Tiger Queen: A Reverse Harem Romance

by Cassie Cole

  “You didn’t read my resume?” I teased.

  He cracked eggs onto the pan. “David took care of that. When he said he wanted to hire you, I trusted his judgment. I saw your Virginia plates. Where’d you get your degree?”

  “Florida State.”

  He whirled toward me. “No shit? I went to Duke. Big conference rivals.”

  “I went to almost every football game as an undergrad,” I admitted. “I seem to remember crushing Duke on several occasions.”

  He aimed the spatula across the kitchen at me. “Hey now. We’re on the upswing. David Cutcliffe is building a hell of a program.”

  “Duke will always be a basketball school to me.”

  “Yeah, we do that well. Shit, I didn’t ask how you like your eggs. So I hope scrambled is good.”

  I let out a dramatic sigh. “I guess that will suffice.”

  We laughed together in the big kitchen.

  He brought me the food soon after. The eggs were fluffy and sprinkled with pepper, and the pancakes were dark brown, bordering on black. I thought they were burned until I took a big bite.

  “Oh, this is good. Chocolate flavored?”

  “They’re made with chocolate protein powder, yep. Apparently that’s what dad ate every morning.”

  I took a bite of eggs and swallowed. “I’m really sorry about your dad. Obviously I didn’t know him, but it still sucks. I don’t know what I would do if my dad died.”

  Anthony’s handsome face struggled for a moment as if figuring out what emotion to display. A sad smile won. “Yeah, it sucks. I mean, we weren’t that close. I got out of here as soon as I got accepted to Duke and I never looked back. But I still thought dad was invincible.” He stared off. “I still don’t think I’ve accepted it. I keep expecting him to walk downstairs and shout that it’s another beautiful day in tiger country!”

  I laughed at his mimicked country accent. “Where are the other two?”

  “They set out about an hour ago.”

  I groaned. “And here I thought I was getting an early start!”

  “That’s David for you. Sets his mind to something and sees it through.”

  “Then why is Jake up so early?”

  “Because,” Anthony said, “he hates to let David look better than him.”

  I finished my food, put the dishes away, and then headed to the zoo. The half-mile walk from the residence was the perfect amount of time to get my blood flowing and mentally prepare for the day. It helped that it was a cool morning with zero humidity, and a beautiful sunrise spreading across the clouds above.

  The sound of a band saw led me to the food prep area. David was hunched over the bench, pushing a huge slab of meat through the blade. I paused in the doorway and admired the sight of him from behind. Even if I hadn’t known what he did for a living, it would have been obvious that he lifted weights—and he did not skip leg day. Bent over the bench, I had a perfect view of his ass inside his khaki pants. He adjusted the meat on the table and his cheeks flexed in a way that made my ovaries twitch.

  I shook off my lust and moved to where I was within eyesight of him, and waved. He turned off the saw and raised his protective mask.

  “Was wondering when you’d wake up,” he said with a smirk.

  I glared at him playfully. “I thought this was early. Tomorrow I’ll be up before you.”

  “We’ll see. Same deal as yesterday?”

  “Pretty much. You prepare, I’ll feed.” I went to the fridge and took out a big plastic bucket. “That reminds me. I wanted to add extra chicken necks to Big Caesar’s food. He had some dandruff that I think is due to lack of fat in his diet.”

  He nodded slowly. “Glad to see you’re taking your job seriously.”

  I carried the tubs of vitamins over to the Mule. “I’m not here to screw around. I’m here to work. You know where Jake is?”

  David rolled his eyes. “Fuck if I know. He insisted on leaving the house at the same time as me, but when I asked what he was going to do he told me to worry about my own damn business.”

  I loaded up the Mule with the trays of food and drove out into the zoo. The chimps swung over to the fence and watched me drive by, and then the wolves leaped to their feet to stare me down. Even the birds seemed to watch me. It made me feel like I really was in charge of this place. Like the animals knew I was on their side.

  If David is telling me the truth, the voice of doubt said in my head. Ashley’s skepticism had burrowed under my skin and was itching.

  I tried to ignore it as I got to work.

  13

  Rachel

  On the way to Caesar’s cage I passed the tiger enclosure with the six females. None of them were in sight, which was concerning until I saw why. They had been moved to the temporary holding pens adjacent to the main enclosure. Jake was inside the big area, using a shovel to scoop droppings into a wheelbarrow. He was shirtless, had a beanie on his head and white earphones dangling down to his pocket, and he wore sunglasses even though it was still twilight out. His muscles already bore a sheen of sweat, which glistened as he worked the shovel.

  It is way too early in the morning for you to be looking like a snack, I thought to myself. I had to force myself to pay attention to where I was driving.

  I parked the Mule and shouted, “Morning!”

  He glanced in my direction, but didn’t say anything.

  “Fine,” I muttered. “Be that way.”

  Caesar was sitting up like a well-behaved dog. I prepped his food with vitamins as I had done yesterday and pushed it through the cage. Then I grabbed a handful of chicken necks—which had the shape and texture of flaccid penises—and tossed them into the cage.

  As he had done yesterday, Caesar reared up on his hind legs and put his front paws through the cage like he was asking for a hug.

  “You’re needy, aren’t you?” I said. “I promise I’ll give you some attention in a few days. After I’m certain you’re familiar with me.”

  I started to walk away from the cage.

  “You afraid?”

  Jake was leaning on his shovel and staring at me through his sunglasses. The sun was peeking through the trees, casting a solitary beam of light across his six-pack abs.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You afraid?” he repeated. “Of Caesar.”

  “No,” I said a little too defensively. “I’m just getting used to the animals.”

  “He don’t bite.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  Jake barked a laugh and began shoveling again.

  “What?” I demanded. “You got an opinion you want to share with me?”

  “Nope. You’re the vet,” he said, twisting the word to make it sound like an insult.

  He was judging me!

  One of the first rules of handling big cats was that you always treated them like they were hostile. It was the same concept as always assuming that a gun was loaded. You never wanted to get complacent. In this line of business, one mistake was all it took to end your career—or life.

  But I didn’t want Jake to think less of me. And Caesar was still standing against the bars of the cage, waiting for me.

  I approached slowly. His blue eyes watched me with curiosity and intelligence. Tigers were incredibly smart. It was possible that he knew how to pretend to be docile to lure people closer to the cage. Put a big cat in a cage and allow it to be bored all day? You never knew what game it might come up with.

  Caesar panted steadily. I was close enough to smell his breath. Big cats had terrible breath thanks to the meat particles that putrefied on their teeth. It stank like death.

  Slowly, I reached forward toward the cage. My fingers slipped between the bars. Call Kenny Loggins because I was now in the danger zone. My fingers slipped into his fur and touched his chest. He remained stationary, front paws still through the bars on either side of my head.

  Tigers couldn’t purr. They didn’t have the same larynx muscle as house cats or cheetahs. Instead, Ca
esar made a sound somewhere between a human moan and a low growl. It was the equivalent to a purr, and the sound instantly made me relax.

  “Good boy,” I said soothingly. “You just wanted a little loving, didn’t you?”

  He continued making his happy noise, and tried to lick me through the bars. I moved my hand up and scratched him underneath the jaw, which he absolutely loved, stretching his head out straight just like a smaller cat. I continued scratching and rubbing him along the side of his head, then behind the ears. My arm up to the elbow was inside the cage, now.

  For a few seconds it was easy to forget what I was doing. I was back at my Florida State residency, where I knew the cats were docile and had been with them for months.

  Then, in a flash, I remembered where I was. This was only my second time interacting with this six-hundred-pound beast. It would easily rip my arm off.

  Caesar stopped panting and tensed as if he could sense my fear. Slowly I pulled my arm out of the cage, then backed up until I was a safe distance away. Caesar looked offended, then fell back to all-fours and began eating his meal.

  As I walked back to the Mule, Jake called out to me: “Told ya.”

  “Do you know why he’s in the smaller cage?” I asked.

  He removed one earphone and said, “He gets picked on.”

  “Picked on?” I repeated incredulously. “He’s the biggest tiger in this place.”

  He shrugged.

  “This cage is meant for temporary transportation. He needs a larger enclosure.”

  “Yup.” He put his earphone back in and resumed working.

  I began preparing the next cluster of food trays. Jake was still mucking out the enclosure when I was done.

  “Hey!” I shouted. He removed his earphone. “I need to feed the females.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I bit back my impatience. “The temporary pen you have them in? It’s too small for feeding. They’ll fight. They need to be fed in the main enclosure so they can spread out.”

  “So let them out.”

  I waited for him to move. He didn’t. “Aren’t you going to leave the enclosure?”

  “Nope.”

  “You’re just going to stand there while I let these six aggressive females out to feed?”

  “Yup.”

  I let out a nervous laugh. “Nice try. I’m not falling for that.”

  He stared back at me, impassive behind his sunglasses.

  I piddled around on the Mule to buy myself some time. The females were all sitting in the temporary pen, watching Jake move the wheelbarrow around like he was a juicy antelope. Some of them even licked their lips. Yet Jake took his time methodically cleaning the enclosure.

  The gate between the temporary holding pen and the main enclosure was a thick piece of steel held in place by a metal pin. I walked over and put my hand on it. The six tigers, tensed, ready to be let out.

  “I’m gonna do it,” I warned.

  Jake growled like a tiger and tossed down his shovel onto the grass, then stalked over toward me and the exit. I tried not to look smug. I had stood up to him, called his bluff, and now he was backing down. It made me feel confident and in charge.

  But instead of opening the gate to leave, he reached through and put his hand on top of mine on the gate pin. His hands were calloused and rough. He fixed me with a long stare through his sunglasses, then yanked the pin out.

  The gate swung open, and six eager females leaped into the enclosure.

  It was like watching a car crash in slow motion, knowing what was about to happen but being unable to stop it. Jake turned away and began walking back to his shovel. The tigers slid around the gate, stalking toward him. They spread out, surrounding him on two sides like they were hunting him on the plain.

  One of them reared up, mouth open and teeth glistening in the morning sun. I steeled myself…

  …But then she threw her paws over his shoulders and licked his face.

  “Yeah, yeah, good morning to you too,” Jake muttered. He rubbed the tiger and gently pushed her off, and another leaped up and took her place. “I see you, Bella. Always the jealous bitch.”

  He rubbed them and pushed them away while walking back to the shovel. They loped along next to him like it was a game. He picked up the shovel, started to resume his work, then stopped to look at me.

  “You gonna feed them, or just stand there?”

  Sufficiently cowed, I went back to the Mule to retrieve the food trays.

  14

  Rachel

  I spent the morning feeding the animals. Normally this type of job would be split among two or three employees, but since it was just me it took all morning. A quick break for lunch—bologna sandwiches again—and then David and I cleaned the food prep room.

  “What’s next, doc?” David asked when we were done. “I’ve got some financial stuff to do, but I can help for about an hour.”

  I pulled out my notepad. “The enclosures need to be weeded. The grass is getting long, which harbors ticks and fleas. Most of the cages still need to be mucked out, too. Jake has been doing that all morning but he’s only a third of the way done.”

  David grabbed a shovel. “I’ll take the dirty work.”

  I put a hand on his arm. It was like touching a brick wall. “I’ll muck. You can grab the weed-whacker.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  As I pushed the shovel and wheelbarrow through the zoo, I wondered why I had been so insistent on taking the shittier—literally—job. Maybe it was because I didn’t want the guys thinking that I was afraid of doing the dirty work around here. Jake had made a comment about that to his brothers yesterday.

  Mucking out cages was disgusting work. I had done plenty of it during my residency, but I had thought those days were over. Doctors of veterinary medicine didn’t normally do grunt work. But this zoo was anything but normal, and sanitary living conditions were the most important thing to keep animals safe.

  As I cleaned out the chimp cages, I looked inward. Why did I care about what Jake thought? I normally didn’t let guys get to me that way. Either a guy liked me or he didn’t. I never felt the need to impress them.

  Once again, Ashley’s comments itched inside my skull. Was I letting their attractiveness cloud my judgment?

  “I’m just cleaning up shit,” I told Maurice the chimpanzee. “It needs to get done. That’s all there is to it.”

  Maurice stared back at me from the temporary pen, judging me with his too-human eyes.

  David’s weed-whacker buzzed over in the wolf enclosure while I worked. After an hour it went silent, presumably as he returned to the visitor’s center to work on the financial stuff he had mentioned. When I was done mucking out the rest of the cages I retrieved the weed-whacker from the equipment shed and picked up where he had left off. I moved through the pedestrian walkways, cutting the grass away from the path. Even though it wasn’t in the animal enclosure, it was still too close to them. Unkempt grass simply being nearby would cause the spread of ticks and fleas.

  When I was done with the pedestrian paths I cleaned up the grass around Caesar’s cage. The big enclosure with the six females needed it next. Unlike Jake, I didn’t feel safe enough to do the work while the animals were around me. I waited until Jake was on the other side of the zoo, then I used a handful of chicken necks to lure them into the temporary pen and closed them off. The girls looked offended.

  “Just because you’re friendly with Jake doesn’t mean you’ll be friendly with me,” I told them. As if to emphasize the point, one of them—Bella, I thought—snarled at me unhappily.

  It was hot work, and I sweated profusely until the sun fell beneath the trees to the west. The temperature immediately dropped twenty degrees. If it was this bad in May, I didn’t want to see what it would be like in July or August.

  Depending on how long it took David to move the big cats, I might be done by then.

  As I moved the weed-whacker around the outside
of the enclosure, the hair on the back of my neck stiffened. I looked around and saw Anthony on the other side of the enclosure fence, a hundred feet away, taking photos with a Canon DSLR camera.

  Photos of me.

  I let go of the trigger and the weed-whacker winded down. “Hey! What are you doing!”

  He lowered the camera. “I’m taking photos.”

  I gripped the weed-whacker like a weapon as I marched across the enclosure. “I can see that. Why are you taking photos of me?”

  “They’re for the GoFundMe page,” he explained. “I’ve got the page all set up, but I’ve been doing research on effective tactics for drawing donations. Describing all the work that needs to be done isn’t enough. We need photos of the work itself. That’s what tugs on people’s heart strings and makes them open up their wallets.”

  “Then why aren’t you taking photos of Jake and David?” I demanded.

  “I… I’ve taken photos of them too.”

  “Let me see.”

  The camera wouldn’t fit through the fence, so I stuck my arms through to hold it on his side. I flipped the switch to look at the photos taken. The first ones that appeared were of me, of course. To my relief he had only taken tasteful photos of me maneuvering the weed-whacker, and moving the cats to the temporary pen, and mucking out the chimpanzee cage. There weren’t any photos of me bending over or anything, even though I had done that plenty of times. Then my image on the screen was replaced with Jake’s sweaty body. The muscles in his arms and chest rippled as he held the shovel. The next one showed him with one of the female tigers leaning up on him, his hand on her chest and a wry smile on his face.

  I realized I was staring at Jake’s photos too long, so I quickly scrolled faster. Sure enough, some photos of David appeared next, running the weed-whacker in the wolf enclosure.

  “Okay,” I said, handing the camera back to Anthony. “Sorry if I overreacted.”

  “No sweat. I probably should’ve told you ahead of time.” He ran a hand through his messy chestnut hair. “I told David, and I assumed he would tell you, but if not I can see why it would be creepy. Heh. You photograph well, by the way!”