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He could tell from the smell of asphalt on the wind that he was cutting a little closer to the main road than he liked. He knew very well what happened when men encountered mountain lions. Still, he crept closer, barely making a sound. 

Abruptly the trees opened into a wide meadow drenched in afternoon sunshine. Clouds billowed in a bright blue sky as heavenly as any Renaissance painting. On a wide boulder, with her skirts spread around her and her face turned to the sky, sat his next-door neighbor, Briar Steele. Tears sparkled on her cheeks.

CHAPTER THREE

Briar

A light breeze tugged at Briar’s blond curls as she basked in the last light of the day. She hiked up the hem of her lavender poplin skirt so her knees could feel the same sun that was bathing her arms. She wanted to be done crying. With a sky like this in front of her, it seemed like a waste to blur her vision with tears. 

It wouldn’t last. Already she could detect the slight shift in light that meant night was coming on. She told herself that after the sunset, she would go home and prove her power to Norine. Somehow. 

It wouldn’t be easy. Norine really believed Briar was lying about having a power. 

Briar couldn’t remember when she had started making things up. As a child, she had entertained her mom and dad by telling fantastic stories as they sat on the porch of their trailer at the end of the day. She had dreamed up a tribe of elves called the Spriklets, prickly creatures made of thorns and dust that could hitch a ride to exotic locations on a man’s pant leg. Her older brother Arthur had insisted on adding a detail: After their adventures, the Spriklets could ride the wind home whenever they missed their mommas. 

Briar’s brow creased, thinking of it now. She had been burying these memories for the better part of a decade. Now they were all coming back. Not all the memories were as sweet as the evenings Briar had spent with her family, spinning stories while a panoramic sunset had the sky sparkling with Texas dust. 

She’d sent the Spriklets to places she knew only from the radio and picture books: movie sets and amusement parks and baseball games. Things she couldn’t experience on the dusty outskirts of Cokeville, Texas, before the war came and shook up her whole world. 

Maybe she wasn’t entirely done crying, Briar reflected as she wiped away a tear. The memory was so vivid: her mother’s laughter, the echo of her own childish voice in her ear, the sky at that perfect blend of pink and orange where everything was beautiful, even a rusty trailer in a lot surrounded by a cyclone fence. 

Did making up stories count as lying?

When Briar came to Independence Falls at the age of eleven, all the energy and creativity she had put into the Spriklets was channeled into developing an elaborate fiction about her dead parents. The trailer park in the middle of nowhere became a posh house in Dallas. Her mother’s factory job became society parties. Her terrifying father had become a war hero. Her poor, damaged brother had become a successful businessman based in Denver. She told herself that if she imagined a better life well enough, inhabited that reality as truth, then maybe it would become true. 

It had worked … for a while.

She heard a twig break. Briar whirled her head around, peering down the murky path between the trees. Under the spreading branches of the pine trees the woods were shadowed. The hairs on the back of Briar’s neck rose. 

It was probably just her imagination, but the darkening clearing sounded different somehow: stiller, more silent than silence. 

“Hello?”

She caught a flicker in the tall grass. Was something out there?

The ensuing silence seemed to last forever. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching her. 

Some dried leaves crunched in the underbrush. Briar leapt to her feet with a little shriek. 

“Get!” she yelled, spreading her arms wide. She didn’t remember much from Girl Scouts, but she remembered this much—most animals would run away if a person acted big and made a lot of noise, as if she were a dominant predator. “Go on! Get away from me! I’m terrifying!” 

The spike of pain in her head at that statement was more annoying than piercing. She flapped her arms up and down and danced from foot to foot. 

“Okay fine, I’m not terrifying! But, um, I’m probably not very tasty! And I can yell really loud! So, shoo! Scram! Vamoose!” 

She was starting to feel a little silly, but it was sort of fun to be shouting. It certainly felt better than brooding. She listened as the echo of her shouts faded into silence. Nothing. 

Briar wrapped her shawl around her once more, turned around, and sat.

Sitting right in front of her was a full-grown mountain lion.

The sound Briar made was too high and thin to be a scream. Her hands and the soles of her saddle shoes scraped on the rock as she scrambled backward, somersaulting off the rock and tumbling to the ground below. 

Terror had her recovering her footing, and her eyes went right back to the cat. It hadn’t moved. Maybe it wouldn’t attack her if she didn’t run. 

“Go away!” she shrieked. 

She sounded nothing like a dominant predator. 

Goodness, the thing was huge! Much bigger than she had thought. His head reached easily as high as her waist, and even under its tawny fur she could see that its shoulders were thick and muscular. His sinuous tail was wrapped around his feet, and the tip of it tapped softly against the ground. 

The animal didn’t appear to be stalking her. In fact, it appeared to be ... bored. 

As if to confirm her suspicion, the mountain lion yawned. 

The row of bright white teeth revealed by the yawn did nothing to ease Briar’s fears. The cat may have looked placid, but she had no doubt it could be on her in an instant. She could clearly imagine those sharp teeth sinking into her flesh and grinding down to her bones. 

“Please don’t hurt me,” she moaned mournfully. 

In response, the animal crouched down into pounce position. 

Briar screamed and stumbled backward. Her foot caught on something, and then she was falling. She plummeted too fast to catch herself, but had long enough to think,
Oh no, I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead!
When her butt hit the ground, she already had her hands up to protect her face, certain that at any moment she’d be pinned by those enormous paws and the cat would be tearing into her neck. 

When her scream had faded and nothing happened, Briar cautiously peeked between her fingers. The cat was sitting on the rock, its head cocked to look at her curiously. Seemingly satisfied that she was all right, he bent to sniff at the rock. 

Briar realized that her shawl was still spread on the rock, where she must have dropped it in her panic. It was a delicate blue wool as ethereal as clouds, woven into an intricate pattern and brushed smooth as silk. Some of her finest work, she had to admit. 

The cat ran its sensitive nose over the shawl, keeping its liquid eyes focused on her. It had the general shape of a house cat, but that was where the similarity to a pet ended. There was a wildness about it, a contained violence that kept her eyes flicking from its wide paws to its muscular flanks to its sharp eyes. 

Her heart was pounding wildly in her chest, and she kept forgetting to breathe. There was some tiny logical part of her that told her if the cat hadn’t attacked already, it probably wouldn’t, and she clung to that bit of reason in a sea of terror. 

 Maybe she could escape while it was busy with the shawl. It was her favorite, and the wool had cost her a pretty penny, but that didn’t matter. She could make another once she was home, safe, and not about to be eaten by a mountain lion. She pressed her hands to the ground and lifted her hips, preparing to scramble to her feet. The cat raised its head, and she froze. 

Sunlight gilded its coat, turning the tufts of hair in its ears into stars. His large eyes were blue green, made deeper by the rim of dark fur that outlined the curves of his face. His high, hard cheekbones narrowed to a blunt snout, giving him a fiercely serious expression. Something flickered in her mind, some comparison, but she couldn’t get a handle on it. Then the cat did something so incongruous, she didn’t believe her own eyes. 

It stretched out its leg at her and flexed its paw, pointing one foot pad at her chest. Then it bobbed its paw at her, for all the world like it was gesturing for her to sit back down. 

Briar’s surprise had her arms collapsing under her. Her bottom hit the ground with a thump. 

“What … what …?” She couldn’t even form a question, but the words burbled up anyway. 

As if in response, the cat made a sweeping movement with its paw. There was something soothing in the motion, and Briar got the sense that it was telling her to calm down. But how was that possible? 

Before she had time to think about it, the cat surprised her again. He ducked his head back to her shawl and lifted it carefully in his mouth. 

He leapt down off the rock, making Briar tense again, but he dragged the shawl along with him. He approached silently, his eyes never leaving Briar’s. When he was a few feet away, he stopped and dropped the shawl from his mouth. 

Briar didn’t move. The mountain lion nodded at the shawl and backed off a step. 

Had this animal just returned her shawl to her, tame and sweet as you please? Briar could hardly believe it. She looked at the shawl, then at the cat, then at the shawl again. She wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the cat looked somehow amused by her predicament. 

“Um … thanks?” she said, her voice tremulous.

She found a way to push herself up to her knees. Warily, she reached out for the shawl. 

Lightning-quick, the cat pounced. Briar pulled her hand back with a tiny shriek. It took her a moment to realize that the cat wasn’t coming for her. He had his broad paws tangled in the wool, and as she watched he twisted and fell onto his side. 

He dragged the shawl with him, wrapping it around his body. He rolled onto his back and bundled the shawl in all four paws. He popped the shawl out with his feet, then spun up and caught it mid-air. He twisted again and landed upright. 

He looked to Briar, but all she could do was gape at him. Was a mountain lion actually … performing for her? 

He tilted his head, then took the shawl between his teeth. With a quick flip on his head, he tossed the shawl upward. It billowed out above him, and he shuffled a bit so it landed fully extended across his back. 

He poked his head out from under the shawl. The blue fringe brushed over his brow. 

Briar made an incredulous sound that became a high, shaky giggle. 

Encouraged, the cat sighted its own thick tail, which poked out from the other side of the shawl. He dove upon his tail, leaping and twisting under the shawl as he tried to capture his tail between his paws. 

Briar was laughing out loud now, caught between fear and hilarity. 

Finally, he flipped onto his back and caught his tail. He glanced back to make sure Briar was watching, then took a comically enormous bite of the tip. Jerking as if shocked, he shot all four paws in the air and then let them collapse. His mouth fell open and his eyes closed, as if he was playing dead. 

“Oh, that was wonderful!” Briar exclaimed, clapping a little. “I can’t believe this is happening. Maybe Norine’s right and I am going crazy.” 

The cat jumped up to his feet, then slid one paw out to give a courtly bow. Briar laughed again. Her fear had mostly left her. Whatever this creature was, it was capable of communication. It could joke and play. 

“What … what are you?”

As if in answer, the cat fell onto its back again. A rumbling sound rose from its chest. It took Briar a moment to identify the sound. The cat was purring. He met her gaze once more, then stretched his supple neck in invitation. 

Briar took a deep breath. She glanced at the cat’s massive paws. Its claws were sheathed, but she knew they were there. Those short daggers embedded in his paws could easily shred her skin. But somehow, Briar thought she could trust him. She felt certain that he meant her no harm. 

Anxious, excited, she reached out and laid a hand on the animal’s chest.

CHAPTER FOUR

Charlie

When Charlie felt Briar Steele’s narrow fingers sink into the fur on his chest, he sighed with pleasure. It had been a very long time since a woman touched him who wasn’t a nurse or his mother. 

He’d had offers, sure. Women had started showing up not long after the car accident that had ruined his leg. They seemed certain that he needed care and comfort of a very special kind. It was tempting, but there was something about the way those women looked at him—as if his infirmity was part of what made him attractive. As if they could help him overcome his grief and guilt over Angela’s death. 

But Charlie couldn’t be healed. And he couldn’t be with someone who looked at him with pity. 

There was no pity on Briar’s face now. Her deep brown eyes were aglow with curiosity. Her soft pink lips were parted with wonder. Excitement had high color brushing her porcelain skin. She was the sort of beautiful that made a man think of fairy tale princesses, somehow innocent and regal at once. 

 A princess who was currently rubbing his chest with enthusiasm. 

She had both hands on him now, massaging her elegant fingers deep into his muscles. She was marveling at him as she worked her fingers higher, up to the soft fur covering his neck. His purr took on a deeper intensity when she smoothed the fur over his shoulders. 

“God, you’re a beautiful animal,” she murmured, and then ran one hand down the center of his rib cage. 

He couldn’t stop himself from arching up into her touch. He had never been touched while he was a cat before. All of his other senses were sharpened when he transformed, so he supposed it shouldn’t have been surprising that physical sensation was more intense. Her hands sent little shock waves of satisfaction radiating through his body. Her fingers were working their way lower now, stroking the fur that flared out across his belly.