Walk on the Wild Side

by Christine Warren

  Raising her hand to his lips, he pressed a kiss to her chilled skin and tugged her forward.

  The private nurse had left the door to Martin's room partly open, but Max knocked on the dark panels before pushing it wide. He'd called before he and Kitty left the hotel to let the older man know they were coming today, and Martin had gotten himself ready. He'd had himself dressed in an elegant pair of striped blue pajamas with neatly pressed lapels, his thinning hair neatly combed, and he'd obviously had a bath that morning. He sat upright in his bed, propped up on well-fluffed pillows like a king on his throne. He looked better than Max had seen him in weeks.

  "Come in," he said, and though his voice didn't boom like it used to, it sounded strong enough to merit the tone of the command. "There's been enough waiting done around here, don't you think?"

  Max grinned. Trust the Felix to cut right to the heart of the matter. "I brought you a visitor, Martin, but if you don't behave yourself, I can just take her back again."

  Martin snorted. "Try it, boy, and you'll find out my bite is still worse than my roar. Where is she?"

  Very aware of Kitty's position behind him, Max reached back to reclaim her hand. "Martin, I'd like you to meet Miss Kitty Sugarman. Kitty, this is Martin Lowe."

  Max gave a single, gentle tug on her hand and found it unnecessary. Of her own accord, Kitty stepped around him and into the room as if she'd done this a thousand times. He noticed the square set of her shoulders and the upward tilt to her chin and felt like applauding. She took in her father's condition with a glance and never blinked.

  "How do you do, sir?" she asked, her voice cautious but strictly polite.

  Her father barked a laugh. "I'm still breathing, girl, and these days that's the most I ask for." He waved her toward him. "Come closer. I want to get a look at you."

  Max saw the chin notch higher, but Kitty moved until she stood just out of reach of the bed.

  "I suppose you can have a look, sir," she said coolly, "while I have one of my own."

  The subtle reprimand had Martin grinning like a loon. "I see you inherited a mouth from somewhere."

  "It came free with the ear and nose set."

  The Felix laughed harder than Max remembered him doing since his diagnosis, hard enough to send Martin into a coughing fit. Max stepped forward, intending to get Martin a glass of water or thump his back, but Kitty was already moving. Gently, she grasped her father's thin forearms and raised them high over his head.

  "Keep your arms up," she instructed. "It'll help your airways clear."

  Sure enough, after two more rattling coughs, Martin drew in a deep, labored breath and collapsed back against his pillows. "You some kind of nurse or something?"

  "No, a librarian," Kitty responded calmly, "but I come fully equipped with common sense and a certificate in first aid. Why? Are you looking to hire some help?"

  "I'm looking to get rid of some," Martin grumbled, "but every time I fire them, that interfering son of a gun hires them back."

  The younger man shrugged and kept his expression bland. "Well I'm sure as hell not going to be the one giving you sponge baths, old man."

  To Max's surprise, Kitty shot him a scolding glance and perched her hip on the edge of her father's bed. "So," she said, folding her hands in front of her, "I hear we might be related."

  "Might be?" Martin grinned. "Little girl, you've got Lowe written all over you. I'm just tickled to death to finally be meeting you."

  "You could have done that a long time ago."

  Kitty's voice held no accusation, but the truth dented Martin's grin. "I know that," he sighed, "and I've already put it on the list of the things I'm ashamed of. All I can say for myself is that at the time I thought it would be for the best."

  Max recognized his cue to leave. He put his hand on Kitty's shoulder and squeezed. When she looked up at him, he leaned down to her. "I'll be right outside if you need me, kitten."

  She nodded, and he slipped quietly out of the room.

  The temptation to hover near the door and listen almost overwhelmed his good intentions. He knew father and daughter needed privacy to become acquainted, but Max's instincts kept urging him to stay with them. He cared about them both. Martin had been like a father to Max for more than half of his life, and Kitty…

  Max jammed his hands into his pockets and prowled toward the front of the house. In just a few short hours of acquaintance, Kitty had managed to make a place for herself inside of him that he didn't know if he could dislodge her from. He wasn't even sure he wanted to. If he hadn't known it was too soon to tell, he would already be calling her his mate.

  Wandering into the living room at the front of the house, Max stood before the huge many-paned window and looked out over the front of the property without seeing a thing. The timing almost didn't matter to him at all. Something inside him already recognized Kitty as his mate and to hell with tradition.

  Leos had their own way of choosing mates, a way not entirely human and not entirely leonine. Unlike their animal cousins, Leos did mate for life, or at least for long-term monogamous relationships. Like humans, they dated until they found the right person, but the recognition of someone as the "right person" didn't come from an intellectual and emotional comparison of common interests and visions of the future.

  Leo mating was more basic than that. A male recognized his mate when she went into heat for the first time in his presence, and a female recognized it when her heat was triggered at the wrong time of the month by her new mate. In an animal pride, male lions seized control of a group of females and killed their cubs to force the females into estrus. Leos didn't take things that far—at least not in the modern age—but Fate had decided that the right male would still act as a trigger for his female mate to come into heat within the first two weeks of their relationship, no matter what stage of her normal cycle she might otherwise have been at.

  In a way, it made things simple. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl date. After the first few dates, boy's presence stimulates girl to ovulate. Boy detects the change in her scent and does what comes naturally. Boy and girl live happily ever after. In theory.

  The problem was that Max didn't think Kitty would see things in quite the same way. Even if he was right and they were destined to be mates, he had a niggling feeling she wouldn't like the idea of her body choosing the man she should settle down with. And when Max put his ego aside, he also got the feeling that he wouldn't be the kind of man she would choose for herself.

  No matter how sweetly she responded to his kisses, no matter how quickly her body melted to his touch, Max knew he made Kitty uneasy. He didn't think he frightened her; it wasn't that kind of unease, but she had trouble relaxing around him in a way that had nothing to do with their mutual attraction.

  He could only speculate on the cause at this point, but he had already come up with two plausible explanations, and he thought it might just be a combination of them both. First came the fact that lots of things made Kitty uneasy right now. She'd just found out she wasn't the person—the human—she'd always believed herself to be, and she'd just found out she had a father she hadn't known existed. That would make anyone uncomfortable in their skin for a while. But the second reason had less to do with who Kitty was than with who Max was.

  For some reason, Max got the impression that Kitty thought he was out of her league. It made no sense to him. He might only have known her for less than a day, but he already knew her to be beautiful, intelligent, capable, tough, spirited, and generous. He also knew the taste of her made him drool and the feel of her made his palms itch. In his mind, she had absolutely no reason for self-doubt, but he could read it on her face nonetheless.

  He'd seen it the first time when he told her about her father owning the Savannah, and it had lingered on her face the entire time Max had been showing her around her suite. He'd seen it again when she'd sat down to dinner with him last night, and it had returned this morning when he drove her onto her father's property. The only thing that
made sense was that she was intimidated by her father's and Max's wealth, which in his mind was completely ridiculous.

  Money meant very little to Max. It made a good way of keeping score, he supposed, and he had to admit that he had gotten used to the things it could buy over the last few years, but it wasn't something that ruled him. He'd grown up in circumstances that made some of Vegas's slums look luxurious, and he could still remember what cold and hunger felt like. He preferred not to feel them again, but he didn't fear them. He'd built this life for himself, and as secure as it was, he knew that if one day it disappeared to leave him with nothing, in time he would be able to build it again. He didn't even waste time thinking about it.

  He got the impression, though, that Kitty did.

  How long he stood brooding in front of the window Max wasn't sure, but when his eyes caught a flash of light at the far end of the long drive he cursed under his breath. He hoped Kitty and Martin had made good use of the time since he'd left them alone, because it looked like the house was about to get a lot more crowded.

  * * *

  Chapter Eleven

  AFTER MAX'S WHISPERED REASSURANCE TO KITTY, HE had slipped silently out of the room, and that was saying something, since she and Martin had both gone so quiet, you could have heard a pin drop over the hum of his monitors.

  The long silence, tense and awkward, stretched between them for slow-moving minutes. Kitty thought about breaking it, wanted to break it, but now that this moment had come, she couldn't think how. She'd grown up fantasizing about all the things she wished she could say to the father she'd thought was dead. She'd wanted to tell him stories about lost teeth and schoolyard fights, academic triumphs and girlish crushes. She'd wanted him around to come to parent-teacher conferences and for her to brag about to her friends, but over the years she'd resigned herself to the fact that she wouldn't ever be able to tell those tales to her father, and her grandfather had been the best substitute she could ever have asked for. She'd grown up, she'd thought.

  Then, her world had turned upside down, and suddenly she had the opportunity to tell her father anything she'd wanted, because he wasn't dead; he was alive, and he wanted to meet her. But by now, she'd had a couple of weeks to think up thousands of insults to hurl at the head of the living man who had known about her for twenty-three years and never bothered to pick up a phone or send an e-mail or show his face to her.

  She had lingered over those plans of hers, savoring them like a bittersweet delicacy. In her mind, she'd called him every foul name she'd ever heard, a couple she couldn't pronounce, and a few she'd just made up on the fly. The anger she'd generated had helped her through the days of shock and confusion, had given her something to think about beyond the pain of losing her very sense of identity and the fear of the new future that might be waiting for the person she'd just become.

  But now…

  Sitting here at the bedside of this wasted man, whose disease had added decades to a face that had obviously been handsome in its day… now she wasn't sure. It would have been easier for her if he'd had horns and a pitchfork, like she'd occasionally imagined, or an obvious God complex, or a disdainful sneer. Anything to help her put her back up and to fuel the resentment and anger she'd carried with her all the way from Tennessee. God, though, didn't seem inclined to answer her prayers.

  Maybe it was the exhaustion of a sleepless night after a day of grueling travel, or maybe the lingering memory of the botched attempt on her life, but in that moment, facing the father she had prepared herself to hate, Kitty found that the feeling currently overwhelming her seemed more like… a sense of being in the right place at the right time.

  Of course, that was tempered by a big ol' cloud cover of fear with the potential for occasional periods of light panic.

  She forced herself to sit calmly on the edge of his bed and watch him watch her with eyes the exact color of her own. She could think of absolutely nothing to say.

  Her father finally made the first move, awkward though it was. Clearing his throat, he adjusted the thin tube of plastic under his nose and shifted his stare to a point she calculated was somewhere over her left shoulder. "I, ah, hope you had a pleasant flight."

  "It was fine. Very little turbulence."

  "Good. Good." He smoothed a crepe-skinned hand over the bedspread. "And I understand Max put you up at the Savannah last night. I hope your room is comfortable?"

  "Very. It's very comfortable. It's amazing, in fact."

  Kitty felt a bead of sweat develop along her hairline. Sweet baby Jesus! The conversation during her first date hadn't been this awkward.

  Come to think of it, she doubted the negotiations at the Treaty of Versailles had been this awkward. For the Germans.

  "I had hoped that you would come and stay at the house for a few days," Martin ventured, now possibly looking at her shoulder itself. "It would give us more time to get to know each other."

  "That sounds…" As appealing as covering myself with maple syrup and lying on top of a hill of fire ants. "… like a lot of trouble for you," she said, forcing a smile. "I couldn't impose."

  "It's not an imposition."

  "You're very kind, but I couldn't put you out tha—"

  His frown deepened into a scowl, and he made it all the way to her left temple. "You're not putting anyone out. I want you to stay here."

  "Really, I'd prefer to stay in town."

  "And I'd prefer you to stay here!"

  She gritted her teeth and fell her dander rise. "I appreciate the offer, but I'm happy with the hotel."

  The scowl became a glower, one aimed square into her eyes. "Damn it, girl, you're my daughter! You should stay in my house!"

  "And you should mind your own business, you old dictator!" she shouted back, her control snapping. So much for the whole peaceful thing. "If you wanted me around so much, maybe you should have done something about it two decades ago!"

  Kitty ended on her feet with her hands clenched into fists, her chin thrust forward, and smoke pouring out of her ears. For a long, tense moment, neither of them said a word. They just tried to glare each other into submission like a couple of junkyard dogs. All one of them needed to do was use a leg to scratch behind the ears and the image would be complete.

  Still, no matter how ridiculous the two of them looked, she refused to be the one to back down. Her temper had been riding her for weeks now. At the moment, the release of a good long shouting match sounded right up her alley.

  After a few seconds, she saw Martin's jaw shift and something sparked in his bright green eyes. He pursed his lips and gave her an evaluating once-over. "I'll say one thing for you, girl; you've got guts. There aren't many Leos in this world who'd be willing to take your tone with me."

  Girl? Wow, was he a charmer.

  "I'll take any tone I like with you," she growled. "I don't take orders from men I don't know, and I am not staying in the same house with a bunch of strangers just because we happen to share a chromosome or twenty. I don't know you, so it's not like I can possibly trust you at this point."

  The man had the nerve to grin. "Feel good to get that off your chest, girl?"

  "My name," she gritted out, "is Kitty."

  Martin snorted, still smiling. "I know, but that doesn't mean I'm going to call you that. What your mother was thinking when she named you I cannot possibly fathom."

  "Probably not, since you weren't there."

  His smile cracked. "I can't go back and change the past. It's a little late to ask me to tuck you in at night, don't you think?"

  "I'm not asking you for that," she said, her hands clenching into fists at her sides. The mix of anger and elation and hurt and confusion threatened to overwhelm her, but she refused to let him see it. "I didn't come here to see what you could give me, and I didn't come here to run into your warm embrace."

  "So why did you come here?"

  That was a good question.

  Kitty clenched her teeth and took a deep breath. Part of her wanted to gi
ve him the telling-off she'd always imagined, to let him know how much it had hurt to learn he'd been out there all along and never once contacted her. But now, looking into her father's stubborn face, she started to wonder if it really mattered anymore.

  Probably not, she admitted to herself. Honestly, the past was past, no matter how bad a part of her wanted to pull it into the present. And that was really the crazy part. Her past had actually been pretty great. Missing father or not, she'd had a good home, a family who loved her, and everything she needed to grow up strong and secure and independent. It was her present that was giving her nightmares.

  The thought drained the tension from Kitty like pulling the stopper in the bathtub. Suddenly the urge to fight was gone and she found herself almost wanting to laugh at the absurdity of arguing with this man over something he'd done before she'd even been born. As her grandfather would have said, she hadn't walked in her daddy's shoes, so how could she know if the toes didn't pinch?

  Kitty looked down at the new tennis shoes Max had immediately noticed, and grinned. When she raised her eyes back to her father's face, the smile lingered. "You know, all of a sudden, the answer I rehearsed for that question seems a little silly."

  Martin sighed and waved a hand in a gesture of invitation. "Well come on, then. Let me have it. I'm sure you must have been saving up for me, and I won't deny I deserve to catch hell for some of what I've done to you, so let it out. I'm ready."

  She shook her head. "Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Lowe, but to be honest? I got nothin'. I think I've already yelled just about every fool thing I can think of to yell. How about we just agree to tell everyone we had a great big fight and leave it at that? That way we can go right on to the next stage of this thing."

  Martin looked surprised, then wary. "What exactly is the next stage?"