The Lion's Fling (Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance Book 1)

by Lilly Pink

  “But that’s never been a problem for you. If you aren’t sleeping there’s a reason.”

  “Alright, fine, there is, but I’m not sure I should tell you.”

  “Why not?” Penelope asked with hurt radiating from her voice. “Aren’t I your best friend? Or have I been replaced so quickly?”

  “No, not replaced. Never replaced. It’s just that you won’t approve and I know it. I don’t want the two of us to have made up only to step straight back into another fight.”

  “It won’t. I promise you, Eloise. I know I’m too hard on you sometimes. Maybe a lot of the time. I’ve always tried to make you into the same person as me, and that’s not fair. You’ve never tried to do the same to me, not really. I’ve been jealous of you and I’ve let it stop me from being the best possible friend. I would like it if you could tell me, although I understand that you might not want to. If you do, though, I promise I won’t judge you.”

  “You might, and if you do I won’t say it isn’t justified. It’s about a man.”

  “A man?” Penelope repeated, making a valiant effort to hide her shock and almost succeeding. “What man? You met someone in the last three days?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “It’s a man you haven’t met before?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant, either.”

  “Well what, then? I’m so confused and the suspense is killing me!”

  “You were there when I met him. It was at the carnival. You weren’t very impressed by him, if I recall, which is why I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “The man outside of the fortune teller’s tent?!”

  She shrieked the words, actually shrieked them, and Eloise winced and put her finger up to her lips. The last thing she needed was Penelope’s parents talking to her own and telling her father that she’d been talking about some carnival boy. That was the perfect way to get herself into a boatload of trouble and that was something she was looking to avoid.

  Penelope responded as she’d hoped for the admonishment, clapping her hands over her mouth so that her face appeared to be all wide eyes and nothing more, and Eloise felt herself relax the tiniest fraction. When she was reasonably sure that Penelope wasn’t going to start yelling her head off again, Eloise nodded silently. Penelope removed her hands from her mouth and scooted closer to her friend, her face practically glowing with excitement that surprised Eloise completely.

  “Seriously, Eloise?”

  “Seriously. Are you mad?”

  “Why would I be mad?”

  Eloise looked at Penelope with a hesitance she was sure she wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding. Penelope all of a sudden having decided that she was able to get on board with Eloise being attracted to one of the carnival gypsies seemed like a very unlikely thing indeed. The two of them had made up and that was something she was very glad of indeed, but she couldn’t keep herself from remembering the way Penelope had acted when they had actually been in front of Archer and his friend.

  It was one of those things she thought she would never be able to forget, the look Penelope had worn on her face. It was the kind of look that stuck with you, that showed you a person’s true nature to a greater degree that you ever wanted privy to. Once you saw something like that, you couldn’t ever unsee it. It was just stuck in there, rolling around your brain and popping up at the most inopportune times.

  It made it more difficult than she would have liked to engage in the typical girlish gossip of girls her age, which was a sad thing indeed, as far as she was concerned. Because Eloise wanted to engage in that gossip. More than that, she felt like she needed it. Aside from her trips to and from Penelope’s house, Eloise had done very little aside from stew over the mysterious gypsy man.

  She felt like she was going to burst with all of the things she had not said and Penelope was the only one she really had to say them to. Because of this, she jumped lightly to her feet and hurried to shut the bedroom door, then turned back to face a friend who was now practically foaming at the mouth for want of information. She was also wearing a look of mild hurt, probably because she had picked up on the fact that Eloise no longer totally trusted her.

  “Why would I be mad?” she repeated, this time with a tone that sounded just a little bit sulky. “It’s not like I’m your parent or anything.”

  “Sure, I know that,” Eloise answered quickly and in a placating tone, wanting very much to avoid falling headlong into another fight with her best friend. “It’s just that I also know you worry. You’re the more practical one of the two of us, after all. I think we can both agree on that.”

  “You said it, not me.”

  “That’s right,” she laughed, feeling horribly relieved at the effectiveness of her small deception. “I did. And you don’t, like him, do you?”

  “Come on, Eloise. I never said that. I don’t even know him.”

  Eloise nodded, careful to keep her face level and without any real discernible expression. Penelope seemed to have forgotten the way she’d treated Archer and although she didn’t like it, Eloise wasn’t surprised. It was the way things worked with people, especially people in their particular circle. It wasn’t something that was nice to talk about, this prejudiced and ugly way of thinking, and so they simply didn’t do it.

  Eloise wasn’t supposed to be mentioning Penelope’s behavior at the carnival and in doing so she was breaking an unspoken agreement. It was better to pretend Penelope had been perfectly polite and never in the least offensive.

  “I know. It’s just a feeling I get, let’s say that.”

  “Who cares though, right? What I think doesn’t matter a lick. You seem to be pretty worked up over the man.”

  “No!” Eloise laughed a little bit too loudly. “No, not at all. It’s just…”

  “See? I knew it! I knew there would be a ‘just.’ Come on, spill it. It’s just what?”

  “I just can’t seem to get him out of my head, that’s all. You know the way most people, most strangers anyway, just sort of go right back out of your head almost as soon as you meet them?”

  “Sure, I guess I know that.”

  “The funny thing is that hasn’t happened with him. I can still see him as plainly in my mind’s eye as I would if he were standing right in front of me. It’s like his image is embedded there and I can’t get rid of it. Even if I wanted to, I can’t get rid of it. Something about him keeps drawing me in.”

  “And I’m guessing your parents wouldn’t be so alright if they knew that.”

  “Are you kidding me? They would be so far from alright it wouldn’t even vaguely resemble the emotion. And I made my father a promise.”

  “What sort of promise is that?”

  “That I would stay away. The carnival is still here, Penelope. It’s still here and I’m not to go anywhere near it or near him. It’s been far more difficult than I would have imagined. It’s been much harder than I would have believed.”

  “And will you break it? Your promise, I mean. Are you going to keep it?”

  “I’m going to try my best. I don’t want to disappoint my parents, Penelope. I think you know that. Because of that I’ll do my very best, it just feels like it might not be possible.”

  “Of course, it’s possible. People don’t just fall for people that way, not outside of fairy tales and we are most certainly not living in one of those. No, if you want to stay away you will, and I for one think that’s for the best. There’s no need for you to be mixing with the likes of him. Especially when there are so many nice men in our circles. And besides, he’d only be picking up and leaving when the carnival left town and then where would you be?”

  “I don’t know,” Eloise answered slowly, feeling as if she was trying to see through some kind of a fog. “I guess I hadn’t really thought about that.”

  “Heartbroken!” Penelope crowed, sounding almost gleeful now with flushed cheeks and shining eyes. “Heartbroken, that’s where you would be. Heartbroken and worse off than when you s
tarted. It’s better for you to stay away, your father is definitely right about that.”

  “You’re probably right,” she answered, feeling like the assessment was anything but right but not knowing why or how to articulate it. “There’s no need to stoke the fire, I suppose.”

  “Exactly. See? It’s better when we can talk to each other about things. I’m glad we’re alright now, Eloise, truly I am.”

  “I am too. Now, why don’t we talk about something else? All this has made me feel strangely light-headed.”

  And so that was exactly what they did. They spoke on all manner of things, none of which were what Eloise had inside of her heart. Even in that friendly session of gossip and talking about things that didn’t really matter at all, at least not to her, by the time she arrived back home she was beyond frustrated and wanted nothing to do with anyone.

  Instead of sitting down to cocktail hour with her parents (something of a tradition in the Wright home and a rather magnificent one at that) she marched straight up the stairs, pouring herself a cocktail out of the little bar stash she kept in her own set of rooms. When she threw herself on top of her plush duvet, it was much earlier than she was accustomed to falling into bed and she was sure she would never drift off to sleep.

  As is often the case when people go to bed with that sort of sentiment, she was completely wrong and without even realizing when it was happening, she drifted off into a fitful, restless slumber. She would undoubtedly have kept sleeping the whole night through if it weren’t for the strange sound outside her window that pulled her out of the grey land of dreams.

  “Wha—?”

  She woke with a start, her heart pumping too fast and so loudly she felt like it might burst. Her eyes flew open, staring up at the ceiling without comprehension as her body fought to pull her back down into her slumber. She lay perfectly silent and perfectly still, waiting to see what it was that had woken her up in the first place.

  When nothing happened and she was very sure she was alone in her room, she began to wonder if she’d made it up, if her mind was playing tricks on her born out of her prolonged agitation. But no, that couldn’t have been it because there it was again, a strange, oddly dull little clinking sound. It came twice in a row in quick succession and Eloise was sure it wasn’t in her head.

  She was also sure it wasn’t in her room, which gave her the courage to sit up and take a look around. She was terribly tired, the kind of bone tired that made a person feel a little bit ill, but she had so much adrenaline pumping through her veins that she hardly noticed the fatigue. When the noise came a third time, she was able to isolate from which direction it was occurring and her fear (which was stupid and unfounded, seeing as she could have easily shifted into her lion form and ripped any intruder apart) quickly began to change into something else. It was curiosity she felt now, curiosity and a thrill of excitement that something unusual was happening in her otherwise ordinary life.

  Perhaps a part of her already knew what she would find when she went to her window sill as well, there was always that possibility. Some part of her felt it, felt it and was almost sick with anticipation.

  “It’s you,” she said in a breathless whisper, all of the air in her body rushing out at once so that she felt dizzy as a result. “It’s really you.”

  As she peered down at the lush lawn beneath her, she saw the man she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about for even a second of her time. There was Archer Grant, his hand cupped and holding a loosely gripped fistful of pebbles from the front drive. When her eyes met his, she saw a flash of gold and couldn’t tell whether it was real or imagined.

  It was there and just as quickly it was not, leaving her to think about the discussion she’d had with her father several nights before. It had been a lecture of warning, one meant to scare her out of doing the things her father wished to forbid, but any effect it had achieved was long gone.

  The only thing Eloise cared about, the solitary thought she kept coming back to, was that Archer Grant was here and that he was here for her. He had found her, found her and come to her and that was the most exciting thing in the world. As if she could hear his thoughts, his voice called out to her to come to him.

  His mouth did not move but she could hear him all the same and she did not hesitate to comply with his wishes. Even if he hadn’t wanted her to join him, it would have been virtually impossible to stop her at that point, after all of the thinking about and longing for she had done over the man.

  Leaving the house by exiting her bedroom and descending the staircase was not an option and Eloise knew it. If that strange, frenetic night of the carnival had taught her anything it was that her father was a man of instinct. He had known on that evening that something would happen and he had acted accordingly by sitting up for her with a drink and a temper.

  She had no way of being sure, but something told her that her father might be down there again on this night, not knowing why he was doing it but feeling the need all the same. She knew that her father understood that she had done what she was told and stayed away from the carnival, but something told her he no longer trusted her, not really.

  She got the strange feeling that he was watching her, calculating the odds of her doing something against the rules for a second time. If she was right about that and not just giving into a young woman’s dramatic paranoia, he might very well be down there in the dark waiting for her to do something she shouldn’t be doing at all.

  For all Eloise knew, he could have spent every night since the carnival doing that very thing, watching and waiting for something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Eloise couldn’t stand the idea of being intercepted and thus missing her opportunity to discover what Archer had come to find her for and so she would not leave her parents’ home by conventional methods.

  Instead, she slipped the window up, wincing as it squeaked from lack of oil and making a mental note to have that taken care of in the future. She stood still again, waiting to see if the small intrusion of noise would draw any unwanted attention. When it didn’t, she slid one long, lithe leg over the frame, ducked her head and then did the same with the other leg. The night had the kind of chill that meant New Orleans’ brand of winter was on the way and a stiff, cool breeze ruffled her hair and made her nipples go hard beneath her sheer chiffon slip.

  Although she had never in her life sneaked out of her parents’ house, not even once, she managed it with surprising ease and after a rather graceful little shimmy down a drainpipe she found herself mere steps away from the object of her obsession.

  “You found me.”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “I was highly motivated.”

  They exchanged words in whispered tones, a whole conversation of whispers somebody without their unique physical attributes might not have even been able to hear. There were very few of those words however, because words weren’t what either one of them was interested in. Eloise hardly had the words to name what had her interest. She wasn’t even sure she understood it, only that she knew she wanted him in a way she hadn’t ever wanted anything in all of her life. She wanted him in a way that made her burn, a way that made her insides feel like they had been twisted into something totally foreign to her.

  Because she had no words to explain this to him, she didn’t bother trying. She understood that her words would not do her justice. She understood it the same way that she understood that she was connected to Archer on an animal level normal people could not and would not understand. So instead of speaking, she closed what little gap remained between them and without ever breaking eye contact, took him by the hand. She held onto it lightly, only holding onto his fingertips really, but where their skin touched there was electricity that felt like it could someday be lethal.

  As if the very earth they stood on were linked to their physical reactions, the sky suddenly split apart with a massive jag of lightning and then booming thunder that made even the trees tremble. People all
across the city woke with starts and gasped in surprise in their beds, but neither Archer nor Eloise even flinched. This raw savagery of nature was their element and they were now completely in it.

  Eloise began to walk, never looking to see if Archer would follow because she never had any doubts, and led both of them towards the family barn. It was several yards back from the house and hadn’t been used regularly in quite some time. It was a place Eloise never thought about, a place that wasn’t typically on the radar of her life, but that now felt like the only place for them to go.

  They walked together silently, drinking in the rapidly oncoming storm as they went. By the time they arrived at the wide, tall doors and Archer easily swung one aside to gain them entrance, Eloise was shaking all over. She was shaking, but not with cold or fear or any such mundane emotion. She was shaking with want. She was shaking with the anticipation of what was coming.

  “Archer.”

  He turned to her then, the beautiful profile of his face chiseled into the night sky with another streak of lightning, and her words deserted her. Then he was upon her without bothering to shut the door. There was nothing to shut it for, nothing they needed to shut out. There was nothing that existed except for her and him and the feeling of his warm, calloused hands grasping her by the chin.