Paranormal Dating Agency_Claimed by Her Tigers Page 2

  “Is he always talk first, think later.” I asked Noah with an exacerbated sigh. Not that I truly cared. It was nice to have someone so upfront about what they were thinking. I worked in a world where everyone was either kissing my ass or being snarky at my expense. This was refreshing and, if I hadn’t needed to leave, I’d have enjoyed getting acquainted with them.

  “Pretty much.” He shrugged, earning him the stink eye from his mate. No, that wasn’t right. They didn’t smell mated. Boyfriend? No, that didn’t work either. His whatever he was. “So, us being an us doesn’t upset you?”

  “Hardly.” Which his smirk told me he already knew. Damn it. I could smell me. Why did they have to be so stinking hot? “You not making a start on our date does.” So I could leave, went unspoken.

  “What time is your plane?” Noah asked, checking his watch. “We can drive you after our date.”

  “I’m not taking a plane.” I so very much had not wanted to get into any of this.

  “Fine. How far are you driving tonight so we can be sure to not keep you out so long you fall asleep at the wheel, causing us forever to regret our selfish desire to dine with a beautiful woman.” Shane. It was always Shane. I just met them and I already knew that.

  “You heard?” I asked Noah who was now giving me his best I dare you glance.

  “Of course we did,” Shane mumbled. “We don’t understand, but we heard.”

  “Not much to understand. My future mate is on his way here. I want to not be here when that happens. Can we have dinner now so I can go?” It was more than they needed information wise, but, for whatever reason, sharing even that much with them lifted a bit of weight off my shoulders.

  “Fine, but the conversation isn’t over, and I will drive you.” Noah picked up my bag.

  Bossy much?

  Sexy much?

  The night was not going to go the way I’d intended, for certain sure.

  “Heck to the no on that one.” I snapped the bag back like a little brat. “I’m bringing my car.”

  “Fine, you can drive me, then.” He held his hand out for my keys and bag, and I passed them over. “Or Noah, if you prefer,” he replied to the growl I hadn’t quite noticed I was giving.

  My hyena was acting all weird. Between her stay-and-fight instincts and her these guys are ours bullshit she was throwing at me, I felt off kilter. Most shifters had saner animals, and, in that, I envied them. Hyenas were less than well-hinged on a good day.

  “Let’s go.” I marched out of the apartment, accidentally brushing Noah along the way, causing my hyena to become even more adamant they were hers.

  Down, girl. Mama has to get us away from the whole mated-by-contract shit first.

  Chapter Two

  “I pegged you as a sports car kind of gal,” Noah teased as he climbed into the front seat of my truck.

  I felt bad having Shane drive behind us, but the guys insisted we take both vehicles since I was “so determined to run away,” which was a far more accurate assessment than I might wish.

  “Why? Because I’m a model?” I was pretty touchy on the whole model stereotyping thing, but once I snapped the words at him, I felt bad.

  “You’re a—no way.” He turned to face me, the keys still in his hand. “That’s why I recognized you.” So maybe my success was bigger in my head than in reality, although he did recognize me, so there was that. “No, I meant because you seemed to be bucking all the trends of your kind. It’s a pretty safe bet that if you see a hyena they have either a truck or an SUV.” He wasn’t wrong. Hyenas, as a very big generalization, all had little penis syndrome without the actual little penis in most cases, ’cause—shifter. No, they had to prove their power and strength in the most dumbass of ways, like huge-ass cars.

  “True on both counts,” I admitted. It was not a vehicle I’d have picked out. “This was a present from my father when I got graduated, and it still runs, so here it is.” The thing was older than dirt by modern standards, but since I took care of it, I was going to have it forever. “If I were to pick a car of my own, I’d probably go with one of those crossovers.” In red, because you can take the girl out of the land of hyenas, but you can’t take the hyena out of the girl.

  “Utility and comfort.” He nodded and started the truck. “I can see that.”

  He seemed to approve and, darn my hyena, she was all about that prancing around as if she’d just won the stupid jackpot. Down, girl.

  “Should we call Shane on my phone so he isn’t alone?” I asked as we pulled out and I caught a glimpse of their car behind us.

  “He’s going to kick himself for not getting the hands-free upgrade.” Noah laughed. There was a lot more to that story. Probably all their stories. What I couldn’t figure out was why they were searching for me when they already had each other and, to all outward appearances, had a great relationship.

  “Oh.” I angled myself so I could watch him as he drove. I wasn’t as concerned with where we were going as I should be. Partly because I trusted Gerri wouldn’t set me up with serial killers unless that was what I asked for—which I had not. In fact I believe I wrote No serial killers at least three times on the application. But a bigger part of me—much bigger than I wanted to admit, was enjoying my time with Noah, and the idea of spending more time with them both excited me just a little bit, and by little bit I meant hella lot. “How long have you guys been mates?”

  I cringed as his jaw tightened. Maybe I was just as bad as Noah.

  “We aren’t mates.” His words were curt, but not in an angry way. It was hard to describe, as if he wanted to tell me, but not like this. Maybe this was why I was still unmated. I just didn’t get men sometimes.

  “But you are together.”

  He nodded.

  “Sorry, was that too forward?” It clearly was. I stank at this relationship stuff.

  “You were embracing your inner Shane.” He chuckled, and all was instantly right in the world. Or, at least, in the car. The rest of the world was still waiting to pounce on me like I was its prey.

  “That I was.” I agreed having come to that conclusion before he had, or at least he had expressed.

  “And to answer your question, we’ve been together for four years.”

  Four years! That was unheard of in shifter courtship. Four weeks was pressing it. Shifters tended to know right away or move on. Unless of course it was a friends-with-benefits kind of relationship, and then it was all booty calls and not much else, the friendship part of it an exaggeration for the most part. And that was not what I’d witnessed with Shane and Noah in our brief time together. They were in sync, somehow, indicating they knew each other on many levels.

  “Four years, and yet you are still not mated. That is a very unshifter thing to do, if I may be so bold.” Which I was. What a dumb phrase that was. It was almost as bad as I sorry if this offends you, but or I probably shouldn’t say anything. If I may be so bold was filled with suckatude, and yet out of my mouth it poured like I was channeling my inner mother.

  “You sound like my mother.” His hand fell to my knee. No, fell wasn’t the right word. It was slow and deliberate, as if asking permission. Good—I didn’t know what he was. He smelled cat, but what kind I had yet to decipher. Something new to me. For all I knew he was a Siamese or Coon cat.

  “And mine,” I admitted, placing my hand on his because not touching him skin to skin when he was so close, his scent enveloping me so, just wasn’t going to work for me. If I’d met him in another situation I’d have worried about getting between he and Noah, but as they both came out to date me—together—I was good.

  “We’re together because we love each other.” Which anyone with eyes could see. “We plan to mate. Our lack of bite shows willpower more than lack of commitment.”

  So, it was officially riddle time. I glanced up, seeing the lights of downtown coming into view. It wasn’t my ideal place to dine, surrounded by buildings and people, but I could make do, especially for these guys.


  “Explain, please.” I gave his hand a little pressure, trying to convey that I was sincerely curious and not being the bitch my questions probably made me out to be.

  “Will you explain more about the running away that led to us almost getting stood up?” The challenge had my hyena’s attention. She loved a flipping challenge.

  “Fine,” I conceded to both Noah and my hyena. Traitor. “I will.”

  “Because of your enthusiasm, I will regale you with our story.”

  I had to admit, he was funny. And hot. And nice. Arggg, why couldn’t he have showed up last week? Oh yeah. I took my sweet-ass time contacting Gerri because I wanted to do it on my own to prove I didn’t even know what anymore.

  “When Shane and I met, it was the fairy-tale love-at-first-sight bullshit you see in all the movies, except he turned me down.”

  My jaw dropped. I saw Shane as an all-in kind of guy.

  “So the love at first sight was initially one sided?” Maybe he had been one of those guys who needed time to convince themselves to go outside their cackle norms. Some cats had weird ideas of who should and shouldn’t mate, and if either was from a royal family, that explained a lot.

  “More like Shane might not have the gift of a filter when it comes to speaking, but he does have a gift—premonitions.”

  Holy crap. He was more than a royal in their world if he told anyone other than Noah about his gift. Cats were huge into the other powers, as if turning into huge ass cats wasn’t pretty awesome in and of itself.

  “Not often, but from time to time. Anyway, when he was a kid, he had one where he was mated to two shifters and they were all happy.”

  “And you were one of them?” Which meant bite me baby in my book, but this wasn’t my book, it was Shane’s.

  “He assumes so with the whole love-at-first-sight thing, but he was little, and the details faded. So, fast forward to about a year ago—we decided to actively find our third since fate wasn’t sending them along.”

  He turned left, heading away from downtown just as we got there. Interesting

  “Shit, we don’t know if it is a guy or a girl. But someone is out there for us, and we refuse to give up until we find them.” My heart sank a little. They might not even want someone with boobs.

  Why let possible future rejection bother me so much when I was leaving anyway? It wasn’t like we were going to have dinner and then claim each other in the parking lot or anything.

  “And that is why you wouldn’t let me cancel.” Just in case I was theirs. But if they had love at first sight, and I was just being dragged to dinner, the odds were not in my favor.

  “No. Gerri called us and threatened to kick our sexy butts if we didn’t.”

  I could 1,000 percent see her doing just that.” He paused for a long moment, during which I didn’t breathe. “That, and you’re hot.”

  I was hot. He thought I was hot. That worked for me.

  Chapter Three

  Instead of driving into downtown, Noah had simply been taking a shortcut to a cozy little inn just outside the city limits. He explained, as we got closer, it was shifter owned and had plenty of hunter-free land out back for its customers to run. It also happened to be where the men were staying, after driving three hundred miles for our date.

  No guilt for trying to cancel on them. Nope. Not any.

  We walked in and were greeted by a little firecracker of a woman who had to be in her eighties is she were a day. She quickly sat us near the fireplace and told us the evening’s dinner selections. Our choices being—take it or leave it. Since it was pot roast, we were all on the take it train. Not that we would have left—but, pot roast.

  “So, Shane, what do you do? For a living I mean?” I asked as soon as we were settled. He had missed our initial conversations, and I didn’t want him to feel left out, especially since he was the reason they were on the date in the first place. Not that Noah seemed to mind my redirecting the conversation at all.

  “I’m alpha.” He said it with the same nonchalance of stating he worked at a bank or drove a city bus. He was alpha, with a capital A. That was a big deal in all shifter communities.

  “You look shocked.”

  I was. He allowed, no enjoyed Noah taking control of the situation, from letting him smack him in reprimand, albeit playfully, when he was a little to forward, to driving me to the inn. Neither of those behaviors or a half-dozen other tiny hints along the way had led me down the path to thinking he was an alpha. Plus, he wasn’t a power-hungry asshole, which had been my experience with alphas not my father. Because although my parents irked me to no end, especially with the mating crap, but I would always be Daddy’s little girl. It was a thing.

  “It’s just, you seem to—”

  “Let Noah take control?” He got it in one, so I nodded, hoping he would continue explaining because there was no pretending there. I wanted to know all things about both of them. I found their company addictive, which was probably very very bad even though it felt very very good.

  “I do.” He reached over, taking Noah’s hand. “I’m in control the rest of the time. It’s nice that he is the one at home.”

  That made sense and, quite honestly, my mother ruled the roost at my house, even though dad was the alpha. If woman had been allowed to be alpha in our cackle, she’d probably have been in the running, though. She was a tough, powerful shifter with a keen sense of observation and a nosy-body gene like nobody’s business.

  “So he tops.” Why had I blurted that out? Yeah, that’s right because the second he admitted to letting Noah take control a porn reel started rolling through my head. What was it about these guys?

  “Jiminy crow! He smiled brighter than he had all night, and he was a smiler. “You were right, she is a me with boobs.”

  “You said that?” How had I missed that, and had he said my boobs were nice? Because, suddenly, that mattered. I had a good rack, but if they liked a mouthful and no more, they were smelling around the wrong girl. I was plus sized in all the places. “When?”

  “When you were in the restroom.” It was official: I was never peeing again.

  “Nice.” I took a sip of water, my never peeing again vow extremely short-lived. “Just for that—are you a bottom?”

  And not just for that. I very much wanted to know—in detail—with pictures. And in person, if they’d be so kind. Oh yes, with me beneath them all. Yes, that was it.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes?” He sometimes bottomed. Which meant sometimes he topped. Holy crap. If I stuck around, I could potentially be a part of so many arrangements. But I couldn’t stick around. Contracts had been signed. Suck.

  “Yes, sometimes.”

  “And that depends on?” Because, by then, all the fucks I had to give about being polite and decorum were officially spent. I needed to know all the things.

  “It depends on what Noah tells me to do.”

  Would he tell me what to do, too? Did I want him to? I was pretty sure that was a yes.

  “Hot damn. So is he like the daddy?”

  I knew jack spit about daddy relationships, so even if he said yes, I wouldn’t get it. But one of the models I done a lot of shoots with always talked about how he wanted a daddy, so out it came. And I wasn’t even drinking shifter wine.

  “See what you are doing, Shane?” Noah tsked. I had been pretty sure I was the one messing things up. “You’re getting our girl all worked up, and we still haven’t even eaten.”

  He had a point. New panties were in order.

  “And neither of you has answered me.” Wanting to steer the conversation away from my pheromones.

  “No.” Shane said. No explanation. Just one word. Which maybe I deserved with my overtly blunt questions in a semipublic place, but I wasn’t going to settle for.

  “No, you won’t answer me?”

  “No. Not my daddy.”

  I gave him my you’d-better-not-be-done-talking look.

  “More my alpha.”


  So much better than a daddy.

  “Technically, you are both alphas.” At least birth-wise. Politically, Shane would be the only one, but chances were good their clan had at least a handful of strong alphas to protect it. Not that cackles and clans needed the kinds of security measures they had in the days of old when all things were decided with teeth and claws.

  “True enough.” Noah met my eyes. “But so are you.”

  He was both right and wrong.

  “Hyenas don’t acknowledge alpha traits in females.” Or their education, or their skill, or anything other than their womb.

  “Good thing we aren’t hyenas, then, because we plan to acknowledge the crap outta you and all your traits.” Did Shane know he was stealing my heart with comments like that? I doubted it. He seemed to be oblivious to subtle nuances, which was odd given he had to be pretty observant in his position.

  “Shane?” Noah growled between his teeth, more reprimand than question.

  “What?” He shrugged in response, not at all taken aback by Noah’s actions. “You know I’m right, and she gets me.”

  Which was true.

  “I kinda do.” Or did more than I was comfortable sharing. “So, what are you. I smell cat? Coon? Domestic?”

  My joke seemed to fall flat with Shane, but Noah’s eyes sparkled.

  “Siamese.” He teased back. Good cat.

  “No shit.” I clapped and bounced in my seat like a little kid about to be handed their birthday present. “So, will you make that whining cry all night.” We had a Siamese when I was living in the agency’s models only apartment before I was discovered. It was totally a thing.

  “Or turn into tigers and roar.” Shane just closed his eyes, shaking his head as if Noah and I were out of our minds. Which, from the pheromones bouncing around the table, we probably all were. At least with lust.

  “Tigers. Nice.” My hyena was clawing at me to claim them. She needed to chill out. We were so not near that point. Even on shifter timelines, it was far too soon. And there was the whole contract thing. “My hyena agrees,” I admitted as they stared at me as if sensing my inner conversation. Maybe they did. They had their own animals to contend with.