Panther's Passion Read online

  Nate wanted nothing more than to go to her and say, seriously and without any hesitation, I will pay for Eva’s college. I will support you. Quit your job right now, and we can travel the world together.

  And he could. He wasn’t a billionaire or anything, but he ran one of the top security companies of its size in the Chicago area. If he’d wanted to expand, become a big business, he probably could have become a billionaire.

  He didn’t. He couldn’t stand the idea of losing the personal touch, being totally out of the loop about what was happening on the day-to-day.

  But he had plenty of money. Most of it was securely invested, based on his buddy Carlos’ recommendations. Carlos had gone into the business world after getting out of the Marines, determined to never have to want for anything, and had made a killing.

  Nate hadn’t wanted a killing. But he had wanted to be totally covered for retirement—which he hoped was still a long, long way away—and for any crises that might come up, plus a comfortable cushion for living large, if he ever decided to do so.

  Carlos had laughed at that idea. Nate had never been much for luxuries. But he’d given Nate solid advice, and now Nate had more money than he really knew what to do with.

  He donated some of it to charity, and otherwise ignored it. But using it to pay for Eva’s education—bright, thoughtful Eva, who Nate could already see was so like and so unlike her mother at the same time—well, that would be worth it.

  He just didn’t know how Stella was going to react. Carlos had talked to him, once, about how money could be used for control.

  “People think, oh yeah, free money, that sounds awesome,” he’d said. “They think, I totally want a sugar daddy or a sugar momma. Rich parents. But when someone gives you money, even if they don’t want to attach a string—that string is there. And it’s not going to go away.”

  Nate didn’t want Stella to feel that string.

  He was going to have to figure out exactly the right way to offer. But meanwhile...he was calling Carlos.

  “Nate,” Carlos answered, sounding pleasantly surprised. “What’s happening?”

  “I was wondering if you wanted to take a break from work and come help me on a job,” Nate said.

  Carlos made an explosive noise. “Would I. I will be on the next plane, my friend. Where am I going?”

  “That was fast.” Nate had expected to be put off by claims of responsibility to his job. High-level businessmen like Carlos usually couldn’t just take off from work without notice, no matter how much they—or, at least, Carlos—seemed to want to.

  “I’ll tell you about it when I get there. Where to?”

  “Glacier National Park,” Nate said, and waited.

  Sure enough, he could almost hear Carlos’ eyebrows go up. “What are you doing working a job in Cal’s hometown? Is he in trouble?”

  “No, nothing to do with him—I haven’t even seen him since I got here, actually.” Nate was going to have to look Cal up once the Todd situation was taken care of. Cal had married his mate Lillian only a few months ago, and their old Gunnery Sergeant would surely have some solid mate-related advice to impart.

  “No,” Nate continued, “this is Ken’s new sister-in-law. She’s in trouble.”

  “In trouble, huh?” Carlos was quiet for a second, and then said thoughtfully, “I guess Glacier Park is the place to be, since everyone seems to be congregating there. I’ll be there as fast as I can. Don’t suppose they have an airport.”

  Nate smiled to himself. “Don’t think they allow those in national parks, buddy.”

  “Right. Well, I’ll figure it out. Be there soon. And I’ll explain some things once I’m there.”

  “Same here,” Nate said, and hung up before Carlos could demand to know what sort of things he had to explain.

  Then he went back to the dishes. Everyone had a lot of figuring out to do, and they might as well do it in a clean house.

  ***

  Stella

  Stella went to talk to her daughter.

  She’d migrated off the porch back up to her room at some point, so Stella knocked softly and waited for the, “Come in.”

  Eva had been about ten when she’d started insisting that her mom knock and wait. It had been one of the first real signs of her growing up and wanting independence, and it had made Stella wistful for her babyhood—even though Eva’s babyhood had been the hardest time of her life.

  Now, her baby was all grown up and getting ready to apply to college, and the wistfulness was back.

  “Hey, mom.” Eva was dressed now, coffee consumed, munching on a granola bar and scrolling through her phone again.

  Eva was too supernaturally good to ever really need punishment—frankly, she was more mature than Stella was, some days—but if Stella had ever needed to punish her, threatening to take away her phone would probably make her willing to do anything in the world. She was practically surgically attached to it.

  “Hey,” Stella said, sitting down on the bed next to her. “Can I talk to you about something?”

  Something in Stella’s tone must have alerted Eva to the fact that this was serious, because—wonder of wonders!—she set her phone aside and looked up. “What is it?”

  “Well,” Stella said, “Nate and I...” She hesitated.

  Eva only took a second to get it. Or, at least, to get something. “Mom! He’s supposed to be bodyguarding you!”

  “No—I know—it’s not like—” Stella had to take a deep breath to compose herself.

  Meanwhile, Eva was rattling on. “I know he’s nice and, like, I guess pretty good-looking for an old guy, but Mom, you can’t just mack on your bodyguard—”

  “I know! And if you’ll let me get a word in edgewise, I’ll explain why this is different,” Stella said, with some I’m-Your-Mother snap to her voice.

  Eva subsided, looking mutinous.

  “It’s more than what you’re thinking,” Stella said carefully. “Nate and I have discovered that...we’re mates.”

  Eva’s eyes went round and huge. “Mates?”

  Stella nodded.

  “Like Aunt Lynn and Uncle Ken? Like Mavis and Colonel Hanes? Like—”

  “Yes, Eva, like all of those.” Stella wasn’t going to let herself think about the number of picture-perfect mates pairs there were in Glacier Park, all happily living here, quiet and domestic, many of them raising families...and how much she didn’t really want her life to look like that.

  “So,” Eva said, hesitatingly, “you’re going to be together...forever?”

  “That’s the idea,” Stella said on a long exhale.

  “Can you—uh, can you do that?”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Stella said dryly.

  Eva flushed. “Sorry.”

  “No—no, I’m sorry, honey. That’s totally fair. I know I haven’t seemed very interested in settling down before now.”

  Eva smiled a little. “I guess you could put it like that. But being mates is...different?”

  “It really, really is.” Stella was surprised to realize that she meant every word of that. The idea of leaving Nate, ever, for any reason, sent up a screaming sense of wrongness in her chest. Before now, she’d always been in the moment during her relationships, living with a sense of I’m here for the now.

  But now, she was here for the long haul.

  Eva was ahead of her, though, as usual. “Are we going to move again?” she asked tentatively.

  “Do you want to move? Nate lives in Chicago,” Stella said leadingly.

  Eva smiled a little. “I—Chicago would be awesome.”

  She didn’t sound as excited as Stella had thought she would. “I would’ve guessed you’d be jumping for joy at the thought of living in a big city for once. I thought all the nerds lived in big cities.”

  Eva laughed. “Not all of them. I just—I have this cool job here, and Aunt Lynn and Ken are here, and this house is really awesome, and the Park is right there, and we can shift whenever we
want. And...I made a couple of friends.”

  Stella raised her eyebrows. “Friends, or friends?”

  Eva blushed. “Mom! Stop it.”

  Stella held up her hands. “Okay, okay. Stopping. But you haven’t said anything about this before.”

  Eva made a face. “Didn’t want to jinx it. I thought they’d think I was weird or something. But they’re pretty weird, too, so.”

  “Good,” Stella said firmly. “The world needs more weirdness.”

  Although...this made everything more complicated.

  “So I don’t really want to move...right now,” Eva finished. She made a worried face. “Do we have to?”

  “No,” Stella said immediately. “Of course not, honey. We can absolutely stay here.”

  “Or, if you wanted to go live in Chicago, maybe I could live here with Aunt Lynn and Uncle Ken?” Eva asked tentatively.

  That idea tore at Stella’s heart. “No way,” she said. “You’re going off to college somewhere fabulous next year. I’m not leaving you behind for a whole year before I absolutely have to.”

  Eva smiled softly. “Okay. Thanks, Mom.”

  Stella leaned in and hugged her. “No charge.”

  Eva hugged her back, and Stella thanked her lucky stars for such a fantastic daughter.

  Eva pulled back, and said, with a kind of a light in her eyes, “Hey, do you still have to keep working at Oliver’s now?”

  “Eva!” Stella said, putting as much shock and admonishment in her voice as she could, to disguise the fact that the idea had, actually, crossed her own mind as well. “That’s not the sort of thing you can assume. We’re not going to be freeloaders on Nate’s generosity for the rest of our lives.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Eva sat forward, hugging a pillow. “You always say that you don’t have time to focus on your drawing because you’ve gotta put food on the table. You’re always working these crappy jobs for long hours because we need money. But now maybe you could just...be an artist? That’s a job.”

  “That’s a job that takes a lot more effort that just making drawings sometimes,” Stella said tartly, “and isn’t likely to make me any money anytime soon.”

  She knew because she’d tried it, here and there—selling drawings at local craft fairs, talking to tiny art galleries in Missoula, seeing if there was any way to build herself a website that didn’t involve a lot of tears or a lot of money. She’d come up essentially dry every time—even if she sold a drawing or two at a fair, that didn’t make her enough money to be anywhere near worth it.

  “That’s my point, Mom,” Eva said patiently. “Now you could take some time to do it. To build up a customer base.”

  “I don’t—I don’t know anything about doing that,” Stella said, because she couldn’t quite say, Nate wouldn’t put up with that.

  She’d dated plenty of guys who’d been disdainful about the idea of trying to make money from art, but even though they hadn’t discussed it, she knew Nate wasn’t going to be one of them.

  “Talk to Nina’s mom.” Eva looked really excited now, possibly because she’d brought this up before but this was the first time Stella had entertained the idea past the first sentence or two. “She consults with small businesses, remember? She taught Aunt Lynn how to turn her guide business into something that really makes a profit. She’d know what to do.”

  “I—” I can’t. Stella only knew Mavis a little bit. She was Colonel Hanes’ mate, and Lynn’s friend, and she’d helped them all drive Todd’s pack off when they’d shown up at the house.

  She was also a beautiful, graceful, capable, professional woman, who always seemed to know what to say, and who had a track record of helping all sorts of local businesses around Glacier Park get back on their feet.

  Stella found her intimidating as hell. But she couldn’t admit that to Eva, not when her daughter was looking at her with those hopeful eyes.

  “I’ll...see what I can do,” she managed.

  “Great!” Eva said. “I’ll let Nina know that you want to talk to her mom.”

  Wait, don’t— But it was too late: Eva had already grabbed her phone and was texting.

  “I didn’t know that you and Nina were close,” Stella managed. It looked like Eva was having a whole social life that Stella hadn’t even known existed.

  Eva shrugged. “She’s nice. She’s moved around a lot, too, although she was by herself and it sounded like it really sucked, not like us.” She looked up. “She told me that meeting Joel and finding a pack here with the snow leopards was the best thing that ever happened to her. Does Nate have a pack?”

  “I...don’t think so.” Stella hadn’t asked. Nate hadn’t mentioned anything, though. Just his job.

  Eva’s face fell. “That’s too bad. Maybe he could move here and make a pack with us, instead of us moving to Chicago to be with him?”

  Stella hated to disappoint her, but she had to object with, “His job’s in Chicago, honey. His whole security company is based there. I’m sure there’s all kinds of work for a security consultant in Chicago that there isn’t up here in Glacier.”

  Although Nate did say he traveled a lot for work. That made Stella wistful in the way that living in a big city didn’t. If there was one perk she was going to demand in this relationship, it was that she get to tag along at least sometimes. When Nate was going somewhere particularly exciting.

  In this relationship.

  Jeez.

  “Oh,” Eva said softly. “Well, um. I guess we can move, if we really have to.”

  Eva was putting a brave face on. She’d done that before—there had been times when she was younger, when Stella had picked them up and moved them even though Eva really, really hadn’t wanted to. When she was very little, she’d thrown tantrums and told Stella, in all seriousness, that Stella was ruining her life. After she’d gotten older, she’d bitten her lip and insisted that she understood, that it was fine.

  But those had been the times when they had to. When Eva had liked the house they were living in or the boyfriend Stella had been dating...but that relationship was over, so they couldn’t stay there. When she’d lost a job, and so they’d had to move somewhere where there were different ones.

  When wanderlust grabbed her, she’d sit down with Eva and say, “Should we go somewhere else?” and wait. And if Eva’s face scrunched up and she shook her head...well, Stella would wait and ask her again later.

  This...was something in between. But Stella knew one thing for sure: they didn’t have to move. She had a job and a place for them both to live, and Eva had a school to go to and, apparently, friends to spend time with.

  And that, more than anything, made her want to stay. Because Eva had always had such a hard time making friends in the real world, instead of just on the Internet. Stella couldn’t quite bring herself to make her daughter abandon them, now that they were here.

  “So,” she said, settling herself more comfortably on the bed. “When do I get to meet these friends of yours? Want to have them over sometime?”

  “Mom,” Eva said, the song of the embarrassed teenager everywhere. “But we’re so weird.”

  Stella laughed. “But weird is good. Didn’t you say so yourself?”

  Eva subsided with a grumble, and Stella smiled to herself, despite the disquiet in the back of her mind.

  Her daughter was happy. She and Nate would just have to work everything out for themselves.

  ***

  Nate

  “Eva doesn’t want to move to Chicago.”

  Stella looked nervous. Nate set the broom aside—he cleaned when he was nervous, all right, it was a leftover habit from the Marines and at least it was something useful to do—and went over to take Stella’s hands.

  It was becoming a habit: reaching out to take her small, birdlike hands, pulling them up to his lips, pressing a kiss against the soft skin. He was already starting to memorize the way they felt against his mouth.

  He pictured doing this every day for the
next forty years, until he knew her hands better than he knew his own. It was a nice thought.

  “She has friends here,” Stella continued. “She has a hard time making friends. And she loves Lynn, always has. So I don’t think...I don’t think I should make her.”

  “Then you don’t have to,” Nate said immediately. “I told you before. I’m not going to insist that you totally uproot your life for me. There’s no reason you should automatically have to do that.”

  Stella made a face. “Well, I don’t want you to totally uproot your life for me, either. You have a job and a company that you love.”

  That was...mostly true. Nate did love his company. And he loved—parts of his job.

  An idea was starting to percolate in his head. “I might be able to think of a way to make this work,” he said slowly. “But I’d have to make some phone calls, talk some things over with people. Can we wait a couple of days?”

  “A couple of days to think about totally uprooting our lives?” Stella opened her eyes comically wide. “You stick-in-the-mud. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  Nate laughed at the sight of her.

  She relaxed her face after a second, and laughed with him. “The terrible thing is, at nineteen I would’ve said exactly the same thing, but it would’ve been serious.”

  Nate waved his hand. “We’re all idiots at nineteen.”

  “Except my daughter,” Stella said, rolling her eyes. “Who is seventeen going on forty sometimes.”

  “All the more reason to take her opinion seriously, then.” Nate kissed her beautiful mouth. “I should go talk to her, too, actually. I want her to know that I’m going to respect the both of you, and that she doesn’t have to worry about me whisking you guys away somewhere.”

  “Hurry up,” Stella said, glancing at the clock. “She has to go to work pretty soon.”

  And in fact, Eva’s footsteps sounded on the stairs. “Hey, Mom, I have to leave in like fifteen minutes, is there any food?” she asked.

  Nate glanced at Stella as he said, “Hey, Eva, why don’t I drive you to work? We can pick up some breakfast on the way.”