by Lynn Red
His eyes just about sparkled. They might have, actually; it was hard to tell with the washed out effect all the stage lighting and massive camera set-ups splattered across the scene. “You open your eyes and you see someone that before that, you’ve only seen in dreamy, vague kinds of ways. Someone you watched from across the room and never quite had the courage to do more than smile at. Someone like...”
Rip’s dramatic pause was better delivered, and more gripping than anything Laney ever heard in a Shakespeare production, or a Rogers and Hammerstein musical that she pretended not to watch. He squinted and arched his hand over his eyes, as though trying to shield his vision from a terrible glare. “Where are you?” he asked, like he didn’t know. He was staring straight at her, but he was smiling the whole time. Either that, or he was waiting for her to out herself, which was downright polite, Laney thought. How many bombastic, and apparently popular people, would have the wherewithal to let someone out themselves to the press instead of just blundering onward?
This one, Laney thought. This guy would, but to say he’s just those things is about the biggest understatement in the world.
Rain streaked her hair, plastering the fiery copper waves against the chilled skin on her forehead and her cheeks. A rush of cold coursed through her, followed by a wave of delicious, all-encompassing warmth. She felt it from the center of her being outward. Tingling, electric snakes ran down her belly, around her thighs, and all the way down her arms and legs to her fingers and toes.
Smiling, Laney pointed at herself and gave Rip the fakest “who me?” look anyone had ever managed to throw out. He extended a hand as though to ask for a dance, and she watched in awe as the huge gaggle of humanity and shifters parted in front of her. They all turned, more or less in unison, and as they did, Laney’s heart jumped straight up into her throat.
Laney had never been the demurring type. She hated it when Disney princesses acted helpless, and she hated even more when heroines in novels ended up clutching their pearls and waiting for a hero to come and sweep them off their feet. And it isn’t like she was exactly doing that; she certainly wasn’t wearing any pearls to clutch, but this was a new feeling. An entirely new, bizarre feeling that she couldn’t describe, and just like when she couldn’t name her feelings or understand why she was having them, she hated it.
This time though? This kind of confusion, she could definitely get used to having.
Her feet moved forward, seemingly of their own volition, but in the back of her mind, Laney was already in Rip’s arms, and there wasn’t a damn person here to distract either of them from what they both wanted to do. She felt the tension and the desire emanating from Rip, and couldn’t help her smile widening.
“Who is she?” “Whose that?” “Rip Black is settling down?” “Her?” the whispered questions swirled all around Laney’s head, and no matter how incredulous they were, or how doubtful, or how betrayed some of their voices were, she didn’t care. “He called us out here for this?” someone to her immediate left asked, halfway between a hiss and a whisper, possibly to the woman standing next to him. He was obviously trying to appear cool, distracted and cynical about the situation. Laney recognized exactly what he was doing, because it was something she herself had done in the past.
“You better believe it, buddy,” Laney said. “And if you ever want to get with someone like her,” she tilted her head to indicate the stiff, well put together woman with a tight bun in her hair and the charcoal gray pantsuit, “you better start working on your style.”
“But... Ih-ih-it’s not that,” the man stammered. “And how’d you hear me anyway?”
Shaking her head, Laney sailed past him, moving slowly to make sure she didn’t end up slipping on the rain-slicked cobbles beneath her feet. No more distractions, she told herself. No more stopping to comment.
Aside from taking her out of her moment, which none of these people had a right to do, every time she stopped and looked around the crowd, the feeling of oppressive foreboding that she was in a very alien place sunk into her chest, and she wasn’t going to allow that to screw up her mojo, either. And past that, she preferred not to do anything that could possibly taunt her propensity for nausea, and crowds definitely had that function. But her mind was steel, her nerves were iron, and damn it, she wasn’t going to let anyone ruin this moment that she almost ruined for herself.
Almost able to touch his hand, she paused for a second, took a big breath and held it for a second. He reached for her again, and she felt his grip. Her fear, whether it was the crowd, or the nagging fear that this was all still somehow either a daydream or the world’s cruelest prank, melted away. Even though she was just stepping up from the street onto the sidewalk, a six-inch increase in height, it felt monumental.
It felt like she was taking a step the likes of which she’d never thought she’d had the courage for. In that moment, she was Neil Armstrong, she was George Elliot publishing Middlemarch. Nah, to hell with all that. She was Laney Langston, and she was finally letting herself fall in love and believe in it.
She stared right into Rip’s soft, impossibly blue eyes and stepped around the podium, then up behind it with him. He pushed the rain soaked hair out of her face and pulled her close against his body. His warmth melted her heart and every breath she took filled her nose, her lungs, her entire being with his essence. Every thought in her brain told her this wasn’t possible and that things like this weren’t real.
And yet, there she was, and it was most definitely real, just like the way his full, soft lips brushed her throat. He kissed her then, deep and hard and hungry, so much that it pushed Laney’s head back and she had to fight to keep her balance. Well, she would have, if he wasn’t holding her so tightly that it seemed like was using her for an anchor.
A lightning bolt flashed brilliantly against the dead black of the near-midnight sky. Laney pulled back, staring into Rip’s eyes, and saw that there were tears in the corner of each of them. He smiled, and they rolled down his cheeks before soaking into the collar of his fashionably unbuttoned dress shirt. A flick of his thumb wiped away tears that she didn’t even realize had formed in her eyes, that’s how taken she was, that’s how entirely swallowed up in everything her entire being had become.
“Why me?” she whispered so softly that only a lion could hear her, and only one that was a few inches away.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said softly. “But I think the answer is the same for both of us.” Laney felt herself shaking, and knew that if she didn’t do something real quick, those pair of tears were definitely going to become a river, and of all the things in the world she didn’t want to do in front of a crowd, she’d already done the first—kissing so deep it made her knees shake—and she certainly wasn’t going to get all emotional. No way, no how, no sir.
She pulled away from another kiss, and Rip sucked her bottom lip as she did. She smiled again, bit her lip and chewed softly before hooking a finger in one of the unoccupied belt loops on Rip’s tailored trousers. She flattened her hand against his swelling cock, and gave him a little squeeze. She knew that the podium hid what she was doing, but she also knew that it wasn’t going to hide the blush creeping up Rip’s face and reddening his cheeks. But instead of pulling away, he stealthily slid his hand down the front of her body and pressed a finger to her sex. She squealed softly, then laughed for a second and bit at his neck.
As the two of them played like neither of them ever had before, something incredibly strange began to happen. From somewhere in the gallery, someone began to clap. Slowly at first, isolated and distant, but it was there nonetheless.
Then, she did what she promised herself she wouldn’t do: Laney took a deep breath and she turned around and looked at the entire, stunned crowd to find the one guy clapping. He had a slight build and a bald head with a blond fringe of hair around the sides. He wore a jacket with a network emblem on the breast pocket, though the increasingly powerful rain made it impossible for Laney to see th
e emblem clearly. She laughed again, and moved her hand from Rip’s crotch to his waist. He was watching the crowd too, but he kept alternating between glancing out at the audience and looking down at Laney.
Soon, a second fan joined the first one, and it wasn’t long until half the crowd was clapping along with them. The slow, confused golf clap hit a crescendo and as applause swept through the crowd, Laney finally spotted Elaine. Her friend lifted her arms above her head in a boxer’s victory pose, and pumped her fists. She’d never seen Elaine actually get excited about much of anything, and she sure as hell hadn’t ever seen her voluntarily go out in the rain, so something real special was happening.
A “woo!” from the audience dragged Laney back to reality from the strange fugue of awe she had fallen into. The cheers swelled louder, and louder, until another flash of lightning punctuated the whole thing with a brilliant flash of white.
“This is really happening, isn’t it?” Laney asked Rip. “Like, we’re really up here, and you just made the biggest, grandest romantic gesture I’ve ever heard of—seriously, a press conference—and...all for me?”
He was still smiling, and when Rip finally turned back to her, all she had to do was look into those deep blue eyes and she knew, just knew, to the depth of her soul, that there was no mistaking it.
“You saved me,” he said softly.
Before Laney could say anything in response, the sky above opened the hell up. The fat, spattering rain turned into a pour. Streams of water ran off the awning above Laney and Rip, forming a curtain between them and the crowd. “They’ve gotta be soaking wet,” she finally said. “And they’re still out there clapping. This is just unbelievable.”
“I’m guessing a lot of those folks are tired. They’re beat down, they work themselves to death and they try their best not to feel. Well, now they’re feeling. They don’t have a choice. They can’t stop themselves, and no amount of wet shirts and squishy shoes is going to do anything to stop that,” Rip said as he turned Laney to face him and held her still. His thumbs framed her cheeks, and for a long moment, he just stared into her eyes, studying her every feature. “I know that I’m feeling more than I have in years. And it’s all because of you.”
“I know I keep saying this,” Laney said softly as she looked back out toward the crowd. “Oh, they’re leaving.”
“Finally,” Rip said and pulled her close again. She could feel the warmth of his breath sliding around her throat. Everywhere it went, goosebumps followed. Waves of warm and cool pulsed deep inside her belly. “What do you keep saying?”
“Oh,” she shook her head, laughing softly. “I guess it’s just that I’m trying to figure all this out, because my brain is an asshole and it won’t just let things alone. Why me? And... how did you have a letter for me before I’d ever seen you?”
He ran his thumbs along the line of Laney’s jaw and licked his lips. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and shuddered as he let it escape. “Like I said in the letter, it wasn’t the first time I saw you. And you might not believe me, but I really didn’t mean to take a lion nap in the middle of the stacks.”
“But when?” she asked. “I mean, I don’t go many places except the library and my house. I guess I swing by the diner across from work fairly regularly, but—”
“It was a week ago,” he said, cutting her off and saving her from a long ramble session. “You were going around the library, turning off a bunch of televisions that people left on. I guess it was about... oh, ten-thirty or so, and you were wearing a blue skirt, a shirt with a Calvin and Hobbes strip on it. It was the one about exploring, you know, the last one Waterson ever did?”
“You noticed that?” she asked. “And you knew that? I really did make the right decision,” she said with a smug grin. Rip was far too invested in telling the story though, so all he did was smile in acknowledgement.
“I’m good at hiding,” he said. “But when I saw you, there was this weird tingling thing in the base of my skull that made me thought that I was either going to have a seizure, or that I was looking at something... at someone that I had always wanted and just never knew,” he paused briefly, “no, not wanted. Needed. I knew I couldn’t let you go, but I couldn’t explain why until our little run through the woods.”
Laney watched his face, letting her eyes follow the shallow laugh lines in the corner of his mouth. She craned her neck, stood on her tiptoes and sucked a kiss right below Rip’s jaw, just under his ear. She pulled his earlobe into her mouth, slid her tongue around it, and then kissed him again just beneath, smiling when he shivered.
“You made me take a chance,” she whispered, relaxing back onto the balls of her feet. “You pulled me out of my shell. And somehow, you’ve done something that I’m not sure anyone on earth has ever done—you got Elaine to like you in less than a year of being around her.”
He chuckled softly. “Is that my number one fan, still sitting on top of your car?”
Laney turned briefly and waved. “That’s her,” she said. As she watched, Elaine crept down off the roof and climbed in the driver’s seat, turned on the headlights and pulled a wide U-turn. “I hope you brought a car,” Laney said. “Or that you don’t mind rain.”
“With you around?” Rip asked. “I don’t mind anything.”
12
The rain beating down sent a thrill surging through Laney as the two of them crouched, shifted, and charged out into the darkness. Usually when she shifted, Laney had a pouch around her neck with replacement clothes in it, just in case she got caught out somewhere and needed to be, you know, wearing pants.
This time though, she hadn’t cared to bother. She hadn’t even thought of it, which was saying a whole lot for someone as fussy and always prepared as Laney tended to be. When Rip kissed her that last time before he whispered, “bet I can beat you to our spot,” Laney’s entire soul quailed in delight. She would have swooned, but she was much too interested in catching up with Rip to waste time swooning.
She knew exactly what he was talking about: the clearing where they’d played the day before. As she ran, she thought back and it seemed like she’d known him approximately forever. She didn’t understand it, couldn’t understand it, but she didn’t care, either. She ran so hard that the muscles in her legs alternated between the sweet ache of exercise after a long day at a desk, and nearly revolted with pain.
“Better keep up!” Rip shouted back at her, somewhere ahead in the darkness. She couldn’t see him, even with her keen lion eyes, but she could hear him, and more than that, she could smell him.
That leathery smell of earth and just pure, unadulterated man gave Laney energy she never knew she had. Her fur was plastered down by the rain, which was coming down so heavily now that even through the thick forest, she felt drops pounding against her. The cool wetness mirrored her own urgent desire, although hers was so hot, so sticky and sweet that she could already feel him against her, could already taste his kiss.
“I’m waiting!” she heard him call, and immediately her heart skipped a beat.
Are we already there? Is this really happening? She laughed at her own doubts. After everything that happened in the past few days, she still questioned, still worried. Even though she knew she had nothing to be concerned about, it was all so new that she kept falling back into old traps.
Creeping toward the clearing where she knew she’d find him, Laney got an idea.
She paused with her paws in a pool of quicksilver moonlight. It’s my turn, she thought. I’m gonna get you good.
She crept nearer, inch by inch, step by step. When she finally saw Rip, the sight almost stole the breath from her chest. He was staring up at the moon, his ocean-blue eyes reflecting the silver light. Laney was directly behind him, and had been careful to stay downwind. Still, she refused to move at more than a few inches at a time. She tested the ground before putting down a paw to make sure she didn’t step on a twig, or even crinkle some leaves.
As Laney neared the clearing’s
edge, she had to make a decision: to creep or to charge? It didn’t seem like she’d actually manage to sneak all the way across the way to Rip, but it’d almost be worth the effort if it worked, and she made him jump out of his skin. On the other hand...
She took a deep breath, tried her best to keep from laughing, and blasted off. Her feet a blur of motion underneath her, her mouth wide open to grab his neck, at the very last second, just after she took to the air, Rip turned.
But it was too late.
Way, way too late. With his mouth wide open, Rip let out a bellow of laughter. Laney crashed into him, knocking him over backwards. They rolled, one over the other, in three tumbling somersaults before he finally came to rest with her on top of him.
In an instant, they were both human. Neither of them had bothered with keeping a pouch of clothes on them to keep with shifter decency. “You think we’re gonna get in trouble for being naked in the woods?” Laney asked. “Reid’s kind of an asshole, but—”
“That Danniken guy, he seems pretty all right,” Rip said. “And honestly that’s why I’m not too worried anymore. Between the two of them they’ve got everything nailed down. And, uh, as far as I understand, there’s no rules about shifters being naked in the woods when they have sex. Otherwise, how—”
“Sex?” Laney kissed his neck and then gave him a warning nibble. “What makes you so sure?” She kissed his collarbone and giggled when he shivered. Nothing quite like making a gigantic, beautiful, musclebound lion shiver and get all goosebumpy to make a girl feel right.
“Well, in the brief flash of time that I’ve known you, I think we can both appreciate that neither of us hides our desire very well. Also, we gotta hurry. I have to be back in Redby for the meeting tomorrow morning.”
“Meeting?” Laney asked, kissing the hollow of Rip’s throat.