The Bobcat's Tate (14 page)

“So you’ve told me,” Megan
said, icicles dripping from her voice. “And I already agreed that I would not speak to him again. Are you having fun ruining my damned life? I hope so.”

“
Oooh, Megan said damned,” Richard crowed gleefully.

“So did you
, just now,” Schuyler pointed out.

Megan
turned to her younger brothers and sisters. “All right, everybody, race you to the main house. First one to the front door gets a dollar.” They all turned and shot off like rockets, with Megan running after them.

Tate turned to
Lainey. “I’m sorry. I had no idea about your engagement being over.”

“That’s because you didn’t ask,”
Lainey said heatedly. “And speaking of not asking, I should have asked you—what the heck did you have my glass for?”

He looked her right in the eye. “I was going to run your fingerprints
. Would you like to know why?”

“I’m all ears
. All pointy, tufted, ears.” She let the tufts spring up from her ears for just a moment before she shifted them back.

He laughed,
but quickly grew serious again. “I did it because I think you’re my fated mate, and because I want to include you in my life. I know you said you wanted to take things one day at a time, and you didn’t want to share anything of your past with me, but I was hoping I could persuade you to reconsider. However, the most important thing in my life is my family, and I had to find out what kind of person you were before I went any further and invited you to be one of us. I had to find out if there was some nefarious reason you didn’t want to tell me who you were.”

“Yes, Tate, there was,” she said
, reeling from the revelation. He felt that whole “fated mate” thing too? He actually wanted her to be part of his family? “And the nefarious reason’s name is Miles Bauer. Oh, and my parents. They wanted to force me to marry him.”

“Why?”

“It would greatly increase their social standing. My parents are the ultimate social climbers. They view everything and everyone as a way to get ahead. My brother Donny is very handsome, and they trotted him out like a trophy at every occasion. Me—I was always the invisible girl, until Miles suddenly took an interest in me. Or so I thought.” Her heart pounded painfully against her chest.

“What do you mean?”

She winced at the memory. “It all started at Donny’s birthday party. My parents threw this big birthday party for him and pretended that he’d invited me. I didn’t even know they were going to be there, or I wouldn’t have gone. We’d had a falling out when I quit working for their company, and I hadn’t spoken to them in a couple of months. So I show up at this restaurant, and Donny shows up, and it turns out Donny hadn’t sent me the invite, and even he didn’t know they were springing a surprise party on him, or he wouldn’t have gone, because he doesn’t want to be around them any more than I do. They’d sent him an invite pretending that I had invited him there.”

“And how did
that man figure into this?” He said
that man
with an expression of contempt.

“When I showed up,
there was this handsome guy there, and he made a beeline for me and paid attention to me and nobody else all night. Beautiful girls were throwing themselves at him, and he only paid attention to me. I should have smelled a rat, of course.” Once Lainey had thought of that night with wonder and amazement; now, she only thought of it with bitterness.

“You’re a beautiful girl,
Lainey. I’m sorry if anyone’s ever told you otherwise.” Tate’s eyes locked on hers and held her gaze, and she believed that he meant it with every fiber of his being.

Then he asked, hesitantly
, “So…you were in love with him?”

“Now that I look back on it, no
. I was dazzled that someone so handsome and charming would like me, and he was incredibly sweet and attentive and seemed fascinated by everything that I said. But I never, ever felt anything for him like I felt for you.”

Tate smirked with self-satisfaction
. “How about the sex? Am I better than him?”

“Come on, really?”

“Yes, really.”

“If you must know, I faked all my orgasms with him because I was terrified of losing him
. I thought there was something wrong with me because he couldn’t make me come, and then I’d sneak into the bathroom after he fell asleep and, let’s say, I took matters into my own hands.”

Now Tate’s face was stretched in a gloating smile of victory. “Is that so
?”

Lainey
shook her head in amusement. Men and their egos. She actually found it adorable that Tate, Mr. Handsome Alpha himself, wanted reassurance from her.

Then she continued with her sorry tale
. “As soon as he started dating me, my parents were suddenly all over me, wanted the two of us around all the time, dragging us to their country club to introduce us to their friends. They’d never, in my life, had me come to the country club before I met Miles. They loved how handsome he was, and that he came from an old, well-respected name in Philadelphia, dating back to the Revolutionary War. Old money who’d spent all of their money. My parents are more second generation
nouveau riche
, always trying to buy status and respectability. We were at the country club one night when he proposed to me in front of my parents, and I said yes, and I remember afterwards my mother took me aside and said hold on to this guy and never do anything to upset him, because I’d never be able to do better than him.”

Tate’s eyes widened. “Wow.” His tone was a mixture of anger and sympathy.

Lainey nodded. “I know, I know. But that’s how my mother always talks to me. And up until recently, I always believed her. But the wedding was getting closer, and I kind of realized that Miles and I really didn’t have anything in common. I suspected that he wasn’t actually interested in the things that I like. Museums. Musicals. Ballet. It wouldn’t have mattered to me at all, though. What bothered me was that he pretended so hard to be fascinated by it and insisted on going to all these events with me. I started to realize that he secretly hated all of it, which just seemed dishonest and weird. He was really secretive about his cell phone, and things just weren’t adding up.”

She
grimaced at the memory she was dredging up, but now that she’d started talking, she couldn’t seem to stop.

“I had the keys to his place
. One night, I pretended I was going to spend the night at my friend Katherine’s house. I left, and snuck back an hour later. He was talking on the phone to the girl who he’d supposedly broken up with, but he’d gotten back together with her after he started seeing me, and the things he was saying…”

She was horrified to realize that hot tears were spilling from her eyes and running down her cheeks, and a sob bubbled in her throat.

Tate pulled her into his arms, and hugged her tightly, and she sagged into his warmth, his simple, honest, unpretentious warmth.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he said.

But suddenly, she wanted to, wanted to lance the festering memory and let the poison spill out for once and for all.

“He was talking about he couldn’t wait to get the wedding over with, so he’d never have to have sex with me again
. He called me a fat bitch, and said that having sex with me was like drowning in lard, that pretending to come when he had sex with me was the best acting he’d done since theater class in high school.”

She took a deep, shaky breath, struggling not to
burst into sobs. “He was saying something about how my parents had promised him two hundred and fifty thousand dollars deposited in his bank account after he’d been married to me for one year, and a hundred thousand dollars a year after that, and a bunch of other bonuses. Then I heard him saying, ‘I swear, baby, I’ve got a written contract.’”

Tate had gone rigid with anger
. “If I ever see him again…”

“Don’t,”
Lainey said, with a shaky laugh. “It’s not even worth it. He’s got a miserable life. Turns out his parents were tired of him getting arrested and doing drugs and burning through what little was left of their money, so they’d kicked him out. He was on the verge of having to go crawling back to work for them in some menial job they’d picked to punish him, when my parents presented him with this deal. Now, he’s a college drop-out with no job skills and no prospects. Nothing but his pretty face.”

“It won’t be that pretty if he gets within a
thousand feet of me.”

Lainey
managed a smile, and continued with her story. “I burst through the door I’d been hiding behind, and he screamed like a girl, I swear to God, and dropped his cell phone on the floor and it broke in a million pieces. I told him the wedding was off, and I never wanted to see him again, I threw his keys at him, and when I ran out, he ran after me, screaming that he and my parents had a deal and I couldn’t back out of it. He followed me into the street before he remembered that he was wearing nothing but his tighty-whities, and there were people pointing and laughing at him, so he turned around and ran back to his apartment building, but the door had locked when it shut behind him. He had no cell phone, and gosh, I wish I could have helped him but I’d already given him back his keys. He shifted right there on the spot, and ran straight up a tree.”

Lainey
started to laugh, and Tate joined her, and she laughed harder, and then they were both laughing so hard that tears were rolling down their cheeks.

Ever since
that night, she’d felt an ugly poison bubbling inside her, staining her with its filth of humiliation and grief. Now that she’d told Tate the truth, it was the most amazing thing: she felt the stain fading away as if she’d bleached it from her soul. She’d said it out loud, and she realized that she wasn’t the one who sounded ugly and desperate and pitiful. Miles did.

“But wait,” Tate said, “
why do your parents still think you’ll marry him, after you told him it was over?”

“Oh,
my parents.” Lainey’s laughter faded, but she was still smiling as she wiped mingled tears of laughter and sorrow from her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I told them and they acted annoyed that Miles had been so careless as to let me overhear that. That was it. They were shocked when they realized I wouldn’t marry him. They said they’d signed a deal with Miles, and they expected me to honor the contract, not to make public fools of them after the wedding had been announced in the paper and all the invites had been sent out. My mother said they’d done it for me, because they didn’t want me to die an old maid, and asked how could I be so ungrateful?”

“
I can see why you wanted to get away from them. I’m just wondering, though, why the subterfuge? Why come here and hide out under a fake name?”

Lainey
sighed. “My parents are very manipulative, and very determined. Here’s an example. I decided to quit working for them as their bookkeeper, and go into teaching art. They didn’t approve. They liked having control over me. They used their influence to make sure that no school in the area would hire me, until I finally ended up working in the one place that would take me because they were totally desperate, a treatment facility for hardcore juvenile offenders. The teacher before me was stabbed, and the one before that had his jaw broken, so every day that I’m not mugged is a good day.”

She frowned, looking worried. “Honestly, I’m still afraid of what they might pull. The wedding is supposed to be in a week and a half
. Until it’s over, they’re going to do anything they can to force me to go home.”

“Ha,” Tate said scornfully. “They’ll have to get through the Calloway family first.”

“But—”

“No buts,”
Tate said. “I’m taking you out to dinner tonight, on a real date. I’m going to woo you like a real man should, and then I’m going to show you how desirable you really are.” His eyes gleamed, and Lainey felt a shiver of desire lifting the hairs on the back of her neck.

“Maybe,” she said, managing a smile.

“I’ll pick you up tonight at Imogen’s around six. Now, let’s go make sure my family hasn’t burned anything down or climbed onto the roof of the mansion.”

He
held Lainey’s hand as they walked, and ran his thumb over her palm. The sensual touch sent little jolts of arousal sizzling through her body, and she felt her panties go damp.

“I need a change of underwear whenever I’m around you,” she muttered, and then blushed bright red. Had she really just said that?
In her out loud voice?

But Tate just chuckled, a warm, rich sound. “I like that I do that to you,” he said. “I’m going to do a lot more to you tonight.”

As they got closer to the house, Tate slung his arm around Lainey’s shoulders in a clear claim of ownership. Miles had never done that, Lainey thought. Charming as he’d been, he’d never been big on public displays of affection. Now she knew why.

Back
by the house, Loch was walking around with Ginger and her family, inspecting the freshly planted flower beds. Purple and yellow pansies winked up at them from fragrant beds of fresh mulch.

“How’s the sketching going?” Ginger asked.