—they’re going to be scared to death and probably think they’re having a nightmare. Come on, Keller—let me just knock.”

The cougar shook his head once, very firmly, and then butted her chest again, harder this time. In fact, he butted her so hard that Samantha stumbled backward and nearly fell.

“Hey, you don’t have to get pushy about it!” she hissed. “Come on, I—”

But before she could finish her sentence, the cougar was gone, disappearing noiselessly into the trees and bushes surrounding the shack.

Samantha expected to see him reappear up on the front porch, but he didn’t. In fact, nothing happened for what felt like a long, long time. Just as she was about to go up and knock on the front door after all, she heard a deafening roar, followed by a short, masculine scream from inside the shack.

Her ears perked up and she stared at the ramshackle structure, wondering what the hell was going on in there. A second later, the front door banged open and a man wearing nothing but sagging boxer shorts and a long gray beard burst out into the night. He didn’t spare a glance in Samantha’s direction—she was mostly still hidden in the trees and bushes anyway. Instead, he ran as fast as he could and jumped into the airboat. It started on the second try with a muted roar, and the man drove it away so fast, waves from its wake sloshed up the banks of the waterway, wetting Samantha’s bare feet.

Looking back up on the porch, she saw the huge head and shoulders of Keller’s Cougar poking out, filling the entryway with his massive frame. There was a light in his eyes that looked somehow amused. Samantha thought if she didn’t know better, she would think he was laughing.

“Hey,” she said, picking her way carefully over the rough ground up to the porch. “That wasn’t nice, you know.”

The huge Cougar seemed to shift and shimmer. Before her confused eyes, he shrank and straightened until suddenly the animal was gone, as though he had never existed.

In his place was Keller, as naked as she was, with an amused smile playing around his sensuous lips.

“I know it wasn’t nice,” he said. “But it was necessary.” He made a sweeping motion with one hand. “Won’t you come in? It’s not the ten-thousand-dollar-a-night Emperor suite at the Mandarin, but for tonight, it will have to do.”