Staring into the compelling blue of his eyes, Alex knew a fleeting sensation of panic. Not for Caliban, but for herself. The secret of “taming” wild animals was twofold: first, convincing the creature to accept a trainer as one of its own kind, and then, to persuade that creature—through the skillful art of bluff—that the trainer is superior, dominant.
Gazing into Noah’s eyes, Alex recalled the peculiar image of how the big cats had so often looked at her in submission—but this time she was gazing through the cat’s eyes at Noah. And he wasn’t bluffing.
What she had only sensed intuitively before now hit her with the force of a blow. She was attracted to Noah because of the element of danger she sensed in him, and that frightened her because she now recognized a strength greater than any she had faced before.
In the circus there had been a very old trainer who had taught Alex the skills she had needed, and she suddenly remembered a pet theory of his. He believed that only “alpha” or dominant personalities ever became successful trainers. Because, he said, only those innately strong people could convince a savage creature to bend its proud neck. He had said that Alex was an alpha person, a rarity among women.
And he had predicted lightly, casually, that it would be difficult for her to find a man she could “run in harness” with. Only an equally strong alpha could match her, he’d said, and they were uncommon indeed. She would, he’d said confidently, know when she met one.
She knew.
There was no need for some feat of strength from Noah, no need for the beating of chest or shouting of power. What she saw in his eyes was a quiet, understated strength, but beneath that was a flaring of something sharp-edged and primitive. It was as if the strongest cat she had ever faced looked at her now with blue-gray eyes.
And Alex felt an equally primitive flaring within her. It was not in her to submit, and her clamoring instincts were telling her now that she was in danger of doing just that. He was stronger. Somehow, he was stronger, and she knew now that his casual companionship of the past days had been the deadly patient waiting of a wild thing.
“Alex?”
She blinked, looking at him, seeing how deceptively civilization could cloak in gentle colors the heart and spirit of a wild thing. She had forgotten his question, and when a shout reached them from Noah’s balcony, relief swept over her.
“Alex!” one of the painters yelled. “We need you up here!”
She stroked quickly to the ladder and pulled herself up, mumbling something that might have been “Excuse me” as she reached for her lavender cotton coverup and donned it without bothering to towel off.
Noah watched her disappear through her sliding glass doors, then pulled himself from the water and sank down on a recently purchased lounge chair to stare broodingly into the sparkling water of the pool.
Since he had taken a few weeks’ vacation to settle into his new home and set up his studio, there had been far too much time for thinking. Noah would have preferred to be busy, devoting only part of his time to coming to terms with the fascination he felt for Alex. She was a puzzle, and he had always enjoyed delving to the heart of any mystery.
He had watched her unobtrusively these last days, his photographer’s eye catching unguarded moments when he had yearned for a camera in his hand. Like the moment when she had stood in a group of large, coveralled painters, dwarfed by their size yet curiously dominant because all heads had been bent attentively to hers. And the moment coming down the stairs from his loft when she had suddenly thrown a leg across the railing and slid gleefully downward, the green sprites in her eyes laughing up at him.
And other moments. Pensive moments, humorous moments. Moments of frowning concentration and moments of odd, elusive wistfulness.
She seemed a dozen women in a single lovely skin, and she haunted more than his dreams. After her deliberate warning Noah had carefully backed off and settled down to wait, something in him certain that the time would be well spent.
Yet she had looked at him just now with a startling intensity, as if she had rounded a corner to face a threat looming in front of her. He had forgotten his own question as he’d gazed into green eyes flaring with turbulent emotion and felt something in himself stir to wakefulness.
Now he was restless, on edge. What had he said to provoke that reaction in her? He’d asked about Caliban. Just that. In fleeting moments during the past days he had wondered idly about Alex’s pet, still faintly bothered by the name. Then he had traced the memory to Shakespeare, and had still been only mildly curious.
After her reaction to his question, he was determined to find out what was going on.
It was sometime later that Noah moved slightly in his lounge chair, only half conscious of the itching tingle between his shoulder blades. He wanted suddenly to turn and look behind him, feeling just as he had after he’d heard the eerie moan in the night.
Then he heard the sound again, this time in broad daylight.
His scalp tingled a primitive warning, and muscles bunched in the instinctive reaction to a threat more sensed than seen. Slowly, carefully, Noah turned his head—and then froze.
The animal standing only a foot away was a yellowish-gray in color, and was somewhere around nine feet long. It weighed every ounce of four hundred pounds—all of it clearly muscle. Shaggy hair a shade darker than the rest framed a large square head in which yellow eyes surveyed Noah with interest. And a long tail with a tuft of black hair on the tip waved gently.
Noah knew a moment of incredibly clear thought—sharpened by fear, he decided later—and realized that this was Caliban. And there was indeed something special Alex had neglected to mention about her pet.
She hadn’t mentioned he was a lion.
Logic told him that she would hardly make a pet of a savage creature, but logic instantly amended the thought. What would Alex, an animal trainer for four years, consider a savage creature?
Then Caliban yawned mightily, and Noah suddenly relaxed.
Where sharp teeth should have been was only the clean pink line of gums. He didn’t have a single tooth in his head.
“As you can see,” Alex said quietly, having obviously just reached the pool, “Cal would have a hard time turning into a maneater.”
Noah tore his gaze from the lion and looked at her. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” he demanded softly.
Caliban padded to the edge of the pool, crouched, and jumped into the water.
Alex sat in a lounge chair beside Noah’s, tense with the worry that her landlord and employer might report her. She didn’t think he would, but she wasn’t at all sure of that. And even though a part of her cursed her own forgetfulness in neglecting to fasten the screen on her patio door, another part knew that Noah would have found out soon anyway.
“Why?” he repeated after an incredulous glance toward the swimming lion.
“Because it’s illegal,” she said simply. “If the animal control people knew about Caliban, he’d be put in a zoo—or destroyed.”
“How long have you had him?”
“Six years.”
“Since the circus?” Noah shook his head bemusedly. “But how—”
“I stole him.” Alex sighed. “It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time.”
After a moment Alex nodded. “All right. But I have to go back to the beginning. Caliban’s beginning. He was born in a private zoo and hand-reared because his mother died. The man who owned the zoo let Cal roam free in his house and treated him like a child.” She smiled faintly, gazing toward the still-swimming lion. “As far as Cal was concerned, he was people—he didn’t know he was … king of the beasts.
“You see, mother nature made a slight genetic error when she created Cal. She put the soul of a kitten into a lion’s body. Even years later, when the zoo was closed after the owner’s death and Cal was bought by a circus, he never showed an affinity for other lions. He never even learned how to roar.
“By the time I joined the circus
, they’d given up on making him seem ferocious. He was too lazy to perform in the ring; they used him as a comedian, because he’d always roll over to have his belly scratched and make the crowd laugh.”
“Why did you steal him?” Noah asked, watching her profile intently.
For a moment Alex didn’t answer. She waited until Caliban caught the top step of the ladder and nimbly pulled himself out of the pool, then came to sprawl in a wet and lazy heap beside her lounge chair. Then she looked at Noah.
“Just before I left the circus, Cal lost all his teeth. It was partly age and partly a gum disease. He was old even then. The owner decided he’d be too much trouble to feed, so he planned to have him destroyed.” Her hand dropped to rest on the broad head of her pet. “I couldn’t bear that. Except for the loss of his teeth, Cal was perfectly healthy. So, the night I left the circus, I took him with me.”
“The circus didn’t report it?”
“No. The owner was something of a shady character; he wouldn’t have dared report the loss of a big cat to the police. Besides, he knew. He knew I’d taken Cal.”
She looked back down at the lion, then stared at Noah defiantly. “Lions rarely live to be twenty: Cal is thirty-one. Thirty-one. He has never in his life so much as scratched another living creature and when they put him in a cage with a lioness, all he wanted to do was wash her face as if she were a pet. He doesn’t know he’s a lion.”
Noah realized that she was waiting for him to announce his intentions. Would he report the lion or join her in a quiet conspiracy? Instead of doing that, Noah asked another question. “How’ve you managed to hide him for six years?”
Alex took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Caution, planning—and a little help from a few friends. Cal’s own nature helped. Male lions tend to rest and sleep nearly twenty hours out of every twenty-four, and Cal is very obedient. He tends to stay where I put him. I take him out for exercise very early and very late. And I’ve been lucky.”
“What d’you feed him?”
“Mostly baby food but he’ll eat anything as long as it’s finely ground. Left to themselves, lions eat only about once a week—and then they stuff themselves. But Cal’s fed twice a day.” She took another deep breath, then asked tightly, “What will you do?”
Noah gazed at her for a long moment. What he saw was a beautiful delicate woman who might have weighed a fourth of what her pet weighed, a woman who had kept a lion safe, happy, and secret for six years—in a city. That alone spoke volumes for her strength and determination.
He rose to his feet and reached for the pale-blue terry-cloth robe lying over the back of his lounge chair. “Why don’t we take Cal inside,” he said mildly, “before one of the painters looks down here and has a heart attack.”
Alex got up as he did, and if he had wanted to be rewarded, her glowing smile was more than he would have asked for. “You won’t report it?”
“Report what?” he asked blandly. “As far as I’m concerned, your pet’s just a big cat.”
“Thank you, Noah.”
“Don’t mention it.”
As they headed for the deck outside Alex’s loft, Noah thought ruefully that this situation would have been a prime source of blackmail for an unscrupulous man. But Noah was neither unscrupulous enough, insensitive enough, nor stupid enough to attempt that ploy. Practically speaking, the two strongest reasons to avoid blackmail were clear: An unwilling, coerced Alex in any man’s bed, he suspected, would be a dangerous, unpredictable thing indeed; and it would obviously be nothing short of insanity to blackmail a woman with her own lion—however toothless.
“What’re you thinking?” Alex asked curiously as they stood in the living area of her loft.
He looked at her. “I was thinking of the possibilities of blackmail,” he answered honestly, wondering how she’d react. Being Alex, of course she avoided any exclamations of horror and mistrust.
“You wouldn’t,” she said definitely, then added calmly, “Iced tea?”
“Thank you.” Noah grinned to himself as he tossed his robe over a chair then sank down among the pillows on the couch. “What makes you so sure I wouldn’t?” he asked, half-turning to watch her over the partition as she prepared the tea in the kitchen.
Alex didn’t answer until she had handed him a glass and sat down at the end of the couch. She was more than a little disconcerted by the nearness of his lean, tanned body, especially since it was clothed only in dark-blue trunks. It occurred to her vaguely that her preoccupation with Caliban’s safety had quite blinded her these last days to Noah’s incredible attractiveness.
Wary of giving herself away, Alex unconsciously and automatically underwent a subtle transformation beneath Noah’s fascinated gaze. Her own awareness of his attraction sent a danger signal to her brain and that brain, conditioned to meet danger with an appearance of calm and confidence, instantly sent its own signals to her body.
Her tense shoulders relaxed; her head rose with the poise of calm pride; the faint frown disappeared from her brow; and the turbulent green eyes subsided into serenity.
“Because you wouldn’t blackmail me,” she answered finally, dispassionately. “You wouldn’t enjoy dominating me like that.”
Noah, still fascinated, barely heard her. Since in his own mind her lion-taming past seemed incredible, he was very conscious of that part of her life; he immediately understood her transformation, and a part of him was elated to elicit that reaction from her. She was wary … but she was aware.
After a moment he cleared his throat and murmured, “Should I growl or roll over or something?”
Startled, she blinked at him. Then, as realization sank in, she bit her lip unsteadily. “Um, I beg your pardon?”
“The whip and chair weren’t physically present,” he decided thoughtfully, “but somehow they were here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she managed to say, avoiding his eyes to pretend to watch Caliban as he dragged his bear from the bedroom.
“Alex,” Noah said very gently, “I’m not a threat. Am I?”
She leaned forward to place her glass on the coffee table, mainly just to have something to do. Then she sat back and reluctantly turned to meet his steady, inquiring gaze. Softly, compelled to be honest by something in his eyes, she said, “Very few creatures are a threat—until they turn on you. But the possibility is always there.”
“And you guard against possibilities.”
“After four years in cages I don’t have a scar anywhere,” she said, steady. “Because I was always alert to the possibilities.”
“I would never hurt you.” He heard his own voice emerge quietly and was dimly aware that the tables had been turned on them again—by his doing this time; what could have been light was now very serious.
“You know what they say about the road to hell.”
“Being paved with good intentions?” He hesitated, searching her face intently. Once more he had an odd feeling of déjà vu; their words seemed to echo in his ears as if he had heard them before and, curiously, a line from The Tempest whispered in his mind: “What’s past is prologue.”
“You’re staring at me,” she murmured, uncomfortable.
Noah shook his head slightly, not denying her accusation but rather trying to throw off the peculiar thoughts. When he gazed into her green eyes, the thoughts—any thoughts—vanished of their own will. “It just isn’t fair,” he said huskily, leaning forward briefly to set his glass on the coffee table.
“What?” she asked, bemused.
His hand rose to touch her cheek. “That anyone should have eyes like that.”
Alex couldn’t look away, not even with her instinct for self-preservation clamoring a strident warning. And none of her other instincts would surface to protect her now because no bluff could overpower his own strength. “Noah …”
He leaned toward her slowly, his fingers still lightly touching her cheek. “I’m not a lion, Alex,” he whispered. “I’m just a man.”
&nbs
p; As his lips found hers, she had time only to absorb the vast understatement he made with such confidence. Just a man? Then she was conscious of nothing but his touch, his kiss, and of the incredible force of the feelings rising instantly within her.
No one had ever warned her.
Vibrant colors pinwheeled before her closed eyes, so bright and shining that they made her ache. She could hear the roar of a rain-swelled stream, and smell the dark green of a forest. Then the crackle of a fire and the warm shelter of strong arms held her spellbound, enchanted. A fierce certainty gripped her body, the certainty, the familiarity, of coming home….
Alex opened her eyes, dazed, to look into his equally blurred and bewildered stare. Very slowly Noah sat back, his uneven breathing obvious.
“I’ll risk it,” he said finally, deeply.
She swallowed. “Risk what?”
“The possibility that I’m … not your blue-ribbon affair.”
“Noah—”
“I’ll risk it, Alex. Will you?”
The blue of his eyes compelled her, pushed her past any thoughts of safe uninvolvement. “I … don’t think I have a choice.”
“Because you’re not sure? Because I could be?”
She nodded. “I thought I’d know right away.” It was a tacit denial of the knowledge, and only partly a lie. She knew it was a blue-ribbon affair for her. But was it the same for him?
Noah seemed to relax. “We have time,” he murmured as if to himself. He studied her for a moment, then smiled and abruptly changed the subject. “Tell me, did you learn to tell fortunes in that circus?”
Alex blinked at the change of subject, but was grateful for the opportunity to avoid serious thought. “Not really. Oh, there was an old woman with the circus who claimed to be a Gypsy—and might have been, for all I know—but that stuff’s mostly fake. She talked to me a little about palmistry.”
He held out his right hand, palm up, and the blue eyes laughed. “Then tell me if I’ll meet someone tiny, blond, and beautiful….” he challenged her.
She laughed in spite of herself, but bent forward to study his hand. One neat oval nail traced the line curving at the base of his thumb, hesitating for an instant before continuing on until the line met those at the inside of his wrist. “You have a long lifeline,” she murmured.