She bit at her lower lip, watching the leopard until it disappeared into foliage. She was alone. The space around her filled up with sound. Birds. Insects. Even a frog, indicating water very close by. Her hands dropped to the buttons of the shirt and slid them back into position.

So that meant she had to come up with option four. She just had to be logical and really think it all the way through. She’d gotten away from Rafe. She’d escaped when everyone would have told her it was impossible. How the DEA had spotted her, she had no idea, but still, she was smart.

People didn’t get that she was intelligent because of her lack of formal education. It hadn’t occurred to anyone that she might be able to learn to read on her own. There were children’s shows on television. Even language shows. And she’d watched every one of them over and over. Children’s educational shows. They’d saved her life.

Once she could read enough, she’d used the Internet to find places for math and science. For history lessons. But always, always, she read. Newspapers, magazines, every book in Rafe’s house. She read dictionaries and the labels of cans. She read the ingredients of everything that came into the house. She didn’t want Rafe to know she could read and she made certain she never made a mistake in front of him.

She knew he tracked her computer, reading everything she did on it, learning everywhere she went, so she used his computer, the one in his sacred office, the one he never once considered she might touch. She’d used his own computer to educate herself and she’d done it right under his nose.

The moment she knew Rafe was a shifter, she tried to find out more about them, but there wasn’t really information anywhere, so she read up on leopards and studied their behavior. Clearly shifters were different. Leopards were loners, they didn’t live in groups as Eli hinted some shifters did. Leopards had multiple mates and the females raised their offspring alone. She had the feeling shifters didn’t do that either, but she didn’t know. It was a possibility and that needed to be addressed at some point if she didn’t get away from Eli.

She could do this. She could think her way out of this, or at least hit on some kind of a plan. Part of the problem was Eli. He did more than just melt her body every time he looked at her. She still remembered sweet. Worse, he still gave her sweet. He treated her as if she mattered. He didn’t need to look after her the way he did, but then he’d done it before, drawing her in, only to stomp on her.