Come back, boy, the Voice said. Come…
“No,” he rasped. The woman’s startled face became a blur in his sight. He backed away until his legs hit the bed again. He shook his head violently, trying to rid himself of the thing that rode on his returning memory like a leech,
Panic raced along his nerves. He twisted and leaped up onto the bed, circling to stare at the walls that imprisoned him.
Walls. They closed in, ready to crush and suffocate. He was trapped. But his eyes found the woman again and looked beyond her.
There was a door. A way out. Only she stood between him and escape from the Voice. He had run from the Voice—he remembered that now. He had run, and run, and run…,
He jumped down, forgetting as he did the transformation of his body. His miscalculation sent him crashing to his knees. He surged up again, flung himself at the door and hit it with his full weight. It refused to give. He clawed at the wood with his bare, useless fingers until they were raw with pain.
Warm, strong hands caught and held them. He turned on his captor, a snarl caught behind his teeth. The woman’s eyes fixed on his. She challenged him, denying her own fear, with the implacable authority of a pack leader.
“Stop,” she commanded. “Take it easy. You’ll be all right.” She tugged, pulling his hands away from the door. “Let me help you.”
He shuddered, remembering those words. They had drawn him here. They drowned out the Voice of judgment, worked a powerful magic on his soul.
He turned his fingers in her hold and gripped her hands. Her body resisted. His nostrils drank in the scent of her as his skin absorbed her warmth.
Another name came to him. A name from the past—a gift the girl had given him so long ago. Her name.
Alexandra. He formed the word in his mind and shaped his lips to voice it.
“Alexandra,” he said, lifting her hand to his mouth. He touched his tongue to her skin and raised his eyes to meet hers. “Alexandra.”
* * *
His voice was deep, husky, and perfectly comprehensible. He was at least half-crazy, and quite possibly dangerous. Rationally, logically, Alex knew she’d never seen him before.
But somehow he knew her name.
She shivered at the touch of his tongue on her hand. His gaze held hers with so potent an appeal that she was helpless to look away or pull her hands from his grip. Only moments before she’d been trying to calm him, still his frantic attempts to tear down the door. Now, with a touch and a glance, he almost made her believe she had met his golden gaze a hundred times.
During the past few minutes her emotions had undergone a series of overwhelming transformations. First the erotic half dream of Peter, then the shock of finding a naked man in her bed, the fear when he’d come after her—and then the anger.
Her counterattack had been instinctive, a primitive surge of violence at his trespass. He had been touching her, caressing her, making her feel. For a moment this strange, wild man had been the focus of all her inarticulate rage.
But when she saw him lying there, hardly able to speak, with that desperate, haunted look in his eyes, her anger had died. And when he began to claw at the door like an animal in a trap, she’d instantly responded as she’d have done with any panicked wild creature.
Until the man had spoken her name and shattered that brief illusion.
He still looked wild, with his burning golden eyes and shaggy hair and unselfconscious nudity. He didn’t seem to be aware of his state at all, but he had made her aware. He had made her far too aware.
Alex wet her lips. She hadn’t seen many naked men in her life, and only one intimately. This man was taller and bigger than Peter, and he was… She struggled for the right word.
She felt herself drifting into a strange, dreamlike state as his warm breath caressed her skin. It occurred to her what he most resembled: a prehistoric human from some old movie, hunting mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. Or a man raised by animals in the forest, come back to civilization.