He wasn’t the only one affected by what his nose could detect. Underneath the musk of his animals, the grass, the soil, everything of earth, she could scent him, the hardness pressed against her thigh already secreting that glistening moisture that sometimes happened when a male became aroused.

“You’ve been listening in my mind when I didn’t know you were there.” A lot. Her voice came out shaky. She didn’t know whether to be terrified . . . or something else.

“It’s not my usual way. Kohana was right about that. But your mind has been going to so many interesting places, and you are part of what I need to understand to determine what’s best for the fledglings. So I thought it would be best to use my expanded senses to follow you.”

Somehow, that didn’t seem like the whole truth to her, but he had no reason to tell her less than the truth, right? She was his, for whatever he wanted in this moment, as if he’d cast a spell over her in truth. As he’d spoken, touched her, she’d wound her fingers tighter into that loose fall of hair, and found his neck. She trailed along the artery there, the one she’d drink from if she were his third-mark servant, in need of strength. Or just for his pleasure. She’d seen that, too. Sometimes, even if he didn’t need it, Danny liked it if Dev drank a few drops of her blood, licking them from her throat, reaffirming that connection with her.

Stiffening at her astounding train of thought, she saw a flash of intensity in Mal’s eyes she wasn’t sure was warning or a fierce reaction to the way she’d touched his throat like that.

He shifted, the grass making a rustling noise beneath his body. She heard one of the leopards chuff, then make a questioning growl noise. “Being in your mind, even at the level of a second-mark, I know what your body wants, regardless of your conscious inhibitions and reservations. A human male without that advantage might back off, appalled at what you’ve had to accept, or he might worry that he’d bring back what Victor did to you.” He held her in the clasp of that gaze. Those dark brown eyes had flecks of gold, she realized. And glimmers of crimson. “But I’m not human.”

He followed the curve of her chin with his knuckles. Just like one of his cats, she lifted it, so he could stroke down the line of her throat. At the base, he reversed his direction, his fingers spreading out and moving back in toward her so there was the startling pressure of his hand collaring her throat, tightening enough that she had to hold her chin up, held fast by his strength and the mesmerizing power of those earth-colored eyes. It should have stoked fear, as he’d said, but it didn’t. Her body recognized the dominant move for what it was. Her thighs, uncaring of her principles or baggage, trembled, shifted, telling her she was fast moving beyond damp, straight into slick-and-willing-for-entry.

“As a vampire,” he continued, his voice as effective as fingertips down the center of her body, trailing over bare sternum, midriff, to the mound of her sex, “I read your desire and your arousal. When one of these cats feels hunger stir in his belly and sees that impala taunting him with the challenge of escape, he must hunt. My instincts won’t deny me the chase, the need to answer that hunger. The nourishment I want is your cry of pleasure. You may resist it, may try to tell yourself I’m taking from you as they did, but it’s your chance to take, too. You’ve fought so hard for these fledglings. You’re fighting your memories, your fears of the future. Surrendering to me is the one place you can let go and act on your instinct, like a wild animal. Once you do that, you’ll bring the strength of a lioness to what you face as a woman.”

He drew his touch back then, diabolically making the ache intensify. “So what will it be, Elisa? A woman, or a wild animal? If you choose the woman, remember you back away from a predator slowly, one step at a time. No running, no taking your eyes off him. If you run, I will take you down.”

The challenge weighted the air between them, a challenge she didn’t know how to answer. She’d never “taken” in her life, never had the aggressive instincts of the wild animal he was referencing. It coiled inside of her, the things she wanted, the things she’d lost, the things that confused her still. She knew she had no answer for him. But perhaps she could test herself in another way.

Slowly, she drew her arms down, her hands slipping away from his neck as she folded her limbs against herself, staring up at him. “You told me I don’t need to know more. You were surprised I could see those bluish lights. You talked about the protection of the skins, but you didn’t say it like it was a wishful thing, the way we wear crosses and hope someone is listening when you pray. It is magic, isn’t it? Will you tell me?”

She didn’t expect him to answer. In fact, she was counting on it. It would confirm there was no real connection between them, the physical lust as temporal as an animal coupling and as emotionally empty. However, after following her brow with a fingertip, then tracing it down her nose, a brief touch on her lips again, he sat up, bringing her with him. She was inside the span of his arm as they sat, legs bent, gazing down on that meadow where the leopards were.

“The cheetah and cubs we saw tonight aren’t here, on the island. When we drove through that open plain, we were actually in Africa. For just a moment or two.”

“Of course. That’s what I would have suspected.” She blinked at him. “I don’t think you need to worry that I’ll give away your secret. Not sure anyone would believe that.”

His lips curved, but the serious set of his eyes remained. “There is a sizeable island here, and the house sits in the center of it. However”—he drew several lines in the dirt banked against the fallen tree—“these sections, when you move into them, you’re not actually here. These are pieces of land elsewhere in the world, that have been patched here by magical fault lines. You can’t wander past them into larger territories. And it’s . . . off-kilter with the reality there. Those actually in those places can’t see or hear us or our cats. Our lions on the open preserve are walking in the environment they’d have in Africa, a shadow of it, without the danger of the poachers. When the island was first formed, a certain number of prey animals—impala, zebra, wildebeest—enough that we could maintain a herd, wandered across that protected fault line before the man who created it sealed it and . . . off-centered it. I’m sure he’d laugh at my rather nontechnical explanation, but that’s the bare bones of it.”

She was more than a little amazed. “I don’t know anything about magic, but that sounds extremely complicated.”

“It was. Just about depleted him. Had to nurse him here for a week before he was back to standing strength again. He’s a little too sure of his own talents. Course, I don’t really know what will kill him.” Mal grimaced.

“And the bed?”

He shrugged. “The canopy over the bed is the focal point for the magic. All the interwoven branches, the charms and sigils, hold it all together. If you tried to unravel it, or break it, you’d simply... incinerate. If you merely touch it, you’re fine,” he added at her startled look. “When the pelts came into my keeping, Derek said they would make a vital part of the casting and protection. The spirits of the cats that used to belong to those coats helped strengthen the connections and the overall protection on the island.”

“Derek. Does he live here?”

Malachi shook his head. “I don’t know where Derek Stormwind lives. Sometimes I’m not quite sure what he is. A sorcerer is probably the best definition. He looks about thirty years old, has since I first heard of him, back in the eighteen hundreds. He came through here years back, when I was setting this place up and trying to decide how I would make it work to rehabilitate cats from different environments.”

“He sounds a bit frightening.” Now Elisa understood Kohana’s darkly ominous comment.

“He’s a lot like one of these cats. You respect his power, have confidence when you deal with him, but you never forget he can be dangerous. I think Derek belongs more to the mysteries of nature than things of man, and it’s a part of nature far darker and more twisted than most of us get to see or comprehend.”

She thought about that, thought in his current disarming state he wasn’t much different from the unpredictable Derek. “So when you sleep in the bed . . . does it do anything to you?”

“Sometimes I just sleep, but there’s always the sense of cat spirits in my dreams, their bodies pressed up to me. And no, it’s not my house cats. They don’t like the bed. They prefer my desk upstairs. I think the magic unsettles them.”

“So much for cats being familiars.”

“Well, I expect there are familiars who are cats, but not all cats are familiars. Some of them are just basic folk.” He gave her a half smile.

It was alarming, how her heart skipped a beat at that expression. She needn’t have worried, however. In a blink, his mien became stern once again and he rose, offering her a fairly impersonal hand up. “I brought you out here so you know what the open preserve is like. I or one of the others will bring you again if you’d like, but you leave the grounds only in my company or others of the staff. If, on the unlikely chance you’re here long enough to be trusted to run errands off the compound, you will get out of the Jeep only where Kohana tells you to get out, and then you come right back. If the Jeep breaks down, you stay inside of it, with the windows rolled up, until we come find you. You’ll have a radio at all times if you’re off the property. Understood?”

She nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Do you want to go see the fledglings now?”

Her heart leaped. She couldn’t contain her joy, even though his voice became even colder and more authoritative. “While you’re there, you’ll obey everything I tell you to do or not to do, immediately and without question.”

“Yes, sir.” Just please take me to them. She didn’t intend it as a direct plea to him, but she expected he heard it. On their walk back to the Jeep, he didn’t try to touch her again.

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