She couldn’t help rolling her eyes. “Haven’t you figured out that expression and that tone of voice really don’t work on me? The days of blind obedience are over, Graeme. They’ll never return.”
“You’re no longer a child, Cat,” he scoffed. “Blind obedience was never what I wanted. Yet you seem determined to keep us in the past, where every act, every response, is either black or white, when you know damned good and well our lives never existed on such a plane.”
“You mean a plane where I could trust you?” she asked archly, her grip tightening on the door. “You’re right there. We never existed in that place, I just thought we did.”
“For someone with exceptional photographic memory and an aptitude for logic, you can be amazingly nearsighted and surprisingly illogical,” he accused her as his expression pulled into lines of disapproval. “I taught you better than this, Cat. Why don’t you use some of those incredible gifts I know you possess for something other than hating me?”
The slam of the door wasn’t a shock. Even as her muscles bunched and the hiss of fury left her lips she threw it against the door frame with a powerful flip of her wrist.
“Because you’re so deserving of my hatred?” she retorted, knowing it wasn’t hate she felt.
She’d known that all along. She’d never hated him, not for a single moment. How much easier her life might have been if she could.
“In the eyes of a child, perhaps,” he agreed. “But you aren’t a child, Cat. Even at twelve you were no child, any more than Judd and I had the option of claiming such innocence. You knew when I disappeared that I hadn’t been taken by that death squad, just as you knew a transfusion of your blood would have dire results. You ignored what you knew.”
“You were dying!” she screamed, overwhelmed by the lash of remembered fear at the sight of his wounds and the blood he had lost. “I couldn’t lose you.”
But she had lost him.
He stood there, just staring at her, his gaze heavy and somber. And knowing.
She had known the transfusion would enrage him. She’d overheard Dr. Foster telling him never to risk it without taking precautions. She hadn’t known what the precautions were, but she’d seen the injection he’d received before getting a transfusion from her after an experiment Dr. Bennett had performed had gone wrong.
“To you, it was worth the risk,” he guessed, his voice incredibly sad. “That risk exploded out of my control.”
“Because I infected you?” she sneered.
Stalking to the other side of the room, she rubbed at her arms, the ache for his touch nearly unbearable now.
“I won’t fight with you over things you refuse to see.” He breathed out, the sound fraught with weariness, or sadness. “I can understand your anger, Cat. I can even understand hatred. Your refusal to acknowledge what you knew then and now, I refuse to accept.”
He refused to accept it?
He’d done everything possible to isolate her, to strip her of friends and loyalties, and he thought she should just accept it? Acknowledge what he thought she should know?
“I’ll never trust you,” she whispered painfully. “Never.”
Moving toward her, he shook his head with slow, even movements.
“You already trust me, baby, you just don’t want to accept it yet.”
“You’ve lost your mind.” Disbelief warred with the hunger rising inside her as he came closer.
“Yeah, I did, a long time ago,” he agreed, his arm curving around her waist to drag her against him. “Then I found it in a lonely desert as I watched a tigress hunt and realized all I dreamed of had been right beneath my nose as I searched for her.”
Surprise parted her lips and she would have demanded an explanation. But his kiss stole the words as well as the need for them. Sealing them together as the taste of the mating hormone spilling from both of them mixed, exploding through her senses and her emotions.
Wrapping her arms around his neck, her fingers spearing into his hair to hold him to her as a broken moan escaped her throat, Cat knew she couldn’t have survived much longer without him.
She’d searched for him. She knew that. She’d drawn him back to the desert, gave him the clues needed to find her and refused to tell him who his contact had been. She’d waited for him, night after night, searched the night and the desert for him, and she’d told herself she hated him. She’d told herself she was simply tired of waiting for him to find her and kill her.
What he was doing was more painful, though.
Yet, she was cooperating, wasn’t she?
A strangled cry of need and knowledge filled their kiss.
Tightening his arms around her, Graeme swung her from her feet and carried her to the bed. With his lips still covering hers, their tongues licking, tasting each other’s kiss and their hunger, he moved over her. His body covered hers, his hands exploring, removing the clothing separating them and blocking access to naked flesh as she tore at his with sharpened claws until they fell away.