The idea of losing her was terrifying. He tried to tell himself that it was his leopard he worried about, but he knew that wasn’t the strict truth. He needed her. Fyodor Amurov, that frozen block of ice, a man who never needed anyone or anything, needed her. He kept walking, putting one foot in front of the other, but he felt as if he were walking to his doom.

13

EVANGELINE curled into the fetal position, drawing up her knees to her chest, trying to make herself as small as possible. So many times in the swamp, night after night, the big male leopard had prowled around her camp, scratching and biting at the door, trying to get in. She knew he was a shifter because he often tried the door with his hands. Once he broke the lock, but she had already gone out the window at the urging of her female.

The leopard tried to track them in the swamp, but she knew her way around by that time and she’d gone to the very center of a heavy grove of cypress trees, climbed very high into the thinner branches where the cat couldn’t follow. The next morning she’d found his paw prints circling the grove of trees, but he hadn’t followed her all the way through the thicker brush. She’d been so scared. She’d moved camps after that. She’d been eight years old.

He didn’t get us. Her female brushed a caressing stroke along the inside of her skin as she’d done when Evangeline was a child. We’re older now. Even if they got past the male leopard guarding us and broke into this room, we would kill them.

“You haven’t emerged,” Evangeline whispered. “You mean I’d have to kill them.”

I would come to your aid.

She was being a baby, allowing the circumstances to throw her back to her childhood. It happened. Just not often anymore. Evangeline forced herself up into a sitting position. “I’m happy you think you could come to my aid, but it doesn’t work that way. You can’t just come out whenever you feel like it. The circumstances have to be right. We both have to be fertile at the same time. Saria told me all about it.”

That’s happened already. Twice.

Evangeline’s breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t stay still and had to get to her feet and pace. “What do you mean? That’s impossible. I would have known.” She’d been told that the emergence was extremely uncomfortable sexually.

The first time you were very young. Fourteen. I tried to keep from making it difficult on you. We hid in the deepest part of the swamp for days.