Because, he understood at last, this relationship was important.

His beast calmed. It wasn't the calm of surrender but that of a predator sizing up his prey. "I'm a healthy adult male," he began.

"And you have needs." All softness leaked out of her face. "Spare me the lecture - if I don't give it to you, you'll get it from somewhere else. Do I have it right?"

Chapter 21

Clay decided it would be impolitic to laugh. If she'd been a leopard, she'd have been showing him her claws about now. "Not quite."

"What, there's been a new development?" she snorted. "Men are all the same."

"As a healthy adult changeling male," he continued, ignoring her glare, "touch is part of my life. I won't turn into a raving lunatic if I don't get it - living without a pack for so many years taught me how to go without the kind of touch most of DarkRiver takes for granted."

She continued to watch him, eyes narrowed.

"But," he said, "it's important to me." He was known as a loner but that had never meant exclusion. Not in DarkRiver. "Same as when I was a kid."

She folded her arms. "You just said you got used to not having it so much when you were young."

"No, I said I got used to living without the kind of touch the pack takes for granted," he corrected. "I had another kind of touch to keep me sane. I had you."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she said, arms falling to her sides.

But he could see she did remember. All those times when she'd crawled into his lap, neither of them saying a word as he held her and they watched the sun set over the broken edges of the city. All those hugs she'd given him without guile. All those days she'd held his hand as he led her safely through the junkyard.

"That was friendship." Her eyes filled with memory. "You were my best friend."

"I still am." He always had been, in spite of what he might've said in anger.

"So, why...?"

"Is that all you want? That we be friends?"

A hesitation, then she nodded. "Friends." Talin needed this relationship to be something pure, unsullied by lust and the evil it spawned.

"And if I need the touch of a friend from you, will you give it to me?"

Wary of the cat's nature, she looked into his face. "Friends don't kiss."

"Actually, a small kiss given to a packmate is considered normal," he told her, "but I won't ask that of you if it makes you uncomfortable. I'm asking about the things you did before."

The hugs, the friendly contact, without expectation, without the dark stain of sex. "Yes." She smiled and wrapped her arms around him. "Yes."

His own came around her. "Good."

Her smile threatened to crack her face. This would work. Without desire to sully up the waters, maybe they could forget the mistakes they had both made and go back to the innocence of what had once been between them.

Clay hoped to God he knew what he was doing. Sitting there on the carpet in Nate and Tamsyn's living room, his legs sprawled out in front of him, it was all he could do not to groan aloud in frustration. A few hours ago, Tally had agreed to a friend's touch. What if she never took the step into accepting a lover's? And he would try to become her lover, of that he was certain.

By leopard logic, he was her friend, therefore any touch of his was a friend's touch. That bit of feline reasoning gave him space to play with her and slowly, oh-so-slowly, convince her that sex between them didn't have to mean the loss of everything good. What he refused to consider was that he might fail in that endeavor.

"Sorry I'm late," Mercy's voice broke into his thoughts.

With her arrival, all the sentinels - Clay, Vaughn, Nate, Dorian, and Mercy - were there. Lucas sat on the floor opposite Clay, Sascha curled up on the sofa behind him. Vaughn's mate, Faith, usually attended, too, but had decided to sit upstairs with Tamsyn and Tally today. Clay was a little worried about that. Then again, he thought with a burst of possessive pride, Tally was more than capable of looking after herself.

"Okay," Lucas said, "this is about the Rats." He laid out the facts. "Do we accept their offer and give them free run of the tunnels?"

"Would they be reporting back to us?" Mercy asked from her armchair.

Lucas nodded. "The pact equals a formal acceptance of our rule."

"Big decision," Nate said, "letting another predator, even a weak one, in on our patch."

"They get aggressive, the pact's nullified." Lucas's face was icily practical. "They'll be dead within hours."

"Strategically," Vaughn said, "their range is one of our most vulnerable spots-our beasts don't like it down there. If the Psy learn enough about us to take advantage of that, they could do a hell of a lot of damage." He turned. "Clay?"

"I agree." Oddly enough, despite the aggressive lure of his beast, this was what he brought to the sentinels - a perspective shaped by his humanity. It was less because of his genetic inheritance than the fourteen years he'd spent pretending to be fully human. That human side could look beyond the leopard's territorial instincts. "Teijan's solid - that's why it took him so long to decide. He won't break the deal if we don't." There was a streak of honor in the rat that might've surprised those who judged him on the nature of his beast.

Dorian began to play his ever-present pocketknife in and over his fingers, the absent movements smooth as white lightning. "I've dealt with Teijan - trading info. His people aren't the best fighters, but they're excellent spies. Human members included."

Lucas raised an eyebrow. "Takes one to know one?"

Dorian's grin was quicksilver. "Something like that."

"At our initial meeting to discuss a formal pact, they struck me as honest though wary," Sascha said, speaking for the first time. "Teijan won't give his loyalty lightly, but I don't think he'd betray an alliance either. There's something very proud about him."

"That a professional opinion?" Dorian asked. "Did you read him, Sascha darling?"

Sascha scowled at the blond sentinel. "That would be unethical. My instincts say he's trustworthy."

Dorian shrugged. "Your instincts are those of an empath."

Clay agreed. Sascha might not have done a conscious reading, but she had to have picked up something that had led her to make that statement. "Maybe you need to have another meeting with Teijan and his people."

"I'm not reading them." Sascha's scowl grew deeper.

Lucas reached up to tug at the end of her plait. "Damn ethics."

"I'll go to the meeting," she said, slapping away his hand but with a smile edging her lips, "and I'll let you know what I think, but it'll be my opinion, nothing else."

"Jeez, Lucas," Dorian muttered, "I thought you said you were corrupting her."

Sascha threw a cushion at him. Laughing, Lucas caught Dorian's return volley. "Stop teasing my mate. She's in a temperamental woman mood."

Mercy's low growl filled the air.

Dorian snorted. "You're just mad because you drew the short straw."

"Why do I have to be the liaison with the wolves?" Mercy demanded. "Riley is such a damn stick in the mud, I want to - " She clawed her hands and made feral sounds.

"I'll lend you a knife," Dorian drawled. "That way, you won't get your girly nails dirty."

Mercy tackled him in a pounce that Dorian fielded with expert grace. He still failed to keep her from pinning him to the ground - because he was laughing too hard.

Clay looked around at his grinning packmates and knew Tally belonged in this circle. She was his now. No one and nothing - not her fears, not that damn disease - was going to keep her from him.

Talin had thought of Sascha as a tough sell, but Lucas's mate had nothing on Faith. While the small, curvy redhead had the same night-sky eyes as Sascha, the similarity ended there. Faith's smile was rare, an indefinable darkness to her that Talin recognized - because she held echoes of the same thing inside herself.

"So, you knew Clay in childhood?" Faith asked as they sat in the large rumpus room upstairs. "He's never mentioned you."

Talin felt a stab of hurt followed by irritation. Who was this woman to question her about Clay? "Unsurprising, really. We were very young the last time we saw each other." But he had walked in her soul every day of her life.

"I knew about you," Tamsyn said from where she sat in an armchair between Faith and Talin. She was knitting something using a green wool that reminded Talin of Clay's eyes. "'My Tally,' that's what he called you."

"You knew?" Faith frowned, the expression so subtle it was as if she hadn't yet learned to share her emotions without shields. "Of course, you've known him much longer."

Tamsyn continued to knit as she talked. "Yes. But he's become good friends with you very quickly. You must have some kind of magic."

The jealousy that hit Talin was a vicious creature, tearing and ripping and violent. "I guess he must've developed a thing for helpless women." The bitchy comment was out before she could stop it.

Tamsyn's knitting needles paused, then resumed. Faith raised an eyebrow. "What makes you think I'm helpless?" Her smile was ice.

Talin wasn't backing off, not after the cracks Faith had taken at her. "You look like a touch would bruise you." The other woman's skin was a creamy gold with not a freckle in sight. "The word that comes to mind is fragile."

Tamsyn laughed. "Sorry, ignore me. You two go on."

Talin glanced between the DarkRiver women, felt a flush creep up her neck. "Clearly I'm missing something." The sense of exclusion hurt all the more because she'd thought Tamsyn liked her.