Tarian Outcast (Page 6)

“You can shut up now, Dill-hole,” Kannon growled, shoving him in the shoulder hard as he passed.

“Ow!” Dillon complained.

Weiner.

Sure enough, Human Katy was walking across the parking lot right for them, bouncing with every step. She was sashaying her hips. Amused, he leaned against the open garage door frame and arched an eyebrow. “Are youuuu okay?”

“Oh, hi, fancy meeting you here,” she called. She was getting clumsier with her walking.

“Is your leg asleep?” he asked.

Human Katy sighed and her shoulders sagged as she started walking normal toward him. “No. I was trying to do that sexy strut like the hot girls on TV do, but I’m not very coordinated.”

He chuckled. Whoa. He was pretty sure that was the first laugh he’d had all day. He wasn’t about to admit how good it was to see her because she was human and off limits, so instead he asked, “You here to hand-deliver the suitcase I forgot?”

“Yep! I stalked you on the shifter website. Did you know it gives your work address and your Pride’s address?” she said, coming to a stop in front of him. “That’s kind of messed up.”

“Welcome to the life of a shifter.”

She beamed up at him with a megawatt smile, her eyes looking even brighter in the daylight with her mussed black bangs framing her face. Her hair was in those beach waves girls spent too much time to achieve, and she smelled like hairspray. Not gross hair spray, though. This one had some floral and mango scent. Tolerable.

He would’ve helped her escape her silent smiling and staring but, truth be told, he enjoyed seeing her awkwardly dig her way out of everything. So he just stood there smiling back.

Human Katy stopped blinking and made her eyes really big, so what the hell? He did the same.

“We’re having a staring contest,” she whispered. “No blinking.”

“What does the winner get?”

“What do you want?”

“So you admit I’m already gonna win?”

“No. Just…theoretically, what would you want to win?”

“A blow job in the back parking lot and a package of un-shucked peanuts. I like to leave the shells in the bed of Dillon’s truck and pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about when he rages.”

“I like it. Who is Dillon?”

Okay, his eyes were starting to dry out from this game, but he kept them open as he twitched his head behind him. “Co-worker. He’s a normie and obnoxious about ninety-five percent of the time, but sometimes he takes a nap on his break, and then he’s okay.”

Human Katy let off this tinkling laugh that did something funny to his heartbeat. “Okay to the peanuts, no to the blow job. I’m a very moral girl. Plus, I got called a whore yesterday, and I’m trying to shed my questionable reputation.”

A snarl rattled up his throat before he could stop it. Carefully he asked, “And who called you a whore?”

“Your new best friend.”

“Mmmm,” he said in a purr as he imagined all the ways he was going to slowly kill that prick, Dayton. “You aren’t a whore, but if I were you, do you know what I would do?”

She was prying her eyeballs open with her fingers now. “Advise me, oh strong one.”

“Go take a hot picture and post it. Own it. Look confident as fuck in it. Take the power away from that idiot’s insult. Now you go. What do you want if you win?”

“Tacos.”

Oh, crap, he blinked from his laughter. Touché.

“I won, I won, I shot the BB guuuun,” she sang.

“I haven’t heard that since I was a kid.”

“I say it all the time. Because I win. All the time. It’s a curse really, never being put in my place with losing.” She had her little chin lifted high in the air, and all her words were lies. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face if he tried. She was so damn cute. He cleared his throat and tried to compose his face. He meant she would be cute if she wasn’t a human.

“There’s a taco truck a couple streets over. I’ve got a lunch break after I finish this inspection and change a tire.”

“Yeah, I saw the food truck when I was driving in. My stomach growled when I cruised by it.”

“In your hotrod minivan.”

“Don’t knock my minivan. It has a spacious back seat for bumpin’ and grindin’. I would know because I’m a ho.”

Through his laughing, he rolled his eyes and said, “Fuckin’ stop with that. You don’t give off the ho vibes. It’s a good poem, though.”

“Thank youuu, thank youuuu. I’m hungry, so hurry and do hot mechanic stuff. I’ll wait here and watch you. In a completely non-creepy way, of course. But maybe pour a bottle of water over yourself before you change the tire. Momma needs to take pictures.”

“Oh, my God,” he murmured, shaking his head as he walked off. His face was gonna be sore from smiling tomorrow if he wasn’t careful.

The reality of what had just happened hit him as he returned to removing the skid plate off the front of the truck to finish the inspection. He’d just had a staring contest for peanuts and tacos with a pretty girl. He really liked her flavor of weird.

He would get her lunch as a thank you for returning his suitcase, and then he would move on and never see her again. Lions didn’t mix with humans. They were too fragile.

As the entire Pride had reiterated last night when they saw him making out with some humie on a dark road. Fuckin’ nosy spies. Ronin had her social media pages tracked down only minutes after they’d gotten back to the big house, and then Kannon got to hear a boring lecture on the dangers of human/shifter relationships. He’d literally fallen asleep during it. It’s not like Ronin was telling him anything new. It had been beaten into their heads since they were all cubs. Humans didn’t belong in the Tarian Pride. There had never been a single one in the history of Tarians, blah-blah-blah.

It’s not like Kannon was trying to marry her. Although she’d probably look hot in white. A vivid image sprung up of her walking down an aisle toward him, a white dress, her hair down, a bouquet of pink flowers in her hand tied in a white ribbon that was gently waving in the wind, her eyes on him…

Shit, why did he always do that? Kannon shook his head hard. Since he was a kid, he’d had these vivid imaginings that would hit him from nowhere. He wasn’t some future teller, either. He just had some glitch in his imagination that made little momentary wishes into a small sequence. Like a four second video that played in his mind. These that involved Human Katy, though, he didn’t like. He was going to have to say goodbye to her for good in an hour, maybe two, and he didn’t need these little fantasies making it harder on him. That was girl stuff, right? Imagining a scene from a wedding with a person he barely knew?

And now his lion was purring like a happy house cat.

Kannon was beginning to think something was seriously wrong with him.

Chapter Seven

Kannon was ridiculously hot.

Ridiculously. Like…no man had any business being that hot. That much hotness shoved into one being was just unfair to the mere mortal peons around him. These poor men he worked with didn’t have a shot at getting a girl’s attention. Not with Adonis Long Shlong sauntering around the garage like some demigod dressed in a grease-smeared white T-shirt, with mussed black hair, perfectly trimmed whiskers, chiseled jaw, full lips, and perfect teeth. And those brown eyes that turned a fiery gold, his man-nips poking out against his shirt, low-slung navy work pants, scuffed up boots, and muscles poking out every-damn-where. Even his Adam’s apple was hot. She needed to figure out a way to manipulate him into either taking his shirt off so she could count his abs or get him to enter a wet T-shirt contest. Either way, she wanted to see them belly bumps.

Geez, what was wrong with her?

Katy felt like snapping her teeth at a lady sitting in the waiting room with her, staring out the big picture window to the shop. She was watching Kannon, and fanning herself. And she had this little yappy dog that was barking right at Katy. In general, she liked dogs, but this one was interrupting her perverted thoughts.

“Denver, shhhhh,” the lady said. “Mommy’s busy.”

She didn’t take her eyes of Kannon, who was yanking a big metal bar and loosening a stubborn tire. Every muscle in his arms and back rippled with his effort.

Stare Face petted her dog without looking down at it. The dog didn’t look that impressed, probably because the lady was patting it right over the eyeballs and still not paying attention to it.

If Katy was a shifter, she would’ve morphed into her animal and bit the lady. But knowing her luck, she would be an oyster shifter who would just lay there, spit water, and confuse everyone.

There was a man, probably Dillon, who was standing beside the truck Kannon was working on, his arms crossed over his chest and a grumpy look on his face as he looked from Kannon to Katy and the pretty, yet annoying, appreciator of Kannon’s finer assets. “Oh, come on,” he called, his voice muffled through the glass.

With a frown, Kannon looked over his shoulder at Katy, and his face morphed into a wicked grin. He said something to Dillon, stood up, and sauntered to a mini fridge against the back wall, peeling off his shirt as he went.