The Bobcat's Tate (9 page)

“Darn it,” Ginger said. “And I was so hoping to get my hands on a
cold, dead body today.”

“Sorry, baby, you’ll just have to settle for my hot
, live body.”

Tate stared off into the woods, his thoughts drifting back to
Lainey. Why had she left today without saying goodbye? Should he just go to the boarding house and ask her out to dinner, and see where things went from there? Or was he just setting himself up for disappointment?

And should he even be pursuing a complete stranger who wouldn’t tell him anything about herself
? Maybe there was some reason why she was so cagey every time he tried to find out more about her, although he couldn’t imagine what the reason would be. He’d run a check on the rental car, and it had indeed been registered to a Katherine McNamara, who lived in Philadelphia and had no criminal record.

So why had she acted so squirrelly when he’d asked her name?

The truth was, he didn’t know a thing about her, except that he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

“
Hellooo.”

Tate glanced up, startled. Loch was waving at him. He’d been trying to get Tate’s attention while Tate mentally drifted off to
lala land.

“Bobcat got your tongue?” Loch grinned at him
. Damn it, was Tate’s sudden infatuation that obvious?

“Mind your own beeswax,” he grumbled. “I’m headed back to
Beaudreau’s to replant the flower bed. Call me if you need me.”

And with a sigh, he climbed into his pickup truck and headed back to the
Beaudreau Mansion, struggling without success to banish all thoughts of the sexy bobcat from his mind.

Lainey
sat at the long wooden table, ignoring the early morning chatter that swirled around her, as the other boarding house guests dug into their home-cooked breakfast. She stared into the swirling depths of her coffee cup as if she were reading tea leaves, but she found no answers there.

“Didn’t sleep too
well last night?” Marigold said, sitting down in the spindle-backed chair next to her.

“What was your first clue?”

“The circles under your eyes, the frequent yawning, and you’re working on your second mugzilla of coffee.”

Lainey
looked down at her extra-large coffee mug. Light, sweet, life-saving. “Third. Insomnia. What can I say?”

The truth wa
s, after her encounter with Tate the day before, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She’d lain awake half the night imagining him naked, tangled in the sheets with her, his hungry mouth on hers…

What did it mean? Was he her fated
mate, or was she just in lust with an undeniably hot man who’d kind of flirted with her, maybe?

“So you really, absolutely believe in this whole fated mate thing?” she asked Marigold.

“Of course I do. It’s the equivalent of love at first sight for humans, but different. Stronger. At least that’s what shifters tell me, including my fiancé.”

“Wouldn’t it make sense that fated mates would only fall for someone of the same species, though?”

“Not necessarily. Shifters of different species can still have offspring, so why not? I don’t see how it’s any different than humans of different races. I have a leopard-shifter friend in New York who ended up with a wolf shifter. They have a kitten and a pup. Ask me how their kids get along. Go ahead, ask me.”

Lainey
snorted. Like she didn’t know where this was going. “I already know the answer, but if it makes you happy, I’ll ask. How do they get along?”

“They fight like cats and dogs!” Marigold laughed hysterically at her
own joke, slapping her knee with glee.

“Very, very funny.
Really, you’ve missed your true calling. But seriously…my mother swears up and down that the whole fated mate thing is just an old wives tale. A lot of city shifters think that.”

“All these shifters who want to
assimilate, to be more like humans…you can’t suppress your true nature. Your parents aren’t fated mates, I take it?”

Lainey
laughed at the thought. “Good heavens, no. One night when my mother had had a few too many gin and tonics, she told me about how she met a guy when she was in college, and she had that instant thunderbolt feeling, and she said that proved that the whole fated mate thing was a myth. She said the guy obviously wasn’t her fated mate, because he was poor. He was a maintenance worker. Her parents freaked out when they heard about it, yanked her out of school and made her go to a different college. They immediately fixed her up with my father, who came from the right sort of family.”

“So…what’s their marriage like?”

“Miserable. They have separate bedrooms. My parents think I don’t know, but my father’s never had a secretary that he didn’t bang, and my mother has a battery-operated boyfriend.”

Eeek
.
Being tired apparently made her babble even more than being tipsy. Lainey was mortified. “Oh, God, she’d die if she knew I knew, and she’d die even more if she knew I told anyone.”

Marigold only gave her one of her trademarked shrugs.

Suddenly, Lainey found herself wondering if her mother really had met her fated mate, and if the reason that her mother was such a miserable, angry person was because she’d refused to acknowledge it. The way Lainey was constantly thinking about Tate ever since she’d laid eyes on him…it would be miserable to go through life feeling that way. It would be even worse if it happened to someone like her mother, who was in complete denial about her feelings and who would never admit the true source of her frustration and misery.

What if Tate really was her fated mate?
Damn. Lainey needed to avoid Tate at all costs, before she became any more infatuated with him. Should she still go to the wedding? But how could she avoid it, after she’d promised Ginger and Marigold?

A little voice in her head told her maybe she should just pack up and leave town
. She barely knew these people. She didn’t owe them anything. Ginger didn’t really need her to do sketches; that had just been an afterthought suggested by Marigold.

She realized, though, that she didn’t want to leave. Everyone here made her feel so welcome. Everyone was so friendly, so accepting, that sh
e found herself wishing she could stay longer than the two weeks she’d booked. The fact that Tate was here didn’t make it any easier…even though that situation was impossible.

“I’m so confused,” she sighed, and took another huge swig of coffee.

“It’ll all work itself out. Your fated mate is waiting for you, you’ll see,” Marigold said, with a cheerfulness and confidence that Lainey wished she could share.

Lainey
pushed back her chair and stood up. “If I drink any more coffee, I’ll float away. Maybe a cold shower will wake me up.”
And take my mind off Tate
.

“Don’t
take too long. I need to approve your wedding day outfit, and then I have to go meet Ginger and the fam so her mother can continue driving us all crazy.”

Semi-awake after a cold shower,
Lainey drove into town in her rental car, following Marigold in her VW bug, which had big fake eyelashes on it and a license plate that said
lovebug
.

At Blair’s, the only clothing store in town,
Lainey let Marigold talk her into buying a peach-colored dress made of stretch lace, with shirring at the waistline and a surplice-style v-neckline, and matching shoes. Then, remembering what Tate had said about how she dressed as if she wanted to hide her body, she impulsively snapped up several more outfits, all of which clung to her body and emphasized her curves. Everything else she had in her suitcase was big and blousy and flowed like a caftan in an attempt to hide her girth.

It was a foolish and impulsive choice, one she wouldn’t have made even a few days ago
. She really should be watching her money, but heck, she was on vacation, wasn’t she? She was on vacation from everything, including her old self, the self who tried to hide under tent-dresses.

“Atta girl!”
Marigold said approvingly. “Show off them boobies.”

Lainey
snort-laughed at that. It was hard not to love Marigold, even if she was a total loon.

“And you’ve got a great laugh,” Marigold added
. Lainey raised an eyebrow, looking at her suspiciously to see if she was making fun of Lainey, but Marigold meant it.

“All right, I’m going to go meet
Ginger for the millionth fitting of the wedding gown,” Marigold said, as they walked outside, Lainey laden down with a half-dozen plastic bags. “Ginger’s fine with the gown, but her mother’s just gone gonzo.”

“Better you than me. I’ll see you back at the boarding house tonight,”
Lainey said.

She walked over to the general store, where she bought a couple of sketch pads and some colored pencils and spray fixative so that the sketches wouldn’t smear
. The streets were crowded with shifters; the small town was filling up more and more as the wedding day grew closer.

If Katherine hadn’t booked that room at the boarding house a year ago, before Loch had proposed to Ginger,
the room would have been snapped up in a heartbeat by wedding guests, and Lainey would never have had the chance to take Katherine’s place. The boarding house was full of wedding guests for the next week. So was the one motel in town, Marigold had told her. People were sleeping in mobile homes, pitching tents in a little tent city which had sprung up outside of town, crashing on friend’s couches…

Was this coincidence
part of the whole “fated mate” thing? Had fate led her to be right where she should be, so she could meet the right person?

But why would fate be so cruel as to dangle the
world’s sexiest wolf shifter right in front of her, at exactly the wrong time in her life, when she could do nothing about it?

She knew what Marigold would say if she asked her
:
Patience. It will all work out the way it’s supposed to.

Of course, that was easy for Marigold to say when she was living with her adoring
fiancé in an adorable little cabin on her great-aunt’s property. Everything had worked out for her; she had nothing to worry about.

Lainey
stood on the sidewalk, debating what to do next. She could go back to the boarding house, help out with some chores, and then sit outside and sketch the sunset. She could go to the Beaudreau Mansion and do some sketches there, but she knew that her desire to do so was only a flimsy pretext to “accidentally” run into Tate again. Literally run into him.

A low purr rumbled up in her throat as she pictured what that would be like, stumbling on soft earth and
then falling against his hard body. Would he be hard all over? Her cleft oozed juices of arousal at the thought of it.

Okay, so the
Beaudreau Mansion was definitely out.

“Hello,” a sensual
male voice called out. “If it isn’t the lovely Katherine.”

She turned
. Hamilton Hooper was sitting on a bench by the general store.

“Hello, Hamilton.
” She sat down next to him.

“There’s quite a commotion here, isn’t there?”
He smiled without humor, watching the crowds of shifters wandering the streets.

“How is it going
? Are the police making any progress on the tiara theft?”

“Not that they’ve shared with me,” Hamilton said
.

Lainey
could smell whiskey on his breath. He leaned back on the bench and stared off in the distance, looking morose.

“You want to know a secret?
” he said, suddenly. “I wanted to be an actor more than anything, but I’m only good at one thing, and that’s not acting. It’s making people want to have sex with me. That’s what I’m good at.”

“That sounds…rather empty, after a while,”
Lainey said. “If there’s no love involved.”

“It’s true, and yet that’s what I do.
Again and again.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I do so hate to be alone. Then I have to listen to the sound of my own thoughts.” He spoke in the tone of an actor, as if he were on a stage. His eyes were fixed on some invisible point on the blue horizon.

“You’re a shifter. Maybe someday you’ll meet your fated mate…if that’s really a thing.”

He smiled ruefully at that. “It is for some people. I don’t think it is for me.”

“Are you going to stay here in town, do you think?” she a
sked. “There’s that festival for single shifters which happens every October. Supposedly, a lot of shifters meet their fated mates there. Maybe you do have one, and you just haven’t met her yet.”

“I might
. I don’t know. I only came out here to help my mother with the store, but she’s getting dottier by the day. I might just sell the store.”

He turned to look at her, suddenly focusing on her with unnerving intensity and leaning in close
. There was that expensive cologne again, clinging to him like an invisible cloud. “You’re lonely. I’m lonely. Why don’t we distract each other?”