The PlayLion Billionaire: A Paranormal Billionaire Romance (5 page)

Yet—and yet. Olivia remembered the gossip that went around the office; Robert Lowe was not acting like the carefree playboy he had been since before taking the helm as the company’s CEO. He was in the office early, he wasn’t partying late at night, and he was taking a firmer hold on the day-to-day business than he ever had before. The company was responding to his newfound zest for leadership; Olivia was looking forward to the end of her probation period, when she could sign up for stock options.

She remembered that during their lunch date cum interview, Robert had mentioned that he was working towards settling down; Olivia remembered that he hadn’t been very enthusiastic about the idea—but he seemed to be slowly taking on the burden of being a responsible adult more and more eagerly.

As she approached her car, Olivia thought wryly that he must have actually moved on; he must have found the woman with whom he could settle down. It surprised her that she felt chagrin at the thought.

Olivia rummaged in her purse for her keys, looking around the nearly deserted garage. Her car should not be this difficult to find. As she searched, she remembered their last progress meeting. True to form, Robert had had lunch catered in from a restaurant that he partly owned.

Somehow, in the course of their meetings, he had managed to learn exactly what Olivia liked to eat, what her preferences were. She would have accused him of having someone spy on her to discover her tastes, but she learned that he was very, very astute; she didn’t make a comment on the fact that the seared tuna over salad and the rich, creamy pureed soup were just what she had been craving.

The most recent meeting had been the most relaxed of any of them, and Olivia had found herself talking to Robert almost like a colleague instead of as her boss. They discussed some of the office gossip—the open secret that Chelsea in accounting was sleeping with Garret in IT, and the fact that Manuel in Business Development was getting divorced. She had found herself joking with Robert, completely at ease.

Beneath the friendliness, there was an undercurrent present and Olivia didn’t know how to react. In spite of her wariness, in spite of the fact that she had told herself that she would have nothing to do with Robert Lowe except as her employer, she found herself thinking about him at odd moments. It was far too easy to remember just how much she had enjoyed their tryst. She could remember every detail of the way he had felt inside of her, how good it had been. She hadn’t made any attempt to date anyone since that encounter; Olivia told herself that it was because she was focusing on her career, but she wondered sometimes how true that was.

Her gaze fell on her car, and Olivia sighed with relief. She started walking faster towards it, thinking longingly of her pajamas, her couch, and the pint of ice cream waiting for her in the freezer.  Maybe she’d make it a real night in and have a glass of wine with her dinner to further unwind. 

She would forget all about Robert Lowe and the strange way she was starting to feel closer and closer to him. He was awakening some kind of affectionate trust inside of her while being completely professional.

She would watch some mindless TV, get some sleep, and go into her next meeting absolutely prepared, and eventually things would cease to be strange. If Robert was really settling down with someone as the office gossip suggested,  she would be happy for him when he announced it, and she would never have to even consider the way she would react if he
did
make another pass at her.

Olivia paused a few yards from her car; she had a strange, skin-crawling feeling, as if someone was watching her. That was impossible, of course—there was great security at Lowe Freight headquarters. She looked around furtively, chiding herself for being silly. If anyone knew she was being so paranoid, they would laugh at her.

But she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone, maybe even a few someones, were watching her, were almost stalking her.
You’re just tired. Get your butt home and get some sleep.
Olivia took a few more steps towards her car.

But the feeling wouldn’t go away, even when she rationally explained it to herself. Olivia looked around again, but there was no sign of anyone—not even the kind of peripheral sense of movement that suggested someone hiding. She took a deep breath, straining her ears to hear the faintest of sounds. There was a low generator hum, the churning low thunder of the climate control system. Somewhere a few levels above, someone’s car alarm chirped as a car door was unlocked, but there was nothing in the noises to make Olivia think anyone was on the floor with her.

She shook her head and started back towards her car, thinking that she would make her weekend count. If she was imagining people stalking her or watching her like creeps, she was more tired than she had admitted to herself.

As she reached the driver’s side of her car, Olivia saw the faintest flicker of something in the corner of her eye. Her heart began to pound and she turned her head to see what it was, even as her mind told her that all she was going to see was some kind of moth crossing in front of the overhead fluorescent lights. There was another slinking shadow off to the side, and Olivia looked in that direction, her exhausted twinge of fear turning into a flicker of panic.

She turned around completely, her eyes searching the nearly deserted parking garage for any sign of what could have caused the odd shadows.  Olivia licked her suddenly dry lips, swallowing against the tightness in her throat.
It’s nothing. You’re being paranoid.

Before she could turn back around to unlock her car and get in, Olivia saw another shadow flit across her peripheral vision. She grabbed convulsively at the handle of her car, tugging at it uselessly. There was definitely something in the garage with her; not a person, but something that seemed to have a predatory movement. Whatever she was not seeing, it was bigger than a moth.

Olivia tried to find her phone in her purse, thinking of stories she had heard of feral dogs and cats in the city, attacking people. The last thing she needed was to have to go to the hospital before her insurance was in place.

Her fingers had closed around her phone when the shadowy figures appeared, coming out of the shadows. Olivia’s eyes widened as three lions--two males and a female -- came prowling out from behind two cars several yards away. They were enormous; they looked at least twice the size of what Olivia remembered lions at the zoo looking like, and all three were staring at her intently.

Her heart pounded in her chest. Olivia froze, her mind trying to comprehend what was happening. Lions? In the middle of the city? She shook her head slowly, trying to clear it of the fog that had descended.

Everything was briefly still. Olivia started to catalogue details irrelevantly, her mind spinning in the aftermath of the thick haze that had formed. One of the males had a patchy, unimpressive-looking mane; the other was slightly shorter and stockier, with a thicker, fuller mane.

The female had scars on her face, along the liquid muscle of her side; both of the males were similarly scarred, their tawny coats streaked with lines.
How the hell are there lions in a parking garage?

Olivia tried to remember where the nearest zoo was, and whether she had heard about escaped lions. Her mind simply could not compute the sight that was in front of her.

The stillness broke in an instant, and Olivia let out a startled yelping scream as the three lions sprang into action as one. Their claws clicked on the pavement, and Olivia fumbled uselessly with the handle of her car door, knowing instinctively that it would be utterly futile to run. The three lions closed the distance, their muscular bodies coiling as they prepared to leap at her.  Olivia screamed again.

She crouched against the body of her car, holding her hands up, cringing down into as tight a ball as she could manage. She felt a flash of searing pain along her outstretched arm, and then her eyes were full of sparkling fireworks that accompanied a sudden jolt through her skull. Everything went black and Olivia barely felt the impact as her body crumpled down onto the pavement.

CHAPTER FOUR

Robert felt the change crackling along his bones as he prowled around the crime scene. The scent of Olivia’s blood on the pavement, little though it was, was enough to drive the animal inside of him to appear almost against his will. He knew that he had to be patient, that he had to hold back the brutal part of his nature.

As he clenched his hands into fists, he wanted to roar his displeasure, he wanted to transform immediately and seek out the lions that had done this to his mate. He wanted to make them bleed. He wanted to kill them immediately.

“We can track them,” Katarina was saying, glancing at him furtively. He knew that the other lion was reacting to the intense, sharp pheromones that were radiating from him; he tried to take a deep breath, but Robert could feel the lion coiled inside of him, ready to strike, and ready to destroy whatever stood between him and his mate.

He was just starting to get her to like him again; Olivia had finally begun to relax in his presence. He had planned to use their next meeting to start to press his case with her, slowly but surely.

Robert had planned it out; he would make an offhand comment, a compliment about her outfit. He would somehow steer the conversation to their first meeting—and then he would leave it there. He had observed Olivia closely through their meetings, and he had not been above asking the members of his Pride who worked in her department, for information about the new employee. Katarina and a few others knew that Olivia was his intended mate—but Robert had not made it common knowledge yet.

“How did they know?” Robert asked harshly. “How did they target her?”

Katarina shrugged.

“You know how,” she told him matter-of-factly. “Someone can’t be trusted.”

Robert nodded quickly.  Someone in the Pride told the renegades trying to take over his territory about the Alpha’s potential mate.

“Find out who,” Robert said simply.

“Don’t you want me to track her?” Katarina asked him doubtfully. Robert shook his head.

“I’ll do it. And I will kill every last one of the lions responsible for this.” It was not an act without precedent; there had been other battles for the Alpha position, in other Prides, that had similar outcomes. Robert tried to do what he could to keep Olivia safe, but he knew that the fact that she hadn’t come around yet, and he couldn’t just tell her that she would have to stay with him, had left her open to attack. His only hope had been in limiting who in the Pride knew that he was interested in Olivia.

“Can you take on that many?” Katarina asked him. There was no way of knowing exactly how many renegades Peter had attracted—lone males, and the scent-marks at the Pride’s reserve had indicated a few females—but Robert didn’t care about that.

“They have my mate,” he said, his voice taking on the low, growling tone of a dangerously provoked lion. “I don’t care how many of them there are. I will kill each and every one of them.”

“No prisoners,” Katarina agreed. “Do you want anyone with you?”

“This is my fight,” Robert said. “She’s my mate.”

Katarina smiled wryly. “Does she know that?”

Robert scowled. “She doesn’t have to know it.”

“If they’ve transformed in front of her…” Katarina said, holding her hands up defensively and taking a few steps back. “Just—keep in mind that you might have an uphill battle.”

Alexis, the only member of his Pride that Robert trusted on an equal level to his mother, appeared.

“Holy shit,” she said, looking at the blood that pooled and smeared on the concrete.

“You help Katarina figure out who gave them the intel,” Robert told his second, as he looked around. He scented the air, finding Olivia’s pheromones painted among the various other smells. “They will be on trial as soon as I take care of the garbage. I am not even going to wait for a full moon tribunal. If the elders have a problem with that, let one of them call a challenge.”

“They took your mate,” Alexis said, shrugging. “The elders will understand.”

Robert felt the change coursing through him, crackling like electric fire through his bones. His body wanted to shift, wanted to assume his other form. He took a deep breath, struggling to hold it back.

It was not the time to give into the fiery, predatory rage. He had to be patient. He had to find Olivia first, and then he had to ensure that he could get her out of wherever the renegade lions were holding her. Then he would change. He would give in to the blind mate-defending rage, and he would take care of those vermin who thought that they could take his mate with impunity.

“Get to work,” Robert said, turning on his heel. He scented the air without even waiting to see if the two women had anything else to tell him. He knew that he could trust Katarina and Alexis to discover where the weak link in the Pride was; he knew just as surely, that they would contact him once they had not only located, but also captured, the betrayer.

Robert could focus everything in his mind on finding Olivia. The scent of her fear-pheromones was enough to make it difficult to focus, and to stay in his human form. They had injured her --that much was clear by the blood. There wasn’t very much of it, so he had to assume that they had taken her alive, and that the group was hiding somewhere, with Olivia in their possession.

She would be terrified. Whether she knew that the lions who snatched her were were-lions or not, being attacked and carried off by wild animals was enough to terrify anyone.

Robert scented the air again and again, finding the thread of scent. He followed it to a smear of blood in the guest parking lot outside of the building; they had carried her to a van there. Robert sniffed and snorted. His sensitive nose took in the particular, peculiar scent-characteristics of whatever vehicle they had loaded her into and he committed it to memory.

As he was walking quickly to his personal car, determined to do whatever he had to do to follow the trail, Robert’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He cursed under his breath; he didn’t need to be bothered just then. He took his phone out, thinking it might be an indication from Alexis or Katarina that they figured out who sold him out, who revealed his choice of mate.

Instead, there was a text message from an unknown sender.
We have your mate, Alpha. Step down and hand over the Pride, or she will die.
Robert let out a roar of pure, unadulterated rage. Another message came in.
Meet us in the Pride’s territory.
He clenched his teeth.

They would obviously have Olivia with them there. It would save him the trouble of tracking her down -- but he had no intention whatsoever of turning over the Pride to Peter and his group of renegades.

Robert stopped next to his car, taking a shaky breath. He closed his eyes. He had no idea how many of them there were; he would have to make sure that Olivia would be safe while he fought and killed the renegades.

Within lion society, he was perfectly in his rights to kill those unaffiliated with a Pride, who had raided Pride-owned territory, and who had now stolen his mate. But he couldn’t be two places at once. It would be all too easy for one of the renegades to kill Olivia while he was fighting the others.

Robert exhaled, still feeling the impulse to change dancing through his veins. He would have to get the Pride involved. It was their land, and it was an insult to them. His personal issues with the renegades were only part of the problem. He sent out a group message.
Everyone must come to the Pride territory,
Robert wrote.
Anyone not present in an hour will be put on trial and face the elders.

He knew it was a gamble. Whoever was feeding the renegades information would likely tell them that the entire Pride was going to head to the territory. They might decide to slink away into the dark and take Olivia with them.

They might decide to kill her.  Robert knew that Peter would not have made such a move if he didn’t know that this outcome was a possibility. Peter would have killed Olivia outright, or he would have proposed a meeting on his own ground, or neutral territory. Anything that happened on the Pride’s territory was the business of the Pride as a whole.

He thinks that he’ll just challenge me in front of everyone, and take over the group that way,
Robert thought. Robert climbed into his car, clenching his hands on the steering wheel and fighting back the change that threatened to overtake him in spite of every effort at self-control.

He realized that it was entirely possible that Peter had, in fact, killed Olivia. That when he arrived at the meeting place, he would be without a mate; and that Peter was counting on that fact to remove any objections from the rest of the Pride to challenging Robert.

Robert felt his heart lurch in his chest at the thought that Olivia might be lying somewhere dead even as he turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of his spot. She might be growing colder every moment, even as he tried to save her.

Robert roared again. If Peter and his minions had killed his mate, he would not only kill them—he would declare war on any family and allies that they had. He would make sure that he had revenge on everyone and anyone connected with the lions responsible for his mate’s death.

Robert pulled onto the road, his vision tinged red as he made his way the long, long distance to the Pride’s territory. He had to make himself believe that Olivia was still alive. He would have nothing but revenge if she was dead; and he knew that if that was all he was living for, he would not last long as Alpha. The elders would turn against him.

More importantly, if he lost Olivia, Robert didn’t even want to be the Alpha of the Pride anymore. There would be no point at all in remaining to lead the community he belonged to, if the woman he loved was gone. His heart beat faster in his chest, thinking of her fear-scent. They would not have killed her; the mate of the Alpha would be too much of a prize to waste outright.

Robert struggled to keep himself calm as he wound through the streets of the city, steering straight for the deep woods, the rural countryside, the location of the Pride’s territory. The thought of what someone like Peter would do with such a prize as Olivia, was enough to make him growl. He would make them all pay for everything they had done so far -- and he knew that he would have the backing of the loyal members of his Pride.

Robert had to hope that there were enough of them to make a difference; that there weren’t more people than he guessed on Peter’s side.
Even if there are only five of us,
Robert thought, his hands tightening once more on the steering wheel,
I will kill every last person involved in this, by myself if I have to. Nobody touches my mate.

*

Olivia’s shoulder, arm, and head all throbbed, each demanding attention separately in a cacophony of pain that made her cringe. She didn’t want to open her eyes. What little she could remember of the attack made it difficult for her to even believe that she was alive.

There had been a moment, a flicker of consciousness after everything went black, where she thought she had heard an engine starting. She could dimly remember the sensation of being lifted up and unceremoniously dropped onto a hard, carpeted floor with a dull thud. The feline reek of musk filled her nose, but before she could even cough in reaction to the smell, she had been out once more.

She froze, trying to figure out where she was. There was still a reek of cat-musk nearby, but it was nowhere near as strong as it had been before. There was something oddly familiar about that musk smell, Olivia thought foggily. She tried to remember where she had smelled it before and decided that it must be from visiting the big cat houses at the zoo.

Olivia breathed slowly. The air was fresh wherever she was; there was a breeze. She decided before she opened her eyes that she must be outside somewhere. She shifted and heard the rustle of vegetation. She was definitely outdoors—she could smell the scent of trees with the undercurrent of musk running through it. She opened her eyes slowly.  If she was being watched, she didn’t want to draw attention to herself.

How exactly had the lions transported her here? Olivia began to piece together her fragmented, vague, foggy memories. She decided that she had a brief flicker of awareness when she’d been loaded into some kind of van. So now, she was somewhere outside. It was dark, but the stars and the moon were enough for Olivia to see trees, and a grassland area off to one side. She was alone; that seemed strange.

Olivia heard a low, loud, feline growl that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Swallowing against the tightness in her throat, she turned her head slowly to see the glimmer of leonine eyes in a pair of low bushes near her—and the sound of a growling, throaty purr. It was a female lion, and the lion was unmistakably watching her.
What the hell is going on?

She had been attacked by lions, and then loaded into a van -- and now there was another lion. Or perhaps it was the same female lion as before. To the best of Olivia’s knowledge, lions did not own or drive vans. They did not abduct people.

As if in answer to her question, the lioness stepped forward slightly, watching Olivia intently all the while. Olivia started to cringe away, even though she knew that it was useless; at her peak, she would not be able to outrun a lion, and the pain still throbbing in her arm, shoulder, and head, told her quite clearly that she was not at her peak. Olivia heard a sharp sound --something almost like pain -- and then the air around the lioness seemed to vibrate. The female lion coughed, shaking, and Olivia almost felt bad for the predator.