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armchair some distance from the bed. It took him almost twenty minutes to shift back. She didn’t know whether the increased time between shifts was good or bad. His skin was still burning hot when she got back to him, so she sponged him down again.
    She was learning to recognize the movement of his lips that meant he was thirsty, and had a hand under his head and the glass ready before he roused himself enough to turn his head toward it. He drank without opening his eyes, then snuggled his cheek on her hand, sinking back into sleep.
    As she turned away to set the glass on the night table, she must have missed the ripple that usually warned her of the impending change. The next minute it wasn’t a human head resting on her hand. It was the leopard’s.
    She gasped. The leopard’s eyelids flickered partly open at the sound. Sierra froze. To jerk her hand away and run might provoke it into violent action. She didn’t know what to do.
    The leopard’s muzzle was against the inside of her forearm. Its fangs could rip out the vein in her elbow in an instant. She was shaking, absolutely terrified.
    It drew a deep breath, scenting her. Then its eyes closed and its face turned in her hand, cheekbone pressing into her palm.
    It was the same movement Ian had made as a human. Sierra finally understood that the leopard was Ian. So far she had been separating the two. It was either just Ian or it was that terrifying leopard. She saw now that they were one and the same, understood it on an emotional level.
    Ian would never hurt her. Neither would the leopard. She was sure of that.
    She ran a hand tentatively over the massive head lying along her forearm. Never in her life had she had the opportunity to touch a big cat. The fur under her palm was soft. She ran her hand down its…his shoulder. The muscles beneath the fur were like steel cables, the bone dense, its structure so different. What a wondrous thing it must be to change from one to the other! She could envy Ian being a Shifter. It seemed to have a lot of advantages.
    He moved restlessly under her hand. She stroked his fur unthinkingly to calm him, the way she would have stroked her pet cat years ago. He relaxed, just as it had, and she smiled down at him.
    This was so weird and yet so nice, like some sort of fairy tale. She kept stroking him since it seemed to soothe him. It established a pattern—she’d give him water to drink and swab him down when he was human, stroke him and talk quietly to him when he was cat. It wasn’t long before she was completely comfortable with him in either shape.
    Leaving the cat part out, it was still strange to feel at ease with Ian Raeder. It must be because right now he was wounded and helpless, his hurtful mockery silenced. They were complete opposites—he an extrovert, she an introvert. Back in high school, she had been the ultimate nerd—quiet, shy, studious, the one who wore dime-store instead of designer clothing. With teenage intolerance, her schoolmates had been scornful of her and she had been equally scornful of them. But unlike them, she had kept her opinions to herself and tried instead to remain unnoticed by everyone.
    But he would notice her trying to fade into the background and he would say something to focus unwanted attention on her. “Mouse”, he would call her as she tried to hide, jeering at her shyness. What he’d enjoyed most was provoking her into betraying her real opinion. Annie had said that he had just been trying to bring her out. Sierra couldn’t buy that. He’d been sending her up. Then, when at last she was driven into some sarcastic retort which would get her into trouble with the others, he’d laugh in triumph and change that to “Mouse with fangs!” She had found both the name and the laughter infuriating.
    She roused somewhere in the middle of the night to find that she had fallen asleep for a little while, her head on the mattress beside him. His massive paws with their three-inch-long claws