The Bobcat's Tate (8 page)

“Schuyler said she could do it
.”

“Felix ran up a tree and literally nearly broke his neck.” Tate’
s brows drew together in a scowl. “If you say you’re watching the kids, you need to either do so or hand them over to another adult.”

Megan went pale.
“Oh, God. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“What were you doing that
was so important you needed to dump your family?” He peered at her more closely. “Is your lip gloss smeared? I swear to God, if you’ve been anywhere near that Sinclair boy—”

“I haven’t!” Megan’s voice went high, angry and defensive
. Lainey felt a twinge of sympathy. She could understand why Tate was protective of his sister, but she also knew what it was to cringe under the lash of family criticism.

“I’m Kat
,” she said brightly, striding forward and thrusting her hand out.

“Megan,” the girl muttered.
“Pleased to meet you. If you’re going to date my brother, you should talk to me first. I could tell you a few things about him…like he’s a total control freak over-reacting asswipe.”

“Date?
What?” Lainey’s mouth fell open.

“Excuse you?
Language.” Tate looked outraged.

“See what I mean?” Megan complained
. “I’m eighteen, and he talks to me like I’m five. Do you have any idea what it’s like working with your family?”

“Unfortunately, yes,”
Lainey laughed. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

“The absolute worst,” Megan agreed fervently, while Tate let out an indignant growl.

Megan looked Lainey up and down. Lainey had been getting a lot of that lately. “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Tate started dating. God knows he hasn’t gotten any in ages. Maybe if he did, he wouldn’t be such a crabby jerkwad all the time.”

Tate’s
chest swelled with indignation, and it looked as if he were about to tear a strip off Megan’s head. Before he could, , they heard the kids yelling from the direction of the house. “Tate! Tate! Come here!” The kids definitely sounded alarmed about something.

With a sigh of exasperation, he headed back to the m
ain house. Lainey followed, hoping that Felix hadn’t climbed anything else, and Megan followed her, muttering under her breath.

The
children stood next to one of the wings of the mansion, clustered around a bed of recently planted flowers.

A bo
lt of alarm shot through Lainey. The flowers were all withered and shriveled, every last one of them, little dark knots clumped on bright red mulch.

Was this the Cypress Witch’s prophecy coming true? She fervently
hoped not. Ginger and Loch seemed like such good people, so clearly in love, and she’d hate to see anything ruin their wedding.

Tate looked baffled
. He knelt down and sniffed at the flowers. Even in human form, shifters had superior scenting abilities.

“Weed killer,” he said, scowling. “Somebody put weed killer on all the flowers.
I smell scentsbane, too.”

He headed ove
r to the main house, and they all followed. As Lainey walked, Felix grabbed her hand, and Ashley, the girl with the ponytail, grabbed her other hand.

“Can you carry me?”
a little boy with a crew cut, who must have been Richard, asked Lainey hopefully.

Wow,
this isn’t like being at work at all. I am almost positive none of these children would cut my throat and take my purse
, Lainey thought.
I could get used to this.

“I’ll carry you,” Tate said, scooping him up in his arms.

“I wanted her to carry me. She looks softer. She’s like a big pillow.”

“Richard!
” Tate scolded, but Lainey burst out laughing. She’d never thought of the positive aspects of being larger before.

They walked up the marble steps and into the
house, which had heart of pine flooring and ceilings so high Lainey had to tip her head back to look at them. Inside was a massive foyer with a double spiral staircase leading upstairs, and doors leading off in all directions. The staircases were marble, and a broad stripe of red carpet lapped down the middle of them like velvety tongues.

In the foyer,
Loch was standing with Ginger, Marigold, and a small cluster of other people, including aman and woman who appeared to be Ginger’s parents. The woman looked to be an older version of Ginger, and she was holding hands with a skinny, balding, wolf shifter with gold-rimmed glasses. The woman was human, Lainey noticed, although there was also a whiff of magic there. Probably a witch There were three chubby girls with them, all of whom bore a strong resemblance to Ginger. They were chatting with each other as Lainey walked up. Marigold had mentioned that Ginger had younger sisters, all living in New York.

“Thanks for lending me the dress,”
Lainey said to Ginger. “I had a slight emergency that required that I shift and climb a tree. I’ll wash it and get it back to you tomorrow.”

“You know what, it looks fantastic on you,” Ginger said, looking her up and down. “Keep it.”

“Well, thank you.” People in small towns were amazing, Lainey thought.

“I’ll be right back,” Tate said to
Lainey. He set Richard down and turned to Loch. “Can I have a quick word with you?”

Loch followe
d Tate down one of the hallways.

Lainey
looked after him and heaved a sigh. Now was the time to sneak out of here. She’d been hurt before when she’d thought that Tate was only questioning her because he thought of her as a suspect, but now that she realized he might actually like her, she was really worried. Tate was handsome, sexy, and obviously an incredibly great guy—he’d actually taken on the task of raising all of his younger brothers and sisters. She could see herself falling for a guy like that, falling hard. That was the problem. She couldn’t start a relationship based on lies.

A tiny part of her wished she could talk to Tate about it, even though she barely knew him. She just couldn’t, though
. She couldn’t bear to relive the humiliation again with anyone.

No, she just needed to avoid the hot wolf shifter as much as she could
before her resolve melted and she ripped off all her clothes, rubbed up against him and purred.

* * *

“There’s no way it’s a coincidence that the flower bed was vandalized. Someone’s trying to interfere with the wedding. We’re going to need to post security here until the wedding takes place,” Loch said, looking frustrated. “There’s a caretaker who lives on the grounds, but he can’t keep an eye on everything.”

Tate nodded in
agreement. “Good plan. You might want to see if you can keep it quiet that you’ve added the extra security, though. You could put some of your deputies on my landscaping crew, in plainclothes, and then when everybody else leaves at the end of the day, they could stay inside the house and keep watch.”

“
I’ll do that,” Loch said. “I just hate to see Ginger getting stressed out about this. Me, I don’t care about all the fancy-ass wedding decorations or the tiara or anything like that. If it weren’t for the fact that tradition calls for the Alpha to have a huge, over-the-top wedding and invite everyone in the damned state, I’d be happy to elope to Vegas.”

“I hear you,” Tate said. Not for the first time, he envied Loch and the obvious passion he had for his feisty, smart-mouthed bride.

Loch’s radio crackled. The dispatcher’s voice said, “Any available units, reports of a Signal Five located at Silver Creek. Please respond.”

A Signal Five was a dead body
. Loch grabbed his cell phone and made a quick call.

“Where is the body?
Any indication that it’s an unnatural death? I see. Thanks.”

Tate raised a brow in question.

“It’s almost certainly a natural death,” Loch said. “Meyer Schofeld. Some hunters were out in the woods, found him lying face down in the creek. I still need to check out the scene, though. It’s about twenty minutes from here. Want to come with?”

“Sure thing.”
Tate knew he’d become legendary for his excellent sense of smell, even among shifters; he could out-scent a bloodhound. He was frequently called in to crime scenes to help track perpetrators. “I’ll come with you, and then we’ll come back and work out the details of sneaking in some extra security. Are you bringing Ginger?”

“Of course.
What better way to take her mind of all of this, then a nice, exciting death scene?”

Ginger’s mother was a witch, which made Ginger half
wolf, half witch. Ginger could shift, but she also had inherited powers. In her case, they manifested in the ability to see a dead person’s final moments if Ginger touched their body or something that they’d touched, or visited their home or some area they’d spent a lot of time in. If there was a death anywhere in Loch’s jurisdiction and the cause was in question, she’d help Loch out.

They walked back to the foyer, and Tate quickly scanned the room for Kat, but she was nowhere in sight
. Damn, that woman could disappear faster than he could say “boo.” Was it him she wanted to get away from? Was it because of his brothers and sisters? She’d seemed to like them…although it was probably too much to hope that the woman who made his heart pound and other parts of his anatomy stand up and pay attention would also be the woman who’d actually want to take on a huge ready-made family. Since when had he been that lucky?

Well, nothing to do about it,
he thought with a sigh. He had a murder scene to sniff around, a flower bed to dig up and replant, seven siblings to wrassle…

Half an hour
later, after Loch had calmed down Ginger’s mother, who’d been in a state of mild hysterics ever since the tiara theft, and after Ginger had rustled up some clothing that was better suited to tramping through the woods than her strappy sandals and sun dress, they all headed out, with Loch and Ginger in Loch’s patrol car, and Tate following in his pickup truck.

When they
arrived, however, they were greeted by an unhappy-looking deputy standing by his patrol car. There were two hunters with him, leaning on their pickup truck.

“We haven’t been able to find the body,” Deputy Ackerman told
Loch. “We went to the area where the hunters say they saw it, and there’s nothing. A few of us shifted, ran up and down the stream a mile in either direction, nothing.”

“Were you at least able to find th
e spot where the body was found?” Tate asked.

“No, all we know is that it’s a couple of miles from the road. The hunters didn’t leave any mark by the spot; they weren’t expecting the body to be moved.”

“Maybe he was just passed out, not dead,” Loch suggested.

One of the hunters
, a human, shook his head. “I know dead when I see it,” he said. “We saw him lying face down in the creek, half underwater, weighed down by his backpack. I ran over, pulled him out, turned him over…water gushed out of his mouth. He’d been dead for at least a few hours. He had a big dent on his forehead, and a gash.”

“So somebody could have attacked him,” Loch said
. Tate knew Loch was thinking through all the possible scenarios.

“
Maybe, but it was a rocky stream bed,” the hunter said. “You know Meyer. He didn’t walk too steady. He could have been drunk, fell into the water, hit his head on a rock.”

“So what could have happened to the body?” Ginger wondered. “Could a wild animal have dragged it off?”

“They wouldn’t have dragged him that far this quickly, and we’d have spotted it,” the deputy said. “If he was really there, and he was dead, somebody must have moved the body. We announced it over the radio, so anybody with a police scanner could have heard it.”

“
Not much we can do at this point, if you’ve already searched the area,” Loch said.

“You know, I saw Meyer standing at the edge o
f the crowd when you were questioning people about the tiara theft,” Tate mused.

“True, although so was half the town,” Loch said.
“Hard to picture Meyer being involved. I know he’s a drunk, but he’s never been in trouble for anything more than trespassing or public intoxication. Then again, he hangs out with Rodney McColl, who has some burglary convictions. I’ll have my men pick up Rodney, see what he has to say. Maybe the two of them acted together. Meyer could have acted as lookout while Rodney broke in, and then Rodney didn’t want to share.”

“If the body was dumped in the middle of the woods, it’s a good bet whoever did it thought that it wouldn’t be
found for a long time, if ever,” Tate said. “It was just dumb luck those hunters stumbled on it…otherwise, in this heat, it would have decomposed and been eaten by animals before anybody found it. Days from now, there’d be nothing but scattered bones.”

“Right,
” Loch said. “And if the person who dumped the body heard that the police were being summoned to the scene, they’d want to move the body before we could have Ginger touch it and read Meyer’s final moments.”