Lion In Wait (A Paranormal Alpha Lion Romance) (7 page)

She wanted to ask how he knew, how he could tell. She wanted to ask what they were going to do, how they were going to get away but the look on her mate’s face told Cass that this wasn’t the time for any questions. It wasn’t the time for anything but silence, and maybe a whole hell of a lot of luck.

“Stay down,” he whispered. “Any luck, they’re drunk. I can take ten of them if they’re sober, but if they’ve been down in the bottle, the two of us could take on that whole camp.”

He laughed bitterly under his breath. “They’re circling out there. Probably trying to kick up their courage. Whatever happens, you stay down, out of sight. Got it?”

Cass narrowed her eyes. “I’m the one that swung a whip, jackass,” she hissed. “I’m not useless in a fight.”

“Yeah, but you’re useless against guns, which I’m sure they have. Like I said, stay down.”

“But guns?” she asked. “Why? Why would they want to kill us?”

Lex shook his head. “You owe him, and as far as he knows, I’m a lion that’s going to kill a bunch of babies and make his carnival look bad. Better dead than red. That’s how the expression goes, right?”

“Something like that,” Cass smirked and grabbed for Lex. He let her catch his bare shoulders and pull him in for one more kiss. “I just had to taste you one more time,” she said. “Don’t get hurt, okay?”

“With you back here, waiting for me?” The lion pulled his lips back in a smile that was as stirring as it was menacing. “Not a chance in the world I’ll let them keep me away from you.”

Just as he was crouching, tensing up, Cass thought to take on his animal form... or whatever he called it, the lights swerved away from the entrance to the cave, and Lex froze in place. The next second, he grabbed her hand, jerking her to her feet. “What’s going on?” she gasped, surprised at the jolt.

“We got one more chance,” Lex said, kissing her hard and deep. “They’re either gone or looking for us. Either way, I’m not gonna regret taking this chance. Come on.”

––––––––

“T
his probably looks
really
weird,” Cass laughed nervously as she bobbed and bucked around on the huge lion’s back. “I’ve never even ridden a horse before. Just think what my mom will say when I tell her about riding a lion.”

“Not a word of this,” Lex growled, through his feline lips with their strange way of distorting his words. “If my soul didn’t burn for you, if my heart wasn’t already yours, I’d never let this happen.”

She grabbed a fistful of mane and squeezed his sides with her thighs, trying to keep balance.

“Either way,” she said. “This is definitely something I’ve never done before, and I’ve done a whole hell of a lot.”

“I’m glad you’re entertained,” he hissed, cresting a slight hill and sinking down low into a depression. The place they were probably held a seasonal river when the rains came, but right now it was just a slightly damper, much lower, place in the desert. “This will keep us out of sight, or at least make it harder to spot.”

“And if they’re in that old pickup, they’d be crazy to try and come down that hill. That old thing would fall end over end,” Cass said, reluctantly stepping off her mount. “Do I have to?”

She laughed at the growl that answered her. “Oh lighten up, Lex,” she slapped his hind quarter. “Live a little. I doubt you’d whine so much if I were riding you the other way.”

He froze. “But I’m so much bigger, how would that—”

Cass shot him a confused glance. “I thought you said you weren’t an alien back there.”

“But riding,” he said, “oh... Oh,
that
sort of riding.” As he shifted back to his deliciously naked human form, he was laughing, and to Cass’s delight, blushing slightly.

“Two things,” she said. “First – don’t you ever get cold? I mean I don’t mind the naked calendar guy thing, but seriously, it’s kinda chilly out here. And second, I can now die happy – I made a magic lion blush.”

“There it is again,” Lex growled, though he was still grinning. “Magic lion. It’s like you think
I
am the strange one.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Cass cracked her back, and rolled down the legs on her jeans. She’d rolled them up to keep from tripping Lex while he was dashing along the desert, but now that they were still again, the chill was growing. “Did you find out about my Super Mario lunchbox collection?”

“You’re still trying to get me to let on that I have no idea what you’re talking about, but we definitely had Nintendo. We’re normal, mostly, we just you know, turn into animals from time to time. Do you have any metal ones?”

A puff came out of Cass’s nose. “I do not have a lunchbox collection. I might not have tricked you into revealing that magic lions don’t know anything about pop culture, but really you just fell into the nerd trap.”

He shook his head, smiling fondly, but distantly, as though his mind was far away, somewhere else entirely.

Shortly, he got up and brushed the dirt from his legs. “Also, no, I don’t get cold.” He grabbed her hand and placed it directly over his heart. “Hot natured.”

She curled her fingers against his bare skin, the warmth penetrating her palm. “Be back,” he whispered, kissed her wrist, and disappeared into the night.

Huddling her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them, Cass had a chance to think for the first time since the great escape. Which really, wasn’t so amazing after all, thinking back on what had happened. They made a distraction, they ran, and that was the end of it. Then again, she’d somehow communicated with a lion, who at the time, she was fairly certain was
just a lion
, and gotten free.

But for what?

She knew Lyle wasn’t going to just let her go. It wasn’t even the money she owed him for all those bails he posted and payments he made to get people off her back. “I was so stupid,” she berated herself. “What the hell would a guy like Lyle want with a twenty year old who’d just run away from life? I shoulda seen it. Shoulda known.”

She dug the toe of her boot into a crack in the dirt below herself, and leaned backward, relaxing against the small pile of stuff they had with them – mostly just her lion taming equipment and a few extra clothes she always kept in the Indiana Jones-like tote she wore. The bag was ostensibly for show, but it never hurt to be prepared in case something got torn mid-show.

Overhead, she watched the blinking stars, which seemed much clearer here, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, than they ever had before. She still couldn’t quite grasp what made her so calm about Lex’s revelation, although she supposed years of listening to whack-a-doo radio and watching alien and Bigfoot shows had her trained to accept the crazy.

Then again, the existence of shape shifters being made apparent and obvious is a little more of a step than listening to crazy people rant about Area-51.

A chill wind blew across the desert, and she realized she didn’t have the slightest clue where they were. She kept a vague mental map of roughly the distances they’d traveled and the directions they’d gone, and overhead she could track somewhat by the North Star. But this dry river bed where she now hid, the endless scrub brush and small clumps of scrubby trees and mesquites, it gave away no secrets, held no landmasses or much anything else useful for navigation.

She lay back further, reclining fully onto the ground, propping her head and neck up with her pouch as she stared, transfixed, into the sky. She remembered being a little girl, and in between bouts of studying too much and worrying about whether she’d studied enough, going out in the back yard and sneaking glances through her dad’s enormous – and as he constantly reminded her, expensive – telescope.

She felt Lex creep up beside her, and started talking as he lay down.

“I always wanted to be an astronomer,” she said. “Or I guess, I wanted to be what I thought an astronomer was. I’m not sure I’d be such a good fit for all the math and sitting around observatories and waiting to collate the eighteenth gamma ray burst of the day.”

“Okay, there you got me,” he whispered. “We might have videogames and daycare like humans, but formal education isn’t much of a thing for lions. Although I hear owls do things differently.”

“Figures,” Cass said with a smile. “Study the stars, you know?”

“Well I
have
seen television. I know what an astronomer is, but what I mean is – what’s the point?”

“Of what?”

“Of taking these infinite mysteries, all this beauty, and turning into a list of equations and theories? Why not just enjoy it for what it is, and not worry too much about the details?”

For a long moment, both of them were silent. Cass couldn’t quite figure out how to respond to that incredibly astute question, and Lex learned a long time ago that if you’re going to ask a question, you wait for the answer. He didn’t really
get
rhetoricals.

“I think it’s just another way to appreciate it,” she finally answered. She felt Lex collect the hand she’d had laying on her stomach into his hand, and once again, the heat of his skin surprised her at first, and then gave her a tremendous feeling of safety. “Does that make sense?”

He was about to open his mouth when she continued. “I mean, you can look at something like the stars, and go ‘oh, those are pretty’, and have that be it. Or, you can look at them, and think about how they move, why they’re as bright as they are, and what it is that keeps them doing what they do.”

Another long silence.

“Why do I think you’re beautiful?” he asked slowly, as softly as the wind whispering over top of their little embankment.

“That’s not fair, answering a question with a question. It’s, uh some kind of logical fallacy probably. I didn’t really do college.”

“Why do you need to understand
why
something has beauty, is my point. What does knowing that the reason I like the way you look boil down to the crook of your nose or the space between your eyes do for me? Nothing. The world is the world. Love it for what it is.”

“Well it’s all a moot point anyway, I never made it.”

“You seem to have made it so far,” he answered in a surprisingly flat way.

“That’s very survival-oriented of you. I mean in school, didn’t make it through, just kind of fizzled out. Went too hard, too fast. Tried to do that thing where you try to please everyone. And then I started having breakdowns. After one particularly bad one,” she gulped back the emotion in her voice. “Anyway, I ran away, ended up on the street, then in a damn circus. How does that even happen? That’s stuff for books, stuff for Lifetime movies.”

Again, Lex was silent for an extended time. The way he did that certainly had an effect: it caused Cass to slow down, to think about what she was saying. She wondered for a moment how many conversations like this she’d missed because of rattling through a bunch of questions and not actually listening to the answers.

“That star might be a hundred million years old,” she said in an awe-struck voice. “Hell, it could be dead and gone by now and the light’s just now getting here.”

“Why?” was Lex’s patently stolid one-word reply. He just let it hang, so apparently, that really was the end of what he was going to say.

“Why the stars? Or why... why what?”

“Why the circus,” he clarified.

“Oh yeah, there’s a story. I’ve already blabbered more to you than I ever did dear old Max, though I was with him for a year and a half. So you first. Why were you in that horrible dirt circus?”

He let out a soft chuckle. “Out of options,” was his cryptic reply. When Cass didn’t say anything, he finally took the cue. “I was adrift, no mate, no cubs, no place in the pride. My mother was the prima, my father the alpha, but I was in the middle of a clutch of cubs. My sister was born first, so she had all the responsibility, and by the time they got to number six – me – there wasn’t much to look forward to.”

Cass rolled over on her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows. She watched the moonlight glint in Lex’s eyes. She kissed his cheek with a short peck, and then settled back into staring at him. “That’s very monarchical. The leading family, all the cubs. So, what, you just had to hit the road?”

“Mmm, no, not had to,” he said. “More like didn’t see the point of not going. I’ve never been one to sit around and wait for something to happen. Like I said, no mate, no cubs, no jewelry on my arms,” he said in reference to hers. “No reason to stay in pride territory. Plus, the Mississippi delta is very humid.”

“Right, so you end up in the desert.”

“It isn’t humid.”

Both of them took a second to laugh, a second to relieve the tension.

“Okay, so,” she began. “How in the world did a lion shifter end up in Lyle Bertram’s circus?”

“Just like yours, mine is quite a story.” And then he stopped speaking.

“Oh, I’m supposed to go first?”

He kissed her softly, pressing her head backwards just so, as his answer. When their lips parted, Lex’s had one of his almost cruelly sexy, half-grins on them.

“Fine,” she said, sighing heavily. Cass crawled to her feet and began pacing as she recounted waking up in a mental ward, and then running away. She told him about the months on the street, working odd jobs to get enough for a bus ticket somewhere else. She described falling in love, falling out of it, dating a guy she didn’t really love, but who has very nice, and then finally not being able to handle that anymore, either.

With every word she said, Cass wrung her hands, took a step in one direction or another, or looked nervously off into the sky. “And then when I really hit the skids, well, that’s...”

“Lyle,” Lex growled.

“Yeah. I was in a bad way. Lots of bad ways, actually. In deep with money, by which I mean I was out of it. And not the sort of broke you can pull yourself up from – the sort of broke where every buck you get goes straight into someone else’s pocket. This restaurant, the owner said I could work for food. So that’s what I was doing.”

“Where did you sleep?” he asked.

That’s when Cass realized that her cheeks were wet, and the only reason the tears weren’t falling off her face is that the cold wind kept drying them before they did. “Oh, pretty much anywhere. Only hit the ‘under a bridge’ depths a couple of times. I did have an old Toyota I slept in for a long time, but then I had to get rid of that.”