Hollywood Tiger: BBW Tiger Shifter Paranormal Romance (Hollywood Shifters Book 3) (7 page)

Chapter Seven

Mindy decided that this unknown JP was the perfect host.

There were
two
luxurious bathrobes in the linen closet along with lots of fluffy towels that matched the blue of the bathroom.

Mindy sat swathed in a man-sized robe at the table with a mug of coffee in her hands as Dennis, his bathrobe hanging open, stood before a spice cabinet loaded with jars and boxes, his hands on his hips. “JP’s fiancée is supposed to be a terrific cook, but I haven’t got a clue.” He turned Mindy’s way, affording a delightful view of his body from collarbones down.

She smiled, thinking she could never get enough of looking at him. “I’m a rotten cook,” she admitted. “All I can make is coffee and toast.”

“How about we stop for dinner before I take you back to your car,” he asked lightly, and she sensed question underneath the question.

“Great idea,” she said, squashing down the poodle inside who was jumping about, barking, Stay! Stay! Stay!
Yeah, and see what happens if he finds out about you
, she scolded the poodle, who curled up into a little ball and vanished.

Dennis poured coffee for himself and sat across from her. “So, do you always go commando?”

“Not always.” She smiled, wanting to recapture the good mood while it lasted. While
he
lasted. “Sometimes I wear a thong.”

His mug clattered on the table. “Okay, we’re talking about something else, or we’ll end up right back in that bedroom. If we make it that far.”

She laughed as if he was joking, though part of her wanted just that. This guy was dangerous, what he could do to her with one hot look and that wicked smile. It was definitely time to get some distance. She already knew that the inevitable crash was going to hurt so much worse than any of the casual breakups of her life so far.

“Those pictures I took,” she said. “Is that going to wrap the case up?”

Until that moment, she hadn’t recognized the expression in his eyes as tenderness until it vanished. His expression smoothed into a considering gaze that shifted somewhere beyond her left shoulder. He grunted. “I suspect it’s too soon to tell. Maybe we should take a look at them. Sloane’s waiting for our report as it is.”

They padded back to the bedroom, where she dumped the photos from her camera into his laptop, a high end model that apparently traveled with him around the world. He really did live out of a go-bag, she thought, looking at the duffel resting neatly on a handsome carved trunk against the opposite wall.

Then they sat together in a wicker love seat on the terrace outside the guest room, the laptop on a tiny table at their knees as he flicked through the photos. Some were harder to read than others as she hadn’t always got the perfect angle, or her finger moved minutely on the camera button while pressing.

“I did a crappy job,” she sighed after three blurry pictures in a row.

“Are you kidding? You were right in the line of fire, and had to move fast. You did damn good. Don’t sweat the smudgy ones. The techies can blow these up and do a lot of other computer magic. This is amazing, Mork.”

There it was again, that little flame inside her when he said ‘Mork.’ It was the way his voice caressed the word. She could feel a smile in his tone, though he wasn’t smiling as he bent intently over the laptop.

“I have to say, though I’m no expert, these contracts look legit,” he commented. “One point two mil for a screenplay that sounds like something me and my buddies wrote when we were in high school? Damn!”

“About that,” Mindy said, and repeated her conversation with Emma Gordon, ending with, “Aren’t internships usually unpaid? And even if they are paid, for one point two million, surely she would already have an agent and be in the Writers’ Guild, wouldn’t she? Whether or not she’d signed a non-disclosure agreement. She sounded confused, or maybe it was only me.”

“That makes two of us,” he said.

“One thing I do know,” she stated. “And this isn’t just Haskell, though I notice he does it in exactly the same tone, with exactly the same creepy smile, which is to say ‘Trust me,’ right before he utters a big fat lie. They
all
do it! The word ‘trust’ has almost lost all meaning, like the word ‘value’ hammered at you day and night from commercials trying to sell you something you don’t want and don’t need. It’s got so that anyone who says ‘trust me’ is a red alert.”

He gave her a rueful smile. “I hope I haven’t said that to you.”

“Of course you haven’t,” she retorted.

“And I won’t.” He held up his right hand. “Trust me!”

She dug her elbow in his side, knowing she was doing it as an excuse to press up against him.

Dennis gave that lovely rumbling purr of a chuckle deep in his gorgeous chest, then said, “But this much I am sure of, you’re right about something shady in that screenwriter’s story. I’ve listened to Mick enough for my bullshit detector to be at Defcon Three. Tell you what. Let’s shoot this stuff over to Sloane, go get some dinner, and I’ll drop you off at your car. We’ll let the experts hash this stuff out.”

She agreed, and grabbed up her clothes to change in the bathroom. There was obviously at least one other bathroom in the place, because when she came out, dressed again, there he was in jeans and a loose shirt over a tight black tee that hugged his chest and abs. God, he was handsome, she thought, staring up at him.

He smiled lazily down as he asked, “What kind of food do you like?”

“Anything,” she said as he led the way out to the garage where the Lexus waited.

“Well, that narrows it down to all of L.A.,” he retorted with good cheer as he held open her door for her. “Let’s try this. Do you like live music? Middle Eastern?”

Mindy waited until he got in the driver’s seat, then said, “I love folk music, ethnic music, really, everything but rock that feels packaged. And live is my preference—I usually don’t tell people this, because I know it sounds snobby, and of course I’ll listen to anything if someone recommends it. But that summer in Hawai’i, I first got addicted to traditional Hawai’ian music when I heard it played live. Then someone introduced me to Polynesian music, then Malaysian, and well, you get the idea.”

“It was Greek that hooked me,” Dennis said as he wove down the narrow, winding road between discreetly hidden Hollywood houses. “On one of those tiger cruises. Lucked into a concert by Domna Samiou. She talked about the roots of the music, some of it more than two thousand years old. My buddy JP unearthed some CDs his father had collected on tours with his orchestra. For a while there I wouldn’t listen to anything newer than five centuries old. God, what an obnoxious ass I was.”

“I think obnoxious assery pretty much goes with the territory when you’re a teen. What’s your favorite kind of music now?”

“No single favorite. But the types I like best go with dance. Lately I’ve been listening to some Georgian, and a year ago when I saw a Chhau celebration, I started hunting down recordings,” he said.

“I’d love to see both,” she said as he turned onto Hollywood Blvd. “What’s the oddest to Western ears that you’ve ever experienced?”

“That would be the whistlers of La Gomera.”

“Where is that?”

“What we call the Canary Islands. Silbo Gomera. Coolest music I’ve ever come across.” He parked. “Hungry?”

“Starving.”

As Mindy walked into the heavenly smell of Lebanese cooking, she was aware of a sense of impending loss. It had nothing to do with the restaurant. She knew what it was. She didn’t want to leave Dennis.

She forced herself to imagine what he would do if he woke up in the middle of the night with a dog in his bed. Best bet? The dog catcher and a metal cage, her second worst fear every time she risked changing. Worst case scenario, he finds out she’s also human and, what, turns her over to some creepy government agency to stick in a lab and study? That was her first and worst fear.

She suppressed a shiver as the hostess led them to a table. The place was crowded. Mindy caught snatches of others’ conversations, and suspected from the quick glance that Dennis cast from side to side that he was thinking the same thing as she: avoid talking about Haskell and the sting.

That meant personal talk. If she took over the conversation, she could steer safely away from danger zones—like her own secrets.

“You’ve mentioned these friend you grew up with,” she said after their drinks came. “Tell me about them.”

He grimaced slightly, his dimples deepening. “What’s there to say? We were pretty typical kids. Boring. I’d rather hear about you.”

“Which would be ten times more boring because my only experience with other kids was pretty much confined to classroom, playing field, organized events. And of course steps and halves coming and going. I moved too often to learn how to make friends,” she said, lobbing the conversational ball right back at him. “You can’t possibly bore me.”

“Well, we were a bunch of little devils, when I think back,” Dennis said, looking away as though sorting his words. “The ways boys usually are. We lived in a small town, so we did small town stuff. Watched a lot of TV, or played outside. Whole town was our playground, and the empty land beyond. When we weren’t dirt bike racing, we were heavily into anime, specifically mecha. In fact, that’s pretty much what got cameras in our hands—we wanted to make our own adventure films . . .”

He reminisced, mostly about trouble they got into, keeping her in a ripple of laughter. But while she laughed, little clues kept niggling at her—Mick. Russian grandparents. Terrible teenage filmmaking disasters. Could his Mick possibly be the huge filmmaker Mick Volkov? No way.

That house in the Hollywood Hills—could that belong to Mick Volkov? No, it was a nice house, but no film director mansion, and anyway, hadn’t Dennis said something about the owner’s fiancée? Mindy was very sure she’d seen something on one of the talk shows about Mick Volkov getting married recently to Number Four.

So that detail didn’t add up. She kept listening, but some of her enjoyment faded, and she was glad when the audience quieted down as the first performers came out. She did not want to be paranoid, and she had been trained not to put two and two together to make seven. Still, she hated the thought that he might be bragging or scamming her—another Jerome Haskell.

That’s it. I’m paranoid because he’s too good to be real
, she thought as they were served delicious Hafleh Beiruti. They’d even decided to share the same dish, like some long-settled couple.

She was glad when the performers began playing, precluding any but occasional bits of conversation. The food was delicious, she noticed with the periphery of her attention; while it pleased her taste, and the music bathed her ears, all her other senses sensitive to every subtle alteration in Dennis.

Five numbers in, the belly dancers appeared. They began dancing, and Dennis leaned over so close a lock of his hair touched her ear as he whispered, “How do they rate?”

Mindy’s heart raced, and even though she was still fighting that sick sense of paranoia, she couldn’t keep her gaze from the curve of his lips, or touch of ruddy candlelight on the gold strands in his hair and the outline of his strong cheekbone. Her thighs tightened against the spike of heat inside her, and she forced her voice to coolness. “The one second from the right is the best at technique, but if you’re shopping, I’d say the one at the far right is the prettiest.”

A quick glance from eyes that reflected the candle flame, and he said briefly, “I like your dancing better.”  And as the dancers bowed and left the stage, he turned to signal for the check.

When the waiter brought it, she pulled out her purse and said firmly, “Here’s my half.”

He didn’t hassle her, but laid his bills on top of hers.

The lights came up for the intermission, so they left, walking out into the balmy air and brilliant lights of L.A. at night. The drive back to her car was accomplished with light chat about nothing much—the latest films, favorite restaurants, easy stuff. He seemed distant, almost absent, and she discovered that she had become attuned to the subtle changes of timbre in his voice. She could feel him withdrawing, and she had to hold down the puppy inside who wanted to break free and curl up beside him, sniffing all over to discover what was wrong.

Her car sat lone in the library lot. He pulled up beside it and he got out to open her door, saying, “We’ll be in touch. Thank you for today,” he added, his voice deepening to that resonant note that sounded so sincere. Felt so sincere.

“Thanks,” she managed, her throat constricting. She shut her car door and refused to look back at him as she started the Honda and drove away.

By the time she reached her apartment, she had a plan. She threw down her purse, retreated to her room, curled up in her big armchair and called her middle step-sister. Mindy and Tania had never been close—Tania was everything Mindy’s mother had wanted Mindy to be: tall, thin, with straight strawberry blonde hair, and blue eyes.

Last year Tania had married a mid-level news executive at NBC. Tania knew
all
the gossip in the news world.

“Tania? It’s Mindy.”

“Look, Mindy, now is not a great time. We’ve people coming over, and you know it takes me forever to —”