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Licking her lips, Tanith let out a soft sigh and leaned back against the display table housing all of Alani’s recent works-in-progress. Some had been thrown to the floor when Tanith stormed in; so much for a pottery collection for the resort. Alani had been working all week on those pieces. She couldn’t wait to show them to the Ruiz family. She’d be devastated.
Just like Tanith was. Alani lived for her art. How could Tanith suspect her in all this?
“I think it’s better we have this conversation in person,” she admitted weakly. There was a brief pause, followed by rustling in the background, like Alani was grabbing her purse and keys.
“Something happened at the gallery, didn’t it?” The dreamy quality was gone, and in its place was the fierce determination that Tanith knew dwelled within her friend. “Are you there?”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m on my way.”
Tanith dropped her arm to her side, phone clutched loosely in her hand. It had stopped shaking, but the rest of her body was still in flight-or-fight panic mode. For the most part, it all just felt numb.
Blake strode into the room suddenly, moving along the walls, crouching down and dusting his hand over the floor. She’d never seen him move so quickly, with so much purpose. It totally rattled her vanilla image of him. Head tilted to one side, she cleared her throat.
“Dusting for prints?” Tanith gasped when he glanced up at her. Somehow his eyes appeared darker than usual, and his face contorted into a…snarl? She was so used to him smiling, that mellow expression a permanent fixture of his features. This was different. Startling, even. Slowly, Tanith pushed back onto her own two feet, one hand hovering over the display table for support. “Blake…what is it?”
***
Blake smelled cougar. And he knew from what the bears had told him about the events last winter that a cougar was the last thing anyone in Angel Fire wanted around. Especially one that chose to come inside an art gallery and cause trouble – meaning it could not possibly be wild. It had to be a shifter.
“I just… I’m just taking a few mental snapshots,” he told Tanith, trying his best to school his features and knowing he was failing by the look on her face. He couldn’t help it. His inner bear was on high alert, and with good reason: an enemy shifter, multiple shifters, had been in his fated mate’s gallery. This building, this business, was like a second home to Tanith, and cougars had traipsed through it like they owned the place.
He needed to find out where they went, what they touched, how they got in—and what they were after. Everything he gathered here, he’d report back to the bear clan alpha, Miguel Ruiz. All that aside, the human side, the part of him that controlled logic and reason, knew he had to keep Tanith calm.
He knew he ought to tell her to call the police so he could investigate in private—also known as sniffing floorboards and curtains—but she appeared about two seconds away from freaking out. All her symptoms indicated she was in shock. Calling anyone besides her artists was probably out of the question. All the color had left her cheeks. She hadn’t started crying yet, but that was typical of shock. Numbness. Blake could handle numbness.
“Tanith, maybe you should sit down,” he suggested, recalling the lounge setup in the common area. “Then I’ll call the police.”
Fucking cougars. Blake had tried to steer clear of the drama with the local bear clan, but he had heard enough about the felines to leave a sour taste in his mouth. It killed him that he hadn’t picked up on the scent right away, but both he and his inner bear were so obsessed with Tanith’s scent that everything else sort of just faded into the background—even the scents he ought to be paying attention to.
Now that he knew what he was looking for, various cougar scents jumped out at him from everywhere, suggesting they had left their mark on just about every inch of the basement studio space. No scent leapt out at him to suggest any shifters lingered, but once he had Tanith seated, preferably on something soft that would cushion her if her blood pressure did drop enough to induce fainting, Blake would tear the place apart to make sure none had stayed behind.
God, he hoped there wasn’t a cougar hiding in the supply closet. Although Tanith appeared to have a number of friends within the bear clan, he suspected the human woman didn’t know their true nature as shifters. This certainly wasn’t the way to introduce her into his world, though if they continued moving their relationship forward—debatable, given the mess that had just been dumped on Tanith’s lap this morning—Blake would have to tell her at some point.
When she didn’t respond right away, he exhaled deeply, trying to rid himself of that dank shifter scent, and moved to her side. His inner bear wanted to nurture, to protect—to claim. He wanted to hold her to him and never let go. Most of all, Blake’s inner black bear wanted to mark Tanith in every single way—covering her physically with his scent and bonding with her sexually, intimately, to ensure all the local shifters, friend and foe, knew she wasn’t fair game.
But the human side of him knew Tanith didn’t need that right now. A woman like Tanith needed an equal and a silent protector, the kind who watched her back when she didn’t realize it needed watching. What his bear side wanted to do to her was too much right now. Too intense. For now, Blake planned to provide support in whatever way felt right to her.
“Come on,” he urged gently, wrapping an arm around her shoulder, but not too tightly, and steered her toward the stairs. “Let’s go sit down.”
“Before I fall down,” she added, more self-aware than he expected. Blake chuckled and risked a quick peck to her temple—a move she didn’t shy away from. Tanith just blinked numbly, which wasn’t exactly the response he wanted either.
“You tell me if you feel like fainting,” he instructed, the couch in sight. “I mean, I am kind of a doctor.”
“Kind of,” she echoed, and he detected a tad more life behind her words this time. That was promising. The speed at which she had gone from irate to quiet had initially concerned him, but then Blake had found himself distracted with cougar scents.
“Here we go, down on the couch,” he said, hating the way he sounded as though he were speaking to a patient. His bedside manner had always been praised, so maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. His inner bear wanted to get down on the couch with her, but Blake didn’t want to crowd her. “Let me get you some water.”
“There are bottles in the fridge,” Tanith told him softly, fiddling with the orange shawl wrapped around her shoulders. On any other woman, he would have found the color off-putting, but somehow just about everything suited Tanith. She was just that kind of woman.
Maybe he was biased, given that she was his fated. But Tanith was just beautiful. She could wear a paper bag and be beautiful.
As Blake headed for the fridge, something, call it a gut feeling, told him to look up—and what he saw made his blood run cold. There, in red—ink? Paint? Blood?—was a scrawled message across the ceiling.
YOUR YOUNG FOR OUR FEASTING
YOUR LAMENT FOR OUR DRINK
“Oh my God,” he muttered.
“What?”
He lurched forward to stop her from seeing, but it was too late. Tanith shot to her feet, so Blake gabbed her arms instead to steady her, and pulled her to him tightly when she started to scream.”
“Let go of me, Blake,” she insisted. “I gotta go. I need to check something at home!”
“Tanith, wait, what about the gallery?” Blake called after her.
“You call the cops,” she called over her shoulder as she ran for the door. “Lock up afterwards. You can bring my keys to the school tomorrow. I trust you, Blake. I know it’s crazy, but I do. I’ve got to go check on my daughter right now!”
