Hollywood Tiger: BBW Tiger Shifter Paranormal Romance (Hollywood Shifters Book 3)

by Chant, Zoe

  She closed both hands around it and tried to aim at the snake, but it and the tiger were rolling around, the snake desperate to squeeze the tiger, the tiger frantic, his yellow eyes wide and hazy.

  Mindy met that gaze, light bursting somewhere behind her ribs.

  I know you, she thought, emotions still some way behind her and scrambling to catch up. Right now she was numb, and shaky and desperate, her brain racing—And I have to do something about that snake—

  Yes. Her gaze snapped to the bottle of Scotch, which was three-quarters full. She tucked the pistol into the front of her dress, picked up the bottle, and with all her strength smashed it directly onto the snake’s face. Glass and pungent alcohol splashed everywhere.

  The snake jolted as if electrified, then slumped into loose curls.

  A second later the tiger blurred, and there lay Dennis, one shoulder bleeding copiously, his gorgeous body sprawled in the blood and glass.

  He croaked, “Mork. Pool.”

  Mindy swung around as Hank surged up, one hand holding his dripping pistol.

  Before he could blink the water from his eyes, Mindy yanked the pistol from her dress and pointed it at him. “Drop it,” she yelled.

  He brought his pistol up. Mindy gripped hers tighter, aimed in front of Hank and pulled the trigger—and to her surprise, the gun leaped in her hand, water geysering up about six inches from Hank’s left hip.

  He let out a surprised yelp and fell back into the pool. Mindy backed away, aware of a high, thin wailing somewhere in the distance. She glanced at Dennis, who was in the process of yanking the pants off the snoring guy he’d konked with the cane.

  He struggled one-handed to get the pants over his legs as the wailing increased to the sound of sirens.

  “Dennis?” Mindy asked, still pointing the gun at Hank in the pool.

  A flicker at her right, and Torvaldsen was back as a man again, with tiny cuts all over his face. He lay naked amid the scraps of his ruined clothes as Dennis picked the pistol out of one of the fallen guards’ hands, and pointed it at him.

  Torvaldsen stilled, blinking rapidly, his lips drawn back into a rictus.

  Maybe two minutes later, though it felt like an eternity, the back doors of the house banged open and a SWAT team poured out, weapons to bear. Dennis raised his hands, and Mindy copied him, but anxiety didn’t turn into relief until she saw Agent Sloane come through the doors behind the team.

  She dropped her pistol on the table and ran to Dennis, and he closed his one good arm around her as if he would never let her go.

  “I love you, I love you,” she sobbed into his chest.

  “I love you, too, my darling Mindy,” he whispered, and her ear pressed up against his tawny chest hair.

  She heard a low purr.

  ***

  “You are so amazing. How the hell did you come up with that?” he whispered.

  Mindy snuggled tighter against him, and a wash of tenderness almost defeated the throbbing pain at the way she carefully avoided touching his right shoulder.

  “The Scotch?” she said in that small voice. “It was after you talked about the Amazon. I was reading. About the scariest creatures there. And how to defeat them if they attack you. And they said snakes like anacondas will go blind and its nose will blank out if you throw alcohol at it. I figured Scotch would work.”

  “Talk about overkill! No wonder you dropped the bastard like a stone. That kind of Scotch is something like putting jet fuel into a moped.”

  “Good,” she muttered into his chest. “And I hope it hurt. He was trying to kill you.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he murmured into her hair.

  She gulped on a sob. “I wanted to.” Then she tipped up her head, her curls flying wildly around her face as her eyes rounded, full of question. “But you could’ve gone first.”

  “I—it’s not that simple,” he said, knowing he sounded weak. Stupid. “That is, not just me—”

  “O’Keefe, sit down so the EMT can tend that shoulder before you fall.” Agent Sloane appeared next to them, one finger pressed against the earbud in his ear.

  Dennis was afraid that if he moved, he would fall flat on his face. Mindy seemed to read his mind, or maybe it was only his muscle movement, because she closed her arms around his chest and held him steady as an EMT put one of the patio chairs against Dennis’s knees.

  He sank into it, and the dizziness struck all of a sudden.

  Agent Sloane said, “Miss Maurek, may I request you to step this way—careful of that glass with your bare feet—and we can talk?”

  Dennis watched her cast a worried look back at him, then Sloane said, “He’s not going anywhere.”

  “I have questions, too,” she said.

  Sloane flicked her a glance, then with his toe nudged the edge of a ripped shirt lying in a tangle in the mess on the patio. Then he cast her a questioning look.

  “Then you . . . know?” she asked in a low voice, casting another troubled look Dennis’s way.

  Agent Sloane gave a single nod.

  “Do they?” she indicated the SWAT team busy taking away Torvaldsen and his minions.

  He shook his head, as the EMT slid a hypo into Dennis’s arm. A sting, then the pain dropped under a cottony cover. He knew he was going to fade out, as his tiger tapped all his energy reserves to begin the healing process.

  “Mindy,” he whispered. “Don’t go . . .”

  He didn’t think his voice was very loud, and his eyes began to close, but two warm hands brushed his cheeks, soft lips touched gently to his, and she breathed, “I’m not leaving you.”

  ***

  Mindy watched Dennis lean back, eyes closed as two EMTs worked on him, muttering back and forth in Medicalese.

  She couldn’t understand any of their jargon, but Agent Sloane said approvingly, “Good. Through-and-through.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means the bullet went cleanly in and out of his shoulder without hitting a bone and ricocheting, or burying itself further into him. So they won’t have to dig it out of him.”

  Her stomach shivered. “What’s going to happen now?” Mindy asked.

  “The local police will take Torvaldsen and the rest of these guys away and lock them up until the FBI comes along to take custody. My opposite number in Sweden has been trying to catch up with Torvaldsen for five years, and will be yelling to get him back. Along with authorities in half a dozen other countries.”

  “I hope the meanest one wins,” she said, anger flooding her again when she remembered her horror at the way Torvaldsen coldly lifted that pistol and fired. “At least he was a bad shot.”

  “No, I expect he put that bullet where he wanted to,” Agent Sloane said in a low voice. “He wanted information. As it happens, information that Dennis didn’t have. We were all wrong, as it turns out.”

  Mindy crossed her arms tightly over her chest, pressing against the shivers that she couldn’t seem to stop. “We figured that out. Haskell wasn’t on top. He was being set up, too.”

  “The scammer scammed. He seems to have discovered it as well, and fled the scene in Hollywood, leaving behind an unholy mess. LAPD is trying to sort it all out now. As for who will win eventual custody of Torvaldsen, I have faith in my opposite number. We take care of our own.”

  Mindy looked into Agent Sloane’s face. His expression was inscrutable, and she considered all the meanings those words could have—from sinister to safe.

  Agent Sloane added, “Perhaps it would be best to leave it to Dennis to expand further.”

  Mindy nodded jerkily, not wanting to say anything. She was too jittery to think too far ahead, but a lifetime of habit kept her from mentioning her own ability. She swallowed in a tight, dry throat, knowing that reaction tears were not far away.

  “Come on, Miss Maurek,” the agent said kindly. “We’ve got a car in the lot out here. I’m not going to let them take Dennis to the hospital—I’ll bring him out as soon as they have that s
houlder wrapped. We have our own doctor.”

  And so it was.

  After that long horrible day, she wished she could shut her eyes and be alone with Dennis. She longed for quiet, and time for questions, and his arms around her.

  But reality was the strong afternoon sunlight, and picking her ruined sandals up after the crime scene photos had been shot, and then sitting in the back of an unmarked cruiser with the air conditioning blasting, as the radio dispatcher uttered a lot of jargon, and a horde of uniformed people tramped in and out of the house.

  At some point, the churning quaky feeling in her stomach gave way to rumbles of hunger. Mindy would have laughed if she wasn’t so tired, and so worried about Dennis—but here he came at last, escorted by Agent Sloane.

  A few moments later he dropped into the seat beside Mindy, and because she sat at his left, she pressed up against him. At once his arm tightened around her, and she relaxed at last, until then unaware of the tension that had gripped every muscle.

  He leaned over to kiss her, and she surrendered to the sweet fire.

  Questions—the entire world—could wait.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was midnight when at last they walked exhaustedly into the quiet guest room high in the Hollywood Hills. Mindy had not left Dennis’s side, and he had held her hand through the long process of questioning, then listening to Agent Sloane’s report.

  Because Greg had been able to warn him before falling unconscious, Agent Sloane had made it to the studio ahead of Torvaldsen and his gang. Thanks to Mindy’s photos, he had known exactly where to go, and which file cabinet to break into.

  He’d had just enough time to scoop all those film development files into a courier bag, and he was driving out a bare minute before Torvaldsen’s two black vans roared through the lot gate, smashing it to smithereens. Sloane had passed the two vans unnoticed in his nondescript car, and then began the race with the data across the valley to their IT person.

  From preliminary reports of what they’d found, the fake film and its investors turned out to be, as Agent Sloane said, a pimple on the butt of an elephant. Torvaldsen had been using Haskell’s shady bookkeeping to hide a far more sinister plot involving massive amounts of money for international gun running, and connections with worse kinds of illegal traffic.

  “Torvaldsen’s main M.O. was to stay on the move. But at some point he got arrogant and careless—because all his various deals were all right there, disguised as future film productions in development,” Agent Sloane said. “We haven’t had time to go through it all, of course, but what we seem to have now is hard evidence, names, and money channels. Jackpot.”

  “What about Ben the hawk?” Dennis asked.

  Sloane’s teeth showed briefly. “I took care of Ben the hawk.”

  And Dennis whispered to Mindy, “Agent Sloane is a peregrine falcon shifter, one of the fastest raptors on earth.”

  Right around then, someone brought not only coffee but a bag of savory, oven-fresh pastrami sandwiches and rich, delicious matzoh ball soup from Jerry’s Famous Deli, near CBS Studio Center. That and the steadying sense of Dennis safely sitting right next to her revived Mindy like magic.

  When it was their turn to talk, Dennis stayed silent while Mindy told her story. When she came to Torvaldsen’s order to Hank, she said, “Dennis attacked those men, until he got shot, and I tripped Hank into the pool. Then Dennis got a gun, and I got one, and there we were until you came.”

  Agent Sloane said, “I see. Dennis?”

  “Like the lady said,” Dennis replied. “I wasn’t tracking details by then.” He tapped his right shoulder lightly.

  “Well, all I can say is, between the two of you, you did a superlative job. That last couple miles up to Mulholland, I was afraid of what I might find. I can’t thank you enough for your fast thinking in the heat of action. If you don’t have anymore questions for me, why don’t the two of you go get some rest? The formal depositions and the like can come later.”

  “When we get our story straight,” Dennis said once they reached the parking lot, where somebody on Agent Sloane’s team had thoughtfully brought Mindy’s car.

  Mindy sent him an anxious look, to see him smiling tiredly.

  Since it was Sunday, there was no rush hour traffic, and soon they were over the Hollywood Hills on the south side once again.

  Dennis turned to Mindy, and wordlessly held out his left hand in invitation—and appeal.

  She wanted to go home and get rid of her filthy dress, but she wanted even more to stay. The cold, sick feeling in her stomach had faded, replaced by butterflies as she turned off the engine, and they walked into the quiet house.

  When they reached the bedroom, Dennis kicked off his shoes and grunted in pain as he tried dealing with buttons with his left hand.

  “Let me,” she said.

  He dropped his hands, smiling down at her as she reached up. She was shocked to discover his skin hot to the touch. She gently undid the big work shirt that somebody had loaned him and carefully lifted it away from his right arm, then laid it over the bureau. Then she undid his pants and he stepped out of them. Her emotions were a swirling mix of affection and tenderness and worry, and as he fell back onto the bed with a sigh, she skinned out of that horrible dress that she never wanted to see again, kicked off her sandals, and crawled up beside him.

  He lay with his eyes closed, and his left hand out, open in wordless plea. She caressed his palm and leaned in, and then, for the first time in her life, dared to let the poodle rise just enough so she could sniff him all over his right side. The wound smelled clean under all the antiseptics and the bandaging. So the fever had to be part of his healing process.

  She pulled just the sheet up to his waist. “Perfect,” he sighed. “Don’t go.”

  He sighed again, this time a deep sigh of contentment. “I love you.” His whisper was no more than an outward breath. And he dropped into sleep.

  Mindy’s eyes stung. She was so happy it hurt right behind her ribs. Even though her mind buzzed with questions, and she had no idea what tomorrow would bring, she let it all go, stretched out beside him, and remembering how much her skin hurt when she had a fever once, she left her hand near his fingers now loose in sleep.

  Then she, too, dropped off.

  She woke instantly alert when he gasped. She sat up. The room was dark, pale squares painting the walls from the street lamp down the hill. She touched Dennis, and found him drenched with sweat, his skin clammy.

  “Dennis?”

  “s all right, Mork. Fever broke.”

  “Are you thirsty?”

  “God, yes.”

  She whirled out of bed, flitted through the dim halls to the kitchen, and returned with water, which he downed in three gulps. Then he lay back.

  “Is this good?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Two days, it’ll just be a sore spot.” He paused, while outside a night bird chirped, then said, “You didn’t know that?”

  “I thought I was the only one in the world,” she said, and she didn’t know why, but her voice was unsteady.

  He stretched out an arm and she snuggled up against his side. Sweaty as he was, he smelled so good to her, and she sniffed the wound again. Still clean.

  She felt a soft chuckle deep in his chest, and his voice rumbled as he said, “You are amazing. I love every inch of you. Including that fancy, prancy pedigree poodle. A poodle! That is so wonderful I can’t even begin to express how wonderful.”

  “I love you, too. And that beautiful, scary tiger.”

  “He would never hurt you. He knew you were my mate—my life mate—before I could get it through my thick skull.”

  “Life mate?” she repeated, full of question, but steadied by the sense of rightness in those words. She snuggled tighter against, him, pulled up the duvet, and waited, but once again his breathing slowed.

  She fell asleep smiling.

  ***

  Dennis woke with the early morning light. His head th
robbed in time with his shoulder, but with only a smoldering ache rather than the searing pain of the night before. He glanced to his left, reassured at the sight of Mindy’s round hip under the duvet, and the feel of her warm skin nestled against his ribs.

  He sniffed, and there was that delicious aroma, better than any perfume or soap ever made. It was her fragrance. Her soft, curly hair brushed his arm, and he thought, how could he have missed that she was a shifter?

  But he wasn’t one of those shifters who could sense the animals beneath other shifters’ human forms. What grieved him the most was how long it took to understand his tiger, who had let him know in every way he could that this adorable, amazing Mindy was his mate, from the first time they touched.

  He let his hand brush over her hair to caress the curve of her neck.

  Her face lifted, and there was that brown, honest gaze reflecting the good-hearted, candid quality of the dog inside her. Her hand drifted over his stomach, and she smiled. “The fever’s gone.”

  The hand drifted lower. “Ah!”

  He couldn’t help it—he quaked with silent laughter, and his shoulder protested with an echo of last night’s pain. He winced.

  She burrowed under the covers and pressed soft kisses over his stomach, and he gasped when her warm tongue poked into his belly button. Then the duvet lifted and there were her eyes again, this time with that melted amber glow. “Is this good for you or bad for you?”

  “Good,” he croaked. “Real good.”

  Another grin like she’d been gifted the birthday of the world, and she threw back the duvet. The morning light glowed golden over the softness of her curves, highlighting the peaks of her breasts, already puckering.

  He reached, but his shoulder protested. He winced and fell back.

  “You’ll get your fun,” she said. “But first my turn.”

  And heat coiled low in his belly as she wriggled those wonderful hips of hers and settled herself between his legs. His cock roused even more.

  But Mindy had other ideas first. She began kissing the inside of his knee, working her way slowly up his inner thigh. His cock began to pulse, and that was before she nuzzled into the hollow of his thigh . . . and gave him a good, long lick.