Out of Chances (Taken by the Panther, #2) Read Free Page A

had to watch,” Chay snapped.
    She giggled. “You’re joking, right?”
    Chay bit back his response. Annie was a fox shifter down to her very bones. Some of those raised in less traditional families had their mischievous tendencies more tempered by the mores of mainstream society, but Annie was practically a walking stereotype. At this point, it was no use expecting her to change. “Is Dr. Torrhanin with her yet?” he asked instead. He’d used his smart watch to call the elf as soon as he’d stepped out of Tara’s quarters.
    Annie nodded to the screen. “See for yourself.”
    The two of them were standing in the middle of the bedroom, Tara looking distinctly uncomfortable as she kept rubbing her upper arms over and over as she talked. The mics were off, and Chay didn’t turn them on. She deserved that much privacy.
    “So, how’d she get dosed?” Annie asked. “Or were you too busy to ask?”
    “She doesn’t know,” Chay said curtly, sinking into the indentation that he’d worn into the faux leather of his cheap rolling chair. He’d tried one of the fancy Aeron ones that Luke Ford and Annie both used, but he’d concluded that his broken-in old thing was too much like a part of him.
    “Well, that’s not very helpful.”
    “No, it isn’t,” he agreed. Ophelia Prescott was on the duty roster for this hour, but her chair was still pulled up to her section of the long desk. “Where’s Ophelia?”
    Annie shrugged. “One of her kids has a bug. She’s playing nursemaid.” Her tone hovered between sympathy and disgust. Annie didn’t have room at this point in her life for children, and she regarded them as particularly gross aliens.
    Chay felt a sudden burst of gratitude at that. However much Annie would tease him about what he’d done, it was nothing like Ophelia’s tongue-lashing.
    “And no one came to fill in?” Chay asked.
    “Oh, Seamus came,” she said, “while you were...otherwise engaged. So he left again.”
    Damn. None of the Mansfield brothers were going to be the least bit happy with him.
    Couldn’t be helped, now. It sure as hell should have stopped him then. He’d put so much on the line for a moment of...what? Passion? Self-indulgence? None of those words quite seemed to fit. He’d risked not only Tara but the respect he had from the rest of the team he’d built so slowly and carefully over the years.
    Frak. There was no undoing what he’d done. And going forward .... His mind shuddered away from any promises of what he’d do in the future. It wasn’t like he’d planned what had happened, but he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to keep it from happening again.
    She was too young for him. Too vulnerable. And she was in a position where he was most definitely taking advantage of her. So what he had done was wrong, wrong, wrong no matter what way he looked at it. And it wasn’t like he even knew what he felt for her. He’d had crushes before—and the euphoria of early love. But this wasn’t that. It was like Tara was under his skin, inside of his head in a way that didn’t even have a name.
    She was attractive enough. Hell, she was gorgeous in an earthy sense—not model material like Annie’s carefully bred perfection but stunning in her own way, with those brilliant green eyes and her olive skin. But his admiration for her physical attributes was somehow separate from the kind of psychic itch that she made him feel when she was around.
    And even when she wasn’t.
    Chay blew out a puff of air. None of this was going to answer his questions about what had happened to her. Tara clearly had no idea—or else she was keeping things from him. But she didn’t seem to be. He suspected that she was absolutely as bewildered as she appeared, and while shifters couldn’t read minds, his nose was excellent at smelling the cascade of stress hormones pouring through her.
    So. There were two possibilities. Either something had happened to her at the College of William and Mary, or