His Purrfect Mate (7 page)

Wit
h each breath that she drew in came the coppery tang of blood, and the thick, heavy smell of lion.  There were wolves in the house. She might be able to take on one wolf, but multiple wolves? A wolf pack could bring her down and rip her throat out.

Down
the entry hallway that led to a massive foyer, she saw paintings had been pulled from the walls and lay in shreds and splinters on the floor.  A wooden table had been overturned and the hallway rug had been wrinkled back.  From deep inside the house, she heard growls, growing closer.

Heart pounding in her chest, she turned and ran from the house, the
wolves in hot pursuit. She could hear them thudding through the house, and their roars tore through the air. 

Should she try to run for it? They could probably outrun her – odds were she’d trip over something before she’d made it a quarter mile.

Outside the house, her heart skipped a beat when she saw a massive panther flanked by a Kodiak bear running straight towards her - and then she scented that the panther was Kenneth, and the bear seemed to be with him.   Kenneth’s limo was parked next to her car. 

She skidded to a stop, and quickly shifted
to panther form.

She turned back to the house, and saw three massive
gray wolves in the foyer, staring at her and Kenneth and the bear.  Apparently they decided that taking on the three of them would be more trouble than it was worth, because they turned and raced back into the house.  A minute later, she saw them running out the back door, and into the woods.

Chloe glanced over at Kenneth to see what he’d do next. He crouched low, with an angry growl rumbling from his chest, his tail lashing the air furiously, but he didn’t pursue.  The bear, tall as a tree, let out a threatening bellow that split the air, and the lions ran faster, vanishing over the horizon.

She couldn’t help but notice how beautiful Kenneth was in panther form, eyes glowing a luminous blue, his massive muscles rippling beneath his glossy black fur. When his lips curled back they revealed fangs as white as ivory, and she suppressed a small shudder; she wouldn’t want to be on Kenneth’s bad side.

Focus, she scolded herself. 
Chloe shifted back, grabbing her sweater from the ground and pulling it over her now-naked body. Fortunately, it was a big, thick sweater that hung down to her mid-thigh; she hugged it around herself, shivering.

Kenneth and the bear also shifted back; Kenneth picked up his shirt from the grou
nd and tied it around his waist like a loincloth, and the bear followed suit. Neither of them seemed to feel the cold, or maybe they thought it wasn’t manly to shiver.

“What the hell?” Chloe
demanded. “What are you doing here? I mean, thank you for rescuing me, but why are you here?”

“I followed you from your house.”

“Why?”

“I had a feeling that I should.”

Well, his feeling had obviously been accurate – unless he was somehow behind all this.  She didn’t want to believe that of him.

She glanced at the house. “I need to see if my grandmother is
in there,” she said.  “She didn’t answer me when I called to her, and I smelled blood.”

Kenneth nodded. “
I could smell it too, from outside.  We’ll search the house.  Stay behind me.”

She followed him
and the bear shifter inside, catching glimpses of Kenneth’s bare butt as they walked down the halls. It was a magnificent gluteus maximus, round, firm, perfectly sculpted. His legs were thick as tree trunks and well muscled, the legs of a man who spent many hours at the gym every week.

She tore her mind away from his perfect body. Her grandmother’s house had just been broken into
and her grandmother was apparently missing; what was wrong with her, checking out Kenneth’s butt at a time like this?  Kenneth somehow brought out her inner pervert; she couldn’t stop thinking about sex when she was around him, no matter how inappropriate the timing.

“Grandmother?” she called out.  There was no answer; she’d had a feeling there wouldn’t be.

She saw Kenneth looking around and knew that he was thinking the same thing that she was thinking: this is the house of a crazy person.

Thick dust coated most of the surfaces
.   Paintings were piled up haphazardly on tabletops, sheets were draped over furniture.  All the mirrors in the house, bizarrely, had sheets taped over them with blue duct tape.

There were foot prints in the dust, some of them small, most likely her grandmother’s, and then larger ones, possibly from the wolf shifters.

They raced through the house, through dozens of rooms, calling Sophronia’s name, but she was nowhere to be found. Chloe struggled to keep up with Kenneth, stumbling over rugs and bumping into furniture.  Kenneth kept glancing back to make sure she was still with him.

The furniture smelled moldy and everywhere they ran, clouds of dust flew up from their feet and floated in the sunbeams that shot through the windows. 

They ended up in the kitchen, where a great pool of blood, already drying, spread out across the tile floor. Chloe stared at it, judging its size, trying to decide if somebody could survive the loss of that much blood.  Flies buzzed around the pool and skated on the surface of the thick red pond.

“
Is that her blood? She told me to meet her here at noon. Where is she? The lion shifters didn’t take her, we would have seen her with them when they ran out the back.”

“
There’s a lot we don’t know about your grandmother,” Kenneth said.   “I need to tell you some things I found out yesterday.  My grandfather didn’t leave your grandmother for another woman. After things ended between him and your grandmother, he waited five years before marrying again.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Chloe protested.
“If he didn’t break off his engagement for a woman, why would he break it off?”

“Very little about this
makes sense,” Kenneth said. “And it’s all the more reason for you to come work for me. Help me catalogue the artwork.  There’s some mystery revolving around those specific pieces that were stolen, something that might help us figure out what happened all those years ago. Did you know that your grandmother repeatedly tried to break into my grandfather’s house after they broke things off?  Did you know she ended up going to jail for it, and losing her job at the university?”

“
Why would my grandmother lie to my mother about all that?”

“Well…”Kenneth said delicately
, glancing around the kitchen.  A teetering mountain of dirty, moldy dishes piled in the sink, thick gray dust coating the counters like fur…”Your grandmother clearly had some…issues.”

“
She was normal before she met your grandfather. Everyone says so.  You know, forget it, I don’t have time to argue about this.   Damn it, I can’t even call the police from here because my cell phone doesn’t work,” Chloe said, frustrated.

Kenneth nodded at a phone on the kitchen counter. “Oh,” she said. “I forgot about landlines.” She grabbed the receiver and held it up to her ear. 

“No dial tone.  The intruders must have cut the phone line,” she said with a shudder, imagining the lions creeping through the grass and slashing the lines.

She was glad Kenneth and his chauffer were still there.   The house felt lonely and haunted. 
She wished she could turn to Kenneth for comfort, to let him wrap his arms around her – not, of course, because she wanted
him,
as much as she wanted to feel his warmth and strength wrap around her.

If they found
Sophronia alive somewhere, she thought, she would insist that she seek professional help.  It was horrifying that Sophronia had lived like this for as long as she had.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, heading for the front door and glancing askance at the pool of blood.  Kenneth and the chauffer followed her.  “I’ll follow you into town to make sure that you’re all right,” Kenneth said. “Then we can-“

“There is no ‘we’,” she cut him off quickly. She had to stop him talking because she felt weak and scared and she wanted his help more than anything, and she didn’t dare to depend on him or trust him.   How had he known to follow her?   Was he really there just to help, or was Alfonse right – did he have his own secret agenda? The last time a woman from her family had depended on a Chamberlin, things hadn’t ended well at all.   “Right now my only concern is the safety of my grandmother and my mother.   \.”

* * *

“Mother,
you need to tell me the truth about Sophronia.”

The day after her grandmother’s disappearance,
Chloe had done research all morning and then driven to Syracuse, to her mother’s antique shop. They sat in the store at a Victorian drop-leaf table made of black walnut, which had a “for sale” sign dangling from it.  Hilary had brewed tea for both of them, carefully setting it on placemats on the table.  She lived in the former servant’s quarters behind the store.

The store was a
sprawling old Victorian home which was crammed with a beautiful explosion of clutter, mostly European, 18
th
century to the present, but there was one entire section dedicated, rather incongruously, to middle Eastern art.  Chloe had never questioned it before; now she found herself wondering if that was Sophronia’s influence.   Sophronia had given the shop to her mother.

There were
circles under her mother’s eyes, and her mother was twisting a cloth handkerchief and untwisting it.

Sophronia
was still missing.

She’d
spent hours at the police station the day before, and they’d come up with nothing useful.  The blood in the kitchen was definitely that of a panther shifter, the police had informed her.    The police hadn’t found any sign of Sophronia. No ransom note or telephoned demand for reward money had been received.  She hadn’t checked in to any hospitals, anywhere in New York. The house was in such a state of disorder that it was difficult to tell if anything had been stolen.

“
”What makes you think I haven’t been?”Her mother wasn’t meeting her eyes.

“
Because things just aren’t adding up.  All those things that grandmother told you about Barrett Chamberlin and what he did to her…how closely did you investigate what she said?”

“Well, I…I didn’t,”
Hilary said hesitantly.  “Why would I? I didn’t have any reason to question her.”

Her mother was staring at the table.

“Mother, there is still something that you’re not telling me. I’ve never pushed you on this, because it’s painful for you to talk about, but grandmother is missing, and somebody is breaking into Kenneth Chamberlin’s houses and stealing artwork that sounds very much like the artwork that Sophronia has been seeking. And furthermore, grandmother lied to you about quite a few things.”

At her mother’s startled look, she said “I have spoken to Kenneth Chamberlin
. Don’t give me that look!   He told me that Barrett didn’t get married for five years after he and Sophronia broke it off.   I went through old newspapers this morning to see if I could verify that, and it’s true. He announced his engagement to Sophronia in 1960.   He announced his engagement to Elizabeth in 1965 and married her that year.   Also, according to public records, in 1961 Sophronia broke into his house on multiple occasions, and went to jail for it.  And she was working for Barrett, not the other way around.   Why would she tell so many lies?”

Her mother grimaced, but didn’t look surprised. “I
’m not surprised she lied. I was hoping to never have to tell you about this,” she said. “It’s the curse. Or at least, Sophronia believed there was a curse.”

“What
kind of curse? Why would she be cursed?”

“
It happened after Sophronia and Barrett went to Turak together. Sophronia purchased a collection of artwork, statues, vases, ceramic shards, ceremonial vessels, all of which turned out to have been looted from the tomb of an ancient priest, and she and Barrett brought them back here, and immediately afterwards, that’s when everything in her life fell apart.”

“Mother.
I think it’s very likely that Barrett was the one who purchased the artwork, and I don’t think he actually stole it from her,” Chloe said, gently but firmly. “Sophronia worked for him, not the other way around. She was an adjunct professor, living on an academic’s salary. She wasn’t wealthy. He was. I looked through old newspaper clippings; he was a renowned art collector and adventurer from a young age, before he met her.”

Her mother shrugged unhappily. “I
have no way of knowing if that’s true or not. I do know this much.  I talked to colleagues of hers at the university.  I wanted to know what my mother was like when she was younger, if she…if she’d always hated children, or it was just me, something about me…”

Suddenly her mother was blinking away tears.

Chloe winced in sympathy and grabbed her mother’s hand. She pitied her grandmother for her obviously disturbed mental state, but she also hated what she’d done to Hilary. Hilary had always been such a strong, constant, presence in Chloe’s life (sometimes too present, in fact), that she couldn’t begin to imagine the pain of being abandoned by one’s own mother at birth.  “Good heavens, mother. Of course it’s not you.  You are a wonderful person who takes in stray animals and volunteers at soup kitchens. You have friends. You have me.  You had daddy, until he died. You have like a million friends on Facebook.”