Free Jaguar's Kiss (Lone Pine Pride) by Vivi Andrews Page B

was about mates and alliances and the good of the pride.”
    “Yeah, we always had fun.”
    “My life isn’t full of fun anymore. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect that it would be. Like when you grow up, that’s it, the fun’s over. But is that how it has to be? I feel like my life has been nothing but waiting for the last year. The perpetual holding pattern. And no one to blame but myself. I chose this. I’m the one who sits around in suspended animation, waiting for my life to begin rather than going out and getting it. Rather than looking at what I really want.”
    “It’s starting now,” Patch said. “You’re getting married.”
    I don’t want to get married. She couldn’t make herself say it out loud. “Yeah.”
    Lila came down off the log and stretched out beside Patch on the ground, not caring if it ruined her dress. Side by side, they stared up at the canopy in silence, shoulders brushing.
    “I lied to Santiago,” Lila admitted softly. “I don’t even know why I did it.” Because it felt safer, probably, hiding the truth.
    “What did you lie about?” Patch asked.
    “He asked me if I remembered the day we met and I said no.”
    Patch turned her head, frowning. “That must have been years ago.”
    “It was. We were playing football and I made him and Mateo join us. Remember?”
    “Not really, but it sounds like something you would do.”
    Lila remembered that day with crystalline clarity. How she’d been aware of his gaze the second it had touched her. How she’d played harder and laughed louder with him watching. How she’d used the flimsy excuse of two shifters leaving their make-shift game to cajole him into joining them. The way his eyes had laughed into hers across the line of scrimmage even though his mouth had stayed serious. And that moment, that unforgettable moment when he’d lifted her off her feet and taken them both to the ground and suddenly it hadn’t been play anymore.
    In that instant she’d felt the weight of something else, his intent, no longer playful, a line no one else had ever dared cross with her being breached. With him, for the first time, flirtation hadn’t been a game. It had been foreplay.
    And that scared the shit out of her. Because she couldn’t let herself want him. Not then. Not now. Not ever.
    “Silly thing to lie about,” she mumbled.
    “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Patch said idly. “He’ll be gone soon anyway.”
    Lila’s head snapped to the side. “What did you say?”
    “Santiago. He’s relocating to Seattle. Didn’t he mention it?”
    No. That couldn’t be right. He wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t stir her up and twist her in knots and then just vanish. “You must have heard him wrong.”
    “Maybe.” But Patch didn’t sound like she thought that was likely.
    Lila’s thoughts reeled.
    He’d kissed her. He’d said he wanted to kiss her again. He wouldn’t just up and leave after that. Though what had she done? She’d rejected him. She’d told him to stop. Told him she was marrying Roman. Avoided him. Run like hell. Why should he stay?
    But when she thought about the pride without Santiago, when she considered never seeing him again, that she might never look up and see him across the dining hall or on the other side of the compound, his eyes smoldering into hers, when she thought he might just walk away—no. It was wrong. He belonged here. Lone Pine wasn’t right without him.
    “I have to go.”
    She scrambled to her feet, barely aware of Patch’s soft “Lila?” behind her, already running down the path back toward the main compound.
    How dare he leave without even telling her? Sure, she hadn’t exactly made it easy for him to tell her in the last week when she’d been hiding from him, but she’d needed time to think things through. Time, damn it. Was that so much to ask for? He was asking her to rock her entire world to be with him and at the first sign of adversity he just up and moves to Seattle?
    No. Hell no.