Just One Taste (18 page)

J
une

“
H
ere
, kitty, kitty.”

Lyra Anders reached under the bed and grabbed the first weapon at hand. She lobbed a fuzzy tiger paw bedroom slipper at her brother. Missed him by a mile. Her glasses were still on the trunk she used as a bedside table, along with the romance novel she put herself to sleep with. She picked up the book. “Get out.”

“You won’t hit me with that either.” Flynn plopped down on the bed. “It’s time to wake up, sunshine. Rough night?”

“You know it wasn’t.” She scooted up against her pillows and put her glasses on. Tortoise shell to match her golden brown eyes and streaky golden brown hair, which currently looked like she’d ridden around the island in a convertible with the top down. Her skin was golden brown too, the result of spending much of the spring outdoors readying the inn for the first of their summer company that was arriving on the eleven o’clock ferry. She glanced at the clock radio. In five hours.

“Jeez, Flynn, it’s 6 A.M.!”

“I’ve been up for hours. Gotta get in training, Lyra. Tomorrow our guests will be expecting a big breakfast in exactly one hour.”

“Yeah, and
you’re
doing all the prep work and cooking, remember? I’m just the hostess. And nobody will be down until after eight, anyway. Maybe even nine. That’s always the way it is every summer.”

Every
summer was a bit of an exaggeration. Lyra and Flynn Anders had only been running the Perch for a year. They had quit their “real” jobs and now worked like slavering dogs, as Flynn had once complained. He’d turned handyman, cooked three meals a day and mixed a mean cocktail, and Lyra did everything else from wash and change the sheets to flower arranging to soothing ruffled hackles.

By the end of last season they had both smiled so much against their will and stood so long on tired feet they wondered if they should just sell the inn and go back to real life, but the winter had afforded them the opportunity to streamline and subtract their duties so they wouldn’t want to immolate themselves by the fourth of July.

Meals could be served buffet and family style. Sheets could be changed every other day. Guests could amuse themselves.

Lyra and Flynn offered two-week sessions from mid-June through Columbus Day at their inherited island retreat for a ridiculously astronomical amount. Their very special guests were entitled to gourmet dining, kayaking, hiking, swimming, fishing, bicycling, leaf-peeping and limitless discretion. Despite the rates, the inn was already fully booked for the season.

Their grandmother would be spinning in her grave if she had known what the twins had done to her rambling shingled “cottage” on its exclusive Maine island. The old girl had valued her privacy and possessions and twelve bedroom suites. The house had seen plenty of shifter parties in its day, but Lyra and Flynn meant to make some money on the privacy, possessions and bedrooms from shifters like themselves who were looking for someplace to
be
themselves.

They’d managed to make it through last winter with a little money to spare. It had helped that Lyra did some free-lance website design. Her art degree was finally being put to use after she had spent the five years since college in dead-end office jobs. Flynn had kept an eye on a couple of empty summer houses, plowed snow, tutored a couple of island kids and pulled in enough.

Enough for Lyra to replant the gardens with plenty of catmint and white perennials that reflected the moonlight. Enough to advertise on the Frisky Felines website, a cat shifter singles dating site. Tonight every bed would be slept in—that is, if sleep was desired. Lyra figured most of the guests would be rolling in the fresh-cut grass watching the moon’s beam waver on the water. Engaging in a little tumble and personal grooming. She felt a little shiver as she imagined a nice warm rough tongue right where she wanted it.

A few weeks of the summer were dedicated to family-style vacations. Couples came with their kits and explored the fourteen-mile jumble of rocks and fields and sandy beaches that made up Jessie’s Island. But Lyra and Flynn had decided to start their season off with a bang, so to speak. Single cats who’d been confined to city suits and sunless canyons would be able to let loose under the clear skies and ocean breezes of Maine.

The Perch was down a meandering peastone drive, obscured from the road by a thick pine forest. There was plenty of acreage to roam for her fellow shifters, and no worry that she and Flynn would be alarmed at any unusual midnight yowling. In fact, Lyra planned on welcoming her guests personally. She had a winter-long itch, and was hoping one of the male guests could be persuaded to scratch it.

The island pretty much shut down to visitors from October through May, and none of the local boys had any appeal for Lyra. Although there were a couple of burly lobsterman who talked a good game about hunting and local wildlife, she doubted they’d be able make it through her transition alive.

Good thing the island was too small for the discharge of firearms, or she and Flynn might have found themselves mounted over somebody’s beachrock fireplace if they’d been spied running loose in their natural state. Cougars were rare enough in Maine. Only two had been sighted in the last decade and that was just how she and Flynn liked it.

But in five hours, well, four hours and forty-five minutes now, cars would be rolling off the ferry and down the island’s single looping road to the Perch. Flynn would have a simple lunch of lobster salad sandwiches, chips, fruit, cookies, beer and wine for them. She’d distribute the info packets with maps and recommendations, do a little ice-breaking. There were new bicycles in the barn for day trips, and new kayaks in the boathouse. A family-style dinner was served at eight in the paneled dining room, and after that—

Lyra grinned to herself. She was going to get lucky, or pretty much die trying.

There was something soothing about the glassy gray water and green hillocks as the old white ferry plowed across the bay. Ben Cooper sat in his car with the windows down. His dark hair was whipped by the same wind that propelled a few scattered sailboats. He could see a square lighthouse in the distance.

He thought he’d already figured who the shifters were as they’d waited in the twenty-car ferry line, and not just because most of them were driving late model SUVs and cars as opposed to the rusty trucks the islanders seemed to favor. He knew as well as anybody that while lobstermen and carpenters always downplayed how much they made, they did pretty well and could have afforded more than the gimme caps and plaid shirts they wore and the junkers they drove. But there was a tension in the air, practically a vibration, coming from certain quarters.

It was still a little too early in the season for the New York and Philadelphia summer people to invade the quiet of Jessie’s Island, and that was fine by Ben. He’d spent enough time the past two years teaching and coaching in a private boarding school filled with their kids.

In fact, he’d first heard of Jessie’s island from Trevor Angus Howard the Third, his star pitcher and a summer resident. Thank God the kid was with his parents and sisters in Tuscany, because Ben didn’t want to have to stay prim and proper one more day. For longer than he cared to consider, he’d felt like a guy wearing a shirt collar that was two sizes too small. It was time to loosen the tie and let the buttons fly.

He’d tapped into his savings for this vacation when he first read about the Perch on Frisky Felines. His salary was nothing to write home about now, if he’d still had a home. His current faculty apartment was nothing to brag about either. He’d seen the inside of more impersonal hotel rooms than any guy should. His major league career had turned out to be in the minors, and once he’d trashed his shoulder, his pitching days were done.

He had been twenty-four then and unemployed. But he’d always liked kids and had some student teaching under his belt, thanks to the nagging of his parents. They had taught middle school kids for a thousand years and were more than pleased with his choice. Cranford Academy needed a health teacher and baseball coach, and he guessed he needed Cranford Academy. After the headmaster explained part of his “benefits” included an apartment attached to a dormitory with a dozen kids and three meals in the school dining hall seated with his advisees every day, he’d almost turned the job down. But he was looking for some structure in his life now that he couldn’t play ball anymore.

In fact, he’d thrown himself into structure for years—scaffolding, mummification practically, ever since the first night he’d gone from teenage boy to panther. The girl he’d been with fainted dead away as he’d retracted his claws and played dumb when she came to. Playing dumb was not hard, because his transformation had been as much of a shock to him as it had to poor Heather O’Reilly.

His family couldn’t help him; he’d been adopted as an infant. A kitten, he thought wryly, and they didn’t have a clue as they’d tucked him in at night and read him The Jungle Book. He hadn’t even been able to talk them into extending his curfew past 11 P.M. in high school, they were that strict.

What was he supposed to do, go home and say, “Hey. guys, I wonder if you can help me. The other night when I was trying to screw this girl, I turned into a big black cat?”

They would have locked him up in a loony bin somewhere.

Thank God for the Internet. It had taken him a while, but he finally figured out what was going on, and it had scared the shit out of him. He discovered that what had happened with Heather was an aberration, that his general all-around teenage horniness had inadvertently triggered the panther part of him. Usually shifting was an organized, planned process. There were actual words to say. It was true sometimes the change became involuntary, if you were physically threatened, overstimulated or exposed to violence.

He wondered if shifter soldiers through the ages had thrown down their guns, turned and just ate their enemies.

And Ben guessed he’d really lucked out. If he’d changed in the act of taking poor Heather to teenage boy’s heaven, he would have killed her if she hadn’t been a shifter too. And if she had been, he would have had to marry her and make her his life mate. Not exactly what he had in mind when he tried to get into her pants after the junior class winter formal. The whole destined mate thing was something even now he didn’t much want to experience, even though a decade had passed.

He’d read every word about controlling his transformations and channeled all his powers away into sports. Soccer, wrestling, baseball. Lacrosse and rugby when he could find kids who knew the rules.

He was fast. He was strong. He was scared. He’d spent almost ten years surrounding himself with people who didn’t give him time to get in touch with his animal side except in an organized sports way. But his animal side was banging on the door right now, and the sooner he got to the island to open that door, the happier he’d be.

He’d checked out the shifter girls already as they’d sauntered between the ferry terminal and their nice clean cars. He just knew. The animal instinct thing was no lie. Funny how shifters hadn’t seemed to settle in his part of Connecticut when he was growing up, the raven-haired adopted son of blond school teachers. He’d never, ever sensed—no, smelled—anything like what was wafting across the parking lot here on the Maine coast.

The females were sleek. Self-confident. The Perch guaranteed each singles session was equally divided between males and females, so mating was an unstated but foregone conclusion. He wondered which one—or more—he’d wind up with tonight.

Ben had gone through a very dry spell since he was cut from his team. It was always easy to find girls on the road—all those baseball movies were mostly true—and he knew how to rein himself in and not scratch some poor Baseball Annie to death.

But living in a boarding school did not present the smorgasbord of sensual delights he’d once taken for granted. And the chance to be himself—to not hold any part of him back with others such as he—would be a novelty. Nobody’d get freaked out if they got nicked and bitten some. In fact, they’d expect it.

Didn’t that beat all. Ben Cooper guessed he was really a virgin. He’d had more than his share of pretty human girls—anyone as pretty as he was himself was bound to score—but never had encountered another cat in all his travels. It was time he stopped denying who he was, what he was. For two weeks he was going to experience everything he’d refused to consider as he tried to be “normal.”

He looked in his rear view mirror. A charmingly freckled redhead sat behind the wheel of the parked car, her long fingernails tapping impatiently. As the ferry clipped through the waves, the cars shifted some. His senses were on full alert now. She was no islander’s wife, coming home from the mainland with a week’s worth of groceries. She was a cat on vacation.

When the ferry bumped into the pen, Ben felt a thrill. The air was perfumed with beach roses and salt water. A flotilla of lobster boats was moored at the landing, home already from their morning runs. A couple of grizzled guys were waiting on the dock to load up some containers of lobsters for the return trip.

The DOT workers fiddled around with the ramp, and soon a snake of cars made its way past the little white lighthouse. It was long out of commission, but Ben saw the sign that said it was open to the public to explore. He might do that one rainy afternoon, if he wasn’t in someone’s bed.

He had a map on the passenger seat, but he realized he could just follow all the other bright, shiny cars ahead of him. The island only had one main road anyhow, with glimpses of blue water behind simple old farmhouses and a general store at the fork.

Must be pretty dead in the winter time, he thought. The Perch was the only hotel on the island, and its dining room was for guests only. There was lots of old money here, people with their own chefs and maids for cocktail parties, Trevor had told him. The Howards owned some huge monstrosity on the “rich” end of the island. The Perch was up-island, built by the Anders family, who were plenty rich before the stock market crashed in 1929 but needed their privacy so they could keep their furry little secret.