Romancing the leopard, p.7
Romancing the Leopard, page 7
He forced himself to look away so he didn’t do something embarrassing, like jerk her against his side. He’d suggested the idea. His reaction to seeing her hanging off the balloon—that duel combination of amusement and terror—surprised the hell out of him. Enough that it took him several minutes of staring out over the landscape before he really saw their surroundings.
The fairgrounds stretched out below them in a patchwork of roads, farmland, and the buildings and tents inside the grounds. A second balloon had just landed on its own platform below, people who looked tiny from this height disembarking. The sky was bright, the day warm, giving them a spectacular view of their surroundings. When he stopped worrying, he realized just how fun this all was.
He grabbed the railing and faced outward, taking it all in while keeping Cat in his peripheral vision. To his leopard’s relief, she pulled back from her position hanging over the rail, to look up at the balloon, and the burner heating the air. A little flap near the top of the balloon opened and closed a few times, releasing the hot air and giving the pilot control of their altitude.
Cat’s eyes were wide, the wonder on her face captivating. She seemed to be studying everything, watching the pilot’s actions, then jumping her gaze to the balloon to see the results. Her fascination with the process of it all made him grin.
“Enjoying yourself?” he asked.
“This is so cool,” she muttered without looking at him. “Or I should say warm. So the flap opens, cool air, hot air, adjusted…” She continued to murmur under breath, dissecting the process, her full attention on that while the other passengers in the basket were busy oohing and aahing over the scenery.
For long moments, Dylan just watched Cat, as fascinated by her as she was by the balloon’s mechanics. He had to shake himself when he remembered he’d had an ulterior motive for this ride. Forcing his gaze back to the fairgrounds, he hunted the crowds. While he was no eagle, his still had excellent vision, and even at this distance, he could pick out individuals from the mass of humanity shuffling around the site below. He obviously couldn’t scent the tigers from up here—all he smelled at the moment were propane, fire, and if he leaned close enough, Cat—but he hoped something would stand out, some indication of who these other shifters were.
He looked for trios of people, especially trios of men. He was sure, based on their scents, that all three shifters were men, so that seemed the easiest way to spot them without being able to verify their scent signatures. Unfortunately, there were several groups of men in the crowds, a few in twos and threes. One group, with one particularly tall individual, caught his attention. They seemed to walk through the crowd without actually looking at the booths they passed. One of them hunted the surrounding people, but the other two just stared ahead, cutting a direct path toward the parking lot.
Dylan narrowed his gaze a little as his leopard growled in his head. Were those the tigers? If so, they seemed to be on their way out of the fairgrounds, which was a relief.
Something about the way they moved…as if they had no interest in what was going on around them. That struck him as odd. Why come to the festival if you weren’t interested in enjoying the sights?
But then, he could just be imagining things. Hunting for telltale signs of danger where there were none. Picking out three men in the crowd who might well just be humans who’d seen everything already and were heading out.
Still, he watched the men closely. His every instinct honed in on them even when he knew he should keep searching the crowds for other possibilities.
Something about the way they moved…
He turned as the balloon turned to keep the men in sight and didn’t stop staring at them until they reached an SUV in the parking area. He might have continued to watch them until they’d driven away but Cat’s light touch on his arm startled him back into his surroundings.
“Hey, you okay?” she asked, staring up at him, her eyes narrowed in concern.
“Sure. Yeah. Why?”
“You just…growled.”
“I did?” He had? Hell, he hadn’t even noticed. He shrugged and tried to brush off the moment with a smile. “Guess I’m not as comfortable up here as I thought I’d be.”
She studied him as closely as she’d been studying the mechanics of the balloon, and Dylan had to fight not to look away from her penetrating gaze. He had a feeling she saw more of him than he was entirely comfortable revealing.
Yet.
He blinked. Yet? That thought surprised him as much as the fact he’d let out an audible growl on accident. Did he want Cat to know so much about him? See him in ways other people didn’t? Because his leopard side seemed to be welcoming that idea even as his human half balked.
What the hell was happening to him?
9
Cat let Dylan’s explanation go but she kept flicking glances at him from the corner of her eye as she pretended to stare out over the landscape below. She’d been having a great time studying the inner workings of the balloon. She kept calculating various parts of the process—balloon area to mass ratios, air flow, temperature, propane adjustments. She’d even asked the pilot a few questions, which he’d been happy to answer.
It had taken her half the ride to realize Dylan seemed… She wasn’t sure. Kind of like he wasn’t there, but also hyper focused. He’d been watching the ground, or maybe someone on the ground, with so much intensity she’d swear his jaw was going to crack under the strain.
And then the growl.
The sound was quiet enough she was pretty sure no one else in the basket had heard. They might have been pressed against the sides of the basket in terror if they had. It had been a very low, deep, menacing growl. The kind that made the hairs on your neck stand up. Not in a good way either. Not the kind of growl she’d been fantasizing about pulling out of him in bed. No, this was a dangerous sound. A sound of warming.
An animal sound.
And it reminded her so very much of the tiger shifters she had to work not to scurry to the opposite end of the basket herself.
But he wasn’t a tiger shifter. She’d know if he was. Well, not the way her sister could tell when a tiger shifter was around. But still, she was sure she’d know. None of them had had any qualms about revealing who they were to her before this. They all just came right out and demanded her time because of who they were.
She’d been living under the assumption that all of them would do that, announce themselves and their intentions. She’d assumed they had to.
But… Did they? Was that one of the rules? Or had the tigers she’d been dealing with just been exceptionally arrogant? Because it occurred to her as she watched Dylan from the corner of her eye that one of them deciding to take a more subtle route, coming to her on more human terms and doing all the normal things humans did when they were attracted to each other—flirting, dating, talking, getting to know each other—that a tiger smart enough to take that approach might just breach her defenses.
And Dylan was a very smart man.
Her heartbeat thumped harder as she considered the possibility. She couldn’t ignore it. She couldn’t afford to. There was too much at stake. She had purposefully avoided getting romantically involved with a tiger shifter—not that any had succeeded in endearing themselves to her anyway; too many demanded her attention, none of them tried to win her in a more palatable way. She loved Ethan, and Amy was happy with her choice of husbands, but there was too damned much baggage associated with having a tiger shifter partner. Too much emphasis on reproduction. She just didn’t want any of that. She wanted to stay as far away from it as possible because she wanted to live her life on her terms.
If Dylan wasn’t just another grad student, an ordinary human here to enjoy the eclipse, she needed to know. Because she was falling hard for him, quickly. Too quickly really. And that had been scary enough. If he was part of the shifter world… That changed everything. Comfort or no, lust or no, she couldn’t allow herself to be seduced into that world. She had plans. And they didn’t include turning her life upside down for the tigers.
A sneaky and irritating part of her mind reminded her that she hadn’t settled on her future plans yet. That she’d been waffling and considering another stint in grad school until she could decide.
That she had a job offer in California very close to where Dylan currently lived.
She shook her head. No. She wouldn’t think that way. Not now. She had to know first if he was just an ordinary man, or if he was tied to the tigers. She could be imagining all this because she was so hyper conscious of the shifters. She could be making up excuses to dismiss her feelings for Dylan and run away.
She could be right to worry and need to get out, now, before she got any deeper in.
The balloon caught a stronger breeze and lurched gently to one side, enough of a jolt to pull her back to the present. She grabbed the rail and looked down. Hey, they were returning to the platform already. She hadn’t realized so much time had passed.
“Shame it’s over already,” Dylan said, smiling down at her.
Her thighs actually clenched at that smile. Heat spread into her veins, bubbling with desire. Damn but he was handsome. If she had to walk away from him because he was a tiger shifter, she was going to be so pissed.
The balloon set down on the platform with a few gentle bumps and was immediate surrounded by people getting it anchored back to the ground. The pilot banked the flame and thanked everyone as they stepped back out of the basket. Cat took an extra moment to thank him for answering her questions. Then she and Dylan moved back onto solid ground.
She laughed a little when her knees wobbled. “That was fun. Thanks for suggesting it. Almost as good as a Ferris Wheel.”
His answering grin left her breathless. And had the unfortunate side effect of drawing her attention to his mouth. His extremely kissable mouth.
No. She had to get a few answers before she indulged in those sexy fantasies again. She couldn’t afford to take chances. She was likely imagining things, making excuses. He probably had nothing to do with the shifter world. And if she brought up shapeshifters directly, he’d probably think she was one of those scientists whose mental health had cracked and they now had only one foot in reality. She had to be more subtle.
But how did one find out if the person they were lusting after was actually a tiger shifter if said source of lust was pretending to be human? Amy hadn’t had a clue until Ethan had outright told her. Neither she nor Amy had had any idea such things existed to even ask the questions. If Dylan was a normal human, he wouldn’t have any idea either, and so if she didn’t handle this right, she risked driving him away.
Which, given how much she wanted him, how much she didn’t want to let him go already, might actually be for the best.
She pushed that thought aside. First things first. Find out if he was a tiger shifter.
Then she could worry about her feelings for him.
They wove through the crowds, heading back toward the pavilion for the next NASA talk without having to discuss where they were going next. That kind of synchronous thinking confirmed Cat was in trouble, one way or the other.
She gave herself a little internal shake. They’d discussed going to the talk earlier. She needed to stop making more of this attraction than was there. Especially since there was still a lot she didn’t know about him. As they took seats near the back of the pavilion to await the start of the talk, she considered options for uncovering if he was a shifter or not, but no actual clever conversational tricks arose. Which wasn’t surprising since clever conversational tricks were not her forte.
But when getting to know someone, she could ask about things like family, right? That might help. Maybe there’d be some hints in his family history.
“You have siblings?” she asked. She had to hide a slight frown. It was an out of nowhere question, not really related to anything prior, and felt as awkward as she did in that moment. But it was personal conversation. It might not help with the shifter issue, but she had to try.
He smiled, not showing any signs of being confused by the non sequitur. “I have a lot of siblings. My parents didn’t know when to call it quits.”
Her eyes widened. “How many is a lot?”
“I have six sisters, including a twin, and eight brothers.” He held her gaze, and his lips twitched.
She imagined her expression was the thing amusing him. “You have fourteen siblings? Fourteen. As in…fourteen?”
“Yes, math genius. Fourteen.”
“And a twin?”
“Julia. She doesn’t love astronomy the way I do.”
“Fair enough,” she murmured. Fourteen siblings. Who had fourteen kids these days? That was the kind of thing her grandparents did. And even then…fourteen? How could his parents afford that? “Are you… Where do you fall in the birth order?”
“Youngest.” He chuckled and shrugged. “But in a family that size, it’s good to be the baby.”
“Sure.” She’d been the family baby too, the youngest. But there was her and Amy. Her parents hadn’t felt the need for… “Fourteen kids. Wow. That’s…”
“A lot? Yeah, it is. Believe it or not, we all get along, too. Most of the time. No one has officially been disowned anyway. At least not in the last few years.” He laughed so she assumed this was a family joke.
“Not to be too personal but how do your parents afford so many kids? If I didn’t get scholarships and things, I’d be up to my eyeballs in student loans by now. Did some of your siblings not go to college?” She knew not everyone went to college. She wasn’t that naïve about everyone else’s desire for a higher degree and academic pursuits. But if even a few of that many kids went to college, that could cost a fortune. And that was outside the usual costs of just raising so many kids.
She gave herself a little mental shake. Dylan was a grown man in graduate school, and if he was the youngest, that meant his siblings were all grown too. One way or the other, his parents had managed it.
“My mom…had some money when she moved to this country.”
“Where’s she from?”
“Guyana. She worked her way up through Central America and then did quite well here when she settled in the US. My dad had accumulated a few resources too by the time they met. They managed. Plus, the family business does well enough for us.”
“Family business?”
“The Joneses run animal rescue shelters around the country. We specialize in exotics.”
“Really? Your family’s business is rescuing animals?” At his nod, she blinked a few times. “That’s really cool! Amy and I have a dog…or, well, she lives with Amy right now. Her name’s Spike. She’s a poodle.”
He grinned. “Spike, huh? Sounds vicious.”
“She’s a badass alright.” His grin was infectious. “Do you like animals?” Just because it was his family’s business, didn’t mean he was an animal lover.
“Love them. I’m particular fond of dogs.” His mouth twitched and his blue eyes sparkled. There was more to that look than she could interpret.
“Then why didn’t you go to work in your family’s business?” She realized the moment she asked that the answer was obvious. Because he’d loved astronomy more.
But he surprised her when he said, “I did for a few years. We all work in the business in one way or another, even if it’s not our primary job. Lot of fundraisers and stuff.”
“How did you fit all that in?”
He shrugged. “Just managed. Took a little longer to get my degrees, but the extra money helped pay for everything. Kept me out of debt.”
“Useful.” A lot of the grad students she knew hadn’t been so lucky. “Amy worked even after going back to finish her degree, too. She didn’t want debt either and someone had to pay the rent. She insisted I not work while in college.”
“How come?”
She rolled her eyes and glanced toward the front of the pavilion where a man in a NASA t-shirt and shorts was coming up to the small stage. “I’m…not great at focusing on a lot of things at once. I mean. Sometimes I’m not great at focusing period. But when I am focused, I don’t do very well with distractions. My multi-tasking skills are what my sister would politely call weak.”
He laughed. The sound brought her gaze back to him. He looked so damned gorgeous when he laughed. How was that possible? She’d never really noticed that with other men before. Even hot guys. Was it just him? Or was it her fascination with him that made watching him laugh the sexiest thing she’d ever seen?
“Focus is good,” he said, lowering his voice as the speaker at the front of the room got started.
His gaze dropped briefly to her mouth, and when he met her gaze again, his expression had gone from amused to intent. Her stomach did a flip dance and her pulse started pounding harder. And just like that, she went from wanting to make him laugh again, to wanting to strip him naked and crawl onto his lap. He’d done that to her with a glance.
What would he do to her if they were naked?
The idea was enough to warm her cheeks, her body flashing hot as the possibilities rose to entice her, fantasies that had nothing to do with where they were and what they were doing. Thoughts entirely inappropriate to the talk that had started. For a few long moments, she wasn’t even sure what the NASA guy was saying.
She just wanted to get Dylan alone.
Her earlier worry seemed silly now. She was seeing tiger shifters were there weren’t any. He was an ordinary man. Well, maybe not ordinary. No one that gorgeous and sexy and smart could be called ordinary. But he was a human, like her, and there was no reason to be suspicious of him. The tigers had made her paranoid. She was determined that they wouldn’t drive her life, but they had been, whether she liked it or not. And if she wasn’t careful, she’d push Dylan away for no good reason.
She dragged her gaze from his, turning her attention to the talk, because if she didn’t, she was going to lean in and kiss him. And she had a feeling that would be very dangerous in such a public space. Although, kissing him in private would be very dangerous, too.
