His heat was seductive. It enveloped her hands and tingled up her wrists. No, it wasn’t a tingle, she realized, but a pervasive invasion of yumminess. Her gaze leaped to his, and her breath caught. His eyes were fixed on her face, but not such that he seemed to see her. Instead, he was looking through her or inside her or she didn’t know where, but it was intense. Powerfully direct—like an arrow aimed straight at her heart—and yet silent and steady. If he was an arrow, he was flying clean and true straight at her.
She had the sudden urge to duck and cover, but it was too late. She couldn’t move without breaking his wondrous heat. She couldn’t even blink, so fascinating was his expression. A deer in headlights, that was what she was. A dumb animal too stupid to pull away. And yet, it felt so…
Angry. Infuriating. Boiling fear and frustration and hatred steamed off her skin. She felt her hands clench around his larger ones. Rage flashed through her body, exploding in the air between them…and was gone. Poof. As if it had been lifted right off her skin. The anger was gone, and she was left feeling…what?
Lost and inadequate. She didn’t know how to help her brother, wasn’t sure she could get into college much less make it once there, and most of all, didn’t know if she could keep things together long enough to start a life that had been on hold for eight years. Everything was about to change, and she wasn’t sure she could handle any of it.
“I’m not angry anymore,” she said, awe infusing her voice. In truth, she’d never really been angry, just overwhelmed. “My brother, Joey,” she blurted. “I don’t understand him. He seems to be reaching out, but I don’t know what to do. I hate feeling so useless.”
She refocused on his face, reality intruding with a sudden shock. What was she doing confessing that kind of personal detail to this man? Whipping her hands out of his, she took an unsteady step backward. “What did you do?”
His hands fell to his sides, but his expression remained calm, and his eyes begged her to touch him again, to feel that yumminess once again. “It is what I teach,” he said softly. “Chi—personal energy—and how to purify it.”
“What?”
He straightened, and his eyes grew softer and warmer. They were mesmerizing as he spoke, tempting her to believe anything he said.
“Every living thing has an energy field,” he said. “We call it chi. The clearer your energy is, the clearer your thoughts are. I quieted your chi so you could think more clearly.” He smiled. “That is what I teach. I show people how to clear their energy field.”
She blinked, her mind whirling in confusion. “But the girls…I saw them. And you, too. You were all stripping!” She was babbling, but she couldn’t seem to stop.
“Your chi is growing chaotic again.” He extended his hands, but she backed away.
“Don’t touch me!” Tracy didn’t know why she was so vehement, especially since she did want to take his hands. She wanted to feel that incredible warmth sliding through her system again. She wanted him, and that thought terrified her more than all that other stuff about energy and chi and naked college girls. She felt confused and inadequate, which made him an even stronger temptation. She wanted to curl into his strength and lay all her fears at his feet. But she could not, not, not do that with this man! Not until she knew who he was and what he did. And yet, the desire was so strong.
She watched him bend down for his attaché case again. His expression was open, his body language charming, and his tush was really, really nicely formed. “I know it’s a lot to handle, right now,” he said. “But I have another class this evening at seven. Please come. Bring the police if you must, but come and see that what I teach is not illegal. It’s not even immoral.”
She wanted to shake her head. She wanted to say there was no way in hell that she would be sucked under his spell, but her mouth remained resolutely shut. Meanwhile, his hair was slipping across his forehead again. It was cute. He was cute and sexy and really smart, too. That was why she’d noticed him from the very beginning. “I don’t know what to think.”
He nodded and his eyes continued to draw her in, promising an answer if only she gave him a chance. “You have felt the energy. You know it is real. Come learn more tonight.”
He sounded so reasonable. And the last ten minutes had shown her that her anger stemmed from another source entirely—from Joey and her uncertain future. She didn’t know what to do.
“Your chi has cluttered up again,” he said quietly. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
She bit her lip. She did feel unsettled and…and exactly what he’d said: cluttered.
“Seven o’clock,” he repeated. “Please come.”
Chapter 3
NATHAN BARELY MADE IT upstairs before he collapsed on his bed with the shakes. Sweet heaven, he hadn’t realized! He hadn’t known, and who could have guessed? No wonder Tracy protected herself so fiercely. No wonder she didn’t date and never gave the ham-fisted American brutes the time of day. She was a tigress!
In every generation, there might be a dozen women who possessed the natural sensuality and purity to walk in the heavenly realm. These women could use their physical gifts to commune with angels and bring divine messages to Earth. It was like being a natural Buddha, only in a way most people would never accept. Buddhas used the mind to reach heaven, tigresses used their bodies as the window to the divine.
These women were a closely guarded secret in China and virtually unheard of in the United States. But he had grown up in a tigress temple, so he knew how special such women were. His great-grandmother, by all accounts, had been one of them. But the temple had floundered in recent years, in part because it lacked the guidance of a true divine tigress.
He couldn’t be sure that Miss Williams was one, of course. He had only touched her chi, branded the feel of her sweet energy into his mind. But there had been such untapped power within her, that he knew…No, he corrected himself, he guessed at her potential.
The irony of the situation made him laugh out loud. He had just divorced himself from his homeland and left the temple never to return. He wanted nothing to do with tigresses anymore—either natural or trained. And what did he discover? Perhaps the greatest untapped spirit in his generation.
No wonder she’d seemed so innocent in their flirtations. She had to keep her natural inclinations under tight control. If a woman of such sensitivity were to accidentally awaken the tigress within her—well, that would be terrible. The sexual drives would be overwhelming. Nymphomania was the usual result. Besides, he knew she was a single parent to her brother. He doubted she had the privacy to explore her sexuality as she wanted. So she kept herself apart as a way to protect herself.
It all made sense now. But oh, how that knowledge had cost him! His organ throbbed at the memory of touching her sweet chi. What a joy it would be to slowly initiate her to the ways of the tigress, to train her to take full mastery of her sexual powers!
Except, of course, he had foresworn all that. He had left the temple and had no wish to help any tigress in any way at all. They were all selfish women focused completely on heaven at the expense of everything and everyone else. Their quest was holy, their pressures innumerable, but he was done with helping them.
He struggled with his sense of ethics. He had to explain the truth to Miss Williams. He had to tell her about the temple and her natural talents. And when she understood, she would leave for the temple in Hong Kong and he would never see her again. She wouldn’t want to go, he knew, but spirits had a way of forcing a person to do things they never expected. He had seen it happen many times. An inner tigress was the most fearsome of spirits. It would want to be trained, would need to stretch for the divine. That was what tigresses did.