She sat bolt upright. “You tried to shift?”
“Yes.” Again that almost cynical, too-knowing smile, so unlike him. “It didn’t work.”
Alex sprang up, pacing across the room.
“I think it would have worked,” Kieran continued. “I was very angry. But the alcohol…”
The far wall stopped Alex, and she leaned her forehead against it.
“I remember now.” His voice was so damnably indifferent. “Drinking did that. No matter how angry I got, I couldn’t shift.”
Of course. Alcohol blunted the senses. Couldn’t it also hamper Kieran’s unique abilities?
“And you didn’t want to,” she murmured. “You would have been glad to find a way not to change. Because you couldn’t control it. Because you couldn’t accept what you are.”
“You should be pleased, Alexandra. You wanted me to control my changing. I found a way.”
“I never told you to hide behind poison. Isn’t it just another kind of running?”
He was silent. She pressed her cheek to the cool wood. What did they do to you, Kieran? What happened to you, to make you hate your own nature? Running, you said. Maybe you were running away from yourself. Because if you got yourself nicely drunk and then looked for a good fight, maybe you could make yourself believe you were human.
His face was as bleak as a gray winter sky. “Perhaps,” he said with an odd, distant gentleness. “Maybe I should keep on running.”
She met his gaze and saw no trace of the lost boy-man who’d been so desperate for her help, so willing to do whatever she asked. “Damn it, Kieran, I want to help you.”
“No.” He looked at his hands, turning them over as if he expected them to change before his eyes. “No. You don’t need the complications. Because it has become complicated, Alexandra.”
“I don’t see—”
“What do you see? A wolf that’s safe as long as he can be controlled and studied and understood?” His bleak smile returned. “What happens when I become something you can’t control anymore?”
She shivered in spite of herself. “I accept what you are,” she said, “even if I don’t completely understand—”
He stepped forward, forcing her back a step, “I won’t be the cause of your fear.”
“Fear?” She thrust out her jaw. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Look at me, Alexandra,” he demanded. “I’m not human, and yet I’m a man. In every way.” He loomed overt her, and she felt his words at the most visceral level, deep in the pit of her belly.
“If I’m a man,” he said, “you fear me.” Her throat closed. She searched for a logical response and couldn’t find it.
“No,” she whispered.
“You don’t lie well, Alexandra.”
She moved blindly across the room, putting the sofa between them. “I’m not lying.”
“Then why are you running from me now?” For the first time she truly comprehended what it must feel like to be prey, run to earth and exhausted and with no hope of escape. To walk away now would be to prove what he said was true. To walk away now would make her a liar, even to herself.
So she stood where she was as Kieran came closer, until she could see the rapid pulse beneath the skin in the hollow of his neck. She focused on that faint movement with desperate fascination, unable to move as he stalked past and behind her.
Then the last chance to run was gone.
His arms were gentle as they closed around her waist.
His heat leaped like electricity directly into her body, shooting through every nerve and muscle. It was like the first time he had held her, but a thousand times more compelling.
She didn’t fight as he held her sealed to him. She didn’t resist as he turned her around and spread his hands across her back to draw her closer still, until she could feel every hard line and contour of his body from chest to thigh. She took in the heady masculine smell of him—pine and earth and perspiration and something nameless and erotic.
“Alexandra,” he said, his voice rough and guttural. He took her chin in his callused palm, and she had no choice but to meet his gaze.