“Hey! I’m half naked here!” She barely had time to cover herself with what was left of her skirt, tying it into a makeshift sarong.
“Of course you are, you just shifted. You must be from the city. Nobody here cares about that kind of thing.” A young blond girl with braids stuck her hand out. “I’m Schuyler. Thanks for saving my stupid brother.”
“I am not stupid.” The little boy glowered at her. Then he turned to Lainey. “That was awesome. Can we do it again?”
“No, you moron, you almost broke your neck,” Schuyler said. “And she ruined all her clothes because of you. I’m telling Tate.”
“Telling me what?”
The last voice that Lainey wanted to hear rumbled from behind the bushes, and then Tate Calloway strode up.
Lainey froze on the spot. This was a nightmare. He’d see her flab hanging out, her lumpy rolls, her cellulite…
“What’s going on here?” he said.
“Felix climbed like a hundred feet up that tree and climbed along a really skinny branch and it was going to break but this lady came along and turned into a cat and grabbed him with her jaws and climbed back down and saved him,” Schulyer said, without taking a breath. “She’s a bobcat shifter.”
“Felix?” Tate swung on him with a glare.
The little boy hung his head. “Sorry, Tate.”
“I would certainly hope so. Have you learned anything from this?”
“Bobcat shifters can climb really fast?” Felix suggested.
Tate scowled. “No. That is not what you learned. Well, that’s one thing, but not the important thing. What you learned is that you do not climb a tree unless there is an adult there watching, and do not climb any higher than they say.”
Tate turned back to Lainey, his eyes gleaming. “Well, hello, Kat.”
“I’m, ah, kind of half-naked here,” she squeaked, pressing herself into the glossy green hedge and wishing she could disappear.
Tate turned to the group of shifter cubs. “Guys, this is an important mission,” he said in a serious tone. They all perked up and looked excited. “Go find Miss Ginger, and ask her if she’s got a spare dress with her. Remember to tell her thank you.”
Shifters almost always carried spare outfits with them, because outfits couldn’t survive a shift. Lainey unfortunately didn’t carry an extra outfit with her, a legacy of her mother’s disapproval of shifting in general. When you can exist in the lovely form of a human, why would you want to be an animal? her mother would ask with a contemptuous sniff.
“Race you!” Schuyler turned and ran, and the other kids ran after her.
“Sorry about the monsters,” Tate said. “They’re quite a handful.”
“Hey, none of them tried to stab me or steal my purse,” Lainey said, thinking about the at-risk youth that she taught back home. “I consider them angels.”
“Wow. You set the bar pretty low. Who’s tried to stab you?”
Oh, crud. Now she’d opened the door to him asking her about her job, which would lead the way to him asking all kinds of questions.
“I grew up in a rough area of town,” she mumbled, which wasn’t the least bit true, unless you counted her parents’ emotional abuse as rough. “So—you’re watching these kids? Are their parents busy?”
She was instantly sorry she’d asked. A shadow crossed his face, and he shrugged. “They’re mybrothers and sisters. My parents died four years ago. I’m the parent now. Full time dad to six kids. They help me run our landscaping company, when they’re not busy driving me crazy, that is.”
“You’re so lucky to have them,” she said fervently. She meant it. Even though she’d just seen them all together for the first time, she could sense the love and affection that bound the family together.
“Lucky?” he looked amused. “I guess I am. By the way, I meant to stop by Miss Imogen’s yesterday to make sure you’d made it there okay, but I got swept up in the investigation, and now I’ve been stuck out here, helping get the place ready for the wedding. I did call, though.”
“Oh. Thank you.” Maybe he wasn’t looking at her as a suspect. Maybe he really had been interested in her. Lainey’s recent engagement had seriously messed with her confidence in her ability to judge men’s true intentions.
“I know you’re probably not staying for long, but Blue Moon Junction’s a beautiful place,” he said. “If you’d like someone to—”
All of the kids ran up to them, crowding around her. A little girl with a ponytail held up a dress that looked as if it would be the right size.
“Robin, give it to me! I should give it to her—I’m the oldest,” Schuyler said.
“No way, Jose,” Robin stuck her tongue out at her older sister and handed the dress to Lainey.