Hostage to Pleasure

Lucas’s face went very quiet. “Well, hell.”


“Yeah.” He dropped the hand holding the beer bottle between his raised knees.

“You don’t want to?”

“I don’t know what the fuck I want.” He thrust his free hand through his hair. “All this time, I’ve done everything I could to be better, deadlier, faster.” Talin called him Boy Genius because she thought he was a compulsive overachiever. She was right. “It wasn’t enough that I was good at computers, I had to become a top-level hacker. Not enough that I got into architecture—I had to ace every exam. Hell, I even became a fucking pilot because it was a skill none of the other sentinels had. That drive—it was because I couldn’t shift.”

“Made you one tough son of a bitch, even as a kid,” Lucas agreed. “Now you’re wondering if you’ll lose that drive if you gain the ability to shift?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Dorian, that’s pure bullshit. We both know you’re too fucking hardheaded to ever be less than the best.” Throwing Dorian the empty beer bottle, Lucas folded his arms. “You’re scared, man.”

Dorian’s leopard growled. “And you know shit, Luc.” He got up and went into the house, closing the door behind him. He felt Lucas shift back into panther form and disappear a second later.

But as he slipped into bed beside Ashaya’s curvy body, soothing his beast with the lush warmth of her, the words of two very different men kept circling around and around in his head.

You’re scared ...

. . . people aren’t ready . . . to go out into the unfamiliar darkness.

Turning, he propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at Ashaya’s sleeping face.

Her eyes opened a second later. “You’re thinking too hard.” A complaint followed by a yawn.

“Sorry.” Their bond wasn’t telepathic in the true sense, but it had become obvious that they picked up thoughts from each other at random times.

“You’re still worrying over the shift, aren’t you?” Her eyes darkened. “I should’ve kept silent. You were hap—”

He pressed a finger against her lips. “When you want something so bad it hurts,” he said quietly, “and you bury it, bury it so deep that you convince yourself it no longer matters . . . and someone tells you you can have it, it’s terrifying. What if you take the chance and you’re wrong? What if you let yourself feel the loss and it’s this huge pain and you can’t put it back in the box?”

Ashaya kissed his finger and moved his hand so it lay over her heart. “I’m not an expert on emotion,” she said in her honest way. “Most of the time, I have no idea how to deal with the storm inside me.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“But see, Dorian, I know one thing.” She pressed her hand to his chest. “There are two huge hurts in you. You let yourself cry for Kylie but you’ve never let yourself face the other loss.”

The way she’d simply accepted Kylie’s memory as a part of their lives made him love his mate even more. “You accepted my sister,” she’d said when he’d asked her about it one night, “how can I possibly do any less for yours?”

His guilt, too, was gone. It had burned away during that same conversation—when he’d told Ashaya about Kylie’s fierce spirit. “She hated bullies,” he’d said. “She was ten years old when she saw some kids picking on another boy at school. She flew at them, scratched them up, got into trouble for fighting. But she didn’t care. She made friends with that kid, stuck with him until his family moved to another town.”

“Such a big heart she had,” Ashaya had murmured. “Such a beautiful heart.”

That was when he’d heard Kylie’s laughter in his mind, seen her chiding face.

Of course I would’ve accepted her, big bro. Stop being silly and let her make you happy. Or I’ll haunt you.

He’d finally understood that his sister, with her huge heart, would never have wanted him to feel guilty about this beautiful, perfect thing called the mating bond. That simple knowledge had given him a powerful kind of peace.

But Ashaya was right; as far as his latency went, he’d never even tried for peace. “If I mourn for it,” he said to her now, releasing the vicious control that had allowed him to survive as a child without half his soul, “then I admit it’s gone forever. I don’t want to do that, Shaya. I don’t want to tell my leopard that it’s going to be trapped inside me until death. I don’t want to think of it as a separate being. I want to be complete.”

Ashaya nodded, eyes shiny. “I’ve got it almost ready to go. I thought I should be prepared in case you—”

“Let’s do it. Soon as you’ve finalized everything.” The decision was made. “That way, we’ll know quicker if it doesn’t work.”

A burst of panic in Ashaya’s eyes. “Dorian, I’m so sure but what if—”

“Then I go on,” he said. “At least we’d know that we tried. No regrets.”