Chapter 2

Acool drink?!

Ollie"s koala sputtered the word at top volume, which was, as it turned out, incredibly loud. Nobody thought of koalas as noisy, and they mostly weren"t. But when they were, it was a lot.

Especially when it was in his head. A cool drink?! the koala demanded again. She"s our mate, mate! Don"t take her for cool drinks! Take her into the trees and make passionate luuuuuuv to her!

Oliver Campbell was, for one agonizing moment, incredibly glad that there were no meaningful trees in the Virtue town square. He was fairly confident he could keep himself from scooping Tiffany Wright over his shoulder and carting her off for acrobatic sex even if there had been trees, but honestly, the lack of them made it easier.

A cool drink,he agreed as gently as he could. It"s two in the afternoon. A cool drink is suitable for negotiating over.

What"s to negotiate?the koala said. We"re meant to be! Let"s do it! She"s into us!

If the last part of that was true, then fate was much, much more generous than Ollie thought his koala deserved. He couldn"t say it was wrong: Tiffany"s gaze had barely left him since he"d come down the stairs, and there was a hunger in her teal-blue gaze that made him want to shiver. She was tiny: maybe a hundred and sixty centimeters, which translated to…small, in American measurements. Sunshine blonde curls spilled in a ponytail from under her hardhat, and she had delicate features, a petite nose, a small full mouth…

…and looked like she could bench press him. Her biceps, visible in a short-sleeved shirt under her safety vest, were thick, solid muscle. Her shoulders had to be equally strong: they were wide for her size, at least, and although her general torso shape was indistinguishable beneath the vest, her thighs, clad in tight, thick blue jeans, looked carved of rock.

On second thought, he shouldn"t have suggested going anywhere, because he wasn"t sure he could walk with all the blood in his body concentrated in his crotch, but it was too late now. "A cool drink?" he asked again, aloud, but in carefully controlled, quiet tones.

Tiffany wet her lips, shook herself, wet her lips again—that wasn"t fair—and nodded. "It"s not going to change anything," she warned. "I still have a contract."

"I understand."

"You"ll want to go to Kate"s." Sarah, the woman who had been about to intervene on his behalf, nodded across the square toward a cafe. "Great lemonade, great food in general, and also closer than anywhere else."

"Oh, good. Thanks. I don"t know where anything is in this town," he said to Tiffany as he offered his elbow. To his dismay, although not really to his surprise when he thought about it, she cast him a look that suggested he was a lunatic, tossed her hardhat back toward her workspace, turned, and marched toward Kate"s Cafe ahead of him.

Phwoar. Lookit her go. C"mon, mate, we gotta hit that.

Ollie closed his eyes, as if denying his koala the actual sight of Tiffany Wright"s exceptionally well-formed backside would remove it from his mind"s eye. He"d spent a lifetime dealing with the koala"s temper—they were not nice, cuddly, sweet little beasts the way they looked—and he had long since learned that the only thing worse than its aggressive tendencies was trying to cope with its amorous ones. And this was worse than usual. Mostly it didn"t care all that much about human women. Why would it? But apparently meeting the woman, his fated mate, that interested the koala.

Unfortunately, it had seemed to have learned all of its vocabulary about human romance and romantic interactions from crude movies that Ollie himself had never actually watched. Occasionally he wondered if he spent whole nights bingeing bad movies while in koala form, his human self peacefully sleeping while the koala picked up language Ollie would never, ever use himself.

He"d taken several steps with his eyes closed by that time, and opened them just in time to trip over Tiffany. His legs were much longer than hers, and he"d caught up without meaning to. Before he could pull back or issue an apology, she, with the air of a woman who had dealt with handsy men a lot in her life, grabbed his wrist, dropped her weight, and rather magically flung him over her shoulder onto the ground in front of her.

He hit with a whump that knocked all the breath out of him. Stars danced in his vision and the sky swam above him for a few seconds. Then Tiffany Wright came into view above him, hands on her hips and an expression that said she knew she ought to be sorry, but wasn"t, stamped clearly across her beautiful face.

The koala whispered, Oh my God, yes, and Ollie knew he was lost.