The Lion's Arranged Mate: A Paranormal Lion Shifter Romance Page 2

  “I am quite tired,” Anastasia said abruptly, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, and her high-heels clicked on the tarmac. “I would like to retire for the present. Tell me, where is our car?” He swallowed and pointed absently at the Triumph at the far end of the airfield. Anastasia seemed unable to comprehend what he meant by his errant gesticulation until he gave a tight-lipped smile. “You can’t mean, not that thing? A bike?”

  “Well, it’s not that bad,” Alan said, “she moves smooth as butter, and she’s better on gas. In addition, she’s got speed. She’s really fun, believe me.” He knew that he didn’t sound convincing by the disgusted look the noblewoman gave him. Her cheeks seemed to blanch for a moment, which was a startling contrast to the otherwise red gestalt of her appearance.

  “This is… intolerable,” she said in a low, threatening voice.

  “You’ve never ridden a bike before?” he asked. “It’s really simple. Just hold on. I have a helmet for you.” She followed him uneasily, clearly upset by the fact a limousine hadn’t picked her up, and obviously quite mistrusting of this bearded man who was supposed to be her husband. He picked up the blue helmet off his bike’s seat and handed it to her.

  “This will completely ruin my hair,” she said in a snobbish voice.

  You think that’ll ruin your hair, just wait until we start cruising at 80 clicks an hour, he wanted to say, but held his tongue and tried to smile politely again. “Safety first,” he said, “you’ll be glad you’re wearing that if we hit a rough patch and end up sailing forty feet through the air. Cement is not the best cushioned material.”

  He saw another look pass across the woman’s face, and felt a little sense of satisfaction in seeing it was fear. “This is… intolerable,” she said again, daintily trying to position herself on the motorcycle. Because she had to swing her leg over, the bottom of her dress hiked up higher, and she absently tried to pull it down over her naked thighs. The slit in the dress opened, and had Alan turned around in his seat, he would have seen the faint outline of her panties.

  He put on his own helmet and looked down and saw the white of her knees and the long slender arch of her legs on either side of him, and felt a weird sexual chill, despite the fact Anastasia was turning out to be more than a handful. “Ready?” he asked, kicking the ignition.

  She didn’t reply, but as he gently relaxed his hand on the accelerator and they took off, she reflexively reached out and wrapped her arms under his waist. He smiled – so much for your ego now, he thought, turning left onto the main highway.

  He thought it might be nice to show her around the neighborhood a bit, and took her past Cameron’s house and the second bridge at the end of the valley before skirting back and showing her the main street of Cedarhaven. It was hardly a village with just the single road and a gas station, post office, and diner lining it, along with a few hidden boutiques and bookshops.

  He hollered over his shoulder, giving her a history lesson on the town he was proud to be a part of, but she made no indication of having heard him – and if she did, she took little interest in it, merely tightening her arms around his waist when they went around a turn, or took off from a stop sign.

  Maybe it was a fruitless endeavor. He sighed and headed back toward his own cabin. She stepped stiffly off the back and pulled the red dress down over her smooth thighs again. She seemed visibly shaken, and her knees quivered under her, and for a moment Alan wondered if she hadn’t been hurt in some way, but she returned to her natural poise and grace and smoothed her luscious red hair down her shoulders.

  Alan shook his head as she walked toward the cabin without waiting for him. “Make yourself at home,” he said softly, and then noticed that there was a wet spot on the back of his jeans. He touched his back pocket and found it was damp, and there was a damp spot on the seat as well where she had been sitting.

  When he realized what it was, even he had to blush. The way she had been sitting as a passenger on the seat, and the fact she had to pull her dress up so that only her panties were touching, meant that the vibrations of the motorcycle had travelled straight to her groin. No wonder she wasn’t able to say anything while I was giving her a tour, he thought, she was being stimulated the whole time. He looked again at the damp spot on the seat, and remembered the way her arms had tightened around him as they had gone over the bumpy bridge.

  The idea he had driven her to a silent orgasm on the back of his bike was as comedic as it was embarrassing, and he tried to ignore the erection that was trying to swell against the seam of his jeans. Inside the cabin, he found her already splayed with her legs tucked up behind her on one of the couches, and she had already poured herself a cold gin and tonic from his private bar. He wasn’t quite sure if he was insulted by her presumptuousness, or further turned on.

  “How do you like it?” he asked, and regretted it immediately.

  “It’s… quaint,” she said, and when she saw him staring at her curiously, quickly turned her head away. If she suspected he knew about her little accident on the bike, she made no motion of acknowledging it. “I suppose I should expect nothing more from a lowborn like yourself. I don’t mean that as an insult of course, it’s just… the way things are. There are divisions.”

  Alan frowned and cleared his throat irritably. He reached in the fridge and pulled out another beer. If I wasn’t an alcoholic before meeting Anastasia, she’ll probably turn me into one by the end of this marriage, he thought.

  “As a matter of fact, we built this cabin ourselves, by hand,” he said, but the bitterness in his voice couldn’t be allayed. “It’s a symbol of our brotherhood. Not that I would expect you to understand that.”

  She shrugged indifferently. “I didn’t meant to cause offense,” she said in earnest, and Alan could almost believe it. As a lowborn, he had never really grown up with the sense of entitlement that so marked the higher-ups. He had gotten his first taste of it when he’d met Kyle, all those years ago – he’d been a pompous brat, expecting everything and everyone to wait on him. But Kyle’s changed, he thought, and tried to be patient. Maybe, with some care, even Anastasia could effect a change. She’d have to, if she wanted to have any peace of mind while living in Cedarhaven.

  “It’s fine,” he grumbled.

  She tipped the glass of gin and tonic back carefully, her knees still tucked under her. “You really don’t like me, do you?” she asked.

  “I suppose I should have asked that question first,” he said resolutely. “I know this is not what you’re used to. In fact, it’s probably the very opposite of what you’re used to. I can sympathize to a certain degree… this marriage wasn’t your idea, I know.”

  She shrugged. “It’s true, I expected to be married off to my third cousin, Lionel. A proper gentleman and autocrat, if ever there was one. We get along, though stiffly. So yes, I was a bit surprised… and why not, I’ll be honest, miffed… that I was being sent to a backwater town like this.”

  Alan nodded again. Keep it cool, he thought. “Cedarhaven is a lovely place,” he said. “We’re all a community here. Everyone knows everyone else – there’s none of the masks and decorum and bullshit of the other estates and houses here. We’re all honest folk. You’d do well to try and fit in with the others.”

  “What do you know of estates?” she laughed, and he clenched the beer in his hand until it crinkled, and that made her stop and hold her tongue.

  “I’m the liaison, remember? Oh, I may have been born to a lower caste, but I’ve been among your kind, I’ve seen the estates… probably more than you have, princess,” he snapped, “so I know what it’s like to have grown up in that atmosphere. Which is why I’m being patient with you. But you’re pushing it.”

  She stood up, her face suddenly brazen again.

  “Listen,” she said a decibel too loud, and then quieted, “listen, I… I don’t know what you were expecting. I’m sure like the rest of us, you got a curt envelope with a picture and brief information. But the fact of
the matter is, you’re a stranger and I don’t know you… any more than you know me.”

  “I’ll grant you that,” he stood up, his dark face glowering.

  They both stared at each other, silently willing the other person to resign, but they were both too strong, too heedless of authority, and too prideful to back down before the other one did first. Alan saw now that she really was as tall as he was, even without the high heels, and a hot scent emanated off her. Her greenish-hazel eyes were sharpened by a keen intellect and an unparalleled sense of her own self-worth.

  Time seemed to pass for an interminably long time, and he wondered whether one of them would tire out first or not. Anastasia’s expression was now different from before, not trying to match his, but rather trying to figure out what was going on behind his own visage. She’s trying to size me up, he thought with sudden panic.

  If there was one weakness to Alan, it was lack of capacity to hide anything. It was one of the reasons he was such a terrible poker player, and why Cameron and Kyle always made fun of him, even though he kept coming back again and again. Deception was not in his nature like it was in Anastasia’s, and now that she had finally found someone with such a diametrically opposed personality to her own, he couldn’t help but be intrigued and fascinated.

  He took another step closer, until their faces were less than an inch from one another, and he resisted the urge to back away from her. He could smell her breath now, see the gentle rise and fall of her breasts between the sliced red dress, the sway of their supple corners tempting him in some strange game of which he didn’t know the rules. It was Anastasia who broke eye-contact first – she lowered them, and cocked her head, seemingly distracted. “I’m sorry,” she admitted. “I’m still trying to figure out this whole… arrangement. You might be able to tell, but I’m not used to this. I have a way of saying things that… er, upset other people. It’s not my intention. I simply say what I think when I think it.”

  There is something admirable about that, he thought at once. “Fair enough, but I think you need to be a little more… easy-going. Especially if we want this marriage to work.”

  She nodded. “Very well, I concede that,” she said. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

  He scratched his head. “Uh… I… I don’t know. I think we just need to learn to get along, become familiar with the other person’s likes and dislikes… something like that?” he offered.

  She sighed and sat back down on the couch, pulling her legs in under her. The gin and tonic popped on the counter and he sat down with a sigh as well. It is going to be a long marriage, he thought to himself. It then occurred to him that maybe the noble’s concept of sex and relationships was different – he had penetrated their ranks, travelled to almost all of the great estates and met too many highborn shifters to count, but he never really grasped their social dynamic.

  “Tell me,” he continued again, “what… well, I mean, in the noble houses, how do you approach marriage? I mean, what do you do?”

  Anastasia wrinkled her lips as she tried to recollect. “I suppose it’s not so unlike what you do, although perhaps it’s a bit more formal,” she remarked. Her lips tightened again, as if she were on the verge of telling him something, and then decided against it. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  She’s hiding something, he thought. The mention of the noble houses and marriage in the same house had seemed to startle her, and he now saw a fidgety panic in her eyes.

  “Hm,” he scratched his head, “why don’t you try me?”

  Her eyes darkened. The family name Stormfang is apt, he mused. “There are things, even about my pack, that I can’t divulge to an outsider. Let’s… let’s just drop it okay?” she asked.

  He weakened for a moment and shrugged. Another silence fell between them, and he tried to keep from looking at the small dark space where her knees parted slightly. When she noticed his efforts, she blushed a little and turned away from him. “Where… where’s my bedroom?” she asked hurriedly.

  Thankful for the diversion, he showed her to the main bedroom, and quickly pointed out that he would sleep on the couch. At least, in her own words, until the ceremony was finalized. Besides, I think we’ve both suffered enough drastic changes in our habits to throw sleeping together in the same bed into the mix, he thought – when he looked across at Anastasia he saw she felt the same way.

  “Well!” he exclaimed, “I know you probably want to change and what-not. So I’ll let you be. It’s probably about that time, so I’ll start making dinner. Do you have any preference? All I’ve really got on hand is some frozen salmon… vegetables?”

  She stopped at the doorway, one strap of her dress already lilting off her shoulder blade. Her eyes were flaring again, half with wonder and half with admonishment. “Wait,” she asked, “you mean it’s just the two of us? There’s no maids… no servants?”

  Oy, Alan thought.

  “Nope! Just us…”

  “And you… you actually make food? With your own hands?”

  Again, he couldn’t tell if she was putting him on or not, but the earnest look on her face was evidence enough. “Naturally. Unlike you nobles in your mansions of fancy, we lower folk and peasants have to make do on our own. As you might have noticed from looking around, it’s not like I’ve ever had a girlfriend or wife before. So I’ve had to learn how to survive on my own.”

  “But… but,” she seemed unable to reconcile the fact that anyone could survive without maids and butlers to do the dirty work.

  He shook his head and let out a long sigh. This is going to be a very long marriage, he reflected.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Alan hated to admit it, but since the two of them had agreed to keep things ‘official’ according to Anastasia, things had been easier around the cabin. It was still very difficult for her to get used to the fact she didn’t have any servants – the other domestic chores of the house were also a problem, and he had to take special care to teach her about some of the more basic things like doing laundry or preparing meals.

  He had to hand it to her – rather than feeling ashamed of her ignorance, she took it as a challenge, meeting every new obstacle with a fervor that bordered on obsessive-compulsive. She wasn’t happy until she had excelled and mastered every task, and it gave him a sort of pride to see her dedicating herself.

  He had worried that she would remain stubborn – but he saw now that her stubbornness wasn’t so much an inflexibility, but rather a sheer determination, and his opinion of her seemed to grow with each passing day. At the end of the week, he decided it was time they reward themselves. It was unlikely, he figured, that she’d ever gone camping, so he surreptitiously began to pack all the ingredients: clothes, food, water, all the things they would need.

  “I have a surprise for you,” he said, when he came back late on Friday from his job at the local bar. It had been a slow night, as it usually was – his job as a bouncer was usually compounded with calling taxis for the overly inebriated, or bullshitting with the proprietor and guests. Anastasia was in a nightgown reading by the window – she always waited for him until he returned home, and more often than not, they would nestle into each other, learning the other by touch, though they hadn’t made love yet. Irrepressible, he had called her one night, and she had punched him playfully in the arm, but not denied it.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked, thinking it was about the bar.

  “Oh yes, no I was thinking… this weekend we should go camping. The actual marriage ceremony isn’t until next week, so… we have two days to ourselves. What do you think?”

  Her eyes widened in thought. “I… I don’t know. I’ve never camped before,” she admitted. “Is it hard?”

  He wanted to kiss her, she was so cute. “No harder than doing laundry,” he winked.

  The next morning they woke early and he packed up the Triumph’s side-bags with everything they’d needed. Anastasia still wasn’t used to the bike, but she grit her teeth and put th
e helmet over her coiffed hair. The Triumph was just another challenge to her, and if he knew her as he thought he did, she wanted nothing more than to overcome it as well.

  Luckily, she had worn something a little more casual, and the cut-off shorts seemed like a more appropriate choice of attire. She saw Alan looking at her ponderously as she got onto the back seat and put her hands on his shoulders.

  Alan had deliberately kept the location a secret, even after she had pestered him, but as they took to the open road and the wind howled past, she seemed to find a new sort of thrill in the scenery that flashed by. Both of them, a Wolf and a Lion, were at heart predators, inclined to the power of their own long strides as they hunted through the wilderness, and this act of sailing over the earth on two wheels seemed to beckon and call to an inner power in them.

  She’ll love it, he thought. The place he’d selected was a lake that was up one of the logging roads that Cameron used to access his woodlot. A similarly small cabin had been constructed on one shore of the alpine body of water, and though it was modest, it was cozy enough for two people.

  He could picture it in his mind even now – the tall ridge of granite mountain cliffs to the northeast, hedged by ice and dwindling glaciers, and the long white streaked tendrils of clear water that branched downward like liquid lightning to the glacial blue perimeter of the lake.

  It took them longer than he anticipated to get to the cabin as they left the main road and went up a forked branch. She held on tightly, and if she was alarmed by how far he was taking her into the wilderness, she made no indication – but her embrace tightened on him the further they went.

  At last, the road gave way to a clearing where the trees were shrunken and wide swaths of yellowing tundra grass expanded toward the lake. He didn’t have to see her face to know she was gaping at it. He pulled the bike up beside the cabin and they both hopped off – a chilly wind bit down at them and she held her bare arms and shivered, goosebumps rising on her naked thighs.