Beast Within Page 6

  “Good question. Okay, as long as we’re talking about siblings and confessions, I have a confession.”

  “You beat up your sister to steal her ruffles and laces?”

  “I sure wanted to when we were kids. But no, this is different. My sister works in a biomedical lab in Houston. I took blood samples of you when you were in your jaguarondi shape and in your human shape. I sent the samples to her to see what the hell is happening to you. It has to be something triggering the DNA to change. Maybe she and her colleagues can figure out what and help you to stop it.”

  “Why DNA?”

  “This has to be happening to you on a sub-molecular level because the change is too perfect. You know, like the scientist in the graphic novels who turns green and bulks way up when he gets mad or scared.”

  “You’re saying I’m an incredible hunk?”

  She grinned at him and swatted him. “Behave. You do have your moments, but we’ll get into that later. You said you knew who did this to you?”

  “Yeah, I think so. It’s not like I was born in a litter and have been doing this my whole life.”

  Her chuckle at his feeble joke helped him calm down further. He plucked at the loose silk pajama bottom, once again sliding his fingers up and down a fold. He wanted to rub her silken skin but for the moment settled for the material.

  “Do you know what happened to you? And who did it?”

  “Specifically who? No. The area where it happened? Possibly. Why? And how? Not a clue.” Dylan concentrated on the silk between his thumb and forefinger, wishing he was touching her wet folds instead. “It has to do with my former job in Special Forces. I’d tell you what I did, but…”

  “Yeah, yeah, then you’d have to kill me. My security clearance is pretty high. I’ll have you know I came into Reserves as a First Sergeant.”

  “No, kidding? You outrank me. I was invalided out as a Master Sergeant. Should I salute you?”

  “Your pickle has been doing so all evening.”

  Dylan shifted on his stomach, trying to find a soft place for his hard shaft. “I have no control over it. Not only are you a toothsome wench, but one of the side effects of the damn blackouts…”

  “Not blackouts,” she corrected him. “Changing back to human form after being a jaguarondi. My personal opinion is you have trouble adjusting to the differences in your senses from human to jaguarondi. As a result, you try not to remember the experience and consider the experiences as blackouts. I’ll point out that you did remember what happened in the kitchen, even though you were a jaguarondi at the time.”

  “You know,” Dylan thought back through what he considered blackouts. His internal clock ticked rhythmically. His internal clock always reminded him how much time had passed. Knowing the time helped him remember who he was. With those thoughts in mind, he forced himself through his memories and beyond the confusion and pain during what he thought of as his blackouts. He pushed himself to once again experience the blackouts’ strange sights, sounds, scents. He compared his vague remembrances to what had happened in Haley’s kitchen. He realized his vision, hearing and smell sharpened just before Haley made him aware he was changing when they were enjoying foreplay a few minutes ago. Damn it, when was he going to get some sex again? Probably not until Hildy had her say. “You might be right. And maybe I’m adjusting since I can remember what happened in the kitchen and moving to the bedroom?”

  “You remember all of that?”

  “Yes. I remember walking with you and rubbing against you.”

  The gleam in Haley’s eye gave him pause.

  “What?”

  “Did you grow up with cats?”

  Why did he suddenly feel like the mouse being toyed with by the cat? “Yes. They were all over the ranch. Why?”

  “Do you know why cats rub against things? And stroke things with their tails?”

  “I’m not a moron. To mark the things with the cat’s scent. For the cat to mark whatever it wants as belonging to it.”

  “And since you were in a jaguarondi body, rubbing all over me, stroking me with your tail. Well,” Haley paused for a heartbeat, “it gives a whole different meaning to the old term of pussy-whipped.”

  Dylan groaned at her awful joke. He never had understood why a woman’s thatch was often called a “pussy”. Eating a muffin made so much more sense. Having a muff warm his cock—that had some logic. But pussy?

  Not that it mattered to him. At this point, he really didn’t care what it was called. He wanted his cock pounding hard and deep inside his Brunhilde’s pussy again, its warm slickness taking away the ache hammering at him. He shifted again on the bed, well aware he was close to losing control.

  “You act like you’re uncomfortable on your stomach. Why don’t you lie on your back?”

  “There’s a side effect to regaining consciousness from the blackout.” At her glare, Dylan corrected himself. “A side effect to shifting back to human.”

  “Besides ending up naked?”

  “Yeah. Besides being naked, I end up horny. Very, very horny.”

  “Must be the animal part of you.” Haley shrugged her pretty shoulders with the expertise of a first-class stripper. One of the spaghetti straps holding up the pajama top slid down her upper arm. “Go ahead and lie on your back. You’ll be more comfortable.”

  Her calm practicality amazed him.

  “Um, it’s a bit of a tent pole.”

  “Oooooh, yum, yum,” her blue eyes widened with mock innocence and sparkling humor. “It’s not like I haven’t seen it before.”

  “Do you think you might be so turned on by its size you might force yourself on me to have your wicked way?” Dylan rolled onto his back, then scooted up so the bedstead braced his shoulders.

  Hildy eyed him, then licked her lips and frowned at him. “We have got to get this changing stuff under control. I really want to have my wicked way with you. But not at the moment. Tell me what you think happened. The how and why will have to wait until we find the specific whos and beat the shit out of them.”

  Dylan didn’t want to think about his time in captivity, much less talk about it. But he also didn’t want to spend the rest of his life changing into a wildcat at inopportune moments.

  “It has to start with my Special Forces job that involved infiltrating the cartels across the border that smuggle people and drugs. For all the good it does to stem the tide. And the wall across the southern border is worthless. Amazing the damn ground underneath it doesn’t collapse considering the way it’s riddled with tunnels.”

  “Yeah, big old waste of taxpayer money. More people, and infrared equipment works better. We spend a lot of our time in Wildlife Management rescuing people who’ve been abandoned in the brush and tracking down caches of drugs. So what happened with your spy job in the smuggling cartel?”

  He grasped her silk pajama leg again and rubbed it. If he touched her naked skin, he might go completely animalistic. “One group I’d been working with got busted by a rival cartel. All of us, including the people who were trying to get across, ended up in one of the competitors’ prison camps.”

  “Not fun.”

  “It gets worse. One night, a bunch of us were taken to a hospital straight from hell. You remember those psych tests we got subjected to when we signed up for our compulsory terms?”

  Haley’s full lips thinned. She nodded, her face set in hard, grim planes.

  “Those were a cakewalk compared to what we were put through. In addition, they did a bunch of things for physical endurance. I also have memory gaps during which I think they did medical things to us because I woke up with anesthetic hangovers.”

  “You keep saying ‘us’.” Haley’s fingers grasped his shoulder and kneaded it.

  “Definitely more people were being experimented on. I caught glimpses of other people, plus I heard them. I want to find that Hell Hospital again. The place needs to be razed. They’re not only experimenting on adults, they’re using children.” Dylan closed his ey
es and swallowed hard. Once he found the hospital again, he’d alert his former squad members and they’d pull the strings to close it down.

  “It’s in Mexico?”

  Dylan shook his head and looked into Brunhilde’s eyes. The winter blue sky eyes looked back at him with compassion and encouragement to continue. “I caught a glimpse of the area at night a couple of times. I have this strong urge to go to the Davis Mountains here in Texas. Maybe it was the star pattern I saw. I know I saw we were in mountains, but it didn’t feel like Colorado or Mexico. I just have this insistent thought that it’s in the Davis Mountains and I have to go there. I think it’s The Halcyon Institute.”

  Haley’s eyes widened. “That can’t be right. The Halcyon Institute is a very respected research and development hospital for helping people with massive injuries and body trauma.”

  “I know the reputation,” Dylan snapped. “They get appropriated a lot of government funding for their help with war injuries. I’ve been there to visit injured buddies. I was drugged a lot of the time I was held there, but I think the star pattern and mountain range are the same. I want to be positive before I start blowing any whistles. Besides, I have this extremely strong urge that I have to be in the Davis Mountains and soon.”

  “But how did you get out?”

  Dylan knew by the skeptical look on her face she didn’t believe him about The Halcyon Institute. Hell, he still didn’t believe it either. But he was going to make sure. For now, it was enough that she wasn’t calling the cops on him. Maybe if he finished his story, it might make more sense to both of them.

  “Someone took us back to a prison camp in Mexico. At least, I woke up from a drug-induced stupor there. A coalition force of Special Forces broke into the cartel prison and pulled us out. The SF people said it was too easy, no more than token resistance, as though whoever was in charge wanted us out of there. Everyone was suspicious as hell, but we were damn glad to be out.”

  “Then you came back and were invalided out because of your so-called blackouts?”

  “Hard to stay SF when I kept waking up with no idea how I got places.”

  “I’m sure the naked raised a few eyebrows too.” Haley grinned at him.

  One thing he loved already about Haley was that she was wacky enough to find something funny in everything. Her joy in life eased the shadows threatening him.

  “The stand-up cock didn’t help much either. I was actually worried I’d get busted out for being a pervert.”

  “Poor Pickle.”

  Dylan bared his teeth at her. “Damn. If my teeth were pointed right now, I’d rip your throat out.”

  Haley ran her hand down his chest. “I have an experiment I want to try. I want to see if we can learn to control this changing bit.”

  Dylan’s blood heated at her touch. His cock jerked. “Oh, yeah? Does it involve you getting naked and an exchange of body fluids, I hope?”

  “However did you guess?”

  Dylan lunged at her, but she pushed him back against the bed.

  “Let me explain first.”

  “Talk, talk, talk. Yap, yap, yap. Ever heard of ‘shut up and kiss me’?”

  “Shut up and let me talk. I have a master’s in biology.”

  “Big whoop. My mom’s love of poetry led me to get a Ph.D. in European Literature.” Dylan tunneled his hands under her pajama top. He got his hands around her breasts, but she pulled herself away.

  “Oh, Doctor, I’m so not impressed. And this degree in which you Piled Higher and Deeper qualifies you for what?”

  “To ascertain if a patron desires fries with the order.” He reached for her again, but she slapped his hands.

  “Yeah, I thought so. Keep your hands to yourself, big boy, before I get my handcuffs out. And I don’t mean the breakaway bondage ones. I’ll knock you out and get my official ones around you.”

  Dylan tucked away his grin. She wore her Valkyrie game face which clearly radiated do not mess with me, you will not win.

  Maybe if Dylan behaved himself for a bit longer while she yakked away, she’d pull out the breakaways and let him use them on her. Being the sub in bondage games wasn’t something he liked, especially after all the crap he went through in Hell Hospital.

  “Listen to me. When you were eating, even a while ago when we were having sex, you didn’t fully change into the jaguarondi. Do you have any idea what you were thinking at the time?”

  “Sex?”

  “Get your mind off your pickle, pickle head! Think.”

  “Oh, hell. Okay, okay. Let me think. When I was eating the steak, I wanted to get my face into it like a caveman. I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of you so I forced myself to use a fork.”

  “Okay, that’s a start. And when we started rolling around on the bed?”

  Dylan felt like he had in sixth-grade when he tried to pick up the eighth-grade head cheerleader. “Hell. I was afraid if I made an ass out of myself by turning into a jaguarondi, I’d never get laid.”

  Haley patted the top of his head as if he was a little kid who learned to tie his shoes.

  He grabbed her hand and pushed it onto his shaft. “It’s called lap dancing for a reason.”

  She had the gall to laugh. “If this works like I think, we’ll get to that.”

  To his pleasure, she didn’t remove her hand, even though she didn’t massage his cock either. She just kept talking, “There is a part of the brain called the amygdala.”

  “Wasn’t that the name of Luke Skywalker’s mother in the old Star Wars movies?”

  “That was Queen Amidala. Shut up or I’ll twist your balls until they turn blue.”

  “Yes, ma’am, Brunhilde.”

  “The amygdale decodes emotions, particularly those involving things that threaten a person or animal. It reacts with the brain’s hippocampus that stores and retrieves memories. The result of the two working together is strong emotional reaction to something. Frightening memories retrieved from the hippocampus can result in the amygdale to produce anxiety.”

  “I’d be impressed if I cared for a biology lesson. When do we get to the sex?”

  “You are the perfect proof of men who can’t use their brains and cocks at the same time. Not enough blood to work both organs. Now listen to my theory. The anxiety of trauma such as this gunshot wound,” she patted the healing wound on his thigh, “or the horrible realization that you were turning into a jaguarondi in the kitchen resulted in anxiety strong enough to send the amygdala into panic-attack mode. This panic attack released the fight or flight adrenaline and might have triggered the DNA to change you to the jaguarondi.”

  “Like I changed after you kneed me in the nuts?”

  “Um, yes. Sorry about that.”

  “Kiss it and make it better?”

  Brunhilde’s eyes gleamed. “Now we’re getting to my experiment. When you ate the steak, you wanted to not embarrass yourself by acting on the animal instincts. You controlled it. Now the pleasure of making love is similar to the same emotions that trigger pain. So,” she slowly ran her hand up and down his cock, “if I do things like this, we’ll reprogram the amygdala so it associates it with pleasure. With enough work, you might be even be able to learn how to control the change.”

  “I promise to practice all night if necessary.” Dylan reached for the hem of her pajama top, but she stopped him yet again.

  “No. You’re going to have to be my sex slave. You’re going to have to do what I say and let me do things to you so you can learn to keep the change from happening.”

  “Oh, hell.” Dylan considered the scenario. He absolutely hated not being in control, but if the only way he was going to get anything was to be the sub, then he’d suck it up and be the sub. First though, he needed to make something clear to Hildy. “Just don’t handcuff me or tie me up. I think I’ll go into a panic attack after being in the Mexican cartel prison camp and Hell Hospital. Then you might prove your theory is correct when I turn into a jaguarondi and start ripping things up
.”

  “The object is to teach you to learn to not change into a jaguarondi. Okay, I won’t tie you. Hang on to the bedstead bars.”

  Obediently, he wrapped his hands around the bars behind his head. She pushed apart his legs until she had room to kneel between them. Although she eyed his body up and down, to his frustration, she didn’t touch him. He dug his heels into the bed and lifted his butt, wanting her mouth on his favorite body part and saw a drop of cum on his tip.

  “Hildy, please. Go down on me.”

  “No, Pickle. You get no choice in what I’m going to do. No talking or I’ll gag you.”

  “Don’t gag me. Remember I’ve been held prisoner for real. I’ll shut up.”

  Haley nodded solemnly. “I promise not to gag you then. But no more talking.” Instead of smacking him in punishment, which he would have enjoyed at this point, she sat back on her heels and continued to watch him.

  She took off her pajama top and he saw her peaked nipples. With her gaze still roving over his body, she lifted her breasts with her hands and rubbed her nipples with her thumbs.

  Dylan bit back his groan and instinctively arced his back. His hands and mouth tingled. No. He refused to allow the change to occur. He wanted to get laid. She wasn’t going to participate if he turned into a jaguarondi. He forced the tingling to go away.

  When he looked back at Haley, his Brunhilde was smiling at him.

  “You stopped it, didn’t you?”

  He nodded. She told him not to talk and, by damn, he wasn’t going to say a word.

  “Very good.”

  She leaned down over his body. Her lovely, white hands toyed with his balls. As it brushed against his darker skin, her blonde hair shone silver in the full moonlight. She blew lightly on his hot, hard shaft.

  Finally, she took him into her mouth and began to suck.

  Chapter Six

  To his dismay, she pulled away from him. “Don’t come yet,” she ordered. She licked her lips as though savoring the taste of his cum.

  “Are you fucking insane? My balls are about to explode.”

  Haley sat back and glared at him. “Make it stop. If you can’t control your own cock, how the hell can you learn to control the shift to jaguarondi? Don’t let go of the bedstead and don’t talk.”