Mating Rituals [Impulse 4] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (18 page)

“I’ve got room for the kids.”

She affected an expression of mock surprise. “You want us to be the first mated couple in Impulse not cohabiting?”

Tyrone felt ready to commit murder. The bitch had well and truly boxed him in. How could he live in the same town as his children and not live
with
them? He knew very well if he didn’t let Maria move in with him she’d poison their minds against him. And if he did take her back, she’d drive a wedge between him and Kane.

What a fucking mess!

He glanced at Rafe, imploring him to intercede, knowing there was nothing he could do. If Maria came back to Impulse with the children, that would be the end of Rafe’s official involvement. It would be up to Tyrone to fix things from there.

He couldn’t stay in the same room as her and made for the door before his violent proclivities won out over common sense. Maria was always one for winning ungraciously, and if he didn’t get out now she’d catch up with him, just to rub his nose in it.

Tyrone felt like a condemned man as he walked slowly down the stairs, the weight of the world resting on his shoulders. He’d anticipated leaving this meeting free to mate with Aisha, if she’d have him. But he wouldn’t have asked her, not until they’d sorted out Kane’s problems. Aisha was theirs to share, and it needed to be done right. She needed to know they were shifters and all that implied before she made her decision.

Now that would never happen.

He saw her across the bar and his breath caught in his throat when he observed her dress. She looked sensational! She was chatting to a couple of the beta tigers, who looked his way and smiled, as did Aisha. With his supersensitive auditory powers, he heard Aisha ask who the beautiful woman with Tyrone was. Shit, Maria had followed him down the stairs! Before he could send out a pheromone warning the tigers not to let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, one of them followed the direction of Aisha’s gaze and elevated his brows.

“Oh, I didn’t know Tyrone’s partner was back in town,” he said.

Aisha looked stricken.

“Fuck it!” Tyrone muttered.

“What is it, darling?” Maria asked, placing a predatory hand on his shoulder. “Don’t tell me that little redheaded human has attracted your interest. We can’t possibly have that, now, can we? Whatever would the children say?”

* * * *

Kane overheard the exchange between Aisha and the tiger as well and moved to intercede. Before he could reach their mate-to-be, the door opened and Kane’s sensitive nostrils were assailed by a distinctive perfume that stopped him in his tracks. He’d only ever smelled it once before, and that was in the hotel in Miami when he woke up with a strange woman who had his sperm all over her thighs.

Conversations trailed off and a decided hush fell over the bar, telling Kane that the newcomer was a stranger to the colony. He was unsure whether or not he wanted her to be a stranger to him as well. If she
was
the woman he’d slept with, was it a good or a bad thing that she’d turned up here so soon? When he could no longer avoid looking, he lifted his gaze.

It was definitely her.

“Kane, there you are!” She walked across the space that separated them and threw her arms around his neck. “You look surprised to see me, darling. Had you forgotten we agreed to meet here this weekend?”

Tyrone and Maria had reached Kane’s position. Tyrone looked at the woman and scowled. Maria looked furious. When the woman finally released Kane, Tyrone spoke.

“What the hell’s going on?”

“You know her?” Kane asked, pushing Susanna away from him.

“Oh yeah, and now this is all starting to make sense.” He glared at Maria, his eyes filled with disgust. “This
lady
is in several pictures I saw in Maria’s house in St. Augustine. If I was a betting man, I’d put money on her and Maria being good friends.”

It felt to Aisha as though someone had sucked the air clean out of the room, and once again she found herself struggling to breathe. The atmosphere was rife with tension as everyone crowded in a tight circle around Kane and Tyrone and the two stunning women who appeared to have prior claims upon them.

She noticed that Vilas slipped a protective arm around Chantal’s waist, Mikael and Philo flanked Layla with their imposing physiques, and all the other men moved to their women’s sides as though drawn to them like magnets. Isolation and loneliness gripped Aisha. She felt like a wallflower—an uninvited guest with no business intruding on a private party—with no one to protect
her
.

If she hadn’t been so devastated at having her suspicions about Kane’s and Tyrone’s connections to other women confirmed, she might have found it amusing that so many women had more than one male championing them. Perhaps the atmospheric ions were responsible for the unorthodox arrangements that passed for normal in Impulse. The professional part of her brain wondered if anyone had studied the oddities from a human relationships standpoint before. Aisha made a mental note to give it consideration.

Kane glanced at Mikael, and she got the weirdest impression that they were communicating telepathically. She told herself she was being ridiculous, until Mikael nodded and came to stand beside Aisha.

“Let me take you home,” he said. “The party’s over.”

“No thanks.” Why did they want her to leave? “I’m not going anywhere. I want to know what’s going on.”

Mikael looked set to argue, but Kane’s voice drew their attention and he didn’t push the issue.

“I get it, too, buddy,” Kane said in a mordant tone. “Maria sent this woman to set me up.”

“She didn’t send me to do anything,” Susanna replied. “I offered to do my friend a favor. Kane took Maria’s husband away and left her and her kids near destitute.”

“That’s what she told you, is it?” Tyrone said in a mildly derisive tone.

“Shut up!” Maria hissed to Susanna.

“What the—”

“It’s a coincidence us both being here, that’s all.” Aisha didn’t have a clue what was going on, but what she did know was that this Maria woman sounded a little desperate. “We know each other. So what?”

“Don’t forget where you are, Maria,” Tyrone replied. “It’s pointless lying, because about a dozen of us are inside your head right now, reading your evil mind.”

“I hear her kids crying for their dad all the time when I visit Maria,” Susanna said, her beautiful face rendered ugly by an angry flush. “I saw how it was tearing Maria up. I got the whole story from her, although she didn’t want to tell me at first—”

“I’ll just bet she didn’t,” Tyrone muttered.

“I realized I knew Kane from those tourist conferences we both attend and decided to do something to help my friend.”

“The kids miss me?” Tyrone glowered at Maria. “You said they never asked after me.”

“Did we have full-on sex?” Kane asked Susanna, looking to Aisha like the answer really mattered to him. If it was that important, she was surprised that he couldn’t remember.

“Of course,” she said breezily.

“When I was pumped full of Valium?”

“Ah, I—”

“I’ll take that as a
no
then.”

“You wouldn’t cooperate.” Susanna frowned. “Do you know what that does for a girl’s ego?”

“You silly bitch!” Maria screamed the words at Susanna. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming down this weekend? You’ve ruined everything now.”

Kane and Tyrone shared an elongated glance that spoke of relief. As one they turned toward Aisha and smiled. Kane also winked, but Aisha barely noticed. Her attention remained focused on Maria, whose increasingly weird behavior mesmerized her. She appeared to be conducting some sort of inner struggle with herself. Her language was an incomprehensible, garbled monologue. She raked the air with her fingers and it looked to Aisha as though whiskers had sprouted from the sides of her face.

Aisha’s drink must have been stronger than she’d realized since she was obviously hallucinating. She shook her head to clear her vision, but when she looked at Maria again the whiskers remained right where she thought she’d seen them and there was a thin coating of fur springing up over Maria’s arms. Maria expelled an evil hiss, baring her teeth as though fighting against whatever it was that was happening to her, but it was too strong for containment.

“She’s shifting,” someone said curtly.

Susanna screamed as Maria’s bones cracked and popped, her clothes just seemed to evaporate, and fur now covered her entire body. Incredibly she had turned into a beautiful, lithe feline. Aisha didn’t know much about cats, but she thought this one might be a female leopard. Her eyes flashed like fiery beacons lighting up a night sky. Her body was sleek, her fur glistened and rippled like flowing silk, and her extended claws looked deadly.

Kane had said something about having been drugged recently. Aisha assumed it must be catching and that she, too, was hallucinating. Either that or this was some sort of weird dream and she’d wake up soon. Before she could convince herself that she was safely tucked up in bed, the feline approached her with those wicked claws aimed straight at her face. She opened her jaws to display rows of vicious teeth, and a rumbling growl echoed from her throat, as though this wild animal bore Aisha a personal grudge.

Several people shouted a warning that Aisha barely heard. She was aware of movement and activity all around her but was fixated on the angry leopard and seemed unable to look away. Another leopard appeared in her line of vision. A larger one—presumably a male. He placed himself between Aisha and the female, but he was too late to protect Aisha. The female sidestepped him, sprang up from strong hind legs, and launched herself at Aisha.

It was too much, too real for Aisha’s mind to overcome her fear. She willed herself to wake up, but the nightmare persevered. The thought of being ripped to shreds by those wicked teeth, even in a dream, made Aisha so afraid that her mind shut down, her world swayed, and she fell away into a dead faint.

* * * *

When Aisha opened her eyes again she was lying on a couch. She had to be in the guys’ apartment because she recognized the decor. Mikael, with his long stripy hair, sat beside her checking her vital signs. Before she could say anything she heard Kane and Tyrone come in.

“She okay?” Kane asked in an anxious voice.

“Just regained consciousness. Treat her gently and give her some of this to drink when she needs to sleep, or if it gets too much for her. It’s just a mild sedative.”

“Okay, thanks,” Tyrone said.

“All sorted out over there?”

Aisha saw Tyrone wipe blood from a deep scratch on his arm. “Yeah, it’s over.”

“Good. I’ll get the details from Rafe. You just look after your lady.”

“That’s all we’ve ever wanted to do,” Kane replied.

They sat down on either side of her and Kane took her hand. The weirdness of the proceedings in the Cat’s Whiskers came back to her and she snatched it away. She knew it was all in her imagination—that her body must be suffering from lack of fresh oxygen, too much sex, not enough sleep—something. Even so, she felt wary of them.

“How do you feel?” Kane asked.

“How do you think?”

“We’re sorry, that shouldn’t have happened,” Tyrone said.

“Ah, so it did happen. I did faint. It wasn’t just my mind playing tricks on me.”

“Mikael caught you before you hit the floor.”

“Oh well, that’s all right then.”

“What do you think you saw?” Kane asked.

Aisha laughed, even though it wasn’t remotely funny. “A beautiful woman turning into a wild beast. How wacky is that? Wanna send me off to the funny farm right away?”

“We didn’t want you to find out this way,” Kane said, looking deadly serious but wisely not trying to touch her again.

“You’re kidding me, right?” She opened her eyes very wide and swallowed against the ache in her throat. This absolutely couldn’t be happening. “Please tell me it’s all some kind of sick joke.”

“Do you trust us, Aisha?” Kane asked.

Did she? She shared a look between them. Their handsome faces were alight with anxiety as they waited for her to answer, as though her opinion really counted for something. Against all the odds she
did
feel safe—not just with them but with everyone she’d met so far in Impulse. With the exception of those two women, obviously. She’d felt the spirit of community the moment she set foot in Impulse. She also knew that no one had answered her questions with complete honesty. Well, the time had come for that situation to change.

“Trust works both ways, guys. I need to know what’s going on here.”

“We couldn’t tell you before.”

“Because I work in the media?”

“No,” Kane said. “We’re used to media types sniffing around us. We can handle them.”

“Then why not?”

“This is going to freak you out,” Kane said. He took her hand again, and this time she didn’t snatch it away. “But you deserve to know everything. The odd things that go on here in Impulse, the air, the way we move, the way we communicate—everything relates to who, or should I say what, we actually are.”