by Lynn Red
Lion In Wait
Alpha Lion-Shifter Paranormal Romance
by
Lynn Red
Copyright 2014 Lynn Red
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
-1- | “I could really do without the dirt in my teeth.” | -Cassiopeia
-2- | “I can’t tell if you’re serious, or trying to imitate a clown’s squeaky shoe.” | -Cass
-3- | “There’s the line over there. He crossed it so far we’re in the next county over.” | -Cass
-4- | “Weather the storm. Just… just weather the storm.” | -Cass
-5- | “Just two misfits, alone in the world.” | -Cass
-6- | “I probably look just about like a monkey on top of a lion. No wait, that’s exactly what I am.” | -Cass
-7- | “If I’ve got you, what else do I need?” | -Cass
-8- | “Finally. You have no idea how hard it was to wait for this.” | -Cass
Connect with me online at my facebook page: facebook.com/lynnredromance | Click here to sign up for my mailing list to get the latest news and exclusive excerpts, contests, and cover reveals! Or navigate to: http://eepurl.com/G1q2X
Bonus Excerpts | To Catch a Wolf (Werewolf Romance) | Jamesburg Shifters #1 | AVAILABLE FREE! | -1—
Change For Me (Werewolf Romance) | The Alpha’s Kiss #1 | AVAILABLE FREE!
Two Bears are Better Than One
Further Reading: Bearly Breathing (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)
Also By Lynn Red
About the Author
-1-
“I could really do without the dirt in my teeth.”
-Cassiopeia
“Turnbow, Oklahoma,” Cass said, turning to face the sleeping lion she’d spent more time with than any human being for the past seven years. He lifted one eyelid, though it could have just been a dream instead of a response to her voice. “Welcome to absolutely nowhere, Lex.”
Outside the double-wide trailer, the general din of familiar noise was beginning to rise. Bertram & Martin’s Enchanted Carnival was setting up for another night of small crowds, small profits, and late payments. Cass watched Lex as he snoozed. One of his nostrils flared, he let out a soft snort, and kicked one of his huge paws in a sleep spasm. Even though she lived in the trailer, with a seven-hundred pound lion, she never bothered closing the cage. It drove the circus owner crazy, but out of everyone in this desperate, dirt circus, the only one she could trust?
The lion sleeping eight feet from where she sat. His golden fur, his wild, tan mane, his tail, flopped left and right as he dozed. He was still shiny from the last time he’d gotten a good brushing. Thinking of how he rolled around, tongue hanging out of his mouth, purring like a giant house cat as she ran the brush over his fur always made Cass laugh.
And anything that made her laugh was a very, very good thing. Not much laughter to go around in this world of dirt and dust and rough, hard people.
Cass scribbled on a notepad, doodling the outline of a paw, fantasizing about getting it tattooed somewhere. It was just that, though – a fantasy. Money came and went, but it was hardly enough to keep herself fed, much less sock away for a tattoo of a paw. Lex stirred again, this time rolling over onto his back, legs in the air like a dead cockroach.
When he did that, his jowls always hung limp, showing off his massive teeth, but mostly just making him look like an upside down sock puppet. She laughed softly, shaking her head. In seven hours, maybe seven and a half if the crowd was as slow to show up as it had been for the last couple of nights, she and Lex would go out and pretend to dance a deadly ballet.
She’d dodge, he’d snarl, she’d crack a whip and he’d act like he was going to kill her—of course, he’d never posed even the slightest danger to her, which would totally destroy the whole mystique of the act. If anyone knew, that is.
A knock on the door, short and terse, jolted her attention and made Lex open his eyes fully, though he may still have been sleeping. Nothing much bothered the enormous lion, who emitted a low, rumbling growl. There was something else, too, something intelligent in his eyes, that Cass thought was almost too human to be fully animal.
She shook her head. “Yeah?” she called at the closed door. Any visit was a bad visit, as far as she was concerned. “Who’s there?”
“That goddamn lion locked up?”
Her stomach sank. Lyle Bertram, she realized with a cringe. Between him and Martin, why did it have to be Lyle who’s still alive? Fate’s got a cruel sense of humor sometimes.
“Hold on,” she called back. When she went to close the cage door, Lex looked up at her, those oddly, intensely, intelligent eyes sparking flecks of yellow and brown in the flickering light of her desk lamp. “Give me a sec.”
As though he were responding, Lex shook his head, tossing his mane back and forth, and climbed to his feet with a grunt of effort from deep in his belly. Even if Lyle made her stomach turn and put every shred of her being on high alert, knowing that Lex was right there gave her some small measure of comfort.
Lyle banged on the door again, shouted something incomprehensible at someone else, and then whacked his meaty paw into her thin, aluminum trailer door for the third time. Lex curled his lip in a silent snarl.
“Yeah,” Cass said with a smile, “you and me both.”
The pounding was starting to make the door jump a little, enough that Lex had lowered his head, the way he did when he felt threatened, as rare as that was. “It’s okay,” Cass whispered, petting his snout through the bars. “Don’t worry.” She rolled her eyes. “Here I am talking to a lion.”
Lex growled softly, nudging her hand. They always had had a strange connection. Since Lyle brought him into the circus as a wounded, orphaned adult, he and Cass took to one another. He snapped and bit and growled at everyone else, but with her, he was calm, placid, and peaceful. That’s how she went from the peepshow to the bigtop.
Hell of a world.
“Open this damn door before I knock it down!”
“Half past ten and he’s already sauced,” Cass whispered. “Hope you’re ready for Hurricane Lyle.”
Lex shot a glare at the door, and settled back down, though he didn’t take his eyes off the door.
“I’m coming,” Cass said. “I wasn’t dressed.”
As she went to open the door, she slipped her notepad into the drawer in her desk. No particular reason, but hiding anything and everything about her personal life, her mind, her person, made her feel like she was a little more in control of her life.
With a sigh, she pressed her thumb against the latch on her door. Before she could open it, Lyle burst through in a wild huff. “The fuck are you doin’ in here?” he blurted.
His round face, cheeks covered in about two days of stubble, was bright red. Lyle’s eyes small, bloodshot, and full of rage, reminded Cass of a pissed off warthog. Actually, so did the rest of him. The man’s slumped shoulders and sweaty body were almost quivering, he was so angry.
Instinctually, Cass backed away from him, hitching her thumbs in the waistband of her loose-fitting cargo pants. She twisted her foot, grinding the toe of her boot into the black and blue checkered linoleum floor, and took a step nearer to Lex.
“What do you need, Lyle?” she asked, consciously speaking slowly and softly to try and calm her enraged boss. “Show canceled for tonight?”
“Shou
ld be,” he said. He’d been drinking, she could tell that from the sour smell on his breath, but it was probably light still since he wasn’t slurring. Yet. “Barely sold any tickets, can’t cover feed for the damn animals.”
Cass could swear she heard Lex growl.
“It’s either the animals or the workers.”
“Isn’t that what we get paid for?” Cass asked. “Or are we not getting paid either?”
Lyle looked away, his pig-like jowls trembling, which meant that he was clenching his jaws. “You’ll get paid.”
“Which means some of us won’t?”
“Big toppers get paid, the schleps have to wait. That’s the way of it, they all know.”
Letting out a laugh as sour as Lyle’s whiskey breath, Cass gave him a nasty half-smile. “You never change, do you?”
“It’s nice to be consistent.”
“Use mine to feed the animals,” Cass said, sighing heavily, without a second thought. “They need the food more than I do. And you treat them worse than you treat me, somehow. They deserve this much.”
She coulda swore Lex growled softly.
“You sure?” the lumpy little man stuck his hand in his coverall pocket, fished out a dirty wad of bills. “This is what I owe you this week. You sure you want to feed these damned ugly beasts instead? Hell, if that lion’s hungry, he might put on a better show.”
Lyle kicked one of the bars on Lex’s cage and spat on the straw floor of his cage. “Lazy shit.”
All at once, Lex let out another of those deep, rumbling growls as he climbed to his feet. “He doesn’t like that,” Cass said. “Probably best not to taunt the lion you were trying not to feed. Like you said, if he’s hungry, no telling what he’ll do.”
There was a hint of intended malice in her voice. A brief fantasy flashed through her mind of Lyle kicking the cage again, and his foot ending up between those massive teeth. What she wouldn’t give for that to come true.
She noticed that Lyle took a few small, wise, steps back from the cage before he started up with the vitriol again. “Yeah well,” he said, mopping at his forehead with a very old, very ratty handkerchief. “Either way, you’re too nice for your own good, Cassiopeia. Nobody’s gonna look out for you if you ain’t gonna look out for yourself.”
“You worry about you,” she shot back. “Let me do what I want with my money. You feed the animals, and keep feeding them with my pay until you can do both.”
The bald spot stretching from the back of Lyle’s egg-shaped head all the way to the front started burning red. She was getting to him. Then again, “getting to” Lyle Bertram was about as difficult as eating mashed potatoes. Still, it felt good each and every time she did.
“Yeah,” he said in his slow, vaguely-East Coast accent, “about that. Not sure we’re gonna make much headway toward catching up this quarter. Sales are down, everything’s down.”
“I’ve seen the crowds,” Cass said. “I’m no idiot.”
He chose to ignore what she said, or if he didn’t, he at least didn’t react except for mopping at his face again. The cloth he used seemed like it was about ready to give up the ghost and fall to tatters. As she watched him wipe and wipe and wipe again, Cass thought maybe being an unraveling handkerchief was preferable to being around Lyle for the rest of eternity.
Nodding, Lyle turned back toward her door. “Oh,” he said, freezing but not facing her. “You’re doing two shows tonight.”
“Two? Shouldn’t you ask Lex about that? He gets a little cranky after all the stuff gets thrown at him. I can’t promise he won’t get himself a carny snack.”
She coulda swore the growl that came out of the lion sounded almost like a laugh. Short bursts of sound that reminded her of chuckling. When she looked in his direction, he was watching her as well.
“I ain’t talking about two lion shows,” Lyle growled. His voice was thick, heavy, and greasy.
Cass narrowed her eyes, her anger burning hot in her chest. “You can’t make me dance again,” she said. “We had a deal.”
“Deals change, Miss Kalen. If you want me to keep feeding that stupid lion, and you want to keep getting paid, you’ll do exactly what I say. And what I say is that you’re doing your lion show at eight and your other show at eleven. Be ready. I’m not afraid to drag you outta this trailer.”
Without another word, and without waiting for a reply, Lyle pulled a flask out of his ratty coveralls, took a swig, and left the door swinging in his wake.
“I’d like to see him try to drag me out,” Cass said, sitting back at her desk, intertwining her fingers and cracking her knuckles. Lex chuffed, as if in agreement. There were a surprisingly wide variety of sounds he could make, and over the years, Cass had learned more or less what each one meant. “You’d love to take a bite outta him, wouldn’t you?”
She stood up, opened the cage door again, and gave Lex a scratch behind the ears. His head was so big that she couldn’t do both at once, so with a handful of ear in either hand, she dragged her fingernails behind his huge ears, trying not to laugh as the tongue flopped out, and the giant creature rolled onto his back. “Oh, stomach now?”
He grunted and thrashed back and forth. “No matter what, at least I’ve got you, huh, big guy?”
Lex was watching her, staring at her face, as she scratched. She thought – and not for the first time, not even that day – that there was something far, far more than lion behind those eyes.
*
Once the organs stopped grinding, and the music stopped playing; once the funnel cakes were gone and the rancid oil emptied, Cassiopeia settled back into her trailer. Lex stood up and gave her a purring growl of welcome when she opened the door and threw off the lingerie she’d been forced to prance around in front of a crowd of leering, sweaty, ruddy-faced men.
It wasn’t the dancing that bothered her, not the nudity or anything of the sort. It was the leering, the glares, the gropes that went too far before they were stopped. “Maybe you can go with me next time?” she asked the huge lion as she collapsed into her squeaking chair.
She crossed the small room, opened the door to the other half of it, and smiled as Lex got to his feet, and followed her out of the cage. A rough lick on the back of her hand immediately settled her slightly-frazzled nerves, and Cass set to absent-mindedly scratching her best friend’s neck.
“We gotta get out of here,” she said. “And I mean we. You and me. Although,” she cocked and eyebrow, “I’m not entirely sure about the legality of running away from a circus with a lion in tow.”
Lex purred, nuzzling her leg until she resumed the scratching. “You got any ideas, big guy?
“Maybe I could get a job at a zoo? I mean, I have no degree, got no real education, but I’ve read plenty. I can learn. And what the hell, I come with my very own lion.”
With a heavy thump, the lion collapsed onto the ground, then pulled up an arm under his head to use as a makeshift pillow. “And if that happened, you’d have all sorts of lion friends, a big place to run around. I mean, zoos might have their own problems, but anything’s better than living in this prison, huh?”
The noises outside were the same ones she heard every night. Every single night for the last seven years, she’d heard the howling laughter, the drunken screeching, and the increasingly rowdy crowd. It never lasted long though, before degrading into a few fights, and a few brief relationships that would be forgotten as soon as the morning sun drenched whatever nothing town they’d stopped in.
Tonight was a little different though. In the morning, the Bertram & Martin Carnival was moving. Business was so bad, so slow, that there was no point to staying.
Cass had always wondered if one of the reasons they never took direct routes, that they never got anywhere near a decent-sized city, was because if they did, people would hit the road on their own. If they had a way, would the people Lyle had conned into working for him try to get away? Or were they all just as broken and fragile as she was?
Shaking
her head, Cass opened her desk drawer and got both her notebook and the bottle of rum she kept hidden there for special occasions. She turned the mostly-full bottle around in her hand, staring at the idyllic-looking estate on the front of the thing, before pouring a healthy slug into the tin cup that she also used for coffee, and sometimes soup.
After swallowing that measure, she took a deep breath, closing her eyes and sighing as the warmth spread from the back of her tongue through her belly. She poured another, larger drink, and sipped this one.
“You know,” she said to Lex, who looked up at her. “It’s funny. I live my whole life running from one thing or another. Live on a boat for a few years, tried my hand at ranch work, tried everything that came along. How the hell did I end up here?”
Another sweetly burning sip slid down her throat and warmed her nerves. “I dunno, Lex. I just don’t know. I never thought I’d end up here, not for this long anyway. I never thought when I was a little girl, dreaming of running off to join the circus – I never thought “yeah, that sounds good. I’ll do some coochie dancing, I’ll half-starve, I’ll drink way too much two or three times a week. That,” her voice grew bitter, “sounds like the life I’ve always dreamed to live.”
Lex let out a long, slow purr, stretching his back legs behind himself and twitching his tail against the floor.
“I thought I was just on a little adventure, you know?” She scratched his side with her bare toe. “Like when people take a road trip, and just decide to extend it a week or so. Or, I guess, seven years.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d had this conversation, either with herself or with Lex. He was everything to her – friend, confidant, therapist, and very frequently, protection. No one messed with her, at least until they were really drunk. After all, a seven hundred pound lion is a fairly good deterrent to funny business.
She went to take another sip and found her cup empty. “One more?” she asked Lex, who was snoring happily at her feet. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
After a few quiet minutes of scribbling in her notebook, and another healthy swig of sauce, Cass was sufficiently relaxed to climb over into her small but comfortable bed. These were the things of her life – the desk, the chair, the bed – all the things she owned were right here. Clothes too, but those were frequently ruined from traveling, so she didn’t bother with anything past the necessities, hence all the rough, khaki cargo pants.