Read Online Tiger Bound by Tressie Lockwood - Free Book Online

won’t be ignorant when they come.”
    “When who comes?” Deja croaked. While he read, she had taken hold of his arm, and the further along the mystery entwined, the deeper her nails sank into his flesh. Heath pulled her hand away and set it in his lap. She clung to his side while he puzzled over what this all meant.
    “I think he means Spiderweb. The next paragraph explains it. ‘ There is a powerful organization that is in the business of creating superhumans. I say superhumans, but what I mean is they are manufacturing shape-shifters, men and women who can morph into animals. The chosen favorite is the tiger—a rare white tiger. I worked for this organization as a geneticist, and on the day I helped your mother escape from the facility over thirty-five years ago, she was pregnant with another man’s baby. I did so on the order of my superiors. ’”
    “Geneticist,” Deja shrieked.
    Heath paused for a moment and moved to the fireplace mantel to study the pictures he had placed there. He would get back to the letter when he collected his thoughts because he needed to know everything. The man he knew as his dad turned out to be a liar, and if he understood the words correctly, Tate Hunter was not his real father.
    Tate smiled from the picture with an arm slung about Heath’s mother. Heath had her blond hair and blue eyes. He looked nothing like Tate, but then that wasn’t impossible to happen. Plenty of kids took on the characteristics of one parent and not the other. Maybe this was some elaborate joke his dad planned and he intended to spring it on Heath then tell him it was all make believe after he got Heath worked up.
    “But Dad wasn’t the joking kind,” he murmured.
    “Huh?”
    He ran a hand over his aching eyes. His head still hurt, and he almost spun around to go to the table and scoop up the pills, medicine formulated to do what? “Nothing. I guess I should call him Tate since he wasn’t my father.”
    “Oh, Heath, baby.” Deja came over to him and encircled his waist from behind with her arms. Her soft breasts pressed into his back, and if he weren’t so thrown with the news, he could enjoy the sensation. She kissed the valley between his shoulder blades, and he derived some comfort from that, but not much. “He’s still your dad because he raised you and loved you. He said that at the beginning of the letter, and I believe him. No man could care for you the way he did if it was only a job. I don’t understand everything he talked about, but there must be a reason it happened. I mean, does he give more information?”
    Heath skimmed the rest of the letter, which amounted to little more than a paragraph. Even the last sentence hadn’t been completed, as if someone interrupted him while he wrote. Heath recalled where he found the box and realized why it looked so worn. Tate had it no doubt for thirty-five years, as long as he’d been alive.
    “This must be hard to comprehend, but I have to be blunt to be sure I get it all down. First, Spiderweb is powerful and dangerous. They will kill to keep their secrets and kill to keep their people in line. I have told them that you are human with no traces of the tiger in you. I’ve sent them blood samples every month along with my reports.”
    “He took your blood?” Deja interrupted.
    “No.” Heath’s mouth went dry. His vision blurred, but it wasn’t because he wept or because he would faint. He didn’t want to see the words that sealed his fate, that told him the hope he felt when he first held Deja in his arms and kissed her sweet lips was about to be taken away from him by a dead man that he never knew. He steeled himself and blinked a few times. The words swam before his eyes, and he took a few more moments to calm his mind using the techniques Tate had taught him. I can never think of him as my dad again. He read the last few words in a monotone. “‘ You are not human, Heath. I lied to Spiderweb. I took your blood to be sure, and I