Grayslake: Lion to Get Her (Alpha Lion Shifter Romance) (Kindle Worlds Novella) (The Jamesburg Shifters Book 8) (13 page)

“Yeah. In places I’m not entirely sure I want to be tingling just now.”

“Sure, sure, but still it’s a good kinda tingling, right?” Elaine snickered. “A good sort of queasy?”

Laney nodded. “I guess so, why?”

“Because the way you’re feeling right now is the same way I feel when I watch pretty much any kind of television that features a man in a suit, a uniform, a state of undress, or... hell, even cowboy boots and a hat. As long as he isn’t bull riding. If he’s bull riding, I just wait for him to get gored.”

“Elaine?” Laney asked with a tiny curl to the left end of her lip. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure, I guess.” She let out a long, trailing sigh and smiled when she did. “Sorry, just thinking about that guy of yours. He wears suits
and
flannel shirts, I bet.”

“I bet. So, I can ask you anything, right? We can talk about anything?”

Elaine shook her head as though to clear a cobweb that was wrapped around her brain. “Yeah, shoot.”

“When did you become such a horndog?”

Elaine blustered out another laugh. “Horn ferret. Now shut up and drive. I ain’t gonna let you miss this for the world.”

––––––––

T
he entire library was lit up like a porn store in the middle of a going-nowhere interstate. From stem to stern, press packed into the entrance area that was covered by an awning. In the ten minutes between leaving her house and their arrival at the library, rain had begun.

It was a plodding, slow, fat sort of rain. The drops seemed to tumble from the air and loop over themselves on the way down before they finally flopped on the ground, splashing and soaking the concrete in a layer of almost greasy moisture. Laney pulled her car to a halting, hitching stop and turned off the lights first, but let the engine idle. There was so much press, and other assorted humanity gathered in front of the library that the normal parking lot had overflowed, and the dynamic duo were forced to park across the street, near the alley where Laney chased old Samuel earlier in the day.

“This is gonna suck,” Elaine said, wishing she’d bothered to bring a jacket. The alcohol’s inner warmth was beginning to flag, and a chill took her for a moment.

“I’m not sure I agree,” Laney said.

She shivered too, and clutched her elbows. “I don’t know why I think that, but... I do.”

Elaine smiled, but her lioness friend didn’t notice. Her eyes were strained as she stared into the darkness. The bright lights of camera crews and the pale, flickering white of florescent overhead bulbs gave her the beginnings of a headache, and the changing air pressure didn’t help either.

“Where is he?” she asked a moment later. “Where’s Rip? If he’s not around then what the hell’s going on?”

“Maybe he told them he was coming and hasn’t showed up yet?” Elaine asked, offering a tentative explanation. “I mean, he
did
get shot today, so a little tardiness wouldn’t be all that offensive.”

Nodding, Laney pushed her door open with her foot, and as soon as the first plopping rain drops bashed against her shin, she switched off the ignition. Her attention rapt, she couldn’t bear to look away from the dais, though nothing was happening. She stared harder, narrowing her vision and focusing on the splintered corner of the podium. “That’s where the bullet went,” she said in a hollow voice.

Elaine didn’t reply, she just grabbed Laney’s forearm and held tight in silent support. They took the first few steps toward the crowd. It didn’t seem real; the whole murmur of the crowd felt far away, like a dream that was fading, but still right on the fringes of reality. It wasn’t strange enough that there were all these reporters both from the human and shifter worlds, here in Redby Township. It wasn’t enough that they were, for some reason, hanging out in front of the library and about to have the second press conference of a day with a man who Laney loved and didn’t understand why.

None of that was enough to make her feel this way. For all her anxiety and nerves, Laney was solid. She had the sort of quiet calm that, even when she panicked, no one knew except Laney herself. But even in those moments of panic and terror, she
understood
her emotions and why they were happening. Right then, as she stared at the splintered corner of the podium behind which Rip was standing when the bullet tore into his shoulder, she couldn’t explain, not even in the basest way, why her heart was pounding so hard she thought it might jump out of her chest.

The crowd fell silent, which was new and at once terrifying and refreshing. Something was about to happen, Laney just knew it. From the left of the awning-covered area, there were flashbulbs popping in a way that reminded her of newspaper reporters with things like
moxie
and
pluck
taking still shots of someone who was about to do something very important.

Except, if what she was thinking was right, none of this would be important to anyone listening except her. None of what he was about to say was going to have the slightest bit of impact on anyone on earth except the woman he was going to be directing a whole lot of words at, and who he didn’t even know was there.

She saw a mop of black hair, hardly brushed but somehow perfect in its crookedness, and then she saw, by virtue of another flash going off, a smile with very white teeth.

And that one crooked canine. Seeing the brilliant blasts of light reflecting off his eyes and his teeth and the sharp lines of his cheekbones, Laney made her mind up right then to do something she never thought she would. “If this goes like we both think... hope it will, take my car, yeah?”

She didn’t wait for a response. It didn’t take a split second before she pulled away from Elaine and barreled toward the dais. “Rip!” she screamed out, and relished the way just saying his name felt on her tongue. It was like dripping honey running over her lips.

When he turned to her and caught her gaze, his smoldering eyes, impossibly blue even in the hazy gray of nearly quarter of eleven at night. He smiled for a split second, and then started laughing as he was carried off in the surge of people trying to force him to the pedestal in the middle of the swarm.

For a moment, Laney got the image of an ant hill freshly prodded with a stick. All the ants swirled around with a purpose that anyone looking on from above could see: they were rebuilding the walls, emptying out tunnels. But there was no way to tell from their level that there was any order to their actions, except that they somehow
did
know.

“What are you doing in this nowhere town, Rip?” one of the peanuts in the gallery shouted at him as he ascended the little platform and adjusted a microphone. He waved at them to quiet down, but that was about as lucky as Laney tearing off her shirt and jumping on him. Actually, it was quite a bit
less
likely, as she thought about the whole scenario. “What were you doing earlier when you got shot?” Someone else asked. Laney was starting to get irritated for Rip at all the people croaking at him.

“How are you here when you got shot? Shouldn’t you be in a hospital?” that one was a human reporter. The shifter reporters all started laughing, and the human couldn’t figure it out. After a couple of uncomfortable seconds, he asked a different question to clear the air: “Is this some kind of re-emergence for you? What message are you here to give? Are you running for President?”

That
got everyone roaring. The idea of Rip, the playful lion-shifter with a slightly wild view of how shifters should act, and a penchant for running around without any pants on, being the leader of the free world gave Laney a shot of amusement. She pictured him standing in the middle of a State of the Union address, shirtless, behind a podium. And then when he started getting into the speech and stepped out from behind, he would show off that just like in Texas, everything is bigger with shifters.

She took a deep breath, and at exactly the same time, Rip lifted his hands again. “Enough!” he shouted into the mic. “If you want to ask questions, fine, but you need to wait for me to actually say what I’m here to say.”

He cleared his throat and kept waving his hands around. It reminded Laney a whole lot of the cubs at Kiddie Time when she, or anyone else for that matter, tried to get their attention. She glanced around the crowd briefly, and then her eyes settled once again on Rip. When she did, she caught him staring at her. Straight, directly, hungrily, at her—no, into her—his eyes burned the same way Laney’s nerves did.

For the few seconds they held one another’s gaze, there was more exchanged than there could have been in three weeks of talking. He’d known she would come, and she had. She’s known, somehow, that he wasn’t going to go anywhere without seeing her again.

The fact that the two of them were there, and were staring at one another, meant that they could count on each other. That whole business about fate and mating and what-all else that Laney never believed? She was seeing it unfold right before her very eyes.

“I,” Rip started as soon as the crowd fell silent, “came here three months ago. I needed to, as some of you know, get away from what I made and never meant to make. At least, not as far as it went.”

He took a deep breath and looked over at Laney again, like he was drawing on her for the strength to do something he needed to accomplish, but that every fiber of his being fought back against with all its strength. She felt his nervous energy in the way he kept smiling between sentences. As he ran through a speech about how his life had changed in the past six years of what he called ‘advocacy’, Rip kept watching her. He was a dynamite speaker, so he was looking around like you’re supposed to do to make the audience all feel engaged. But after every sweep of the reporters in the audience, he came back to her.

Like he’s coming home
, she thought.
Like everything that he’s talking about led him here. Like the whole universe was built just to make this happen
.

She shook her head and couldn’t help but laugh at herself as she ran through the mystical possibilities.
No, what happened is that two people met under weird circumstances, and both of them happened to be looking for something they didn’t even realize they wanted
.
The only thing the universe has to do with anything was that it had the decency to give him gorgeous eyes, and those cheekbones that just about make me want to scream
.

Someone in the front stopped him with a stuttering question. “So does this mean you’re finished? You’re just giving up the fight?”

Rip smiled slowly, not once taking his eyes off Laney. “No,” he said quietly. The rain beating down overhead, and streaming along Laney’s face gave her the strange sense of a cleansing shower; of a healing mist that was washing away whatever it was that haunted Rip for so long.

“I’m finished? Giving up?” Rip laughed. “No,” he said. “I’ve just been talking to some new friends, some people I met in this town. And by the way, quit calling it the middle of nowhere. Stop acting like just because this isn’t some place full of skyscrapers and subway stations... and Subway restaurants, that this place is something less.”

At his chiding, the reporter gaggle fell silent. Rip smiled again, in the way a mischievous kid smiles before delivering a really stellar prank, or the way a heckled comedian grins just before delivering a verbal knockout blow to whoever was stupid enough to try and heckle the guy who talks into a microphone for a living.

“I came here because life in the cities, life on the lecture circuit and the political talk shows, and the morning shows and the book tour circuit was killing me. No, wait, that’s not true. It was fun, and I was doing good work—work that needs to continue—but I was tired. Not tired like a person gets after a long day of trimming trees, either. I was getting tired in the way a person does when their soul is slowly sucked out of them for years and years, and one day they wake up,” he paused just briefly enough for Laney to notice what he’d said, “and look into someone’s eyes that they’ve needed their whole life.”

His eyes just about sparkled. They might have, actually; it was hard to tell with the washed out effect all the stage lighting and massive camera set-ups splattered across the scene. “You open your eyes and you see someone that before that, you’ve only seen in dreamy, vague kinds of ways. Someone you watched from across the room and never quite had the courage to do more than smile at. Someone like...”

Rip’s dramatic pause was better delivered, and more gripping than anything Laney ever heard in a Shakespeare production, or a Rogers and Hammerstein musical that she pretended not to watch. He squinted and arched his hand over his eyes, as though trying to shield his vision from a terrible glare. “Where are you?” he asked, like he didn’t know. He was staring straight at her, but he was smiling the whole time. Either that, or he was waiting for
her
to out herself, which was downright polite, Laney thought. How many bombastic, and apparently popular people, would have the wherewithal to let someone out themselves to the press instead of just blundering onward?

This one
, Laney thought.
This guy would, but to say he’s just those things is about the biggest understatement in the world
.

Rain streaked her hair, plastering the fiery copper waves against the chilled skin on her forehead and her cheeks. A rush of cold coursed through her, followed by a wave of delicious, all-encompassing warmth. She felt it from the center of her being outward. Tingling, electric snakes ran down her belly, around her thighs, and all the way down her arms and legs to her fingers and toes.

Smiling, Laney pointed at herself and gave Rip the fakest “who me?” look anyone had ever managed to throw out. He extended a hand as though to ask for a dance, and she watched in awe as the huge gaggle of humanity and shifters parted in front of her. They all turned, more or less in unison, and as they did, Laney’s heart jumped straight up into her throat.

Laney had never been the demurring type. She hated it when Disney princesses acted helpless, and she hated even more when heroines in novels ended up clutching their pearls and waiting for a hero to come and sweep them off their feet. And it isn’t like she was exactly doing that; she certainly wasn’t wearing any pearls to clutch, but this was a new feeling. An entirely new, bizarre feeling that she couldn’t describe, and just like when she couldn’t name her feelings or understand why she was having them, she hated it.