Home > Tarian Outcast (New Tarian Pride #3)(6)

Tarian Outcast (New Tarian Pride #3)(6)
Author: T.S. Joyce

“I haven’t heard that since I was a kid.”

“I say it all the time. Because I win. All the time. It’s a curse really, never being put in my place with losing.” She had her little chin lifted high in the air, and all her words were lies. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face if he tried. She was so damn cute. He cleared his throat and tried to compose his face. He meant she would be cute if she wasn’t a human.

“There’s a taco truck a couple streets over. I’ve got a lunch break after I finish this inspection and change a tire.”

“Yeah, I saw the food truck when I was driving in. My stomach growled when I cruised by it.”

“In your hotrod minivan.”

“Don’t knock my minivan. It has a spacious back seat for bumpin’ and grindin’. I would know because I’m a ho.”

Through his laughing, he rolled his eyes and said, “Fuckin’ stop with that. You don’t give off the ho vibes. It’s a good poem, though.”

“Thank youuu, thank youuuu. I’m hungry, so hurry and do hot mechanic stuff. I’ll wait here and watch you. In a completely non-creepy way, of course. But maybe pour a bottle of water over yourself before you change the tire. Momma needs to take pictures.”

“Oh, my God,” he murmured, shaking his head as he walked off. His face was gonna be sore from smiling tomorrow if he wasn’t careful.

The reality of what had just happened hit him as he returned to removing the skid plate off the front of the truck to finish the inspection. He’d just had a staring contest for peanuts and tacos with a pretty girl. He really liked her flavor of weird.

He would get her lunch as a thank you for returning his suitcase, and then he would move on and never see her again. Lions didn’t mix with humans. They were too fragile.

As the entire Pride had reiterated last night when they saw him making out with some humie on a dark road. Fuckin’ nosy spies. Ronin had her social media pages tracked down only minutes after they’d gotten back to the big house, and then Kannon got to hear a boring lecture on the dangers of human/shifter relationships. He’d literally fallen asleep during it. It’s not like Ronin was telling him anything new. It had been beaten into their heads since they were all cubs. Humans didn’t belong in the Tarian Pride. There had never been a single one in the history of Tarians, blah-blah-blah.

It’s not like Kannon was trying to marry her. Although she’d probably look hot in white. A vivid image sprung up of her walking down an aisle toward him, a white dress, her hair down, a bouquet of pink flowers in her hand tied in a white ribbon that was gently waving in the wind, her eyes on him…

Shit, why did he always do that? Kannon shook his head hard. Since he was a kid, he’d had these vivid imaginings that would hit him from nowhere. He wasn’t some future teller, either. He just had some glitch in his imagination that made little momentary wishes into a small sequence. Like a four second video that played in his mind. These that involved Human Katy, though, he didn’t like. He was going to have to say goodbye to her for good in an hour, maybe two, and he didn’t need these little fantasies making it harder on him. That was girl stuff, right? Imagining a scene from a wedding with a person he barely knew?

And now his lion was purring like a happy house cat.

Kannon was beginning to think something was seriously wrong with him.

Chapter Seven

Kannon was ridiculously hot.

Ridiculously. Like…no man had any business being that hot. That much hotness shoved into one being was just unfair to the mere mortal peons around him. These poor men he worked with didn’t have a shot at getting a girl’s attention. Not with Adonis Long Shlong sauntering around the garage like some demigod dressed in a grease-smeared white T-shirt, with mussed black hair, perfectly trimmed whiskers, chiseled jaw, full lips, and perfect teeth. And those brown eyes that turned a fiery gold, his man-nips poking out against his shirt, low-slung navy work pants, scuffed up boots, and muscles poking out every-damn-where. Even his Adam’s apple was hot. She needed to figure out a way to manipulate him into either taking his shirt off so she could count his abs or get him to enter a wet T-shirt contest. Either way, she wanted to see them belly bumps.

Geez, what was wrong with her?

Katy felt like snapping her teeth at a lady sitting in the waiting room with her, staring out the big picture window to the shop. She was watching Kannon, and fanning herself. And she had this little yappy dog that was barking right at Katy. In general, she liked dogs, but this one was interrupting her perverted thoughts.

“Denver, shhhhh,” the lady said. “Mommy’s busy.”

She didn’t take her eyes of Kannon, who was yanking a big metal bar and loosening a stubborn tire. Every muscle in his arms and back rippled with his effort.

Stare Face petted her dog without looking down at it. The dog didn’t look that impressed, probably because the lady was patting it right over the eyeballs and still not paying attention to it.

If Katy was a shifter, she would’ve morphed into her animal and bit the lady. But knowing her luck, she would be an oyster shifter who would just lay there, spit water, and confuse everyone.

There was a man, probably Dillon, who was standing beside the truck Kannon was working on, his arms crossed over his chest and a grumpy look on his face as he looked from Kannon to Katy and the pretty, yet annoying, appreciator of Kannon’s finer assets. “Oh, come on,” he called, his voice muffled through the glass.

With a frown, Kannon looked over his shoulder at Katy, and his face morphed into a wicked grin. He said something to Dillon, stood up, and sauntered to a mini fridge against the back wall, peeling off his shirt as he went.

Oh, he had a single small tattoo on his inner bicep, a perfect set of washboard abs, impeccable pecs, and the sexiest happy trail leading from his belly button down, down into his pants. He also had light silver slash-mark scars all over his arms and torso, but it only added to his appeal. Apparently, she liked bad boys.

He pulled a water out of the minifridge and opened it and took a drink, his profile to Katy. A bead of sweat trailed down his arm.

“This is like a movie,” she murmured, and suddenly, she was no longer sitting in her chair but was smashed up against the window glass watching Kannon’s one-man show.

He drank half the water bottle down and then poured the rest over his head. It splashed onto his face and ran down his shoulders and chest.

“Are you serious right now?” Dillon griped.

Was that her moaning?

Kannon was fighting a smile as he grabbed a towel and dragged it over his wet skin, across his chest and down his stomach, and then he toweled off his hair until it stuck up just perfectly.

Was that her sighing?

And then he did the sexiest thing yet, made his way over to a recycling bin. He met Katy’s eyes and held her gaze as he dropped the plastic bottle inside.

“Oh, he even recycles,” the lady plastered to the window glass next to her murmured.

“So freaking hot,” Katy agreed.

A crowbar went sailing at his face, but Kannon caught it easily. He cracked up as Dillon stomped out of the garage and yelled, “I hate you, man!” over his shoulder.

The gentleman waiting on the other side of the room for his tire to be changed sighed the most annoyed sound Katy had ever heard, but that was okay. He just couldn’t appreciate the gift of hormone surges Kannon had just given the ladies. Unlucky him.

Ten minutes later, Kannon had the tire changed and rang up the grump across the room. “You ready?” he asked her with a wink.

Unable to find a single intelligent thing to say, she said, “Me hungry.”

Kannon snorted and ran his hands through his still-damp hair. “Me hungry, too.”

“I’m hungry, too!” the lady with the dog informed them.

“Get your own,” Katy muttered as she sidled around her and followed Kannon out the door.

“Dillon, can you ring up the inspection?” Kannon asked. “She’s all ready to go. I pulled her truck out front for her. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Oh, sure, just leave me and the boys to do all of the work,” Dillon said.

“You haven’t done anything all day,” Kannon retorted without missing a step. “Earn your paycheck, or I’ll start looking for someone who works more and complains less.”

“Wait, are you the boss here?” she asked as she jogged to catch up.

“Head mechanic. My boss, Jimmy, owns this place. I’m not head honcho, but I run that team back there for him. The garage is mine to run during the day shift, and he handles the evenings so I can get back to Tarian Territory at a decent hour.

Kannon’s stride was really long, and he had the grace of a predator, while Katy was much more like a petite rhinoceros that had stepped on a thorn. She had to keep jogging a few steps to catch up when she fell too far behind.

“I like your tank top,” he murmured, glancing down at it.

Katy scrunched up her face as she looked down at the black shirt with the gold logo that said I like Sax with an outline of a saxophone under it.

“Remember when I told you it was laundry day when I packed for this trip? I only have ridiculous clothes here. I’m going to go shop for some souvenir T-shirts after I meet my friend, Drea, today. I bet she’ll come with me. We used to shop all the time.”

“There’s some cute boutiques on Main Street.” Kannon’s dark eyebrows lowered. “Not that I pay attention to that stuff.”

She laughed and slid her hand into the crook of his elbow. “I’m not making a move on you. I’m just training you to walk at a human pace so I don’t trip and die trying to keep up with you.”

“Oh, sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Not used to being around humans like this. I work at the shop, but we don’t have humans in the Pride, so I don’t spend time talking to them outside of business. Or walking with them.”

“Why no humans in your Pride? Are they not allowed?”

   
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