He turned on his stool and let her get to work behind the bar while he analyzed the other occupants of the bar. Magnolia sat with a trio of well-dressed men and they were laughing together like old friends. The next table looked like an escaped troupe of actors from the set of a bad Hollywood western, complete with spurs and Texan hats. They were playing cards, very enthusiastically.
A boy who looked far too young to even be in the bar was hitting on a table of middle-aged women wearing terrible jewelry who were giggling at him indulgently. An elderly couple was sitting further out onto the pool deck, looking out over the beach and nursing glasses of wine. Tony guessed from their body language that they were conversing in the unspoken way that some shifters could.
Jimmy had apparently delivered the recalcitrant luggage, and was lingering near the self-serve snacks that were opposite the upper entrance.
“Your drinks,” Scarlet said, putting them in front of him with a little more force than necessary before swishing off to take orders from the table of card-players.
Tony turned to take the shot of whiskey just as a new figure appeared in the doorway and paused to look around.
She was petite and curvy, with a curtain of black hair and medium-dark skin. There was a certain exotic look to her, a sultry elegance that belied her simple khaki shorts and collared shirt. The shirt was unbuttoned a tantalizing way, showing more than a hint of the curves of her breasts. Somehow, that was even sexier than the fully nude women who pranced around the resort in their heels. Her short, straight nose was the perfect center of a round face, and her big eyes looked golden from this distance.
Pretty girls didn't usually turn Tony's head, and he certainly hadn't come to Shifting Sands looking for companionship, but something about the figure woke his tiger, and if he had been in that form, his ears would be perked in her direction.
He realized he was staring just as her gaze swept the room and caught his. He downed the shot of whiskey in a moment of wild confusion, and the next several seconds were a heated haze of pain as the fiery liquid went down the wrong pipe and he had to cough himself back to breathing. When his eyes had stopped watering enough to look around again, the woman was right next to him, smiling invitingly. “Buy you a drink?” she offered.
“You do know that this is an all-inclusive resort?” Tony had to ask, looking around as if to make sure that it was, because between the burning whiskey and her proximity, nothing made sense.
'That's her,' his tiger and all of his instincts were telling him, but after years of waiting to meet his one mate, Tony couldn't believe either his amazing luck or his awful sense of timing.
It didn't matter that he was at the resort on business, and potentially unfortunate business at that. It didn't matter that he hadn't given much thought to settling down. One look at this woman's light brown eyes, and he was hopelessly, entirely lost in her.
All of his vague ideas about what a mate was went out the window. This wasn't about lust, or at least, not only lust. He knew this woman to bottom of his soul, and she was everything he'd ever wanted in another person, all wrapped up in what was easily the sexiest package he'd ever seen.
Chapter Five
Amber lingered outside the entrance to the pool bar, agonizing over how many buttons to leave open on her shirt, and finally went in.
She had just decided she liked how much cleavage was showing when she caught sight of Jimmy, that odious chatterbox from the shuttle, and it was everything she could do not to button her shirt up to her chin. A quick assessment of the room showed that everyone else there was with someone, except for a big chunk of manflesh who was leaning on the bar itself.
Perfect!
He turned away from her approach to take a shot of alcohol from the counter, and then coughed and sputtered ungracefully at it as Amber shimmied herself over to his elbow with the transparent excuse of getting a drink from the bar.
> “Can I buy you a drink?” she blurted, hoping she looked sexy and not just desperate.
The man was even dreamier up close. He had broad shoulders under his t-shirt, and a square jaw straight out of a superhero comic. He had brown eyes and dark brown hair, barely long enough to show some wave, and this smoldering look that unsettled Amber to her toes. It was like he had been lifted, word for word, out of her teenage dream diary. She was attracted to him like she'd never been drawn to anyone, and felt oddly as if he was meant entirely for her.
But that was idiotic. Much like she was.
“You do know that this is an all-inclusive resort?” he asked her, glancing around.
He was probably looking for an escape route.
Amber felt her face heat, and blessed her unknown progenitors for giving her skin that would mostly hide it. “Oh, ah, yes,” she stammered, then chose honesty as her best path from there. “I'm sorry, I just didn't want to get caught alone with him.”
She tried to subtly raise her eyebrows in Jimmy's direction, and probably only looked like she was having some kind of seizure.
“Who, Jimmy?” He looked around to the far side of the bar, and made no effort to keep his voice down. Fortunately, a rowdy group of shifters playing cards had a timely moment of noisy celebration and woe.
Failing to actually sink into her barstool and die, Amber said between clenched teeth, “Very subtle. Do you work undercover often?”
That made him nearly fall off his own barstool with a start. “I beg your pardon?”
Surprised by his reaction, Amber put up innocent hands. “It's just ... that wasn't very slick. Okay, you know what, let's try this again.” She put out a hand. “I'm Amber. I'll just order a drink and go if you'd like.”
“Tony,” he said, taking her hand and clinging to it like a drowning man. “Please don't go.”
Gratified by that reaction, and surprised by it, Amber gave a squeeze that was a little more lingering than polite. “Okay,” she said with a little laugh.