Read Online Lion In Wait (A Paranormal Alpha Lion Romance) by Lynn Red - Free Book Online Page B

far,” he answered in a surprisingly flat way.
    “That’s very survival-oriented of you. I mean in school, didn’t make it through, just kind of fizzled out. Went too hard, too fast. Tried to do that thing where you try to please everyone. And then I started having breakdowns. After one particularly bad one,” she gulped back the emotion in her voice. “Anyway, I ran away, ended up on the street, then in a damn circus. How does that even happen? That’s stuff for books, stuff for Lifetime movies.”
    Again, Lex was silent for an extended time. The way he did that certainly had an effect: it caused Cass to slow down, to think about what she was saying. She wondered for a moment how many conversations like this she’d missed because of rattling through a bunch of questions and not actually listening to the answers.
    “That star might be a hundred million years old,” she said in an awe-struck voice. “Hell, it could be dead and gone by now and the light’s just now getting here.”
    “Why?” was Lex’s patently stolid one-word reply. He just let it hang, so apparently, that really was the end of what he was going to say.
    “Why the stars? Or why... why what?”
    “Why the circus,” he clarified.
    “Oh yeah, there’s a story. I’ve already blabbered more to you than I ever did dear old Max, though I was with him for a year and a half. So you first. Why were you in that horrible dirt circus?”
    He let out a soft chuckle. “Out of options,” was his cryptic reply. When Cass didn’t say anything, he finally took the cue. “I was adrift, no mate, no cubs, no place in the pride. My mother was the prima, my father the alpha, but I was in the middle of a clutch of cubs. My sister was born first, so she had all the responsibility, and by the time they got to number six – me – there wasn’t much to look forward to.”
    Cass rolled over on her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows. She watched the moonlight glint in Lex’s eyes. She kissed his cheek with a short peck, and then settled back into staring at him. “That’s very monarchical. The leading family, all the cubs. So, what, you just had to hit the road?”
    “Mmm, no, not had to,” he said. “More like didn’t see the point of not going. I’ve never been one to sit around and wait for something to happen. Like I said, no mate, no cubs, no jewelry on my arms,” he said in reference to hers. “No reason to stay in pride territory. Plus, the Mississippi delta is very humid.”
    “Right, so you end up in the desert.”
    “It isn’t humid.”
    Both of them took a second to laugh, a second to relieve the tension.
    “Okay, so,” she began. “How in the world did a lion shifter end up in Lyle Bertram’s circus?”
    “Just like yours, mine is quite a story.” And then he stopped speaking.
    “Oh, I’m supposed to go first?”
    He kissed her softly, pressing her head backwards just so, as his answer. When their lips parted, Lex’s had one of his almost cruelly sexy, half-grins on them.
    “Fine,” she said, sighing heavily. Cass crawled to her feet and began pacing as she recounted waking up in a mental ward, and then running away. She told him about the months on the street, working odd jobs to get enough for a bus ticket somewhere else. She described falling in love, falling out of it, dating a guy she didn’t really love, but who has very nice, and then finally not being able to handle that anymore, either.
    With every word she said, Cass wrung her hands, took a step in one direction or another, or looked nervously off into the sky. “And then when I really hit the skids, well, that’s...”
    “Lyle,” Lex growled.
    “Yeah. I was in a bad way. Lots of bad ways, actually. In deep with money, by which I mean I was out of it. And not the sort of broke you can pull yourself up from – the sort of broke where every buck you get goes straight into someone else’s pocket. This restaurant, the owner said I could work for food. So