Wild About You

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Cassie Thompson slammed on the brakes, sending everything in the U-Haul lurching forward. Was that a fucking tiger? In the middle of an intersection in nowhere, Maryland?

She squeezed her eyes shut and sucked down a deep breath, catching savory hints of butter and yeast in the air.

She’d been driving for eleven hours straight, and it was after four a.m. It was probably just some insomnia-induced hallucination manifesting from her subconscious.

She made a mental note to talk about it in her next therapy session, then opened her eyes.

Oh, shit. Her heart fell into her butt. Not only was the tiger still there—and big, even for a Siberian—but he was clearly emaciated and inexplicably surrounded by a circle of pickup trucks.

Had she stumbled upon some kind of cult?

The Eastern Shore might as well have been a different planet than San Diego.

Half a dozen men armed with rifles appeared to be arguing from the bed of the biggest truck. Instinctively, she reached for her field bag. She shouldn’t get involved. She was only supposed to be in this tiny-ass town for a couple of days before heading to Baltimore.

But that tiger needed help, and he clearly wasn’t going to get it from any of these rifle-toting rednecks.

Before she could think better of it, she had dropped to the asphalt, bag in hand. Her ankle wobbled. Oof, the stupid Louboutins. One of her flipflops had broken at a gas station outside Nashville, and she’d grabbed the first pair of shoes she could dig out of a moving box.

One of the men turned at the sound of her door slamming shut.

“You need to get back in your vehicle and evacuate the area, ma’am. We have a situation here.”

Cassie hesitated for a second, then straightened up and marched over, footfalls echoing against the storefronts. Just because someone gave her an order didn’t mean she had to obey it.

She gave the speaker a once-over. He was smaller than the tiger, but not by much.

A rolled-up flannel exposed tattooed forearms, and his deep frown was easily visible despite his trimmed beard.

His wavy hair stuck up a bit like he’d been pulled out of bed, and his dismissive tone suggested that he was an asshole.

And she had no time to suffer assholes. Not anymore.

“I can see that. I’m a vet.” She dropped her field bag on the open tailgate of the truck and tied her hair back with an elastic she always wore on her wrist.

“Look, lady—” The man shook a finger at her, and something dark and angry bubbled up inside her like tar.

Ma’am? Lady?

She pointed her own finger in response. “Put that gun down. Are you trying to get someone killed?”

Silence fell. The lumberjack made a face like she had just shot a glitter cannon into his beard. One of the younger guys grimaced. Weird vibes.

“What’s the plan?” She addressed an older man to the right of the opinionated lumberjack.

From here, she had a clearer view of the tiger. He paced in the circle of headlights, ears flat and muscles tense. His fur was matted. The poor thing had definitely been through something horrible.

“We don’t have one. Tiger broke out of his travel crate en route to the sanctuary,” the old man grumbled. He gestured at a pickup truck parked haphazardly in the lane. The metal around the doorframe had bent—apparently far enough for the emaciated tiger to slip out.

Cassie froze. How was that even possible? Any reputable zoo would have the highest quality transport crates, likely one made specifically for him.

Which meant that wherever he had come from wasn’t a reputable facility. And wherever he was going might not be either.

She narrowed her eyes. “Where was he headed?”

“Willow Bend Wildlife Sanctuary. Just down the road.” A younger guy in a backward baseball cap pointed.

She itched to google the place and check for citations. But there wasn’t time. She could always call around to reputable places in the morning and personally oversee the transfer. “Do you trust this place? Do they treat the animals well?”

“We’re wasting time,” the lumberjack boomed.

She flinched at the volume of his voice, and her grip tightened on the bag.

I’m not in danger.

The lumberjack plowed on. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a fucking tiger in the middle of a pedestrian intersection. Morning commuters will be flooding the streets in an hour.”

Cassie frowned, and some of the anxiety melted away. She’d had enough of this dude’s lip.

“Animal control said it wasn’t their jurisdiction,” a third guy said, stuffing his phone into a pocket.

“Well, that’s just great.” The lumberjack ran a hand through his hair.

“We have to shoot it, Noah. My kids are sleeping a block away,” another guy said.

Cassie swore to herself and climbed into the back of the truck, heels wobbling on the uneven floor of the bed. “No one is shooting this tiger.”

She couldn’t do anything in these damn shoes. A blow dart required precision.

She bent down to undo the strap on a shoe and almost fell over. The leader—Noah, apparently—reached over to steady her, but she slapped his hand away.

“Hold these, please.” She foisted her shoes on the backward baseball cap guy. “Do not lose them.”

He took them and tucked them under his arm like a football. At least he understood the assignment.

“What are you going to do?” Noah asked.

She unzipped her bag and pulled out her blowpipe and medication bag. “I’m going to sedate him so we can get him out of the intersection.”

“Are you qualified to do that?”

She shot him a withering stare. At least being pissed off was keeping the anxiety at bay.

“Does it matter? Right now, I’m your only option. Now move,” she said firmly.

Oh, that was good. She was taking charge, bossing some strangers around without worrying what they thought about her. Maybe she really was making progress. Her therapist was going to be so proud.

Noah jumped off the truck bed with a cloudy expression. The bags under his eyes suggested he was exhausted. Maybe that’s why he was being such a dick.

She snapped the pipe together like she had done a hundred times before, but a tremor of anxiety struck. She had tranqed a tiger in the wild only once, and it had been daytime. Estimating the cat’s weight would be hard, and if she didn’t get the dosage right, the ketamine could kill him.

“Can I have some light?”

Three men descended on her with phone flashlights.

“Keep it steady,” she requested.

In minutes, with hands that only shook a little, she had drawn up her best guess at a dosage, injected it into the medication delivery syringe, and loaded it into her blowpipe.

She turned back to the tiger. Her heart ached for the big cat. It must have been terrifying to be removed from your home, only to suddenly break out into a new town while surrounded by strange guys with guns.

The blowpipe was light in her hands as she took a deep, steadying breath. She stabilized her elbow on the roof of the truck and propped her foot on the side. For a moment, she could pretend she was back in the zoo, getting ready to perform a standard medical procedure on a pampered cat.

But she’d probably never work in a zoo again. That path had been taken from her. Fucking Dave.

She zeroed in on his front haunch, following it as the cat paced. She clicked her tongue, and the cat’s head lifted. He paused and turned in her direction.

Thwap. The dart shot across the intersection and found its home. Exactly where it was supposed to. A relieved sigh slipped between her lips as she lowered the blowpipe.

“That was amazing.” Backward ball cap guy craned his neck.

There was a murmur of agreement, but Noah looked like she had darted him instead.

She stowed the pipe and stared at the cat. “We have a couple minutes before the medication sets in. We need a plan to get this poor guy to the animal sanctuary. Is anyone in contact with the owner?”

“That would be my mother,” Noah said.

Great.

She turned toward him. “Oh. So you were the one driving a wild animal in a flimsy cage in the open bed of a pickup truck instead of a temperature-controlled relocation van?”

She might struggle to speak her mind when it came to her own welfare, but that cat couldn’t speak for himself. Someone had to.

“I didn’t have a choice, okay?” Noah said. “He came from some breeding-for-profit sideshow zoo that got shut down in North Carolina. They didn’t have a crate, so I had to bring ours. No other facilities could take him, and he was going to be euthanized tomorrow.”

Her hostility dropped by a centimeter, but then Noah opened his mouth again. “Was I supposed to just let him die, Doctor? Do vets have a Hippocratic oath?”

Her hands tightened into fists. “You never should have taken a tiger you weren’t sure you could safely accommodate.”

“I don’t remember asking for your opinion.”

Cassie glared at him. “Wow, I’m so sorry for coming in with a better plan than ‘let’s traumatize this tiger by cooping him up in a poorly designed crate for six hours and then shooting him in the middle of an intersection next to Pattie’s Freakin’ Pierogies.”

She thrust a finger at the sign on the building next door. Her voice had reached a volume she almost never used. Wow.

“Guys?” the older man interrupted.

“What?” they both shouted.

“Tiger’s asleep.”

Cassie turned her attention back to the big cat. She slung her stethoscope around her neck and pulled a flashlight from her bag, then started a stopwatch.

The hood of the red pickup truck was cool beneath her fingers as she crawled toward the cat. She approached slowly, cautiously, bare feet padding over the asphalt. Some cats came out of anesthesia very quickly. Others struggled to wake up. She still wasn’t sure that she got the dose right.

The cat’s chest rose and fell evenly. She brushed a gentle hand over his side.

“Oh, you poor thing,” she said softly. She pressed her stethoscope into his chest and listened to his breath sounds for probably longer than was necessary.

His pupils were responsive. She slid a monitor onto his tongue and watched it carefully.

His vitals were steady for the moment. She breathed a sigh of relief.

“Is there a medical building at the sanctuary?” she called to Noah.

“Yes,” he said flatly.

“Great. We’ll need a carry tarp and four of you,” she called to the men who were still peering out from behind the circle of trucks. “We need to move these trucks and back the crate over. Now, please.”

There was a flurry of activity. Eventually, Noah backed his truck up and unfurled a carry tarp—that, at least, looked to be regulation-sized.

In minutes, they had heaved the tiger onto the truck bed and slid him gently inside the partially destroyed crate.

“I’m going to ride in the back with him,” she said.

“That’s not safe,” Noah said flatly.

“I don’t care. We never move animals while sedated, and he needs to be monitored.”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “You’re just going to leave your U-Haul in the middle of the road?”

Shit. She turned and spotted the baseball cap guy.

“Here,” she said and threw him her set of keys. “Could you move this for me? I’m staying at the—crap, what’s it called? There’s a little bed and breakfast in this town, right?”

“Ah, the Bay Breeze. Yep, I’ll move it there for you.”

“Thank you. Let’s go.” She slapped the side of Noah’s truck, and he rolled his eyes and got behind the wheel.