I rolled my eyes. “And once again, the greater good of shifter society comes at the expense of one woman’s liberty. You toms are all alike. Posturing, blustering, hypocritical bigots.”
“Stop talking,” Titus growled, and I recoiled from the anger in his voice instinctively.
Then hated myself for that.
I’d never shied away from a fight in my life, yet every feline instinct I’d been infected with was suddenly telling me to lower my eyes and slowly back away from the angry Alpha.
Screw that. If I’d learned anything from mandatory training, it was that I didn’t have to give in to my shifter instincts. I was still as much human as feline. As was Titus.
He was also the only person in the world currently in the position to give me what I needed.
Freedom. A little space. A chance to talk to Abby.
“You only have a problem if the council finds out. So don’t tell the council.” I shrugged, hoping he couldn’t see—or somehow scent—my internal human-versus-feline battle of wills. “No one ever has to know how I broke out.”
“They’ll figure it out. You didn’t leave any scent on the ground, and the only vehicle that left the Di Carlo property other than Teddy’s was mine.” He tapped a name on his phone, and Faythe Sanders’s picture and phone number appeared. “If you really don’t want to cause me trouble, call Faythe and tell her what you did.” He tried to hand me his cell phone, but I pushed it away.
“Wait. Let’s talk about this.”
“We’re not negotiating,” he growled. “Call her, Robyn. That’s an order.”
I leaned against the passenger-side door, my arms crossed over my chest. Trying not to think about the wild, exciting nature of his scent—the warm, living version of the one I’d bathed in for four hours. “I don’t take orders from you.”
“If you want to belong to my Pride, you do.”
Belong to his Pride? I’d asked for sanctuary, not membership. Were the two inextricable?
I had no interest in trading one Alpha’s rules and machinations for another’s—no matter how good he smelled. But if pretending I wanted to belong would keep him from sending me back to the Di Carlos…
Wait a minute.
“The way I see this, I win either way.” I ticked the possibilities off on my fingers as I thought aloud, half convinced that I had overlooked some devastating detail. “If I join your Pride, I have to follow your orders, but you can’t send me to Atlanta, because I won’t belong there anymore. If I don’t join your Pride, I don’t have to follow your orders, which means you can tell me to go to Atlanta, but you’d be wasting your breath, because you’re not the boss of me. Or am I thinking about this all wrong?”
He frowned at me in the dark, and even his scowl was somehow sexy. “Are you asking me to help you manipulate me?”
“I’m assuming that if you have a counterargument, you’ll throw it at me. Soon, preferably.”
“A counterargument.” Titus slid his key into the ignition, and my pulse jumped when he started the car. “How’s this: I’m going to drive you to the border and tell Teddy Di Carlo to come get you. He’s less than an hour away.”
“That would be the biggest mistake of your life.”
Titus laughed, and the sound echoed through me, touching off little sparks everywhere it landed. “I’m pretty sure the biggest mistake of my life was following a shadow and a snort into a clump of brush during a corporate camping retreat three years ago.” He untucked the tail of his button-down shirt and pulled it up to reveal four prominent white claw mark scars stretched across the defined ripples of his abs.
I reached out to touch them before I realized what I was doing. Then I jerked my hand away.
Stop it, Robyn. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the enticing mental image of his bare stomach. Yes, Titus was hot in an obvious sort of way that made my pulse race and my skin flush, but those reactions weren’t real, and neither was any totally hypothetical attraction I felt toward him. Tabbies practically ovulating in the presence of an Alpha was hormonal witchcraft, and nothing more. Exactly the kind of shifter instinct I’d spent the past nine weeks learning that I didn’t have to give in to.
Like bloodlust, and the overwhelming urge to shift when I got angry…
“But we play the cards we’re dealt, right?” Titus continued, dragging my thoughts into focus.
Or you trade them in for a better hand. Which is what he wanted to do with me.
And what I wanted to do with my entire miserable existence. I’d been a semester from graduating with a degree in History from the University of Kentucky when I was sentenced to indefinite house arrest in Atlanta. I’d already been accepted into the graduate program, and my secret nerdy ambition had been to help eliminate educational bias by producing high school textbooks without culturally motivated omissions.
But that would never happen if I wound up married to some tom I hardly knew, popping out a baby every eighteen months for the next decade, not because I wanted kids, but because shifter society needed them.
“If you try to take me to the border, I’ll jump from the moving vehicle. Or I’ll call 911 and tell them I’ve been kidnapped. I’ll do whatever it takes to stay in the free zone, and you can explain to the council how you not only removed a tabby from the Southeast Territory, but you lost her and wound up on the news.”
His gray eyes narrowed. “You would throw my entire Pride and me under the bus just to get out of a deal you made?”
“Just to…?” I sat straighter and fought not to let him hear how desperate I was. “Have you ever been under house arrest? Ever been forced to live with strangers? Denied use of the telephone? Have you ever been told you can’t go back to school, and you can’t talk to your parents, and you can’t even go for a walk by yourself? Have you ever had your every move studied and observed? Ever been the subject of endless medical testing? Ever had a guard stand outside the bathroom door while you shower, to make sure you’re not prying the window open? Ever been told that you’re worth nothing more than the secrets floating around in your bloodstream and the eggs waiting to be released into your uterus?”
“I don’t actually have a uterus, so I’d have to say no.” But his joke couldn’t cover his discomfort. He understood why I had run. Yet he still wanted no part of my battle with the council.
“I’m sorry I dragged you into this, but…is there anything you wouldn’t do to reclaim your own autonomy?”
He watched me for a moment, and I could see that he was giving the question actual thought. “Well, I’d like to think I wouldn’t screw other people over in the pursuit of freedom.”
“Again, I didn’t realize I was doing that. And I’m sorry.” If I could do it again, I’d certainly do it differently. “But what’s done is done, and I can’t go back. You don’t have to take me to Abby. All you have to do is let me go.” I reached for the door handle. “I’ll be fine on my own.”
His hand landed softly on my arm, and I fought the overwhelming and humiliating urge to press myself into his touch. “No, you won’t.”
“I heard part of your pitch today, before Dr. Carver came to run his tests. You told the council you’ve brought safety and stability to the free zone. If that’s true, I’ll be fine.”
“I told them I’m bringing safety and stability to my territory,” he corrected. “Present progressive tense. As in, the process is ongoing. The Mississippi free zone is like the wild west, Robyn. I’m the law, but the law is new, and there are still plenty of outlaws out here trying to raise hell.”
I cocked my head to one side. “Did you seriously just use a cowboy analogy?”
He shrugged, and I missed the warmth when his hand left my arm. “It was more of a sheriff/desperado metaphor. But my point stands. I can’t leave you here to fend for yourself.”
“Fine. Let me see Abby, and I’ll call the council and tell them you had no idea I was in the car until you pulled into your driveway.”
His brows rose in the da
rk. “You’d lie to the council?”
“Would I lie to the governing body unfairly seeking to plot out my entire existence, without so much as asking my opinion? Hell. Yes.”
Titus studied me while he weighed his options. “That won’t stop them from coming to get you.”
I shrugged. “You’re an Alpha, right? I’m sure you can think of some way to keep the enemy out of your territory. If you can’t, can you really call it ‘your territory’?” If there was one thing I’d learned about Alphas, it was that they couldn’t resist a challenge.
Titus growled again, but the words buried in that aggressive sound sent a thrill of excitement running through me. “Buckle up.”
“This is your house?” I stared out the windshield at the front gate until we passed it, then I twisted in my seat to see it close behind us. “How did the gate know to open?”
“There’s a sensor.” Titus patted a small sticker on the lower right corner of his windshield, where my university parking pass had gone, back when I’d had a car. Back before a horrific camping trip had ended my academic career and sentenced me to an existence ruled by instincts I still didn’t always understand.
By instincts, and by a council of ten Alphas governing my life by committee.
“When my car’s within ten feet of the gate, it opens. When the car passes out of that range, it closes.”
“That’s awesome.”
“Thank you.” His deep voice echoed with pride. “My company developed the technology.”
“Seriously?” I’d known he ran some business, and according to the Southeast enforcers, he was the most high-profile stray ever infected. But I’d had no idea his was a tech company. Or that he had such a huge house… “How many bedrooms do you have?”
Titus laughed. “Um…seven in the main house, I think. I haven’t counted in a while.”
Holy shit. “How many bathrooms?” I stared as we approached the three-story Greek Revival with sprawling lawns and manicured flower beds that looked colorful even in the winter. Even in the dark.
“Eight, I believe.”
“Eight bathrooms.” He could pee in a different toilet from Sunday to Sunday, then start all over on Monday. That’s not rich. That’s wealthy.
Suddenly I felt like an idiot. What if he thought I’d hidden in his car because of…all this? That I was a tabby gold digger?
“It’s just now midnight. It looks like someone’s still awake.” Titus looked toward the house, where lights were on in several rooms. “Probably Abby and Jace.”
“How do you know?” I couldn’t stop staring at the house. “Don’t you have, like, a zillion enforcers?”
“A dozen. But most of them stay in the guest house, behind the pool. And at any given time, at least half of them are out on patrol. Right now, I have seven spread out around the territory, and five defending our home base.” He gestured beyond the windshield at the property spread out around us.
“So, this is like any normal Pride? Only bigger.”
“Kind of.” Titus pulled the car to a stop on the half-circle drive between a massive set of curved brick steps and a three-tiered water fountain at the center of a semicircle formed by the arch of the driveway. “Geographically, my territory is the smallest in the country. But we have about twice the shifter population Jace said they have in the Appalachian Pride. Ninety percent strays.”
“The other ten percent rogues?” Natural-born toms who left shifter society for one reason or another.
“Yes.” He turned off the car.
“Donna Di Carlo says they’re all criminals.” My gaze roamed over the front of the house. “That your territory is nothing more than a penal colony.”
Both Titus’s smile and his eyes seemed to shine at me in the dark. “We’re much more than just a penal colony.”
“So they are criminals?”
“According to the council’s rulings? Yes. Most of them. Including Abby and Jace.” His smile faded into a thoughtful look. “As are you.”
I blinked, surprised. He was right. “I—”
The front door flew open, and Abby raced down the arched brick steps, leaving Jace’s backlit silhouette in the doorway. “Titus! How did it go?” But then she stopped short, her jaw falling, when she saw me through the car window. “Robyn?”
“Hey.” I pushed the door open and stepped into her hug, and the tension I’d been battling for the past hour of my car ride with Titus just melted away.
Abby was the only person in the world I knew I could trust. She’d risked her life to shield and protect me.
“Faythe said you were missing.” She seemed to be trying to squeeze all the breath from my body. “Titus found you? Does the council know where you are?”
“No.” Steps clomped down the stairs behind her, and I looked up to find Jace looking not at me, but over my shoulder. At Titus. “Faythe would have called us if they knew.”
“Hey,” a new voice said, as two more toms—one on two legs, one on four—stepped out of the house onto the porch. “What’s going on?”
Titus cleared his throat as Abby finally let me go. “Robyn, this is Drew Borden, my lieutenant.”
“In the ‘right-hand man’ sense of the word, not the G.I. Joe sense.” Drew stuck his hand out, and I shook it. “I’m the lead enforcer in this Pride. This is Knox.” He patted the glossy, black-furred head of the shifter standing next to him.
“Knox what? I assume he has a last name?”
“Actually, it’s Alistair Knox,” Drew said, and the cat standing next to him gave a throaty growl. “But he hates his first name, so we only use it when we want to piss him off. To what do we owe the pleasure…Robyn, right?”
“Yes. Robyn Sheffield.” I turned to Titus, to see how he wanted to explain my presence.
He only crossed his arms over his very well-formed chest and shrugged. “That’s your confession to make.”
“Confession?” Drew’s brows rose.
I couldn’t imagine that Titus’s men would be any happier than he was to hear about the position I’d put their Pride in. “Can I have something to drink first? Maybe a sandwich? I’m starving.”
“Of course.” Abby wound her arm through mine and tugged me toward the steps.
Titus stepped into our path. “No,” he declared, his voice deep and…final. “Tell them.”
“Titus?” Drew’s posture tensed in response to his Alpha’s tone. “Everything okay?”
“Robyn?” Abby looked worried now too.
I took a deep breath, then let go of her arm. “I kind of…defected. Unofficially. But I didn’t know I’d be starting such a shitstorm.”
“Damn it,” Jace mumbled, and Knox gave another low growl, not of aggression, but of…displeasure.
I was starting to feel distinctly unwelcome.
Abby frowned. “What does that mean—unofficially?”
Titus exhaled, as if he were fighting for patience. “She snuck into my car and hitched an unauthorized ride out of the Southeast Territory. To see you.”
Jace scrubbed one hand over his newly short brown waves. He met Titus’s gaze. “We have to send her back.”
“I’m staying.” I sucked in a deep breath and met each set of eyes in turn. “They’re trying to marry me off. I heard them. Your dad said that wouldn’t happen, but I heard them!” I told Abby.
“I tried to tell her they won’t do that,” Titus said. “Faythe would never let that happen. Your dad would never let that happen.”
“They didn’t ‘let’ Jace get exiled, either, yet that happened,” Drew pointed out.
“Technically, they can’t make Robyn get married,” Abby said, and though normally I hate being discussed as if I weren’t present, that probably wasn’t a good moment to start complaining. “But there are enough old-school Alphas left to make her life very difficult until she does what they want.”
“Even with your brother on the council?” Titus asked. “Won’t he take your dad’s side?”
“Isaa
c might swing the other way just to show he’s not biased. Either way, he’s a pawn,” Jace growled. “The council only accepted his Alpha status after they exiled me because they knew they could manipulate him.”
“He’s a good man in a tough position, Jace,” Abby insisted. “You’re holding a grudge because he got your sister pregnant.”
Drew chuckled, and Knox gave an amused feline snort.
Jace rolled his eyes. “Good men can be pawns, Abby. Especially young good men, with no leadership ability, who have an intense desire to please their elders and safeguard their own status.”
Abby shook her head with a glance at me. “He wouldn’t—”
“If he thought making waves would endanger his position or make things rough for Melody, he would.”
She frowned at Jace, but clearly had no argument for his point.
When an uncomfortable silence fell over us, I glanced from one face to the next. “So, I can stay?”
“No.” Jace shook his head. “They’ll come after you with everything they have.”
“We can’t just put her out on the street,” Drew said, and Knox bobbed his muzzle. I gave them each a grateful smile.
“This is temporary.” Titus clicked a button on his key fob, and his car locks thumped. “Drew, go tell the others that we have a guest, and I’ll introduce everyone in the morning.”
Drew nodded, and he and Knox took off into the huge house.
“Titus…” Jace’s tone sounded like a warning, and Titus’s bearing stiffened almost imperceptibly in response.
Two Alphas in one house. I bet that’s a laugh a minute…
“She’s going to call Faythe and tell the council that she ran on her own,” Titus said.
“That won’t absolve us,” Jace insisted. “If we don’t send her back, they’ll have a concrete reason to turn down our request for formal recognition. Then they’ll come in and take her.”