Chapter 10
Three weeks later, Lana was about ready to give up on Jackson.
“I’m telling you, Roman, he’s not interested,” she said, throwing herself down into a chair in his suite.
“I don’t think that’s it, sweetheart,” her alpha said. “I think he’s uncomfortable with the idea of sharing you with me.”
“That’s up to you to fix.”
Roman laughed. “I can let him know I’m okay with it. You have to let him know that you’re fine. That you find him attractive.”
“How could I not? He’s beautiful—that blond hair, those green eyes.”
“Okay, okay.” Roman’s voice turned gruff. “I’m okay with it. Doesn’t mean I want to hear about it.”
With a laugh, she stood up to go plant a kiss on his lips. “You know you have nothing to worry about.”
Still, she’d been distracted lately. She’d had a lot on her mind—not least of all the news Roman had received that the tiger-shifter birthrate was dropping all over the country.
She dropped heavily back into the chair and thought for a few minutes about how she and Jackson could get away for a few days, for a weekend even.
I can’t believe I’m having to try to figure out how to seduce a tiger-shifter. They were usually so aggressive.
“I’m going for a walk,” she announced.
“Take someone with you,” Roman ordered, still anxious about her going anywhere alone, despite the fact that no one had seen an Inca in weeks.
“Will do.” She could get one of the more unobtrusive beta males to follow her. That should be good enough.
She wandered along the River Walk for a little bit, bathing in the warm light of the evening sun. It was drawing up on the end of spring, when the humidity in the air evened out and the summer heat began to set in. It was the most perfect time of year for the night time hunts she loved to go on.
The smell of fresh-ground coffee assaulted her senses as she stepped into her favorite shop. It had been a while since she’d been here.
A smiling teenage barista smiled at her invitingly. “Hi, Miss Lana, what can I get for you today?” she said in an overly peppy voice. This girl had the most impenetrable customer persona Lana had ever seen.
Lana smiled back happily. “The usual.”
The little blonde teenage girl busied herself behind the counter, pouring Lana a medium decaf coffee and bagging a plain donut. Lana thanked the young girl and, upon turning to leave the store with her treat, she spotted a tourism guide in a box by the door.
Well, why not play tourist? It was as good a way to get Jackson to pay attention to her as any.
She grabbed one. Maybe she could find somewhere for them to go for the weekend, if only to get away from the constantly prying eyes of the rest of the streak. Even Lana had to admit they could be exhausting.
As she opened the guide, she realized it outlined all the national parks near San Antonio.
Going for a moonlight run.
That sounded like heaven right now. It sounded better than heaven.
Much like the rest of her kind, Lana was a bit of an introvert. She needed to have interactions with other people, but most of the time she preferred to be alone. The problem with that was right now she was spending so much time with the streak that she had little time to herself.
Having the streak constantly around makes it hard to seduce a guy, too.
Returning to the hotel, she thanked her guard, who’d stayed politely out of her way on her walk.
With a sigh, she placed her coffee on the table in the living room of her suite and flopped exaggeratedly onto the couch, staring off into the distance for a few moments before flipping through the pages of the guide. After carefully considering all her other options, she decided on one of the national parks. It was exactly everything she wanted.
Well. Okay. Mostly it’s away from the rest of the streak.
For one weekend, she felt she and Jackson deserved true freedom. It was best for her to let him know what she had planned, though.
Lana gathered her courage and dialed the phone number in the streak’s directory; Jackson Henson.
Jackson’s deep voice greeted her from the other end of the line.
“Hi, Jackson. It’s Lana.”
“Oh. Well, how can I help you, m…” As usual, he gulped down his automatic “ma’am.”
“If you wouldn’t mind terribly, would you be able to spend a little time on a small trip with me? I wanted to explore one of the national parks a little bit this weekend.”
“Uhh. Yeah, that’d be fine.”
It doesn’t sound fine.
Still, it was a start. “Roman says you own a small café? I’ll meet you there tomorrow evening?”
“Sounds good.” Jackson’s response was clipped.
“Okay, thank you.” With a sigh, Lana ended the call and got up to start packing her things. She wouldn’t need much, just a change of clothes.
The weight of the world lifted off of her shoulders as she lay in bed next to Roman as he slept that night, exhausted from a day of meetings with the other tiger-shifters. The idea of being away from the streak, even if only for the weekend, was a huge relief for her.
Maybe, just for the weekend, she wouldn’t be reminded about how their numbers were dwindling.
For an instant, she wished, and felt guilty for thinking it, that she was simply a normal person, that the fate of her species didn’t seem to rest on her shoulders. Humans were overpopulated—why couldn’t she have been one of those? Sure, she passed for a normal human being in day-to-day life, but so did the rest of them.
All that night, Lana had dreams of communing with nature, lounging beneath trees in her feline form, and running endlessly through a dense, green forest with Jackson at her side. She woke up feeling more refreshed than she had in months.
* * *
Although he hadn’t told anyone else about it, Jackson was still suffering from nightmares about his late wife. Every night it was the same. They would be at home, his wife busily cooking dinner in their homey little kitchen, savory scents floating around the room when she would turn around to reveal a shredded mess of a face. That’s when his subconscious would remember that she was dead, and that the baby he heard crying in the other room wasn’t real.
Jackson awoke in a cold sweat to the soft glow of an alarm clock on his bedside table. It was 3:45 am. Frustration spread like a cancer through his body. He knew that she was dead, he remembered every second of it, including how he was kicked out of the delivery room only to hear a few minutes later that his beloved and his newborn kitten had both passed. It was burned into his memory, never to be forgotten.
He ran his hands through his shaggy blond hair, which was now stringy and damp with sweat, then put his feet on the cold floor. Heaving a sigh, he pulled himself out of the bed and stumbled off into the bathroom to have a warm shower, and hopefully find some solace before his day actually started.
By this point, he was waking up at this time so consistently that he’d set his coffee maker to start on a timer. When he stepped out of the shower and lazily dried himself off with a nice, soft, fluffy towel, the air in his small suite in the hotel was already thick with the smell of freshly brewed coffee. Lord knew he needed it. There wasn’t a day in his life that he could function without first imbibing that hot, bitter, dark elixir of life. Not anymore.
Jackson sat at his kitchen table, fully ready for his day and drinking his unsweetened, sludge-like coffee, breathing in reality. It seemed that, even from here, he could smell the dew on the grass outside. Late spring mornings were the most refreshing; the night was still slightly cool and the days were hot. Perfect.
He needed to busy himself until it was time to head in for work, and that was easy enough. Jackson’s suite was near immaculate. There was a lot of extra time in the mornings for him to make sure that his bed was made and everything was organized. He needed to keep himself busy, so the bookshelves were neatly organized and sometimes even alphabetized. It wasn’t that he needed it to be this way, but he had to keep his hands busy in the mornings.
This was his routine. Wake up, shower, have coffee, organize until he had to leave for work. And that’s what he was doing—wandering around his home picking up anything that could possibly be out of place and putting it back where it belonged before heading into work.
Jackson was simple by nature. Not stupid—in fact he was rather well read—but he liked things to be just so. He liked his home to be clean and his employees to listen to him, he liked to be able to find the things that he was looking for and he liked being able to keep an eye on the younger tiger-shifters. This was enough for him. It brought him a sense of peace since he couldn’t look after his own kitten, since he couldn’t take care of his wife anymore.
What he didn’t want was to be dragged into an old-fashioned relationship with an Alpha Mate. He didn’t want to share his mate with other men.
But he couldn’t very well tell his own alpha no.
So he had to at least pretend to try to get to know her.
It’s a good thing I get to leave to go to work every day.
Jackson owned a little restaurant off the beaten tourist track, a kind of hangout for locals, where several of the younger adults in the streak were employed. It had always been a good way for the kittens of the other families to get a decent start on their resumes before heading off into the bigger world, and a great way to keep an eye on them. Keep them out of trouble.
He had learned to delegate a lot of the work to the other employees there. Leave menu options to the head chef, the stock ordering to the manager. All he really needed to do was sign off on things, and it generated enough money for him to pay what bills weren’t covered by the streak. It was modest, but it was good.
“Found a girlfriend yet?” the manager, Luke, spouted at Jackson almost the second he’d walked through the door. This was a nearly daily occurrence for them.
“Nope.” Jackson’s retort was nearly immediate. “Ever gonna stop asking me that?”
“Not until you find one.”
Great. That’s exactly what he wanted, to be pressured into finding another mate by his underlings every day.
He couldn’t even begin to think what Luke would say if he knew Roman was pressuring Jackson to take on an Alpha Mate.
He sighed again and walked into his office, ready to organize all the paperwork and sign all the paychecks. It was Friday, after all, and he was sure all the young people under his employ were excited to go spend their money on pointless things.
There was never a lot for him to actually do during the days here—more often than not he signed paperwork, handed out paychecks on Fridays, and wandered the restaurant greeting the guests, making sure that everything was satisfactory. He loved that there was always a customer base, that people were generally pleased with their food and their overall experience at his establishment. There were all kinds of horror stories about owning restaurants, but he’d never really had much trouble with it. They weren’t open terribly late, the staff understood and stuck to his guidelines, the quality was always up to par. They weren’t gourmet by any stretch, but it was respectable fare.
Steady. Normal. The way he liked things.
Not like sharing an Alpha Mate.
He had to find a way to quit thinking about his leader’s dark-haired, pale-skinned, long-limbed mate, with her beautiful eyes.
“Gah,” he said aloud, dropping his head into his hands. After a moment, he forced himself to focus on paperwork again.
Shortly after the dinner rush, Luke popped his pony-tailed head into Jackson’s office with a beaming grin. Perfect, white teeth gleamed from a caramel colored face across the room, their brightness matched only by the gleam in his eyes. “There’s a gorgeous woman here looking for you.”
Jackson laughed and rolled his eyes at Luke. “Thanks,” he muttered before stepping out of his office to greet the woman who was no doubt Lana.