The Bobcat's Tate

“Drive three miles and turn left,” the GPS intoned in its maddeningly calm, monotone voice.

“Really, you stupid machine? What have I ever done to you?” Lainey Robinson pushed a lock of wavy brown hair from her eyes and glared at the colorful screen.

She’d been in Blue Moon County for five minutes, and already the GPS on her rented car was straight up
trying to kill her. If she followed its directions, she’d end up driving into the swamp that lay just ahead. Florida swamps were known to be filled with alligators. She had a feeling that in a contest between gator versus bobcat shifter, the gator would win, and she’d be bobcat shish kebab.

Where to go?
Left or right? She had trusted in technology and neglected to buy a map at the Orlando airport, three hours south. Silly her. The GPS had gotten her somewhere in the vicinity of the town…and then, out here in the middle of nowhere, decided to experience brain freeze.

Lainey
was sitting there, idling, with no idea what to do. She needed a moment to think. She pulled over to the side of the road, turned off the engine, and climbed out into the warm, humid embrace of a Blue Moon Junction morning.

She was completely alone, on a tiny strip of road that threaded through a primeval forest splashed in countless shades of green
. The air was perfumed with honeysuckle, and fat, fluffy clouds hung in the still, blue sky like decorations in a baby’s mobile.

She should be panicking, but standing out there
, surrounded by nature, had an oddly calming effect on her. Dwarfed by the towering mangrove trees, whose massive gray-black roots looped higher than her head, Lainey felt very small, but strangely at peace. She was a city girl, born and raised in Philadelphia, and yet she felt as if she’d lived here all her life. She was suddenly seized with the temptation to strip off her clothing, shift into bobcat form, and start climbing trees. If she didn’t have a noon check-in time at the boarding house in the tiny town of Blue Moon Junction, she’d have done it without a second thought.

A warm breeze stirred her hair, ruffling the brown waves that flowed over her shoulders and fluttering the hem of her skirt, a red silk dirndl skirt that swirled around her knees.

An image of her mother’s disapproving face flashed in front of her. Renee hated it when she wore primary colors.

“Wouldn’t you like to try something a little more subdued?” she’d wheedle
. “This is so…bold. Everyone will stare at you.”

Lainey
always wished that her mother would just come out and say what she was thinking:
that skirt makes your ass look huge
. Actually, her refined, elegant mother would never think in such vulgar terms, but that was the general idea.

“And what’s so bad about people staring at me, anyway?” she muttered, as if her mother could hear her.

She knew the answer to that question. While her parents would never say it out loud, they’d prefer that their large, socially graceless daughter with the big laugh and the bigger figure would stay quietly in the background. For her own good, of course. So nobody would hurt her feelings. That’s why they’d insisted that she decline to attend the debutante ball with her cousins when she was eighteen, why they included her brother Donavan, and not her, in family photos and in the brochures for their construction company…

“We’re just protecting you, dear,” her mother would say. “People can be so cruel
when you look…well…it’s for your own good.”

Suddenly something wet and plastic-y
thwapped
against her cheek, making her start, until she realized that it was just a large, windblown leaf.

It was almost like a gentle rebuke from nature, pulling her back into the present
.

She laughed
. Why dwell on the past? Here she was, in one of the prettiest places on God’s green earth, wallowing in self-pity. How pointless was that?

She climbed
back into the car. “Left,” she decided, and started driving. When the GPS’s mechanical voice became increasingly agitated, she reached up and switched it off, and then rolled down her window so she could smell the sweet honeysuckle blossoms that twined the trees lining the road.

As she drove
, she felt the tightness that always lay coiled inside her loosening, and the tension draining from her shoulders. She hadn’t felt so light and free in… Actually, she couldn’t remember if she’d ever felt this way.

Nobody knew she was here. Nobody could find her
. She wouldn’t be checking in to the boarding house under her real name. Her friend Katherine had made the reservation there a year ago, and then been unable to keep it when she’d been offered an internship as a pastry chef in France. Lainey had agreed to take over the reservation. She’d even had Katherine pay for it with her own credit card, and then paid her back in cash, to make absolutely sure that nobody could find her here.

For the next two weeks, she was Katherine McNamara, woman without a past
. A woman who’d never heard the name Miles Bauer. A woman who could reinvent herself as whatever and whomever she wanted to be.

Her instincts seemed to have led her in the right direction,
because on the road ahead she could see a big wooden sign that said “Welcome to Blue Moon Junction.” It was decorated with a picture of a blue moon, and on the face of the blue moon was a howling wolf.

She’d heard that Florida was a shifter
-friendly state. In Pennsylvania, shifters made up about twenty percent of the population, but in Florida, the numbers ran more like forty percent. Many shifters tended to gravitate towards states with more woodlands and rural areas.

She’d also heard that Blue Moon Junction was a tiny, sleepy little backwater, so far from any large cities that few visitors ever travelled there
except during a big, statewide, shifter festival in October called Howl-o-ween. This was not festival season.

The remote location of Blue Moon Junction had
appealed to Katherine, who was an amateur bird photographer and who’d been dying to travel through the swamps and take pictures of the rare bird species there. It was definitely appealing to Lainey, who’d just had her heart rolled over with a bulldozer and then spit on for good measure. Lainey wanted nothing but peace, quiet, and privacy.

As
Lainey rolled down the main street of the town, however, it didn’t look particularly sleepy or quiet. There were dozens of cars lining the street, and a sizable crowd of people clustered in front of a store which bore the sign “Hooper’s Jewelry Store, est. 1914.” There were also several sheriffs’ vehicles, and men in uniform talking to the people in front of the store.

A group of older women with hair
in curlers, wearing pink polyester gowns, were standing at the edge of the crowd. It looked as if they’d just piled out of the Kurl Up And Dye Salon which was across the street from the jewelry store, and they were watching the goings-on with avid interest.

She managed to find a parking spot behind a large landscaping truck which bore green and gold lettering announcing that the truck was owned by Calloway & Sons.

Surely someone here could direct her to Imogen’s Boarding House, she thought.

She climbed out of the car and walked towards the crowd. Something unfortunate had happened, but she didn’t know what
. It didn’t look as if anyone had been injured; there were no ambulances or fire trucks.

People were crowded around a handsome, muscular man in a sheriff’s uniform
. He was standing with his arm around the waist of a plump, pretty girl with wavy, red hair, who had a big sparkly engagement ring on her finger. They were both wolf shifters. Lainey could tell by the scent, but also from their eyes. Shifters had eyes with the same color and pupil shape of their animal species.

The plump redhead leaned in to the sheriff, who was clearly her
fiancée, and his arm tightened around her shoulders. Lainey wished she could snap a picture of them, of their obvious affection for each other, and send it to her mother, but since she was never speaking to her mother again, that wasn’t happening.

Still, she thought, it was nice to see living proof that her mother was wrong: a decent man could love a larger woman.

Standing on the edge of the crowd, with his back to her and his hands on his hips, was a tall, muscular man, a wolf shifter, by the scent of him. He had broad shoulders and narrow hips, and his worn blue jeans were molded around the most perfect male butt she’d ever had the pleasure to lay eyes on.

She felt a jolt of adrenaline shoot through her, and she shivered in the damp Florida heat
.

The old
Lainey would have backed away slowly, slunk off to meekly ask one of the old ladies from the beauty salon for directions to the boarding house, and then spent weeks regretting it and wondering if the view of that hot shifter was as attractive from the front as it had been from behind. He would have been the faceless star of many a late night self-satisfaction session.

The new
Lainey suddenly found herself sauntering up to him and tapping him on his very broad, muscular shoulder. Part of her was shrieking in panic—silently.
Hey, new Lainey, slow down!
the cautious little voice that sounded like her mother chided.

I’m not
Lainey anymore. I’m Katherine for the next two weeks
.
And shut up
, she told the little voice.

“What’s going on here?” she asked boldly, as the wolf shifter turned to face her.

She froze where she stood.

The view from the rear had been great, but the view from the front was magnificent
. She tipped her head back to stare up into the blue eyes of a wolf shifter, eyes that were the icy blue of a winter sky, with little flecks of black in them. He had an adorable cleft in his chin, and broad, strong cheekbones with a hint of sunburn coloring his sun-bronzed skin. His thick, brown hair was perfectly mussed; she yearned to run her fingers through it.