“Atta girl!” Marigold said approvingly. “Show off them boobies.”
Lainey snort-laughed at that. It was hard not to love Marigold, even if she was a total loon.
“And you’ve got a great laugh,” Marigold added. Lainey raised an eyebrow, looking at her suspiciously to see if she was making fun of Lainey, but Marigold meant it.
“All right, I’m going to go meet Ginger for the millionth fitting of the wedding gown,” Marigold said, as they walked outside, Lainey laden down with a half-dozen plastic bags. “Ginger’s fine with the gown, but her mother’s just gone gonzo.”
“Better you than me. I’ll see you back at the boarding house tonight,” Lainey said.
She walked over to the general store, where she bought a couple of sketch pads and some colored pencils and spray fixative so that the sketches wouldn’t smear. The streets were crowded with shifters; the small town was filling up more and more as the wedding day grew closer.
If Katherine hadn’t booked that room at the boarding house a year ago, before Loch had proposed to Ginger, the room would have been snapped up in a heartbeat by wedding guests, and Lainey would never have had the chance to take Katherine’s place. The boarding house was full of wedding guests for the next week. So was the one motel in town, Marigold had told her. People were sleeping in mobile homes, pitching tents in a little tent city which had sprung up outside of town, crashing on friend’s couches…
Was this coincidence part of the whole “fated mate” thing? Had fate led her to be right where she should be, so she could meet the right person?
But why would fate be so cruel as to dangle the world’s sexiest wolf shifter right in front of her, at exactly the wrong time in her life, when she could do nothing about it?
She knew what Marigold would say if she asked her: Patience. It will all work out the way it’s supposed to.
Of course, that was easy for Marigold to say when she was living with her adoring fiancé in an adorable little cabin on her great-aunt’s property. Everything had worked out for her; she had nothing to worry about.
Lainey stood on the sidewalk, debating what to do next. She could go back to the boarding house, help out with some chores, and then sit outside and sketch the sunset. She could go to the Beaudreau Mansion and do some sketches there, but she knew that her desire to do so was only a flimsy pretext to “accidentally” run into Tate again. Literally run into him.
A low purr rumbled up in her throat as she pictured what that would be like, stumbling on soft earth and then falling against his hard body. Would he be hard all over? Her cleft oozed juices of arousal at the thought of it.
Okay, so the Beaudreau Mansion was definitely out.
“Hello,” a sensual male voice called out. “If it isn’t the lovely Katherine.”
She turned. Hamilton Hooper was sitting on a bench by the general store.
“Hello, Hamilton.” She sat down next to him.
“There’s quite a commotion here, isn’t there?” He smiled without humor, watching the crowds of shifters wandering the streets.
“How is it going? Are the police making any progress on the tiara theft?”
“Not that they’ve shared with me,” Hamilton said.
Lainey could smell whiskey on his breath. He leaned back on the bench and stared off in the distance, looking morose.
“You want to know a secret?” he said, suddenly. “I wanted to be an actor more than anything, but I’m only good at one thing, and that’s not acting. It’s making people want to have sex with me. That’s what I’m good at.”
“That sounds…rather empty, after a while,” Lainey said. “If there’s no love involved.”
“It’s true, and yet that’s what I do. Again and again.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I do so hate to be alone. Then I have to listen to the sound of my own thoughts.” He spoke in the tone of an actor, as if he were on a stage. His eyes were fixed on some invisible point on the blue horizon.
“You’re a shifter. Maybe someday you’ll meet your fated mate…if that’s really a thing.”
He smiled ruefully at that. “It is for some people. I don’t think it is for me.”
“Are you going to stay here in town, do you think?” she asked. “There’s that festival for single shifters which happens every October. Supposedly, a lot of shifters meet their fated mates there. Maybe you do have one, and you just haven’t met her yet.”
“I might. I don’t know. I only came out here to help my mother with the store, but she’s getting dottier by the day. I might just sell the store.”
He turned to look at her, suddenly focusing on her with unnerving intensity and leaning in close. There was that expensive cologne again, clinging to him like an invisible cloud. “You’re lonely. I’m lonely. Why don’t we distract each other?”
Lainey shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, but it doesn’t really work that way for me. I like some actual emotion to go with my sex.”