“Of course not. But that’s not the issue. When the council finds out I have you, they’ll think Ilied. They’ll invade my territory to get you, and people will die. My Pride will never be recognized, and without the council’s cooperation and resources, Life will never get better for strays in the free zone. I have to think about the greater good, Robyn.”
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 Idon’tjoin your Pride, Idon’thave 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 tohelpyou 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 anytotallyhypothetical 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.
