The Jaguar's Romance Page 3

  “That’s a bingo.”

  Pushing her plate away, Sally folded her arms. “What else can we do?”

  The server took that unfortunate moment to saunter over to the table. She smiled and cocked her hip. “I’ve always been able to interest you in dessert, Oscar.”

  Sally’s face twisted into an expression of utter evil. Her voice dropped an octave as she growled through her teeth, “Just bring the gosh-darn check, Barbie.”

  Chapter Four

  It was a long ways from the county courthouse to the Ripple. Oscar volunteered to drive Sally home. Instead of walking her to the courthouse lot, he took her around the corner.

  “Sorry I freaked out on your friend.”

  Oscar waved it away. “You’re stressed out. It’s totally understandable. I’ll call her and smooth things over.”

  The growl of her inner bear tickled her vocal cords but she managed to keep her envious words to herself.

  “Don’t be jealous,” Oscar said, reading her expression. “It is only instinct. I am part cat, you see.”

  Sally studied him out of the corner of her eye. He didn’t look like he harbored an animal. “You said Felicity called you. Are you a mountain lion like her?”

  He let out a snort. “Lion indeed. Of course not. My soul is shared by the greatest cat of the Americas, el jaguar.”

  “Did you two used to be an item?”

  Oscar shrugged one shoulder. “For a time. It is all in the past. As cats, neither of us possesses much in the way of fidelity. In my defense, neither do bears.”

  Sally didn’t know what to say to that. She didn’t really have anyone to be faithful to. Still, she was pretty sure if she did have someone, she wouldn’t be cheating on him.

  “I want you to open up your inner beast, Sally. Use your sense of smell to tell me what is going on around us.”

  She balked at the request. “Well, so far, it’s been all or nothing for me. Either I’m me, or I’m a bear.”

  “Both are you. Gently coax it from your heart. Let her see the world through your eyes as you smell the world through her nose.”

  Sally concentrated, making her thoughts go still to find the animal. She touched the bear. The beast didn’t shy away. Taking great breaths through her nose, she made the bear understand. Her brain was flooded by olfactory information that was tough to sort out.

  “There’s a cook frying four hamburgers on a flattop. He’s wearing too much Drakkar Noir because he hasn’t taken a shower today. He’s sweating nicotine and needs a smoke break. A school of fish is swimming just beneath the surface of the river. The peppermint gum on my shoe was chewed by a girl with braces and a lot of fillings. There’s a tornado of perfumes in the courthouse, staff just about to leave the building for lunch. The homeless man on the corner is a liar—his coat is filthy, but his clothes smell like laundry soap and he has a fold of bills in his pocket.”

  A fish leaped from the river that ran along First Street. A man in a stained white shirt and paper hat ambled into the alley and lit a cigarette. Doors of the courthouse burst open to a gaggle of women chatting excitedly. On the corner, the homeless man sang an old Sinatra standard and held out his hat.

  “You see how the world is revealed through your greater senses?” Oscar urged.

  The courthouse staffers swung their way, heading for the restaurants. A redhead and a brunette smiled and greeted Oscar by name. The bear reared up in her head at the familiarity. Sally’s surroundings went crystal clear; she heard individual songs on the radios of passing cars, the paper shredder on the third floor of the courthouse, the astringent oily smell of deputies’ handguns, musty feathers of a bird in a street tree.

  Her hands creaked as they widened, fingers shrinking to claws, black fur stubble itching her arms.

  Oscar took her hand. “Easy, Sally. Put the bear back. We don’t want her running around on the street at lunchtime.”

  The human part of her seized on his words, locked on his face. With a few deep breaths, Sally let her bear slip into the very back of her mind. She felt herself quiver. “Holy cow, that was close.”

  “Close, but you reined in your beast.” Oscar smiled, dimples on his cheeks. “But let’s get you home, just to be safe.”

  He took out his keys, and the old Lincoln parked on the street next to them beeped. With a flourish, he opened the door gesturing her in.

  “Why didn’t you park in the courthouse lot?”

  Oscar got in on the driver side. “I might need to leave in a hurry. I hate being hemmed in.”

  On the drive home, Sally covertly studied the man who claimed to be her knight in shining armor. If not for the close-trimmed black goatee and the blue of five o’clock shadow on his cheeks, he might be considered pretty. He did have long lashes and that full, curvy mouth. She had to compare him with Thorn, the man she’d been sort-of secretly crushing on for years.

  Oscar was no tower of rippling muscle like Thorn. He was maybe six feet, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. Thorn’s features were rough, like a sculptor’s sketch. Oscar’s were sharp and refined, from the almond shaped eyes to the aquiline nose, the dimples in his strong jaw. Sally felt herself go all tingly, so she gazed out the window.

  Sitting so close to this beautiful man made her forget how much trouble she was in. She’d been arrested for attempted murder. And while a few dozen suspects could be easily dug up—any boyfriend or husband of a good-looking woman might want the gorgeous Thorn dead—the sheriffs were focusing on her.

  Like Iwalani said, these secret lives of shifters would play no part in an official investigation. Sally herself wouldn’t have believed people changed into animals if it hadn’t happened to her. But why had it happened to her?

  She couldn’t believe Oscar’s reasoning. Their first couple of hours together revealed the private eye as a dog more than a jaguar. Waitresses, secretaries, it seemed like the man was a walking hookup. Flattering her only put Sally on point. Despite being the sweetest sweet-talker (the accent went a long way toward that) she had ever heard, Sally understood this was part of his game.

  That a-hole bear hadn’t turned her because he was enthralled with her. Sally was no hottie. Sure, she had big boobs, and a lot of guys liked that. Otherwise, except for her wild dark hair, there wasn’t anything special about her. She was no man’s fantasy that was for sure. Some stranger hadn’t seen her from afar and said, “That is the one I want to claim as my own. And change into a were-bear.” The idea was impossible to believe (and on so many levels).

  Oscar pulled into the empty lot of the Squirrels Nuts. Home crap home. A gentleman, he leapt from the car and opened the door for her. “I’ll walk you up.”

  This was crazy. Earlier, she was arrested for murder, and now she had to go to work. Life was weird. “Thank you for the ride.”

  “It was my pleasure.”

  They stopped by the front door of the bar, Sally fishing for keys. “What’s our next move?”

  She gazed up at him, finding his eyes locked on hers. Jeeze Louise, he stood inches from her.

  “I know what I want my next move to be,” he said, gravel in his voice.

  Holy moly, that look. Was he going to--?

  Oscar’s hand moved beneath her chin, tilting her head up. When his lips met hers, she felt a spark shoot from her mouth all the way to her girly parts. White light filled her head, and she was only aware of the firm pressure of his soft mouth, the fleeting touch of his tongue. She made a tiny cry in the back of her throat like a total geek as his hands sank into her curls.

  When they broke, she struggled to catch her breath. “I’ve got a thing, an inventory kinda, y’know, working.” Stop babbling!

  Oscar smiled with one side of his curvy lips, eyes lidded. “I will be in touch.”

  “Touch,” she repeated lamely. Sally realized her hands were fisted in his lapels and let go like they were on fire. “Yes. Okay. Gotta go.”

  With that, she unlocked the door and slammed it, leaning hard on t
he inside. It took a few moments for her heart to stop fluttering.

  Chapter Five

  She spritzed herself a cola with a lot of ice behind the bar, realizing she needed something more along the lines of a cold shower. Sitting on a barstool, she managed to stop her head from spinning. Oscar was so smoking hot; she couldn’t believe he wanted anything to do with dumpy ol’ Sally. Yet there it was. But even as the idea elevated her heart, she recalled three women flirting with Oscar in the brief time she’d known him. Worse, he admitted he was a love-’em-and-leave-’em kind of guy. Was the love ’em part worth the inevitable heartbreak? Probably not. She felt utterly crushed when Thorn fell for Felicity—and she hadn’t even kissed him.

  No, despite all of the private eye’s smooth talk and that hot kiss, Sally knew the creature that turned her, and who wanted to kill Thorn, hadn’t picked her for her looks. She thought about the few of her grandfather’s papers she had gone through. There might be some kind of clue there. Sally couldn’t say why she thought this, other than she had glanced something weird. Weird seemed to be key in all this. Heck, weird defined her life these days.

  She checked the clock, still plenty of time before the Squirrels Nuts opened. Sally went up to her apartment for a jacket. From the bedroom window, she could just see the roof of her grandfather’s house through the skeletal trees. It was time to go back in the cellar.

  The old farmhouse stood along an overgrown road that led from the back of the bar’s parking lot. It was barely a path now, but clear enough to follow. Outside of winter, the place was completely hidden from view. With the leaves on the ground, she spotted the happy yellow house quickly.

  Inside, she passed the antique furniture, a lot of nice pieces that were in good shape. There were built-ins that were cool. She really needed to get over here and dust. Access to the cellar was through what looked like a pantry door in the kitchen.

  Weird smells drifted from below, perhaps without her new inner bear, Sally wouldn’t have noticed before. A chemical, rotten egg odor and the scent of long ago burned wood. Still, she hurried down. Another set of doors, like huge steel storm doors, stood in a deep archway. She doubted she would have the strength to life one of those rusty doors. They were ugly and rusty, marked with weird designs. It gave her the feeling that even looking at them might give her tetanus. She couldn’t help but avert her eyes.

  After crossing the huge cellar, she dragged the boxes and trunk under one of the suspended bulbs. Sally grabbed the folder on top of stuff in the trunk. The hand-written medical records told an odd story.

  A hundred years before, a document placed her grandfather in a tuberculosis sanatorium. How could that be, Sally wondered. Doing some math, she came up with her grandfather being born in the 40s, the late 30s at the oldest. Men did have children later in life than women, but still.

  According to doctor’s notes, her grandfather’s TB was terminal. In November of 1919, he was not expected to live out the year. Except the next document in the folder was a discharge from the sanatorium. The man had no symptoms of TB. Sally sat on the trunk. While not positive, she was fairly certain that the treatment for TB was antibiotics, unavailable back then.

  She dug deeper, seeing mostly bills. Funny how some things never changed. Finding nothing else of interest, she started on the boxes.

  These contained mostly ledgers. Sally chuckled over her grandfather’s expenses. He paid five dollars for a pair of boots, fifty cents for a big steak, a nickel for a loaf of bread. It had cost him only a thousand dollars to build the bar she owned, but Sally imagined he’d done most of the labor, and maybe cut a lot of his own wood. Most of the early entries included pay from a logging company.

  Sally marveled at this peek of an earlier time, but, fun as it was, it didn’t offer her any clues. She kept digging. At the bottom of the last box, she hit pay dirt. There were a couple of diaries, and a locked steel box of documents. Finding the earlier of the two journals, she cracked it open and read:

  “First January: snow hip-high, wind shakes this cabin so that I think I forgot to use nails to build it. Nothing but white wilderness meets my eyes. My brother died to pay for this orchard, I cannot fail him.”

  From the first entry, Sally was glued to the scrawled words. While her grandfather had written every day, much of it was only single word comments like “cold.” It made the longer passages stand out.

  “Thirteenth March: Final 5 acres cleared. New cherry and pear planted. Is there anything lonelier than waiting for trees to bear fruit? Winter may have us yet in its grip. Without company, I may go mad.”

  “Twenty-third, April: Mending deer fences all day. Thinking of a tavern on the Barlow Road just to pass the time. Solitude making me nutty as a squirrel.”

  Her bar! Sally dug into the journals, now completely lost to the past.

  ***

  Oscar drove through Ripple, almost a town, consisting of the bar, a gas station and a general store huddled at an intersection without even a stop light. New construction stood off the highway, a three-story skeleton of an apartment building. He couldn’t help but chuckle. Felicity—always about territory that girl. While the foothills and forest were beautiful, why would anyone want to rent an apartment so far outside of Portland?

  He followed Iwalani’s directions even farther into the wilderness, coming upon a single-wide trailer on a short driveway. A dusty loaner car from a body shop and a sporty little two-seater took up the space, so he opted to park on the street.

  While this hardly seemed the den of an apex predator, Oscar recognized Felicity’s taste in vehicles. Distantly, he heard the sound of hammers. Deeper in the woods behind the trailer, he could make out the framing of a small house. No doubt Felicity’s influence. It was difficult to imagine a high-class woman such as she inhabiting a mobile home.

  His knock was answered by a giant. The man completely filled the doorway. Long dark blond hair sun-streaked at the tips and a close-trimmed beard framed two black eyes and a bandage across the bridge of the nose, an ace bandage wrapped his right wrist. Oscar considered himself a tall man, but this guy would have to duck sideways through the door.

  “What?”

  “You must be the victim.” Oscar pulled out his license. “Hola, I am Oscar Leon, private investigator.”

  The giant, Thorn, scowled at him. “And?”

  “An amiga of yours was arrested for your attempted murder.”

  “Sally didn’t do this.”

  “That is what I intend to prove. May I have a moment of your time, señor?”

  A voice from within called out, “Let him in, Thorn.”

  Inside, the place was not quite the dump it looked like from the outside. Still, three people in the tiny living room made his skin crawl. It was so tight in there. He took a breath, focusing. Oscar’s pulse increased at the sight of a tall, blonde woman, sweater and jeans hugging her curves. “Felicity, mi Tesoro.” He kissed her hand.

  An ursine growl issued from the giant. Oscar had to suppress a smile.

  Felicity cocked a hip. “Knock off the smarm, Oscar. As much as I don’t like Sally, I know she’s innocent.”

  Innocent was an apt descriptor, Oscar thought. Something about Sally’s purity had grabbed his attention in the way no bad girl (such as the one in front of him) ever had. While Oscar loved the bad girls, and would undoubtedly be loving a bad girl later this evening, there was nothing better than swaying a good girl. “Tell me what happened.”

  Thorn glared at him; then dropped his eyes. “We should’ve stayed with her for her second shifting.”

  Felicity put a hand on Thorn’s shoulder. “It’s not our fault. She wanted to try it alone.”

  “But she ran off the first time—it took days to find her. She could’ve starved or frozen to death.”

  “You act like she is your child,” Oscar interrupted.

  Thorn’s hot eyes met his. “She’s my responsibility. It’s my fault what happened to her.”

  Oscar side-eyed him.
“I would say that this is not entirely true.”

  The bear of a man looked away. “I promised Sally. And I promised The Vet. It’s part of my job as apex predator around here. I have to look out for my own. All kinds of bad things happened when I ignored people around me. I won’t let it happen again.”

  Oscar had heard that being apex predator was the reason this evil man was out to destroy Thorn. The interloper would take his place atop the food chain, and woman he sought, Thorn’s mother, would be open to him again. While bear politics eluded him, Oscar thought the idea was far too simplistic for all the trouble Thorn, Sally and Felicity had gone through.

  While he found it plausible that a man would kill to obtain the woman he loved, such a deed would be an act of passion. What this interloper presented was cold and calculated, premeditated. Some other motive must be behind this insane scheme.

  Oscar thrust out his lower lip in thought. “As you know, I have done much research into your past at Felicity’s request. This man who wants you dead—he is quite the mystery. And a dangerous one.”

  “It’s infanticide, plain and simple,” Felicity said. “It may be a taboo subject among predator shifters, but this asshole wants Thorn’s mother as his own, and he’s out to eliminate her offspring. You know this much, Oscar.”

  Thorn nodded. “The Vet agrees. Because I’ve been a shitty apex predator, this guy managed to sneak in under my radar.”

  From the outside, it was an easy enough story to believe. But as he worked the case, Oscar felt less positive about the theory. This unknown assailant preferred to use indirect methods to achieve his goals. One of those methods was biting Sally, and turning her into a bear shifter. That the man wanted to use her, as a weapon and a plaything, sent steam hissing through Oscar’s soul. To trap her, hold her against her will, was there any worse crime? He was el homre malvado—an evil man.

  “You fought with him. What can you tell me about this man?”