Timothy by Bailey Bradford Page B

meanwhile he wanted Tim to know him just as he wanted to know Tim. The best way to do that was to talk, and since Otto fully intended to jump Tim’s bones as soon as they got home, now seemed a good time to converse.
    “My parents sent me to live with my uncle, James Otto Marquat, once I turned twelve. Just for the school terms,” Otto clarified. “And obviously, James is who I’m named after. He and Dad are twins, but Uncle James and his wife Kay never had kids, so they got me for most of the year until I graduated from the private school I went to. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin then came back here to live. I still visit Uncle James and Aunt Kay a couple of times a year, but they live in Florida now.”
    “Must be nice, knowing your heritage like you do,” Tim mused. Tim twisted around and studied Naran. Otto concentrated on her as well and ascertained she was asleep. The soft snores she was emitting helped with the diagnosis. Still, when Tim spoke his voice was barely even a whisper. Otto wouldn’t have been able to hear him without the sharpened senses he had. “My grandmother Marybeth was born in the Himalayas, and her entire shifter clan was slaughtered when she was just a kid. The hunters who killed them thought they were just snow leopards, and—” Tim cut off on a curse word. “Okay, I can see where Naran might have a point about how to deal with people involved in poaching on the buying or selling end. Still, I think it was just the way things were done, which doesn’t make it right at all, but the hunters are the ones who found Grandma in her human form, that of a six year old girl, and they took her and raised her. When she was older she met Vincent, my grandpa, and they fell in love, or were mates, I suppose. They moved to Colorado and Grandma just was too young when she lost her family. She knew very little about us.”
    Otto thought of the stories he had heard of a clan being wiped out in the Himalayas. The time period sounded right. He was sorry it’d been Tim’s family it had happened to, sorry it had happened at all, of course.
    Naran snorted in her sleep, then coughed and sputtered before lurching forward. “Drop me off at the shop, please,” she asked and Otto agreed. She probably had left her vehicle there.
    The silence in the vehicle was only mildly uncomfortable, but more from the lust springing to a more powerful life between he and Tim. Even Naran seemed affected as her scent grew stronger with arousal. She glared at him in the rearview and Otto had the sensation again of her knowing. Maybe she did, because the next glare was at Tim and Naran smacked the backs of both of their seats.
    “Stop it!”
    Tim yelped and clawed at his headrest as he twisted around in his seat. “What? What’d I do?”
    Naran turned up her nose and thumped Otto’s seat again. She spoke in a rapid-fire burst that even he had trouble understanding, but he did manage to eventually translate it for Tim—once Otto stopped laughing. “She said she is a lesbian and doesn’t feel attraction to men at all but between the two of us making crazy lust eyes at each other, she’s getting turned on and it’s creeping her the fuck out.”
    Naran spoke again and this time actually poked the back of Otto’s head for emphasis. “Ouch! Stop it, woman. She also said the pheromones are choking her.”
    “I’m sorry?” Tim questioned. “Uh, I can think of someone who repulses me, like this one guy trying for his party’s presidential nomination… Or actually, I can think of several of them. Uck.”
    Otto saw Tim shudder in his peripheral vision. “You don’t have to go that far. I wouldn’t want you totally out of the mood.”
    “They’d about do it,” Tim muttered. “Why is she staring at me?”
    “You funny,” Naran answered. “Stop. I go here.”
    Otto stopped the truck. They were still a few minutes from the shop. “Are you sure? It’s no problem to drive you on down a few more