"Come with me," he said. "I want to show you something."
I followed him through the door. Then I looked around in awe.
It was a library. Or, at least, that’s what I wanted to call it. Two full walls were lined with shelves full of books, floor to ceiling. There must have been thousands there.
The other two walls were painted a deep old-fashioned red. But you could hardly see any of the red. They were crammed full of paintings and what looked like framed rectangles of fabric. Those also filled the space from floor to ceiling, apart from the window.
I leaned in and examined the closest one. It was a portrait of an extended family. Three adult men, two adult women and four children.
"Are these paintings of your family? From the old days?"
"Yes." He flicked a switch and that wall was instantly illuminated by hidden spotlights.
"How old is this one?"
"That's pretty recent. The early 1800s."
I gulped. "That's recent?"
"Well, in the grand scheme of things."
"What do you consider very old then?"
He pointed to a large tapestry, embroidered with intricate design. It was faded but I could still make out some colors.
"Well, this one is late medieval."
"Excuse me?"
"It's from the 1400s. Around the time of King Henry the Fifth."
"You're kidding me?"
He looked at me curiously. "No, I'm not. All families go way back. You have medieval ancestors too, you know."
"I guess. But mine didn't leave me a huge country house with a room full of portraits to remember them by."
"Well, there is that."
He led me across the floor. We trod over a large red and cream rug.
"The rug's an antique too, no doubt?" I wondered if I should have taken off my shoes.
"Yes, it's a Persian rug. Only a few centuries old though. No big deal."
He winked at me and my heart tossed a somersault.
I tried to concentrate on the room and not his hotness. There was certainly plenty else to look at in here.
It looked like one of the portraits was staring at us.
“Some old paintings give me the creeps," I said. “Look. This guy is giving us the eye wherever we stand."
Sebastian went quiet for a moment. I worried that I'd said the wrong thing. Then he spoke again.
"That's my great-grandfather, Bartholomew. He was instrumental in setting up Pallida Fortis Bank across Europe. Until he set about modernizing the bank, we only operated in Britain, France and Austria-Hungary, as it was then. The Boer War made things difficult. The entente cordiale with France improved matters considerably. It was then that my family really made the bulk of its fortune.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but it sounded impressive.
"So that's when you became, like, gazillionaires?"
He laughed. "I suppose so. We've certainly never had any trouble holding on to our assets since Bartholomew's days. Pallida Fortis is, uh, quite a successful investment bank.“
That was putting it mildly. I worked in the London office only yesterday and it was super luxurious. The boardrooms and reception area were like something out of an oil tycoon’s fantasy.
But here was something else pushed down in the back of my mind. I couldn't ignore it any longer.
Before he walked out, Sebastian had told me a terrifying secret. He was a tiger shifter.
I kept turning it over in my mind. A white tiger shifter. Not a normal man. Some kind of part-beast, part-man hybrid. I'd heard of shifters before but I couldn't ever imagine them being real.
The man I’d known just twenty-four hours but had already slept with? Um… Yeah. He told me that very morning that he wasn't human. Not entirely.
I had to ask him about it. There was no way I could ignore what he'd said. And I couldn’t pretend it wasn't a problem.
"Can I ask you something else?” My lips were suddenly dry. I wished I'd thought to bring a lip salve in my jeans pocket.
"Of course."
“Er… well…”. I hardly knew where to start.
”You want to know more about shifters? Or, rather, about my being a shifter?"
I was shocked he guessed was I was thinking. But then I guess it wasn't really that unexpected.
"Yeah. I'm... I'm floored by it, to be honest."
There was no point pretending it wasn't that big a deal. It was a huge deal. Monstrously huge.
"Of course. How could you not be shocked? It's extraordinarily shocking, I imagine, to someone outside the magical community."
I let those words percolate for a minute.
Then I had to speak up again.
"The magical community?”
Sebastian laughed, a low rumble that brought to mind distant thunder.
"It's all a little much at once, isn't it?”
I had to wrap my mind round the situation for a while. We fell into a companionable silence.
He broke the silence first. “If you like, I will answer any questions you have right now. Fire away.”
It was too good an offer to resist. I burned up with curiosity.
“Okay,” I said at last. "Can you explain to me how you came to know you were a shifter? Or, like, are your family all shifters? All the people in these pictures? How does it work?"
I looked around the room, turning three hundred sixty degrees to take in every face on the walls.
"Yes. All of us. We're descended from one of the most powerful magical bloodlines in antiquity."
"And you're all tigers?"
"We're all white tigers, in this branch of the family. Well, mostly.“
"So… So how is it, being tiger shifters? What does it mean, for your generation? Here and now, in the modern world?”
He strolled to the window, looking out at the horizon.
“Oh, I don’t know. It means various things.”
“Wow, so descriptive.”
“Okay, well. It means we have faster healing abilities than Plainfolk. That’s what we call the non-magical community. Healing powers are pretty useful. It also means we're stubborn and have quick tempers. Not so useful.” He moved a paperweight along a sideboard about an eighth of an inch. “It means we are immediately aware of our fated mates when we meet them. Even when the mates themselves have no idea.”
He turned to look at me. I froze under his blue stare.
"It also means we tigers tend to try our best to avoid meeting our fated mates for as long as possible. Tigers love to play. We're immature. We’re aggressive. We love the thrill of the chase.”
My face must have shown a reaction, because he walked back over to me and smoothed a tendril of hair off my face.
"It also means when we fall in love, we fall hard."
Time seemed to stop. I was under his spell again. How did he do that?
Of course, he broke the spell in seconds by walking back to the window. It felt as though he was guarding himself against something, but kept letting himself down. Then he’d regain control. It was pretty maddening, to be honest.
"Do you have any other questions about my family?" He surveyed his property through the window.
Naturally, I had a stack of questions. But my mind felt foggy and distracted.
Think, woman. Stop imagining his strong hands all over your body and think.
“Okay. Yeah. Do you have any shifters in the family who aren't tigers? And, uh, do you have any family members who can't shift? Do you have any other magical powers? And do you-"
"Whoa there, one at a time. Any shifters in the family who aren't tigers? Yes. We have ligers."
"Ligers?" I smiled tentatively, wondering if he was making an odd rhyme joke.
"Ligers are half-lion, half-tiger. They have a lion for a father and a tiger for a mother. A couple of my aunts on both sides married lion shifters, so their children are ligers.”
His face hardened. I got the feeling he disapproved of that in some way.
>
"Do lions and tigers get on okay together?"
He snorted. "Let's just say we have our differences. Lions are faithless and feckless. Tigers get the job done, regardless of their other commitments."
I wanted to ask more, but his thunderous expression warned me off.
"And non-shifting family members? Any of those?"
"There are some distant family members who refused to live as shifters. They kind of renounced their shifting power. It's hard to explain, but they sought magical help to revoke their shifter abilities. It didn't end well for them. But that was their choice.”
He smoothed down a peeling fragment of paper on the edge of a vast map.
“Plus, there are some shifters of all species who choose to live as animals full-time.” He stopped to look at a tiny portrait of a young girl. “They never shift back to their human form. So those from our family live in countries where tigers are indigenous. Parts of Asia, Russia and so forth.”
"So nobody in your family is born unable to shift?"
"Not so far. I suspect a non-magical baby wouldn't survive in a magical mother's uterus anyhow.”
These facts were blowing my mind a little. Magical uterus. Definitely not a phrase you hear every day.
“And do you have other powers?"
He reached behind his neck to rub it, like he was tired or something. Then he whipped out his hand again... and it had turned into a tiger paw with outstretched claws.
I screamed.
His paw turned back into a hand. Right before my eyes.
"Oh... my... GOD. I need to sit down.” I stumbled over to a nearby dark red leather armchair and dropped heavily into it.
"Yeah, sorry. I shouldn't pull out party tricks like that. You were asking a serious question."
“Yes, I was.”
"Sorry." He knelt at my feet and took my hand with his - now thankfully human - hand. "I have only the sort of powers all shifters have."
"But I don't know what those powers are. Apart from freaking out houseguests with... stuff like that.”
"Shifters have certain magical abilities as part of their legacy from the Old Magic world. They have special communal capabilities, in particular."
I rested my head on the leather chair back and squinted.
“But I still have no idea what you're talking about. Can you put that into English for me?"
"Ha." He sat on a big old chair opposite mine. "Well, all right. I'll try."
"I'd appreciate that."
"When a group of shifters get together - the same type of shifter, I mean, from the same family - well, their powers are enhanced."
"Enhanced?"
"There are ways of making your combined powers greater than the sum of their parts."
"You're doing it again. What?"
"Sorry. How can I put this?"
He rubbed his eyes and cradled the back of his head with his hands, searching for the words. His biceps bulged. I tried not to notice. The tingle of all my nerve endings proved I was terrible at that.
“There are some… some magic spells, if you like, which work when shifters get together. The most famous is the Grand Trine incantation. If there are three from the same bloodline, they can cast a powerful protection spell to vanquish all marauders. Sorry, I mean to zap their enemies and win the fight."
"Cool." I ignored his teasing tone.
"Or the Mutatis Mutandis incantation. Four or more of the same bloodline can alter the course of time from that point forward, but only in the lives of those involved. It's hardly used. Shifters talk about it a lot, but the fallout is so extensive that it's rarely worth it."
I rested my arms on the sides of the chair and cast my eyes upwards. The ceiling was decorated with a huge painting, like a mural of the heavens or something. It was so detailed, you could probably stare at it all day and still notice something new when you came back.
"This is a lot to take in," I said.
Understatement of the year.
"I'm sure it is." Sebastian looked troubled. "If I could have spared you all this, I would have. But none of us can escape our ancestry."
"I guess not. So do you all live here together?”
“Who?” He looked startled.
“You and your family. I guess there’s plenty of space for everybody.”
“Oh no, it’s just me here.”
I gasped. “Just you? In this big old place?”
He seemed awkward again, like I’d said the wrong thing. I just plowed on, unable to stop asking questions now I’d started.
“Don’t you get lonely out here on your own?”
He pressed his lips together firmly and the muscles in his jaw pulsed on the side of his face.
“I’m never alone. I have staff. Plus I travel frequently.”
He clearly lived a pretty solitary lifestyle. It just didn’t seem to make any sense.
“I’m amazed some supermodel hasn’t snapped you up and given you a houseful of kids, if I’m honest.”
The words just blurted out of me. My cheeks burned and I wished immediately that I’d kept my mouth shut.
“You say that like it’s something I might want.” He shoved his hands in his pants pockets. “Can’t think of anything worse than to be trapped by domestic responsibility. It’s bad enough running a bank.”
“Wow. Okay.”
His words stung. How could he be so negative about the idea of loving someone? Raising a family together? Growing old together? It sounded blissful to me.
“Some guys would love to be at the center of a family, taking care of their wife and kids,” I said.
His stare bored into me. “Good luck to them. I like my independence.”
There was something a little off about the way he was talking. It didn’t ring true, somehow. There was a hollowness to his words. Like he was trying to convince himself as much as me.
“It just blows my mind,” I said. “You have everything. Everything. And you still think you’d lose something important by having people around you to love you.”
I was shocked at my own boldness in saying this to some guy I hardly knew. Not to mention the fact that I was a guest in his home. He’d saved me twice from certain danger.
But then he was the entire reason I was in danger in the first place.
“Look, maybe it’s just the tiger way,” he shrugged, strolling idly up and down. “We don’t live in a pack. We like to roam free. My family is scattered far and wide and none of them have many children. I have a few cousins in Europe and the US. But I couldn’t even tell you my own brother’s email address.”
“Then that’s a real shame,” I said.
“You’re a family girl then, are you?” He said it with a note of mockery, which angered me.
“No. But I would give anything to turn back time and make things right with my family. I’d love to have my own family one day too. It seems we’re pretty different.”
“Apparently so.”
Neither of us said anything for a while.
Then he reached out to take my hand. We gazed into each others’ eyes for a few moments. I wanted so much to say something, anything. Or to hear him say something to me. But we were mute.
Our eyes were locked on one another. We couldn’t tear ourselves apart, even though it was pretty clear that we couldn’t be together either.
“Shall we walk in the garden and get some fresh air?” he said at last.
* * *
We made our way over to the other side of the room. It was a long stretch of floor. I felt self-conscious about the click of my shoes on the burnished wood floorboards.
Sebastian held open the door of the french windows and we stepped into the garden. His garden.
The view took my breath away for a moment.
The helicopter had landed in another part of the grounds and I hadn’t seen the full beauty of the landscape from there. An orchard filled the distance on one side. There were lush green hills and valleys as far as the eye could see. Th
e cliff that dropped away to the edge of the grounds was jagged and imposing. The Cornish sea sparkled just beyond it.
“We’re basically on top of a cliff here, right?”
“More or less, yes. The storms are spectacular here. Great to shelter in the summerhouse and watch them.” He grinned at me with his sexy smile. “Even better if you’re not alone.”
Hot pangs of desire pinged across my body as I met his eyes.
“Oh really? Shame the weather’s so gorgeous then.”
Spring sunshine bathed us with its warm rays. I loved the feeling of it on my skin. But I would have given anything to huddle down with him in the summerhouse right then.
We walked around the edge of the hedgerow bordering the top of the garden. The grass felt bouncy underfoot. Sunlight reflected off the sea, glittering like it was studded with sequins. I shaded my eyes.
"It's so beautiful here," I said. "No wonder your family settled down here all those years ago.”
Sebastian looked momentarily uncomfortable once again when I said the words “your family”. Then he seemed to relax again.
"It was a long, long time ago. They moved here from what used to be called Prussia, back in the seventeenth century. Then a bunch of them shipped out to other parts of Europe and America."
We walked next to each other, not touching. But our arms were so close, I felt the warmth radiating off him. I was suddenly desperate to touch his skin and feel it on mine.
The garden was so huge. We kept quiet until our sharp words were more distant, along with the house.
It wasn’t long before Sebastian slipped his arm round me. My skin fizzed at his touch. Our disagreement faded to nothing.
It felt so good to be held by him again. So right. Like connecting a power cable to a cellphone, or something. I was grounded again. Recharging.
"Shall we head down to the beach? We can walk along and watch the waves. You can collect seashells. Paddle. Whatever you London girls do when you’re released into the wild.”
He was smiling again, with his blue eyes twinkling mischievously.
"Okay. Let's do that then."
We crossed to the very edge of the garden where it bordered the cliff. There was a just a low white gate and fence between us and the narrow steps leading to the sand below. Sebastian opened the gate and held it for me.
"Usually I'd say ladies first, but I'll go ahead this time. It's pretty steep and if you fall, it's better that you fall on me."
Tiger Billionaire: The Whole Story (BBW Paranormal Tiger Shifter Romance Box Set) Page 7
