Free Wild Thing by Doranna Durgin Page B

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