Free Out of Chances (Taken by the Panther, #2) by V. M. Black Page B

their position was impossible for her to ignore, and from the insistent hardness against her thigh, neither could he. She freed one of her arms, which had been trapped between them, and put a hand on his shoulder. It didn’t even cover half the bulge of muscle there.
    “I didn’t shift because you were here,” she said. “Holding me. Is that the plan, then? You’ll just...hold me forever?” She could feel the panther just waiting for a chance to break through.
    “No. Only until you learn to control your shifting,” he said lightly.
    She searched his eyes for the source of confidence behind his words, hoping it wasn’t just bravado. “I don’t understand how I’m supposed to do that. When she—it—comes out, it wins. Every time. You can send it back, but otherwise, I just have to wait until she feels like leaving again. I’ve never won against her. And I don’t know how. You might as well be asking me to learn to fly.”
    “You’ll figure it out,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”
    Tara reached inside her own mind and tried to find something, anything that she might be able to use to fend the panther off if she came back again. But it was like looking for weapons in an empty room. “How long did it take you before you could win?”
    She saw the pain in Chay’s dark eyes, and her stomach sank even before he spoke. Because she knew the answer in his reaction. And it held no hope for her.
    “I never lost,” he said. “Not fully. For minutes together at first. But I always beat him back in the end.”
    “What about the others?” she asked, hardly trusting her voice to speak. “Annie and Liam and Luke. What about them?”
    “Luke is the only one of that group who isn’t natural-born,” Chay said.
    “So what about him? And the others who aren’t natural-born? What about them?” she pushed.
    “They all won, too,” he said. “They can lose themselves at times. Any shifter can. But in the end...the human always wins.”
    “But not for me,” Tara whispered. “When I turned the first time, I shifted back because I got knocked out. And the second time and third times, I shifted because the panther decided to let me go. She...stepped back. I’ve never fought her off and won. What does that mean, Chay?”
    “It depends on who you ask.” His arms tightened around her.
    “What would most people say?” she pressed.
    It was a very long time before he answered. “That you’re already lost. That, at best, I’m delaying the inevitable. At worst, I’m torturing you by not letting you go sooner and putting you out of your misery, and I’m deluding myself.”
    Tara blinked back the tears that threatened to run over. She’d never been the pity-party type before, but then again, she’d never been told that she was terminal. “And what would you say?” she asked around the lump in her throat.
    “That you’ll find a way. Somehow. We’ll figure it out, or maybe, Torrhanin will, or something,” he said.
    “Why didn’t you just lie to me?” she asked. Dammit. One tear escaped her eye, overflowing down her cheek and making a pathway for another. “Why are you telling me the truth? No one at that Air Force base was ever going to tell me the truth, even if they’d let me wake up for more than a few minutes at a time.”
    “I’ve done enough to hurt you already. I can’t lie to you, too.”
    Those words just made the tears come more quickly, and Tara turned her head to the side. But Chay caught her chin, tilting her head back, and he softly kissed the tears away.
    “Hush, now, bae girl,” he said, his lips so close to her skin that they brushed across it as he spoke. “It’ll be all right. You’ll make it right.”
    She laughed through her tears. “Why do you call me that?”
    He pulled back enough to meet her eyes. “I guess...I heard it in a song. Or maybe scrolling through Twitter. Or Instagram.”
    “Snooping on people, you mean. Like you’ve snooped on me. Because you’re a...a