Free The Bobcat's Tate by Georgette St. Clair Page A

thinking about her.
    “ Hellooo.”
    Tate glanced up, startled. Loch was waving at him. He’d been trying to get Tate’s attention while Tate mentally drifted off to lala land.
    “Bobcat got your tongue?” Loch grinned at him . Damn it, was Tate’s sudden infatuation that obvious?
    “Mind your own beeswax,” he grumbled. “I’m headed back to Beaudreau’s to replant the flower bed. Call me if you need me.”
    And with a sigh, he climbed into his pickup truck and headed back to the Beaudreau Mansion, struggling without success to banish all thoughts of the sexy bobcat from his mind.

Chapter Five
    Lainey sat at the long wooden table, ignoring the early morning chatter that swirled around her, as the other boarding house guests dug into their home-cooked breakfast. She stared into the swirling depths of her coffee cup as if she were reading tea leaves, but she found no answers there.
    “Didn’t sleep too well last night?” Marigold said, sitting down in the spindle-backed chair next to her.
    “What was your first clue?”
    “The circles under your eyes, the frequent yawning, and you’re working on your second mugzilla of coffee.”
    Lainey looked down at her extra-large coffee mug. Light, sweet, life-saving. “Third. Insomnia. What can I say?”
    The truth wa s, after her encounter with Tate the day before, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She’d lain awake half the night imagining him naked, tangled in the sheets with her, his hungry mouth on hers…
    What did it mean? Was he her fated mate, or was she just in lust with an undeniably hot man who’d kind of flirted with her, maybe?
    “So you really, absolutely believe in this whole fated mate thing?” she asked Marigold.
    “Of course I do. It’s the equivalent of love at first sight for humans, but different. Stronger. At least that’s what shifters tell me, including my fiancé.”
    “Wouldn’t it make sense that fated mates would only fall for someone of the same species, though?”
    “Not necessarily. Shifters of different species can still have offspring, so why not? I don’t see how it’s any different than humans of different races. I have a leopard-shifter friend in New York who ended up with a wolf shifter. They have a kitten and a pup. Ask me how their kids get along. Go ahead, ask me.”
    Lainey snorted. Like she didn’t know where this was going. “I already know the answer, but if it makes you happy, I’ll ask. How do they get along?”
    “They fight like cats and dogs!” Marigold laughed hysterically at her own joke, slapping her knee with glee.
    “Very, very funny. Really, you’ve missed your true calling. But seriously…my mother swears up and down that the whole fated mate thing is just an old wives tale. A lot of city shifters think that.”
    “All these shifters who want to assimilate, to be more like humans…you can’t suppress your true nature. Your parents aren’t fated mates, I take it?”
    Lainey laughed at the thought. “Good heavens, no. One night when my mother had had a few too many gin and tonics, she told me about how she met a guy when she was in college, and she had that instant thunderbolt feeling, and she said that proved that the whole fated mate thing was a myth. She said the guy obviously wasn’t her fated mate, because he was poor. He was a maintenance worker. Her parents freaked out when they heard about it, yanked her out of school and made her go to a different college. They immediately fixed her up with my father, who came from the right sort of family.”
    “So…what’s their marriage like?”
    “Miserable. They have separate bedrooms. My parents think I don’t know, but my father’s never had a secretary that he didn’t bang, and my mother has a battery-operated boyfriend.”
    Eeek . Being tired apparently made her babble even more than being tipsy. Lainey was mortified. “Oh, God, she’d die if she knew I knew, and she’d die even more if she knew I told anyone.”
    Marigold