“Where’ve you been?”
Tyler was as much a father to him as a brother, but the question still rankled. He wasn’t a fucking child. He didn’t owe anyone an explanation. “Out.”
His unflappable brother didn’t twitch an eyelash. As a kid, Michael had wondered if Tyler had used up more than his fair share of the control genes and there’d been none left over for him.
“Out,” Tyler repeated. “At two a.m. The Cherokee’s LoJack showed you took it off pride land. There a reason you went to see the humans in the middle of the night?”
“What? Do I have a fucking curfew now? Like a cub? I’m twenty-four fucking years old. If I want to take my girlfriend out for a drink, whatever the hour, there’s no law against that.” Michael’s temper rose with every calm word his brother uttered.
Tyler held his gaze steadily, his voice low and unruffled. “It isn’t about your age. You know that.”
“What do you want to know? If I shifted? If I exposed us all? If the villagers are on their way out here with pitchforks? Well, rest easy, big brother. No one saw us.”
Tyler’s chin slowly lowered an inch. “No one saw you. So you did shift. Where?”
Inside Mara. Somehow Michael didn’t think that answer would go over well. “I didn’t shift. Not all the way. We were at the Bar Nothing. Everyone there was falling-down drunk, so no one saw a thing. There wasn’t even much to see.”
Nothing to see. Right. As long as no one saw him pin Mara to the side of the Cherokee. Michael tried to hold his brother’s gaze without flinching, but his eyes flicked over to the Jeep, returning to the scene of the crime.
Tyler frowned, more a tightening around his eyes than a full facial expression, but it was ominous all the same. He glanced over his shoulder, following Michael’s gaze to the claw marks he’d gouged in the metal frame. Tyler turned, walking slowly over to the Jeep and running a finger along one particularly deep divot.
“Subtle.”
Shit. Michael grimaced. Now he was in for it.
Why did he have to be such a terrible liar? His sister liked to tell him it was one of his best features, but he’d never had her appreciation for the lack. And now it looked like Tyler was gearing up to rip him a new one.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me why you thought the Cherokee would make a good scratching post?”
Michael locked his jaw, sticking to his original defense. “No one saw us.”
“Ah.” Tyler still didn’t look at him, continuing to study the damage to the SUV. “So you lost it, in a public place, and went feral enough to leave your ride looking like it’s been attacked by a bear, but that’s okay because no one saw you. Is that it?”
He was twenty-four freaking years old, but Tyler could still make him feel like a cub who’d just been caught clawing the furniture. One silky-smooth question was all it took to send shame and embarrassment spearing into his stomach.
Michael didn’t remember their father. The bastard had left the pride when Michael was three and Ava two, leaving his mate and all five of his kids behind. Tyler had become the man of the family. Their mother wasn’t dominant. She protected her cubs, but Tyler was the head of the household from the time he was fourteen. He had been mentor and disciplinarian. When he was little, Michael had wanted nothing as badly as he wanted to make Tyler proud.
Now that ingrained urge dug its claws into him again, bringing with it a surge of angry bitterness that he would never be good enough, controlled enough. Tyler would never consider him an adult because until he could control his shifting, his brother would see him as nothing more than an oversized cub.
His animal ran close to the surface, but in all other ways he was a man. He couldn’t go away to college, but he read everything he could get his hands on to ensure he was just as educated as anyone else in the pride. He couldn’t hold a job outside the pride, but he worked twice as hard as anyone else at the work he took on at the ranch. He may be emotional, but that didn’t mean his brain didn’t work. That didn’t mean he wasn’t a thinking, productive, adult member of the pride who deserved to be treated as such.
He wasn’t a fucking cub to be taken to task for staying out too late at night. He was a man. Why couldn’t anyone else see that? Not Tyler, not Mara. None of them.
Michael’s breath came in short pants, the urge to shift a tight fist in his gut.
“Mike? Take a deep breath. Let it out slow.”
“Fuck off, Tyler. I’ve heard all the Zen bullshit before and not a fucking bit of it helps.”
Tyler was as unfazed as ever by his explosive temper. “What would help?”
“Respect,” Michael snarled. “I know my control is bad. I know better than anyone what a threat it is to our security to shift in public. I’ve had it drilled into me. I may be trapped on pride land for ninety-nine percent of my life because no one trusts me enough to leave for even an hour—in the middle of the night, when no one saw me—but that doesn’t mean that during the time when I am here, on the pride, not threatening exposure to anyone, that I deserve to be treated like a fucking child. I’m not four anymore, Tyler, and you aren’t my father. So back. The fuck. Off.” His claws were out, his teeth sharp, and his shoulders hunched under the urge to shift, but he fought it back and managed to stay in mostly human form.
Tyler watched him with expressionless passivity. At least he stopped petting the damn claw marks on the Jeep.
“Respect is earned, Michael,” he said in a quiet rumble, the growl in his voice the only indication that his animal was up too.
“I’ve earned it,” Michael snapped. “The only thing I haven’t done is what I’m not able to do. In every other way, I’ve been a full, adult member of this pride for six years. All I’m asking is to be treated like one.”
Michael didn’t give his brother a chance to get in the last word. He was done listening. He slammed out of the garage and ran across the ranch compound to his bungalow. He forced himself to stay in human form, if only to prove that he could. He focused on the heat and the feel of sweat against his furless skin, the beat of his soft-soled shoes against the dirt path. It was pure ornery stubbornness, but he refused to let the lion out. Denying the shift was like ignoring a piece of his soul. He wanted to punish it, even if it was punishing himself. The lion was destroying his life, taking Mara away from him, stealing the respect he deserved.
Michael ran into his bungalow. He kicked off his shoes and stripped off his shirt, but still he didn’t shift. Instead, he pressed his hands against the door, concentrated on the wood grain beneath his palms, and forced the animal back.
Chapter Five
“Momma!”
Mara’s heart lurched as the pigtailed girl streaked across the schoolyard. She flung herself into the air with a blind certainty that her momma would never let her fall. Instinctively, the muscles in Mara’s arms contracted, preparing to catch that squirming bundle of eager young shape-shifter.
But she wasn’t that momma. She wasn’t anybody’s momma.
The momma in question looked more like an escapee from cheer practice than anyone’s mother, complete with pink streamers in her high ponytail. She tossed her little girl, Sanka, high into the air and caught her giggling, squirming form.