Trusting the Tiger: BBW Tiger Shifter Paranormal Romance (9 page)

He cleared his throat. Toni glanced over at him and went pink as he attempted to mime his predicament.

“There are some blankets in the trunk. Key’s in the ignition,” she said quickly, though without averting her gaze. “Grab some for the kids, too, please?”

Jack popped the trunk and easily found the pile of blankets. They were thick, woollen blankets, the sort of thing you might have around for emergency picnics. He wrapped one around his waist and passed the other two to Toni, who dropped them neatly over the two kittens’ heads.

“All right, kids. In your own time.” She turned back to Jack, arms crossed defensively over her chest. “Jack…”

“I—” Jack began, and then reality caught up with him. This was no time for lengthy explanations. He had to get them all somewhere safe, where they could figure out what the hell was going on and how to deal with de Jager and his crew.

“You can’t go back to the campground,” he said in the end, stumbling over the words. “I’ve got a house in the forest. You’ll be safer there. Please. I can look after you there.”

He watched her think it over, eyes flickering as she took in the scene around them. The crashed van with claw-marks on the back door and open cages inside. The two kids, in human shape now, huddled in their blankets. And him, in the middle of it all and – yes – bleeding slightly from the wound on his hip.

“I’ll explain on the way,” he said to fill the silence.

“Good idea,” she said at last, setting her jaw. “You drive.”

CHAPTER NINE

TONI

Jack told her what had happened: the cages, the driver with a gun. His voice was calm, but he was gripping the wheel so tightly his knuckles were bone-white. When he finished, Toni felt worse than when she’d had no idea what was going on.

He shared her suspicion that de Jager – and however many men he had with him – had come to Silver Forest with the express purpose of hunting shifters. And they had the technology to do so. They could detect mindspeak, and they could silence it, which meant they could find shifters and prevent them from calling for help, or warning others.

They’d almost succeeded. Jack had saved the twins, but the driver had escaped. How long until he reported back to de Jager? How long until they struck again?

Lexi and Felix were sitting in the back, wrapped in their blankets. Toni kept a worried eye on them as Jack drove past the campground and on to a long gravel road. They had both looked very pale when they first shifted back, and were still unnaturally quiet and still in the car. But Toni could feel them talking to each other just out of her mental hearing, and while the sensation of their secret mindspeak usually set her on edge, this time she was glad of it. They might not be ready to talk to her, but they were talking to each other. That was something, at least.

To be honest, if they had started asking her questions about what had happened, she wasn’t sure how she would answer. What had happened was so terrifying she could barely think about it; her mind edged around the thought as though it would burn if she got too close. How could she talk to them about it without terrifying them even more?

Then there was Jack. Jack, who had stolen her heart the moment she met him – and, hell, that had only been yesterday! Jack, who had been so wonderful, who had romanced her as though she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Who…

Had disappeared into the night after the van that held Lexi and Felix. Had run and somehow caught up with a speeding vehicle, and rescued them.

Jack, who clearly
wasn’t
telling her everything. But she had a pretty strong suspicion what he might be leaving out.

Catching up with a speeding van? His clothes all mysteriously disappearing between him running off and her catching up with him? Those claw marks on the van doors?

She’d have to be an idiot not to figure it out.

Jack was a shifter. Something big, and powerful.

She could feel the unsaid conversation hanging in the air. No, not just the conversation: The Conversation. Capitalized.

***

They drove on through the forest for about an hour, winding along the narrow road under the trees. Toni could see Jack keeping watch on their surroundings as he drove, and was reassured by the thought that, with their shifter powers, either he or the twins would likely pick up on anyone lurking in the shadows. As they went deeper into the forest the flat ground gave way to rolling hills, all covered in thick, old-growth trees.

Suddenly they turned a corner and the forest fell away to reveal a wide road leading up to what Toni could only imagine was Jack’s house. The sight was enough to drive the worries from her mind, if only momentarily.

So this is the house that Jack built
, she thought, too awed to make the joke out loud.

She knew his family used to live in the area, so she had been expecting an old building, a stately wooden pile gone slightly creaky with age. Instead, the house in front of her was slickly modern. There was wood, yes, but only as an accent to floor-to-ceiling windows that caught the light from the car’s headlights and scattered it back across the ground.

Toni could only see one storey from the road, and the building’s flat roof made it look as though the house was sinking into the landscape – like it was a great glass-and-wood creature just resting in the forest, not impinging upon it. Simple steps led up to a wide, open deck; Toni could imagine what it would be like to relax there on a hot day, surrounded by the serenity of the woods. If only they were arriving in difference circumstances … if only everything had been different.

“I’m sorry about the state of the place,” Jack said, his voice tinged with embarrassment. “I’ve only been back in the country for a few weeks, and I haven’t exactly made weeding a priority…”

Toni refocused her gaze to the open ground in front of the beautiful house. Maybe it had been a proper lawn at some point, but the forest was taking over, sending out creeping ferns and wild bursts of colorful flowers to recolonize the space. She smiled. “I’m glad you didn’t. Give me a little wilderness over sculpted gardens any day.”

Jack pulled in to a covered carport hidden along the side of the house. He paused before opening the door. “I’ll check the house first. I haven’t had any alerts from the security system, but just in case…”

Toni nodded and watched as he moved silently to the front door. For a few minutes she couldn’t see or hear anything from inside the house, then a light switched on and she heard Jack calling out for her and the kids to come in.

Lexi wriggled eagerly out of the car and then paused and turned back, waiting for Toni and Felix to catch up before she went any further. Toni felt her heart sink. She had always wished the kids would be less of a handful, less taken to haring off out of sight the moment her back was turned, but now all she wanted was for them to feel safe enough to be able to do just that.

Not just to
feel
safe enough, she corrected herself, shivering. For them to
be
safe enough. For them not to have to worry about anything like this happening again.

She wrapped her arms around the twins’ shoulders and led them up to the house. Jack was standing silhouetted in the orange light of the entranceway; in that moment, he, and the house behind him, seemed like the only warm and safe place in the entire forest. Toni hurried forward.

“Come on in.” Jack ushered them inside, then pressed some buttons on a control panel beside the entranceway. The door shut and locked behind Toni with a reassuring
thunk
. Jack’s hands flew over the controls. “I’m just activating the privacy settings. We’ll be able to see out, but no one outside can see in the windows. They won’t even be able to tell if the lights are on.”

“They’ll see the car outside, though,” Toni pointed out.

Jack raised one eyebrow and, with a flourish, pressed one final button. A mechanical hum filled the air and Toni looked out the nearest window to see a wall descending down the side of the carport, hiding the car from view.

She whistled. “Nice.”

<
’m hungry
> whispered a small voice at the edge of Toni’s mind.

Toni ruffled Felix’s hair and looked across at Jack.

“Any chance of something to eat before I put these two to bed?”

“Absolutely,” Jack replied, leading the way farther into the house. “I’ll grab some of my old clothes for the kids, and I’ll put on some food while you all get washed up.”

Toni couldn’t stop her eyes from flicking downwards when he said the word ‘clothes’ because, of course, he still wasn’t actually wearing any. And while the blankets from Toni’s car might be sufficiently robe-like when wrapped around an eight-year-old, they didn’t exactly provide full coverage of Jack’s muscular frame.

Her eyes lingered over the strong lines of Jack’s back as he showed them to the bathroom. Lingered – and then turned away, guiltily.

He must think I’m a shifter
. How could he not, after tonight? And after everything that had happened that afternoon … what if he thought that she was – that they were…?

She shook her head. There was enough going on already. She would have to admit it to him eventually, that she was just a normal human. But not yet.
Please
,
not yet
, she begged silently, though she wasn’t sure who she was begging.

No.

Toni had heard her mom and dad talk about how sometimes their cats would talk to them, but Toni was no shifter. It was her own voice she heard in her head. After all, there was no one else in there to be the voice of reason.

I have to tell him. Soon. I can’t lie to him about something like this – even lying by omission.
It has to be tonight.

Then Jack spoke, and Toni realized they had stopped walking.

“Here we are,” he said, opening a door. Toni fumbled with the bathroom light switch, and gasped as soft light illuminated a surprisingly large room.

“Wooooow!” cried Lexi and Felix in unison. Toni didn’t blame them. The bathroom was luxuriously fitted out and, Toni realized with a strange swooping feeling in her stomach, probably the size of her entire apartment back in the city.

Felix and Lexi leapt into the room, investigating it inch by inch like the curious cats they were. They peered into cupboards, ran their fingers along the smooth edges of the floor-to-ceiling marble tiling, and pressed every button they could see and reach – which was a lot of buttons.

As lights and taps flicked on and off, Toni glanced back out into the corridor to see that Jack had disappeared.

She squared her shoulders. Right. This was her chance to talk to him while the kids were occupied, and before she had a chance to wuss out.

Toni retraced her steps through the house. The house was bigger than it had looked from the outside – all that glass made it reflect so much of the forest, the actual size of the building was camouflaged – but it was surprisingly easy to find her way around.

She eventually found Jack in a mudroom at the other end of the house, bent over a low counter. A battered first-aid kit sat on the bench in front of him. Dried blood was flaking from his skin as he tried to twist to look at the wound in his side. Dried blood – and fresh.

“Let me look at that,” Toni demanded. Her voice came out more harshly than she had intended, but her whole body was itching with displeasure at the thought of Jack in pain. “You’ll only injure yourself more if you move around like that.”

Jack looked up, his face tight with pain. “Toni, you don’t need to—”

“Clearly, I
do
,” Toni argued, and pulled the first-aid kit over to herself. She rifled through it and quickly plucked out an antiseptic cream and some sterile gauze. “You’re in safe hands with me. I just renewed my Red Cross first aid certificate.”

“They teach you about bullet wounds for that?”

“Short answer, no. But they did teach us what to do if someone skewers themselves on a pair of pruning shears, so … same difference, right?”

Jack chuckled, then winced. “Hah! Ouch.”

“Sorry. No more bad jokes.”

Toni began to wash away the blood crusted along Jack’s side, using soft, gentle strokes. She was relieved to see there was more blood than there was wound. And what wound there was looked several days, rather than several hours, old.

“This isn’t looking too bad,” she announced, reaching for a sterile bandage. “The bullet must have just grazed you. I can
see
exactly
where
it grazed you, actually, and trust me, it’s pretty gross. But it’s not bleeding anymore.” She secured the bandage, and paused. “Quick healer, huh?”

“Always have been,” Jack replied, his voice soft. “My family, too. Just like you.”

“Just like me,” Toni echoed.
No, wait
, she thought at Jack turned to look at her. A thousand words bubbled up in her brain, and tripped over on her tongue.

“Now let me look after you,” Jack said. Toni frowned, confused – and the expression stung her face.

“Ow. Oh, right. My major case of roadburn,” she babbled.

“Fast healing is good for some things, but it makes cleaning wounds a hell of a priority,” Jack said, gently tilting Toni’s face into the light and dabbing at her cheekbone with a dampened cloth. “You don’t want to sleep on it and wake up to find your skin has grown back over a fistful of gravel.”

Toni tried to smile without wrinkling her face – and the graze – too much. “Tell me about it. Ellie – my sister – spent five years trying to get her ear piercings to stick. They’d just grow over each time. Once, they actually grew back
over
her earrings.”

“You never bothered?” Jack’s fingers brushed Toni’s naked earlobe.

Of course she hadn’t. After her sister’s experiences, Toni hadn’t wanted to try experimenting with piercings. She didn’t want to risk having them stick, and become another difference between her and her shifter family.

Jack finished with her cheek and moved on to the graze on her forearm. An image flashed up in Toni’s mind, as though she was looking at the two of them from above – the two of them, together, dressing their wounds after fighting to save the two children. A day ago, neither of them had known the other existed; but today, they were a team. A unit.

Almost a family.

And, like a family, secrets boiled under their seemingly unified exterior.

Toni took a deep breath.

“Jack, I have to—”

“Tiger,” he said, almost at the same time.