Accidentally Catty (28 page)

Shaw’s head bobbed upward. “What?”

“Uh-huh. Thass what I heard. Nobody of consequence told me, so don’t think I got some important stoolie or nuthin’. Just a harmless demon thass been around awhile. There ain’t any of ya that can make baby cougars to add to the breed, either, add to that the fact that there ain’t been a baby cougar by a shifter in almost sixty years, and you all dyin’ off. And somebody likes it that way.”

Katie’s sharp gasp filled the room. “But why?”

Darnell’s wide shoulders shrugged. “I don’t know whass gone wrong or why, but you all ain’t reproducin’ nuthin’. That just leaves the elders in your community—whoever they are—and now you, Doc, and Shaw here.”

“Which means all that moaning and groaning coming from your room is officially considered safe sex, huh, Doc?” Nina said on a snort, Wanda hot on her heels.

Katie blanched.

“Nina Statleon! I told you to stay put, you eavesdropper. God, do you always have to be so crass?” Wanda yelped.

Nina gave her a blank stare. “Yep.”

Wanda’s eyes narrowed. “You are the ultimate heathen! I told you to give them some privacy, didn’t I?”

She gave an embarrassed Darnell a playful shot to the arm. “I can’t help it. Jesus, Wanda. It isn’t my fault I have fucking super hearing. It’s not like they were whispering. And it’s true. They’re all ridin’ each other like that roller-coaster Hercules every fucking night, screamin’ with their hands in the air to catch a wave. I’m nocturnal. I hear shit. Sue me.”

Katie’s face flamed red, but Shaw had the nerve to chuckle.
Chuckle.
“Ah, Nina. Ever honest. I find it, despite an almost always jaw-dropping reaction, very refreshing.”

Nina grinned, tightening her hoodie around her head. “Thanks, Spanky-Beck-Shaw. So what’s up with the chick?”

“The chick?” Darnell repeated, making cooing noises at Paulie, who responded by burying his nose in Darnell’s Giants jersey.

“Yeah. This Nissa. I told you, Doc. There’s always a woman, and I’d bet my tolerance for two and half bites of Twinkie that that bitch wants your ass dead. Maybe she’s Three Name’s wife or some shit. I dunno. I just know it’s always the way. There’s always a woman, usually rabid and out-of-her-bird jealous. I called it. Just you remember that when we have to beat the whore down.” She gave them all a pointed look.

Wanda’s lips were turning blue from the clear effort not to slug Nina. Grabbing her by the back of her hoodie, she yanked her hard. “When will you realize you only make things worse? You’re like some metaphoric spoon, always ready to hop into a pot of boiling pasta and stir. Go. Teeny needs help with her pressure socks.” Wanda gave her a hard shove in the direction of the bedrooms upstairs.

Nina slunk off, but not without a parting shot and the flip upward of her middle finger. “Spanky-Beck-Shaw thinks I’m refreshing. So in your face,” she muttered.

Wanda gave Darnell a hug. “I’m sorry. You know Nina. You all finish chatting, and when you’re ready to tell us what you know, please do. I’ll be upstairs beating Nina with a wire hanger until she screams, ‘Please, Mommy! No more wire hangers!’” She laughed at her clever joke and followed Nina’s path.

Katie’d had a moment to gather herself, and the questions had begun forming. “So maybe what Dr. Green was doing had something to do with the shifting population dying out? Maybe whoever tried to kill him knew he knew something? Maybe he was researching a cure? Or maybe he was using them as guinea pigs to find out why they can’t shift?”

Now Shaw’s typically tan skin turned pale. “Maybe when Daniel said we have to save them, he meant the other cougars at the park? Jesus Christ, Katie. Maybe they’re shifters, too?”

Oh. Hell. “Do you think that’s why that cougar jumped up on the glass? Remember, Shaw? I couldn’t tear you away. Maybe, much like when I shifted, if the cougars at the park are half human, half cougar, they can understand everything we say, but they can’t do anything about it because they’re in cougar form?” Though she’d only experienced it briefly, it was painfully frustrating. Dear God, how awful.

Shaw began a brisk pace across the braided rugs, stepping over a sleeping Dozer. “There were at least five or six of them in that sanctuary, Katie. So why wouldn’t they just shift and get the hell out?”

“Well, why didn’t you? According to Tink and Delray, you were there for several weeks, and you didn’t shift until you were in that cage here in my office. Maybe they can’t shift? Maybe it’s why you haven’t shifted? Maybe it’s why I haven’t shifted since that night? I don’t know. I haven’t even twinged since that night. I had a horrible buzzing in my head that just kept growing worse, and then it felt like everything was falling away—out from under me—around me—off of me. But since then, nothing.”

Shaw dragged a hand through his hair. “Fuck,” he swore, clearly frustrated, as he almost never used a word so harsh. “I don’t know. I just know I felt a connection with that cougar. It wasn’t like she was talking to me in my head the way the other animals have. I just couldn’t tear my eyes away from her.”

Katie’s eyes filled with tears, her anguish over her own dilemma all but gone. “We have to help them.”

“That’s gonna be hard to do,” Kaih said, entering the room from the outer office.

“Why?” Both Shaw and Katie asked in unison.

Kaih jammed his hands into his lab coat, his face grim. “Because they moved them all today. Every last one of them and all the other exotics. They’re closing the park, and everyone in town’s blaming you and the ‘city people’ as they call them, for it.”

Katie let her head sink to her chest as she sat on the edge of her bathtub to steady her shaking legs. She stared at her red painted toenails, lost in thought.

“Katie Minerva! You okay in there?” Aunt Teeny knocked on the door with harsh knuckles.

She cringed at the use of her middle name. “Fine, Aunt Teeny. I’m fine.” Fine. Fine. Fine.

“Why do you need time?” Teeny yelled.

Katie pressed a hand to her clammy forehead, pinching her cheeks for color before cracking open the door from her seat on the edge of the tub. “I said I’m fine, Aunt Teeny. I’ll be out in a minute.”

Teeny poked her do-ragged head in. She’d liked Darnell’s so much, he’d given it to her. “What’s a matter with you, girl? Breakfast’s waitin’ on you. I made some mush. Hurry up before it gets cold.”

Her stomach roiled. “I’ll be right there. Just finishing up,” she managed.

Her aunt gave her a toothless grin. “Get to crack-a-lackin’, young lady. We’re all goin’ pumpkin pickin’.You don’t wanna miss that Nina stompin’ though Guthrie’s pumpkin patch like he owes her money, do ya? She’s a card, that one. Then we’re gonna do a hayride. So hurry it up.”

She groaned as Shaw’s head replaced Teeny’s.

“Ahem. Katie Minerva, what seems to be the trouble? You’re missing mush.
Mush
,” Shaw emphasized with a grin, rubbing his hard belly in a circle on his latest flannel shirt.

Teeny gave him a lascivious grin and a wink before patting him on the shoulder and saying, “You see what you can do with her. She’s been a persnickety little flower past few days.”

He pushed his way into the tiny upstairs bathroom with its pedestal sink and avocado-and-yellow wallpaper. He pulled her head to his hip, stroking her hair. The comforting scent of his maleness made her sigh. Even feeling the way she was. “What’s the matter?”

She closed her eyes and allowed him to comfort her. But it would only last a moment because she was on the verge of losing her mind. “I don’t feel well.”

“I can understand why. This bathroom’s wallpaper is just this much away from vomit inducing. We’ll have to see if we can’t replace it.”

Before he ditched her for this Nissa? Or did he plan to tell his maybe-wife he had to go help the old lady with her wallpaper as one last gesture of kindness for taking in his amnesia-riddled ass?

Since Darnell had dropped the “Nissa” bomb, and the whole extinction thing, and no one could locate the animals that had been moved, add to that the fact that Nina said there was always a woman involved made Katie an edgy, conflicted, upset, hormonal wreck. She’d wracked her brain and used the last two of the connections in the city she had who’d believed her innocence to find those animals to no avail. No one knew anything about exotics having been transferred anywhere. It kept her up at night, worrying for their well-being and their care. The possibility that they were trapped in bodies they couldn’t escape.

And now she had this.

This. This. Thiiiis.

Shaw nudged her over on the small ledge and knocked her shoulder with his. “Want to talk about it?”

Yeah. “No.”

“You do, too. Who wouldn’t want to talk to me? I’m charming and witty and almost always in a good mood.”

“And I’m what? A troll?”

He popped his lip-smacking-good lips. “You do have trollish properties, especially these past couple of days.”

Five to be exact. “I’m tired.”

“And mean.”

And . . . Oh, she couldn’t think it. “I’m not mean.” Weak, but mostly true if you didn’t count the ridiculous hissy fit she’d pitched because Shaw had moved the rib eye steaks from one freezer to another.

“Have you forgotten Steak-Gate? I thought you were going to produce chickens right there on the kitchen floor.”

Katie winced. “I was hungry, and I like order. You changed the order of things.” Which was also true. She just didn’t like it so much she’d cry in gulping, sobbing tears over the loss of it.

“You’re touchy and crabby. Do you think it’s because we frolic like teenagers until all hours of the morning? I mean, I’m all for letting you get your beauty sleep, but you’re an animal. There’s just no keeping you away. I’m like your crack,” he joked, slinging an arm around her.

She was in absolutely no mood to joke. “If I were you, know what I’d do?”

“What’s that, beautiful?”

She gave him a hard nudge. “Back. Off!”

Shaw fell on the floor, leaving him awkwardly pressed up against the pedestal of the sink. He tilted his head backward to gaze up at her. “Is it your womanly time? Do you want me to make you some tea and rub your back? Maybe a hot water bottle to soothe those pesky cramps.”

Oh-oh-oh! She was going to kill him. Anger, hot and spiky, hit her gut hard. Latching onto his luxurious hair, she pulled his head to her lap. “No. I
do not
want you to bring me tea or a hot-water bottle, and I definitely don’t ever want you to touch me again! Ever, ever, eeeever.” She dragged the word out, low and harsh. “Know why that is,
Shaw
?” She sneered his name, putting every ounce of pent-up frustration she had in saying it.

“Why would you ever want to give up all this?” he joked, running his hand along the length of his body.

“Because all that gave me this!” she shouted, pulling the pink stick from the pocket of her sweatshirt and let it dangle before his blue-blue eyes.

Which were now large with surprise.

His mouth fell open—so wide she wanted to ram the damn pink stick down his throat with the final destination being an exit from his ass.

Shaw forced her to let go of his hair and scooted back upward to the edge of the tub. “There’s a song about this, right? Paul Anka, I think. Yep. That’s the one.”

“One more joke and I’ll take you out,” she seethed under her breath, gripping her fists to keep from right-hooking him. “You know what I’d like to know, don’t you? How in the everloving fuck did I end up with child if us crazy cougar shifters are unable to procreate and I’m on the pill? What are you, super-sperm-Shaw?”

And then he did something strange, yet totally Shaw-esque.

He smiled. That smile turned into a wide grin. That wide grin turned into a bark of laughter.

Now Katie’s mouth fell open as she pointed to her stomach. “
This
is funny?”

He threw his arm over his mouth to muffle the squeals coming from his throat.

“I’m pregnant, you sex maniac! All those nights you conned me into doing the wild thing in every available corner of our rooms and the shower, and you have the nerve to laugh at me being knocked up? How dare you laugh! I swear by all that’s holy, if you don’t stop right now, I’m going to make Nina look like a novice street fighter by the time I’m done with you!”

He gasped, wiping tears from his eyes with his thumbs, then trying to pull her into his arms. “I’m so—” He snorted, gasping again. Clearing his throat, he bit his top lip with his bottom teeth to fight for composure. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh-laugh. This is brilliant, Katie. I couldn’t be happier.”

Her eyes had surely found their way out of their sockets. “
What?
Are you crazy? Happy?”
Happy?

He nodded his dark head. “Yep. That’s what I said.”

“Hey, coo-koo-ca-choo, have you forgotten everything that’s happened?”

Shaw’s stare was purposefully blank as he forced his face to go blank, too. “In fact, yes.”

She made a face at him, full of disapproval. “I don’t mean that, amnesiac! I mean have you forgotten that I’m almost forty-one years old and pregnant? High risk where I come from, buddy. I can’t even go see an ob-gyn. How will I ever explain I’m going to have a
cat
? Oh, Jesus,” she rambled with hysterical breathlessness. “What if I have a litter? How does this work? Oh, forget it,” she said, looking down at him. “You don’t know. Perfect. This is so much awesome. Not only am I going to have a—a—whatever—we don’t even know if it’ll be human! Not to mention the fact that we have no idea if you should have impregnated me to begin with because this Nissa Dr. Green spoke of could be someone important to you—like—like—maybe your wife? Tack on your age, and I could well be impregnated by a man who’s young enough to be my son. And let’s not forget the thing about the cougar population becoming extinct and no babies for whateverthehell time frame that was!”