by T. S. Joyce
The next song, Kaylee pulled Barret on the dance floor and two-stepped badly with him while Anson ordered them a pitcher of beer. He would’ve been jealous except that Kaylee’s attention drifted to him every few seconds. Even if she had her back turned, she would look over her shoulder at him, like she couldn’t help herself. Good. He wanted all her attention. For the game. Yeah…the game.
He and Jax settled at an empty table, and Anson poured the pitcher of beer between four glasses. If Kaylee could shoot cheap tequila like it was nothing, she could drink beer now, too. And when she came laughing and stumbling off the dance floor with Barret, she picked up her glass without any persuading and lifted it in the air. “To old friends and new friends.” Her eyes softened as they landed on Anson. “And to friends who are both.”
Anson’s panther snarled inside of him at her flippant use of the word “friends.” God, he was losing his mind. He distracted himself by taking a long drink of cold beer. Over his glass, he watched Kaylee do the same. Cute little butt in those cut-off shorts, chugging beer with the boys, hair messy, eyes looking like two jewels in the blinking lights from the dance floor. Smiling, she set her drink down and wiped froth from her upper lip. She was wild and disheveled looking and he thought she’d never looked this pretty before.
Barret and Jaxon were talking at the table, and he shouldn’t do this in front of them with a human, but he couldn’t help himself. Slowly, he set his glass down and closed the five feet that separated them. He slid his hands to her hips and pulled her into a side-to-side dance to the rhythm of a slow song that came from the jukebox. And as she looked up at him with such tenderness in her face, as if she loved being touched by him, he leaned down slowly and sipped her lips. For the game. The game. What game? Her cheek was soft under the pad of his thumb, and unable to help himself, he moved a little closer to her body every time she let him stroke his tongue into her mouth. Fuck, she tasted good. His whole body wanted her. The boys’ voices died to nothing, the music disappeared, and Anson closed his eyes to the world, lost himself completely in touching Kaylee. In kissing her.
He didn’t know how long they stood there, on the edge of the dance floor, making out. He only knew when the song changed because it was such an abrupt adjustment in tempo. When Kaylee nipped his bottom lip, his dick throbbed and he was the one who let off the moan this time. Bitey woman. He liked bitey.
He waited an extra couple of seconds after she pulled away to open his eyes because he wasn’t ready to give up their moment yet. But when he did, she was smiling up at him with the same bewildered expression he was probably wearing.
Was it the alcohol, or was that just the best damn kiss he’d ever had?
Kaylee stretched up on her tiptoes and pecked his lips again. “You’re terrifying,” she whispered into his ear. So close her lips almost touched, and he dragged her against him again just to feel her on his hard dick. No woman could touch her sexiness.
“Do you remember the dance?” she asked, her golden blond eyebrows arched high.
Confused, he froze and listened to the notes coming from the jukebox. It was a boyband song about falling in love with a girl in yellow flip-flops. It was a funny song. It was their song. He’d picked it, naturally, and then Kaylee had choreographed this horrible dance.
“Are we doing this?” he asked low, daring her.
“I mean…” She looked around the bar. “I think we have to. We have fans now.”
Anson snorted. No one was watching them. Most of the bar was three sheets to the wind. “All right. Lead on, little lady. Don’t fall on the lift.”
“Don’t drop me on the lift,” she retorted, leading him to the middle of the floor.
Crap, did he even remember this? Kaylee started doing this chicken dance, bobbing her head, flapping her arms like wings, and yep, the choreography was coming back to him. Next was the robot, while moving around each other. There was some bad breakdancing in the middle, a fair amount of butt-shaking and matching pelvic thrusting. The running man happened, dance line kicks, a matching, terrible hip-hop dance, and for the grand finale, she took a few steps back and leapt clumsily into his arms. He lifted her high in the air, then settled her slowly on her feet as they belted out laughter so hard they were wheezing with it. The drunkards at the closest tables had begun cheering at the robot, but it didn’t really count because Whiskey Barney fell out of his chair and passed out on the floor right around then, too. Those boys wouldn’t remember any of this tomorrow.
They’d messed up the dance so much, but Kaylee hadn’t quit. Nope. She’d just picked it up and done her thing, hands flailing, ungraceful, perfectly imperfect. God, here she was—fun Kaylee. The girl from the Year of Kaylee, before everything fell apart. This right here was the Kaylee who had made it impossible to move on. What other woman would stand in the middle of a crowded dancefloor to the cheering and jeering of the town drunks, doing this ridiculous dance with him? He hadn’t found one. He’d looked. No one was like her. No one could make him laugh like her. No one called to his panther like her. And still, after all this time, that spark existed between them. That chemistry. She felt it too, he could tell. It was in her smile and the way she looked at him, the way his laughter spurred on her own. It was in the way she stumbled over to him and threw her arms around his neck and said, “Anson, you’re still the funnest.” It was in the way she pushed up and pressed her lips on his without hesitation. So she was drunk on tequila and life right now. He didn’t give a single shit about her reasons, as long as she felt safe enough to kiss him.
Oh, this one was going to hurt. It was going to ache down to his soul when she left this time. She’d won. He’d lost the game epically already because he couldn’t deny the feelings stirring inside his chest. He angled his head and kissed her deeper, gripped her hair in the back just to hold her in place against him. Soft hair, soft shirt, soft waist, soft skin, soft Kaylee. He was all hard edges and monster, but she was sweet. She was light. He’d grown addicted to her in the Year of Kaylee because she’d made his animal manageable. She’d siphoned the darkness away from him when things had been falling apart at home.
She was siphoning his darkness here, in a crowded bar, in front of everyone, and she wasn’t even trying.
A sharp whistle sounded, and Anson hunched at the pain to his sensitive ears. He offered Barret a pissed-off look, but his crew-mate wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at something through the crowd, near the door. Jaxon was looking in the same direction, and the hairs rose on the back of Anson’s neck when the scent hit him.
Lions.
Barret jerked his chin toward the back exit. “Let’s go.”
But Kaylee’s demeanor changed the second her eyes locked on Arden through the masses. The alpha of the Cold Mountain Pride was scanning the room, looking for someone.
Something awful churned in Anson’s gut. He looked between her and Arden and back to her. She was pale as a sheet now.
“Tell me he’s not the one you’re meeting.”
Kaylee pursed her lips and dipped her gaze to his work boots. She swallowed hard before she murmured, “Thanks for the drinks and dances. And for clearing up what happened that night with Felicity. I thought all this time…well…” She shrugged her shoulders up to her ears and dropped them again. “It doesn’t matter what I thought anymore. See you around, Anson.”
Seriously? She was dismissing him? Fucking typical. He’d been so stupid. He wanted to spout off to her. He wanted to say something witty that would remind her he didn’t care about her at all. He wanted her to think he still hated her, but all he could do was watch Arden slowly approach the dance floor, flanked by his pride, four dominant male bachelors. Between him, Barret, and Jaxon, they were two panthers and a grizzly. It would be a fair fight, but there were too many human witnesses around.
And Kaylee wasn’t asking him to defend her. She was moving toward Arden now. Her eyes were pooled with apology and regret when she looked back at him, but Anson didn’t give a fuck about that. He wan
ted to rip Arden’s lungs through his chest cavity for winning Kaylee’s heart.
This felt like losing her all over again.
Barret had gripped his arm, was saying something that he couldn’t understand over the roaring in his ears. He and Jaxon pulled him toward the exit, but Anson couldn’t take his eyes off Kaylee greeting that dickhole lion.
Everything was bathed in shades of red by the time Barret dragged him outside.
And as the cool air hit his skin, deep inside of Anson his panther screamed.
Chapter Seven
Kaylee’s focus was trained on the look of utter disappointment and stark anger in Anson’s face as his friends pulled him out the back exit.
That expression ripped her guts out. She’d seen it before, when she’d told her girlfriend, Tammy, that Anson was an animal. She’d said awful things out of anger while they’d stood by their lockers before school the day after he’d Changed in the truck. And then Kaylee had turned around to find Anson standing there, thumbs hooked on the straps of his backpack, golden eyes looking just like they had here—full of hurt and anger.
Tammy had spread it everywhere by third period, even gone to the office to report Anson as an unregistered shifter. She wasn’t to blame, though. Kaylee was.
And now she’d hurt him again.
“What was that about?” Arden asked low.
She’d only seen him in pictures. Those did no justice to how terrifying he was in person. Arden was a giant man, strapped with muscle. When he looked at the back door and curled up his lip, he was more animal than man, his canines too long. His eyes were blazing gold, like Anson’s, and he smelled like fur, felt so heavy it was hard to breathe standing this close to him.
“Answer me,” he snarled.
Kaylee jumped at the harshness in his command. Oh, she didn’t like being talked to like that. But Bentley…
“Anson is an old friend. We went to high school together.”
Arden narrowed his golden gaze on her, then dragged his attention slowly down her body and back up. “This is your pride. Seth is my Second,” he explained, twitching his head at a muscle-bound behemoth with one gold eye, one green. The stranger stared at her with zero feeling. She couldn’t read his dead expression if she tried for a hundred years. “That’s Abel,” Arden said, pointing to a blond man with his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans. His broad shoulders pressed against the thin fabric of his black T-shirt. His expression matched Seth’s, and so did the next lion shifter’s, Colton. “Teague,” Arden introduced the last one, and he also wore the same emptiness on his face. They weren’t a very welcoming crew.
The tequila was muddying her thoughts. No, more accurately, Anson was. Arden had demanded she meet him, then showed up late and brought four extras on their sort-of date. “I thought we were supposed to get to know each other here.”
Arden jerked his chin toward the bar, and wordlessly, his pride melted into the crowd. “Things are tense with Red Havoc right now,” he offered with an empty smile. “It’s safest for their crew, and also my pride, to travel together.”
“Great, but that means I’m on a date with five people.”
His eyes narrowed to little slits and his voice pitched low. “Nah, just two, from what I saw a minute ago. I don’t want you around that panther anymore.”
Awesome, minute one, and he was telling her who she could associate with. Arden was full of red flags.
He straightened his spine and placed his hands formally behind his back. “What would you like to drink?”
“Water.” She needed to sober up, and quick, so she could properly assess the size of the mess she was getting herself into.
Arden’s eyebrow arched in disapproval, and the color in his eyes muddied from blazing gold to a hazel tone, somewhere between blue, green, and gray. “Would you like something to eat?”
“Um, sure! Do you want to share some cheese fries?”
“I don’t share food,” he said in a deep, gravelly voice. That tone was probably really sexy to other women, but it made Kaylee think about how much sexier Anson’s was when his animal was riled up. When Anson got growly, she wanted to slip her hand down the front of his pants and tease him. Arden didn’t even share food. It was test time.
“Do you want to dance?”
Arden blinked slowly, slid his gaze to the couples on the dance floor, and then back to Kaylee, looking wholly unamused. “No.”
Fantastic. Her future was shaping up to be super boring.
“Does one of your pride want to dance with me perhaps?” she asked.
“They know better than to dance with you, Kaylee. If they did, I would bleed them. You’re mine. No one touches you but me. I know what you’re doing. You’re comparing me to that panther. Stop it right now. I’m not the same as them. I’m better.”
Ew.
“Stop making that face,” he murmured.
Double ew.
He sighed, but it tapered off into a growl. “If I dance with you, will you have a drink with me?”
Okay, that was progress, if she ignored the disgusted look on his face at the prospect of dancing. At least he could compromise.
He walked beside her, careful not to touch her or bump her shoulder, even when someone ran into him. “Your sweater looks nice. It looks like a rectangle. It’s good that you don’t show off your curves for everyone to see. That should be for your mate alone.”
Note to self: next date wear a stripper costume. Wow, she was already coming up with ways to sabotage this. Anson, with his easy smile, jokes, care-free attitude, love of dancing, and his genuine amusement with her, had ruined everything. She’d made a huge mistake spending any time with him and his crew. Now suddenly Arden, the shifter she was supposed to pledge to, was unacceptable.
Arden turned and slipped his hands to her waist stiffly. So just as formally, she rested her hands on top of his shoulders. They moved from side to side and looked everywhere but at each other. It was the least romantic moment of her life.
“So your son, Bentley. How old is he?”
The instinct to hide Bentley for his own protection warred with the need to find him a pride. “He’s five.”
“And he’s of the Dunn bloodline?”
These weren’t the important questions a potential step-father for her child should be asking. He should be asking what kind of snacks he liked, and sports, if he was wild or calm, and if he liked the crust cut off his peanut butter sandwich. Not ‘what is his lineage.’
Her fingers were clawed up on his shoulders now, and she gritted out, “His father was Noah Dunn, yes.”
“And Noah left him.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement.
She nodded once, wishing she was anywhere but here. Noah had left her too, and taken her heart with him. She wished she was anywhere other than talking about the failure of that relationship. She hadn’t been enough. Not even close.
“The instinct to raise young is very strong with dominant lions. Was he not dominant?”
“I think he was.”
“Then were you hard to get along with?”
She didn’t answer because her voice would shake with anger if she did.
“Did you leave his bed cold?”
Fuck him. Kaylee stared at the glowing red Exit sign. She should’ve gone with Anson and his crew.
“I need to know why a Dunn lion left his cub, Kaylee. Someday he may come back for him, and it’ll be my job to keep Bentley safe, and also you. I need to know the reasons you are raising that cub on your own.”
She tossed him a fiery look. “Because I wasn’t enough to keep Noah interested. Happy? He liked other women better. I didn’t leave his bed cold, Arden. He left mine cold and empty.”
He lifted his chin and looked down his nose at her. “Good. I’m dominant. Even with your small human senses you can probably feel it. I have needs. In exchange for my fealty and protection, you’ll be expected to fulfill those needs. And I’ll expect a cub with my genetics in the first
two years.”
He was talking about sex in the least sexy way possible. Her stomach turned.
Arden sighed and gave his pride, who were sitting at the bar top, a troubled glare. “We could use a Dunn lion cub to protect. They are bachelors, not interested in settling, and need somewhere to put their focus. They’re getting too mature to stay unpaired. They’re getting dangerous to the people here. My pride needs something to think about other than claiming territory and chasing out the Red Havoc Crew. I need to give them something to protect.”
“Are you really talking about using my son as a pawn to keep your pride under control?” she asked. God, the tequila was going to make a second appearance if he said yes.
The song changed to a fast one, and he dropped his hands from her hips. “In time, perhaps I’ll look at him and you differently, Kaylee. But for now, you and your son are a means to an end, much like I am for you. We both need something the other has. This isn’t a love match, so leave your romantic ideals out of this. I can protect you and your son. I can Turn you safely and teach you and Bentley to be good lions. You’ll have the protection of my pride. Of our pride. And you’ll be queen. We won’t be this small forever, Kaylee. I’ll build up with you by my side and Bentley at the center of my pride.”
“Until you get your genetic offspring,” she challenged him.
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I give you my word I will try to come to care for Bentley, and for you. You’ll be respected in my pride.”
Well that last part was all she’d hoped for just a few days ago. But then she’d crashed into Anson, literally, and he’d turned her world upside down, just like he’d done when they were kids.
A single day, and Anson made her want more.
This was awkward, standing in the middle of a bunch of couples shaking their hips and laughing along to the music, while she and Arden stared at each other, not touching, strangers with nothing in common but still considering pledging their lives to each other.
“How long until I have to give you an answer?” she asked softly. Oh she knew he could hear her, even with the music blaring. Bentley could hear everything.