Free Taber by Aliyah Burke and Taige Crenshaw

it’s a good tired, you know?”
    He nodded and pulled up along the plane. “Have a safe flight!” he hollered over the noise.
    Shouldering her pack, she jumped out. “I will, thanks!”
     
    * * * *
     
    She slept on the way back. She was totally exhausted and had finally succumbed to the need her body told her it could no longer ignore. It had been a rush, there and back. But, thankfully it had all gone well. The two cats were sedated and in their cages, Dr Mitchem had been a dear, and now she could just sleep.
    At the descent, she woke and checked on both animals before buckling herself in. It was a smooth landing and she released a sigh of relief. The ramp lowered and she felt the warm wind of New Mexico flow up and over her. She made her way down and paused a foot from the bottom when she saw Taber striding towards her.
    A flash back to the first time she had seen him hit her, and just like that day her body responded. Even in the area lit by harsh electric lights, she still was in awe of the power he exuded. It amazed her how much she’d missed him and she’d barely been gone a full day.
    He stopped before her. “Everything go okay?”
    “Like clockwork. Dr Mitchem had them all ready. They should be sedated for another hour. Enough time to get them into the holding pen.”
    “They don’t have to go there. Their enclosure is ready.”
    She shook her head. “No. It wasn’t finished. We have about another day’s work to get it ready.”
    “Look at me.”
    She couldn’t refuse the command and lifted her gaze to his. “What?”
    He reached out as if to touch her cheek, only to pull back at the last moment. “It’s finished.”
    “You…did…whatever you do?”
    “Yes.”
    She licked her lips. “Why?”
    “Because it was important to you to not have them in holding.” He stepped around her and waved for the men to come up with the lifts to move the cages into the backs of trucks and drive them up.
    She rode along on the door of the truck that carried Allie. Taber rode in Chet’s. At the enclosure, she stood off to the side and watched him work with the men to get the cages in and pull the cats out. He did that for me? There was even a small pool of water in one corner for them to lie in, if it got too hot.
    Her gaze drifted back to Taber. He knelt over one cat, then the other. She swore he was communicating with them. The others left and soon it was just her and Taber, along with the cats.
    She didn’t know what to say. This gesture was more than she could have asked for. Swallowing, she pushed through the door and let herself in the enclosure. Chet twitched and Taber looked at her.
    “Get out of here, Lainey.”
    “No.”
    “They’re waking up.”
    “I know.”
    “I don’t want you to get injured.”
    “I won’t.”
    He rose, turning his back on the cats. “How do you know?”
    “You’ll protect me.”
     
    Taber wasn’t sure what to make of her statement. Was he reading more into it than she meant? Of course he’d protect her. These past few days had been hell for him. He didn’t know what to do—how to fix it. Any time he’d tried to say anything to Lainey she’d claimed something needed to be done and had ran—like the hounds of hell had been after her.
    He’d even gone to Candace and asked her. All she had done was cluck at him disapprovingly and had said, “She hates being lied to, Taber. And following her, spying on her implies you don’t trust her.”
    “Why?” he’d asked. Not talking about the trusting, but why did she feel this way? What happened to make it so? And how did he fix it?
    “It’s not my place to tell you what happened in her past, Taber. You need to ask her. And I do mean ask her.”
    Hard as hell to ask a woman anything if she treated you like the plague. He’d watched her night after night and day after day as she had sweated beside the men trying to get the enclosure ready for the arrival of Chet and Allie. So when he’d seen the disappointment