Accidentally Catty Read online

  “Spanky. His name’s Spanky,” Kaih offered with the clearing of his throat.

  Katie’s eyebrow rose. “How do you know what his name is?”

  “It was on his collar. He was wearing a collar when he came in, and it said Spanky, remember? I took it off him just before we put him in the cage. See?” He pointed to the thick collar that was now lying by the sink with small, blunt spikes on the backside of it and a copper medallion hanging from the center.

  Wanda muffled a giggle.

  Nina leaned into Katie. “Tell Spanky Buckwheat that the gang’s waitin’ on him, and we need to get this show on the road. Daylight happens. Every day. It burns. You don’t want to see me pissed off because I have a third-degree burn.”

  Katie turned back to the cage, her stomach a nervous nest of fear. “Spankyyyy,” she cooed in a soft drawl, letting a tentative finger skim his shoulder, fighting the surprising pleasure touching his ruddy male skin brought. “Time to wake up now, kitty . . . uh, man . . . um.” She sighed and whispered with a clench of her teeth. “Just wake up!”

  Spanky stirred momentarily, then nodded off again, his head falling with abandon against the back of the cage, his mouth unhinged at his jaw.

  “Oh, for the love of Jesus and all twelve. Move,” Nina ordered with a snarl. Latching her fingers between the bars of the cage, she lifted it high over her head before Katie had the chance to react, shaking it up and down as though she were picking up nothing more than an empty cardboard box.

  Spanky’s muscled body banged against the sides in a mess of inert limbs. “Dude! Wake the fuck up, would you? I have shit to do. I don’t have time to wait around until you feel like moving your bootylicious ass, Lion King.”

  “Nina!” Three women howled in unison. Wanda grabbed at her hands, slapping them away while Marty yanked the cage from her in a two-fisted grasp, plunking Spanky back down on the edge of the examining table with a jarring crash. “Knock it off! Jesus, Nina. The man’s helpless in there, and you’re slamming him around like he’s a box of malted milk balls. Christ, you’re so impatient!”

  Katie fell back against Kaih in the commotion, her head swimming with the loud scrape of metal just as the cage tipped over the edge of the shiny table and took a dive for the floor, skidding into the far wall with a harsh crack.

  The cage door popped open from the force of the impact, hanging with a lopsided slant to it.

  Upon landing, Spanky’s head and shoulders slid from the wire enclosure, lying at an awkward angle. His thighs spread wide.

  Oh, yes.

  They were spread—wide.

  Casey rushed to his side, scooping his head into her lap to keep him from the cold floor of the examining room.

  Nina whistled a catcall. “Oh, dude. That’s a whole lotta man, huh?”

  Wanda came up behind Nina, clamping her hands over Nina’s eyes. “Pipe down, perv. He’s a child, Nina. He couldn’t be more than twenty, which, I might add, makes you almost young enough, in some regions of the country where women are forced into early marriages, to be his mother.”

  Nina flicked at Wanda’s hands, slipping away from her grasp and eyeballing Katie. “Hey, Doc—question?”

  Katie’s eyes never left poor Spanky’s prone form when she answered, “Yes?”

  “How old are you?”

  She frowned. “Forty-one.”

  “No way!” Marty gasped. “I gotta give it up to you, Dr. Woods. You look fabulous. I’d have never guessed a day over thirty. You have terrific skin, all berries and cream, and I suppose, if this cougar thing works the way it does with the rest of us, you’ll have that skin for eternity. Damn. Why couldn’t I have been turned at twenty?” she joked.

  Eternity?

  Nina rolled her tongue along the inside of her cheek and snorted. “A thought just occurred to me.”

  Casey grunted with a roll of her brown eyes. “Really? Huh. I thought the smell of burning flesh was just my fingertips cooling down.”

  Nina ignored Casey’s jibe and turned back to Katie. “Know what this means—the age difference between you and Spanky here, don’t you?”

  “We’ll have to find the nearest skateboarding park to drop him off at?” Katie returned dryly.

  Nina chuckled, giving Katie her infamous devilish grin. “It means you aren’t just a werecougar, lady. You’re a cougar-cougar. You took stereotyping to a whole ’nother level. You’re like one of those ‘doesn’t look her age’ chicks who hits on young dudes because they got the zoom in their boom still happening. You’re a total label. Hot. Niiiice work, Mrs. Robinson.”

  Katie bristled, her onetime surge of admiration for Nina’s forward nature turning to frustrated impatience. “I most definitely have no plans to hit or even lightly nudge a twenty-year-old boy. You can believe that.”

  “You know,” a gravelly voice, filled with sin and a husky British timbre, commented from below, stunning everyone into complete silence. “I wouldn’t be opposed to someone like you hitting on me. But we can begin with just a nudge, if that’s what makes you more comfortable. Maybe get to know each other first?You know, all the things people do when they’re in the beginning stages of a relationship? You ask questions about me. I ask questions about you. As a for instance, and definitely not in any way a deciding factor to a future whirlwind courtship between us, what exactly has happened with your hand?” Spanky asked, blue, blue eyes dotted in a heavy fringe of lash, sparkling up at her with innocence.

  Katie clucked her tongue, her control but a frayed thread. Maybe it was the tension, the fear of the unknown. Maybe it was all the fantastical, mystical, crazy things she’d just witnessed. Maybe the final vestiges of the bizarre cloudy haze of disbelief had lifted. Probably, it was the audacity of his question. No matter. Whatever it was, she had but one instinct, and it wasn’t nurturing or doctorish.

  Glancing Nina’s way, Katie growled and logically, as someone who’d studied animals and their patterns in great depth, she realized it held a distinct warning.

  Were someone to ask her if she cared that she knew she was going to lose it—she’d have to say fat chance.

  Out of all of the women, the raving lunatic hovering directly below Nina’s surface would best understand what led Katie to where she ended up next.

  Straddling Spanky’s wide chest.

  But not before she hissed, yes, hissed her fury with a feral scream, virtually leaping across the room with the grace only a prima ballerina possessed, knocking Casey across the room. The only thing missing was a pink tutu and the strains of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

  Latching onto Spanky’s chest hair, Katie met his startled gaze. “I will kill you!”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Whooooa, okay, okay.” Spanky held up a large hand as a sign of submission. “But one last request from the dead man not walking?”

  Katie ran her tongue over her elongated teeth in predatory fashion, her anger, swift and rife, began to cool at the sound of his reasonable tone. “What’s that?”

  “If you decide to do that, and I don’t see why you would. I don’t even know you well enough to be killed by you, leaving me puzzled as to what I’ve done to bring the word ‘kill’ into our conversation with such haste and, dare I venture to say, venom. It’s a little over the top and very ‘the end.’ Anyway, all those nasty technicalities aside, could I possibly get a robe beforehand? Oh, and some slippers. No man wants to die bloody naked and cold, especially in front of so many pretty ladies.”

  Then he grinned. Mischievous. Utterly delighted with himself.

  Katie screeched her fury with a wail, high and long. It was eerie, one she’d heard often coming from the exotic animal park during the long nights she spent trying to sleep and forget why she’d come to this town to begin with. The mournful cry said she had a taste for blood—literally—and tag, Spanky was it.

  Nina was the first to her side with the other women and Kaih shoving up behind her. She planted a hand like a vise grip, intrusive and annoying as hell on Kati
e’s shoulder. “Whoa-ho there, Dances with Wolves. Get a grip. Let the kid be.”

  Katie, from somewhere primal and unknown, gazed up at Nina, her eyes narrowed, her breathing labored and hitching in a wheeze. “Take your hand off me.”

  Nina cocked her head in challenge, a strand of her gorgeous, wavy long hair falling from behind her shoulder. Her nostrils flared when she asked, “Or?”

  Yeah. Or? Katie’s anger at the audacity of this mere child’s question about her hand evaporated like dew in the morning sun. She looked back down at Spanky, unmoving, his breathing steady and collected, his gaze pensive.

  She’d just threatened to kill someone, and she’d done it after she’d launched through the air in a triple axel of deadly intent.

  Katie’s hands shot up into the space between them in a flash of movement. “Oh, God! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Are you hurt?” She let hesitant hands flutter over him, only to pull them back in a gesture of uncertainty.

  He folded his arms, bulging with muscle, behind his head and cocked her a smile full of white teeth. A smile that seemed so strange, coming from a face so roughly hewn and carved from granite. “I have to guess I’ve been much worse off than having a pretty lady like yourself sitting on my chest. So please don’t mock when I again make mention of the fact that the floor’s still just as cold as it was before you came to your senses and opted out of your wish to annihilate me. Though, I suspect, if you keep sitting on top of me, I’ll warm up rather nicely.” He wiggled a raven eyebrow at her and winked, making the jagged scar at the corner of his right eye wrinkle in rakish fashion.

  Nina took her by surprise and just in time to save Spanky’s jugular by hauling Katie off him, yanking her upward so fast, her bones creaked in protest. “Kaih. Could we have something to, you know, cover his man-bits? They’re dangling. Ingrid, quit hovering in the corner like some weird-ass voyeur and man up. Make yourself useful, and help Tonto here find a blanket to cover the kid with.”

  Kaih looked as though he might challenge Nina’s stab at him until she gave him her special brand of the evil eye. He and a simpering Ingrid scurried out of the room to do Nina’s bidding, wordless.

  Nina held out her hand to Spanky, keeping her eyes on his face and pulling him to his feet. He wobbled, but Wanda came to stand on the other side of him, offering him support. He shook his head as though to clear the cobwebs that had surely formed in his tranquilizer-induced brain. His gaze fell on Nina. “Pump iron much?”

  Nina’s glance back was amused, judging by the tilt of her eyebrow. “Naked much?”

  His handsome face went sheepish as he cast his eyes downward to his impressive southern regions. “That is rather problematic,” he shot back. Very British. Very proper.

  Kaih raced back in, Ingrid, less red-eyed now, following close behind. “I got your back, pal. Here.” He shoved one of his old lab coats at Spanky while Ingrid hurled more towels at him and skid over to stand behind Marty.

  Wanda helped him into the lab coat, and the stark white material against his olive-toned skin made Katie’s breath hiss in and out once more. Rolling her head on her shoulders to work out her tension, she grappled with the slew of questions she had, forcing herself to ask them one at a time in a logical fashion. “So, Spanky,” she drawled, “who are you, and how did you land on the front steps of my veterinary clinic?”

  His eyes darted evasively from one woman to the next. “Uh, I’m Spanky . . . I guess, and I have no idea how I ended up on your steps—or in a cage—or in a room so full of such lovely women.”

  Marty preened, hoisting Muffin under her right arm and stroking the dog’s snow-white head. Her sigh was long and wistful. “Did I mention I wish I’d been turned at twenty?”

  “You did, Miss America. Now quit with the googly eyes because you’re a long way from twenty, sister, and focus,” Nina ordered. She approached Spanky the way a hunter approached their prey. Well, a hunter who wasn’t even a little worried her prey would startle and make an escape, that is. “Lay off the charming, Kit and Caboodle, and start talking. Now, or I just might bite.”

  Spanky’s eyebrow rose with an arrogant slant to it, the right corner of his yummy mouth tilting upward just a little. “You bite?” He mock shivered, shooting her a smoldering gaze. “I find that almost titillating coming from a woman of your beauty.”

  He was a real slick Willy, Katie noted. She also noted how charming and well-spoken he was for someone who appeared so young.

  Nina leaned into him, letting her lips hover near his chin, covered in dark, sinfully-raspy-when-it-scraped-the-collar-of-the-lab-coat stubble. “I’ll titillate you right into next week if you don’t tell us who you are, and how”—she reached behind her, latching onto Katie’s paw and lunging it in his face like some scary Halloween mask—“she got this.You’ve got three seconds.”

  Wanda flicked Nina’s nose from over Spanky’s shoulder with the snap of two fingers. “Back up, Sugar Ray, and give the child some room.”

  “Child?” Spanky repeated, his tone littered with surprise. Like he didn’t know he was all of thirteen.

  “Isn’t that what everyone our age calls someone your age? You know, when you’re prepubescent and we’re not?” Katie muttered more to herself than for public consumption.

  She sauntered up to him, all swagger and sashay, noting her head just reached the top of his shoulder. “Forget it. Your age has nothing to do with what you’ve done to me.” She held up her hand. “Explain this. Do it fast before the urge to take your juice box away forever strikes me.”

  His sharp jaw clenched in what she’d label a brief moment of horror at the condition of her hand, then his face fell blank in confusion. If he was playing them, he was a better actor than Brad Pitt on his best day. “I’m afraid I don’t understand your question. However, I hope you won’t find me out of line when I ask, and please, don’t by any stretch of the imagination consider me ungrateful for the use of your ‘just like home’ cage and down-home hospitality, but where the bloody hell am I? And how did I end up, you know, in the emperor’s new clothes?” Spanky glanced down and back up at seven astonished pairs of eyes, meeting their surprised gazes dead-on.

  Katie tucked her paw under her armpit, cornering him against the examining table. Her nostrils flared, his unique male scent tangible and fragrant to her nose. She didn’t just smell him, she inhaled every aspect of his scent right down to the bead of sweat she was sure she’d find trickling down his spine if he were still naked. “Who are you?”

  His jaw jutted forward, littered with dark stubble and full of defiance. “I find I’m not entirely in love with the tone of your question. I feel cheapened by your evident suspicion.”

  “Really?” she spat. “Well, I’m not in love with this!” She shot her hand upward right under his nose again, the rough pads of her paw grazing his hair until it swung back downward in a pendulumlike dash for her side.

  Instantly, Spanky took on a look of contrition and winced. “I see your dilemma.”

  Her chest heaved while she fought a shriek of indignation. “You created my dilemma! Now, who are you and how did you escape Mr. Magoo’s Exotic Animal Zoo?”

  He appeared as though he was going to yell right back at her, but instead he paused, clearly in deep thought. Deep groves in his forehead formed in a frown. “You know, it’s the strangest thing . . .” he mumbled, “I can’t seem to remember my name . . . or anything.”

  “Maybe it was the tranq, Doc? I did shoot him up pretty good,” Kaih offered.

  Katie shook her head. “That wouldn’t make him forget his name. I’m not buying it. Unless . . .” She turned to Wanda. “Didn’t you all say when you’re a paranormal being, your chemistry changes? Nina mentioned it. She said the anesthesia she gave her husband was a general anesthetic, yet he was affected much differently than a human because he’s a vampire.”

  Spanky stuck his head between Kaih and Katie, a conciliatory smile on his ruggedly handsome face. “Well, then. It’s clear there are
much larger issues at hand here than my nakedness and some silly, old cage. You all obviously have your hands full. I’ll just be on my way while you sort out your . . .” He waved a hand. “Paranormal whatever. Your hospitality was nothing short of grandiose. For that, I thank you kindly.” He made a gesture as though he were tipping the brim of an imaginary hat and attempted to escape.

  “No!” Ingrid shouted for the first time since she’d watched the women of OOPS shed their human forms. Her tired eyes began to water. “You can’t leave!”

  Spanky’s eyes zeroed in on Ingrid. “Because?”

  “Because I fucking said you can’t,” Nina interfered, pushing her way into the mix, poking a finger into his bare chest. “Dude, you ain’t goin’ nowhere until you give up this lame bullshit act about forgetting your name and cough up what we want to know. And trust me when I tell you, I will kick your ass from here to Botswana if you try. Now sit down, and don’t move a single muscle but the one called your tongue.”

  Spanky’s nostrils flared, and Katie wasn’t sure if it was in anger at being challenged or with the sheer pleasure of being challenged. “Are your knickers always in such a twist?”

  Nina shot him a devious grin. “I’ll wrap my fucking knickers around your fucking head. Now explain. Because I’m beat, and I’d really like to clear this up so my friends here don’t go all ‘Oh, Nina, you’re such an insensitive beast’ on me. I’ll hear that shit all the way home if we don’t get this straightened out. You have no idea what it’s like to have BFFs like this lame bunch nagging the shit out of you because you’re the kind of chick who tells it like it is. So for the last time, speak. Speak fast. Like now, Snagglepuss.”

  With a haughty cross of his arms over his chest, he glared at Nina. “Maybe you’re not the one due an explanation, eh? Maybe you owe me one. The one that explains how I landed here—in a cage—with not a stitch of clothing on.” He gave them all a “take that” glare.