A strong drink.
The bar was manned by a smiling cowboy, complete with ridiculous hat and over-sized belt buckle. At least Conall didn’t have to hear the Southern drawl.
“What can I get you?” the man asked, mixing something in a shaker and straining it into a glass over mint leaves.
There was a well-worn guitar leaning in the corner behind the bar, completing the man’s cowboy image and driving a spike of pain into Conall’s heart.
Conall picked up a menu and scowled darkly at it.
It was a seasonal menu, with inane holiday twists on traditional drinks. Holly and Santa hats decorated the margins.
This vacation was starting to look like an expensive mistake, and no kind of escape at all.
Chapter 5
The tables on the pool deck were mostly empty; Gizelle could snag the bottles and glasses without having to talk to anyone. In two cases, guests were lounging on laid-back chairs with sunglasses. Gizelle crept up behind them and took their empty glasses without asking, darting away triumphantly without disturbing them.
No one had a chance to ask her for another drink, though one of the women further down the deck gave her a long, skeptical look.
Gizelle realized she was crouching behind a chair and made herself stand up and tilt her chin defiantly.
Her tray was as full as Gizelle trusted herself to carry up stairs. Laura sometimes carried them heaped with glasses, but Tex had made her promise not to stack anything.
She was watching her bare feet as she climbed the grand stairs from the pool deck to the bar above, when the gazelle who was never far from her stirred and gave an unexpected sigh of longing.
Gizelle looked up as she moved off the last step and was struck with a jolt of something like fear, but much, much better.
There was a man standing at the bar in front of Tex, wearing khaki shorts and a fancy silk shirt covered in green leaves. He had dark hair, and he was almost as tall as Tex. He was glowering at a menu as if it had offended him.
Gizelle did not realize she had dropped the tray until everyone turned in shock to look at her.
Almost everyone.
The man at the bar did not turn. He was completely unaware of Gizelle as she stepped carefully through the shattered glass and over the upside-down tray and walked towards him, ignoring the chaos in her wake.
He didn’t notice her at all until she was right beside him, trying to crane around to see into his fascinating face.
He startled like she had, and then stared back at her with blue eyes like pools of sky.
“I do have a mate,” Gizelle breathed.
For a long, unmarked moment, they gazed at each other in surprise.
Then the enormity of it all came crashing down on her and Gizelle was shifting and leaping away in her antelope form, scattering chairs and pieces of her sundress as she fled.
Chapter 6
Conall was not aware of the woman until she had not only crowded into his personal space, but had wedged herself at an awkward angle against the bar to look into his face.
White-streaked dark hair was wild around her face and falling past her waist, half-obscuring her thin, pale face. Big, dark eyes threatened to swallow him whole.
She said something, but Conall was too busy watching those amazing eyes to look at her mouth.
Ours, his elk told him firmly. Ours forever.
Then, before he could even reach out and brush back her tangled hair, she was leaping back, tipping over chairs as she shifted into a gazelle and sprang away in terror.
He sat there, frozen, until a thump that rattled the bar prompted him to turn in a daze to the bartender, clearly at the end of a rant, with familiar words at his scowling lips.