Tiger yanked the phone from her and ended her inner debate by closing his massive hand around it. The ringtone squeaked and went silent, and bits of black plastic rained down to join the junk on the floorboards. Tiger sifted through the wreckage until he found the chips, and he broke those too.
“Well, I guess that’s one solution,” Carly said. The traffic started, and she drove on, her mouth dry.
“You have any more cell phones?” Tiger asked. “Or gadgets? Connor says other things have locators in them.”
“Not with me. They’re at the house.”
“Good.” Tiger went back into his relaxed state against the door, and Carly hoped the door was solid enough to take his bulk.
She drove on, winding through streets, heading for the Bee Cave area. No one seemed to be following her, though the few people they passed in more affluent neighborhoods turned heads as the old car sputtered by.
Carly turned off a little north of Bee Cave into a neighborhood that was fairly new, with large houses and winding streets. She made it to the house she needed as shadows were lengthening, afternoon finally turning to evening.
“Hang on,” she said, opening the car door in the driveway. “I’ll run in and open up the garage. We can’t leave this pile of junk on the street. It will definitely be noticed.”
Tiger was alert now, his eyes changing to the golden sparkle they took on when he was thinking about changing into the tiger. “Who lives here?”
“My sisters. Don’t worry, they’re in Mexico. I have the keys. I’ll hurry.”
Before Tiger could argue, she shut the door and tripped up the small flight of steps through the landscaping to the front door. A key on her ring fit the locks, and Carly pushed her way inside.
A beeping sound startled her, and for one panicked moment, Carly forgot the alarm code. Her fingers knew it, though, and soon the alarm was off.
Carly went out through a back passage to the garage and punched the control to open the garage door. Then she drove the car into the garage, Tiger still in it, turned off the ignition, and closed the garage door.
She coughed and waved her hand in front of her face. “This thing really stinks.”
Tiger didn’t answer. He followed Carly as she got out of the car, entered the house again, and led him through the back passage to the main part of the house.
“Your sisters live here?” Tiger stopped to look around the giant kitchen and the high-ceilinged living room beyond. “How many?”
“My two oldest sisters. They and my mom and my other sister all went to Mexico to shop. I didn’t go because Armand needed me for the exhibit opening.” Carly huffed. “See how well that worked out.”
“So much room for two people,” Tiger said, turning to take in the echoing space.
“True, but they earned it. My sisters run a decorating business together. Althea and Zoë, that is. The one just above me in age, Janine, is married and a teacher. I’m the youngest.”
Tiger pulled off his baseball hat and dropped it onto a chair, combing his fingers through his hair, ruffling it and making it look sexy. The black and orange strands no longer seemed odd to her.
“Why don’t you live here with them?” he asked. “It would be safer for you.”
Carly opened the refrigerator. Sneaking out of the gallery, stealing a car, and fleeing across Austin—very slowly—had given her an appetite.
“Like I said, I’m the youngest. I wanted to go out on my own, see if I could do it without everyone looking over my shoulder and telling me what to do. We’re close, my sisters and me, but they do tend to be a bit overprotective, and at times, downright bossy. Ooh, pasta salad.” She drew out a plastic container, popped the lid off, sniffed it. “Seems okay. Someone needs to eat this before it goes bad.” Carly plopped it onto the counter, then dove back into the refrigerator. “There’s plenty of lunch meat in here. Want me to make you a sandwich? And while I’m at it, you can explain to me why you told me to steal Yvette’s car and duck out of the gallery without alerting Spike or Connor.”
Tiger sat on a stool on the other side of the breakfast bar, which was open to the rest of the room, and leaned his arms on the counter.
“I will tell you everything, Carly. From the beginning. Stop, and listen.”
His face was grave, mouth turned down. Carly ceased her flustered puttering, dropped the fork she’d taken up into the pasta salad, and waited for him to start.
Tiger’s position, leaning forward toward her, made his T-shirt open at the neck, but the shadows were such that Carly still couldn’t see his Collar.
Then she frowned. She reached out, hooked one finger around the ribbed neckline, and pulled it down. Her heart beat faster.
Tiger wasn’t wearing a Collar at all. His skin bore a thin red crease across his throat, but the Collar had gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Tiger saw the fear flare in Carly’s eyes as she realized she was alone with an un-Collared Shifter, nothing to control him, nothing to restrain him.
Her lips parted as she reached to him and brushed one fingertip across the abraded skin. Her touch, that one caring stroke, untightened something inside him.
“You took it off?” she asked in wonder. “Looks like that was painful.”
“Yes.” He didn’t lie. Removing the false Collar had hurt, because Liam had made it to embed into Tiger’s skin, so it would better resemble the real ones. “But not as much as it could have, because I never had a Collar on at all.”
Carly stared at him for a heartbeat then her brows drew together. “What are you talking about? It was right there.” She brushed her fingertip across the line again.
“It was a fake.” Full disclosure, that was the term he’d heard. If Carly was to trust him and help him, Tiger had to give her all the information he could. Nothing held back. “I will tell you all of the truth. When I’m done, if you want me to leave, I will. You’ll never see me again, and I’ll make sure you aren’t bothered because of anything I asked you to do today.”
Carly’s eyes widened. “I think it’s a little late for that. I just parked a stolen car in my sisters’ garage.”
“They made me in a research lab in a place the humans call Area 51,” Tiger said, ignoring her and plunging straight in. “They were trying to create Shifters artificially. Shifters are born Shifter—they aren’t humans who turn into Shifters because they’re bitten or whatever, like in the movies Connor laughs at. I don’t know how they made me—they might have used Shifter DNA, or only animal and human. They never told me. I was the twenty-third Shifter they made. The others all died when I was still a cub.”