Accidentally Catty (19 page)

“Be safe, and any sign of anyone, get out,” Wanda warned. “I know you’re the best candidate for this, Katie, because you’re more likely to understand any medically experimental documentation, but I don’t like it. In this case, I almost believe brawn is better than brains.”

“Fuckin’ A, it is,” Nina agreed.

Wanda shook her head. “Forget I said that. Go. Be careful. We’ll wait. If you’re not back in an hour—we’re coming to find you. No arguments.” She gave Katie’s arm a squeeze as she and Beck headed out into the cold night.

As they walked into the thick of the woods, the scent of wood-burning stoves in the air, it occurred to her that neither one of them had taken out the flashlights they each carried in their pockets so they’d be able to actually see through the thick pine trees separating her aunt Teeny’s from the animal park.

Katie instantly stopped walking, a cold puff of air escaping her lips. “Do you see what I see?”

Beck came up short next to her, his shoulder brushing hers. “A star, a star, dancing in the night?”

Katie smirked at his Christmas carol reference. How many twenty-year-olds knew that song? “No. I mean, can you see as clearly as I can? It’s pitch-black out here, but I can see everything as though the sun is shining and there’s not a cloud in the sky. It’s a little like having night-vision goggles on. For instance, that fern there.” She pointed to her left at a log where a wild fern grew freely. “I can see every detail to it.”

He glanced around the wooded area and nodded, putting his hands in the back pocket of his jeans. “I didn’t even realize it until you pointed it out, but you’re right.”

“Maybe you’ve just always taken it for granted—as a cougar, I mean.”

“Maybe. It definitely didn’t seem out of the ordinary at all to me.”

Katie shook her head in wonder. “All these changes . . .” She thought of her breasts and wondered out loud, “I can’t wait to see what happens next.”

His teeth glowed in the dark when he smiled at that notion. The tufts of hair peeking out beneath his cap and curling against his neck made him more biker hot than ever. “The kid in me keeps hoping for wings and X-ray vision.”

“That’s all there is in you,” Katie remarked dryly, again assaulted by a resentment she could only trace back to this wild attraction she felt to a man she’d known but a couple of days.

His sigh was gruff, filled with impatience. “Hold on there, lady. So tell me. What’s up Katie’s ass tonight?”

Well, in celebration of her new, younger ass, a thong, thank you. A lavender, frilly, satiny thong-tha-thong-thong-thong. She bristled at yet another shrewd observation from the eighth-grader. “Nothing’s up my ass.” Katie began to make her way to the steep decline in the hill that would lead to the parking lot of the animal park.

But Beck didn’t budge. His work-boot clad feet remained immobile. “You’re prickly. I can smell it on you. So what’s the problem now?”

She kept her back to him, inhaling the chilled air, forcing back the urge to participate with more defensiveness. “I have no problem.”

He stalked up behind her, grabbing her arm and whirling her around. His nostrils flared and his eyes narrowed. “Oh, you’ve got one all right, and I know just what it is, Katie.”

Hah. What did he know of
adult
problems? “I promise it has nothing to do with the rumor they’re taking the marshmallows out of the Lucky Charms box.”

He ignored her umpteenth jab at his youth by hitching his jaw in her direction. “You’re conflicted.”

“No. I’m
a
fflicted. With a paw and the Dr. Doolittle syndrome.” And whiskers. Jesus, what kind of sadistic Ruler of the Universe would give her whiskers before she’d even experienced her first hot flash?

“No, Dr. Woods. That’s not the problem here, and you know it.”

Katie rolled her tongue over her lips. “Did you also, in your amnesiac state, forget you have a degree in psychiatry?”

“It doesn’t take a degree to see why you’re so sensitive.”

“I’m turning into a cat. A. Cat. You know, meow? I imagine there’s a degree of sensitivity involved in losing parts of your humanity and gaining some whiskers and a paw. Not to mention the added thrill of canine communication.”

“Whiner.”

Katie’s lips thinned in anger. “Did you just have the nads to call me a whiner?”

“That was me. All nads, resident amnesiac, and imposer upon your quiet, if not dull life.”

The. Nerve. Her life wasn’t dull. It was Zen, baby. A very quiet Zen. “Because?”

“Because despite the fact that you have a paw and a stray unwanted hair or two, you’ve also gained a reprieve from the dreaded middle-aged rack sag. Might I also mention, your back end has been given an enormous gift minus a surgeon’s skillful knife? And yes, I noticed, though the first version I leered at was fine, too. Those two attributes alone are gifts some women would consider a more than fair trade-off. You just won’t see the glass is half full.”

He’d seen her whiskers and not said a word about them? What kind of gay friend was he? And he’d noticed her breasts . . . which excited her. Which made her even angrier.

She tried to shrug his grip off, but he wasn’t letting go. The clasp of his lean fingers on her arm made her insane with two things. Lust and lust. Bad, bad, Katie. “Perky breasts and a firm ass are considered a fair trade for whiskers and a paw? What planet do you suspect you hail from?”

Beck’s dark lashes fluttered against his cheeks while he looked down at her with that glare that saw past her angry platitudes. “I’d bet there are more than a hundred women who’d call that more than fair, and they’d take the deal in a New York minute.” He snapped his fingers, long and lean, under her nose.

“Well I’m not one of those women. I was fine with the aging process. So if you thought gratitude was what I was handing out, you’d be mistaken.”

Beck held up his hand, still keeping her in his grip with the other. “We’ve gone astray. That isn’t why you’re conflicted.”

Katie rolled her eyes up at him and crossed her arms over her chest in a gesture of bored indifference. “Oh, then by all means, share your diagnosis.”

“It has to do with me. I leave you on edge because you’re conflicted.”

“I’m on edge because I don’t know what to expect next when I plant my foot on the floor tomorrow morning. I’ve been a cougar for two days—today it was the twenty-four-hour boob lift and bulldogs in my head, then it was whiskers and a perky ass. I’m not much for surprises.”

“Really, Katie? Well, I have one for you.”

She clapped her hands, mocking his statement. “Oh, boo and yah. Please—please tell me it’s another perk like maybe next I’ll gak up a hairball.”

“I’m not gay.”

Wait, wait, wait.Yes, he was. She bit back a groan. No. No. No. She must insist he be gay. This wasn’t an option he was allowed to take off the table. If he wasn’t gay, she was doomed. So she bluffed. “Yeah? So what? Me, neither.”

His smile was condescending and confident when he answered, “Thus the explanation for why you’re so edgy.”

Okay, now he was getting under her skin and burrowing there. “Wow. You’re on fire tonight, Mr. I Can’t Even Remember I’m a Cat. How do you figure you’re being heterosexual factors into my edginess?” Damn, damn, damn. For someone supposedly so young, his insightful observations were not just mature, but killing her.

“Ah,” he drawled as if he’d found the answer to evolution. “But now that I’ve told you I’m a heterosexual, your edginess will have a new facet.”

“Holy circles.”

“It’s simple. Pay attention. You’re edgy and conflicted because you find me attractive, Katie. It was easier to deny your attraction to me when you thought I was playing for the other team. Now that you know I’m not, you’ll take issue with my age, an age that can’t exactly be pinpointed with any accuracy, especially if the changes in your body are any indication to my own outward appearance. Maybe I’m not the twenty-two-year-old, skateboarding, candy-bar-eating teenager you thought I was. This presents a dilemma for you.”

Hoo boy, did it ever. She continued on the journey she’d begun. Playing dumb. “That being?”

Beck’s cheeks sucked inward, and then he smirked. “How to keep your hands off me.”

Her hands were staying right where they were. That went double for her paw. “Funny how you can’t remember anything, but you
can
remember how to be an arrogant egomaniac. Maybe you really are older. Only a mature man could have compiled that much conceit. It’s a man gift, I think. One that even sprawls the great divide of amnesia.”

Rocking back on his heels, Beck stared her down not even a little fazed, if his arrogant expression was any indication. “Call it what you will, it’s the truth. I’m not gay, and that makes you uncomfortable.
Very
uncomfortable.”

Oh, so the hell what? “It does not, teenager.”

He made a mocking face at her. “Oh, it does so,
Grandma
. I can prove it.”

“With your sage words of wisdom, Confucius?”

Beck lowered his head to her level, leaving an inch between their faces. “No. With this.”

Those confident words between them in the chilled air, he gathered her up, pulling her to him with a hand to the back of her head and the other at the small of her back, plastering her length to his.

Katie’s head tipped back, letting her catch a glimpse of his eyes seconds before his mouth swooped down to land on hers. They glittered with a self-assured amusement—a devilish glint of the hijinks he planned to embark upon.

Curling her hips into his, Beck slanted his mouth over hers, pausing but a moment to chuckle at her surprise before he parted her mouth. His hands splayed across her back, forcing her body to mold with his.

Hot fissures of pleasure were his instant reward, pricking awake each of her nerve endings like small ignitions of heat. She bucked beneath the smooth, heated feel of his mouth, the insistent pressure, the glide of his tongue when it touched hers.

If he was only twenty, they sure made ’em better kissers these days than they’d ever been when she was in college.

And then she found herself forgetting everything, succumbing to the swirl of hormones, racing and rushing to come out of their dark closet in a tumble of gleeful, targeted assaults on her body. The space between her thighs clapped imaginary hands of decadent joy. Her nipples, now crushed against Beck’s sexy chest, newly revived and awake, cried out at the friction their bodies made pressed so tightly to one another.

Katie’s hands gripped at his shoulders, feeling the rigid curves and planes beneath his thick, flannel jacket. They made her fingertips tingle with the need to discover his hot flesh naked, touch the place where his heart beat so fast, she felt it even through her jacket.

And an irrepressible need grew, spiraling from deep within her belly until her blood rushed through her veins and her heartbeat thumped in her ears like claps of thunder.

Beck’s mouth worked hers, driving his tongue into it, the rasp of silky flesh making her entire body tremble with molten hot need. His kiss was wet, demanding, and so delicious, her knees began to buckle. The rigid press of his zipper against her abdomen drove her stand on tippy-toe to press even closer so she could explore the hard length of him.

A sigh fell from her lips as their tongues dueled. A sigh of delicious satisfaction. A sigh she hadn’t sighed in a very long time. The sigh of a woman who wanted the pleasure this odd contradiction of a man wrought from someplace deep inside her.

Beck’s groan, low and thick against her lips, and then his hand, large and hot, cupping her breast was what snapped her out of this bubble of wanton lust they’d created in the middle of the woods. It reminded her that she had no business kissing someone she hardly knew. Someone who’d wreaked havoc in more than just her loins.

Someone who was a kid. Despite his lip-locking skillz.

Katie tore her lips from his mouth with a ragged gasp, but he didn’t loosen his hold on her. Instead, he forced her to look up at him by pulling her closer. Their chests crashed together, Beck’s breath huffed in and out in puffs of condensation while his stare bore into hers. “Did that in any way feel like gay teenage boy to you?”

She shot him a guilty glance before finding a tree just over his shoulder to focus on. “We don’t know how old you are. And I’m not kissing someone who could quite possibly be young enough to be my son. As to the gay thing, my only defense is you said you liked
Project Runway
. I know of maybe one straight man who does, and he’s one pink shirt with the collar flipped up from gay.”

“Correction. I never said I liked
Project Runway
. I don’t know what I like unless you count cartoons. Which I saw briefly because I’ve been so busy doing household chores, I haven’t had the chance to channel surf. I did recognize the tagline for
Project Runway
. That’s beside the point. The point here is you find me attractive. I definitely, if the snug fit of my jeans is correct, find you attractive, too. That’s the point. The other point being, you can’t use my supposed homosexuality as an excuse to freely check out my arse anymore without some kind of guilt attached to it. Now you’re just like me.”

She was puzzled—horrified to have been caught, but puzzled. “Like you?”

“Checking out your sweet backside because it’s sweet and I want it. Period.”

That heat he’d fanned to a flame rushed back to her insides, making her chest tight. “I don’t indulge in casual sex. With anyone. No matter their age.”

“Well, maybe that’s why you’re so bloody tight-assed and tense. There’s more to life than crossword puzzles and a marathon of
Hoarders
. Don’t deny you watch it. I saw the look of dismay when you realized they had a new episode on tonight and you were going to miss it because we ate dinner late. And lighten up. Checking me out isn’t a sin. I’m not opposed to you enjoying having a look at my body.”