Out of Chances (Taken by the Panther, #2) by V. M. Black Read Free Book Online Page B

Spooks and spies, you know?”
    “Okay,” she said, as if she did. “So what do I do here?”
    Chay chuckled. “Like Solitaire? Angry Birds? Candy Crush?”
    She swiveled her chair with one toe to glare at him squarely. She hadn’t missed the slight note of condescension in his tone. “I’m more useful than that.”
    “Of course you will be,” he assured her. “Just as soon as you have your shifting under control. Until then, that’s your only job.”
    He started typing rapidly on the keyboard in front of him, and one of the monitors in front of her blanked for a second. Then her name appeared with a button below inviting her to log on.
    “No password. Go ahead. Sign in,” Chay urged.
    Distrustfully, she clicked the button, and the screen switched swiftly to a desktop view with a handful of simple icons in it.
    “You’ve got almost as many movies as Netflix here, a library of tens of thousands of songs here, and bunch of games over here,” Chay said, tapping the various icons on her screen. “There’s an app with a few thousand books—every USA Today and New York Times bestseller for the last twenty years, along with all the classics. Oh, and a few hundred games on the Steam account right there.”
    “So I’ve got an electronic babysitter,” she said. Her face felt hot again but for a far different reason. She felt like a child being fed a video while the grownups went away and did the work, and she wasn’t accustomed to being useless.
    But Chay didn’t respond to her tone. Instead, he pushed away from the table hard enough to shoot his rolling chair across the aisle to one of the white tables in the middle of the room.
    “I’m giving you something to do,” he said mildly, digging among the clutter on the table until he snagged a pair of headphones. Another shove sent him skating back again. “Here you go,” he said, holding them out to her.
    Tara pressed her lips together briefly before she took the headphones. “Okay then. You guys will watch me not turn into a panther, and I’ll watch...I don’t know, reruns of NCIS or something.”
    “That’s about right,” Chay said evenly. “And when you don’t turn into a panther for long enough, then we’ll reassess.”
    “And then I’ll go home?” she asked. She hadn’t even spoken to her mother since that terrible incident in her lecture. How long had it been now? Two days? Three? Her mom would be beside herself after what had happened at the school.
    “That’s another thing that will be reassessed,” Chay said calmly.
    Tara looked at him for a long moment, studying his face for any meaning behind those words. But his expression was perfectly bland—too bland, but it didn’t help her understand what he meant any better for that.
    Her head was hurting, she realized, not the panther kind of ache but the tired kind, and her eyes felt gritty.
    Finally, she sighed. “Actually, I’m really tired. I don’t know what time it is, and considering how much time I’ve spend knocked out recently—and thanks for your part in that, by the way—you’d think I wouldn’t be, but somehow, apparently, it’s not the same as sleeping.”
    “I wouldn’t know,” Chay admitted. “You’ve got your choice of places to crash, though. Bedroom with video feed or couch without.”
    She gave the couch in the corner of the room a long, hard look. She’d slept on far worse in her year of traveling, but a real mattress with real sheets and a real pillow were far more attractive right now—even if it did come paired with being recorded. “I’ll take the bedroom.”
    “Right this way,” he said, standing up and leading the way to the only other door in the room.
    Tara followed. There wasn’t anything else to do.

Chapter Eight
    H e opened the door and was surprised that he felt slightly self-conscious. It wasn’t like there was anything private about his quarters, not really. His rooms had more or less just silted into their current state rather than