He rubbed his cheek in the mass of silky hair. It wasn’t all physical. Hefelt something for her. Came alive around her. “That’s not necessarily a good thing,” he said aloud. “You know that, don’t you?”

Rachael closed her eyes, willing her body to stop shaking, wanting the pain to recede if only for a brief space of time to give her a moment to breathe nor mally. Rio was an anchor she clung to, the one bit of reality she had. When she closed her eyes, she saw men contorting, fur rippling over their bodies, eyes glowing a fierce yellow-green. In that nightmare world the sound of guns erupted and she felt the shock of a bullet. She looked into those same intelligent eyes and saw pain and madness. And she heard his voice screamingno . That was all. Simplyno .

“I need to hear your voice.” Because it drove demons away. It drove the scent of gunpowder and blood from her mind, and she loved the deep caressing timbre of it.

“I don’t know a lot of stories, Rachael. I never had someone telling me bedtime tales.” He winced at the gruffness in his voice. It was just that she turned his insides to mush and made it difficult to remember she could have been sent to kill him. He believed in logic, and the way she affected him wasn’t logical.

“I’ll tell you one when I feel better,” she offered.

He closed his eyes. She was like a gift, handed to him. Sent to him in his unrelenting world of violence and mistrust. “All right,” he conceded to please her. “But try to go to sleep. The more you sleep the faster your leg is going to heal.”

Rachael was afraid to go to sleep. Afraid of teeth and claws and the all-encompassing pain. She was afraid she would lose her tenuous hold on reality. As it was, she kept forgetting who Rio was. He felt familiar. She recognized his voice, but she couldn’t remember their life together. When he talked to her, she floated on the sound of his voice. When his hands slid over her hot skin, she felt safe and cherished.

Rio told her some absurd tale of monkeys and sun bears he made up off the top of his head. It made no sense; in fact, it was fairly awful and showed he had no imagination, but she was quiet, slipping into a fitful sleep, and that was all that mattered to him. If the woman wanted storytelling on a nightly basis, he was going to have to hastily hone some nonexistent skills and learn to make up interesting tales.

He sighed, his breath stirring tendrils of her hair. What was he thinking, wanting to be able to tell her bedtime stories? He couldn’t imagine such a ridiculous thing, couldn’t imagine what he was yearning for. A woman of his own? Why? To share a home deep in the forest? To share a life of death and violence? He didn’t know the first thing about women. He needed to get her out of his life as quickly as possible.

Rachael murmured softly in her sleep, restless, fitful. A soft protest against nightmares creeping into her sleep. Rio soothed her with some muttered nonsense, ignoring the ache she brought to his heart.

Ignoring the strange memories in his head and the hardening of his muscles. Although his body was exhausted, his brain was alive with activity. Even the normal sounds of the forest didn’t soothe him.

Rio lay listening to her, fear swamping him in waves at the thought of her succumbing to blood poisoning. Her skin burned against his. He bathed her with cooling water, kept the door open with the mosquito net hanging down both at the door and around the bed. The lantern was extinguished to keep the bugs from enter ing.

The rain persisted, a steady rhythm until the next storm hit about an hour later. It raged with enough force to blow rain through the heavy canopy. Rio slid out of bed, padded across the room to close the door. He stood for a long time star ing out into the darkness, breathing in the scent of the rain, the call of the jungle. The chorus of male frogs sang off-key, joyfully hunting mates, adding to the lure of the forest. For a moment the wildness was upon him, beating in him with the need to shift, to escape. But the call of the woman was stronger. He sighed and closed the door firmly, shutting out the wind and rain. Shutting out the heady sounds of his world. He crawled back into bed, pulling the light cover over both of them, wrapping his arms around her and welding his body to hers. He was exhausted, but it took time for his body to relax, for his mind to let go. He fell asleep with a knife under his pillow and a woman in his arms.

Four

There were nightmares. One simply ran into the next. Rachael felt shelived in a sea of pain and darkness where nothing made sense but a male voice pitched low as it murmured soothingly to her. The voice was a lifeline, pulling her from the darkness where teeth and claws savaged her body, where bullets whistled by and thudded into bodies and blood flowed and hideous creatures lay in wait to attack her.

Shadows moved in the room. The humidity was oppressive. A cat made a chuffing noise. Another answered with a gruntlike cough. The sounds were close, within a few feet of her. Every muscle in her body reacted, tightening in terror, increasing the pain in her leg. She couldn’t move her body and when she turned her head, she couldn’t see enough of the room to locate the source of those wild, cat sounds.

Sometimes the wind blew a cooling wave through the room and over her. Always the rain fell. A continual, steady rhythm that both soothed and irritated her. She felt trapped and claustrophobic, confined as she was to the bed. It was humiliating to have a man see to her every need, especially when most of the time she wasn’t certain who he really was. Sometimes she thought she might be insane as the nightmare images of a man shifting into the form of a leopard replayed over and over in her head.

Ther e were moments she knew the man, where she was overwhelmed with love and tenderness, and moments when she stared into a stranger ‘s catlike, frightening gaze and her heart pounded with terror.