He headed over to the main house, and they all followed. As Lainey walked, Felix grabbed her hand, and Ashley, the girl with the ponytail, grabbed her other hand.
“Can you carry me?” a little boy with a crew cut, who must have been Richard, asked Lainey hopefully.
Wow, this isn’t like being at work at all. I am almost positive none of these children would cut my throat and take my purse, Lainey thought. I could get used to this.
“I’ll carry you,” Tate said, scooping him up in his arms.
“I wanted her to carry me. She looks softer. She’s like a big pillow.”
“Richard!” Tate scolded, but Lainey burst out laughing. She’d never thought of the positive aspects of being larger before.
They walked up the marble steps and into the house, which had heart of pine flooring and ceilings so high Lainey had to tip her head back to look at them. Inside was a massive foyer with a double spiral staircase leading upstairs, and doors leading off in all directions. The staircases were marble, and a broad stripe of red carpet lapped down the middle of them like velvety tongues.
In the foyer, Loch was standing with Ginger, Marigold, and a small cluster of other people, including aman and woman who appeared to be Ginger’s parents. The woman looked to be an older version of Ginger, and she was holding hands with a skinny, balding, wolf shifter with gold-rimmed glasses. The woman was human, Lainey noticed, although there was also a whiff of magic there. Probably a witch There were three chubby girls with them, all of whom bore a strong resemblance to Ginger. They were chatting with each other as Lainey walked up. Marigold had mentioned that Ginger had younger sisters, all living in New York.
“Thanks for lending me the dress,” Lainey said to Ginger. “I had a slight emergency that required that I shift and climb a tree. I’ll wash it and get it back to you tomorrow.”
“You know what, it looks fantastic on you,” Ginger said, looking her up and down. “Keep it.”
“Well, thank you.” People in small towns were amazing, Lainey thought.
“I’ll be right back,” Tate said to Lainey. He set Richard down and turned to Loch. “Can I have a quick word with you?”
Loch followed Tate down one of the hallways.
Lainey looked after him and heaved a sigh. Now was the time to sneak out of here. She’d been hurt before when she’d thought that Tate was only questioning her because he thought of her as a suspect, but now that she realized he might actually like her, she was really worried. Tate was handsome, sexy, and obviously an incredibly great guy—he’d actually taken on the task of raising all of his younger brothers and sisters. She could see herself falling for a guy like that, falling hard. That was the problem. She couldn’t start a relationship based on lies.
A tiny part of her wished she could talk to Tate about it, even though she barely knew him. She just couldn’t, though. She couldn’t bear to relive the humiliation again with anyone.
No, she just needed to avoid the hot wolf shifter as much as she could before her resolve melted and she ripped off all her clothes, rubbed up against him and purred.
* * *
“There’s no way it’s a coincidence that the flower bed was vandalized. Someone’s trying to interfere with the wedding. We’re going to need to post security here until the wedding takes place,” Loch said, looking frustrated. “There’s a caretaker who lives on the grounds, but he can’t keep an eye on everything.”
Tate nodded in agreement. “Good plan. You might want to see if you can keep it quiet that you’ve added the extra security, though. You could put some of your deputies on my landscaping crew, in plainclothes, and then when everybody else leaves at the end of the day, they could stay inside the house and keep watch.”
“I’ll do that,” Loch said. “I just hate to see Ginger getting stressed out about this. Me, I don’t care about all the fancy-ass wedding decorations or the tiara or anything like that. If it weren’t for the fact that tradition calls for the Alpha to have a huge, over-the-top wedding and invite everyone in the damned state, I’d be happy to elope to Vegas.”
“I hear you,” Tate said. Not for the first time, he envied Loch and the obvious passion he had for his feisty, smart-mouthed bride.
Loch’s radio crackled. The dispatcher’s voice said, “Any available units, reports of a Signal Five located at Silver Creek. Please respond.”
A Signal Five was a dead body. Loch grabbed his cell phone and made a quick call.
“Where is the body? Any indication that it’s an unnatural death? I see. Thanks.”
Tate raised a brow in question.
“It’s almost certainly a natural death,” Loch said. “Meyer Schofeld. Some hunters were out in the woods, found him lying face down in the creek. I still need to check out the scene, though. It’s about twenty minutes from here. Want to come with?”
“Sure thing.” Tate knew he’d become legendary for his excellent sense of smell, even among shifters; he could out-scent a bloodhound. He was frequently called in to crime scenes to help track perpetrators. “I’ll come with you, and then we’ll come back and work out the details of sneaking in some extra security. Are you bringing Ginger?”
“Of course. What better way to take her mind of all of this, then a nice, exciting death scene?”
Ginger’s mother was a witch, which made Ginger half wolf, half witch. Ginger could shift, but she also had inherited powers. In her case, they manifested in the ability to see a dead person’s final moments if Ginger touched their body or something that they’d touched, or visited their home or some area they’d spent a lot of time in. If there was a death anywhere in Loch’s jurisdiction and the cause was in question, she’d help Loch out.
They walked back to the foyer, and Tate quickly scanned the room for Kat, but she was nowhere in sight. Damn, that woman could disappear faster than he could say “boo.” Was it him she wanted to get away from? Was it because of his brothers and sisters? She’d seemed to like them…although it was probably too much to hope that the woman who made his heart pound and other parts of his anatomy stand up and pay attention would also be the woman who’d actually want to take on a huge ready-made family. Since when had he been that lucky?
Well, nothing to do about it, he thought with a sigh. He had a murder scene to sniff around, a flower bed to dig up and replant, seven siblings to wrassle…
Half an hour later, after Loch had calmed down Ginger’s mother, who’d been in a state of mild hysterics ever since the tiara theft, and after Ginger had rustled up some clothing that was better suited to tramping through the woods than her strappy sandals and sun dress, they all headed out, with Loch and Ginger in Loch’s patrol car, and Tate following in his pickup truck.
When they arrived, however, they were greeted by an unhappy-looking deputy standing by his patrol car. There were two hunters with him, leaning on their pickup truck.
“We haven’t been able to find the body,” Deputy Ackerman told Loch. “We went to the area where the hunters say they saw it, and there’s nothing. A few of us shifted, ran up and down the stream a mile in either direction, nothing.”
“Were you at least able to find the spot where the body was found?” Tate asked.
“No, all we know is that it’s a couple of miles from the road. The hunters didn’t leave any mark by the spot; they weren’t expecting the body to be moved.”
“Maybe he was just passed out, not dead,” Loch suggested.
One of the hunters, a human, shook his head. “I know dead when I see it,” he said. “We saw him lying face down in the creek, half underwater, weighed down by his backpack. I ran over, pulled him out, turned him over…water gushed out of his mouth. He’d been dead for at least a few hours. He had a big dent on his forehead, and a gash.”
“So somebody could have attacked him,” Loch said. Tate knew Loch was thinking through all the possible scenarios.
“Maybe, but it was a rocky stream bed,” the hunter said. “You know Meyer. He didn’t walk too st
eady. He could have been drunk, fell into the water, hit his head on a rock.”
“So what could have happened to the body?” Ginger wondered. “Could a wild animal have dragged it off?”
“They wouldn’t have dragged him that far this quickly, and we’d have spotted it,” the deputy said. “If he was really there, and he was dead, somebody must have moved the body. We announced it over the radio, so anybody with a police scanner could have heard it.”
“Not much we can do at this point, if you’ve already searched the area,” Loch said.
“You know, I saw Meyer standing at the edge of the crowd when you were questioning people about the tiara theft,” Tate mused.
“True, although so was half the town,” Loch said. “Hard to picture Meyer being involved. I know he’s a drunk, but he’s never been in trouble for anything more than trespassing or public intoxication. Then again, he hangs out with Rodney McColl, who has some burglary convictions. I’ll have my men pick up Rodney, see what he has to say. Maybe the two of them acted together. Meyer could have acted as lookout while Rodney broke in, and then Rodney didn’t want to share.”
“If the body was dumped in the middle of the woods, it’s a good bet whoever did it thought that it wouldn’t be found for a long time, if ever,” Tate said. “It was just dumb luck those hunters stumbled on it…otherwise, in this heat, it would have decomposed and been eaten by animals before anybody found it. Days from now, there’d be nothing but scattered bones.”
“Right,” Loch said. “And if the person who dumped the body heard that the police were being summoned to the scene, they’d want to move the body before we could have Ginger touch it and read Meyer’s final moments.”
“Darn it,” Ginger said. “And I was so hoping to get my hands on a cold, dead body today.”
“Sorry, baby, you’ll just have to settle for my hot, live body.”
Tate stared off into the woods, his thoughts drifting back to Lainey. Why had she left today without saying goodbye? Should he just go to the boarding house and ask her out to dinner, and see where things went from there? Or was he just setting himself up for disappointment?
And should he even be pursuing a complete stranger who wouldn’t tell him anything about herself? Maybe there was some reason why she was so cagey every time he tried to find out more about her, although he couldn’t imagine what the reason would be. He’d run a check on the rental car, and it had indeed been registered to a Katherine McNamara, who lived in Philadelphia and had no criminal record.
So why had she acted so squirrelly when he’d asked her name?
The truth was, he didn’t know a thing about her, except that he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
“Hellooo.”
Tate glanced up, startled. Loch was waving at him. He’d been trying to get Tate’s attention while Tate mentally drifted off to lala land.
“Bobcat got your tongue?” Loch grinned at him. Damn it, was Tate’s sudden infatuation that obvious?
“Mind your own beeswax,” he grumbled. “I’m headed back to Beaudreau’s to replant the flower bed. Call me if you need me.”
And with a sigh, he climbed into his pickup truck and headed back to the Beaudreau Mansion, struggling without success to banish all thoughts of the sexy bobcat from his mind.
Chapter Five
Lainey sat at the long wooden table, ignoring the early morning chatter that swirled around her, as the other boarding house guests dug into their home-cooked breakfast. She stared into the swirling depths of her coffee cup as if she were reading tea leaves, but she found no answers there.
“Didn’t sleep too well last night?” Marigold said, sitting down in the spindle-backed chair next to her.
“What was your first clue?”
“The circles under your eyes, the frequent yawning, and you’re working on your second mugzilla of coffee.”
Lainey looked down at her extra-large coffee mug. Light, sweet, life-saving. “Third. Insomnia. What can I say?”
The truth was, after her encounter with Tate the day before, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She’d lain awake half the night imagining him naked, tangled in the sheets with her, his hungry mouth on hers…
What did it mean? Was he her fated mate, or was she just in lust with an undeniably hot man who’d kind of flirted with her, maybe?
“So you really, absolutely believe in this whole fated mate thing?” she asked Marigold.
“Of course I do. It’s the equivalent of love at first sight for humans, but different. Stronger. At least that’s what shifters tell me, including my fiancé.”
“Wouldn’t it make sense that fated mates would only fall for someone of the same species, though?”
“Not necessarily. Shifters of different species can still have offspring, so why not? I don’t see how it’s any different than humans of different races. I have a leopard-shifter friend in New York who ended up with a wolf shifter. They have a kitten and a pup. Ask me how their kids get along. Go ahead, ask me.”
Lainey snorted. Like she didn’t know where this was going. “I already know the answer, but if it makes you happy, I’ll ask. How do they get along?”
“They fight like cats and dogs!” Marigold laughed hysterically at her own joke, slapping her knee with glee.
“Very, very funny. Really, you’ve missed your true calling. But seriously…my mother swears up and down that the whole fated mate thing is just an old wives tale. A lot of city shifters think that.”
“All these shifters who want to assimilate, to be more like humans…you can’t suppress your true nature. Your parents aren’t fated mates, I take it?”
Lainey laughed at the thought. “Good heavens, no. One night when my mother had had a few too many gin and tonics, she told me about how she met a guy when she was in college, and she had that instant thunderbolt feeling, and she said that proved that the whole fated mate thing was a myth. She said the guy obviously wasn’t her fated mate, because he was poor. He was a maintenance worker. Her parents freaked out when they heard about it, yanked her out of school and made her go to a different college. They immediately fixed her up with my father, who came from the right sort of family.”
“So…what’s their marriage like?”
“Miserable. They have separate bedrooms. My parents think I don’t know, but my father’s never had a secretary that he didn’t bang, and my mother has a battery-operated boyfriend.”
Eeek. Being tired apparently made her babble even more than being tipsy. Lainey was mortified. “Oh, God, she’d die if she knew I knew, and she’d die even more if she knew I told anyone.”
Marigold only gave her one of her trademarked shrugs.
Suddenly, Lainey found herself wondering if her mother really had met her fated mate, and if the reason that her mother was such a miserable, angry person was because she’d refused to acknowledge it. The way Lainey was constantly thinking about Tate ever since she’d laid eyes on him…it would be miserable to go through life feeling that way. It would be even worse if it happened to someone like her mother, who was in complete denial about her feelings and who would never admit the true source of her frustration and misery.
What if Tate really was her fated mate? Damn. Lainey needed to avoid Tate at all costs, before she became any more infatuated with him. Should she still go to the wedding? But how could she avoid it, after she’d promised Ginger and Marigold?
A little voice in her head told her maybe she should just pack up and leave town. She barely knew these people. She didn’t owe them anything. Ginger didn’t really need her to do sketches; that had just been an afterthought suggested by Marigold.
She realized, though, that she didn’t want to leave. Everyone here made her feel so welcome. Everyone was so friendly, so accepting, that she found herself wishing she could stay longer than the two weeks she’d booked. The fact that Tate was here didn’t make it any easier…even though that situation was impossible.
“I’m so confused,”
she sighed, and took another huge swig of coffee.
“It’ll all work itself out. Your fated mate is waiting for you, you’ll see,” Marigold said, with a cheerfulness and confidence that Lainey wished she could share.
Lainey pushed back her chair and stood up. “If I drink any more coffee, I’ll float away. Maybe a cold shower will wake me up.” And take my mind off Tate.
“Don’t take too long. I need to approve your wedding day outfit, and then I have to go meet Ginger and the fam so her mother can continue driving us all crazy.”
Semi-awake after a cold shower, Lainey drove into town in her rental car, following Marigold in her VW bug, which had big fake eyelashes on it and a license plate that said lovebug.
At Blair’s, the only clothing store in town, Lainey let Marigold talk her into buying a peach-colored dress made of stretch lace, with shirring at the waistline and a surplice-style v-neckline, and matching shoes. Then, remembering what Tate had said about how she dressed as if she wanted to hide her body, she impulsively snapped up several more outfits, all of which clung to her body and emphasized her curves. Everything else she had in her suitcase was big and blousy and flowed like a caftan in an attempt to hide her girth.
It was a foolish and impulsive choice, one she wouldn’t have made even a few days ago. She really should be watching her money, but heck, she was on vacation, wasn’t she? She was on vacation from everything, including her old self, the self who tried to hide under tent-dresses.
“Atta girl!” Marigold said approvingly. “Show off them boobies.”
Lainey snort-laughed at that. It was hard not to love Marigold, even if she was a total loon.
“And you’ve got a great laugh,” Marigold added. Lainey raised an eyebrow, looking at her suspiciously to see if she was making fun of Lainey, but Marigold meant it.
“All right, I’m going to go meet Ginger for the millionth fitting of the wedding gown,” Marigold said, as they walked outside, Lainey laden down with a half-dozen plastic bags. “Ginger’s fine with the gown, but her mother’s just gone gonzo.”
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