Joshua_The Whitfield Rancher_Erotic Tiger Shapeshifter Romance Read online

  “I don’t understand you. You or your family.” He put his forehead onto hers and laughed. “I think you all need your heads examined. This isn’t what I expected.”

  “Good. It’s nice that I can keep you on your toes. You certainly have me since I met you.” Laughing, he stood up again, pulling her up from the chair. “I’m starving, and I know that we’ve not hired anyone to cook for us so we’ll have to wing it. Can you cook?”

  “No. I never got to learn how.” He said that he could make eggs and bacon, as well as pancakes. “I love pancakes.”

  “Then pancakes it is. Hopefully there is enough stuff down there to make them. I’ve brought all my supplies from the camper and stocked the kitchen. Oh, you might be surprised to find that a lot more of the house is done. By the end of the week, we’ll be having furniture delivered. After we go pick it out.” He took her hand and led her down the stairs to the kitchen. “We also need to get you some clothes. I want to see you in something bright and pretty, as beautiful as you are.”

  When she was sitting in the chair in the kitchen, all she could think about was that he was in love with her. And that he didn’t care what had happened to her. She wondered if he would some night when she was having a nightmare about it. For now he’d not know the haunts that she had, and she could hide them from him. But if he slept with her, there wouldn’t be any way that he’d not know that she woke in terror nightly. She’d cross that bridge when she got to it. No point in borrowing trouble, her sister was always saying. Perhaps he’d not want to sleep with her. There was always that.

  Chapter 4

  Josh closed up his computer when he finished reading the article. There really wasn’t that much out there on telekinesis, and some of it he wasn’t so sure was right. He lived with someone that could and did use it, and some of those people that wrote the articles that he read no more understood it than he did. When Carter joined him in the office, he smiled at her. He loved what she was wearing.

  “I’m not sure this is me.” He asked her why not. “I don’t know. I’m not a big flower type of person. It’s very bright, isn’t it?”

  “It is, and it makes your eyes shine. I also love what you did with your hair. The braid is much easier than all of it hanging down in your eyes all the time.” She fingered the braid and looked around the office. “What do you think of this room? I got most of the furniture for it at the second-hand shop in town. But I’m not sure about the chair. It’s not very comfortable for long periods of time.”

  “If you want to know something, you can just ask me.” He asked her what she meant. “You want me to tell you about the pieces, correct?”

  “No. If that was what I wanted, I would have asked. But I was only making conversation about the room to put you at ease. You seem to be very tense today.” She nodded. “What is it, Carter? Did something happen?”

  “I have nightmares.” He told her that he knew that. “I woke you last night. I’m sorry. Sometimes I can catch the screams, but other times, like last night, I can’t.”

  “What is it you dream about?” She looked out the window, and he could tell that she was nervous or afraid to tell him. “I used to have nightmares when I was a kid. Not like, I’m sure, you have, but I was afraid of the dark. Like terrified. I’d gotten accidently locked in the basement once, and that was all it took.”

  “I hear them. Other people’s dreams and thoughts. It’s harder to shut out when I’m asleep. They come to me, and I can see what they’re thinking. What they plan to do.” He didn’t say anything; this was well beyond what he had read about today. “One of your neighbors is planning his death. He is very ill, and feels as if he can’t go on. His name is Rogers.”

  He wrote the name down to tell Evan, so he could maybe talk to him. “Carter, come here. I’d very much like to hold you. If it doesn’t hurt you.”

  “It doesn’t when you touch me. It usually makes me feel all sorts of things that you’re doing, but yesterday, I noticed that there was only a feeling of comfort. That’s what I want to talk to you about.” He didn’t move, thinking that they could be progressing to something bigger. “Will you sleep with me? Before it gets too far along. Us, I mean.”

  “I don’t know what that means, but if you’re referring to us falling in love, it’s much too late for that. I’m in love with you. I told you that last night.” She nodded, and he saw the tears then. “Don’t cry, love. I’m sorry that you’re going through this, and I don’t know how to help you.”

  “I need a rock. A lifeline I can hold on to when it gets bad. When someone touches me that has thoughts, I need someone, I think, to hold me down, to keep me centered.” She looked at him. “I don’t know if that will work or not. I just know that since I’ve been released I feel like I’m going to explode with everything around me moving too fast. People too close to me. I’m trying my best to deal with it, but I’m overwhelmed. I want to go back, some days, and be put in a cell where I can’t hear or feel.”

  He moved toward her, and when she didn’t back away, he pulled her into his arms and held her. When she grabbed onto his arms and held him, he could feel her sorrow and her pain. Touching her arms, the bare skin exposed from her shirt, he felt the power of her like he’d picked up a live wire while standing in a puddle of water. But he didn’t let her go.

  When she dug her nails into his arms, he knew that he was going to pass out. It wasn’t painful, but it was a lot of information. He could see Mr. Rogers sitting in his chair, crying about how lonely he was. Mrs. Betts yelling at the children next door for making too much noise. All she wanted was for them to come and visit her when her own grandchildren wouldn’t. There was Mrs. Windle down the street, who took a walk every day to see what sort of mischief she could get into to have the police come and visit her. There were more people needing friendship, someone to talk to and to be with. And because they were so alone, they didn’t want to live. Felt useless.

  “They’re all lonely. And they’re scared.” Carter told him that she knew, but for him to look deeper. That was when he saw things that he could never un-see. Women being abused by not just spouses, but their children as well. Humans that were cruel to each other in ways that sickened him. Animals, pets really, starving from being left outside and no one feeding them. He was bombarded with people’s pain, with their thoughts and actions. Then it was all gone when Carter let him go.

  It was painful to think that all this was going on right in his own town. That these people were suffering for reasons that could easily be taken care of or fixed. He reached for Carter again, thinking to hold her, when she took another step back. It occurred to him what she was doing and trying to keep him from seeing too.

  “You only gave me a taste of what you feel.” She nodded, and he watched her face. “What if I told you that we can help these people? Some of them, anyway. They only need companionship, and perhaps a friend.”

  “And the others? How do we help them? How do we help them so that I can have peace?” Josh told her that he didn’t know. “If I touch you, you’re going to feel what I feel. Don’t you understand that? We can’t be mates, it’ll tear you apart. Just as it does me. I thought that sleeping with you might be a way to get this to work. But I can see now that it would have been a major mistake. I might hurt you with too much information that I know about people.”

  He pulled her to him then, holding her tightly until she didn’t struggle anymore. And when she went limp in his arms, he looked down into her face and smiled. She said she was sorry.

  “For what? Showing me in the only way you know how what is going on? I thank you for that. I could never have understood without that. Holding you, being your rock, is what I’d really like to do.” Carter told him that it was too much. “Perhaps for me, and I can’t imagine what it is for you, but I want to help you. I want us to help the others as much as we can.”

  “How?” He pulled her along with him to the desk, and sat her on his lap while he called his brother, Evan. He did i
t this way so that she could hear the conversation as well. “I have some information for you, and I’d like to help you with it.” Evan asked what sort of information. He told him what he’d felt and knew about some of the people in town. “Can we get them help? Some of them, it seems like they just need a friend. I was thinking that we could have the younger pups and others in Nate’s pack be companions to some of the elderly that are lonely.”

  “I’ve talked to Mr. Rogers a couple of times when he shows up at the clinic. He really is in a bad way most of the time. Not so much his age and it pulling him down, but like you said, he’s very lonely. I think that’s an excellent idea. What else did you have in mind?”

  They talked for another two hours. Carter gave them names and information that he’d not gotten. Most of the people were the elderly, some of them were even leap members. This fix he could help her with. The rest of it, he’d have to figure out just what she needed and get it for her. After hanging up from talking to Evan, she didn’t move off his lap but laid back on his chest with her head on his shoulder.

  “When we were little, Rachel and I used to talk about a knight in shining armor coming to save us. He’d be on this white horse and he’d slay the bad people that were around us, and we’d be free to live in the castle with him for the rest of our lives.” He kissed her on the shoulder and asked her what she thought of now. “The same things, only my knight has a face now. And my castle is this home. But I’m afraid of getting you hurt.”

  “I know that, honey. Most of the time, what you can do, it frightens me as well. Not that I believe you’ll hurt me in any way, but you’re so very powerful, I worry about what will happen to you if someone comes for you.” She told him that they were, her parents. “Yes, well, they’re never going to get close enough to you to take or harm you. And they’ll regret the day that they fucked with this family.”

  “They don’t know what I can do. Not all of it.” He didn’t figure that they did. Otherwise they might have backed off. Josh told her that. “No, they would have come regardless. Their thinking is that there isn’t any way that I’d be able to hurt them. That they have some sort of free pass to me because they’re my parents. Not that they like being my parents—they’re just thinking that it will save them if it comes to that.”

  “Carter, have you ever hurt someone and didn’t mean it? Other than the guard, who very much deserved what he got. I mean, you couldn’t have known how to use this power much when you were younger.” She nodded but didn’t speak. “Was it Rachel?”

  “Yes. She was in pain from being beaten by my dad. He’d told her, I suppose several times, that they had no money for a trip that she wanted to go on at school. I knew that he had enough for her to go, and money for her to buy a nice trinket too. So I decided to go and get it for her, so that she could go. But on the way to his room, Mom caught me by the arm and I freaked out at what I saw in her mind. Rachel heard us screaming—it was hurting Mom too, I guess—and Rachel touched me. It threw her across the room, and she hit her head badly enough to need stitches.” He asked her how that was explained to the doctor. “I don’t think even my mom knew what had happened at that point. She thought that with all the anger that we had, it might have made Rachel slip and fall. That wasn’t it—I did it. I hurt her.”

  Josh just held her, enjoying that they were trying to work this out, but no less scared for her when her parents came. The longer they sat there, not speaking but just being together, he realized that she was falling asleep.

  Adjusting her in his arms, he held her while he went to the couch, laying her down on it. He took off her shoes and his own and joined her. It was tight on the sofa, and he decided that they needed a deeper one, but once he was behind her, spooned in with her on the couch, he closed his eyes, thinking that he’d only lay there for a moment or two. But she was warm and comfortable, so he felt himself drifting off in sleep as well.

  At some point he felt her moving. Pulling her closer to him, he buried his chin into her neck. The scent of her was calming to his cat, and he started to drift off again when he felt her terror. Not knowing what it was, he tried to comfort her again when he saw what she was seeing.

  The child couldn’t have been more than a few months old. The blanket over her was a bright pink yet stained with dirt and something else. When the image pulled back, sort of like a movie would when you could see more of the scene, he saw that the baby was laying by the side of the road by a mailbox. It took him several seconds to realize what he was seeing. An abandoned baby. Suddenly a car came out of nowhere and was heading right for the child and mailbox. The screams woke him before he saw what happened to the child.

  “We have to go.” He nodded, still trying to wrap his head around the car and what it would have done to the child. Carter was pulling on her shoes when she told him again that they had to go. “She needs us to get her.”

  He hurried then, but he didn’t know where they were going. Or if the child was really there. As soon as he was in the car, he turned to her. Fear was there, and he could almost feel it.

  “Where are we going?” Carter told him the address even as he was pulling out of the driveway. “Was that real? Is there a child in a ditch?”

  “Yes. They didn’t want her anymore, and if we can get to her before they come back to kill her, we’ll be able to save her.” He drove a little faster, knowing that he’d get pulled over if he wasn’t careful. “How did you know? I’ve never.... How did you know that she was there?”

  “I saw it with you. By holding you, I was able to see it too. But I didn’t see an address. I missed that.”

  They were almost to the mailbox, and he could see the car that had been going toward the child in the vision pulling away after dropping off the baby. As soon as he was level with the box, Carter jumped out, snatched up the baby with the bright pink blanket, and got back in the car.

  Josh pulled into the drive across from the mail box and they looked her over. He could smell the drugs on her, and knew that they’d given her something so that she’d not feel anything. When the car came back, speeding like he’d seen it, they hit the ditch then the mailbox before they flipped upside down several times, coming to a stop a hundred yards or so from where the child had been.

  ~~~

  Dylan didn’t know what was going on, why both Josh and Carter were not saying much, but she had two dead people in the car and an infant that more than likely didn’t belong to them. She went to talk to Carter, figuring she would have the most information.

  “Did you know who they were?” She shook her head, and kept looking at the ambulance where the baby was being checked out by Evan. “Did you see this?”

  Carter looked at her, fearful again, but she nodded. “We both did. Josh was sleeping with me when I saw it. We came here to save the baby, but I didn’t know the couple.” Dylan asked her if it was their child, knowing that it wasn’t. “I didn’t see that part. I’m sorry. I do know that they drugged her and that they didn’t want her anymore. They were thinking that if they killed her, no one would know that they’d done this.”

  “Well, that worked out so well for them.” Carter smiled; it was the first time Dylan had seen her do that since she’d met her. “They were both high on something—we’ve yet to determine what. The child is going to have to go to the hospital, I would imagine, then child services will need to find her parents. Can you tell me who they are by chance?”

  “I might be able to. May I hold her to see?” Dylan walked to the ambulance with her, Josh right behind her. Dylan was glad to see Josh so supportive of Carter, even if he did look as confused as she felt. When Carter was handed the baby from Evan, he told her that she was going to be fine. They’d given her some kind of sedative, but not enough to do much more than put her to sleep for a little while longer.

  Carter held the child, then unwrapped her blanket. When she hesitated for a moment, Dylan watched her until she looked at her.

  “What happens to her if she has no one?�
� Dylan asked her if she could see that. “I haven’t touched her yet. I don’t…. What will happen to her if there isn’t anyone that wants her? Will she go into the system?”

  “More than likely. After she spends a few days in the hospital to make sure that she has no ill effects from whatever they gave her. They’ll also see if she’d been abused prior to that.” Carter nodded, but still didn’t touch her. “Are you afraid of what you might find?”

  “Yes.”

  It was enough of an answer that Dylan’s heart broke for her. She wanted to take the child from her and tell her that she’d find another way. Also, she wanted to hold the other woman and tell her that she’d fix whatever she could to make her happy again.

  Carter touched the baby’s cheek, then put her tiny hand into hers. As soon as the baby wrapped her fingers around her larger one, the little girl opened her eyes and looked right at her. Dylan was both glad and afraid of what she might have gone through in her short life.

  “This isn’t the first time that she’s been drugged. When she cries, they give her Benadryl so that she’ll shut up. It makes her sick, and they hurt her when she is.” Evan asked how she had ended up with the other couple. “I can see her mother’s face, and that of her father. They make her smile, and she is glad when they come to her. Beth, her name is Beth, and she was kidnapped a week ago when her mother was walking down the street with her in the stroller. The man held a gun to her head while the woman took the child.”

  “Do you have a name for the parents?” Dylan couldn’t believe that she’d gotten this much information, and even how it had happened. When Carter frowned, she thought that she’d gotten all that she could. Then Josh stepped up behind Carter and touched the child as well.