by Zoe Chant
Two kittens were in Scarlet’s outstretched arms, one a striped gray with a white belly, the other cream-colored with orangish Siamese points.
“I am doubling the price of your lease,” Scarlet told Conall.
“A bargain at twice the price,” Conall said magnanimously.
Scarlet peeled the gray one gently off her sleeves with a ripping sound as it clung to her, mewing its protest, its tiny tail tucked in tight. “This is the sweetest of the two,” she said, dropping it into Gizelle’s waiting hands. It immediately started to purr.
The other kitten bolted for Scarlet’s shoulder and tried to hide beneath her hair, but it wasn’t fast enough to escape her. “I’ve been calling this one Tyrant,” she said, extracting it from her hair.
The kitten mewed and tried to catch her with its needle-sharp claws before Scarlet set it with the other one into Gizelle’s arms. “You are of course free to name it whatever you like. My staff is not paid to scoop litter boxes, and Graham will not be happy if they use the gardens or planters. Do not flush litter into our septic system. They need to stay out from underfoot, and away from guests who may be allergic. And keep your toilet paper out of their reach.”
Without waiting for a response, Scarlet turned on her heel and left.
“Kittens!” Gizelle repeated in awe as they scrambled over her, clumsy and eager with their tiny claws and giant eyes.
She looked up at Conall with laughter dancing in her eyes. “Now I won’t miss you when you go to Boston,” she teased.
Conall mimed a knife to the heart. “You wound me!” he said dramatically.
Arms full of squirming kitten, Gizelle still tried to hug him, with very mixed results and squawks of protest from several parties. “Of course I will miss you, my beautiful Irish elk,” she insisted.
“And I will miss you, my gorgeous gazelle,” Conall echoed.
When they drew apart, the cream-colored kitten was clinging to Conall and trying to scale his shirt to his shoulder.
CONALL SHOWED GIZELLE all about the kittens; how to feed them, where to put their water. They set up the litter box and the sweet one obligingly demonstrated how the kittens planned to use it.
Tyrant, whose name was clearly appropriate and inevitably stuck to her, in the meantime demonstrated why toilet paper needed to be kept out of reach, ripping chunks from the roll by jumping up and tearing at it with her tiny, determined claws and teeth.
After they had laughed helplessly at her antics for a moment, Gizelle pulled Tyrant reluctantly away from the toilet paper roll and scolded her gently. “That’s not your toy,” she said, distracting the kitten with a plush mouse that chimed.
She and Conall played with the kittens until they began to seem clumsier than ever. Gizelle was alarmed when they started to ignore the toys that had enraptured them moments before.
“Are they alright?” she asked in concern, when even a ribbon dragged across Tyrant’s toes couldn’t get her attention.
“They’re just getting tired,” Conall told her, and sure enough, they shortly collapsed into a boneless furry heap on a pillow. Even lifting the sweet one’s paws didn’t cause more than a minuscule twitch of her ear. “They’re just children,” he told her. “They’ll do a lot of playing and sleeping at first.”
Gizelle tucked the sweet one’s paw back into what looked like a comfortable position. “This was the best present of all,” she said with a sigh. “Thank you.”
“I hope you still feel that way when they destroy something you care about,” Conall warned her. “They will require a lot of patience and need a lot of attention and love.”
“I am so full of love,” Gizelle said, trying to describe how it felt inside her. “It will spill over if I don’t give some of it away.”
Conall’s look said that he understood, and when he took her hands and pulled her close, his kiss said that he felt the same way.
Gizelle opened her mouth to him, accepting his love even knowing there couldn’t possibly be room for it, because the overflow was so delicious.
It was hard to remember being afraid of his touch. It was so comfortable now, even when comfortable wasn’t quite the word for it; it raised a dizzy anticipation in her and his hands were so wonderfully large and nimble as he traced the line of her shoulder and held her in the small of the back like they were dancing.
There was no room on the bed for them among the piles of books and gifts and sleeping kittens, so when Conall might have laid her down, he picked her up instead, his breath ragged near her ear, and carried her out to the second bedroom.
Gizelle started to slip quickly out of her dress, and he caught her and did it more slowly than she knew was possible, one strap at a tantalizing time, kissing every inch of her skin as he carefully exposed it.
She took no such care with his clothing, unbuttoning as fast as her own fingers could go; they were trembling with something better than fear, something sweeter than panic.
Then they were naked at last, and Conall was a safe weight over her on the smooth bed; an invitation and a delicious demand as he lifted her legs and drove into her. As full as she was, with joy, with passion, with love, with him, there was more, and more, and yet more, until they were sweaty and spent and laughing together in release and Gizelle felt as boneless as her kittens.
He continued to caress her, as if even afterwards, he couldn’t have enough of her under his fingers.
“You make the most enchanting music,” he said, kissing her neck.
“You are the one playing,” Gizelle said dreamily. “You know all my strings and tuning pins.” He had shown her all the parts of his guitar.
He chuckled at that and gathered her close in his arms. “You write all of my songs,” he said into her hair.
“You are all of my songs,” Gizelle countered, kissing his shoulder.
His elk sighed then, in long-suffering disgust. You are our mate, he said simply, as if that explained everything.
And perhaps it did.
A Note from Zoe Chant
I hope you enjoyed Gizelle’s book! This one is really close to my heart, and was both a pleasure and a challenge to write. Next up for Shifting Sands, I’ll be tackling Breck’s book... though I’m going to have to drag him kicking and screaming to his own happy ending, I’m sure. (Dooooom...)
I always love to know what you thought – you can leave a review at Amazon (I read every one, and they help other readers find me, too!) or email me at [email protected].
If you’d like to be emailed when I release my next book, please click here to be added to my mailing list. You can also visit my webpage, or follow me on Facebook or Twitter. You are also invited to join my VIP Readers Group on Facebook, where I show off new covers first, and you can get sneak previews and ask questions.
Keep reading for a special bonus story, Scarlet and the Christmas Kittens, which occurs during the events of Tropical Christmas Stag, and a preview chapter from another series, Green Valley Shifters!
The cover of Tropical Christmas Stag was designed by Ellen Million (visit her page to find coloring pages of some of my characters, including Gizelle and Conall!).
Scarlet and the Christmas Kittens
“I’m sorry Mrs. Grant. I simply cannot confirm that Conall Wright is residing here, nor could I promise that he would be available to play at your daughter’s wedding if he was.” Even though it was a phone call, and Mrs. Jubilee Grant was several thousand miles away, Scarlet kept her face in a perfect mask of polite restraint out of habit.
Predictably, Mrs. Grant had protests.
“Yes, Mrs. Grant,” Scarlet said calmly. “I realize that you meant Conall Wright the classical guitarist. I cannot—”
She listened a little longer, gambling that she wasn’t missing anything critical during the static moments where the spotty long distance connection was lost.
“No, Mrs. Grant, I had not heard the rumor that the island had returned anyone’s hearing. You understand that we could of cours
e not guarantee such results for any of our guests.”
Finally accepting the futility of the topic, Mrs. Grant turned the subject to flowers and rambled at some length regarding exact species and arrangements. Scarlet patiently repeated exactly the same information she had imparted several times, over several modes of communications.
“I assure you, there will be no problem in supplying what you desire.”
Mrs. Grant clearly did mind the expense of a rambling call to Costa Rica, which did not surprise Scarlet. Someone who was willing to reserve the entire resort for a wedding did not have budget concerns. It was worth indulging her desire to discuss every part of the upcoming nuptials in agonizing detail... for the second time that week.
When Mrs. Grant finally wound down, Scarlet was only listening with half her attention, looking over the end of year expense sheets and bonus calculations.
“Of course, Mrs. Grant!” she said with enthusiasm that probably wouldn’t sound too false over the poor phone connection. “We are looking forward to serving you. Have a lovely evening.”
It was a relief to finally take the phone from her ear, and turn it off.
A glance at the battery indicator suggested that Mrs. Grant had used nearly half of the phone’s charge. Scarlet plugged it into the charger and returned to her paperwork with all of her attention until Graham appeared in the doorway.
Graham had not inherited his grandfather’s oratory skills; when he dropped the loose mail on Scarlet’s desk, it was without a single word of explanation. The box, however, he was handling with particular care, and he actually grinned when he put it in front of her, right on top of the financial statements she’d been checking over.
“What is this?” Scarlet demanded.
The side of the perforated box was emblazoned with ‘LIVE CARGO’ and ‘HANDLE WITH CARE.’
As she stared at it in consternation, it meowed.
Behind Graham came Travis, grinning even wider than the gardener. “Here’s the stuff you’ll need for those,” he said cheerfully, putting a stack of bulky boxes down in the corner of Scarlet’s office.
“Those?!” Scarlet exclaimed. “There’s more than one? What are they?” The box on her desk wiggled. “Oh, no,” she said, suspecting the worst.
Graham was already making a beeline for the door and Travis laughed over his shoulder as they made their escape. “Christmas kittens for Gizelle! Conall wanted you to take care of them for the next few days so it could be a surprise!”
Then they were both hastily gone, and Scarlet was left with a box that meowed at her again, this time in harmony.
She looked at it in uncertainly for several moments while its contents protested, then sighed and carefully opened the box. It wasn’t like she could leave them in there indefinitely.
Two curious faces greeted her, with big blinking eyes in juvenile furry faces. One appeared to be a fluffy cream-colored Siamese mix, the other was a faintly striped gray tabby with white feet and ear-tips. They meowed plaintively and reached tiny, furry paws up the sides of the box at her.
“I should have told Mrs. Grant that Conall would be playing an entire charity concert for her damned wedding,” Scarlet muttered. She ignored the urge to scoop the kittens out of their box to see if they were as soft as they looked and went to investigate the boxes that Travis had indicated she would also need.
One of them proved to have cans of kitten food and a selection of toys and dishes. The other had a shallow plastic tub and several bags of scented sand. As Scarlet puzzled over the instructions printed on the side of one of the bags, there was a crash and she turned to find that the kittens had toppled the box over on her desk and were spilling eagerly out of it.
“Oh, no,” she said, rising to her feet. “There’s important paperwork...”
Clearly understanding her, the cream-colored kitten squatted down and began to pee.
Scarlet was across the room in less than a heartbeat, picking the startled kitten up and holding it up off of her desk as it squawked and finished its business over the floor and on Scarlet’s shoes.
Swearing under her breath, Scarlet carried the squirming creature to the bathroom, where it could do the least harm, and closed it in.
When she turned back to the desk, the gray kitten was walking through the pee for a pile of paperwork, leaving wet footprints behind it.
“I don’t think so...”
Scarlet caught it just as it stepped onto the latest letter from Beehag’s lawyer (though she sourly considered that urine pawprints could only improve the correspondence), and tossed her gently in to join the first.
She growled under her breath as she cleaned up the mess, already plotting out the amendment to her contract with Conall. She set up the litter box according to the directions and slipped it into the bathroom... to find only the gray kitten inside, blinking innocently up at her.
A frantic search of the small room with the gray kitten trying to rub against her ankles and twine between her feet led to escalating panic. Scarlet wondered how she was going to explain to Conall that she’d lost one of his kittens within ten minutes of their arrival.
“The island isn’t that big,” she thought fiercely, and just as she settled in to widen her search, the cream kitten launched itself from the tiny space above the cabinet onto her shoulder and alighted with a triumphant trill.
“How did you even get up there?” Scarlet demanded of it, as it purred and rubbed its tiny face against her cheek. She pulled it off her shoulder and held it at arms length while it swung playful paws in her direction. She set it down with its sibling and sidled backwards out of the room, nudging them back into the bathroom with her foot multiple times as she closed the door carefully behind her.
A single peach paw stretched out from underneath the door, investigated everything it could reach, and withdrew.
Scarlet stared, narrow-eyed, at the place the paw had been, and went cautiously back to her desk.
At first, the sound of their play—meows and pounces and scrambling claws—was distracting. But Scarlet soon tuned it out, turning to the pile of mail that Graham had dropped on her desk along with the kittens.
Much of it was to be expected: bills, advertisements, and end of the year license renewals. But there was one large manila envelope, addressed to Scarlet personally, that was a curiosity.
It had a Vermont return address, but a New York postscript, and when Scarlet opened it, it was thick and full of irregular paperwork. A glossy brochure fell out alone.
There was a letter of introduction that Scarlet read twice, growing more and more livid, and then she flipped through the rest of the material.
She was holding Gizelle’s past in her hands. An unofficial copy of her birth certificate, a xerox of the newspaper article involving the car accident that killed her parents, photographs from when she was a child, and the scientists’ records of her time in Beehag’s zoo.
She picked up her phone, now fully charged, and dialed a familiar number.
“Do you realize what time it is, Scarlet?”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” Scarlet snarled, not caring that it was probably three in the morning in Maryland. “I asked you to find out about Gizelle’s past, not find her a quiet little mental hospital to lock her up in.”
“What are you talking about?” Tony asked at the other end of the line after a puzzled pause.
“This little package that you had your friend at Safe Shifters send me has your fingerprints all over it.”
There was another tired and confused moment of silence on the line. “My literal fingerprints?” Tony asked. “What is Safe Shifters?”
He certainly sounded innocently befuddled.
“Safe Shifters is apparently a lovely little house with bars on the windows in the countryside of Vermont that specializes in mentally ill shifters. They assure me that Gizelle will have a beautiful life with the finest of medical attention and psychiatric care. I received a letter from their director because we had a
mutual friend who cared very much for her well being. Are you saying that mutual friend isn’t you? Because some of this paperwork regarding her past has your agency’s letterhead.”
Scarlet could picture Tony’s furrowed brow in the silence that resulted.
“I’ve never heard of this place,” Tony insisted. “Look, I’ve been doing some research for you, but it’s still in processing to be declassified. I can’t send it until the beancounters decide it’s not going to negatively impact an active investigation.”
Scarlet shuffled one of the pages forward. “So you didn’t send anyone a copy of the bill of sale for exotic wildlife to Beehag twenty-six years ago? Or the newspaper clipping of her parents’ death with your agency’s stamp? Or the scientists’ notes on the experimental drugs they gave her in Beehag’s cages?”
There was a sound like a phone being dropped. A woman’s sleepy voice in the background was indecipherable.
“How did you get all that?” Tony demanded then. “You have notes from Beehag’s records? We don’t even have that. They were classified above our heads directly after my return from the field, before anyone had a chance to go through them.”
“If it wasn’t you, who could have put this together?” Scarlet was equal parts relieved and disappointed; she was glad that Tony had not been so foolish as to think she would want any part in putting Gizelle into a home, and frustrated that now she had no one to eviscerate.
If Tony had an answer, it was lost when Scarlet dropped her phone to the sound of a loud splash from the bathroom and a shrill yowl of terror.
“I’ll call you back,” she shouted towards the phone, and she opened the bathroom door onto a scene of absolute chaos.
The cream kitten was paddling around inside the toilet bowl, shrieking her protest and trying in vain to reach up to the seat, claws scrabbling on the hard porcelain. The gray kitten was standing on its back legs beside the toilet, contemplating its own expedition to the toilet seat to save her sibling.