Grayslake: Lion to Get Her (Alpha Lion Shifter Romance) (Kindle Worlds Novella) (The Jamesburg Shifters Book 8) (3 page)

“Not adult fiction, the
Stephen King
section,” the little girl urged. She was getting very excited about the whole thing. “Can I watch you fight him?”

Up on her tiptoes, the stumpy shifter’s head came almost to Laney’s waist. “Pleeeeeeaaaase?”

“If you promise to be quiet and stay back and—wait a second! I’m not going to fight anyone. What gave you that idea? I’m just gonna get him out of here, or at least wake him up.”
Or if he’s halfway decent looking, I might ask him on a date. I mean, even if he was sleeping, he had to walk into the library in the first place, right? Might not be exactly what I’m looking for in a man, but what the hell—I can’t be all that picky. It ain’t like my clock hasn’t been tick-tocking away for longer than I’d like to admit.

She shook her head to clear her thoughts.

“Everyone said you fought that one guy who made a big mess and knocked over a bunch of carts when he was running around with his shirt off,” the kid said.

Laney cracked a grin. “Well, that was different. When you’re in college you’ll understand that sometimes the only way to counter the intense stupidity that comes from a mixture of Axe body spray, cheap beer, and groupthink is to lay the smack down on a fool.” She smirked again, thinking back to the incident the girl was talking about. She may possibly have overreacted to the rampaging frat guy, but what the hell—a girl’s gotta blow off steam sometimes, and a lioness has an almost desperate need for violence that modern society just doesn’t accept.

So when you get the chance... take a jump, right?

“Anyway,” she said, still smiling, “I’m not going to fight him. Stay behind me, I’m sure nothing exciting is going to happen, but you never know.”

By then, a small train of short people had assembled behind Laney. “Get him Miss Langston!” a tiny voice urged. “Yeah! Get him good! Get that sleeper! You’re not supposed to sleep in school
or
in the library!” another squeaky voice chimed in.

Suddenly, the tiny train gave Laney a shot of courage that could only be described as a similar feeling to going down the road and spontaneously deciding to roll down all the windows and sing along to some
really
raunchy Guns ‘n’ Roses songs, really loud.

And absolutely not giving the first shit who heard or what they thought.

And there was a guy sleeping in
her damn library
.

She puffed her chest up, lifted her shoulders until they formed something like a shelf upon which her head was sitting, and marched directly toward the most popular section of the library, a thought which bothered her and also didn’t. After all, she did really like
The Stand
.

“Okay, mister!” she started before she laid eyes on her victim. “You’ve really got to...”

When she saw his golden fur, his massive legs and arms, and a mane that would’ve been right at home on a 1980s Bon Jovi album cover, she heard her own voice skid to a halt. There, before Laney, in all his glory, was a gigantic lion who had apparently fallen asleep with a copy of
Dolores Claiborne
in his hand, er, paw.

“Can’t say I blame him,” she said, tilting her head to the side and looking at him fondly for no reason in particular. A moment later, she remembered the small legion at her heels, and knew she’d have to at least reinforce the rules.

She could be gentle about it, at least. No reason to be over the top. After all, it wasn’t like he’d fallen asleep in the middle of the floor. And it wasn’t like he fell asleep on a
good
book. She laughed at the thought, and then poked him with her toe.

“Aww, come on Miss Langston!” the girl in the underoos chided. “You gotta be meaner than that! He’s asleep in the library and he’s snoring!” Her kid-lisp made the last word several syllables longer than it should’ve been, and punctuated it with a rise and fall in the middle. She might not’ve been all that excited about kids in general, but this one was goddamn adorable, even to Laney. “What if a kid saw him and thought that’s what you’re supposed to do in lie-berries?”

Laney snickered again. “All right,” she said. “I guess you’re right. And I guess it’s possible he
is
an escapee from a zoo. I don’t know if I’ve ever known a single shifter in my whole life who could sleep peacefully enough to just turn into a giant lion. I almost hate to bother him.”

“Mmm,” the giant lion groaned. “Yeah, just like that. Yes, yes...”

“Oh holy hell!” Laney spluttered. “You kids go on, now, story time is about to start! Don’t want to miss story time, or song time, or whatever is about to happen.”

“We don’t want to miss
this
!” A chorus of voices announced at almost the exact same time. “He’s funny!”

“Yeah baby,” the big lion groaned. “Yeah, just like that. Don’t stop, just do it once. One real good one... yeah, just like that. Keep going, just one good turn and you’ll get me so good.”

He trailed off that time, a little drool coming out of his leonine lips. A moment later, his tongue followed the drool and hung out of his mouth like a homeless earthworm trying to escape an oven.

“Oh my God,” he started up again, the earthworm retracting back to its hole. “Yeah, you really got me, baby. You got me goin’ good now, yes, yes...”

“Okay kids! Back to the rug! Head over to the story rug time mat thing! Mr. Gilligan is ready for song time and—”

From across the library, a haggard looking man coughed loudly. “I still got ten minutes!”

“Shh!” Elaine hissed so hard she might as well have been a balloon with a hole in it. “Quiet!”

“I got ten minutes!” David Gilligan protested again. “She’s cutting into my break, I—”

“Then quit ten minutes early, Mr. Gilligan! Song time! Now! Go, go, go!” she herded the kids back across the center area of the library where sat nothing but empty study tables and a few cream colored Dell PCs from back when the ‘Dude You’re Getting a Dell’ guy was still on the commercials.

Gilligan grumbled, and whined for a second, but rapidly took his guitar up and began a rousing rendition of what seemed to Laney’s ears to be a version of
She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain
set to the tune of
Live and Let Die
—the Wings original, thank you very much. She didn’t much care
what
he was playing, as long as he was entertaining the kids while this sleeping lion finished his sex dream.

“Sex dream!” Laney whispered before she clapped her hand over her mouth. “Finish? No sir, not here.”

She poked the big lion with the toe of her rebellious, for a librarian, Mary Jane. “Wake up!” she whispered. “Get up! You’re traumatizing a bunch of kids, and you’re kinda making me tingle.” She clapped her hand over her mouth again, and shook her head.

“God I’m hard up,” she mumbled. “So is he, apparently.”

“Hunh?” the big lion snuffled a few times. One eye opened slowly, then the other. He blinked once, then again. “Where am I? Why the hell do I have
Dolores Claiborne
in my hand?”

Laney put her fists in her back and pursed her lips. “Sorry to wake you, baby doll,” she said. “You’re asleep in a public library, and apparently having some kind of dirty dream. You were—”

“Wait, what?” he shook his head and pushed himself into a sitting position. “I was dreaming about a...” He trailed off, and blinked a couple more times. “It was a hamburger, I think. I really get into how a person turns a patty, you know?”

Her mouth froze halfway through beginning a lecture. The rest of Laney’s body followed immediately after, until she felt like the tin man who had run out of WD40. “You what? You were carrying on and groaning like you were about to go straight into... er, like you were about to have, you know, relations.”

“Oh hell, I’m still a lion. I can’t believe I did that. Look,” he began. For a moment, he didn’t speak, instead he plodded off behind the section with lots of Dean Koontz books. When he reappeared, he was buttoning a pair of loose-fitting Levis. His button-up shirt was hanging open, and for a moment, Laney just stared slightly slack-jawed, at the lines of this magnificent creature’s muscles.

His shoulders flexed gently as he buttoned the red and blue, checker pattern shirt, and his forearms clenched as he rolled the sleeves up. “Like I said,” he continued, “I’m really sorry. I’ve been working late, not sleeping much. And did you say something about ‘relations’? That’s funny, I haven’t heard that word since the last time my Grannie Clara came to town.” His stomach growled mightily, interrupting whatever he was about to say. He grinned sheepishly. “I guess I’m—”

“Hungry, too, apparently,” Laney finished for him. “I don’t know if I believe you or not, but even if you were having the raunchiest
relations
dream ever,” she said the word with slow relish, unable to hide her grin for long, “making up some story about having a sex dream about a hamburger is creative, at least.” She shook her head. Everything about this guy screamed one of two things: either calendar hunk, the kind of calendar where all the guys are dressed up as soldiers, cops or firemen, or a Chippendales dancer.

Watching him button his shirt had, indeed, gotten her tingly in places she preferred not to have tingling while she was at work, but the careless perfection of the creature in front of her put her off. He hadn’t been rude, well, at least not since he stopped moaning and groaning in the floor. He hadn’t done anything really, except be friendly, but still, something about him struck her wrong.

“I swear,” he shook his head and then ran his hand through his hair, smoothing it down into something resembling a styled mop. “I, uh,” his stomach growled again, and he laughed.

When he did, the sleeping lion flashed a set of pearly whites that were only slightly imperfect. One of the teeth on the bottom row was askance, overlapping his left-side canine just slightly. A moment before she’d been silently and unconsciously running through the list of reasons in her mind that this guy would never have any interest in someone like her. But seeing that tooth put a worrisome spike in the back of her brain.

A spike she had no real desire to deal with just then.

“Anyway, you never told me your name. You have a nice smile,” he said. “And if you can’t tell, I’m yammering because I’m embarrassed.”

“No you’re not,” Laney said. “No one smiles like that if they’re embarrassed. You’re impressed with yourself, aren’t you? You’re the sort that can’t quite get over how life just seems to work out, even when it shouldn’t.”

“Wow,” he said with slight recoil in his voice. “I really didn’t mean to start anything. I was just saying you have a nice smile.”

“Sorry,” Laney said, wincing slightly. “I have a tendency to get defensive sometimes. I couldn’t really tell you why, but—”

The lion smiled and waved a hand. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m the one who came into your house and pushed the furniture around, put my feet on the table, drank all your beer, went to sleep and started snoring.”

She cocked her head to the side and stared at his face. “You... huh?”

He just kept making her smile, and she had no idea why. Laney wasn’t the type to just sit around grinning like an idiot, and she certainly wasn’t the type to pointlessly lust after some guy she just met. Hell, she wasn’t very likely to lust after
anyone
period. She was too busy, had too much to do, too many things going on.

And yet, as she stood here looking at this guy and his tousled hair and his easy smile, she hated him a little... but she liked him a lot.

“Laney Langston,” she said, sticking an arm out.

He went one better and gave her a big hug. “Thanks for waking me up,” he said, then kissed her forehead. “I feel like we’ve known each other a lot longer than I know we have. I think...” he paused. “But I think we’re going to have time to figure all that out. Thanks again.”

And then, without a damn warning in the world, he trotted off, only pausing to drop the book he’d apparently been drugged to sleep by at her desk. He turned back as he did, smiled and waved and then for some reason, patted himself on the left hip.

Laney followed the path he’d taken as soon as the sleepy lion had left via the front door. She was still shaking her head slowly from side to side. From across the room in the children’s section, Gilligan was plonking away on a rote and pointedly irritated rendition of
Baa-Baa Black Sheep
. The twang of his guitar echoed through Laney’s head, circling the spike of desire that her strange, mysterious, and somnolent visitor had driven into the base of her skull.

Electric tingles wiggled down her chest and up her back. She shivered the same way she did when she entered the beer cooler part of a convenience store, and it was hot outside. The chill was at first a relief, but a cringe of foreboding struck her next. This wasn’t at all normal. None of this was normal, not at all. Nothing like this ever happened in libraries, and nothing like this ever happened to
Laney
, more importantly.

“What on earth just happened?” she asked, as she sat back at her desk and began to stare blankly at the half-finished crossword on her desk. When Elaine said something that wasn’t just a shushing noise, it surprised the hell out of her.

“Check your pocket you moron,” Elaine said. Her smile belied her actual feelings, though anyone who hadn’t sat beside her for half a decade would never have known she wasn’t just pissed all the time and pointing her ire directly at Laney.

“Huh?” Laney asked. “Pocket, why? Because of the weird tic that calendar hunk had?”

That time, Elaine snorted a laugh. Calendar hunk? Oh honey you have no idea. Those guys are usually nowhere
near
as hot as the chunk of man-meat that just walked out of here. Photoshop’s a helluva drug.”

When Laney paused for a second, Elaine kept on. “He doesn’t have some weird nervous tic, Langston, he wants you to check your pocket. When he pulled you in for that big, warm hug, he probably stuck it in your pocket.” She sighed, heavily. “I swear, girl, you’re at least halfway to full brain death. Anyway, if some guy was able to stick his hand in your pocket without you noticing, I’d probably check my purse, too. Not for a note, but because he could’ve stolen your credit card.”