Read To Tempt A Tiger Online

Authors: Kat Simons

Tags: #Tiger Shifters series Book 5

To Tempt A Tiger (4 page)

BOOK: To Tempt A Tiger
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“Rose.” Vlad launched off the couch, circled it, and started pacing.

Back and forth, back and forth. To her astonishment, his movements reminded her of tigers in zoos. She sat up straighter in her seat.

“Rose, it’s more than my brothers, though they’re the reason I’m here now. Zoe needs to learn to shift. And she can’t do that in your backyard. She shouldn’t do it here, where anyone might see it. We need to keep her protected, and isolated, while she learns to control her other half.”

He’d brought up the exact thing she was trying to pretend wasn’t an issue. She was still hoping Zoe could just learn how to stop the pain without having to do…what Vlad had done. But what if he was right and she had to do that? “What will happen if Zoe doesn’t learn to shift? What if she suppresses it? Will the pain get worse?”

“Likely. But beyond that, I’m not sure. She’s unique. Even though Nila’s also a hybrid, she can’t shift, so she made it to adulthood without ever even knowing she was half tiger. Ordinary tiger shifters learn to do this when they’re two years old. They’re surrounded by it and don’t consider suppressing it. So I honestly don’t know what might happen to her if she does try to prevent the shift permanently. I’m not sure she can.”

“There has to be—” she started, but Vlad cut her off with a raised hand when his cellphone rang.

He pulled the phone out of his pants pocket, checked the caller ID, and frowned as he answered. “Yes?”

She stood, readying to send him on his way as soon as he hung up. She had some planning to do and he was a distraction. The shifter thing… She’d worry about it once she was sure Zoe was safe.

He listened for a moment, then cursed. “Thanks.” And he hung up. “All three of my brothers were just spotted at the airport. They’ll be here soon. We have to go.”

Before she could respond, she heard a sweet little voice from the hallway. “Mommy? What’s going on?”

 

Chapter Three

 

Rose rushed to her daughter, covering her panic with a smile. “Are you okay now, baby? Any more pain?”

She shook her head, glanced at Vlad, then back at Rose and whispered in that very loud kid whisper, “Who’s he, Mommy?”

“This is Vlad. He’s a…friend of mommy’s from before you were born.” God, with everything else, she hadn’t even begun to think how she’d tell Zoe that Vlad was her father.
If
she’d tell her. She’d prefer he just disappear again and leave them alone. Then she wouldn’t have to explain any of this to her daughter. A cowardly response, but there it was. Vlad complicated things. He’d brought trouble to her door. And while he’d helped Zoe, he’d also thrown Rose’s world upside down with all the shapeshifter talk, with his very presence. She didn’t want to deal with any of it, or him.

And for the moment, she had more immediate problems to deal with. If even part of what he said was true, she needed to get out of the house and get help now. “Are you up for a little trip to see Granny and Grandpa at work?”

“Yay!” Zoe bounced on her toes.

“Great. Let’s go get your backpack ready.”

“You’ll need to pack enough for a week, maybe longer,” Vlad said.

She glared back at him. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Are we going on a vacation, Mommy?”

She frowned. Zoe’s little face had lit up. When they went on vacation, it was usually to some adventure, like bouldering, camping, hiking, or bodyboarding in the ocean. Zoe had inherited her mom’s love of adventure.

“Okay,” she relented. “You’ve been a very good girl. I think you’ve earned a vacation.” She was stuck leaving now. Since she’d never been able to help with the pain, Rose worked hard never to lie to Zoe about anything else. And a plan was starting to form, a way to get Vlad off her back and still keep her daughter safe. “Go get your backpack ready.”

Zoe giggled and spun on her heels, racing back to her room.

Vlad came up behind Rose. “She seems better now.”

“When she’s not in pain, she’s really healthy and full of energy. Almost too much sometimes.” She groaned and Vlad chuckled. The sound sent a little shiver down her spine and a tingling jolt of warmth to places lower.

She leaned back toward him against her will, drawn by his familiar scent, as heat pumped through her, making her skin tingle. She found herself imagining his hands on her arms, her waist, moving up to her breasts.

She straightened and snarled. She hated that she reacted to him in any way that wasn’t anger. She might just have to go back to wishing the torments of hell on him—for both the trouble he brought with him and the way he made her feel.

“I’ll go with you to the office, and then make sure you get away. After I know you’re safe, I’ll take care of my brothers.”

She was curious enough to ask, “How?”

He paused, as if listening to something, then very quietly said, “I need to convince them Zoe isn’t my daughter.”

“That shouldn’t be hard, since you never believed she was.”

“Rose. You know why now. And I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

She closed her eyes briefly as the last four years of heartache washed over her. When she opened her eyes again, she kept her attention on the hallway so he couldn’t see her emotions. “I’ve moved on. I don’t have time to worry about it anymore.”

“Where will you go on this ‘vacation?’” he asked.

She’d been considering that. There was a cabin in Alpine her parents looked after for a family friend. It wasn’t in any of their names, so it should be safe enough while she made more long-term plans to keep Zoe safe. But she wasn’t about to tell Vlad any of that. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I still need to…” He paused.

She finally turned to face him, her brows raised.

“I need to teach Zoe how to deal with what’s happening to her,” he said.

She appreciated his vague reference to the shifter business. Zoe had outrageously good hearing. Rose couldn’t even mutter a “damn” in the kitchen while her daughter was in the bedroom without Zoe scolding her for the “bad word.” Come to think of it, he’d been quiet when mentioning Zoe was his daughter aloud. Did he realize she had acute hearing? Was it related to her being a shifter?

“Getting your brothers to leave us alone is your priority,” she said. “Just tell me how to talk her through the pain.”

“You need to get her thinking about what her—” he glanced down the hall, “—body feels like when everything is normal. Get her focusing on physical sensations that are distinctly human.” He mouthed the word human rather than saying it out loud. “The way her blanket feels against her fingers and cheek is especially good because that’s her favorite thing. Anything tactile will work. That will bring her back into her body.”

“Will that work every time?”

“It should help for a little while longer.”

Hopefully a lot longer because she didn’t want her daughter to have any part of his world. “I can only stay away for a week. My parents can spare us that long, but my father is leading a white water rafting trip at the beginning of next month, and my mother needs me at the office.”

He frowned. “That might not be long enough.”

“How hard can it be? You just have to convince your brothers of what you’ve always believed. They’ll leave, and Zoe and I can get back to our lives.” With a few guns stored in her house. She hated having them around when Zoe was so young, but she didn’t have much choice now. She didn’t dare go without protection against things that could do what Vlad had done. She’d just have to get a good gun safe.

“It’s not that simple,” Vlad said. “I need to teach Zoe—”

He was interrupted by Zoe bouncing back down the hall. “Mommy, need help with blankie. It won’t fit.”

Rose narrowed her eyes. “How much did you pack?”

“What I needed.”

“Uh huh.” She gave her daughter a suspicious look and went down the hall to her room. She wasn’t entirely surprised Vlad followed, but having him casually walk through her home, having him around her daughter, set her nerves on edge.

Suddenly this spontaneous vacation seemed like a really good idea. The farther she was from him while she figured out how to deal with the news he’d delivered, the better.

To her surprise, she wasn’t turned off by watching him shift. It had been a pretty horrifying process. Something out of a nightmare. But for some reason, it did nothing to kill her ever-present desire for him, that edge of lust and love she’d only ever experienced with him. Which sucked. She didn’t want to feel anything for him but anger. Damn the man. She should not still be thinking sexy thoughts about him after he’d just done…what he’d done. She should not be thinking sexy thoughts about him, period.

When she reached Zoe’s door, she realized why her blanket wouldn’t fit in her backpack. The little blue monkey pack was overflowing with toys. “Baby, you’re gonna need clothes as well as toys. You know that.”

“Don’t,” Zoe insisted. “I be naked!” She giggled and spun around.

Rose laughed. Shaking her head, she opened the backpack. “I’ll pack your clothes with mine, but you have to leave some of these toys here. Or we can leave blankie behind?”

“Nooooo!”

“Okay, okay, no reason to yell. Here, why don’t we leave these two dolls? And we can pick up a new pack of crayons and a coloring book along the way. As a treat.”

“Yay!” Zoe threw out the offending “old” crayons, reluctantly put the dolls back on her bed, and then shoved her blanket into the backpack.

Rose marveled at her daughter. Not an hour ago, she’d been curled up in excruciating pain. Now she was all exclamation points and energy, not even a hint of the trauma she’d gone through earlier. Rose’s heart ached with love as she watched her little girl. And her fierce protective instincts roared. If anyone thought they’d hurt her daughter, they were in for a rude and bloody awakening.

That went for Vlad, too.

She packed up a few necessities for herself and Zoe in her own well-worn travel backpack, tossed everything into her SUV, and buckled Zoe into her seat in the back while Vlad hovered over her shoulder.

He smiled when she straightened. “Still a light packer, I see.”

“Habit. You can leave now. We’re good.”

“I’ll go with you. I want to make sure you get out of town.”

“Don’t you need to take care of your brothers?” She could tell by the way his eyes narrowed she’d hit a soft spot. “Thanks for your help this morning and for the warning.” When he still didn’t move, she said, “You’d better go find your brothers. Or do you want them to find us first?”

She was playing dirty, but she didn’t want him to follow her. She didn’t want Vlad anywhere near her anymore. Her feelings for him, and about him, were too complicated. She needed space and time to consider the future and how she would keep her daughter safe.

When he frowned and glanced at the street, she knew she had him.

“Good luck,” she said, then slipped into the driver’s seat, buckled up, and backed out of the driveway, ignoring Vlad as he watched her go. Her brain was buzzing, so full of confused chatter and emotion she couldn’t sort through it all. So she focused on driving, getting to her parents’ office, taking the next steps to get her daughter safely out of town. She’d untangle all the chaos of the morning tonight, after Zoe was asleep and she was curled up in front of a fire with a glass of wine, or whiskey. This situation seemed to call for whiskey.

 

*****

 

She’d left her parents’ office with the keys to the Alpine cabin and was on her way to their house for one of her dad’s rifles, when she started getting nervous for some unexplained reason. She kept checking traffic, looking for cars that might be following her.

Damn Vlad. He had her all paranoid.

Despite what he’d shown her, she had no real reason to believe anything he’d said beyond the fact that tiger shapeshifters were a real thing. Maybe he was the only one. Maybe what was happening with Zoe had nothing to do with the shifter stuff. Rose only had Vlad’s word that his brothers might really try to hurt her daughter, and what good was his word to her after all these years?

She turned into the cul-de-sac and parked on the street in front of her parents’ single story ranch. As she unbuckled Zoe from her seat, she kept a lookout for approaching cars. The neighborhood was extremely quiet that time of day—most of the residents were working people—and the emptiness of the street left her much more nervous than she’d ever been in this area before.

She hurried Zoe inside, trying not to convey any of her own trepidation to her daughter. Zoe thought they were on some grand adventure to the mountains. Rose didn’t want her to worry about anything but how big a snowman she’d be able to build.

Getting her dad’s Weatherby out of the gun cabinet and collecting enough ammunition for it that Rose felt sufficiently armed didn’t take long, but convincing Zoe she didn’t need any of the toys she had stored at Granny and Grandpa’s proved a little more difficult.

For reasons Rose couldn’t precisely put her finger on, her nerves jumped and instinct was pushing her to get out of the house fast. She trusted those instincts even though she had no idea what was driving them. She hadn’t been this panicked at her home when making plans to leave, even after Vlad had said his brothers were in town. But now, her every impulse screamed that she needed to get back to the car and get on the road now, before it was too late.

Unfortunately, Zoe picked that moment to remember she needed to use the bathroom and another excruciating few minutes passed as the anxiety crawling through Rose’s stomach got worse.

“Come on, baby,” she called through the bathroom door. “We want to get to the cabin before the sun sets.”

Part of her wondered if the anxiety was because of the stories Vlad had fed her, or because she sensed Zoe was on the verge of another episode. Usually after a bad one like that morning, they didn’t have to worry about the pain for days, sometimes more than a week. But after everything that had happened, Rose didn’t trust anything anymore.

Finally, Zoe was ready to go. Rose ushered her outside, the rifle case in tow, more than ready to be on the road. She was locking the front door when she heard Zoe giggle. Rose looked up to see a strange man on the walkway behind them, not ten feet away.

BOOK: To Tempt A Tiger
4.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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