Jaguar's Kiss

Chapter Ten

Her jaguar lover was all cat even though he was in human form, lounging on the bed and watching her from lazily slitted brown eyes as she dressed. They hadn’t spoken since he slipped from her body. He hadn’t drawn her tenderly against his chest like last time, hadn’t protested when she rolled out from under his haphazardly draped arm. He didn’t protest now as she fastened her bra and stepped into her skirt. He just watched.

She wanted to apologize again, to beg him to understand, but she knew if she broke the silence it would only start another fight. One she desperately wanted to avoid. So she dressed in silence and avoided looking right at him. He was beautiful, all muscle and heat. She’d never expected a man like him to want her and now that he did it was almost too much to bear.

“I’ll wait.”

She was crouched down, buckling her shoe when his deep voice rasped over the words. She didn’t answer. Didn’t have any words that would magically make everything different so they could be together.

“Go back to the pride if you want. Take the time you need. All you have to do is come back to me. I’ll wait for you.”

Her chest ached and Lila swallowed hard. This was what people meant when they said their hearts were breaking. This was what it felt like. She’d read about it. Imagined it. And yet she’d never understood exactly how much it would hurt. “Santiago—”

He must have heard the rejection in her voice, because he cut her off. “I’ll try to give you space, if that’s what you want, but you can’t ask me not to fight for you, not now that you’re mine.”

She felt like she’d always been his. Even before she knew it. But that didn’t change anything. “I have to go.”

He rose then, all lithe feline grace as he stood and strode toward her, stopping before he was close enough to touch. “Don’t make me wait forever, Lila. I won’t watch you marry him.”

She couldn’t respond to that. Didn’t even have the words to try. “Goodbye, Santiago Flores.”

She didn’t look back. Not when she felt the air-pressure pop of him taking his jaguar form behind her. She didn’t want to see the beautiful black-on-black rosettes or the way his eyes went yellow, glowing bright against the midnight fur. She ran down the stairs and didn’t stop when she heard the first coughing roar.

She fled, refusing to look back, as more roars chased her down the road.

It felt wrong, driving away from him, but she couldn’t think with him there, and she needed to sift through all the layers of confusion that had invaded her neatly ordered life. She’d never felt so lost before—but then she’d never had to choose between what she should do and what she wanted to do, because she’d never let herself want anything the way she wanted to go back to Santiago.

Could she trust that he was right? That the pride would survive without her? Or was he just another person trying to get her to be what he wanted her to be?

She was scared. Just as he’d accused her of being. Scared that she would turn against her pride, hurt her family, destroy so many lives and he might not even really love her the way he thought he did. What if he was only in love with the idea of her? What if he stopped wanting her the second she stopped being his perfect fantasy?

How could she risk it? Not just her heart but all the lives she would disrupt by chasing the dream of him.

But when she closed her eyes, she couldn’t imagine a future without him, couldn’t see herself marrying Roman any more. Not knowing what she did now, being the woman she now was.

Lila opened her eyes—the better to not drive into a ditch—and focused on the road taking her farther and farther away from where she wanted to be.

Santiago may only be in love with the idea of her, but wasn’t that what everyone did? All they had was ideas of each other. And Santiago knew her, knew things about her only Patch had ever discovered, and his affections were unconditional—or conditional only on her being bold enough to take the life she wanted. All she had to do was love him back.

Which she was already doing.

She was in love with Santiago Flores.

She’d dreamt of this—loving and being loved in return. It had always been there, in the back corner of her heart, a longing she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. It had taken Santiago to make her see. She was more than the perfect daughter and perfect future Alpha’s mate. She could be more with him.

The pride gates came into view ahead and Lila tapped the code into Patch’s remote. She didn’t feel her usual surge of homecoming as she drove onto pride land. Her home was behind her now, in a spiral tree house in the woods.

She would speak to Roman. Speak to her parents. They would work something out. No one wanted her to be miserable. There wasn’t a wicked witch standing between her and Prince Charming. Together they would find an answer that wouldn’t weaken the pride and she would be free to be with Santiago.

Lila slowed as the second perimeter line rose up in front of her headlights. The same guards who had stood aside when she pulled rank on them hours earlier now blocked her way. She hadn’t expected her absence to go unnoted, but she hadn’t expected to be barred entry. Lila threw Patch’s Subaru into park, waiting for one of the men to break away from the others and approach her door, but another figure appeared out of the darkness to her left.

Lila cringed as her mother jerked open the driver’s side door.

“Slide over.”

Lila unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed over the center console into the passenger seat. Her mother took her place behind the wheel and the guards parted like the Red Sea when Lucienne Fallon inclined her regal head in their direction. She drove deeper into the pride lands, away from the main compound, without saying a word. She didn’t need to. The little wrinkle of distaste between her brows when she sniffed the air in the cab spoke volumes.

Lila shrank down in her seat, knowing Santiago’s scent must be all over her after their last post-shower interlude.

The Subaru crested a hill on the western edge of the lands and her mother pulled off into the lookout, cutting the engine and climbing out of the car, still without saying a word. Lila followed, albeit reluctantly. She’d known she was going to have to have this conversation with her mother, but that didn’t mean she was looking forward to it.

The night wind was crisp, carrying the familiar scents of the pride lands in fall. Cedar, pine and the traces of feline musk on the wind. A thousand stars pricked pinpoints into the black blanket of the sky, and moonlight cast eerie shadows through the trees as the heavy moon began to rise. Lila wondered what the moonlight looked like sifting through the trees around Santiago’s deck.

“I trust you had a good time,” her mother said finally, when they were leaning side by side against the hood.

“I love him.”

Her mother nodded, as if there was nothing unexpected in the announcement. As if Lila’s whole world hadn’t been reshaped around that fact.

“We make sacrifices for the pride,” she said, her voice a whisper on the breeze as she stared out over the pride lands. “It won’t be easy to give him up, but you know it’s the right thing to do.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Lila, I’m the only one who understands.”

“That isn’t what I meant. It’s not about being the Alpha’s mate. I’m not you. Marrying Roman wouldn’t just be doing my duty for the pride. It would be giving up my chance at being truly happy.”

“Duty is its own happiness. The satisfaction can be so much richer than personal gratification. I know you won’t be the same kind of Alpha’s mate I am, but you’ll be strong in your own way. In your own right.”

“You don’t understand,” Lila said again. “You never had to give up a chance at love—”

“Didn’t I?”

Lila went still at the words, soft, but with a subtle sharpness, a well-honed blade in two tiny words. “Who?”

“Does it matter?” Lucienne turned her head then, meeting Lila’s eyes with such simple directness. “I never regretted my decision to be with your father. Just as you will never regret marrying Roman. He’s a good man, Lila.”

“I know he’s a good man, Mom. But he’s not mine.” Her man was flawed. Demanding and temperamental and romantic and playful in the most surprising ways. Their children may never be able to shift and they may never be accepted into a pride if Lone Pine threw them out. But none of that could counter the fact that he was hers.

“I thought you’d outgrown that sort of childish romanticism.”

“Apparently not.”

Her mother frowned, disapproval in every line of her face. “Have you even thought about what this little rebellion of yours could do to the pride?”

Lila gave a soft, scoffing laugh. “I’ve thought of nothing else for days.”

“Then you know what you’re doing impacts more people than just you and Roman and this panther.” She made the breed sound like an epithet. “Lila, be sensible. I was tempted once too. It wasn’t easy choosing your father when my heart was leading me elsewhere, but it was the right choice.”

“And the man you loved? What did he have to say about it?”

“He agreed it was right for the good of the pride. We both love this place—and your father, in our own ways.”

Hugo. The penny dropped and Lila had to swallow her gasp. Her mother had once been in love with her father’s best friend. A bear shifter she could never marry. Holy shit.

“After I made my choice, we never acted on our feelings, because we both knew it would have a negative impact on the pride.”

So noble. And so stupid. Funny how hearing her mother talk about exactly what she had been thinking of doing to Santiago made it clear how heartless it all was. How wrong for her. She wasn’t her mother. She would always regret it if she left Santiago. Whether their children could shift or not, Lila wanted them to be his. Jaguars, lions, some kind of hybrid, she didn’t care. She just wanted them to be healthy and have his eyes and his laugh.

She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life always wondering if she could have been happier with the man who promised to love her while married by obligation to a man who never truly would.

Lila Fallon wanted the goddamn fairy tale.

“You want me to marry Roman, answer me one question. The man you gave up. Do you still love him?”

Silence stretched until Lila thought her mother wouldn’t answer—which was answer enough. Then, “In a way, I suppose I do. But I love the pride more.”

She supposed.

No, Lila was not her mother. She would never suppose her emotions, living that half-life of all head and no heart. She was a romantic. She supposed she always had been, but it had taken a jaguar’s kiss to wake her up to the fire of longing in her soul.

She would do what she could to make sure it wouldn’t weaken the pride, but she just couldn’t see how denying her heart could possibly make the pride stronger. She couldn’t be happy if she gave Santiago up. It would eat away at her, and who benefited from that?

Her mother straightened away from the bumper, dusting off her hands. “We should get back to the pride. I’m sure we’ve been missed. We’ll tell your father and Roman we were busy with wedding preparations and lost track of time. Perhaps tomorrow we should go into town and you can try on some wedding dresses.” She smiled. “You’re going to be a beautiful bride, Lila. You’ll make the whole pride proud.”

No. She wouldn’t. But maybe that wasn’t such a crime. Maybe she didn’t have to live her life for the approval and happiness of others.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I can’t.”

She didn’t wait to hear her mother’s argument, didn’t even bother stripping out of her clothes, just shifted, ignoring the discomfort of her clothing shredding from her body as her furred form burst through. She leapt into motion, the ground blurring beneath her paws as she ran.

He’d said he would wait, but she couldn’t. Not anymore. She didn’t want to waste another second.

Lila had always been fast, but she’d never had a reason to run like she did tonight. The miles vanished under her paws.