Lion In Wait (A Paranormal Alpha Lion Romance) by Lynn Red Page B

you’re spilling your soul,” she said, to lighten the mood. Thankfully, he smiled.
    “Yeah, I suppose that’s about what I’m going to do.” With his foot, Lex reached over and plucked the plastic bag off the ground, then tossed it straight into Cass’s hand.
    “I’ll never get over how you can do that,” she said, digging into the sack. “Holy shit, a comforter? Why—?”
    Time for another kiss. “Because I know how much you complain about these. And anyway, yeah, you get so cold at night that I’m pretty sure you’re going to drain my body heat and leave me hypothermic at some point. Plus, it’s soft. I like soft.”
    It was such a simple thing, just a blanket, but as she looked at it, and ran her hands through the fuzzy backing, and felt the weight on her arms when she pulled it around herself, tears ran down Cass’s cheeks and she couldn’t stop smiling.
    “I hope I didn’t get the wrong color,” he smiled, lying beside her, tucking one end of the blanket around Cass’s hips, and sliding underneath. He spooned her, inhaling the scent of her soft, lavender-scented shampoo, and growling deep down. “The blue matches your eyes.”
    She sniffed, but the tears were gone. “You’re physically incapable of not being smooth, huh? The color is perfect, but you forgot to answer my question.”
    “Well,” he said, kissing the spot beneath her ear that got Cass wiggling. “I’m sure I have my moments. After all, I did fall for your Trekkie trap, didn’t I?”
    “I know it’s hard,” Cass said in a whisper. “If you don’t want to tell me, just say so. But—”
    “I gave up,” he said. “I left the pride, left my family. It’s kind of... it happens. It isn’t very rare that one of us goes and experiences life somewhere else, but unless we’re ready to give our all to the pride, we don’t go back.”
    “Sounds very Amish.”
    Lex smiled at her, his eyes twinkling even in the vague light coming through the blanket. “Yeah, sorta, I guess,” he laughed. “I don’t know what I expected to find, but all I ended up with was a bunch of credit cards, a bunch of junk I didn’t need, and an apartment in some college town in Oklahoma. Let that register for a second.”
    She stifled a laugh. “Okay, so, a were-lion ends up living in some bachelor pad apartment in Oklahoma ? How the hell?”
    He got very serious all of a sudden. “I asked myself that over and over and over. I never shifted, never felt like I was me, just like I was running from who I really was. And honestly, that’s what I was doing, just running, pointlessly, for ever and ever. So, I ran again, convinced that if I just did it one last time that everything would be fine.”
    “Don’t tell me you got caught by some school and turned into a mascot?”
    “I never even thought of that as a possibility, but that may have been worse. That might be the only thing that could have been worse. No, I ended up on the run, sometimes sleeping in the woods, or the desert, or wherever. Other times I slept in cheap motels if I could scrape together the money.”
    Cass was shaking her head. “I guess I owe you an apology.”
    He gave her a confused quirk of an eyebrow. “Why?”
    “You said our stories weren’t all that different. I didn’t really believe you until now.”
    Lex nodded. “Well, either way, in the end, I tried to run one too many times. Everything caught up with me, and I just went sort of... feral, I guess. I got shot and captured by some half-assed zoo outside of Knoxville. I have no idea where they thought I came from, but I lasted with them about a month before they sold me to Lyle.”
    “Holy shit,” Cass said. “I had no idea.”
    “No one did, because I never told anyone. But now you know where I came from, I know where you came from, and we can put all of that behind us. We can just be who we want to be for the first time in... well in my life, anyway.”
    “Mine too,” she whispered. “Let’s, yeah,