HAPTER 15
“The box says five minutes,” Charlotte said from the bathroom, and Sebastian grinned to himself. Little things—like her insistence on closing the door behind her whenever she used the bathroom—had gone from being odd to being a little endearing. In the werelion community, there wasn’t much in the way of artificial modesty, and he’d never worried overly much about people knowing what he was doing in the bathroom. Obviously, the city had taught Charlotte different values, and ones she hadn’t given up even after three weeks of staying with him.
Alexis, Jack, and Julia had made themselves scarce ever since their full moon attack on Charlotte; they hadn’t been back to their homes, and there were whispers in the Pride that Sebastian had exiled them, even though—strictly speaking—he hadn’t. He would have to deal with it before the next full moon, in two weeks’ time, but for the moment he was more concerned with Charlotte’s status as the mother of his future child. He’d caught the change in her pheromones a few days before, but had said nothing; the allure of continuing to have sex with her every day was too strong, and he told himself that after all, he didn’t know for sure—not absolutely.
Charlotte came out of the bathroom with the pregnancy test in hand, the cap covering the end. She had her phone in the other hand, and Sebastian saw that she’d set the timer on her phone. He’d given it back to her after the full moon; she didn’t have service out in the middle of nowhere, and after the confrontation and what he’d heard her say, he trusted that she was committed at least to their agreement, if nothing else—so he was certain she wouldn’t attempt to escape, or call for a rescue. It helped that she still had no idea where she was.
“You know,” Charlotte said, her voice musing but her body language tense with anticipation, “I’ve read that having sex during pregnancy is a good thing.”
“Have you now?” Sebastian had been racking his brain for days on how to potentially extend their sexual encounters after she had confirmation that she was pregnant. It had been—he was ashamed to admit to himself—one of the reasons he hadn’t told her as soon as he’d detected the change in her scent that told him she was likely pregnant.
“Apparently, it’s good for keeping muscle tone, and for a few other things, like stress management,” Charlotte said, keeping the same light note in her voice. Sebastian wanted to laugh; he’d become something of an amateur expert in reading Charlotte’s body language over the course of three weeks. She wanted to keep having sex as much as he did, but she didn’t want to be the one to change the agreement, to admit her attraction to him. That attraction—that Sebastian felt too—was a problem, but he was honest enough to admit to himself that he had no intention of working very hard to solve it.
“Then maybe we should have sex once or twice a week if you turn out to be pregnant,” Sebastian suggested playfully. “Just to keep you in optimal health.” Charlotte’s face briefly showed disappointment but she recovered an instant later.
“I guess that could work,” she said. Sebastian reached out for her and pulled her onto his lap without hesitating; there would be another three minutes before they knew for sure whether or not Charlotte was pregnant. He buried his face against the back of her neck, breathing in the scent of her. In the past few days, she’d taken on a sweeter, more honey-like scent that he was almost certain had to do with the hormones in her body changing due to her pregnancy.
“Or I could keep fucking your brains out nightly so you get good sleep,” Sebastian murmured, just loudly enough for Charlotte to hear him. He nipped at the nape of her neck, letting his hands play over her body slowly. “Something tells me you’d enjoy that a lot more.”
“Maybe,” Charlotte said, twisting into his touches. “It would give us something to do.”
“I can always find things to do with you,” Sebastian told her, cupping her breasts carefully. That was another thing he’d noticed, and why he’d given in easily when Charlotte had suggested that it was time for her to take a pregnancy test: she’d been more sensitive there in the past several days, almost reluctant to have him touch her.
“Two minutes,” Charlotte told him. Sebastian nodded, nuzzling against her sweet-smelling neck. He found himself more and more often wanting to rub against her, wanting to mark her with his scent and take her scent onto himself. Ever since the encounter they’d had before the Pride meeting, he’d had to hold himself back more and more from impulses that told him that he should make Charlotte his mate outright.
He knew that he should be pulling back from her, that he certainly shouldn’t be indulging himself the way he’d been doing—he should have taken every precaution to keep his distance, only having sex with her for the purposes of getting pregnant. But he couldn’t make himself do it. He loved the feeling of her body pressed against his in the aftermath of their climaxes, and he loved the scent of her body, and he wanted to have more sex with her, not less.
The timer went off and Sebastian felt Charlotte’s body tense against him. “What does it say?”
“I’m not looking at it,” Charlotte replied.
Sebastian chuckled. “Just look at it, for crying out loud,” he said. “Either you are or you’re not pregnant.” He felt Charlotte’s back move against him as she took a deep breath, and peeked over her shoulder as she picked up the test, turning it over to look at the result window. He saw it the same time she did: pregnant. Sebastian’s arms tightened around Charlotte and he pulled her closer to him, reaching up to turn her face towards his to kiss her eagerly on the lips.
“I’m pregnant,” Charlotte said, as soon as he broke away from the kiss. “I—I guess I can’t say I can’t believe it, because I’ve kind of been suspecting for a few days now but…”
“It’s a different thing to have confirmation,” Sebastian suggested, nodding. “I know.”
“You knew,” Charlotte said, her voice sharp. “You already knew I was pregnant.”
“Your pheromones have changed,” he said, “but that didn’t necessarily mean that you were pregnant.”
“You knew it and you held it back from me for how long?”
“It’s been a couple of days since I noticed the change,” Sebastian admitted. “But I didn’t know for sure.” He nuzzled against Charlotte’s neck, hoping to defuse some of the tension he could feel growing in her body. Instead, she twisted around in his arms and tried to squirm free.
“I thought we’d agreed that you weren’t going to keep anything from me anymore,” Charlotte said, her voice sharp and strident. “And you kept this from me.”
“Would you have believed me if I’d told you?”
“I’d have taken a pregnancy test a lot sooner, and known!” Charlotte scowled at him.
“I don’t even know if you would have gotten a positive result before now,” Sebastian protested.
“You still could have said something,” Charlotte insisted.
“Why are you so upset? This doesn’t seem like what I’d expect just from me not telling you about this.”
“I’m upset because you hid this from me and because…” Charlotte shook her head. “Because this changes everything.”
“It doesn’t have to change anything if you don’t want it to,” Sebastian pointed out.
“If this is real, and if... if I manage to carry to term, this means that in nine months or less, I’ll be done. This will be done. I just…” she shook her head again. “I need to be by myself for a while, Sebastian.” He considered arguing with her, but he knew it would be a bad idea; it would just make things harder between them, just make the breach of trust worse.
“Okay,” he said instead, despite the desire to pull her close and lay claim to her. The knowledge—certain now—that she had his baby inside of her, growing and developing, made him want to protect her more than ever, and the desire to mate her, to make her truly his, was almost painful in its intensity.
He watched as Charlotte stood and walked out of the living room, into her bedroom and tried to be contented at least with the cold comfort that she hadn’t tried to escape, to run out of the house and leave him behind as she went into the woods. Now that she was pregnant, he was fairly certain that Charlotte wouldn’t try to escape, but he knew he couldn’t be that certain, and he knew that there was nothing—at the moment—that he could do to fix the situation.
He took a deep breath and decided to occupy himself outside. If there was a baby coming, he would have a lot of preparation to do. The little room he’d held in reserve—barely more than a closet, really—would need to be converted for the baby’s use, with furniture and more.
He needed to make plans to deal with the Pride in the wake of Alexis, Jack, and Julia defecting; there was going to be some kind of reckoning from that, Sebastian knew. And he needed to get his head straight. Charlotte wasn’t his mate, and the animal impulses in him telling him that she should be were distracting him from the real issues at hand.
He needed to protect her, he needed to keep her happy and healthy, but he also needed to disengage from her enough to keep from giving into the instinct to make her fully his. She wasn’t, and she couldn’t be.
Sebastian kept his ears open for any indication that something was happening with Charlotte inside the house as he started to gather up his tools and some materials to start planning out furniture. He suspected he would need to keep the baby in his room at night, at least for the first year, to make sure he could feed it on time.
Most were lionesses, Sebastian knew, slept with their babies in the same bed as them, the better to nurse them in the middle of the night. Werelion infants were both like and unlike human babies, and most of the werelions he’d known had more than a little bit of animal parenting instinct. Almost against his will, Sebastian wondered what it would be like if Charlotte stayed to parent the child she was pregnant with. He imagined her nursing an infant, murmuring a song to the baby, holding it for hours on end. He imagined her sleeping with the baby curled up next to her, exhausted but beautiful, rendered even more precious by virtue of being the mother of his child.
You have to stop doing that, he told himself firmly. That isn’t going to happen. You are going to let her go as soon as she’s recovered from giving birth, and you’re going to move on with your life. You might as well start looking for potential mates to help you raise the child right now.
But the idea of any other woman—even some of the more beautiful werelion females he’d known in his life—was repellent next to the picture of Charlotte raising their child. That was a dangerous realization, and Sebastian knew it. He needed to focus on keeping his Pride in check, and making sure that everything went back to normal. He had to get Charlotte out of his mind, at least somewhat.
Instead of working on furniture for the baby, Sebastian stripped off his clothes and summoned up the change from deep inside of his body. He would go for a hunt by himself, and maybe see if he could get some information in the woods about the defectors, and then he would come back and make sure that Charlotte was okay.
Locked in the house, with the dangerous elements who’d attacked before deep in the woods unwilling to show themselves, he thought she should be okay. He almost thought of interrupting the change long enough to ask Melissa to come over, but realized that Charlotte had been serious about wanting to be by herself. He would give her space, and give himself the time to do what he needed to do to get his head clear.
When he came back, he would—he hoped—be in the right state of mind to take care of things the way that he should. And maybe Charlotte would be in the right state of mind to think about what he did in perspective. Sebastian knew that hormones tended to wreak havoc on the emotional state of pregnant women; he thought that it was probably as much to blame as his error in keeping his intuition from her, or anything else she’d mentioned. A little space then, and they’d both be able to handle the situation.
*
Charlotte paced her room, not even certain of what it was she wanted, or how she felt; she just knew that she was somehow upset, the sensation like storm clouds rolling around in her stomach. She’d told Sebastian that she wanted to be alone for a while, and she’d meant it, but she didn’t know what she thought being alone would accomplish, and the longer she was away from him, the less confident she was that it would take care of anything—at least on its own.
The fact that she was pregnant, all on its own, was a shock. The fact that Sebastian had known—or, giving him the benefit of the doubt, at least strongly suspected it—was upsetting. The fact that now that she was pregnant they would start the countdown to the time when she would leave his life and go back to the one he’d kidnapped her out of, left her feeling almost in despair, and that fact—the knowledge that she didn’t actually want to go back to her job, and her apartment, and her single life—was so beyond bizarre that she didn’t even know how to react to it.
She knew that she should feel relieved that she’d gotten pregnant so quickly, and she should be scared about how the pregnancy would go. Charlotte knew that her mother had never had any problems, nor had her father’s mother, but of course, there was a first time for everything, and she knew nothing at all about Sebastian’s genetics other than that in a specific way they were compatible. It was a compatibility that only he cared about, since it meant that she could carry a child that would transform into a lion at will. Charlotte rested one hand against her abdomen. Of course, so early on—only maybe a week into the pregnancy—she couldn’t feel anything; the baby growing inside of her was little more than a clump of cells, so small that she would only be able to see it under a microscope. It wouldn’t even remotely look like a human being.
But it was there. “God,” Charlotte murmured, finally coming to a stop in her pacing and sinking down onto her bed. It was strange—and even beyond strange—that she felt so at home in Sebastian’s house, in her room. It was nothing like her own bedroom in her apartment, but somehow, thick with the combined smell of both her and Sebastian’s pheromones and the clean scent of laundry, it felt more like home than she could even recall her own bedroom at her parents’ house feeling. Certainly, she had to give Sebastian credit for making it as comfortable as humanly possible. “This is so incredibly screwed up.”
And then, as if saying it out loud had changed the situation at all, Charlotte started to laugh. It was so absurd—from beginning to where she sat—that it was nearly impossible to not laugh. She had feelings for a man who’d had her abducted, and she wasn’t even sure that she could convince herself that the fact that she had feelings was completely wrong. She had only just found out that she was pregnant, and she wanted to keep the baby for herself, even if it was some strange person who turned into a lion when it wanted to.
The few weeks she had been with Sebastian had been so completely different from her life before the kidnapping that it was hard to believe that they’d actually happened, in some respects. Charlotte still had work, but from the convenient story she and Sebastian had come up with to the fact that she worked well enough that nobody really questioned her work habits, and she was getting more work done than she usually did—though, Charlotte thought, that would probably change as the pregnancy progressed.
The staggering reality of the situation hit her again. She was pregnant, and she was going to carry the child to term. She was going to deliver a baby in something like nine months’ time, and she barely knew the child’s father. A boy or girl was going to grow up—half made of her—without knowing the first thing about her, according to the plan that she and Sebastian had agreed on.
For the rest of her life, she would know that there was a child out there with her genes making up a substantial portion of its person, but it would—in all likelihood—never meet her, and it might not ever even know her name.
Would Sebastian just forget about her? The idea of it made Charlotte shiver. The thought that he would completely forget the woman who had given him his child was appalling, but she had to think that he was hoping for it, counting on it. After all, if he’d had any intention of remembering the source of his future child, he wouldn’t have kidnapped her to get the child in the first place, would he?
Charlotte felt the tears sliding down her cheeks and wasn’t even entirely sure what, specifically, she was crying for: the child she would hand over like a ransom demand to the man who’d had her kidnapped, the fact that she would be leaving the Pride’s territory in less than a year, to have to go back to her old life pretending that nothing much had happened? The fact that she was pregnant at all, or so soon? Or—the thought horrified her in its possibility—was she crying because some part of her had started to like Sebastian in spite of how their odd semi-relationship had begun, and she wasn’t ready to be done with the sex, the caring, the strangely comforting presence that he was to her now, weeks later?
A knock at the front door shook Charlotte out of her thoughts, and she dashed away the tears with hasty, clumsy hands, taking a deep breath to gulp down the last of the sobs that had begun working their way up her throat. If someone was knocking, then it had to be a member of the Pride that supported Sebastian—didn’t it?
At least, Charlotte thought, she could be fairly confident that it wasn’t an enemy. At the minimum, they aren’t attacking the place. She rose to her feet and left the bedroom, tingling all over with a mixture of intrigue and dread.
When she opened the door, Charlotte saw Melissa standing on the other side of it, her eyes half-wild. In the state the other woman was in, it wasn’t difficult at all for Charlotte to imagine her turning into a lioness and prowling in the woods. Melissa’s eyes had changed shape and color slightly, as if she were holding back the transformation by sheer force of will, instead of calling it onto her by will.
The woman almost vibrated with tension, and when her nostrils flared, Charlotte could almost imagine her with a lion’s muzzle, with the flat, long feline nose made for detecting the faintest scents and directing them to an animal-human brain to dissect their meaning. “You’re pregnant,” she said.
“Okay, if it’s that obvious to you then I’m really pissed at Sebastian for holding out on me,” Charlotte countered.
“It wouldn’t be something he would necessarily know the meaning of right away,” Melissa told her. She frowned. “That’s not why I’m here.”
“So why are you here?” Charlotte’s hand went almost instinctively to her abdomen but she made herself stop. It’s too small for you to feel anything. You’re being ridiculous.
“I think Sebastian’s been grabbed,” Melissa said, her voice taking on a slightly growling rumble. “I caught scent of his blood in the woods.” Her eyes narrowed. “What’s been going on?”
“We had a fight,” Charlotte admitted. “I just took a pregnancy test maybe… I don’t know, an hour or so ago? And found out that he’d noticed the change in my pheromones more than two days ago.” It sounded silly when she put it like that, but Charlotte still felt the trickle of adrenaline in her system at the reminder of what impact the situation had had on her.
“That would explain why he went out into the woods,” Melissa said, nodding. “Fuck.”
“What’s going on?”
“Well, I have my suspicions, but we don’t have any proof,” Melissa told her. “There’s blood in the woods that smells like Sebastian, and I saw his clothes coming up to the door. He’s out there—that much I’m sure of. What I don’t know for sure is what he ran into.”
“What could it be, though?” Charlotte’s fear and dread intensified and she had a moment of hating herself for being worried about a man she shouldn’t, by any measure, have feelings toward. Just accept that you have feelings toward him, however complicated they are. Deal with the complications later. Even if she didn’t worry about herself, she had to worry about the child to come, and the possibility that instead of giving the infant away at birth, she would be responsible for taking care of it, frightened her even more. “What could get at a lion in those woods?”
“A bear,” Melissa said with a shrug. “Though, for the most part, they leave us alone. A particularly determined pack of wolves could do some damage, but they mostly leave lions alone too—they know they’ll take damage from us, and they don’t really gain anything from the fight.”
Charlotte resisted the urge to tell Melissa to stop telling her what it wasn’t. “So, what does that leave?” She raised an eyebrow, feeling her stomach churn and her heart beat faster. The stress couldn’t possibly be good for the zygote inside of her, but for the moment, that was a secondary issue.
“Another lion,” Melissa said firmly. “And we know of at least three who have been off the radar, but not obviously fully gone for a couple of weeks now.”
Charlotte nodded. “But why would they come after him like this?” She frowned, trying to puzzle through the situation. “And wouldn’t Sebastian be able to take all three of them? Isn’t that kind of the point of him being Alpha?”
“It depends. Sebastian could take any one of us in a fair fight,” Melissa said. “He could take more than one of us pretty readily on a good day. Three against one is bad odds, and we don’t know for sure that it was just three.”
Charlotte considered that and nodded again. “What t do we do?” She bit her bottom lip; if Sebastian was missing, hurt, or even—she didn’t like the thought at all—dead, then she was in a worse position than she had even initially thought. She would be an unwanted invader in the community, with no real protection from an authority.
Charlotte didn’t think that Sebastian’s cousins and friends who’d helped him abduct her would go so far as to protect her for no real benefit. On top of that, she would have no way to get herself back to the city.. There would be no benefit to anyone who might be willing to offer her that chance. She would be in the “better off dead” category, especially if and when other people in the Pride discovered that she was pregnant.
“I’m going to try and track him,” Melissa said. “I was going to get you to come with me—but if you’re pregnant…”
“I’m maybe two weeks along,” Charlotte said irritably. “I’m only barely late for my period as it is.”
“But you’re still pregnant,” Melissa countered.
“Pregnant lions hunt, don’t they?” Charlotte crossed her arms over her chest, ignoring the discomfort in her breasts. “They defend their territory and all that, right?”
“This isn’t your territory,” Melissa pointed out. “But I get your point.” She pressed her lips together. “Sebastian has a gun here, at least one, right?”
Charlotte wasn’t certain of that; she’d never seen one, and Sebastian had told her that for the most part, members of the Pride weren’t fans of guns. But surely, he had something for self-defense, out in the middle of nowhere as he was.
“If he does, then I know where he’s likely to keep it.” Melissa slipped into the house and Charlotte followed in her wake as the woman moved through the living room and toward the main bedroom.
She had been in Sebastian’s bedroom several times over the course of her weeks at his home, but Charlotte had never been interested in snooping through his things. Melissa went straight to the closet in the room and opened it with the air of someone who knew what she was looking for, and had a good idea of where to find it, and Charlotte hung back as the other woman pulled clothes aside to reveal a hidden panel.
“We’re not really big on weapons here, but every once in a while, the situation demands more than muscle, teeth, and claws,” Melissa mused absently as she twisted the dial on a combination lock keeping the panel closed.
“That makes sense,” Charlotte said, more for the sake of saying something than for any other reason. Her head felt as if her brain was spinning inside of it, and her heart seemed to beat faster and faster.
Melissa pulled on the lock and it opened; a moment later the panel came out, and Charlotte stared in a mixture of shock, awe, and confusion as she took in the sight of two guns—a rifle and a pistol—along with a bow and a crossbow, and ammunition to go with all of the above. It was a small cache, but Charlotte had no doubt that each item was carefully maintained, and used with the utmost intention. The thought of those weapons being in Sebastian’s closet the whole time she’d been living with him gave her a chill.
“What do you feel comfortable with?”
Charlotte gave herself a shake, trying to force her brain to work more effectively. “What?”
“Crossbow? Bow and arrows? Gun? What do you want?” Melissa turned to look at her. “You’re not coming with me unarmed when we don’t know for sure how many lions we’d be up against—or even if we’re against lions.”
“Fine,” Charlotte said, taking a deep breath and stilling the inner revolt she felt at the idea of arming herself. She had done some archery as a kid in summer camp years before, but she didn’t think that would improve her chances too much. She’d handled a friend’s pistol before, an older revolver; the one that Sebastian owned looked sleeker, and Charlotte thought that maybe—maybe—it wouldn’t kick as much. She didn’t know for sure that she could actually effectively shoot anything, but it was better than being defenseless against whatever it was they found themselves fighting. “The pistol,” she said finally.
Melissa checked it, making sure it was loaded—it held a clip instead of individual rounds—and handed it carefully to Charlotte. “Let’s get you a knife too,” she said, reaching back into the back of the compartment. She took out something that looked like a rough dagger to Charlotte, but at least that she was fairly confident she could use it without risking too much harm to herself or her growing child. “Here, take a strap for it.” Melissa handed a sheath on a band to Charlotte, and Charlotte looped the band around her thigh, and inserted the knife carefully into the sheath.
“I feel like the least ready badass to have ever existed,” Charlotte told Melissa dryly.
“Hopefully it won’t come to it, but better to be prepared and not need it than need it and not have it,” Melissa said. Charlotte smiled, acknowledging the truth of that statement. If she’d been armed, would it have made any difference in her abduction?
She felt the heft of the gun and tried to decide whether or not it would be worth it to keep it out; in a hasty moment, she thought it would just make things more complicated to have to take it out of a holster, but at the same time she didn’t know if she would be as effective in other ways if she kept it in hand.
Melissa closed the panel and then the closet, and Charlotte could do nothing but follow and try not to make the other woman—clearly determined—regret her impulse to come and get her. She came to a point of near-comfort with the feeling of the knife strapped to her leg, the gun in her hand, and almost felt a tingle of excitement instead of fear and dread as she left the house and walked towards the woods.
“I’m going to need you to be as quiet as possible, and that’s easier if you’re barefoot,” Melissa told her, her face still showing the signs of her humanity barely under control. Charlotte nodded, breathing slowly and deeply, and the two stepped past the treeline together.
Melissa began stripping off her clothes as soon as they were under cover, and Charlotte—still conditioned to non-shifter standards of modesty—felt uncomfortable in the presence of the woman’s clear beauty and obvious nudity. The sensation disappeared after a moment, but it occurred to her that in a span of less than two hours, her entire struggle with the situation between herself and Sebastian had basically played out.
She was utterly unaccustomed to the way that the werelions lived in their territory, and Charlotte rather thought that Sebastian would be just as uncomfortable in the city. You might like him, but if anything has proven that there’s no future to this relationship—if it is one, really—it’s been this whole scenario.
All at once, Melissa dropped down onto her knees, and Charlotte watched as the woman’s skin began to shimmer and move, as the bones underneath it shifted, the muscles somehow twisting. She’d seen Sebastian transform, but it had been at something of a distance—at least the second time.
It was still intriguing and horrifying to watch Melissa’s body undergo the rapid change; to see fur emerging where there had been none, to see the shape of her alter, her hands dissolving away into paws with blunt-tipped claws and her legs move into a more stable position as the transformation continued.
Then where Melissa had crouched there was nothing but a lioness—a glorious, tawny-furred lioness—with a muscular body and glossy coat and big, amber-yellow eyes when the woman looked back at her. Somehow, after a few moments, Charlotte was able to discern the fragment of humanity that still existed in the unusual form, but it was elusive, especially when the lioness began to move through the underbrush in near silence.
Charlotte kept a slight distance, knowing that there was no way she could be as quiet, no way she could avoid disturbing the crackling, crunching, rustling landscape around her as she walked carefully.
The lioness in front of her paused often, her nostrils moving as she scented the air, constantly moving and then utterly still, and Charlotte thought to herself that in a dozen or so years, her own child would look something like that—if it was a female child, more like Melissa, where a male child would have already started to look more like Sebastian’s lion form. The thought that she could give birth to a human being who would eventually live a life alternating between the brutal, fierce promise of a lion and the comforting sight of a human being was almost impossible to truly understand.
Charlotte found herself caught off-guard when Melissa went rigid, one paw raised in the air to step forward, the fur along her spine standing on end. She heard a low, throaty growl from the lioness, and then something like a clicking noise, and then it was almost as if Melissa had disappeared, she darted off so quickly into the thicker brush. Charlotte’s heart pounded in her chest and she had no idea what to do.
Both the gun in her hand and the knife strapped to her thigh seemed utterly useless in the situation she found herself in, alone with Melissa chasing something—or someone—else. Crashing sounds, breaking foliage, came to her ears and she shifted on her feet, trying to discern something of what was going on only a few yards away from her.
From behind her, she heard another sound—a chuffing snort, a growl. Charlotte wheeled around, forgetting about Melissa for the moment, and brought the pistol up to attempt to aim it at whatever had been behind her. More rustling in the brush made her hands feel slick and her mouth feel dry, and Charlotte’s grip on the butt of the gun wavered slightly as adrenaline surged through her.
A lion—proud, indisputably male—emerged, growling lowly at her, his eyes full of malice. Charlotte hesitated, for just an instant thinking that the lion could, possibly, be Sebastian; but no. She blinked quickly and saw that the lion in front of her was not quite as impressive as the man who had impregnated her: his mane wasn’t as showy, he wasn’t as deeply muscled, and the tawny fur had discolored patches here and there, showing that the lion wasn’t in peak health.
“I don’t know who you are, but if you come any closer to me, I swear I will fucking end you,” Charlotte said, struggling to keep her voice level. The lion snorted, looking—briefly—all too human as an expression of dubious belief flitted through its eyes.
Then Charlotte heard a roar, and the lion in front of her flinched, his gaze switching away from her and toward the direction of the sound. Charlotte’s heart skipped a beat as she tried to decide whether the roar had come from another potential assailant or from the man she had been seeking in the dense forest. Then, everything around her went completely silent.