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  He remained silent to her rant of an inquiry, but waited with questioning eyes.

  Her stomach sank and her grip on the railing tightened. Fuck no, she didn’t want to see. “You know, if you’d asked me say, last week, I might have been game. I’m sure it’s super cool and all. But I really feel like shit today, and honestly you’re all freaking me the hell out. So I have to go with no for the moment. But thank you just the same. Just know it’s appreciated.”

  The hot blond guy interrupted his overzealous pride-mate by introducing himself as the head honcho, Luke, and then launched into a speech that offered her reassurance. “We don’t want to frighten you. Only inform. I’m sorry my brother isn’t here to apologize in person, but he will be. You can trust me when I say, I won’t let this go. This is our responsibility and we plan to handle it as such.” The stern set of his jaw left Charlie certain he was serious.

  They’d given her some background on shapeshifting and all the kooky shit that went with it, then as suddenly as they’d appeared, they left to let her digest.

  When all was said and done, even after researching on the Internet what Charlie had always thought was utter baloney and someone’s overactive imagination come to life on a movie screen, she’d come to accept this new fate. There wasn’t much choice in the matter. The changes in her body alone were enough evidence. She was one big shedding hairball, her eyesight was so keen at night when her eyeballs weren’t watering, they were zeroing in on the herd of deer she had in her backyard that were at least five hundred feet away, and then there was her nose. It was suddenly her guide to all things raw and red.

  Raw, red meat.

  And to top everything off Pinky wouldn’t come near her. Not within twenty feet of her even.

  Charlie shuddered. Poor Pinky — so confused — so terrorized by her very presence he mostly didn’t come out from under the bed anymore. Clearly he smelled the change in her and he wasn’t having anything to do with it. Lately, when he ate, he zinged from his new hideout, nabbed a morsel or two from his bowl and zinged back under the bed for cover.

  She left the bathroom and her reverie to kneel beside her bed, lifting the comforter to peek at Pinky. “Pink? Ohhh, Pinkster… is it that you’re worried I’ll eat you? I won’t eat you, I promise. I love you — since the first day I laid eyes on you at the pound. I mean,” she gave him a guilty look, “I have thought about it, okay? Seriously, I’m just being honest here. You do smell good, but I’ve managed to fight the impulse so far. I can keep doing it… I think… So c’mon, huh? I’ll play sock with you,” she coaxed, wiggling a finger at him.

  Pinky whimpered, curling his barrel-round body into itself and putting his head between his paws.

  Charlie sighed in defeat. “So that’s a no. Okay. Fine, but you can’t hide forever. I mean, eventually you’re going to have to trust me.” And I totally hope to live up to that expectation by not snarfing you down whole.

  Charlie rose, her head hanging, her will suddenly stolen from her due to the scent of fresh deer meat hanging around her back yard again. She slapped a hand over her mouth to keep it from watering.

  She wanted to eat a deer and it didn’t even need to be cooked as far as she was concerned.

  Jesus, how much further could she sink?

  You’re a cat, oh, sorry, a tiger from Tibet, la-dee-da — that’s allergic to herself. Sinking has a whole new level for you.

  Right, she was a tiger who had been allergic to cats when she was 100-percent-grade-A human.

  Now that she was half human and half tiger from Tibet, her allergies had become so much worse.

  Which was just another go fucking figure.

  Only she, Charlie Ledbetter, could be bitten by a cat, be stuck halfway between human form and cat form, and have an allergic reaction.

  To herself.

  Jesus. Effin’.

  Chapter Two

  Giving up hope on Pinky for today, Charlie went to her kitchen in search of some more allergy meds. These days she gulped bottles of antihistamine like they were Pepsis, popped any kind of pill in varied combinations like she was eating potato chips, and if she wiped her nose just once more, it’d likely fall off into the tissue.

  Gripping the edge of the kitchen sink overlooking her backyard, Charlie sneezed again, her eyes sore and watering like twin faucets.

  Thank God this could all be fixed.

  She snorted when she remembered exactly how her allergy issue could be fixed. She’d only gone over it a million times since she’d found out the remedy and then once more reassured herself — this would all go away soon…

  Her newly acquired pride relatives had told her so. They really could make this little allergy problem better.

  When one of the pride people had returned three days later, she came bearing more information.

  Okay, so it was some jacked up information, but it was all Charlie had.

  “It’s going to seem absolutely sinful to someone who isn’t of our kind,” Juanita Piljor, er, grandma tiger told her over tea and a bottle of still more Benadryl.

  Charlie sneezed and smiled gratefully when Juanita handed her a tissue across her small dinette. “What? How bad could it be? Like is it some kind of ritualistic virgin sacrifice? Because if that’s the case, you’re scratching up the wrong post. I hate to be blunt, but I’m no virgin. I’m no slut, but lily white I’m soooo not.” Then she cringed. The poor woman had to be seventy if she was a day, cracking wise about sex probably wasn’t appropriate.

  But Juanita laughed, her wrinkled face broke out in a grin and her red lips coated with lipstick curved upward. “Oh, you don’t have to be a virgin.”

  Suh-weet! Charlie cocked her head and raised an eyebrow in question. “Care to explain?”

  Her hand reached across the table, gnarled and covered in age spots, to grip Charlie’s. “You don’t have to be a virgin to do this, dear.”

  She squirmed in her seat. “To do what?”

  “To fix this.”

  “Hold up. Are you saying there really is some kind of sacrifice?”

  “Well, I guess it depends on how you define the word sacrifice. If I were your age, I’d call it an adventure. At my age, it’s just called lucky. Anyway, the ritual goes back many, many hundreds of years and has to do with the full moon and pheromones and something else that escapes me, but I know it works because I’ve seen it with these old eyes. Well, I mean, I didn’t watch… I just know it did the trick.”

  “Pheromones and watching what?” She blew her nose hard. “Okay, here’s the deal. I say you just tell me and get it over with. I have a crazy feeling I’m going to freak and right now, I feel miserable. It can’t be much worse than it already is. So if I have to dance naked while I hop around on one foot and sing Kumbuya, I’m in. I just don’t want to live the rest of my life needing oxygen and a Benadryl chaser.”

  Juanita poured her more tea. “I like a girl who attacks things head on. All right then, this is what’s required. You have to have sex.”

  They really were a lovely group of folk, her pride people via pet store brawl were.

  Yippee-ki-yi-ay. Now if only there were someone who’d be willing to travel the road, as of late anyway, less traveled. While Charlie knew she should be really freaked out, the sex part wasn’t such a big deal. It wasn’t like losing a limb or something. She wasn’t a prude and if that’s what it took, then, okay. It was finding the person to have sex with her she was struggling with. “I don’t have a boyfriend. In fact, I haven’t had one in two years. I own a small bookstore in town and I work a lot. I haven’t had time to date. So I think we have to find another way.”

  Juanita shook her head, the white-grey of her hair, wispy and thinning swaying under her ceiling fan. “Not just sex with anyone, Charlie. You have to have sex with the person who bit you at the rise of the full moon.”

  Word.

  “Um, you mean your grandson?”

  “Yes, Quinn.”

  Quinn. That was a nice name. Charli
e wondered what it’d be like when it rolled off her tongue as she screamed it in passion while she had ritualistic sex. “Forgive me if I’m out of line here, but I can’t have sex with someone I don’t even know.”

  Grandma’s face grew somber. “You will if you want to reverse the effects of the bite…”

  Okay, so from what Charlie gathered from Grandma Juanita, all she had to do was have sex with the dumb ass that had bitten her just as the full moon rose and they could reverse the effects of the bite. She went to bed that night with Grandma Juanita’s words swimming around in her cotton-filled head.

  Then the blond head tiger Luke showed up the next day. She’d never forget the look on his face when he began to retell her about this pending sexcapade while handing her a tissue.

  “You haven’t fully changed,” tall, strikingly rugged and high cheek-boned, Luke explained from her doorstep.

  “Yeah, this is what I hear. I’m not sure if I’m grateful or pissed he didn’t finish the job,” she sorta joked. Pushing back her heavy length of hair and hacking up more gunk from her lungs, Charlie gasped for breath.

  Luke smacked her back, his smile grim, while his brother stared at his feet. “We think, or at least we hope that’s why you’re suffering from these allergies — because you haven’t shifted totally. Your body’s at war with itself trying to adjust and I don’t know that if you did fully shift, if you wouldn’t end up more miserable. We can’t take that chance.”

  “What worries me here, oh Striped One is this — what if we do this thing and it doesn’t work? What if my body likes war?”

  Luke closed his eyes and took a deep breath, clearly seeking patience. “I know the reversion works.”

  “Ahhh,” she chuckled the word. “So you’re a watcher like grandma too?”

  He rolled his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “No, I didn’t watch. I did see the aftermath and everything was right as rain. So let’s just count ourselves lucky Quinn didn’t bite you on the full moon.” He made a face at his brother. “If we don’t do this before the full moon fully rises and you shift completely, you’re in like Flynn. Sunk, to be precise, but we can fix this. If you mate with my brother Quinn, the numbnuts that bit you because he’s a jealous, spiteful hothead who’s into public brawls, you can revert back to your human form with no trouble at all. But I can’t impress upon you how important it is to do this just before the full moon rises.”

  Naturally.

  “Any particular reason this full moon shit makes so much of a difference?”

  His jaw clicked when he cracked it. “The full moon is a shifter tradition. Our entire pride participates in the rise of the full moon, but no, I don’t know why on a full moon you’re totally turned and any other day you aren’t. It just is.”

  Of course, she couldn’t see if the moon was full because her eyes were always watering since she’d been nipped. She might have been more flipped out over the sex thing if Grandma Juanita tiger hadn’t already warned her about it. She’d had some time to catch her breath, figuratively speaking anyway, since yesterday.

  “Care to explain that? Juanita didn’t get too detailed yesterday because she said you had to handle this as pride leader. So hit me with the goods, Tony the Tiger. Because this could just be some cheap, albeit elaborate way to get into my pants,” she remarked dryly.

  Luke grinned that stunningly disarming grin again. “It’s an old legend. A kind of remedy for those who were never intended to be bitten — courtesy of my grandmother, whom you’ve met.” He nodded in the direction of his brother, thumbing a finger at him. “Tell her, numbnuts.”

  “Quit calling me a numbnuts!” he hollered. “It was a mistake and I’d like to explain. Travis Barker and I go way back. We’ve never gotten along, but when he slept with my girlfriend —”

  “Ex-girlfriend,” Luke interrupted, his eyebrows, thick and darker than his hair, knitting together.

  Quinn narrowed his liquid brown eyes. “‘Whatever. He didn’t have to tell the entire pride, did he? Anyway, I was chasing the redneck who slept with Tasha. I had him cornered too, but then we slammed into Charlie and she got pissed — rightfully so. She got between us and Travis got nasty because he’s a drunken asshole. I wasn’t going to stand there and let him insult an innocent woman, Luke. So I intervened.”

  Charlie nodded her head in agreement. “He definitely did defend my girlie-ness.”

  Quinn ran a hand through his light brown hair and shrugged. “I really wanted to smash the shit out of his face, but he grabbed for me over Charlie’s shoulder and I lost my balance. Charlie ended up between us on the floor, but the impact of hitting the floor made my head slap forward and I nicked her ear. If the shithead hadn’t pushed his luck, none of this would have ever happened and everything Luke said is true,” he finally offered, looking in Charlie’s direction. “We do have to have sex.”

  Looking back, when Quinn’s tooth had sunk into her ear, she had heard his grunt of shock. His yelp of dismay had been genuine.

  Charlie nodded her head once more. “Okay, so oops and all. That doesn’t help much when I can’t breathe and my eyeballs are dripping off my face. How am I supposed to be able to concentrate on wonking the kitty out of me when I can’t think straight over the amount of Benadryl in me?”

  “Again, it’s the only way, Charlie, and again, the entire pride is really sorry Quinn is such a jackass.” Luke’s amber and green-flecked eyes hardened as he looked at his brother.

  Quinn scuffed his sneakered feet. “I said I was sorry, Luke, so shut the hell up. Would you let someone talk about your woman like that?”

  “She’s not your woman anymore and drawing that much attention to yourself, in a pet store, of all places, was just stupid on your part.”

  Luke’s reminder clearly pissed Quinn off. “He followed me in there, Luke —”

  Charlie put a hand between them, interrupting their bickering. “How about we save this spat for another time? I don’t know Tasha, but I’m sorry she slept with Travis and I’m even sorrier I got into the middle of this. I say we focus on the problem at hand. And that’s you and me having… well…”

  Luke’s jaw cracked again hard, hard enough that it echoed in her backyard. “Charlie’s right, Quinn. Let’s just do what we have to in order to make things right.”

  Yeah, like have sex.

  Charlie would’ve giggled if this wasn’t all so nucking futs.

  She turned to them and looked Quinn directly in the eyes. “And how do you feel about this, Quinn? I mean, I’m not exactly pretty to look at right now. My eyes are perpetually red, my nose is stuffy and redder still and I want to Alaskan bake the deer in my backyard for dinner. Wait, scratch that. I’d eat ’em raw right off the bone. That can’t be terribly appealing to you.”

  He gave her a sidelong glance and shrugged, his wide shoulders bunching underneath his flannel jacket. “I did do the crime…”

  “Wow, way to bag a chick, huh?” Charlie’s sarcasm was evident.

  Luke stepped between them, his muscled chest at eye level. Tilting her chin up with a finger, he smiled down reassuringly and laughed. “That wasn’t what he meant. You’re very attractive and Quinn was just saying so right before we got here. And I agree.” He chuckled, sending a wave of electricity along her spine.

  Luke’s smile had captivated Charlie from the moment she’d first seen him on her stairs. Truth be told, she’d been eyeing Luke up since he’d come to her door. He was cute. However, he wasn’t the man she had to wonk to get rid of these allergies.

  Quinn was and while he was cute too, Luke had this sort of raw, primal thing going on that Quinn couldn’t touch.

  But — Quinn was the key to being allergy free.

  Too bad, so sad.

  Looking out her kitchen window at the gathering deer, Charlie found dredging up that conversation in her memory only made her like Luke even more three weeks later.

  Luke was the pride’s leader and so he’d taken on the task of seeing to Cha
rlie’s well-being. All that shoulder length, dark blond hair, his smoky, chocolate brown eyes and crazy hot body were more than enough to make her wish Luke had bitten her instead of his brother.

  And he had a nice set of thighs. Not too thick, not too thin.

  Fucked.

  She was so fucked.

  She didn’t want to have sex with Quinn. Not even a little. No, he wasn’t ugly by any stretch of the imagination.

  He just wasn’t Luke.

  Chapter Three

  This didn’t have to be a problem.

  It really didn’t.

  But it so was.

  Now, after getting to know her hot pride leader, Charlie hadn’t been able to stop wishing Luke had been the one to bite her. He made visits often and at first she’d believed him when he said it was his duty as the boss to make sure she was okay. Though lately, checking up on her, bringing her bouquets of flowers made from colored tissues and a new supply of nasal spray somehow didn’t seem like as much a duty as it did an excuse to see her.

  Why someone as hot as Luke would want to hang out with her and her big, runny nose escaped her. But she couldn’t deny all the time spent together was becoming a habit — one she didn’t want to break.

  They watched movies together, ate dinner together, hunted choice cuts of red meat at the supermarket together. All the while, Charlie’s attraction for Luke growing until she thought she’d lose her mind from the mere smell of him.

  Wait, she’d already lost her mind when she’d bought into this shapeshifter sex thing, hadn’t she?

  But he kept his distance whenever they got too close, and Charlie’d decided it was time to change all that.

  Luke had taken care of any doubts she might have had that he was lying about his ability to shift too. He’d shifted for her one night after they’d watched a couple of movies.

  That had been a grand showing of fluffy hair and teeth. It almost made her want to complete the transition because he was so beautiful, but then, she’d sneezed and she was reminded she couldn’t go on like this. Her nose would explode right off her face.