The Jaguar Star (Tales of the Were: Jaguar Island Book 4) by Bianca D'Arc (e book reader android .TXT) 📗

for why Kat… Who knows? I suspect you might be right. Maybe Sonia knows something she’s not divulging yet. Maybe it was a random thing. I have no idea, and the fey aren’t usually very forthcoming with information when we ask questions point blank. All I know is, we’ve got Kat, and we might as well make friends with her. She seems nice enough.” Greg shrugged and dropped his hand from Ren’s shoulder.

“She is nice. Maybe too nice for what will come down on her head after she appears in this movie,” Ren said on a gusty sigh. “I doubt she’s prepared for the media attention she’s going to get.”

“She’s an adult,” Greg reminded him. “I’m sure she’ll figure it out. Just like you did.” Greg tilted his head, as if remembering. “Scratch that. She’ll do better than you did. As I recall, you spent a few years believing your own publicity. Your head was so swelled with your own importance, you barely fit in the doorway.”

Ren pushed at Greg’s shoulder, laughing. “I was never that bad,” he objected. “My cat brought me right back down to earth when my ego started getting too big. Needing to shift and stalk something in order to stay sane had a way of reminding me of what was really important in life, and it wasn’t my bank account or how many fancy sports cars I had parked in the driveway of my Malibu beach house.”

“That stuff doesn’t hurt, of course,” Greg put in, chuckling good naturedly.

“Of course,” Ren agreed with a conspiratorial grin. “But, speaking of our wild sides, how about a short run? I located some deer tracks last night and a watering hole not too far away in dense woodland. Maybe we could stalk something.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Greg agreed readily. “Lead the way, grasshopper.”

Only Greg could get away with calling Ren that. He’d been Ren’s sensei for a whole lot of years.

Katrina sat on the bed after Ren left, her head spinning. Damn. She shouldn’t have drunk so much. She had to be awake and alert the next morning, and more than that, she had to not look like something that had been run over by a truck and found on the side of the road. Well, she knew what to do to solve the dehydration issue. She reached for the first bottle of icy cold water and unscrewed the cap.

Sitting up, she decided to go sit by the window for a bit while she downed as much of the water as she could stand. She might even do a little work before she went to bed, if she could clear her head a bit, but that wasn’t crucial. She was well prepared for the next day. She knew her lines and had studied her notes before going to dinner. A quick re-read in the morning would set her right, and she’d be ready to roll.

She sat by the window, looking to see if she could catch sight of those green glowing feline eyes from the night before, but it wasn’t meant to be. She gave up after finishing the second bottle of water, then grabbed a third—one of those that Ren had brought and left on the table by the door—and opened it before shutting the curtains. She laid out her clothes for the next morning, still a bit unsteady on her feet but definitely regaining sobriety as time passed.

Putting on her pajamas, she went through her nightly routine. Washed her face, brushed her teeth, and put her hair up, off her neck. She swigged water from the third bottle and put the fourth on the bedside table, for later, just in case. Then, she put on the television and put the volume on low, wanting to catch the weather report for tomorrow on the local news as she climbed into the large bed.

She was just settling down to shut her eyes, having figured out the timer function on the television. She’d set it to shut off automatically after about a half hour, which was something she often did to wind down at the end of the day. At home, she would tune to the channel that was devoted to the weather so she could hear what was in store meteorologically for the next day. Here, though, in a strange place, she liked hearing a bit of the local color from what the news people decided to cover.

Katrina sat upright in bed when she heard Ren’s name. Opening her bleary eyes, she saw footage that must have been shot from a long distance, of him getting out of a car. She didn’t recognize the vehicle, but she recognized the surroundings. He was at the side entrance of this hotel, and Sonia was greeting him with a big smile on her face.

Katrina turned up the sound a bit so she could hear what the news people had to say, but it was vague. They were only reporting Ren’s presence in the area and his meeting with the director of his new film, which was shooting in the area. They wisely didn’t give out the name of the hotel, and Katrina doubted anyone could really recognize the location from what had been shown, but they were definitely aware that Hollywood royalty had descended on their town.

Suddenly, this all felt real. Up ‘til now, Katrina had been in a sort of daze, floating through the preparations, as if in a dream, but seeing Ren on the news… It brought the reality of what she was embarking on home in a stark way. Sober as a judge from the shock, she turned the sound back down on the television and lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling in the darkened room. What had she gotten herself into?

A moment’s blind panic assailed her, and she felt like the biggest fraud in the universe. Then, sanity returned, and she gave herself the pep talk she’d had to pull out of her