Hollywood Tiger: BBW Tiger Shifter Paranormal Romance (Hollywood Shifters Book 3) (14 page)

When he was done, he figured he’d better get at it. “You risked everything back there in order to save me, so I don’t think you owe me any explanations. I think I owe
you
some answers,” he said. “Especially as I grew up in a shifter community. I guess I should begin by saying that I’m no good at spotting other shifters, or I might have been able to make this easier by telling you about my tiger right away.”

“And I’ve spent a lifetime of hiding my secrets.” The smile faded from of her eyes.

“I wish I’d figured it out, just to make it easier on you,” he said. “But it’s a lifetime of habit, because it’s not just ourselves we risk exposing. My old buddy Mick is so high-profile—his film will be the first of next summer’s blockbusters, and he’s in the middle of a battle between HBO and Fox for his new pilot. JP is just as well known in the classical music world. The wrong person finds out about them, and they’d be ruined. My dad’s career, same deal. My whole town, because it was settled by shifters, though again, not everyone there knows about them. That’s how careful we’ve been—people in a small town living their entire lives without knowing their next door neighbor might be a hawk shifter. We’re raised to keep the secret.”

“I get it,” she said, still with that wistful look in her brown eyes. “I totally get it.”

He set his empty mug on the bathroom floor and nearly caused a tidal wave as he shifted so that he could reach her with his left hand. He slid his fingers under her chin  and kissed her. “Do you? But I can see it, you’re still upset.”

She pressed a kiss against his wrist. “It’s only jealousy,” she said, in that small, high voice. “Those friends—your family—I’ve never dared be close to anyone. I never dared date a guy more than twice for a lot of reasons, the biggest one being, what if I turned into a dog? I didn’t dare ever sleep over with anyone. And I couldn’t talk to anyone. Not when I grew up hearing that Great-Granny was crazy—and here I was, something far worse.”

“Not worse,” he said, kissing her again. “We’re just different than the non-shifting part of humanity. I asked you before, do you think she might have been a shifter?”

“I don’t know. It was all so . . .”

“Tell me.”

Another searching gaze, and she said haltingly, “The first time it happened, I was asleep. I’d been having these wild dreams. This one was wilder than ever. I woke up tangled in the bed sheets and my pajamas, aching all over, the sheets smelling so strong. When I tried to throw the covers off, my arm didn’t work right. I was a dog!”

“You don’t remember shifting?”

“No. It just happened.”

He clasped her fingers. “Were you scared?”

“Not really. I think that might be my dog nature? Dogs tend to take things as they are, unless something really hurts them.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, all I remember is how different the world was. Full of smells. I jumped out the window, which I always kept open, and ran around all night. When I got thirsty I found a neighbor’s sprinklers and lapped up runoff, but I got all wet. So I skulked back to my room, burrowed into the bed, and when I woke up I was a naked teenager. At first I thought it was a really vivid dream until I saw the muddy paw prints all over my sheets. I washed them myself so no one would know, and, well, that’s how it started.”

“And you kept it to yourself.”

“How could I not?” She shook her head. “Both parents were in the middle of new divorces, and . . . things were tense. I did ask roundabout questions, like,
Hey did you ever dream you’d turned into a dog
, but the looks I got made it pretty clear I was on my own with this.”

“And you don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

“The only halves are on my dad’s side, from his third marriage. They’re grade school kids. Steps have come and gone. Mom never wanted to get pregnant again—said it ruined her figure.” Mindy looked away, her soulful brown eyes expressing the hurt she would have hidden when she said, “I heard her say once she wasn’t going through that again just to get stuck with another clumsy fat kid.”

“I’m sorry to say this, but your mom sounds like an ass.”

“Well, she’s really into the whole fashion thing. Like my grandmother.” Mindy’s lip lifted in a smile, then she gave her easy shrug that—now that he could see it—expressed her poodle’s essentially sunny nature. “The change happened at first only at night. I couldn’t do it on my own until one summer I’d run to my favorite hiding place in the garden, and I was lying in the sun, and . . . I just tightened my tummy and did this thing with my spine, and there I was. And so it’s been ever since.”

She slid her foot along his leg, as if she found his touch reassuring. “As for Great-Granny, after I turned about twelve, she kept asking if everything was all right, if I felt any different. I always told her yes, because I thought she was talking about the divorces, or periods and all that, and between school and all my well-meaning relatives I had enough data on
that
to write a book.  By the time the change actually happened, she had already passed. Do you think it’s possible she really was a pony? But if she was, how come we aren’t all ponies?”

Dennis shrugged. “Depends on the family. My dad’s a cougar. Mick’s a bear. His dad wasn’t a shifter, but his grandfather’s a bear, and his grandmother an otter. JP’s family tend to be either dragons or nothing.”

Mindy listened intently, her expressive eyes so wide he could see his reflection in them. He could sense her trembling with the importance of this conversation, and he knew it was the sense of belonging that she had been missing. Especially a dog, whose deepest instincts long for a pack.

“A poodle.” He brushed a damp curl off her forehead. “I can’t tell you how adorable that is!”

Then he gasped as she blurred, and there was a small brown dog bobbing in the bathtub. He laughed out loud as she gave him a look from those soulful dark amber eyes. Then she got her feet under her, leaped to the side of the tub, and shook all over—showering the entire bathroom, including his face.

Still laughing, he said, “Change back, and help me get out of this bandage. We can tape a square of gauze over it, and then it is your turn for some fun.”

She was instantly a woman again, blinking water from her eyelashes, her body glistening with drops.

“Get on that bed, Mork. This is gonna take a while—starting with your toes.”

***

He took his time.

How could she ever have gotten this lucky? She closed her eyes as he began slowly massaging her feet. Though his right hand hadn’t gripping power yet, he could still use his nails, lightly scoring her skin, and then caressing with his thumb as his left worked at her muscles, smoothing out tension she hadn’t been aware of, until her muscles felt unstrung as a bolt of silk.

Fire coiled in her core as he began working up her legs, first with kisses, and then with those sensitive, knowledgeable hands, but when he reached her thighs, he shifted his weight and started at the top of her head, running his fingers through her hair as he worked lovingly over her scalp.

She shivered with craving, unable to stop making noises. But from the way his lips curved, he liked those noises very much and so she abandoned herself to pleasure as he kissed his way down her face, taking the time to thoroughly plunder and possess her mouth until she was keening with want.

Then her brain blitzed into yawning hunger when he took her breasts in his hands, teasing, caressing, laving with his tongue, and destroying every wit in her head with long, slow, lingering sucks.

Her belly was trembling by the time he had kissed his way down to the tops of her thighs. Slowly he drew them wider apart, and at the first soft kiss at the top of her mound she came with a sweet cascade of ringing pulses, but he kept kissing, and licking each fold, working ever inward until he found her clit—and shot her straight to the sun.

She tumbled in freefall, her entire body trembling, and she lay boneless, delirious with satiation, but oh, he still wasn’t done. He licked and teased and nipped, and the heat was back, spiraling upward, and as he widened her again and slid his cock into her soaked, ready opening, they climbed together, fast and hard, harder. There was no regret of yesterday, no question about tomorrow, just this, now, as he made her his, and she worked him ever deeper into her to claim him as hers.

And they exploded together, floating down out of the sky to lie there with their limbs entwined.

***

When he woke next, the golden rays slanted in: afternoon. He smiled sleepily, knowing that eventually he was going to have to think about real life. His bank account was empty, and though Sloane probably had some kind of budget, it was bound not to be much. He had to be thinking about his next step.

Maybe it was time to man up and take a salaried job. Yeah, he’d hate it, but maybe he’d get used to it. Millions of others did. The yoke would be worth it if every day he could get off the commuter treadmill and dump the tie and suit for the magic of Sex by Mindy.

He knew what his dad would probably say, that compromise was part of being an adult. He’d had his fun. It was time to get a grownup job. Settle down.

Everything would work out if they did it together. For the rest of his life.

He reached with his right hand, aware that the pain was scarcely even there—to find the bed empty.

He sat up, looking around.

“Shit, no.” He wasn’t even aware he’d spoken when he saw the bedroom neat, all sign of Mindy gone.

He walked into the bathroom, finding it, too, sparkling clean—except for a note in JP’s stationery taped to the mirror.

Dennis: I once let words escape that I never thought I’d speak, because I didn’t believe in them: ‘trust me.’

But now I’m saying them again. Trust me.

I’ve got some stuff to take care of, and I’ll explain everything when we meet.

I love you

Mindy

Chapter Fourteen

It was more than a few days—in fact, more than twice the time they’d known one another. Dennis kept her note folded in his wallet, and as the days wore on, he took it out to look at it. Touch where her hand had touched.

He didn’t even know where she lived. Oh, he could find out if he wanted to. He was certain Agent Sloane already knew, or could locate Mindy through his tech whizzes. But trust had to be all or nothing, and he knew that he, too, had had issues with trust and relationships. So here was the first step, taking her at her word.

By the next day he’d finished healing, all but the occasional twinge. Having received a phone call that JP and Jan were on their way back to Los Angeles from London, he packed up his stuff, cleaned up the guest room and the kitchen.

When his old friend and his fiancée arrived, the three went out to dinner, and though Dennis hadn’t meant to talk about Mindy, somehow after a couple glasses of first-rate merlot, it all came tumbling out.

He knew that Mick would not have been able to resist teasing him, after years of Dennis scorning and protesting against mates, steady dating, settling down, and the like. But JP only looked at Dennis out of those steady black eyes of his, beneath which the fire dragon sometimes glinted, and said, simply, “I’m glad you found her.”

Jan said in her beautiful voice, “She wounds wonderful. I’d love to meet her when you’re ready.”

The two were tired after their long flight, and though there was plenty of space in the house—the master bedroom lay at the opposite end from the guest rooms—Dennis decided that he should go visit his dad while he still had the loan of the Lexus from Agent Sloane.

He had a quiet, peaceful late night drive. Sanluce was quiet as ever. When he shambled out of his boyhood room the next morning, his dad greeted him as if they’d seen one another the day before, instead of more than a year ago.

Later that day, his dad barbequed some steaks for them as Dennis once again unloaded pretty much everything, including the Torvaldsen episode, as he knew his dad would enjoy hearing about a bit of action. And no one had a tighter buttoned lip.

“Nice work,” his dad said at the end.

“Which part?”

“Everything. Including your Mindy. Sounds like you two make quite a team. When she comes back, bring her up. I’d like to meet her. You could introduce her to your Uncle Thomas. Take her for a run. Be good for her if she has never had a pack.”

Dennis spoke the words he’d not thought he could, because he couldn’t help the surge of doubts—had she changed her mind, was he really good enough for Mindy—late at night. “Do you think she will?”

Dad grunted as he flipped the steaks. “She’s your mate.”

Dennis let out his breath. “This is new territory for me.”

His dad gave a short nod. “Be good for you.”

“I don’t know if the suit, tie, and cubicle will be good for me, but if that’s what she wants, maybe it’s time. All I know is, my life has to have her in it.”

Another grunt. “Wait and see.”

Dennis looked at his dad with some exasperation. “What does that mean? You don’t think I mean it?”

Dad glanced over his shoulder. “Of course you do. You’ve always been a straight-shooter. You’ve been making decisions about what will be best for her—maybe she’s doing the same. And if she listened to you, well, wait and see.”

Dennis headed south the next day, and as JP and Jan had hit the freeway to return to Sanluce, he drove back to the Hollywood Hills house to finish up with Agent Sloane, now that he was totally back on his feet.

Between them, they worked out reports that suppressed anything having to do with shifters—and reduced Mindy to an unnamed informant—but would stand up in any court in the world. Torvaldsen wasn’t going anywhere except to a deep, dark cell somewhere tucked under the Arctic Circle.

That finished out Day Ten. Dennis was driving back over the hills from the valley when his cell bleeped.

His heart beat fast as he pulled off the road and looked.

Meet me at the Cafe Del Rey’s bar at the Marina, six tonight? M.

***

Mindy sent the text off, and watched her cursor blink as her heartbeat galloped.

One minute, two, then came a response:
On my way.

Mindy shut her eyes in gratitude, and wiped her damp palms down her side.

She still had a few things to do, but at six o’clock she was there in the bar overlooking the boats floating gently on the sparkling water of the marina, as the westering sun sank slowly toward the horizon. She had bought a new outfit, for the first time since she was a teenager wearing capris and a dainty top. She had not worn pants since she was sixteen, and came downstairs in new jeans to her step-brother’s guffaw, and comment about Wide Load.

Since then, she’d hidden her figure under skirts. But with Dennis, there was no hiding. She wanted to see him see her.

The light had turned golden, catching gloriously in Dennis’s tawny hair when he walked into the bar and glanced around. He looked even better than she remembered, dressed in a loose gray silk shirt over a black tee, and jeans. She watched anxiously, smiling when he saw her and flashed his own dear smile, those sexy long dimples bracketing the lips she loved to kiss.

“Wow,” he said. “You look awesome.”

Joy leaped inside her. “So do you.”

“Buy you a drink?” he asked, leaning on the bar next to her and smiling down into her eyes.

“If you like,” she said, “but this was only a meeting place.”

“We met in a bar,” he said, grinning.

Mindy finished off the mineral water she’d ordered, and slid off her stool. “I know. That’s kind of why I picked this place.”

He gave that deep-chest purring chuckle. “But no belly dance?”

“Oh, that can come later. If you like.”

“Oh, I like.” He glanced around. “So, what’s your plan? Are we having dinner?”

“Yes.” She swallowed in a tight throat. Her idea had seemed so wonderful all these last days as she dealt with everything, but now that the moment had come, she was worried that she had totally screwed up. “But not here.”

“Lead on,” he said, holding out his arm.

She slid her hand around the swell of his bicep and guided him out. He didn’t speak as they turned down to the floating docks, and paced along these until they came to the end, where the big yachts had slips. One after another they passed huge, showy mini-Love Boats, until they reached the end slip, where a beautiful cruising sloop rocked gently on the water, the two big, beautiful Bermuda sails furled.

A young female crew member stood at the ramp, smiling in welcome. “Hi. I’m Chelsea.”

“Would you like to come aboard?” Mindy asked, her heartbeat now drumming.

Dennis glanced up, then his gaze swept the deck, his tiger eyes wide with appreciation. “Sure!”

Chelsea wore navy blue bellbottoms and a crisp white shirt. She conducted them into a spacious central cabin with long windows down the sides, and a sunroof overhead. The delicious aroma of beef bourguignon wafted through the cabin, and Dennis glanced down at the two places set. He took his seat, and the Chelsea offered them a choice of excellent California reds.

Mindy said, “You pick.”

“I like anything,” Dennis admitted.

“Whatever you recommend,” Mindy said, and they were served the sauvignon.

“Do you want to cruise around the harbor?” Mindy asked.

Dennis grinned. “If it’s part of the package, bring it on. I have to admit I love sailing, even for half an hour’s float around a box.” And as Chelsea vanished down below to fetch the salads, he leaned forward to say softly, “Mork, this is damn sweet of you, but hell, I would have been happy to meet at a Starbucks. I can’t tell you how glad I was to get your message.”

“I had a bunch of stuff to do,” she said, as the yacht began to move smoothly into the basin. “How about we catch up over dinner?”

He agreed, and as perfect salads were served, eaten, and then the main course brought out, Dennis gave her a generalized report on the cleanup of the case, leaving out names and anything having to do with shifters.

She listened silently until he was done, then said, “I saw the papers after I left JP’s house. It was all about the mess Haskell had totally dumped. The reporters said he’d vanished, leaving Michael Benedict and the assistants.”

“Who were not part of the scam. Neither were the few office workers at the studio. As for Haskell, he was caught at the Mexican border, which was kept out of the papers while the authorities finished rounding up his minions. He ratted out everybody involved, which helped the tech people track down all the various shell accounts. Including his. Your friend’s investments might be tied up for a while, but I think she’ll eventually get it all back. Or most of it.”

“She’ll just be glad to be rid of him and his shady deals,” Mindy said. “As for the rest, one of the things I wanted to do was something for those poor film students. They took a major hit through no fault of their own. I met with them and got their story. Haskell had deliberately gone looking for clueless people he could take advantage of—he was never going to pay any of them.”

“Yeah, we found that out. The contracts were complete B.S. And because none of them had agents, they didn’t recognize the legalese that basically screwed them. And Haskell had forced NDAs onto them so they couldn’t go to their instructors or anyone who might have warned them about all the danger signs.”

“There wasn’t much I could do for Michael, the director, but I got Emma and Kayli internships through one of my step-sisters, who recently married a news producer. These internships won’t be as glamorous as having your own screenplay filmed, but they have the advantage of being real. And they’ll learn a lot from the inside. After the gossip about the fiasco turns into old news, their resumes will begin with legit credits.”

“That was a cool thing you did,” Dennis said. “I don’t think anyone gave them a second thought.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think they would,” Mindy said. “Your five million was apparently supposed to cover the shoot that day.”

“A five million that never existed.”

“Yeah. So I did a little delving, and saw to it that the caterers and the animal people and so on didn’t get bankrupted because of Haskell.”

Dennis set down his fork. “You did? How did you do that?”

Mindy thought,
Here it comes
. But she couldn’t bring herself to the point. Scolding herself for being a chicken, she said, “You’re done, I see. Want dessert now, or later?”

Dennis glanced out the long windows, the running lights of the boats they passed reflecting in his eyes. “How long of a cruise do we get?”

“Long enough for dessert,” she said, forcing a smile as she led him up on deck. Here, the two forward crew, a man and a woman, greeted them with friendly smiles. One of these introduced them to the captain, who had done his twenty years in the Navy before beginning a new career as a captain for private vessels. He and Dennis exchanged chat as the three of them walked the length of the narrow bow, and Mindy watched Dennis eye the flush deck, and run his gaze up the clean lines of the cruising sloop’s mast.

“How long is she?” he asked Captain Niles.

“Forty-six meters,” Niles replied.

“Cruising speed?”

“Ten knots. She can get up to thirteen.”

Dennis whistled. “She’s a beauty.”

“That she is,” Niles responded with pride, and returned to the cabin.

“Want to look below?” Mindy asked.

“Why not?” Dennis asked. “Damn. She really is a beauty. Clean design. I have to say, were I a billionaire, I’d still much rather have one of these than any of those five decker floating boxes.” He waved a dismissive hand at a twenty-five million dollar yacht as they passed, whose owners and guests partied obliviously on the main deck.

“I thought you might,” Mindy said as they descended the gentle curve of the staircase to the below deck. “Here is the main cabin aft.” She led the way in. “Three guest cabins besides this one. The crew of six is housed forward.”

Dennis grinned. “You’ve got all the stats.”

She nodded, and as the yacht made the turn out of the Marina into the open sea, she began to rock with a wider rhythm, and Mindy sat down suddenly on the pristine bed.

Dennis leaned forward to catch her hands. “Geez, you don’t want to put wrinkles in that bedspread—it’s tight enough to bounce a quarter. They probably charge five C-notes a wrinkle.”

Mindy knew she was being a total wuss, so she gulped in a breath and got it right out there. “It’s yours.”

Dennis had been looking out the window at the setting sun just touching the water in a fiery red orb, but cast her a confused look. “What’s mine? The quarter? The bedspread?”

“The yacht. It’s yours. That is, I chartered it. For a year. In case you . . . change your mind. About sailing, or you didn’t like what I picked.” She twisted her fingers together, looking at him anxiously. “Or thought this was a dumb idea. But I thought, we could go around the world, and you could look for the stories you want to tell. And I could help. Or not. It’s yours. To decide. My gift to you.”