“What?” Gizelle asked, puzzled, but back in reality with her.
Jenny reached a cautious hand up towards her face. “I felt… something.”
Stiff, flexible fibers met her fingertips, and the barest brush sent a battery of sensory input to her face.
“Whiskers?!” Jenny shrieked. “I have whiskers!”
These weren’t a grandmother’s mustache-like whiskers, they were inches-long, and bristled out from her face like quivering array of antennae.
Gizelle looked dismissive. “They look lovely,” she promised, but Jenny could picture what she looked like quite clearly and knew better.
In her head, her otter was holding her sides and rolling with laughter.
Jenny gritted her teeth. “Let’s practice some more,” she ground out, even though she was still tired from the last shift.
Gizelle shrugged, obviously mystified by her discomfort. “We can do it some more,” she agreed.
“Until I’m me,” Jenny declared. “Just me.”
Good luck with that, her otter teased.
Chapter 11
“Want something stronger in your orange juice?” Tex offered. He was hauling trash bags in one hand and a milkcrate stuffed with gathered glass bottles in the other.
The bar was empty and Travis was alone. Only two guests were in sight, both of them on the pool deck below.
Magnolia was lounging on one of the chairs by the pool, soaking up the last rays of the late afternoon sun, a margarita in hand.
The other guest was a thickly built man with short-cropped dark hair who looked uncomfortable lounging in his deck chair. He wore mirrored sunglasses and was reading a paperback novel. A bottle of water was gathering condensation on the table next to him.
Travis considered the drink Tex was offering, but finally shook his head. He had a feeling that if he started drinking, he wasn’t going to want to stop. His heart hurt for his bewildered mate, and Lynx was yowling and pacing inside of him.
He settled for saying, “Nah.”
Tex shrugged. “Suit yourself!” He returned to cleaning and emptying bins.
Travis couldn’t get Jenny’s face out of his head, and the lost, frightened look made him ball his hands into fists and want to fight something. But there was nothing to fight, and she didn’t want his help. She had successfully evaded him for several days now.
There was nothing critical left to fix. The resort was as ready for the storm coming as he could make it. Everything was running perfectly smoothly. Even the heaps of laundry had finally been finished, and the big machines were still again.
When he looked up and saw Scarlet walking up from the pool deck, it seemed like perfect timing.
“What do you need?” he asked too eagerly. “What’s next on the renovation schedule?”
Scarlet frowned at him. “You’ve done a lot of work these last few weeks, you do deserve some time off.”
Travis frowned back, trying to figure out how to explain that he needed something to keep his hands busy while his newly-a-shifter mate decided what to do with him. Scarlet wouldn’t appreciate an emotional confession or a rambling story about mistaken identity, and she wasn’t the sort of person who invited intimacy.
Finally, he stuck with the simplest answer. “I don’t really want any time off.”
Scarlet gave him an appraising look and went to the bar. She came back to his table with one of the resort brochures. “We’re going to
have to get these updated with cottage numbers on the ones we put back into service,” she said thoughtfully, spreading it out between them. “And we’ll take the whale watching note off until we can get another boat.”
Travis leaned over the colorful map. “Cottage five could use an upgraded kitchen and new bathroom.”
Scarlet made a discouraging noise. “As busy as we were last week, we are not rolling in money. We have a boat that the insurance doesn’t want to replace, we lost an entire shipment of groceries, and the air conditioner in the hotel was supposed to be a priority.” She didn’t have to add that several of the months before that had been in the red as the resort hosted dozens of refugees from a lunatic’s shifter zoo on the other side of the island.