Tigers Like It Hot (4 page)

“No.” He grinned. “We came here because we heard that they celebrate Halloween for the entire month here and—“ he reached up to touch his face, “as you can see, we have costumes of a sort.” He glanced at Zach and Derek with a wave. “We didn’t expect these two to follow us. We fully expected it to be just the two of us.”

Zach and Derek both dug out their licenses. “Please, go to our rooms with us, and on the way in, you can give the keys and our licenses to the clerk and ensure your safety.”

“Nothing could ensure our safety as much as just telling you all goodbye, right now.”

“True,” Gareth agreed with a nod. “But it won’t change your life forever, either.” He glanced at his friend. “Mac and I can change your life in ways that you can’t possibly imagine. We only need you to give us a chance.” He handed her his driver’s license and she stood between them, wanting to believe that they could help her shed her old reputation and tell her how to change her life. Did they have some sort of job in mind? She didn’t really need to work anymore, but keeping busy was always a good thing.

“Why can’t you tell us out here?”

“It might come down to showing you, and we’d have to to that in our room. We can’t show you what we would need to show you here.”

“Oh.” She supposed that made sense. They wouldn’t carry their things with them everywhere. “I don’t know what you could possibly have in your room that could convince either me, or Kelly, that you’ll change our lives for the better just by being there with you.”

“For that,” Mac said with a grin. “You’ll have to trust us.”

“The problem is, I’m not sure I can do that.”

“Then, at least trust the desk clerk at the hotel enough to find out.” Zach moved closer and stared down at Kelly.

His gaze was filled with something Jessi could have sworn was impossible. There was no way she saw a glimmer of love there. Kelly had just met the man.

“There’s one other thing you should know before we get there,” Derek added as he laced his fingers with Kelly’s.
She
was about to capitulate. Jessi could see it in her eyes.

“What’s that?” Jessi asked with trepidation. Something strange was happening here, and it wasn’t that, for some reason, these four men found her and Kelly hot. It was something else.

“You’ll have to split up. Each of you will have to go to a different room with us.” He lifted his hand when she would have protested. “For one thing, there aren’t enough seats in one room to accommodate us all. For another, this is a decision that you
must
make on your own with no coercion. We promise not to coerce you. You must each promise not to make the attempt to convince each other one way or the other.”

“I’m game,” Kelly said and then turned to Jessi. “Look, Jess, I haven’t had the life you’ve had. You’ve seen what it’s like away from home. I haven’t. I’m almost forty.”

They both nervously glanced at the guys, as though revealing her age would suddenly turn them off. None of them batted an eye.

“I don’t have the experience living away from Langston that you have. I need to take chances. Otherwise, I might miss out on something wonderful.”

“I’ve felt that way all of my life, Kel,” Jessi replied as she stared at her friend. “Every time I moved to a new town, I felt as though
that
was the town that would change my life. That something—someone was just around the corner waiting for me to make the right decision and things would change for the better. That somehow, I would meet my knight in shining armor and I wouldn’t be lonely anymore.” She shook her head. “It’s all a myth, but, like me, you have to find that out for yourself.”

She turned her gaze to Mac and Gareth. “I’ll go with you, but I
am
handing your things over to the desk clerk. I’m also taking your photos and leaving my phone at the diner with the waitress with the instruction to give my phone and your photos to the police. I might be crazy to listen to you guys, but I’m not stupid.” She pulled her cell phone from her pocket. “Now, how do you take those masks off?”

Mac stared at her, his mouth dropping open. “I—uh—that’s the thing. We can’t take them off.” He glanced at the others for help.

What the hell were they supposed to do now? They could shift their faces back to their human shape and appearance, but they couldn’t do it here. It would most likely send the women from them, screaming. If it didn’t run, they were likely to faint dead away at their feet.

At that point, they would have no choice but to carry them back to their rooms, which would effectively break their promise of allowing them the choice and their safety measures.

“Bull crap. They’re masks, so they can be removed.” Jessi’s brows lifted. “That is, unless you’re refusing to remove them. If so, I don’t have any compunction about leaving the four of you here to twiddle your collective thumbs. I’m not stupid and I’m not a pushover…usually. So, you can forget any kind of cooperation from me without removing those masks so we can take a picture. How do we know that you guys aren’t refusing to remove your masks because you have the desk clerk at the hotel in your pocket?”

“I knew there was a reason I was drawn to you,” Mac said with a grin. He pulled his phone from his pocket. “I have a lot of photos on my phone of Gareth and me. Some selfies we took to send to post to our social media sites as we travelled. What if we give the waitress
my
phone?” He handed his phone to her. “There’s even a picture of the hotel and of the two of us in the room.”

“That will do.” Jessi took the phone and glanced back at the other two who shrugged and pulled their phones from their pockets. She glanced through their pictures, most likely noting that there were photos of all four men between the four phones.

Frowning, she looked at the photos. “You guys really take your costumes seriously.” She showed the phone to Kelly. “Look at that one. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was really a tiger’s ears on that guy.” She glanced at the men. “When we’re done talking, I want to know where you guys get such realistic costumes.”

“And where do you live where the guys are all so gorgeous?” Kelly added with a low whistle. She glanced up at Zach and Derek with a low, “Meowrr…”

“When we’re done talking, you’ll know all of that. We promise you.” Zach grinned at Kelly, giving her a quick wink.

“Okay, then, gentlemen.” She held up the phones. “I’m going to take these back into the restaurant and give them to the waitress for safe keeping. She won’t release them to anyone but me, if I have my way in the matter.”

Jessi disappeared through the doorway. Mac couldn’t hear what she said to the woman through the thick glass. He might have been able to if the traffic had come to a stop in the small town, but time moved on and people had things to do, even in a small town.

He ignored the others, watching as she talked to the waitress, handed the phones over with a nod and turned to leave the diner.

She paused ever so slightly when their gazes met, as though wondering if she’d made the right decision. She had, but there was no way for her to know that, at the moment.

Whatever they planned to tell her, it had to be good, to convince the woman to stay with them when she knew nothing about them. Certainly, she would know not long after they got to the hotel room, but what would stop her from calling them freaks and leaving? They couldn’t force her or Kelly to accept them. It was the most rigid law their people had. Their people had deemed
any
kind of coercion immoral as well as illegal.

He had known some who ignored the laws and never returned to the cascade, but that kind of rebelliousness was out for him. He
had
to return to the cascade. His body was partially shifted for life. He could remove the
mask
that made him look like a tiger, but he could never remove the tail.

“Are you ready?” he asked, holding out his arm. He hoped she would trust them enough to take it. It was a small step, but still one in the right direction.

“Yes.” She glanced at his proffered arm.

Instead of twining her arm through his as he’d hoped, she rested her hand on his forearm. It wasn’t much, but it was something. His muscles jumped and contracted beneath the warmth of her hand and he smiled down at her.

He took a deep breath, ignored the acrid scent of car exhaust and concentrated on the lovely, natural scent of his mate. He hoped to wake up to that lovely smell every morning of his life from this day forward.

“It’s not far. Just come with us and we’ll explain everything to the best of our ability.” As far as whether the women would believe them or not—only time would tell.

Jessi bit her lip while Mac led her to their hotel. As promised, they stopped at the front desk. “My friend and I are going up to their rooms for a moment.” She studied the clerk, noting his short-cropped blond hair and green eyes. The man couldn’t have been an inch over five-ten. He didn’t look related to the men, at least.

She placed the driver licenses and car keys on the counter. “We don’t know these men from Adam and we want to make sure that we leave their rooms alive. Please keep these here until I’m able to retrieve them on my way out.”

“I sure will.” He smiled at her. “Ya can’t be too safe these days. If ya need protection, there’s a machine in the bathroom.”

Jessi’s face heated. “We
won’t
be needing any of
that
kind of protection. They aren’t getting lucky today. I’m too old for that kind of crap.”

“Sure, lady.” The young man grabbed the items and carried them to an office behind the counter. He closed the door behind him. “There’s a touch pad lock on that door. Only the clerks know the combination, and I don’t leave until six.” He checked his watch. “If you plan on staying more than four hours, I would suggest you come down here around a quarter to the hour and meet the night guy.”

“We won’t be that long, I assure you.” Jessi was confident that they could tell them what they needed to know. Then, she and Kelly could be on their way and to the next town before dinner. She hoped so, anyway. She certainly didn’t want to spend the night here, knowing these gorgeous men were so close. Their supposed attraction to her was enough to make her want them more than she’d ever wanted anyone so much in her life. That pissed her off. She was over feeling as though she needed a man to make her life complete.

She might need a man to have a baby, but she would never need a man to make her feel good about herself, ever again. She did that well enough on her own. Jessi Harrington was reformed.

She no longer had low self-esteem and she no longer handed out her favors to feel loved. She found out long ago, unlike most women, a man didn’t have to feel a damned thing for the woman he had sex with. He had sex, he enjoyed it and he suffered no repercussions such as being called a slut or a whore. Women weren’t that lucky. She and Kelly had found that out the hard way.

She slid a sideways glance to the men who claimed to find her so attractive. Though she no longer handed out her favors to men to feel loved, there was no reason she couldn’t do it for the baby she’d wanted so desperately for the last ten years. They didn’t have to know. She didn’t need their money to support a child. She’d done well enough for herself in the stock market that she didn’t have to work another day in her life. Neither did Kelly.

Every week for the last fifteen years, she had taken money from her paycheck and invested it for them. If Kelly wanted to pay her back, that was fine. She could give her the original ten grand she’d invested for her. With interest, it might be fifteen grand by now. Even that amount was a drop in the bucket of money she’d managed to accumulate for them both by listening to her book keeper and market advisor.

She let Mac lead her to the elevator, wondering if, after all of these years, she could abandon her morals and sleep with one, or both of these men for a child. They looked healthy as horses, and they were tall, good looking and had bodies to die for. Any child made between them would have to be gorgeous.

Almost immediately, her body reacted to the idea. Cream slid from her channel and soaked her panties at the thought of making love to one of the men who stood on either side of her.

Jessi slid a glance toward Kelly. If the other woman’s hard nipples were any indication, she had some similar thoughts. If not about a baby, she was certainly thinking about sex.

The elevator stopped on the fifth floor and Mac tugged her arm. “This is our floor.”

Even having known they were going to different rooms, she hadn’t expected to split with Kelly so cleanly. What would happen to her friend? Did they make the right decision or were they both like some of the heroines she’d read in romance novels that were just too stupid to live?

“Kelly…”

“It’s okay,” Zach said as he stepped forward to hold the door open. “We’re only two floors up. Room Seven-nineteen. She’ll be fine. I give you my word.”

Those words shouldn’t have relaxed her. They’d come from a complete stranger, yet for some reason, she relaxed and somehow knew that everything would be okay.
They--
she and Kelly—would be okay. Jess didn’t know how she knew it, she just did. She’d learned to trust herself years ago when she left Langston. Though Kelly wasn’t aware of it yet, Jessi’s intuition had made both of them rich women. She wasn’t about to start second-guessing it now.

“I—I guess I hadn’t thought about us being on separate floors. I guess I thought you’d all would have gotten rooms together.” She was starting to babble. It wasn’t a good sign. She hated it when she got nervous. She did stupid things like agree to follow strange men to their hotel rooms, and that was just the light side of stupid things in
her
repertoire.

“We didn’t arrive together. In fact, we didn’t even know Zach and Derek had followed us out here until we saw them at the restaurant a while ago.” Gareth’s stomach growled.

“You didn’t eat.” She closed her eyes at the inane remark.
Of course he didn’t. If he had, his stomach wouldn’t be grumbling.