PANTHER’S PROMISE
by Zoe Chant
Special Sneak Preview
GRANT
“Is this the place?”
Grant stared up at the brightly-lit fifth floor of the building they had just parked in front of. The contrast between the staid brickwork of the lower floors and the floor-to-ceiling, crystal clear fifth floor window was startling. It looked as though someone had sliced away the front wall to peer in at the inhabitants.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, it was starting to snow.
Grant felt his panther’s discomfort with the weather. The emotion was separate from his own feelings, but still distinctly there, a constant, irritating itch. Grant was displeased that he could feel it at all. He’d spent most of the last six months as a panther, trying to get it out of his system, but its instincts were still so close to the surface. If he had been in his panther form, he would have flattened his ears at the cold stuff and maybe even snarled at what his human brain knew were harmless white flakes.
Since he was in human form, he was spared the embarrassment of growling at snow in front of his PA, Lance MacInnis.
“This is it,” Lance confirmed without glancing up. “You think she’ll be here?”
Grant shrugged. “It’s art, it’s new, it’s on a street I didn’t know existed in a neighborhood that would make her mother scream—it’s pure Frankie.”
“And you’re sure this is a good idea?”
Grant glared at the other man. “You clearly think not. Is that your official opinion as my PA?”
Lance snorted, his dark-brown eyes fixed on the window above them. The young black man was clearly solidly built beneath his well-tailored and fashionably styled suit, but the glasses he pulled from one pocket to perch on his nose gave a hint of incongruity to his appearance.
“My opinion as your ‘PA’ is that for a man of your demographic, gallery openings are a high-boredom, low-return investment of your time. And as your friend…” He twisted around in the driver’s seat, peering at Grant over the top of his glasses. “There are easier ways for you to go about this, you know.”
“I don’t want to hear it.” Grant’s shoulders tensed.
“I’m just saying—if Mathis Delacourt isn’t picking up the phone or checking in on Facebook, well, those are human ways to connect.”
“This isn’t up for discussion, Lance.”
“Understood.” The other man’s face was professionally blank.
Are you in there, Frankie? And will you be able to give me some answers?
He was careful to keep the question to himself. The last thing he wanted was to reach out telepathically to another shifter. Even if it wasn’t considered rude to broadcast telepathic messages before you actually saw a person, he was back in the city, now.
And in the city, he played human. No. He was human.
Grant’s spine prickled, the same uneasy feeling that had been plaguing him for the last few weeks. He clenched his fist on the car door handle, trying to shake the sensation of wrongness.
His plan was so simple, it was hardly a plan. He would go in, find Frankie, and talk to her. And it was only natural that the talk would turn to her twin brother.
Yeah, and why I haven’t heard a peep out of him since I got back from the jungle.
A year ago, Mathis Delacourt had been Grant’s closest friend. They had grown up together, two shifters causing endless trouble for themselves, each other, and their families. It had been a competitive friendship, but a close one. Grant had never been completely comfortable with his shifter nature, but without Mathis and his family, he never would have known the first thing about what being a shifter meant. Grant’s mother was human and had been abandoned by his shifter father before Grant was even born.
Grant had always envied the family structure of the Delacourt pride. For lions, family was everything. For panthers—well, he only had his father’s example to go by, but family clearly wasn’t as much of a priority for panther shifters as it was for lions.
Something had changed in the months before Grant left to exercise his panther. Mathis had seemed distracted. Grant himself had found it difficult to concentrate, his panther so restless it felt as though it was always about to burst through his skin, and now he could maybe admit to himself that he hadn’t paid close enough attention to his friend. He’d stepped back and focused on his own needs, and Mathis had done the same.
By the time Grant came back into the country, Mathis had stepped back so far he’d vanished. All of Grant’s calls and messages had gone unanswered.
Grant was a panther. They weren’t pack animals—not like Mathis and his lion’s pride. Not family-oriented. He didn’t need to be around others to feel secure with his place in the world.
But, dammit, he did need his oldest friend to at least pick up the phone once in a while.
Tonight’s mission might not unearth Mathis, but Grant was hoping that his friend’s twin sister, Francine—Frankie—would find the lure of the art event too tempting to resist. Frankie and he might not have always gotten along, but he was hoping she’d at least give him some answers about why Mathis had ghosted on him.
Time to find out, he told himself as he stepped out onto the street. Snowflakes settled on his shoulders as he hurried to the front door, his panther inwardly seething at the cold weather.
Lance fell into step beside him. He seemed completely at ease in the freezing weather—a side-effect of being a snow leopard shifter, Grant assumed, or maybe something to do with his military background. Whereas Grant’s panther longed for the sticky heat of the jungle, Lance’s feline form relished the ice and snow. Even in human form, Lance didn’t seem to feel the cold.
Grant felt better the moment he stepped through the front door and into the warm embrace of central heating. By the time the elevator spat them out on the fifth floor, he was almost purring.
He took a moment to make sure that he wasn’t. Satisfied, he glanced around the room.
The gallery was full of people. Grant took a slow breath as he looked around. He couldn’t help it; even in his human form, he instinctively tried to identify the guests by scent as much as by sight.
Most of them were strangers, but one familiar scent made him turn his head to the end of the room.
Francine Delacourt was a statuesque platinum blonde, with skin as white as snow and iceberg-blue eyes. She looked a little like Marilyn Monroe, if Marilyn had been six feet tall and possessed all the warmth and kindness of a glacier.
Lions. Even when they were in human shape, lion shifters—well, all predator shifters, Grant supposed—had this aura of sheer power around them. Mathis used his in the ring, keeping his opponents on edge. Frankie used hers—or at least, so Grant had heard—to keep her company’s board of directors in line. Right now, she seemed to be happily terrifying a circle of onlookers in front of some paintings of mountains.
“There’s Frankie,” he said, relieved his hunch had been correct. Then his shoulders slumped. He knew it was too much to hope for that Mathis would be here with his sister—the two might be twins, but they were far from inseparable—but some small part of him still grated at not finding his friend here. Frankie was holding court alone.
“You need me to come glare at her with you?”
Grant shook himself out of his restless thoughts and glanced at Lance. “This isn’t a shakedown, Lance. I just want to talk to her. Go guard the canapes or something.”
Lance snorted and moved away. Grant rubbed his forehead. This wasn’t a shakedown—so why did he feel so strange? His skin was still prickling with the same sense of wrongness he’d felt earlier.
Or—was it wrongness? Or was it just different? A new, unsettling sensation. Something he couldn’t identify. Something from his shifter side.
If he’d been in the jungle still, he’d have slunk into the shadows, every sense alert as he waited for his instincts to zero in on what was wrong, on the watch for poachers or another predator.
In the city, though…
I’m in a crowded room, with my bodyguard behind me and a lioness shifter in front of me. What’s the worst thing that could happen?
Frankie’s white-gold hair shone like a flame at the far end of the room as Grant made his way toward her. He slipped easily through the crowd, people moving out of his way without even noticing they were doing it. Lions might ooze raw, visceral power, but panthers had their own effect on bystanders. Grant might not like it, but he had to admit it was useful.
He was only halfway there when Frankie turned around. The painting on the wall behind her was all burnished gold and umber, and her light face and hair stood out against it like a beacon. Her eyebrows drew together as she locked eyes with him, and a strange expression stole briefly over her face. She quickly smoothed the unreadable expression off her face, but the smile that replaced it looked strained.
She mouthed something, too quietly and too far away for Grant to hear it.
Frankie? he called out silently and saw her frown. She turned away and thrust her wine glass into the hand of the woman she’d been standing in front of. Grant could have sworn he saw her spine stiffen before she turned back.
It was so like Frankie to just hand her glass off to some poor human bystander. The woman wasn’t one of waiters, with their expressions of mingled boredom and superiority. She was wearing a soft-looking black dress that hugged her generous curves, and was almost as tall as Frankie. Unusual, for a human.
Grant raised his eyes to the woman’s face, intending to give her an apologetic smile. Instead, he felt as though he’d been struck by lightning.
Next to Frankie’s gleaming blonde hair and silver dress, this other woman should have faded into the background. Her dark curls haloed her face, and the dress that clung jealously to her curves was a matte black that seemed designed for blending in with shadows.
Instead, she was suddenly the only person in the room he could focus on.
Grant’s eyes swept back up to her face, searching for—what? She wasn’t even looking at him. Her eyes were cast down, looking at the half-empty wineglass Frankie had pushed on her. Her lips quirked, and she glanced up at Frankie’s back—and past her, to Grant.
The strange feeling that had dogged Grant since they pulled up outside the gallery was swept away, replaced by a hot, thrumming need. It was a sexual need—Oh, hell, is it sexual, he thought, swallowing—but it was more than that, too. And it terrified him.
The woman’s eyes were dark, a brown so deep they seemed almost black. When Grant looked into them, he was gripped by a need to protect so overwhelming that it was all he could do not to leap across the room and take her into his arms.
Go to her! his panther demanded. It wanted to break free, to make him shift and stalk through the room on four legs, tail lashing, a barely veiled threat aimed at anyone who would harm her. The scents of the room grew stronger as he came closer to shifting, his animal senses becoming sharper.
No, he told himself, and his panther, with all the self-control he could muster. That is a bad idea. That is the WORST idea. What are you thinking?
And this is the worst possible timing for—for this.
He knew what was happening. The thing he was most afraid of.
This woman, this human woman, was his mate. His soulmate.
And there was nothing he could do about it. No choice. No control. He had spent the last six months letting his panther off the leash, in the hopes that that time in the wild would exhaust it. And now he felt as though he’d fallen into a trap from which there was no escape.
No. The situation wasn’t the trap. His shifter nature was.
Grant started to move towards her, unable to keep a feline stalk from his movements. He barely noticed Frankie as he passed her, though her indignant hiss was unmistakable.
He still needed to talk to her. Later. Later, for sure. Right now, though, he had to…
Grant stopped an arm’s length away from the dark-haired woman. She was staring at him, eyes wide. This close, he could smell her scent, a sweet, tantalizing perfume that went straight to his head.
“Hello,” he said, his voice almost a purr.