When McEvans first set eyes on Brandy, his first thought was,Wow, that's a lotta woman. His second thought that she looked to be a bit of a redneck, which – in the world of gator wrestling – wasn't really a bad thing. But he was pretty doubtful about the idea that Brandy could help him find 'Shirley'. Yet, for some reason, he found himself unable to just brush her off so easily.
“I don't mean to be impolite,” he said, “but we've had a lot of folks trying to collect the reward, trying to pass off the wrong gator as Shirley. Some of these gators are impressive in size, but there's no mistaking Shirley for anyone else.”
“I told your girlfriend that I don't need the reward,” Brandy said.
They were in McEvan's studio office now, and his administrative assistant brought them both coffee.
He gazed at Brandy for a second, sizing her up. Their eyes met and then broke off, after taking a little bit longer than was appropriate.
McEvans was aware that he had been staring.
“I'm sorry, but you remind me of someone,” he said. “What was your last name again?”
“Guyette,” she said.
Brandy was feeling a little nervous now, because she could feel a palpable mutual connection here between them, for some crazy reason, even though she was in human form.
“What makes you so sure that you have an idea where Shirley is and that you can track her down?”
Brandy took a breath. There was no way this would sound good to someone who wasn't a shifter, but it was the only plausible explanation she could come up with.
“I've been around gators since I was a kid,” she said. “My parents, believe it or not, used to take me swimming with them starting when I was about 10 years old.”
McEvans was momentarily dumbstruck.
“They did?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, uh, that's not exactly the, uh...smartest thing.” He was choosing his words carefully. Inside, he was screamingWhat the hell kind of trailer trash parents throw their kid into alligator-infested waters??!!
“It's an old Seminole thing,” Brandy lied. No, it was a shifter thing.
She felt pretty uncomfortable here, very aware that he was staring at her like he felt sorry for her abusive upbringing. So she tried to keep explaining.
“Seminoles invented gator wrestling, don't forget,” Brandy said.That much was true.“And letting your kids swim with gators is safer than you think,” she added. Not true at all.
The wheels of McEvan's mind were turning rapidly now as he pondered the implausibility that Brandy swam around with alligators like she was hanging out with friends in a jacuzzi.
For a woman who goes swimming with alligators for fun, she's not missing any limbs and she seems to have all her fingers. And, her toes too – since she's wearing sandals. Go figure,McEvans thought.
“And what does this have to do with Shirley?” he asked.
“I've gone swimming with her a couple of times, I'm pretty sure,” she said. That was sort of true, if she had a split-personality.
McEvan's eyes widened.
“How can you be sure?”
“Well, because she's 13-feet long – she's HUGE,” Brandy said. “Plus she's really smart, and she seems to like people. So I tried calling her by her name – and she actually swam to me. But then she took off after she got bored.”
Was this for real? McEvans asked himself. Was that ASS for real?
“That's amazing!” McEvans said. Both her AND her ass are kind of amazing,came the intruding afterthought. For the first time, he truly felt like maybe this was a genuine lead.
“I just want to get one thing straight,” Brandy said. “Like I said, I don't want the reward.”
“You must want something,” he proposed.
Yeah – you.
“I want a job,” Brandy said.
“What kind of a job?”
“I want to be a herpetologist, and I'd like to work directly with you in the gator pit. I can wrestle a gator better than anyone else.”
McEvans looked doubtful. Brandy did not look like the most athletic of women.
“Give me an internship – but I have to get paid – I can't volunteer – and you can trust me,” she said. “I know what you're thinking. I'm a big woman, but I can carry my weight, and I know what I'm doing.”
“Uh – okay,” he said. “I just don't want anybody getting hurt on my watch.”
“There's something else if I bring her to you,” she added. “Shirley needs her own space AND you can't keep her locked up. You need to let her go back to her home-base once a week for at least a couple of days. Or, better yet, you can have her onsite every other week. She’ll get used to that routine, I think.”
“That doesn't make sense.”
“Yes it does,” Brandy told him. “She ran away, right? A woman needs space. Shirley needs space. If you love that gator, set her free. If she loves you back, she'll come back to you. I think she liked it here at Animal Sphere, but she just needed a break.”
McEvans studied her again. She seems so familiar,he thought. Where have I met her before?
“I don't get this whole alligator-psychology thing you're trying to sell me on,” he said. “But to tell the truth, I never thought that gators had any kind of higher intelligence until I met Shirley. And it looks like I've lost her for good unless someone trustworthy can bring her back.”
“You can trust me, Jake,” Brandy said. It was the first time she said his name.
“Well, if you say that you think you understand this gator and can bring her back,” he said, “and if you have a way of letting me keep her somehow in the long run without her leaving me again, then I'm willing to take a shot.”
She stood up and they shook hands on it. The touch of Jake McEvans hand in hers caused Brandy to catch her breath. His hand was callused and firm, and she wanted him to wrestle her again right then and there.Brandy wanted nothing more than for Jake McEvans to just get up on her back and wrap those manly hands around her jaws to keep them shut!
Outside his office, on her way down the corridor, Brandy ran into Rachel again. She didn't seem to be in a good mood.
“So what's the story?” she asked. “Can you really bring Shirley back?”
“I'm pretty sure,” Brandy said.
“Oh,” Rachel replied.
Brandy paused.
“Is something wrong?”
Rachel hesitated, then for some reason felt like she could talk to Brandy.
“I've been with Jake for two years now,” she said. “And I've gotten used to the long hours, and the travel, and the danger. I get it. He works with wild animals. He's very good at it, and I love that he's a man with a passion...”
Her voice trailed off.
“But?”
“But,” she said, “I get this feeling – and I know it's crazy to be jealous of an alligator – but when Shirley was around, it was like he was in love with her or something. It wasn't normal.”
Brandy's heart fluttered.
“That's crazy, right?” Rachel asked.
“It's crazy,” Brandy assured her. It was, wasn't it? “Men can get obsessive about things. Just be glad he's not a gambling addict or something.”
“If she comes back, I don't know if I can compete for his attention,” Rachel.
Brandy felt bad for her all of a sudden. But the reality was, as a normal human male – a male who did not shift – McEvans would never find her attractive as a woman. He just couldn't appreciate her size the same way he did when she was an alligator.
Was she being stupid here? Was she setting herself in the path of an unavailable man? Probably, but she had a concrete reason to be here as well. Brandy was pursuing a career – this was a stepping stone to her dream job. She was a grown woman and could handle her emotions around McEvans.
Brandy felt itchy. She had to get home and exfoliate.
Chapter 8
Brandy's final paycheck from her old job never showed up as a direct deposit
, so she was going to have to go down to the office.
The woman at the front desk was new, and she did not recognize Brandy. She said that all former employees were barred from the premises once they ceased to be employed. Brandy would have to wait in the lobby.
Eventually her former boss showed up with a check in hand.
“We had to cut it for you the old fashioned way,” she said. “Company policy.”
“Why didn't you mail it to me?” Brandy asked.
“Company policy.”
“Why didn't anybody call to let me know that I should come pick it up.”
“That was our fault. Sorry about that.”
Brandy had worked for five years at this place. For the first year she cold-called the cellphone customers of competitors, trying to get them to switch providers. Then she took customer service calls and tried to help customers with their practical problems. Finally, she became a low-level manager. It was all very boring, and it did not pay well. There was no contract, there was no union. She was white collar, technically, but she could barely pay her bills. At the very least, she didn't have to pay for a cellphone.
Crap! She no longer had a free cellphone!
Her boss had read her mind.
“We wanted to know if you wanted to keep your number and your plan?”
“Uh, I would need to know how much my plan would cost.”
She had signed up for a deluxe calling plan. Of course she did – it was free!
Her boss excused herself to go look up this information. She came back and delivered the bad news.
“Your plan would cost $275 per month.”
“Seriously? Does anyone actually pay that as an individual?” Brandy asked.
Her old boss stood there patiently.
“You can have 45 days – through the end of the next cycle – to decide what you want to do. Then just give us a call.”
Brandy walked out of the air-conditioned building into the humid heat. She pulled up internet access on her smartphone and looked up her plan. She had 2,500 free peak-time minutes per month. She never knew, because she never checked. Who could possibly use up 2,500 peak-time minutes per month even if they tried?
Brandy decided to make the most of it. She was going to call everyone she knew – all her 775 cousins. And all her aunts and uncles. And all her distant relatives whom she hadn't spoken to in years. She was even going to call relatives she had never met or spoke to ever in her life!
She called Marianne.
“Are you busy?”
Marianne was at work.
“I'll come pick you up,” Brandy told her. “Then we're going to the health club. We'll go for a swim, then grab an early dinner.”
Brandy jumped in her car and headed over to Marianne's Gator Rescue site.
Marianne tried to keep her facilities as natural and peaceful as possible. Brandy walked through the front gate, past the main building, toward the pond in the back. High security fences kept predators at bay. Gator hatchlings were easy prey for common animals such as skunks and even small snakes. They were very, very vulnerable.
The squeaking of the hatchlings was incredibly endearing. To Brandy and Marianne, the hatchlings were cuter than puppies, although they were a bunch of little troublemakers and neither woman wanted a batch of her own. The littlest youngsters floated around on lily pads in the pond. A shifter hatchling could be identified by the fact that all of them had deep blue eyes, no matter what color eyes they would have as a human. A normal alligator has olive green eyes.
Marianne told Brandy she had to finish up some paperwork in the office, but that Brandy could stay and play with the kids. The gators that were hitting almost three years were kept inside, because any one of them could shift at any moment. That could not be seen in public at any cost.
While Brandy was splashing around with the hatchlings, Susan Quackenbush showed up. Susan was an unwed shifter mother who had gotten herself in trouble. Her roots were showing – a bad dye job growing out – and her eye makeup was smeared. The woman had been crying.
“I've gotta see my babies!” she gasped. “Please, you've got to let me see them!”
She was desperate. Brandy had to hold her back and take control of the situation.
Shifter moms were as protective as they were stressed-out, and new mothers had real trouble leaving their brood in another woman's care.
At first they would want to show up day after day, but Marianne insisted that they must stop. The shifter community did not want to arouse suspicions. Any distraught woman showing up at a Gator Rescue site day after day would at least cause local residents to question her sanity (gossip spread fast in this county).
“You know you can't come back until they shift for the first time,” Brandy said.
“It's not right!” Susan shouted. “It's not fair! You don't know what it's like to have to go through this!”
“No I don't,” Brandy said. “You're right. What you're going through is awful, I can't even begin to imagine. But we have rules, and the rules protect all of us. What do you think would happen to your children if anyone outside the community found out what was really going on here?”
Susan started bawling like crazy, and now she was past the point of being able to talk. Brandy walked her to the main building, and they sat outside at a picnic bench until Susan finally calmed down.
“This is going the be the longest three years of my life,” she said.
“If you can get through this,” Brandy assured her, “then you can get through anything.”
Brandy hugged her and comforted her until she was ready to accept the situation. When Susan stood up, she thanked Brandy, and then she left.
Marianne had watched the whole thing from a window.
“You did good,” Marianne said.
“You could have come out and helped!” Brandy said.
“You totally had it under control.”
Chapter 9
Brandy and Marianne lay out sunning themselves. They had shifted and were enjoying the sun in the patio area behind Ray's health club.
Ray also had shifted and was sunning himself with them for a little while.
When Brandy had enough, she shifted back. Ray admired the 30-second view before she wrapped herself in a towel. Marianne had pretty much dozed off at this point.
Brandy pulled a lounge chair over so she could still sit next to the other two, and she pulled her smartphone out of her purse. Stretching out on the lounge, she began to scroll through her contacts list. She had been calling kinfolk all week, letting them know she was still alive. She found the number for her Aunt Josephine in New Orleans, and gave her a call. She hadn't spoken to her since last Christmas, and now she had all these free minutes to use up before she lost her primo calling plan.
Someone picked up on the third ring.
“Aunt Josephine?”
“Hold on a sec,” someone said. Now the voice sounded male, and young. That had to be her cousin Tim.
“Hello?”
“Aunt Josephine, it's Brandy.”
“Brandy! Gosh, Sugar – how y'all been?”
“Okay – not bad – I'm just calling to check in. It's been awhile.”
“That's because you haven't returned my calls since after your brother's funeral,” Josephine said.
“I know,” Brandy said. “I'm sorry about that. I just needed space. I wasn't handling it very well.”
“That wasn't something thatshould be handled well,” her aunt said. “Someone so young as Charlie.”
“So how's life in the Big Easy?”
Brandy's aunt filled her in on the basic goings on with the Louisiana branch of the Guyette family. Times had been hard for them with Hurricane Katrina years back, but they managed to pull their lives back together slowly but surely. Before Charlie's death, a number of Guyettes had finally moved back to the state after staying with relatives throughout the Deep South.
“Oh,” Aunt Josephine added. “You don't know yet, but
your cousin Jenny has a lead on the LaBelle family.”
“Uh oh,” Brandy said.
“This could be for real this time,” her aunt told her.
There was a small contingent of Guyettes who still maintained a general grudge against Madame Eve LaBelle and who never could accept their shifter status. They absolutely hated being gator shifters and were always trying to hatch one plan after another to reverse the curse.
Messing around with Hoodoo, however, was decidedly risky business. Hoodoo, as opposed to Voodoo, is a practical system that blends concepts and spells drawn from three streams of folk magic: African, Native American, and Anglo/Celtic. Truly, Hoodoo is a melting pot mixed right here in the U.S., and it is not for the faint of heart. It involves unusual hexes and strange symbolic acts, and it can involve using regular household implements in interesting ways.
According to historical record, Hoodoo was a mere child in the South– less than a decade old in its independent existence as a practical system – when Eve LaBelle started turning everyone into alligators. So, she was an original, if not THE original, Hoodoo Queen.
Being a shifter was not always easy, that's for sure. Brandy preferred it, though, because overall it gave her a better life than if she were a normal human. She was less-than-the-ideal woman according to American cultural expectations, but she was quite desirable by alligator standards. The reason she was single was mostly choice.
Brandy needed a can-do man, one who would take charge and earn her respect; but she was smart enough not to be fooled into accepting a Bad Boy imitation of the Real Thing. Unfortunately, the shifter community was filled with true Bad Boys and not enough of the Real Thing. And, it was not remotely feasible for her to get involved with a man who was not a shifter. So, it was a Catch-22. Brandy got leered at, flirted with, and pursued, but she had to keep up a bitch shield and fend them all off. It was getting exhausting, and even a little depressing. Brandy was lonely and sick of waking up in the morning all by herself in her bed.
Big Gator: A BBW shape shifter paranormal romance Page 4
