Lion's Hunt: BBW Lion Shifter Paranormal Romance Read online

  That was a nicely sanitized version of events, Seth decided.

  “Oh, I hope everything was all right.” Cassie bit her lip. “Was someone sick?”

  How to answer that? His lion roared at him to be truthful.

  “Not exactly,” Seth said slowly. “My brother needed my help with a problem he was having with his business.”

  “Wow,” said Cassie. “I think I’m jealous. I’m an only child, and I always wished I had brothers and sisters. You sound like you’re close to your brother.”

  ...now how to answer that one?

  This was going to make him crazy before long. All he wanted to do was pull Cassie close and tell her everything. He couldn’t keep lying to his mate.

  “I wish my brother and I were closer,” he found himself saying.

  The words were a surprise. He’d always told himself that both he and his siblings were happier when he was away.

  But this was the truth. Seth remembered how he’d felt hearing Max’s voicemail in Peru. Even though the situation had been worrisome, hearing his brother’s voice after months of silence had filled him with relief.

  “I’ve always had a bad case of wanderlust,” he said, “and it meant that I didn’t always get along with my family when I was living at home. All I wanted was to get away. And now that I am away most of the time...I don’t see them as much as I wish I did.”

  His lion purred approvingly. That was something Seth hadn’t told anyone.

  Not even himself.

  “That’s hard,” Cassie said softly. “When you’re stuck in a pattern like that.”

  “That’s exactly it.” She’d hit the nail right on the head. “We have a pattern to how we interact. It’s hard to break.”

  She nodded. “It is. My parents...they’re wonderful, but they still think I’m a kid. That’s our pattern. I can’t seem to get them to understand that what they want for me isn’t the best thing anymore. And they never listen when I try to tell them what I want.”

  “I know the feeling.” Seth could remember quite a few angry arguments with his father along just those lines. “What do they want for you?”

  “Oh...” Cassie shrugged. “A stable job, a nice house, a good husband. Normal things. Whenever I talk to them about backpacking through South America or something like that, it’s always, ‘That doesn’t sound safe at all!’ I don’t think they really understand how much I want to see the world, experience more than just this.” She waved a hand toward the office

  Seth touched her shoulder. Just for a moment, a work-appropriate touch, but feeling the warmth of her skin through the thin fabric of her shirt was enough to drive him crazy.

  “My father was similar,” he said to distract himself. “He just wanted me to start working, making money. He didn’t understand that business and money aren’t so important to me. They were the most important thing in the world to him, but for me...” He shook his head. “As long as I have enough to keep myself going, that’s all that matters. I’m passionate about seeing the world, not about money.”

  Although that wasn’t all anymore, was it?

  “And...I’m passionate about my family.” He laughed a little. “I would never have said that in the past, but it’s true. And that is something my father never understood at all.”

  Cassie’s eyes were so deep, an endless chocolate brown, and he could see the care and the connection in them. “I understand,” she said.

  “Yes,” Seth said softly. “I think you do.”

  ***

  Cassie was trying very, very hard to stay professional.

  It was tough, though, when Seth smiled at her, his golden eyes warm with...what? Cassie hadn’t been able to figure it out yet. There was something there, she knew it.

  But she kept getting distracted by other things, like the strong line of his jaw, or the muscles moving underneath his work shirt when he stretched...or the pain in his voice when he talked about his family.

  It seemed like he’d had a difficult relationship with his father. Just from the way Seth sounded when he reminisced, their problems had been worse than any of the occasional annoyance she felt at her own parents.

  She felt the strangest urge to press him about it, to try and get him to open up even more. That wasn’t like her—she was always happy to hear about others’ lives, but she would never try to get someone to tell a secret, or talk about something that made them uncomfortable.

  But for some reason she felt like she needed to get Seth to talk.

  It was an inappropriate thing to think about even a casual friend, let alone a business acquaintance. Which, no matter how much Cassie might want something more, was all Seth was. She’d definitely been wrong about him being a jerk, but that didn’t mean that he was going to ask her out during a tax audit.

  On the other hand, they really did seem to understand each other. They even felt the same way about traveling, although he’d been doing much more of it than she had.

  She was incredibly envious of the travel experience he’d had. The IRS must have a pretty generous vacation package, and he seemed like he’d taken full advantage of it. But he wasn’t boastful about it like some people she’d known.

  But as wonderful as Seth seemed to be, and as sexy as he looked even sitting in her drab office, and as vulnerable as he’d seemed talking about his family...

  He was still here as part of his job, and it was her job to focus on helping him out.

  And not think about how he’d look even sexier dressed in hiking gear and striding confidently up a mountain somewhere. Or how she could get him to open up more about his family.

  Focus. “It’s officially nine o’clock,” Cassie said, waving at the clock up on the office wall. “So I guess it’s time to actually get started with all of this, right?”

  Seth made a face at the pile of paper. It was unexpectedly cute, and Cassie stifled a giggle.

  She had to wonder how an IRS agent got through the day at his job if he hated paperwork.

  Maybe he was like Cassie, always daydreaming about his next trip.

  “All right, start walking me through it, then.” Seth looked like he was gearing up for a marathon torture session.

  Unfortunately, Cassie couldn’t make it any more interesting for him. Especially since Dave had told her to leave the Secret Lab to him.

  “Okay, let’s start with this office,” she said, and they bent down to look at the pile of paper together. They were close enough that Cassie could smell his warm, masculine scent. He didn’t smell like a man in a cubicle, wearing a suit; he smelled like someone who spent his days outside in the sun.

  “Sounds good,” Seth said, and for a second Cassie wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

  Oh, right. Work.

  “Cassie!”

  She and Seth both startled as Dave’s voice rang out across the room. “Are you all ready for that idiot IRS guy to—oh.” Dave stopped short when he reached her desk.

  Seth stood up smoothly, once again stretching up so tall that Cassie had to crane her neck. “Hi,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Seth. I’m the idiot IRS guy.”

  Cassie stifled a laugh.

  “I apologize,” Dave said, very stiffly. “We weren’t expecting you this early.”

  “I like to get started with an audit as soon as possible,” Seth said blandly. Cassie couldn’t say how, because nothing in Seth’s expression gave it away, but she could sense that he was laughing on the inside.

  “Of course. Well, Cassie knows her way around all the books, so she’ll be walking you through whatever you want to know. Feel free to come to me for anything, of course, but for the most part she knows the numbers just as well as I do. I’ll see you later today to go over some final issues.”

  Seth nodded seriously. “Sure thing.”

  “Fine, then...carry on.” Dave gave them both an abrupt nod and stalked off.

  Seth waited until Dave’s office door closed behind him, and then dropped back in his chair an
d started laughing. Quietly, but with feeling.

  Cassie couldn’t help but join in, even though she knew it was unprofessional. “So, um, that was my boss?” she offered.

  “Seems like a real prize.” Seth’s laughter trailed off, and his expression suddenly sobered. “He seems like he puts a lot of responsibility on you.”

  Cassie rolled her eyes. “If Dave got kidnapped by aliens tomorrow, I guarantee you I could do his job. I even know all his passwords.”

  And if he got kidnapped by aliens, maybe Cassie could finally figure out what the Secret Lab was for.

  It had been a great temptation to use Dave’s passwords to snoop on his computer and figure it out herself, but so far she’d resisted it. Hiking out there and seeing for herself sounded like much more fun, for one thing.

  She brought her focus back to the moment. No Secret Lab shenanigans today, on Dave’s orders. Just lots and lots of legitimate numbers.

  Seth was looking at the stack of paper with another frown on his face, but his eyes were unfocused, and she got the sense that his mind was far away. “Ready?” she asked.

  He shook himself—it was a funny motion, startled and graceful at the same time; he looked almost like a cat. “Ready.”

  “Okay, page one...”

  ***

  Over the course of the day, it became clearer and clearer that Cassie knew everything about the regional office’s financials. She explained all of the raw numbers in terms that made perfect sense to Seth, who really had only a rudimentary understanding of tax accounting.

  Cassie obviously wasn’t a forensic accountant herself, but she was smart and capable and from what she said, she’d been working with all of this data closely enough to have it down backwards and forwards.

  That still didn’t answer the question of how much she knew about the lab.

  They’d started with the office itself, and Cassie was slowly working through all of the data for employees and expenses related to the actual business practices, not any research or development. They hadn’t even gotten to the legitimate research labs yet.

  Seth didn’t know what he was going to do if it turned out that Cassie was in on whatever Hendricks was doing out here.

  On the other hand, if she was in on it, maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe Max was wrong.

  Except Max was never, ever wrong.

  And the day went by slowly, with Cassie patiently turning the pages of her document and explaining what each of the tables and spreadsheets represented, showing him the calculations.

  It was the sort of thing that Seth would ordinarily find hard to concentrate on, but the stakes were so high that he focused on every spreadsheet with laser-attention.

  And Cassie’s voice was a continuous thread, rising and falling with each new set of numbers. It was a throaty contralto that he could listen to all day, even if she’d been reading the phone book. Seth felt himself tuning his ears to it as the day went on: this was his mate’s voice. This woman’s voice would call his attention whenever he heard it for the rest of his life.

  So he listened to Cassie detail the numbers. She placed a finger at the top of each page when she turned it and ran it down as she talked. Her fingers were long and graceful, and her fingernails were painted an entertaining shade of sparkly green, slightly chipped.

  And in the end, it was only because Seth was paying such close attention to Cassie herself that he noticed it.

  There was one office expenditure that she faltered over. Her voice stuttered. Her finger, which had been running smoothly down the entries, was snatched momentarily back from the page.

  Seth focused on that entry. It was a weirdly large expenditure for...gas? “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Oh,” Cassie said, “that’s just Dave’s company car. He drives out to—to one of the research sites a lot. It’s the closest one, and he likes to keep an eye on it.”

  Seth’s heart sank.

  That was a guilty stutter. Cassie was obviously not a good liar, and she was lying about this. ‘One of the research sites’ must mean Hendricks’ lab.

  And she knew something about it.

  All at once, Seth came to a decision. “Cassie, let’s take a break.”

  “Okay.” She looked relieved to be off the hook about the gas bill.

  Seth stood up. “Can you show me around outside for a few minutes? It looks like the scenery is gorgeous around here.”

  “It’s beautiful. One of my favorite things about this office is eating my lunch outside and looking at the mountains...hold on one second...” She located her purse and hopped up. “Okay, let’s do it.”

  He let her lead the way out of the building, through a back entrance. The office was on the edge of town, and five minutes of walking took them to a bridge over a small stream coming down from the mountains stretching above their heads.

  “There’s beautiful path heading up into the mountains here,” Cassie said over her shoulder, skipping easily along over the bridge in her heels. Seth followed with a heavy heart and heavier footsteps, hoping that the conversation they were about to have didn’t go terribly wrong.

  When they’d crossed the bridge and there seemed to be nobody around, even to Seth’s sensitive shifter ears and nose, he caught up to Cassie. “I need to ask you something,” he said. “And I know we don’t know each other very well yet, but I really need you to be honest about the answer.”

  She blinked, clearly perplexed. “What is it?”

  “Do you know what’s going on in the research facility that Dave drives out to?”

  Her eyes went wide. For a long second, she just stared at him.

  “Why are you asking this?” she said finally.

  “I can’t tell you yet.”

  She shook her head firmly. “Nope. If I have to answer your question, you have to answer mine.”

  Well, that was fair.

  Besides, what was Seth going to do even if she did know about the lab? Keep pretending to be a normal IRS agent? Run back to Max and never see her again? She was his mate.

  And he couldn’t believe that she would be involved in anything wrong. She was so fresh and honest. He’d seen her trying to lie just a few minutes ago, and she’d been awful at it.

  She was looking at him expectantly, as if to say, You first, buddy.

  So he took the plunge. “I’m not really an IRS agent.”

  Her eyebrows came together in a frown. “What?”

  “My full name is Seth Rowland. I’m Max Rowland’s brother.”

  Those eyebrows shot up. “You mean, like the Max Rowland? Your brother owns the company?”

  “Yep.” Thinking of the receptionist back in New York, he pulled out his wallet to show her his driver’s license.

  She studied it, then looked up at him, then back at the license. “Wow. Okay.”

  “You believe me?” Even with the license, he hadn’t expected it to be this easy.

  “There’s something about you.” She looked away, and a blush started rising on her cheeks. “I can’t explain it. You have a kind of a...presence. I thought it was strange that an IRS agent should be so...I don’t know.”

  She feels it too. Seth was sure that what she was describing was her experience of the mate bond. He hadn’t known how a non-shifter would experience the bond, but clearly Cassie knew that something was going on, even if she wasn’t sure what.

  But that was a whole different conversation.

  “My brother sent me here to investigate that lab,” he explained. “He thinks our CFO, Carl Hendricks, set it up to do something in secret, without him knowing about it. He thinks it might be...unethical in some way.”

  Cassie’s face fell. “Oh.”

  “What is it?”

  “I knew there was something up.” She turned away and glared up at a mountaintop. “I knew it! Everything about that place is weird. The personnel, the requisitions, the way Dave acts about it...it’s just weird.”

  Seth let out a silent sigh of relief. She wasn�
�t involved. Of course she wasn’t. And of course she’d noticed something was up.

  She turned back to him. “But I don’t know what they’re doing. You have to believe me. I thought that it was just some kind of...top-secret government project, like they were building a vanishing ray or researching the zombie apocalypse or something dumb like that. I didn’t realize it was a secret from the company. I promise I didn’t.”

  Seth couldn’t help himself. He reached out to take Cassie’s hands in both of his. “I believe you,” he said, gripping her fingers and looking deep into her endless dark brown eyes. “Don’t worry. I know you haven’t done anything wrong.”

  She let out her breath. “Thank you.”

  But then she pulled away. “But I have done something wrong. Like I said, I knew something was up. And Dave told me not to tell you—you, an IRS agent, or we thought so—anything about that place! He said he’d do it himself, but I knew he was going to lie to you. All of the spreadsheets for the lab’s financials are clearly hiding something. I should’ve...I don’t know, reported it or something.”

  Seth shook his head firmly. “No, you were doing your job. And like you said, you thought it was something for the government, something legitimate that the company was working on. Even now, we don’t even know what they’re actually doing. The only reason I said it was unethical was because that’s what my brother thinks, and even he doesn’t have any concrete information.”

  “Well,” said Cassie, “then we need to find out.”

  Seth felt his heart swell with love. This smart, determined, passionate woman was his mate. And instead of being caught up in something terrible, she was gearing up to fight it alongside him.

  ***

  Cassie could not believe she’d been such an idiot. Why on earth had she thought that the lab was doing something legitimate when Dave had told her to keep it secret from the IRS?

  She’d thought she was savvier than that, but apparently she’d been wrong.

  Well, now she knew the truth. She believed Seth wholeheartedly—what he’d said just rang true, in a way that nothing Dave said about the lab ever had.