Tropical Lion's Legacy Read online

  Tropical Lion’s Legacy

  Zoe Chant

  © 2019 Zoe Chant

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Shifting Sands Resort

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Note from Zoe Chant

  Reunion

  More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant

  Zoe Chant on Audio

  Zoe Chant, writing under other names

  Shifting Sands Resort

  This is book 9 of the Shifting Sands Resort series. All of my books are standalones (No cliffhangers! Always a happy ending!) and can be read independently, but many of these characters reappear in subsequent books, and there is a series arc, so you may enjoy reading these books in order:

  Tropical Tiger Spy (Book 1)

  Tropical Wounded Wolf (Book 2)

  Tropical Bartender Bear (Book 3)

  Tropical Lynx's Lover (Book 4)

  Tropical Dragon Diver (Book 5)

  Tropical Panther’s Penance (Book 6)

  Tropical Christmas Stag (Book 7)

  Tropical Leopard’s Longing (Book 8)

  Tropical Lion’s Legacy (Book 9)

  Tropical Dragon’s Destiny (Book 10 – the finale, forthcoming!)

  The Master Shark's Mate (A Fire & Rescue Shifters/Shifting Sands Resort crossover, occurs in the timeline between Tropical Wounded Wolf and Tropical Bartender Bear)

  Firefighter Phoenix (A Fire & Rescue Shifters novel, has scenes set at Shifting Sands Resort, and occurs in the timeline between Tropical Christmas Stag and Tropical Leopard’s Longing)

  Chapter 1

  “You’ve got a visitor,” the secretary told Alice Anders as she waltzed in the office to check her inbox. “I just paged you. He’s waiting for you in the principal’s office.”

  “Am I in trouble?” Alice asked archly.

  To her surprise, the secretary only shook her head, looking flustered, and gestured at the principal’s door even more anxiously.

  Leafing through her pile of fundraiser fliers and dress code memos, Alice opened the door absently, and drew up short.

  Sitting in Principal Wetch’s seat was an undeniably impressive figure.

  At six foot four inches tall, Alice was used to towering over other women, and even many men. But when this man stood politely when she entered the room, she had to look up to meet his eyes, and his shoulders were proportionally broad. His suit, probably worth twice Alice’s middle-school gym teacher salary, did nothing to hide the fact that he was incredibly ripped. His brisk handshake was strong and he was dead handsome, with a strong, clean-shaven jaw, and an artistic touch of gray in his short, dark hair.

  Alice would have eaten her dirty gym socks if he wasn’t a shifter, and her bear rumbled in cautious agreement.

  “Can I help you?” Alice asked, sitting across from him at his imperious gesture. She started to sit gingerly, then slouched deliberately.

  “I think you can,” he said in a silky voice, settling into the principal’s seat and leaning back. “I understand you’ll be traveling just after the end of the semester for your coworker’s wedding.”

  “Yeeeeees,” Alice said, drawing out the word. “Is there some problem with that? I should have my grades done in plenty of time. I’m only a gym teacher.” She could not quite keep the challenge out of her voice; she never backed down from a fight, and she sensed that this would shortly become one.

  He smiled at her. “You’re a bear shifter.” It wasn’t a question.

  Alice froze, and could not help glancing at the door, still barely ajar. Shifters were a well-kept secret in this area.

  Before she could formulate a response to his statement, he went on. “You have a brother in Oregon, and two aging parents here in Lakefield.”

  He gave her a conspiratorial look. “Such a shame that they’ll be losing the house.”

  He continued before Alice could so much as blink at him.

  “You teach gym at Lakefield Middle, and have been the wrestling coach here for seven years. You’ve taken them to regionals three years running, which is very impressive for a school of this size. You never returned your last rental to Blockbuster before they went out of business five years ago. Your bank account has seven hundred and twenty-three dollars in it, and you have lined up an under-the-table summer job at a construction firm laying concrete forms.”

  Alice wasn’t the sort to stare. Glare maybe, if a student needed to be intimidated, but staring was for women who were easily shocked, or let themselves be surprised.

  She was staring now.

  “Interesting, that your last visit to Shifting Sands Resort ended up being canceled due to... what was it? Chicken pox?”

  Alice didn’t believe for a moment that his hesitation was anything but feigned for effect.

  “It’s rare for adults to contract chicken pox,” the strange shifter observed. “Rarer still for shifters to get it.”

  “You need a note from my doctor?” Alice asked mockingly. She made herself keep her casual posture, even though she and her bear were both bristling in alarm.

  “I already have it,” the man said casually. “But it’s a little odd that it was from a doctor in Portland. And that your airline tickets were changed at the last minute to Oregon, rather than Costa Rica. Took a bit of a hit on that, didn’t you?”

  Alice was done pretending. “What do you want?” she asked outright, sitting forward and planting her feet.

  The stranger smiled slowly. “I have a matter of interest at the resort, a problem that has recently escalated, and one that has proved unexpectedly challenging.”

  Alice immediately distrusted his tone. “What kind of interest?” she demanded. “And what does this have to do with me?”

  “I have an offer for you,” the man said smoothly, not answering any of her questions. “One that will more than cover your time and any inconvenience. One that will more than cover the medical costs your brother needs.”

  Alice felt her heart drop out of her chest. “What do you know about that?” she asked fiercely, not even trying to pretend ignorance.

  “I know that a million dollars will go a long way towards his care and comfort. With plenty left over to buy your parents a lovely retirement home.”

  Alice forced herself to act like she wasn’t intimidated, though her stomach and her heart seemed to be having a wrestling match in her belly. “Oh, a million dollars,” she said mockingly. “Is that all?”

  “Very well,” the shifter across the desk said, his mouth curving up in a smile that indicated he knew she was bluffing. “Fifty million. Money is no object to me.”

  Alice had always thought that breaking into a sweat from anything bu
t exertion was just literary nonsense, but she did now. “Fifty million?” she murmured, in a very un-Alice way. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

  He laughed, and it was a surprisingly warm laugh. “Don’t look so shocked, Alice. I’m not going to have you murder anyone.”

  That had been the only thing Alice could imagine for that kind of money, but she somehow didn’t feel relieved. “What is it you want me to do?” she repeated.

  “The owner of the resort is a woman named Scarlet Stanson.”

  You don’t have to murder her, Alice had to remind herself.

  The man slid a business card across the desk. “All you have to do is find out what kind of shifter she is.”

  Chapter 2

  “Conall says Gizelle’s been in her animal form for nearly the whole day, the poor dear,” Laura said, sidling up beside Graham Long at the open door of the refrigerator. The wolf shifter wasn’t talking to him, but to her identical twin sister Jenny, the otter shifter sitting at the kitchen bar.

  “She’s a little shaken by the idea of Neal coming back to Shifting Sands,” Jenny explained. “He’s the one who coaxed her back to human form, and she was pretty broken up when he left with Mary.”

  “Was she in love with him?” Laura asked, slipping under Graham’s arm to take a plate of leftover Alaska salmon filet and a bottle of orange juice.

  “Nothing like that,” Tex, Laura’s bear shifter mate, was quick to assure her. “But he was the first one she really trusted. I think she’s worried that Neal won’t like who she is now. She’s changed so much since they last saw each other.”

  Laura, having poured them all glasses of orange juice, ducked back under Graham’s arm to return the bottle.

  Graham was still standing in front of the open fridge, eyeing the contents without interest. Nothing looked appealing, but he still felt oddly hungry, and his lion was pacing restlessly in his head. Finally, he snagged two cold breakfast sausages and a croissant and took a cluster of apple bananas from the fruit bowl.

  The others nodded at him as Graham took the stool at the end of the bar where Laura had left him a glass of cold juice, and he nodded back. That was as much conversation as they generally expected from him.

  “I’m sure Gizelle will be fine once he’s here and they’ve had a chance to reconnect,” Tex said. “I’m more worried about how Conall is going to react to Neal.”

  Conall, Gizelle’s mate, was a deaf Irish elk shifter. Losing his hearing had been devastating to his soaring music career, and he had been unfriendly and prickly when he first arrived at Shifting Sands.

  Gizelle’s love had mellowed him considerably, and her touch allowed him to hear, but he was still cool and grim around strangers, and he was intensely protective of his mate.

  Maned red wolf shifter Neal, once a prisoner in the same shifter zoo that Gizelle had grown up in, had been a hardened Marine before his capture. He had been key in helping Gizelle find her way back to her human form when they were freed, but he was not overly friendly or easy to get to know.

  Now, after more than a year, he was returning to wed his mate, Mary, and would see the young woman that Gizelle had blossomed into for the first time.

  “Even if Conall and Neal can’t stand each other, this wedding should still go much more smoothly than our last one,” Laura laughed. They were still picking up the pieces of the last wedding that Shifting Sands had hosted, one that had ended in a bloody duel, a happily jilted groom, and the establishment of a small shifter retirement home on the island.

  “Well, Neal probably won’t sue the resort, at least,” Tex agreed. “And Mary isn’t going to leave him at the altar to marry a waiter like Darla did. Probably.”

  They all laughed, except Graham, who caught his face before it could smile.

  Jenny, who worked as Scarlet’s lawyer, grimaced as the laughter faded.

  Her mate Travis, the resort handyman, caught her expression and asked, “Any word from Darla’s dreadful mother on that lawsuit she threatened?”

  “Not yet,” Jenny said. “But we’re expecting the worst.”

  “Horray,” Laura said humorlessly.

  Jenny frowned. “What I really don’t understand is why Scarlet isn’t trying harder to find Aaric Lyons’ heir. My firm found some really promising leads, but she’s actually told me to stop pursuing them.”

  Graham hunched over his food, feeling his ears heat.

  Benedict Beehag, the heir to the shifter zoo that Gizelle and Neal had been trapped in, owned the entire island, and had been trying to sell it out from underneath Scarlet and dissolve their contract since he had inherited. The unfortunate part was that he seemed to be going out of his way to market it to the very worst kind of underworld characters, and he had even tried to hire away Scarlet’s most trusted staff in a hostile takeover.

  Scarlet, with the help of Jenny, had been able to thwart his efforts at every turn, but Beehag had proved unpleasant as a landlord, and had not given up trying to sell the property, though each prospective buyer seemed more unsavory than the last.

  Jenny had recently discovered an obscure clause in the lengthy contract that required Beehag to give the heir of the original owner, Rupert Beehag’s partner Aaric Lyons, first right of refusal on any subsequent sales of the property. Everyone had assumed the line had died out, but Jenny uncovered records for a grandson, Grant Lyons, who had moved to America and presumably changed his name.

  “Money?” Laura suggested. “Even if Darla’s mother doesn’t sue, there’s no way she’s paying off the remainder of her bill for that wedding, and Scarlet went all out on the expenses for it. The resort can’t be doing well, financially. Maybe she figures she doesn’t have the funds to buy the resort, so why bother? Maybe she doesn’t want to risk the funds on hiring detectives?”

  Jenny shook her head. “This would be calling in favors from people I’ve worked for; it wouldn’t even cost her. And there’s a possibility—even if it’s slim—that when we find him, we’ll find that Lyons’ got the money for the sale. He can’t be a more unappealing landlord than our current one.”

  “Do you have any idea why she’s balking?” Tex asked Travis. “You’ve been here longer than anyone but Graham.”

  Travis shook his head.

  Graham had been studiously peeling his apple bananas, keeping his head down and hoping he didn’t look guilty, and he was startled into looking up at the sound of his name.

  His fake name.

  “Do you have any ideas?” Laura had been looking his way, and Graham scowled to cover his confusion.

  He only grunted and shrugged one shoulder in answer, and was relieved when no one seemed to expect anything else. They turned the conversation to happier plans for the upcoming wedding.

  He finished his breakfast as quickly as he could, cursing the tiny, challenging peels of the miniature bananas and his own instinct to crush them rather than disrobe them.

  Then he escaped, dumping his peels in the trash and leaving his plate in the sink.

  He scowled to himself as he stalked to the kitchen to get Chef’s request for produce from the garden.

  He’d gotten used to being Graham. He felt like Graham.

  Graham was hard working and quiet. He was dependable and steady. He was solid.

  Graham was someone who had friends, however reluctantly. Friends who trusted him, and included him in their jokes, and asked him for favors. Friends he actually wanted to do favors for.

  Graham was a good guy.

  But he wasn’t really Graham.

  And Grant Lyons wasn’t any of those things.

  Chapter 3

  “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if you met your mate here, too?”

  Alice pretended to laugh. “Har har,” she offered, hoping it sounded less bitter to them than it did to her.

  Her co-worker and best friend Mary meant well, of course. And Amber, who was snickering as she climbed out of the poorly-sprung resort van, didn’t have a mean bone in her body. (She als
o looked almost exactly like she had when she and Alice were rooming together, which was terribly unfair.) Neither of them realized how much the idea of mates hurt Alice.

  “Oh my gosh, the entrance looks exactly the same as it did,” Amber exclaimed. “Wow, the memories! The smells! The flowers! Oh my gosh, the flowers on that hyacinth!”

  Mary had her nose in the air as well. “What amazing surprise has Chef concocted?” she wondered out loud.

  “Pot roast,” Amber deduced. “With a garlicky marinade and a side of fresh roasted radishes and some kind of onion soup, and I think chocolate for dessert.”

  Alice stared at her as her own bear confirmed every one of those smells in turn. “Pregnancy nose is so weird,” she said in awe. “You couldn’t even smell the difference between dish soap and toilet cleaner when we were rooming together.”

  Amber, who was not quite to the stage of waddling, but well past the dangerous-to-ask ‘plump or pregnant?’ phase, smiled. “It’s not entirely a blessing! I had to kick the cat off the bed because she smelled like cat spit,” she confided. “And if I weren’t already banned from scooping the catbox, I would be incapable of it for the stench.”

  She reached for her bag, but Tony, coming around from the other side of the van where he’d been talking with a man he had greeted as Travis, stopped her. “You aren’t supposed to carry heavy things!” he insisted, grabbing it first.

  “It’s not heavy,” Amber protested.

  Tony gave a harrumph of disbelief and shouldered the bag anyway.

  “You know, women have been giving birth and carrying their own luggage for thousands of years,” Amber reminded him.

  “Be glad I’m not insisting on carrying you,” Tony said, ignored the laughing protests of Travis as he scooped up half their luggage and sailed into the resort entrance. “I know where our cottages are, you girls check in!”

  Neal, Mary’s mate, grinned and silently took another load of luggage in his wake.

  There were other guests already queued to check in at the desk in the glorious little courtyard and while Amber and Mary chattered about weddings and babies, Alice found herself scrutinizing the woman behind the desk.