Tigers Like It Hot

by Tianna Xander

  As much as Gareth wanted to deepen and continue their kiss, he knew it must end, at least for the time being. They had much to discuss. Jessi and her friend had a lot to learn about them before they took things any farther.

  Chapter Seven

  Jessi clung to the man as his mouth ravished hers. She couldn’t think beyond what the kiss had made her feel. She was no virgin. In fact, the idea was laughable after her youth, but she felt like one, standing in his arms with him kissing her like no other woman existed in the world.

  Her head spun and her knees grew weak. She tightened her arms, drawing him closer, thrust her fingers through his hair and fisted her hands. His hair was as thick and soft as it looked.

  She didn’t want the kiss to end, yet knew it must. She didn’t even know the man, and her days on one-night stands were long over. She never kissed a man on a first date, and this wasn’t even a first date. Whatever this was, it was much different, and she didn’t know what to do. This one kiss had broken every new rule she had.

  Gareth reached up, gently untangled her fingers from his hair and stepped back to stare deep into her eyes. “We have to talk.” He glanced at Mac and his other friends. “We all need to talk. It won’t take long, and if you still feel the need to run afterward, none of us will stop you. We only ask that you hear us out.”

  Jessi’s heart slipped into overdrive as she stared up at the four men that didn’t want them to leave. What did they want?

  “Look,” she said as she stepped back and tested the grip he had on her arm. “I’m not sure who you guys think we are, but you’re making a horrible mistake.” She licked her lips and immediately knew she shouldn’t have when Gareth’s intense gaze shifted to her mouth. “We’re just two women from nowhere who want to make a new life for ourselves.”

  She had wanted to do that for the last fifteen or so years. How did one outrun the bad reputation they’d made for themselves? They certainly couldn’t do it in their home town. Kelly had stayed in their home town and tried to live it down. Even after Jessi left, made a new life for herself, and returned, the old rumors and innuendo lifted their ugly heads and made themselves known once again.

  They couldn’t outrun their impetuous youth as long as they stayed where people knew their pasts.

  “Then, we can offer you just what you want.” Mac stepped forward, took her hand and lowered himself to one knee.

  “Yes, we can,” Gareth agreed as he slid his hand down her arm, his fingers lacing with hers as he, too, lowered himself to one knee.

  Jessi stared down at them, asking herself how many times she’d dreamed of having one man kneel before her like this and now she had two. “I don’t understand what you could possibly want from us.”

  She glanced over at Kelly, surprised that the other two men had done the same. They knelt before her best friend, both of them staring up at her as though she hung the moon and stars.

  How long had either of them waited to see any one man do this. Now, they stood in this strange, Halloween town with four men staring at them as though they were the only two women on the planet.

  “Come with us to our room. We promise we won’t hurt you. We won’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do and, if you still want to leave when we’re finished telling you what we need to say, you can go, and we won’t stop you.”

  “Uh…” She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “I don’t know about you, Kelly, but I’ve stopped following strange men to their hotel rooms.”

  “It’s tempting.” Kelly bit her lip. “You know how I feel about this, but you’re right. I’m not prepared to go to your rooms, nor am I prepared to take all of you to ours.”

  Not that they had a room. They didn’t. In fact, they had only planned to stop for lunch.

  “You could be anyone, anything. You could be axe murderers, for all we know.” Jessi stared down at the men kneeling before her, her arms tingling from the contact. Something told her that this could very well be the most important moment of her life. That was the main reason that she listened to her head this time, instead of her heart. If it was the most important moment, surely it meant that these men were up to no good.

  “Telling you that we’re harmless wouldn’t help at all, would it?” one of the men asked Kelly.

  Jessi still didn’t know which of them was Zach and which one was Derek. “First of all, knowing exactly who you guys are would help.”

  “I’m Zachariah Webber.” One of the men stood before he bowed and kissed the back of Kelly’s hand. “And this is Derek Sorrelle,” he added as the other man who had latched onto Kelly stood and kissed the back of her other hand.

  “I’m the handsome one in this group,” Derek said with a grin, revealing a dimple that Jessi knew Kelly would think was adorable. It was probably one of the reasons she liked him.

  The two men who held Jessi’s hands stood and bowed over her hands at the same time. Each of them pressed a kiss to the back of the hand he held.

  “We have already been introduced, but we’ll do so again.” Mac met her gaze. “I am Mackenzie Gardner.” He released her hand, reached back and pulled out his wallet. He opened it, revealing his driver’s license, pulled it from the pouch and handed it to her. “Give this to the desk clerk.” He pulled a set of keys from his pocket. “Give the clerk my car keys. Gareth and I rode together. We can’t leave without them.” He glanced at Zech and Derek. “If you take their keys, as well, you’ll know we are stuck in this town with you.”

  “Wait. You said that you have hotel rooms here.” Jessi took the license and the keys from the man. “You four don’t live here?”

  “No.” He grinned. “We came here because we heard that they celebrate Halloween for the entire month here and—“ he reached up to touch his face, “as you can see, we have costumes of a sort.” He glanced at Zach and Derek with a wave. “We didn’t expect these two to follow us. We fully expected it to be just the two of us.”

  Zach and Derek both dug out their licenses. “Please, go to our rooms with us, and on the way in, you can give the keys and our licenses to the clerk and ensure your safety.”

  “Nothing could ensure our safety as much as just telling you all goodbye, right now.”

  “True,” Gareth agreed with a nod. “But it won’t change your life forever, either.” He glanced at his friend. “Mac and I can change your life in ways that you can’t possibly imagine. We only need you to give us a chance.” He handed her his driver’s license and she stood between them, wanting to believe that they could help her shed her old reputation and tell her how to change her life. Did they have some sort of job in mind? She didn’t really need to work anymore, but keeping busy was always a good thing.

  “Why can’t you tell us out here?”

  “It might come down to showing you, and we’d have to to that in our room. We can’t show you what we would need to show you here.”

  “Oh.” She supposed that made sense. They wouldn’t carry their things with them everywhere. “I don’t know what you could possibly have in your room that could convince either me, or Kelly, that you’ll change our lives for the better just by being there with you.”

  “For that,” Mac said with a grin. “You’ll have to trust us.”

  “The problem is, I’m not sure I can do that.”

  “Then, at least trust the desk clerk at the hotel enough to find out.” Zach moved closer and stared down at Kelly.

  His gaze was filled with something Jessi could have sworn was impossible. There was no way she saw a glimmer of love there. Kelly had just met the man.

  “There’s one other thing you should know before we get there,” Derek added as he laced his fingers with Kelly’s. She was about to capitulate. Jessi could see it in her eyes.

  “What’s that?” Jessi asked with trepidation. Something strange was happening here, and it wasn’t that, for some reason, these four men found her and Kelly hot. It was something else.

  “You’ll have to split up.
Each of you will have to go to a different room with us.” He lifted his hand when she would have protested. “For one thing, there aren’t enough seats in one room to accommodate us all. For another, this is a decision that you must make on your own with no coercion. We promise not to coerce you. You must each promise not to make the attempt to convince each other one way or the other.”

  “I’m game,” Kelly said and then turned to Jessi. “Look, Jess, I haven’t had the life you’ve had. You’ve seen what it’s like away from home. I haven’t. I’m almost forty.”

  They both nervously glanced at the guys, as though revealing her age would suddenly turn them off. None of them batted an eye.

  “I don’t have the experience living away from Langston that you have. I need to take chances. Otherwise, I might miss out on something wonderful.”

  “I’ve felt that way all of my life, Kel,” Jessi replied as she stared at her friend. “Every time I moved to a new town, I felt as though that was the town that would change my life. That something—someone was just around the corner waiting for me to make the right decision and things would change for the better. That somehow, I would meet my knight in shining armor and I wouldn’t be lonely anymore.” She shook her head. “It’s all a myth, but, like me, you have to find that out for yourself.”

  She turned her gaze to Mac and Gareth. “I’ll go with you, but I am handing your things over to the desk clerk. I’m also taking your photos and leaving my phone at the diner with the waitress with the instruction to give my phone and your photos to the police. I might be crazy to listen to you guys, but I’m not stupid.” She pulled her cell phone from her pocket. “Now, how do you take those masks off?”

  Chapter Eight

  Mac stared at her, his mouth dropping open. “I—uh—that’s the thing. We can’t take them off.” He glanced at the others for help.

  What the hell were they supposed to do now? They could shift their faces back to their human shape and appearance, but they couldn’t do it here. It would most likely send the women from them, screaming. If it didn’t run, they were likely to faint dead away at their feet.

  At that point, they would have no choice but to carry them back to their rooms, which would effectively break their promise of allowing them the choice and their safety measures.

  “Bull crap. They’re masks, so they can be removed.” Jessi’s brows lifted. “That is, unless you’re refusing to remove them. If so, I don’t have any compunction about leaving the four of you here to twiddle your collective thumbs. I’m not stupid and I’m not a pushover…usually. So, you can forget any kind of cooperation from me without removing those masks so we can take a picture. How do we know that you guys aren’t refusing to remove your masks because you have the desk clerk at the hotel in your pocket?”

  “I knew there was a reason I was drawn to you,” Mac said with a grin. He pulled his phone from his pocket. “I have a lot of photos on my phone of Gareth and me. Some selfies we took to send to post to our social media sites as we travelled. What if we give the waitress my phone?” He handed his phone to her. “There’s even a picture of the hotel and of the two of us in the room.”

  “That will do.” Jessi took the phone and glanced back at the other two who shrugged and pulled their phones from their pockets. She glanced through their pictures, most likely noting that there were photos of all four men between the four phones.

  Frowning, she looked at the photos. “You guys really take your costumes seriously.” She showed the phone to Kelly. “Look at that one. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was really a tiger’s ears on that guy.” She glanced at the men. “When we’re done talking, I want to know where you guys get such realistic costumes.”

  “And where do you live where the guys are all so gorgeous?” Kelly added with a low whistle. She glanced up at Zach and Derek with a low, “Meowrr…”

  “When we’re done talking, you’ll know all of that. We promise you.” Zach grinned at Kelly, giving her a quick wink.

  “Okay, then, gentlemen.” She held up the phones. “I’m going to take these back into the restaurant and give them to the waitress for safe keeping. She won’t release them to anyone but me, if I have my way in the matter.”

  Jessi disappeared through the doorway. Mac couldn’t hear what she said to the woman through the thick glass. He might have been able to if the traffic had come to a stop in the small town, but time moved on and people had things to do, even in a small town.

  He ignored the others, watching as she talked to the waitress, handed the phones over with a nod and turned to leave the diner.

  She paused ever so slightly when their gazes met, as though wondering if she’d made the right decision. She had, but there was no way for her to know that, at the moment.

  Whatever they planned to tell her, it had to be good, to convince the woman to stay with them when she knew nothing about them. Certainly, she would know not long after they got to the hotel room, but what would stop her from calling them freaks and leaving? They couldn’t force her or Kelly to accept them. It was the most rigid law their people had. Their people had deemed any kind of coercion immoral as well as illegal.

  He had known some who ignored the laws and never returned to the cascade, but that kind of rebelliousness was out for him. He had to return to the cascade. His body was partially shifted for life. He could remove the mask that made him look like a tiger, but he could never remove the tail.

  “Are you ready?” he asked, holding out his arm. He hoped she would trust them enough to take it. It was a small step, but still one in the right direction.

  “Yes.” She glanced at his proffered arm.

  Instead of twining her arm through his as he’d hoped, she rested her hand on his forearm. It wasn’t much, but it was something. His muscles jumped and contracted beneath the warmth of her hand and he smiled down at her.

  He took a deep breath, ignored the acrid scent of car exhaust and concentrated on the lovely, natural scent of his mate. He hoped to wake up to that lovely smell every morning of his life from this day forward.

  “It’s not far. Just come with us and we’ll explain everything to the best of our ability.” As far as whether the women would believe them or not—only time would tell.

  Chapter Nine

  Jessi bit her lip while Mac led her to their hotel. As promised, they stopped at the front desk. “My friend and I are going up to their rooms for a moment.” She studied the clerk, noting his short-cropped blond hair and green eyes. The man couldn’t have been an inch over five-ten. He didn’t look related to the men, at least.

  She placed the driver licenses and car keys on the counter. “We don’t know these men from Adam and we want to make sure that we leave their rooms alive. Please keep these here until I’m able to retrieve them on my way out.”

  “I sure will.” He smiled at her. “Ya can’t be too safe these days. If ya need protection, there’s a machine in the bathroom.”

  Jessi’s face heated. “We won’t be needing any of that kind of protection. They aren’t getting lucky today. I’m too old for that kind of crap.”

  “Sure, lady.” The young man grabbed the items and carried them to an office behind the counter. He closed the door behind him. “There’s a touch pad lock on that door. Only the clerks know the combination, and I don’t leave until six.” He checked his watch. “If you plan on staying more than four hours, I would suggest you come down here around a quarter to the hour and meet the night guy.”

  “We won’t be that long, I assure you.” Jessi was confident that they could tell them what they needed to know. Then, she and Kelly could be on their way and to the next town before dinner. She hoped so, anyway. She certainly didn’t want to spend the night here, knowing these gorgeous men were so close. Their supposed attraction to her was enough to make her want them more than she’d ever wanted anyone so much in her life. That pissed her off. She was over feeling as though she needed a man to make her life complete.

&nbs
p; She might need a man to have a baby, but she would never need a man to make her feel good about herself, ever again. She did that well enough on her own. Jessi Harrington was reformed.

  She no longer had low self-esteem and she no longer handed out her favors to feel loved. She found out long ago, unlike most women, a man didn’t have to feel a damned thing for the woman he had sex with. He had sex, he enjoyed it and he suffered no repercussions such as being called a slut or a whore. Women weren’t that lucky. She and Kelly had found that out the hard way.

  She slid a sideways glance to the men who claimed to find her so attractive. Though she no longer handed out her favors to men to feel loved, there was no reason she couldn’t do it for the baby she’d wanted so desperately for the last ten years. They didn’t have to know. She didn’t need their money to support a child. She’d done well enough for herself in the stock market that she didn’t have to work another day in her life. Neither did Kelly.

  Every week for the last fifteen years, she had taken money from her paycheck and invested it for them. If Kelly wanted to pay her back, that was fine. She could give her the original ten grand she’d invested for her. With interest, it might be fifteen grand by now. Even that amount was a drop in the bucket of money she’d managed to accumulate for them both by listening to her book keeper and market advisor.

  She let Mac lead her to the elevator, wondering if, after all of these years, she could abandon her morals and sleep with one, or both of these men for a child. They looked healthy as horses, and they were tall, good looking and had bodies to die for. Any child made between them would have to be gorgeous.

  Almost immediately, her body reacted to the idea. Cream slid from her channel and soaked her panties at the thought of making love to one of the men who stood on either side of her.

  Jessi slid a glance toward Kelly. If the other woman’s hard nipples were any indication, she had some similar thoughts. If not about a baby, she was certainly thinking about sex.