Page 4 of More Than Meets the Eye

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Jack

Roaring wasn’t all that impressive when it came from a human throat.

Luckily, that wasn’t a problem for me.

When Joe Bob Turner planned his day, he probably didn’t expect to be cowering in the corner of Dead End Pawn with a five-hundred-pound tiger snarling in his face.

“I didn’t do it! Tell him, Tess! I didn’t do it!”

Tess, with the courage of her red hair and Irish ancestry, stepped between me and the criminal and shook her finger in my face. “Jack! Cut it out. He didn’t mean it. Remember, we talked about overreacting?”

Wehadtalked about overreacting.

Still.

He tried to rob the woman I loved.

I leaned around Tess’s slender legs and snarled at Joe Bob one last time, and then I licked the side of Tess’s face to make her laugh. Gently, though, because tiger tongues are like sandpaper.

“Yuck!” She scrubbed at her cheek with her sleeve, but shewaslaughing. “Stop it! It’s a good thing I don’t wear makeup to work. Now, back to human, or you won’t get any tiramisu.”

When she put it that way … I shifted back.

Back when I was a soldier and rebel commander, people told me I was still pretty terrifying in human shape, especially when I was angry. The expression on Joe Bob’s face right now said they weren’t wrong.

“I didn’t take anything! She said she’d tell my mama at church,” he said, looking perilously close to tears.

I sighed. Being mean to Joe Bob felt like growling at a kitten. He never meant to do anything wrong; he was just one of those hapless people who had good intentions but usually messed things up along the way to his goal.

“Take this as a lesson. Never, ever threaten Tess again. With robbery or anything else.”

Tess rolled her eyes. “Enough. Leave my customers alone, or I’ll tell everybody about the jitterbugging.”

Joe Bob blinked. “The what?”

“Never mind,” I growl. “What do you want?”

“Jack!” Tess crossed her arms over her chest, narrowed her eyes, and tapped one foot. These were all very clearDanger, Dangersignals when it came to annoying my girlfriend.

I held my hands up in surrender and backed away from Joe Bob, but scowled at him one last time over her shoulder.

When he flinched, she elbowed me. “Ignore the mean tiger in the room, Joe Bob. How can I help you?”

Trying not to look at me, Joe Bob unwrapped the large, rectangular, flat package he’d been clutching since he walked in the door. “I was hoping you’d buy this, Tess. I got it for Donna as a wedding present, because she loves magical stuff, but she said this is too weird, and if I don’t get rid of it, the wedding’s off.”

Tess’s shoulders slumped. “Why is ‘if it’s so weird your fiancée will call off the wedding, take it to Dead End Pawn’ a thing? Why?”

His blue-green eyes widened beneath his shaggy blond hair. “Because you always buy it, just like Jeremiah did when he owned the shop.”

My uncle Jeremiah had left half the shop to Tess in his will, and the other half to me. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. If he hadn’t, I might not have ever come back to town after his death, so I never would have met Tess.

That would have been a tragedy.

The stone in my pocket felt like it was burning a hole through the cloth at the thought, and I suddenly realized telling Mrs. Frost about it might have been a bad idea. I’d only been trying to distract her from putting an arrow in her husband, but still. I’d be lucky if she didn’t tell everybody in Dead End by dinnertime.

Or before.

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