Wild Thing
Doranna Durgin

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Chapter 1

Watch her, Nick Carter had told Mark Burton, and sent Mark into the night after Tayla Garrett—into the sporadically lit Phoenix park she patrolled this night. Watch her patrol, watch her stalk the night greenways—a little sideways jog to avoid a loose dog, so casual, and then all her attention back on the night, on the people within the park, and only Mark’s excellent warding keeping him from her scrutiny.

Watch her. As if Mark had been doing anything but watching Tayla Garrett since his recent reassignment had them crossing paths in Sentinel field activity. Not to mention in the Phoenix brevis regional office, in the hallways…in the damned security lot where she sometimes parked a scooter and sometimes parked a bike. But she’d made it clear enough she still—after all this time—preferred to keep her distance, and he’d reluctantly, achingly, respected her wishes. In spite of the restlessness, the aching, and the tendency to offer her name at intensely inappropriate moments in his personal life. Not that he’d expected to see that particular date again, anyway.

She’d always done that to him. As an awkward fourteen-year-old, growing into impossibly long legs, learning to hide her natural speed from the world and to finesse her cheetah shift, while Mark, a much more mature and worldly eighteen year old, learned that he was indeed human-bound in shape, regardless of his parentage and obvious peripheral shifter skills—the physical prowess, the tracking skills, the prescience…

She runs the Phoenix city parks at night, Nick Carter had told him—Nick, regional adjutant and rarely directly involved in Mark’s Sentinel assignments. “You’ll see what I mean—and I need you prepared to deal with it. You’re going to work together on the summit.”

Summit. Fancy word for a meeting with an Atrum Core snitch, a man whom the local Core sect would no doubt love to identify and eliminate—after a satisfying round or two of torture.

The Atrum Core. Not nice people. Not from their very earliest start, when the world was barely looking at AD, and the Romans and the Gauls were mixing it up in so many different ways. The Sentinels were finding their shape-shifting; the Atrum Core remained ever determined to outpower them any way it could, full of need and greed and ancient family squabbles. And while the druidic Sentinels had grown into their calling as protectors of the earth and its inhabitants, the Roman-sired Atrum Core became entrenched in grabbing power and influence without scruple or care for the consequences, stealing from the earth and even from the lifeblood of innocents to create their power-manipulating amulets and twisted workings.

She runs the Phoenix city parks. Hot damn, she certainly did. Must have been a challenge to dress in the necessary natural materials needed for taking the change and still look like that. Skirt that short, blouse that sheer, camisole peeking out low over her perfectly plump breasts. Her hair, fiery copper, spilled carelessly from a high, loose ponytail, strands of it framing her face. A saucy little purse dangled off her shoulder, and long, long legs stretched down to leather flats—incongruous but no detraction at all. No, no, not the slightest. A living lure, she was.

And a huntress. With all the innate grace of her cheetah form, she moved across the dark grassy grounds of the east Phoenix park, showing no sign of whatever Nick Carter thought Mark might see—what he should prepare to deal with. Nothing but the ever-present thump of wild blood in his veins, wishing for that which he could never do so he might join the one he might never have.

Prescience stole his breath. Here. Now. It happens.

Prescience, a gift from his mother’s line. And tracking, from his father’s side. Not to mention the Sentinel strength, the uncanny night vision, the superb hearing. A certain resistance to death. But when it came to the shifting, Mark was empty. Nothing there to reach for, nothing there to set free.

Here. Now. It happens.

“Hey! No! What’re you—hey!” A woman’s voice, high and startled and shifting quickly to fear.

Mark jerked back his instant response. Sentinels, guardians of the earth—in the beginning, against the Atrum Core, and now against almost anything.

But not tonight. Tonight, in spite of having trained since childhood, Mark merely watched. Watched as Tayla’s posture changed from sexy insouciance to taut huntress within. Wild thing. Still human, still very much in undercover mode. But oh, Tayla Garrett could run. Mark’s heart swelled with the beauty of it, the flashing legs and stunning grace, deceptively swift—crossing the patch of green between curving sidewalks and manicured trees before he could so much as blink, having spotted what Mark couldn’t yet see.

He moved in slightly—she wouldn’t notice, not now. Not with her eye on her target, there, just the other side of the sandstone-brick public facilities: two struggling figures, and she was almost upon them. Mark drew closer, fists clenched on his need to plunge into the fray. Never mind orders—she’d be furious and embarrassed by his intervention.

So he watched. Closer now, easily making out the plump, scantily dressed young woman who fought off a man twice her size. Close enough to see Tayla, moving so swiftly she had no chance to decelerate, and what was she thinking, and ah, there—she had it planned all along, that lightning grab at the attacker as his arm swung back to strike, using him as her brake—transferring all that speed into torque as she planted her feet and wrenched him back and around. His arm made a funny crunching noise as it broke; he cried out and gave way, slamming up against the sandstone brick while the young woman sobbed and scrabbled to put a few feeble feet between them. A few feet and then, face distorted with fear—of Tayla as much as her attacker—she gained her balance and fled.

“No, dammit, let me help—” But Tayla stayed on the man, anyway, following up to snatch the side of his head, fingers twined in his hair and steadying him as her other hand dove for his throat—no attempt to circle that beefy neck, but grabbing his windpipe in a precision claw grip.

Whoa. That’s my girl.

But in the next instant, the huntress fumbled.

“You let her get away!” the man choked, gesturing vaguely after the fleeing woman.

“So I did,” Tayla said, her voice a purr. “You won’t, though.”

“My cousin—” he said, and surrendered to her grip. “Been looking so long—”

Doubt changed Tayla’s posture entirely, suddenly.

No, Mark thought at her, inching closer. You can’t buy that.

“You hit her.” But the doubt crept through to her voice.

His voice sounded stronger. “I was defending myself!”

The doubt settled in. In spite of her instincts, in spite of what she’d seen, in spite of what she was and the training behind her…

The man tore away from her faltering grip; he grabbed her shirt, bunching the fabric between her breasts and jerking her headfirst into the brick beside him.

And then he, too, was gone.

Watch her. Just watch her.

Mark took a step forward, anyway. And another, and—

No. Not yet. Not against orders. Hands bunched in painfully tight fists, he faded in behind a carefully tended tree, deciduous park luxury in the middle of the valley desert. Tayla sprang back to her feet, spitting mad, with every intent of following her quarry—but a car engine roared to life in the nearby parking lot, tires squealing…popping the car over the lot’s speed bumps and out the exit.

Not even a cheetah could run that fast.

She swore—and then she abruptly tested the wind, head lifted as she tasted for power trace and found it, looking directly toward his hiding place. Mark froze—but she shook her head slightly, dismissing him. Knowing there was a Sentinel somewhere in the area, just as she knew the park was clear of anyone else, and not figuring it had anything to do with her. She swiped a hand over her forehead—she bled there—and over a lip now glistening with blood instead of lip gloss, and she cursed again. And then she quite suddenly took her cheetah, buff and black-spotted gold, dropping down, lithe and leggy, bounding out across the grass and into the darkness.

Away. A failure. A hunter losing not to wits or strength or speed, but to confidence skewed. Gut instinct ignored.

You’ll see it, Nick Carter had told him.

And Mark had.

Doing something about it…

That was something else altogether.

Chapter 2

Tayla swept hair from her eyes, settling it back into place as she tucked her bike helmet under her elbow and strode for the Sentinel brevis regional office stairs. Miles of predawn biking hadn’t done her a bit of good. Hadn’t erased the previous night’s debacle from her mind, and hadn’t provided her with an explanation that would slide past Nick Carter’s radar.

The man was consul adjutant for a reason. Hardly anyone saw the consul himself, an aging man who personally administered only his pet projects. But Carter…he was everywhere. Knew everything.

He probably already knew this. Why else the first-thing meeting, requested by page while she was miles out on her ride with no time to hit home first? All right, he knew. So she’d just walk right into his Phoenix satellite office—waved in by his admin, who assessed Tayla’s appearance and then looked away with obvious restraint—and say what she had to. Footfalls silent on thick padded carpet, corner office windows overlooking the vast sprawling humanity filling the Phoenix desert valley, office itself full of greenery and growing things, nothing of trendy faux reality but all combining to fill the office with a heady connection to the earth that the rest of the city often forgot. Carter bent over his desk, shuffling papers.

Yes, she’d just walk right into his office and—“I screwed up, that’s what,” she said.

“Tayla.” Carter looked up. Not a man ever to be caught by surprise—no vulnerability there, only hard efficiency, a certain hint of omniscience. And yet Tayla could have sworn she saw a glimmer of a start.

Maybe she imagined it. But she didn’t imagine the way Carter’s gaze cut quickly to the side—to the other person in the room.

She fumbled her helmet. She grasped the hem of her cap-sleeved jersey, fighting the need to tug it down over her hips and the revealing Lycra knickers that surely, after all, she could have found time to change.

Mark Burton. Someone had to be kidding. Mark Burton.

The same Mark who’d gone to her Mesa high school, who’d run through secretive Sentinel brevis training a group ahead of her, whose personal trace she would have detected in an instant had she not been closed off to the overload of the brevis regional main office.

Mark Burton. She’d made it through her teenage years, somehow—years during which her feelings for him had hovered around her in a veritable aura of schoolgirl crush. Humiliating. Freshman girl, senior guy…the one gawky and struggling to put the pieces of herself together, the other finishing that first growth to manhood, oozing easy confidence, a trail of beautiful, clueless non-shifting cheerleaders following behind him. Never even looking her way.

Just as well.

Distance. It had worked on her then, and it had been working on him now—since her run of luck had ended and so had years of working the field in the same huge city without crossing paths. Since they’d been working the same sectors but not the same teams.

It looked as though that was about to end, too.

So Tayla did what she knew, what had worked. She gave him the briefest of nods, and then she pretended. You’re not here. You don’t matter. I got the message years ago, don’t you worry.

Carter offered her a mild look, not so much as hesitating at her biking outfit, and nodded at the second chair flanking his desk. “Yeah, you screwed up,” he said, pale green eyes cool beneath hoar-frosted black hair that reflected his wolf. “Have a seat.”

She didn’t look at Mark Burton. Didn’t need to. He stood taller than most, of a height with her when many men weren’t. His parents, if they hadn’t passed along the powerful lion, had given him their tawny hair—which was growing more sable by the year, just as the African lion mane darkened with maturity—and a lazy kind of power. Didn’t have to move sharp to move fast; didn’t have to move brute to move strong. Medium brown eyes that shone whiskey gold in the right light…

No, Tayla had no need to look at him. She met Carter’s gaze instead. “What’s going on?”

“New assignment,” Carter said. Generally, Tayla kept to her foundation assignment—rotating between the city’s extensive parks to troll for human predators. But sometimes Carter pulled her in for the short, hard hunts to which she was so well-suited; she either worked solo, or as part of a team large enough to let her blend, one in which she could drift away to fulfill her own role.

Cheetahs. Not known for being team players.

At least, that’s what she liked to tell herself. Excuse enough.

Carter handed her a folder. She couldn’t help a glance at Mark; she found him with a folder already in hand. The realization caught her by surprise, and she missed Carter’s next several words. “…calling it a summit. But you can think of it as a major informant download—and you’ve only got a couple days to secure the site.”

Mark raised an eyebrow. “If you want us to keep the Core from shredding this guy—” literally “—we need more time than—”

Carter cut him short. “The escalated timing is his call.” End of discussion, that. “You two will be working the site.” As if already hearing the words rising in Tayla’s throat, he lifted his head to stop them with nothing more than that hard gaze. “You’re both right. We need more time. But we don’t have it. So you’ll go in low and quiet, a small, specialized team. You’ll know every crack in the sidewalk before our informant arrives—”

“Scottsdale,” Mark said. His voice was still what she remembered—an amazing velvet that made her bones vibrate. Vibrate and crave more. “No cracks on those sidewalks.” High-end area on the west side of Phoenix, extra buff and gloss and cost to match.

“Maybe not,” Carter admitted. “Contact will be made at Eldorado Park—or Vista del Camino a block south. Our man will be staying in the Fronds Hotel, but he’s playing it cagey about the meet.”

“And us?” Tayla asked. She stuttered over the very thought of a hotel room. Quiet torture. Cruel, quiet torture.

“Empty condos next to Vista del Camino, at least until we get a handle on the meet. But that won’t be your responsibility. You’ll cover before and after. Keeping the area clear of surprises.”

“But…” Tayla said, searching for words—trying to maintain her strong, aloof self and floundering around somewhere in awkward teenager-speak instead. “But…”

Mark spared her a glance, if not much of one. “If you’re worried about last night—”

Last what? But she saw the faint wince around Nick Carter’s eyes and she suddenly knew, and awkward made way for horrified indignation. “You were there?” She stood, not even realizing it, the ventilated bike helmet clutched before her. “You were the one? You saw—” And over to Carter. “You told…?” Because of course that’s how Mark had known of her bobble. Her hesitation, the self-doubt that had allowed her quarry to escape.

But she caught the tightness in her throat, and the strain in her thinning voice, and she caught the knuckles white around her helmet chin strap. No, that’s not the way she wanted to do this. She took a breath. A deep one. She found herself. “This is a park thing—I can work it alone. I can work it better alone. And—” she flickered a glance at Mark, just enough to see his faint recoil when she added “—if I’m not alone, then I need someone who can keep up with me.”

Someone who could shift. Whose other form knew speed.

She hadn’t meant to put that faint gleam of hurt in his eye. Only to protect herself. To regain herself.

“I don’t need to prove myself to you,” Mark said. “Not to anyone.”

“No, I meant—” She stopped, every part of her miserable and hating this. Worse than not being noticed. “It wouldn’t make sense to put me with Ruger, either.” Massive Ruger, who took the bear. “In a team, maybe. As partners…it just gives us something to overcome. That’s why I usually work alone.”

“Ruger is a healer, not a tracker. Not security.” But he took it down a notch. “It’s no big deal, Garrett.” Even if maybe it was, if maybe a moment ago he might have called her Tayla instead. “You can be the legs if you want.” His gaze flicked down the length of her knickers and down her bare calves, all the way down to her biking sneaks, and right back up again, all the way to her—

She fought the urge to cross her arms over her chest. “Really,” she said firmly, speaking to Carter. “I work better alone.”

She expected him to shake his head. He wouldn’t have brought them here if his mind wasn’t already made up. But she didn’t expect—

“Let me be blunt,” he said. “I need more from you than you’re giving. I need more from you than you can give right now. I’m borderline on taking you out of the field for assessment.” He stopped—out of pity or mercy, she couldn’t tell. But you know these parks. You’re a tracker. You work personal security. You’re used to putting on an innocuous front.” Okay, maybe she’d get through this unscathed…

Or maybe not.

Carter’s gaze narrowed. “But not by yourself.”

She dared another glance at Mark. No, it really couldn’t get any worse. She’d fumbled in front of him, she’d insulted him, and now Nick Carter had stripped her bare and naked in front of him. He no longer looked hurt or angry; he looked distant. Maybe even sorry for her.

Great.

“Mark’s unique perspective can make a difference,” Carter told her. “I need it to make a difference. And so do you.”

Tayla stood a little straighter, lifted her head a notch higher, and dragged herself through the moment with sheer strength of will and a stubborn chin.

“I mean it,” Carter said. “Don’t pretend you don’t see the problems lately. If you want to stay in the field, you’ll listen—you’ll let Mark be your partner, not just someone you pretend isn’t there.”

Mark snorted gently beside her. So he’d noticed, had he?

“And Tayla,” Carter said, not easing that hard wolf gaze of his one little bit, “the Sentinels need it to make the difference, too. This summit is critical—more critical than I can even tell you. We must have this information.”

Mark leaned forward. “This have anything to do with the leak on that Tucson operation?”

Carter stiffened. Ever so slightly, if only for an instant. He said only, “It’s important. Too important to let personalities and feelings rule what happens next. Do you both hear me?”

“Yes,” Tayla said. She’d caught a snatch of equilibrium in that scant exchange, moments when the spotlight had turned away. She might not agree, she might hate this, but she understood clearly enough—this choice was no choice at all. She’d come to terms with the details once she had some space to herself. She could ground herself in that, find a certain calm there.

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