Accidentally Catty (6 page)

Turning back to Katie, Wanda smiled. “Ignore Nina. It’s easy. We do it often and well. What we need to do now, Katie, is talk to the man in the cage. He’s the one who holds the key to the specifics of what happens next for you. None of us can advise you on much other than general information about the paranormal and the emotions you’ll experience as these enormous changes take place in your body. That’s what we hoped to accomplish when we set out on this mission—to offer information and support in paranormal crises.”

Katie folded her arms across her chest. “So what happened to each of you after you—you . . . were changed? Why does anything have to change for me? You all still live your lives, unconventional as they are. I know blood drinking and raw meat eating are a part of that. So what? There are plenty of cults and the like who call themselves vampires and do the same things you do. Okay, so they don’t really have the restrictions imposed on them the way you do . . . but . . . What could possibly change other than my physical appearance?” Yeah. Big deal. She had a paw and some bitchin’ teeth. And? Oh, indeed and.

How very minimalist she’d suddenly become.

Nina snorted, jamming her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “Listen, homeslice, that’s optimism, if I ever heard it. I’m telling you, shit always goes down on top of your entire chemistry changing. If we have anything, we have drama. Count on it. Nothing’s ever as simple as it first seems. With Marty, it was the beef over her stealing the alpha male of her accidental pack and a power-hungry blonde who wanted her dead because Marty’s mate Keegan didn’t like said blonde. The one his pack had picked out for him to mate with. He liked Cover Girl here better.” She thumbed a finger in Marty’s direction with a roll of her black eyes. “Throw in a kidnapping, a certifiable brother she didn’t even know she had, and that about sums up the bullshit that went down with Marty. And that’s only the beginning, lady. We all had trouble. There’s always some history with these kooks, and it almost always means we have to kick some ass. Don’t get me wrong. I like a good balls to the wall as much as any other girl, but you deserve to be prepared.”

Katie held up her hand to thwart any further tales, but just as quickly let it fall to her side when she caught sight of her claws, thick and black. Shit, shit, shit. This really put a crimp in her pending manicure. “Maybe it’s better I don’t know anything about your personal histories, and instead we focus on what’s next?”

Nina nudged her shoulder, making Katie’s legs buckle a little. “I like you. You’re no pansy.”

Katie gave her a thoughtful glance. “Should I take that as a compliment?”

Marty barked a laugh. “Not unless you consider Attila the Hun’s compliments flattering.”

Nina threw an arm around Katie’s shoulders and tightened her grip around her neck. “Ignore the imitation blonde. Let’s go see how brave you really are and wake the hottie up so we can beat the shit out of him until he coughs it up.”

“Do you mean his intestines, Nina?” Casey taunted from behind.

As Nina directed her toward the examining room, she shot her middle finger upward at Casey. “Intestines, information. They both begin with the letter
i
. Makes no diff to me what he hacks up first. Whatever it takes, is my motto.”

The moment they entered the room, Katie’s bravado fled, trickling away like sand through her fingers.

He was so big all huddled in a ball in the cage they kept for their largest breeds like Saint Bernards and mastiffs. He was also, undeniably, incredibly beautiful in the roughest of ways.

It was just that simple. His long thighs and calves, sprinkled with black hair, were sculpted and lean. Hard shoulders, broad and thick with sinew, lifted in a bronzed shrug of skin when he stirred. The thick fall of his hair, black with the most unusual deep chocolate highlights, was matted in places and raggedly cut at his jawline. He had a Harley-Davidson bad-boy appeal to him, all rigid edges and sharp lines. Big, gruff, and unkempt in a hard-sexy package.

He was also very, very naked.

And young. Maybe twenty-two tops?

“Wow, he’s just a baby,” Casey whispered after a low whistle.

Katie nodded, averting her eyes to avoid the clear path they wanted to take to his southerly parts. She decidedly ignored the twang of her womanly needs reacting to his manly bits and instead, focused on willing him to wake up.

His deep snore startled even Nina, who reacted by curling her strong fingers into the edge of Katie’s shoulder and squeezing.

Marty sighed from behind them. “So what’s next, Nina-nator? You wanna poke him with a stick? Razz him a little?”

“He should be waking soon,” Kaih said as he came to stand with his boss and Nina, a glazed-eyed Ingrid clinging to his arm. “We gave him that last shot a couple of hours ago. He just needs a little nudge.”

Katie inhaled to steady her breathing, forcing herself to follow the procedures she used when an animal was coming out of sedation. Under normal circumstances, she’d open the cage door and stroke their fur, cuddle them, speaking in soft whispers to encourage them to rouse. Cuddling probably wasn’t an option when the animal wasn’t an animal, but a man. Who was an animal.

Oh-oh-ohhhh, God.

She shook off her fear, bracing herself. Running her nail across the bars of the cage, she said, “Time to wake up now . . .” Her new kitty ears cringed at the groan contained within the cage. It made her eardrums scream in protest. “C’mon now, um . . .”

“Spanky. His name’s Spanky,” Kaih offered with the clearing of his throat.

Katie’s eyebrow rose. “How do you know what his name is?”

“It was on his collar. He was wearing a collar when he came in, and it said Spanky, remember? I took it off him just before we put him in the cage. See?” He pointed to the thick collar that was now lying by the sink with small, blunt spikes on the backside of it and a copper medallion hanging from the center.

Wanda muffled a giggle.

Nina leaned into Katie. “Tell Spanky Buckwheat that the gang’s waitin’ on him, and we need to get this show on the road. Daylight happens. Every day. It burns. You don’t want to see me pissed off because I have a third-degree burn.”

Katie turned back to the cage, her stomach a nervous nest of fear. “Spankyyyy,” she cooed in a soft drawl, letting a tentative finger skim his shoulder, fighting the surprising pleasure touching his ruddy male skin brought. “Time to wake up now, kitty . . . uh, man . . . um.” She sighed and whispered with a clench of her teeth. “Just wake up!”

Spanky stirred momentarily, then nodded off again, his head falling with abandon against the back of the cage, his mouth unhinged at his jaw.

“Oh, for the love of Jesus and all twelve. Move,” Nina ordered with a snarl. Latching her fingers between the bars of the cage, she lifted it high over her head before Katie had the chance to react, shaking it up and down as though she were picking up nothing more than an empty cardboard box.

Spanky’s muscled body banged against the sides in a mess of inert limbs. “Dude! Wake the fuck up, would you? I have shit to do. I don’t have time to wait around until you feel like moving your bootylicious ass, Lion King.”

“Nina!” Three women howled in unison. Wanda grabbed at her hands, slapping them away while Marty yanked the cage from her in a two-fisted grasp, plunking Spanky back down on the edge of the examining table with a jarring crash. “Knock it off! Jesus, Nina. The man’s helpless in there, and you’re slamming him around like he’s a box of malted milk balls. Christ, you’re so impatient!”

Katie fell back against Kaih in the commotion, her head swimming with the loud scrape of metal just as the cage tipped over the edge of the shiny table and took a dive for the floor, skidding into the far wall with a harsh crack.

The cage door popped open from the force of the impact, hanging with a lopsided slant to it.

Upon landing, Spanky’s head and shoulders slid from the wire enclosure, lying at an awkward angle. His thighs spread wide.

Oh, yes.

They were spread—
wide
.

Casey rushed to his side, scooping his head into her lap to keep him from the cold floor of the examining room.

Nina whistled a catcall. “Oh, dude. That’s a whole lotta man, huh?”

Wanda came up behind Nina, clamping her hands over Nina’s eyes. “Pipe down, perv. He’s a child, Nina. He couldn’t be more than twenty, which, I might add, makes you almost young enough, in some regions of the country where women are forced into early marriages, to be his mother.”

Nina flicked at Wanda’s hands, slipping away from her grasp and eyeballing Katie. “Hey, Doc—question?”

Katie’s eyes never left poor Spanky’s prone form when she answered, “Yes?”

“How old are you?”

She frowned. “Forty-one.”

“No way!” Marty gasped. “I gotta give it up to you, Dr. Woods. You look fabulous. I’d have never guessed a day over thirty. You have terrific skin, all berries and cream, and I suppose, if this cougar thing works the way it does with the rest of us, you’ll have that skin for eternity. Damn. Why couldn’t I have been turned at twenty?” she joked.

Eternity?

Nina rolled her tongue along the inside of her cheek and snorted. “A thought just occurred to me.”

Casey grunted with a roll of her brown eyes. “Really? Huh. I thought the smell of burning flesh was just my fingertips cooling down.”

Nina ignored Casey’s jibe and turned back to Katie. “Know what this means—the age difference between you and Spanky here, don’t you?”

“We’ll have to find the nearest skateboarding park to drop him off at?” Katie returned dryly.

Nina chuckled, giving Katie her infamous devilish grin. “It means you aren’t just a werecougar, lady. You’re a cougar-cougar. You took stereotyping to a whole ’nother level. You’re like one of those ‘doesn’t look her age’ chicks who hits on young dudes because they got the zoom in their boom still happening. You’re a total label. Hot. Niiiice work, Mrs. Robinson.”

Katie bristled, her onetime surge of admiration for Nina’s forward nature turning to frustrated impatience. “I most definitely have no plans to hit or even lightly nudge a twenty-year-old
boy
. You can believe that.”

“You know,” a gravelly voice, filled with sin and a husky British timbre, commented from below, stunning everyone into complete silence. “I wouldn’t be opposed to someone like you hitting on me. But we can begin with just a nudge, if that’s what makes you more comfortable. Maybe get to know each other first?You know, all the things people do when they’re in the beginning stages of a relationship? You ask questions about me. I ask questions about you. As a for instance, and definitely not in any way a deciding factor to a future whirlwind courtship between us, what exactly has happened with your hand?” Spanky asked, blue, blue eyes dotted in a heavy fringe of lash, sparkling up at her with innocence.

Katie clucked her tongue, her control but a frayed thread. Maybe it was the tension, the fear of the unknown. Maybe it was all the fantastical, mystical, crazy things she’d just witnessed. Maybe the final vestiges of the bizarre cloudy haze of disbelief had lifted. Probably, it was the audacity of his question. No matter. Whatever it was, she had but one instinct, and it wasn’t nurturing or doctorish.

Glancing Nina’s way, Katie growled and logically, as someone who’d studied animals and their patterns in great depth, she realized it held a distinct warning.

Were someone to ask her if she cared that she knew she was going to lose it—she’d have to say fat chance.

Out of all of the women, the raving lunatic hovering directly below Nina’s surface would best understand what led Katie to where she ended up next.

Straddling Spanky’s wide chest.

But not before she hissed, yes, hissed her fury with a feral scream, virtually leaping across the room with the grace only a prima ballerina possessed, knocking Casey across the room. The only thing missing was a pink tutu and the strains of Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake
.

Latching onto Spanky’s chest hair, Katie met his startled gaze. “I will kill you!”

“Whooooa, okay, okay.” Spanky held up a large hand as a sign of submission. “But one last request from the dead man not walking?”

Katie ran her tongue over her elongated teeth in predatory fashion, her anger, swift and rife, began to cool at the sound of his reasonable tone. “What’s that?”

“If you decide to do that, and I don’t see why you would. I don’t even know you well enough to be killed by you, leaving me puzzled as to what I’ve done to bring the word ‘kill’ into our conversation with such haste and, dare I venture to say, venom. It’s a little over the top and very ‘the end.’ Anyway, all those nasty technicalities aside, could I possibly get a robe beforehand? Oh, and some slippers. No man wants to die bloody naked and cold, especially in front of so many pretty ladies.”

Then he grinned. Mischievous. Utterly delighted with himself.

Katie screeched her fury with a wail, high and long. It was eerie, one she’d heard often coming from the exotic animal park during the long nights she spent trying to sleep and forget why she’d come to this town to begin with. The mournful cry said she had a taste for blood—literally—and tag, Spanky was it.

Nina was the first to her side with the other women and Kaih shoving up behind her. She planted a hand like a vise grip, intrusive and annoying as hell on Katie’s shoulder. “Whoa-ho there, Dances with Wolves. Get a grip. Let the kid be.”

Katie, from somewhere primal and unknown, gazed up at Nina, her eyes narrowed, her breathing labored and hitching in a wheeze. “Take your hand off me.”

Nina cocked her head in challenge, a strand of her gorgeous, wavy long hair falling from behind her shoulder. Her nostrils flared when she asked, “Or?”

Yeah. Or? Katie’s anger at the audacity of this mere child’s question about her hand evaporated like dew in the morning sun. She looked back down at Spanky, unmoving, his breathing steady and collected, his gaze pensive.