Page 14 of Tiger Born

“Why?”

“Our mom died.”

Her mouth fell open and the smile faded from her eyes. He watched them turn stormy in an instant. “Oh my gosh,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was complicated. We are all back in town for the funeral. It was a few days ago.”

“Dame,” she whispered, covering her mouth. “What the heck?”

“I am my brother’s keeper, okay? Stellan is my responsibility. Marsden left soon after the Turn. He bounced and Stellan was spinning out, and I was trying to figure out how to be this…this…thing.” He swallowed the lump in his throat and pushed back from the table. He’d lost his appetite a little and needed a break. He huffed a sigh and crossed his arms over his chest, but it burned like hell and he flinched and rested his hands on his thighs instead. “We didn’t have much to do with Mom, Stellan and me. A call every once in a while. She was local, but we didn’t visit much, and she didn’t ask.”

“Why not?”

“Long story short, she thought my dad was fixed, he wasn’t, she never wanted a baby, should’ve never been a mother, and all the sudden she’s pregnant with triplets. Parenting wasn’t her calling.” He offered an empty smile. “Raising us ripped apart her marriage to my dad, and she blamed us for it. She settled for our stepdad a couple years later, and he was brutal. There was never a bond to our mom. She just fed us sometimes.”

“Geez.”

“Anyway, me and my brothers had to put on the funeral, and the reading of the will, all that stuff. Marsden came to my house, we had a big fight, Stellan Changed first, Marsden went second. I tried to break them up and…” He shrugged, wincing away from the bloody memories. They’d been in a hundred fights, but this one had been the worst, by a lot. Marsden hadn’t been involved in years. “I’ll be all right.”

“So, you came to the hospital?”

This was dangerous territory. “I needed help. I knew you were a nurse at that hospital. That’s all it was. No more no less.” He couldn’t tell her how much he’d clung to her social media posts over the years. What a beautiful distraction seeing snippets of her life had been. He couldn’t tell her how he felt about her.

“No more no less,” she repeated, but there as a suspicious glint to her eyes. “Why did you say it like that?”

“I needed help,” he repeated. She didn’t need to know how invested he was. It would only make things worse.

She stared at him with a frown that said she didn’t believe him.

“Look, I don’t know any nurses but you. I saw you in the scrubs the first day we met, you posted selfies from the hospital, I figured you could work your way around sutures, or fuck, give me a blood transfusion if you needed to. Plus, I figured I could convince you to help me since I’d saved you before. I don’t know why I did it.” Lie. “I was bleeding out and hurt and I made a mistake. My brothers couldn’t quit hunting me when I was injured, and I led Stellan right to you. He probably picked up your scent from the second he was around your car. You were the one that got away.”

“Oh my gosh,” she murmured. “How many people has he killed?”

“Zero, and I’m pretty damn determined to keep it that way. Like I said, he has a tiger problem. In his right mind, he knows right and wrong. When he’s the animal though, it’s different. He’s different. He’s…volatile.”

“And hunts women.”

“His tiger doesn’t give a shit if you’re a woman, a man, a honey badger, a notebook, or an asparagus. You escaped him. And then you were smart enough to immediately move houses and set your profiles to private, and he sucks at the internet even more than I do so he never figured out your name, or how to hunt you online. And I wasn’t about to tell him. You’d done well to get away. I just…messed up and put you in his path again.”

“Well, now what?”

“Now I need to heal up enough so I can take him. I’ve been fighting that asshole off bad decisions since he was Turned.”

“Is he evil?”

“No,” Dame said tiredly. Though sometimes he wondered.

“He’s really big,” she murmured. “And fast.”

“He’s lethal, for sure.”

“Okay, this is the part where you tell me it’s going to be okay and I don’t have to be scared, right?”

“No, you should be scared.”

“What the hell?” she uttered.

“Maybe quit the hospital and get a job somewhere else. Maybe move out of the state.”