The Jaguar's Romance Page 4

Thorn’s eyes went distant with memory. “He looks a little like me. He’s a brown bear, grizzly, not Kodiak.”

  Oscar noted a hint of pride at the word Kodiak, and remembered one of the earliest attempts on Thorn’s life was a bear attack in Alaska, when the giant was only a boy. Unravelling the events preceding and following proved impossible. Oscar did put the facts together and learned that the woman who died in that attack was not Thorn’s mother.

  “He was beat up pretty bad when I tossed a silver fetish around his neck,” Thorn continued. “Maybe at the last full moon he could’ve taken it off, but he’s probably not fully healed.”

  “Silver fetish?” Oscar asked.

  Thorn nodded. “A gift from my mother. Bear shifters use them on cubs to keep them from shifting until they learn some control. If someone puts in on you, you can’t take it off yourself. At least, not very easily. I gave it to Sally, but the asshole took it from her. Then I gave it to him—after I broke a bunch of his bones.”

  Unable to shift, the evil man would have to heal at a human rate, which had not incapacitated him enough to thwart another attempt on Thorn’s life. While this was interesting, Oscar felt frustrated. “You know nothing more about him? His name?”

  “I call him asshole,” Thorn shrugged.

  “What about your mother? I discovered she had not died defending you. Any contact from her?”

  The giant shook his head. “Nothing. She may still be afraid of the asshole who’s after me.”

  That, at least, made some sense. He wanted to pursue the idea of the fetish as a gift. If Thorn didn’t remember his mother, how did he know the charm came from her? He had more pressing matters to consider. Oscar gazed at his former lover; then at Thorn. “You understand the danger in all this, no?”

  Felicity answered. “Sally’s alibi was that she was shifted by the full moon. Which is as good as having no alibi. If she’s locked up, with no control over her shifting, the authorities find out about us on the next full moon. About all of us.”

  No one spoke for a time. Oscar felt he’d learned all he would from the couple. Still, he knew there were pieces missing from this puzzle. “If either of you think of anything, call me. You have my number, Felicity.”

  “You do?” Thorn said through his teeth.

  Felicity’s eyes went skyward. “It’s just business, Thorn.”

  Oscar returned to his car, relieved to leave the confining little trailer. What he needed was a break in the case. Before he could return to civilization, his cell phone rang.

  Chapter Six

  Sally put down the first diary. Her grandfather was the son of a pioneer. The man started as a logger before inheriting the orchard, which had long been sold to a neighboring farmer. Her grandfather’s brother had died in World War I, the insurance paying the mortgage on the family farm. Grandpa had expanded the original orchard, clearing a total of ten acres of woods. He constructed a primitive sawmill on the nearby stream, and used the planks to build this house, replacing the cabin before it. Solitude had driven him to build a bar out on the crossroads. It was while doing it that he met a man who would change his life.

  “Fifteenth, May: A stranger happened upon my construction—the largest man I’ve ever seen. He was dressed in furs—a trapper is my guess. He asked why I would build a tavern on a road rarely traveled. I said out of loneliness. He offered to help.”

  “Twenty-sixth, May: My friend opined that I need a house much closer to the tavern. Trees cleared to the road make a suitable clearing. We will construct a modern home there.”

  “Thirtieth, July: Tavern opened. No customers yet, save my friend. We are thirsty from the heat.”

  Sally read through the diary. As she did, she placed documents on the floor in chronological order. Medical records, deeds, licenses, permits and letters formed a graphic of the man’s life. Most startling was his death certificate. It should have come last among the papers, but it was dated forty years before a marriage license, forty-one years before Sally’s father was born.

  She studied her work with a frown. Was this her great-great grandfather? Had she missed an entire generation? Confused, she lifted the diary to read when something fell out. A photograph.

  Sally picked it up, and felt a shock run up her spine. Eyes locked on the image, she fumbled for her phone and called Oscar.

  ***

  The farmhouse in the woods behind the bar charmed Oscar. Antique furnishings in a maze of rooms gave the place a cozy feel. As Sally led him toward the cellar doors, he asked, “Why is it you don’t live here?”

  Sally shrugged. “It’s cute, but I don’t feel comfortable here for some reason.”

  It wasn’t until they mounted the steep steps to the cellar that a disquieting feeling plucked at Oscar’s nerves. Initially, he couldn’t put his finger on it. His cat did that for him.

  A smell of a long dead-fire became acute as they reached the stone floor. Sulfur tinged the air. He noted the granite arch of a huge outside access doorway looked flaky and discolored. Imposing riveted steel of the storm doors beyond drooped and sagged as if they had once been melted. Silver-colored decorations adorned the metal, like glyphs from an ancient language. The figures swarmed in his vision, as if alive.

  “Where do those doors…?”

  Even as Oscar asked the question, he felt something like a static shock in his brain. The strange symbols made him nauseous. He turned from the doors, not of his own accord. Almost immediately, his curiosity diverted toward the room itself.

  Wide depressions dug into the hand-laid stone floor, cracks in the rock and grout surrounding the strange impressions. Something heavy had been down here, and whatever it was, it raised Oscar’s hackles. He fully understood Sally’s feeling less than comfortable in the house above.

  “Why is this cellar so huge?” His eyes were drawn to the shadows made by the groined arch of the vaulted ceiling. The place resembled a squat cathedral—or a dungeon.

  Sally shrugged. “No idea. This used to be attached to a pretty big orchard. Maybe they needed to store a lot of fruit.”

  Something was certainly kept down here. Whatever it was, it was heavy enough to damage the mortared stone floor. And those metal doors… Again, Oscar felt the uncomfortable charge in his mind, dizziness that forced his thoughts away. For the time being, he filed this in the back of his mind, for a pattern of documents was laid out under the suspended light bulbs and thankfully caught his attention.

  “What is this?”

  “Kind of a diagram of my grandfather’s life. I never met him—heck, I barely knew my father.”

  “You are a natural as an investigator.” He took in the documents, some of them quite old. “How do you think this has anything to do with your situation?”

  “At first, because it was just bizarre, but now that I have a better understanding… Well, I’ll get to that part.”

  Oscar paced around, instantly getting a picture of a man’s life. Except. “You have him dying before having a son,” he noted.

  Sally shook her head. “It’s in chronological order. He died in the 1920s, and had a son in the 1960s.”

  He knitted his brows and gazed at her sideways. “Venga.”

  Sally pointed to a row of papers. “No, it’s true. In between, he signed a few bank statements, a few business transactions.”

  “Qué susto, he faked his own death. But why?”

  The woman produced two leather bound journals. “I’ve only read through the first one. Here’s the story. My grandfather built the bar I own to keep from going crazy from isolation. He met a man who helped him with the labor, and they became best friends. Later, a woman shows up at the bar. It wasn’t legal for her to drink in a bar back then, but the locals liked her. She’s beautiful, and both grandpa and his buddy fell for her.”

  Oscar watched Sally’s features light up as she warmed to the tale. The sound of her voice aroused him, and he could not take his eyes off of her mouth as she spoke. “Sigues, segues,” he urged her. �
�Go on.”

  “Then, just when my grandfather thinks he’s going to win the girl, he gets sick—like fatal sick. He’s diagnosed with tuberculosis and locked up in a sanatorium. The doctors think he has a few months to live. Yet he is miraculously cured a few months later. He takes up with the woman, but his best friend is jealous. Grandpa thought he might be murderously jealous, in fact. But it’s too late, because my grandfather knocked this woman up. Two women, maybe family, showed up to take granddad’s hottie and the baby away to safety.”

  Oscar gave her a sharp look. “Would their names be Mathilda and Lily?”

  Sally tilted her head. “How could you know that?”

  “I investigated Thorn a month ago, and I encountered two surrogate mothers. The one, Mathilda Sommers, died defending Thorn from an early attack. It was the name Thorn’s birth mother gave to the hospital when she delivered, but these were two different women. I know nothing about Lily, other than she raised the boy.”

  “When was the baby born?” Sally asked.

  “About twenty-seven years ago.”

  She shook her head. “That can’t be the same baby, the same women. This was more like a hundred years ago.”

  Oscar’s gaze moved across the stone cellar, the hollows on the floor, the damage to the outside doors. He tried to catch a fleeting thought, but it escaped him. “Go on with your story.”

  Sally raised her brows. “Well, that’s pretty much all I know. Oh, except for one thing.”

  She reached into one of the boxes on the floor and came up with a sepia toned photo. “The man on the left is my grandfather. Obviously, their love interest is the woman in the middle.”

  Oscar studied the photograph. The men were dressed in striped suits, with straw boaters on their heads. The woman was beautiful, her hair caught in a snood beneath a broad brimmed hat. He turned the photo over, but nothing was written on the back. “I thought you said you didn’t know your grandfather.”

  “I don’t. But the man on the right? He’s the one who bit me and turned me into a were-bear.”

  Chapter Seven

  Oscar flipped the picture back over and gazed at the three. While Sally’s grandfather was smiling, and the woman looked to be suppressing a grin, the other man gave the camera cold eyes. “What is the man’s name?”

  “No idea. Granddad doesn’t ever write a name. Here, I’ll give you an example.” Sally opened one of the diaries near the end and read. “‘When my greatest friend learned that I had lain with my love, his eyes went dead and his face lost all expression. He fled without a word. The impression left upon me is a fear for my life, and the lives of my love and future child.’”

  Oscar scowled. “Qué irritante.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means ‘how irritating.’”

  Sally blew out her cheeks. “No, I got the gist. What does it mean that my grandfather was palling around with this psycho a hundred years ago?”

  “It means that your grandfather is the father of Thorn.”

  Sally’s eyes popped. “That’s impossible.”

  “More impossible than your grandfather dying, and having a son four decades later?”

  She threw up her hands. “Well, yeah, if the guy just faked his death. But who’s pregnant for seventy-two years?”

  Again, Oscar’s attention was drawn to the odd but subtle destruction of the massive cellar. There was something there, but he could not pin the thought down. It was if a stiff wind blew the thoughts to scattering dust. Instead, he took Sally’s hands in his own. “We are shifters, cariña, very long-lived creatures. Time does not have the same power over us as it does with humans or animals.”

  “Well, it does make a strange kind of sense.”

  “How so?”

  “It means that this evil a-hole didn’t come after me because he was attracted to me. I’m the granddaughter of the guy he hated most in the world—probably more than even Thorn—the guy who stole his girl. He just wanted to screw my life up, not screw me.” Sally’s cheeks colored a little at the word “screw.”

  That purity, that utter virtuousness, somehow begged for just a bit of corruption. Oscar felt his heartrate step up. “I wouldn’t say that for a fact.”

  “Why not? It’s true.”

  “Mm, whatever this a-hole’s motives,” Oscar suppressed a smile at the word “a-hole,” “It has no bearing on how attractive you are.”

  Sally looked down to see that he was still holding her hands. Blue eyes slowly lifted to his.

  “You are decent and goodhearted, and as wholesome as milk. But even milk can be turned into the most decadent things. It needs only sweetness, maybe a little heat, perhaps a bit of… whipping.”

  Sally’s face went beat red from her neck to hairline. The flush sent Oscar’s dick twitching.

  “I’ve known you less than a day,” she said, but her voice was rough, husky.

  “And I’ve known many, many women. Some for less time than I’ve known you. Yet for the first time in my life, I don’t feel as if I’m stalking my prey. You draw me in. The wildness of your beautiful black hair, the civility of your inability to properly curse, the depth of your blue eyes, the snow white of your skin that blushes so easily. I am torn by an urge to protect you as well as an overwhelming desire to ravish you.”

  Sally swallowed. “Where did your accent go?”

  He pulled her closer. “I tend to lose it when I’m horny. Así es la vida.”

  She stammered. “I make you huh… ho… excited?”

  “Muy excitado, si. From the moment you asked me to pat you down. Now, you are a woman not maddened by moonlight. You are free to make your own decisions. I’m hoping you decide you will make love to me.”

  ***

  Sally thought she might pass out. A hundred thoughts went through her head. When was the last time she showered? Did her bra and panties match? Were there onions on her sandwich this afternoon? Why was her bear making a cooing sound in the back of her head? Could Oscar feel that her palms were getting sweaty? Could she really do it with a man she’d known for only half a day?

  Okay, last question answered, yes she could. Oscar was smoking hot, by far the best looking man she’d ever seen, let alone held hands with. While this wouldn’t be her first time, from the blood rushing to her head, this was definitely being taken to a higher level than she’d experienced.

  She meant to ask, “Here?” but instead sounded like she demanded it. “Here.”

  Oscar pulled her into a kiss. Sally thought she would spontaneously combust from the wet fire of his lips. The kiss was strong, the flesh firm, the following tongue insistent. Sally outwardly erupted in one big chill. Inwardly, a fever of passion melted her, spreading from her girl parts to consume every cell of her.

  Her hands automatically flew to his tie, and quickly pulled it from his collar. She then pushed back his lapels and dropped his suitcoat from his shoulders. It was like unwrapping a present with pretty paper—but she was more interested in what was beneath.

  Following suit, Oscar broke the kiss and pulled her oversized shirt over her head. Sally’s first instinct was to cross her arms over her boobs. A more pressing instinct made her unbutton the private dick’s shirt and unbuckle his belt. Deft fingers made short work of her bra hooks.

  As her tits bounced free, she prepared for the moment she’d experienced with all men. That instant groping, nipple-tweaking, motorboating, suckling fascination with her elephant lungs. To her surprise and delight, Oscar locked his lips with hers again, his hands furiously working the jeans over her broad hips. Then, his fingers slipped beneath the elastic of her panties.

  As he parted her sex, Sally felt how utterly wet she was. Following suit, she slipped her hands down his muscled chest. Oscar was cut, from his arms and shoulders, pecs and six pack, down to those dimply hip muscles she had no name for. From there, her hands moved centrally. The size of his erect dick made her glad she used both hands.

  “Holy cow,” she whispere
d.

  Oscar whispered back, “Usually, horse is the animal referenced.” When he bit her ear, she moaned out loud.

  Her hands moved beyond her control to his tight, round ass. Nails dug in as two fingers found the nub of her clitoris and moved rhythmically. She looked into his lidded eyes and raised her lips to his. Mouths mashed together fiercely, her hands wandering over the hard muscles of his back, his shoulders, his neck. All the while, his fingers continued their motion, drawing a shiver that wracked her frame with pleasure.

  “My hands can’t have all the fun,” he said into the kiss.

  With a suddenness that made her gasp, he lifted her off her feet and laid her down on top of the trunk. Her panties were flung away. His hands landed on each side of her as he gazed into her eyes.

  “Tell me you want me.”

  Yeah, she did. “I want you.”

  His face moved away, down. Kisses landed on her tits, teeth on her hard nipples. Oscar moved down, tongue on her belly, in her navel. Rough palms opened her thighs. His tongue searched the lava of her pussy, the tip touching her clit.

  “Oh!”

  His tongue swirled, the motion steady and sure. A firestorm stirred within her. As the friction built up, she cried out. Two fingers slid into her yearning pussy. And then—mercy!—a finger slid into her butthole. Muscles she had never been aware of clenched as the current of pleasure swept her away.

  Oscar raised his head. “Tell me you want me to fuck you.”

  Yeah, she did. “Please, yes.”

  “No, tell me. Say ‘Oscar, fuck me.’”

  “Oscar, eff me.”

  She grunted as he pressed the head of his cock against her pulsing labia.

  “Say it, and I’ll do it.”

  “Yes, do it! Do it!”

  “Say it!” He entered her, less than half an inch. She felt herself opening, and wanted to be opened fully.”

  “Fuck me, Oscar! Fuck me hard!”

  At once, he filled her, words failing her as their hips met. She feared he was too large to accommodate, but her hungry hole devoured him and demanded more.