Tiger Lily - May Dawson Page 0,43

question I had been dreading.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I’m human just like you, Brad.”

He snorted a laugh at that. “Just an FYI, Lily, but no one says ‘I’m human just like you’ unless they’re secretly a monster or an alien. It sure sounds like you don’t know how to human.”

I felt on a regular basis as if I didn’t know how to human, but I thought maybe I’d feel that way even if I weren’t a cat shifter.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said, spreading my hands. “If that’s it, I’m taking my stuff and I’m going home.”

“Wait,” he said, and there was a pleading edge in his voice. “I need to know what I saw. One minute we were talking, and the next there was this big cat racing around the room. And you were gone. I thought maybe I was going crazy.”

Gee, that would be a pity.

I shrugged. “Maybe you were. That’s crazy, Brad. There was definitely no tiger in our apartment.”

He looked at me as if I were the crazy one after all. He’d given me that face plenty of times when we were dating.

“Not a tiger,” he corrected. “A big cat. A big orange cat.”

I gave him that you’re-an-idiot look right back. “That’s what we call a tiger.”

“No,” he said. “It was just domestic cat sized. Like a big ginger tabby. Mean attitude.” He shook his head. “Trashed half our apartment. It was batting stuff off every surface, hissing at me, I had to run out of here because it clawed up my shirt and I swear it went for my eyes—”

He broke off. He’d gone a bit pale at the memory.

I couldn’t process what he was saying. He’d been attacked by a big orange…house cat?

I was a house cat?

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said hotly.

“I know it doesn’t,” he said. “But what happened? Where did you go? Or were you—were you—?”

His eyes had gone a bit wild. He couldn’t get the question out.

If he believed there had been a cat in our apartment, at least I could explain that away more easily than a tiger. “I don’t know what happened, but the cat must have snuck in when I opened the door, or I don’t know, come in from the balcony. You know how cats are! They’re crazy!”

I reached past him to wrench the door open, eager to get back to Silver Springs before he asked any more questions.

He grabbed my arm. “Lily, wait! I can’t make sense of what I saw!”

I wrenched away from him. The guys strode toward us.

Blake was in the lead—of course he was—and his upper lip pulled away from his teeth as if he were about to growl.

I had to get them all out of here before Brad realized there was something really wrong with us.

No, not wrong. Different. We were just different.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, grabbing Blake’s forearm and hustling him toward the door. His big body leaned toward Brad’s, resisting me for a second as if he were dying for a fight, but then he let me tow him along.

I glanced over my shoulder at Brad’s face, which I couldn’t read, as we headed out of the apartment.

As the door slammed behind us, I said, “I never should have left Silver Springs.”

I didn’t just mean today.

23

Archer

“What happened?” Blake asked into the silence of the car.

I turned to look out the window. I was keenly aware of Lily’s body next to mine, the tension in her slender frame, and I had a feeling that if she wanted to talk about her conversation with Brad, she already would be. She was quiet for a reason.

Lily glanced at him innocently in the rearview mirror, their eyes connecting. “When?”

Blake sighed under his breath, and Lily’s chin rose in response.

The two of them together were painful to watch. Neither of them was likely to win any awards for communication, and combined they were so much worse.

Dylan, in the passenger seat, cut his eyes at Blake, warning him off.

Blake ignored him. Blake always did.

“What did you and Gelhead talk about on the balcony?” Blake forged on. “Surrounded by the ghosts of your dead plants?”

Lily flashed him a look, her gaze narrowing. “You helped me re-pot them. I thought you said they might not be dead yet.”

Blake shrugged. “What kind of a petulant loser takes his anger out on innocent plants?”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s a jerk. And he’s in the past.”

I glanced