Fearless

by Maren Smith

  “I promise.” Noah tried again, “I won’t shoot them unless I have to. To be honest, most of the ones I have to remove end up going to the croc farms, but I don’t even like to remove them. Ninety percent of my job is catching, tagging and identifying potential troublemakers that might need relocating, and showing people how to live safely alongside them. People like to live near water. Waking up with a salty in your swimming pool or sunning in the driveway is a good reminder that crocs like it too.”

  “Is that the call you got the other day?”

  “Nah, love. Last call was for a little bloke who lived a little too close to a daycare playground.”

  “Did you shoot him?”

  “For warming himself in the sandbox?” Noah tsked. “I fixed the hole in the fence. Then I tagged him and let him go again. I only shoot the ones the authorities label a menace. It’s not good policy killing them. Crocs have a place in the world, and the world’s a better place for it.”

  “Says the man with a closet full of alligator boots.”

  “Croc boots,” Noah corrected, his smile saying he didn’t take her criticism seriously. “Plus, I didn’t make all of those. Some were given to me in trade.”

  “Trade for what?” she asked, her curiosity reluctantly pricked.

  “When I have to relocate an animal, it goes either deeper into the wild or to a farm, where it then becomes a fashion accessory or part of the breeding stock. Shooting them is a last resort. I only do that when the authorities give the leave because they have no other choice. Shooting them’s not good policy.”

  Kitty didn’t care about policy, good or not. She cared about being stuck in a boat with a carnivorous reptile that was bigger than she was. Having already made four attempts on her life, she wasn’t about to give Australia another chance.

  After dinner, she cleaned up the kitchen while Noah enjoyed his evening tea at the table and finished reading the morning’s paper. Or at least, that was what she thought he was doing right up until the little red dot flashed into appearance on the cupboard door about head level in front of her.

  Kitty jumped, nearly dropping the plate she’d been drying, but it was there and gone again faster than she could blink. In the dead silence of the house that followed, she stood, stunned, the dish in her hand forgotten. She’d almost convinced herself she hadn’t really seen it at all when, clear as a little red dot could be, it popped into existence again, smack on the flat brown cupboard door in front of her, tiny and quivering, and one hundred percent identifiable.

  Laser pointer, her brain supplied at the same exact moment that Kitty triggered. She dropped the plate and pounced, her hands slapping one on top of the other over the vanished dot. The dish clattering to the counter top, before sliding off onto the floor. She grabbed after it, fumbled and it fell. It was a miracle it didn’t shatter. Instead, the plate made the most God-awful racket and Kitty jumped all over again.

  “I’m sorry!” She dropped to her knees, scrambling after it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  “It’s just a plate,” Noah said from the table. That tiny, quivering dot appeared on the floor almost directly in front of her, freezing Kitty where she knelt. She hugged the dish reflexively and looked up. No longer pretending to be interested in his newspaper, Noah sat with a pen-sized laser pointer not quite concealed in his hand.

  A corner of his mouth curled. He wiggled the pointer to make the dot dance off the end of her knee, teasing her with its close proximity, and the long-subdued kitten inside her triggered hard all over again.

  She all but flung the plate in her haste to pounce, but missed. The dot zipped to her right, and then zipped again, out of the kitchen and into the hallway with her chasing on all fours after it. Barely aware of Noah following behind her, she scrambled and pounced, jumping from floor to wall in wild pursuit of the uncatchable. Flicking from wall to wall, that dot bounced her like a pinball all the way down the hallway and through her open bedroom door.

  Caught up in the silliness, Kitty forgot herself. She actually laughed. For the first time in a long time, honestly, freely laughed, as she leapt to clap her hands over the laser dot, catching it against the edge of her mattress. Except she knew she hadn’t. In some distant recess of her mind, she knew he’d only taken his thumb off the button, and still, Kitty couldn’t resist the impulse to peel her fingers back for a quick peek beneath her palms. Tiny and quivering, there it was, captured in the cup of her hands against the blankets.

  It had been a very long time.

  She wanted to cry, but it came out like laughter again. Right up until she spotted the kitten costume lying in four neat piles across her bed.

  “I reckon maybe it’s not as ‘used to’ as you thought,” Noah said from the doorway.

  Kitty said nothing, she just stared at the tail—soft and fluffy, jet black with a stark white tip. It was nicer than her pink set. The fur, when she touched it, lacked that synthetic feel. Trimmed in black tufts, she petted the knee pads, her fingers beginning to shake as she crawled up on all fours to sit on her bed. She pulled the paws into her lap, touched them to her cheek. The ears made her eyes tear, black and white, like the tail, but gently rounded like a real cat’s. Reverently, she stroked the tufts. Nestled underneath, where she hadn’t noticed it until she picked the ears up, was a pink leather collar, studded all the way around with silver bells.

  She looked to Noah in wonder, hardly able to keep the tears back. “Y-you’ve had a kitten before.”

  His smile softened. He shook his head. “Nah.”

  The bells on the collar jingled as she traced them. He’d made these things for her. He’d made them. Dropping everything, she hugged her hands to her chest. They were too precious to touch.

  “You can wear as much or as little as you like,” Noah said, retreating from the room. “Or even not at all.”

  He walked out, not quite closing the bedroom door behind him to give her privacy.

  Did he mean now? Did he mean only in this room, or any time? Or, did he mean—

  He’d meant, she suddenly realized, exactly what he’d said. Just like he always did. He meant that with him she would always be safe. That she would always have a choice and the freedom to be herself. He meant she would never have to live in dread that every word he said had an ulterior meaning or motive hidden behind it.

  Pulling her new tail into her lap, Kitty pet the softness. The silliness of only a few seconds before was gone. In its place, was a strange mixture of awkwardness, hyper-awareness, and budding excitement. She picked up the ears and clutched them too. Dare she put them on? Dare she strip down to what had once been her most comfortable and, in front of Noah, try for a little while to truly be herself? Where someone else could see it?

  If not here and now, then when?

  That thought stuck into her needle-sharp and piercing. God, she was so tired of being afraid. And this? This side of herself that she had once been so proud of, it was another part of herself she’d let Ethen steal away. She thought about the red dot and Noah, waiting in the living room for her to emerge. Maybe with his laser pointer still in his hand. Maybe once more reading his paper, relaxing for the night.

  If she didn’t put this on for him now, Kitty realized, she wasn’t ever going to. If she let herself lose her nerve, that would make it all the easier for her find the mental excuses she needed never again to find it. And then her kitten self really would be lost. All because of Ethen.

  Kitty stripped. She didn’t have to, but she had always been nude whenever she let her kitten out, even before Ethen made it mandatory. Clothes were binding; Kitten was free, unencumbered and natural in both her body and her reactions. Kitty needed to find that again.

  She slipped into her kneepads, the collar with the jingling bells that tinkled so beautiful when she moved, and then her paws. Pulling her long dark hair back into a ponytail to keep it out of her face, she slipped the wire headband on and, this first time, didn’t bother trying to hide it. Without a mirror to chec
k herself, she did her best to adjust her ears so she wore them straight. But, the tail…

  Her heart in her throat, she picked up her tail in her mouth and, on hands and knees, nudged her bedroom door open and crawled to the living room. Noah waited on the sofa, a soccer game playing softly on the TV. His attention wasn’t on it though. The moment she came around the end of the couch, his eyes were on her. Her heart was still in her throat, but it didn’t stay there long. When his smile softened, every uncertainty inside her seemed to melt back into the shadows. A rolling warmth flooded through her. She loved his smile. It was gentle and accepting. He wasn’t asking her to be anything other than who she was.

  “Kitty, kitty,” he sang, making kissing noises as he tapped his fingers to his knee.

  She went, dropping her head as she neared and losing herself in the scintillating allure of simply being. She rubbed against him, breathing in the wonderful masculinity of his scent as she let his knee caress its way down her body. His fingers followed suit, but he didn’t force it, and because he didn’t, it all came flooding back to her. She blinked against the tears as she crawled back to him, climbing straight up his legs to straddle his lap.

  Because Kitty was bold like that. She never had to wonder if she’d be hurt or rejected.

  His hands settled warm on her hips. She let hers rest on his shoulders while she stared into his eyes. Every place he touched her tingled. It was at once the most natural of things, and the most erotic, and Kitty never used to like sex play when she was in her kitten mode. This was supposed to be free time. But apart from touching her, Noah made no move to take it further.

  “Is this for me?” he asked, reaching for her tail.

  Kitty let him take it from her mouth, then bent to touch her forehead to his. Kittens didn’t cry, she wouldn’t either. But she did offer a fragile thrumming purr before hopping back off the couch and presenting herself to him. She dropped her head to her hands, keeping her bottom well up.

  He patted her rump once, then stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

  Kittens didn’t like to be alone. She followed him, hesitantly at first, but quickening her step when he didn’t censure her. He led the way back down the hall to his bedroom. She paused at the door. Rule Number Four meant she couldn’t go in. She mewed, half expecting him to close the door, but he didn’t. He kept it open so she could watch while he dug lubricating gel out of his top dresser drawer.

  When he started toward her again, she presented once more right there in the doorway. He stepped around her and kept going, blowing smoochy noises to draw her back to the living room. She scampered after him, diverting only long enough to give brief but furious chase to the red dot that suddenly re-appeared on the area rug, pouncing and pouncing again until it vanished. By then, Noah was once more sitting at his end of the couch and her attention immediately realigned itself. She came to him without needing to be called. Turning, she presented one last time.

  “Good girl,” he said as she heard the plastic top of the gel tube snap open. “Deep breath… and hold it.”

  There was no discomfort at all, just a brief moment of both liquid and metal cold, and then the plug was inside her. Kitty closed her eyes. Soft fur nestled up against her buttocks and the caress of the long tail brushed the backs of her legs.

  She was whole again. For the first time in over a year, she was free. Free to cover her face and cry without fear that her tears would be used against her. Free to crawl up on the couch to straddle Noah’s lap again, and press her forehead to his and feel nothing but peace and security as his hand settled on the back of her head, gently rubbing and stroking and accepting her.

  He didn’t one time tell her not to cry. He didn’t say anything at all, he simply held her while she curled up against his chest and wished she could go back and do things differently. She wished she’d walked away from Ethen the very first day they’d met. She wished she hadn’t been so damned eager to have a dom—any dom—in her life that she took the first option to present itself. She wished she’d waited for someone like Noah.

  She wished she’d waited for Noah.

  Curling up tight against him, she buried her face in the side of his neck. If only she were a little braver, she wanted so much to thank him. Or even to tell him she liked him too, but he was right. Thirty days wasn’t going to be enough time, and just because two people liked one another, that didn’t change the facts. She couldn’t stay where she didn’t belong, in a country where she wasn’t legal and couldn’t hold a job. She couldn’t hide here for the rest of her life, with a man who, one subtle day at a time, was stealing away all the broken pieces of her heart. She certainly couldn’t have a baby here—how would that even work immigration-wise? How long could she say she was on vacation before someone called her an illegal immigrant and could they, would they, arrest her for it? Take her baby from her once it was born? She didn’t know, but it scared her.

  She couldn’t stay here. At some point, Kitty realized, she had to stop running. She had to clean up her life, get a job, find her independence and be responsible again, and she simply couldn’t do any of that from here.

  Kitty had to go home.

  Preferably before it hurt too much to leave.

  Chapter 14

  Noah got called out to work at four in the morning. The only reason Kitty knew that was because she was sleeping in bed right alongside him when the phone rang.

  Well… sleeping was probably not the right word. She’d done very little sleeping, despite his efforts to exhaust her in the most pleasant of possible ways. Most of the night had been spent wide-eyed and staring at the ceiling, trying to think of how she might make staying here work. Sometime around two a.m., she got up and for almost an hour sat on the toilet with the light off, reading up on Australian immigration laws. Except that with every passage she read, inside she knew she was only taking running away to a whole new level. Two weeks ago, Noah hadn’t even known who she was. What, did she think he was going to marry her? With someone else’s baby in her stomach? Things like that only happened in Hollywood movies.

  She went back to bed and lay there, wide awake and scared. At some point, Noah rolled over, hooked an arm around her waist and drew her in to spoon with him. His chin rested on top of her head where his slow, even breaths proceeded to rustle her hair, and the heat of his hard body cradled hers. Afraid she might wake him, she couldn’t help but touch his forearm. Just to touch him and burn into her memory how very good this moment felt, for all the long nights ahead of her when she no longer had it.

  Then his phone rang and Kitty, who’d been awake for hours, snapped her eyes shut and pretended to be asleep so he wouldn’t know. He took the phone into the bathroom with him, so as not to wake her, but she still heard half of what he said, enough here and there to figure out he was being summoned to work. When he came out of the bathroom, he paused at her bedside to brush her hair back from her face. He didn’t wake her though, and she didn’t let on that he didn’t have to.

  It would be better this way.

  Before he left, he scrawled a quick note and left it on her bedside table. She waited until she heard the front door close and then the truck chugged off into the night. Sitting up only after he was gone, by the flashlight of her cellphone she read the note: Gone to work. Croc under police dispatcher’s car. Gonna relocate it. No need to make brekkie. I’ll be taking you out when I get back. Ta.

  She huddled against the headboard for a long time afterward, holding her phone, trying to figure out the time difference and even who to call. As if she had more than two options. It was a fourteen-hour difference, which made it afternoon in Washington D.C. Hadlee would be at work. A phone call from her was probably the last thing her friend would expect and perhaps even have time for. What was Kitty going to say, anyway: ‘Hey, can I borrow enough for airfare?’

  The second she was off the phone with Hadlee, Garreth would be on the phone with Noah and before she could pack what few things she had to take with her,
back his truck would come, barreling down the driveway. She’d have some explaining to do then, and, God, the last thing she wanted was to have to have to tell Noah everything she was thinking right now. Not that she wasn’t right; she knew she was. So, with knots twisting in her stomach, Kitty finally gave in to option number two.

  Ethen O’Dowell answered his personal cellphone on the forth ring. “Hello?”

  It was such a normal, utterly anti-climatic thing to say. She’d been so braced to have his first words to her be snarling and cruel. It took her almost five panicky heartbeats before she remembered that she’d left her cellphone with him when she’d run. This was a new phone, one given to her by Hadlee and Garreth. He didn’t know this number. He was probably wondering who the hell was calling him on the phone he reserved only for his Menagerie.

  “Hello?” he said again, a touch impatiently.

  She had to say something. If she didn’t, he would hang up, but her breathing wasn’t right. She could feel her chest moving up and down, but her lungs hurt as if she weren’t getting any air and when she opened her mouth, nothing came out.

  Somehow, Ethen must have heard her panic. He’d always had a knack for hearing it, and knowing she was in trouble. “Well,” he said, impatience giving way to thin notes of triumph. “Just when I thought I might never hear from you again.”

  A bitter bilious taste seeped into her mouth. “I need to come home.”

  “Yes, you do.” She could almost hear his smile.

  “We have to talk.” She felt sick.

  “All right,” he agreed. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in—”

  “Oh, wait,” he interrupted with a low laugh. “I’m sorry, I just realized I don’t care.”