Declan said,No—!but the sound of it was lost, even to himself, under the bird's blood-curdling scream.
He wilted. He wilted so much that even his tail feathers wilted, and inside his head, his peacock gave a squeak of alarm.No! Stop! Be confident and attractive! She won't like us if we can't get it up!
Declan had not previously known it was possible to choke on a fit of laughter as a peacock. His knees actually gave out as he coughed with laughter—birds weren't really designed to laugh—and even his peacock's horror couldn't keep him on his feet. He absolutely had to settle in the grass, wheezing and giggling through his beak while the bird wailed internally and tried to hide its head under their wing. Declan giggled under the wing while the peacock made grievously injured eyes at him inside his head. It would have worked better if peacocks were among the birds endowed with great eyelashes, but their beauty came in other forms.
I don't know why you're laughing,the bird said with great tragic integrity.It's true. Females like males who can get it up.
Declan let go another howl of laughter, which unfortunately came across as another unearthly scream, only this time hidden beneath his wing. He could hear his mate giggling, and didn't dare look to see if it was himself or the baby cheetah that was amusing her so much. It would be himself, he was fairly certain of that. He was making an arse of himself, and at some point he would have to tell her he was a shifter, and that worse, he wasthatpeacock, the one who'd behaved like a loon when he'd first seen her.
We are behaving like apeacock,his bird said stiffly.Not a loon. Loons,it said with great disdain,areboring.Black and white, withshort tails.
Aww.Despite his laughter, Declan actually felt sorry for his bird, which was a sensitive, if vain, beast.Yes, you're right. We're behaving like a peacock. A very beautiful one.
The bird sniffed, more or less mollified.Tell you what,Declan said, coaxingly.We can go back to the snack shop and hide behind it to shift, and then introduce ourselves to our mate.
For a heartbeat, while the bird was considering that, Declan had to fight down another laugh.Shifting, in Irish parlance, was kissing, and he tried not to think about that too much when he remembered he was a shifter. Fortunately, the peacock gave a hearty sigh just at that moment and said,All right,which at least allowed Declan to take his head out from under his wing. Of course, as soon as he did, the peacock saw their mate again and tried to shake its tail feathers high. The next half hour was spent mostly with Declan trying to coax it back to somewhere private enough to change shapes while it insisted on following their mate with a resplendent tail aloft in the air. Finally, though, the effort involved in keeping the feathers up defeated even its determined ardor, and Declan turned back toward the far side of the park.
A few minutes later, the peacock whispered,Our mate is following us! She longs to get some tail!and floofed its tail again, parading around as elegantly as it could while Declan all but wept with laughter inside. Their mate stayed a polite distance back, obviously not wanting to alarm him, but eventually they did make it to the snack shop. Declan went behind it while his mate stopped at the front for something, and he let the peacock do one more big stretch with the tail feathers before shifting back to human.
Rightbehind him, his mate's distinctive American accent said, "Oh myGod,what?" and Declan, heart in his stomach, turned around to discover the woman of his dreams gaping at him in disbelief and confusion.
Chapter 3
Tara was short on sleep. She knew she was short on sleep. Very short on sleep. She hadn't thought she was 'peacock turns into man' short on sleep, though.
On the other hand, either a peacock had just turned into a man right in front of her, or she was, in fact,thatshort on sleep. Of the two, the second one seemed more likely.
The man—tall, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and really genuinelydevastatinglygorgeous, with black hair and green eyes, heavy eyebrows and a roguish smile framed by a square jaw—stepped forward with that smile doing its best to be reassuring. It worked very well, in fact, although when he said, "I can explain," in a delicious Irish accent, Tara couldn't decide if the reassurance factor increased or decreased. The accent helped, for sure. The fact that he said he could explain sort of suggested she wasn'tthatshort on sleep after all, which wasn't reassuring at all.
"You didn't—did you…you didn't. Did you?"
No one in the history of language had ever constructed a sentence that poorly, but the guy grinned, bright and apologetic. "I did."
Tara nodded and took a moment to review every possible permutation of what she'd said. 'You didn't' had started out as a question:you didn't just turn into a peacock, did you?Well, that wasn't what he'd done, but that was what her fumbling attempt at a question had been. The next part had been going to bedid you just turn into a peacock,and she was definitely having problems with the order of things there, because once again, he had turnedfroma peacock into a person, but somehow the whole thing seemed like it should be phrased in terms of being able to do it again.
And then she'd been going to repeat the whole thing all over again, with the seconddid youleading into more of astatementabout the whole thing, not a question, becauseyou didn't just turn into a peacockseemed like it was something that needed to be made as a flat statement. A person shouldn't question that kind of thing. Except then she'd added that lastdid youwith an actual question mark audible in her voice, so even if she hadn't managed very many individual words there, she was pretty sure she had gotten what she meant across.
And the very handsome man had said he did. He did, in fact, turn into a peacock. Or into a man, from being a peacock.
So either both of them were very short on sleep, or possibly delusional, or…
Tara had to take another moment to brace herself for this thought:or,she thought with effortful clarity,this guy could turn into a peacock.
She said, "Oh," faintly, and found somewhere to sit down. The ground. That was where she could sit down, because all the picnic tables and things were around the front of the snack shop.
The peacock man's brilliantly green eyes widened in alarm and he leaped forward like he'd catch her, although he seemed to recognize it was a controlled kind of sharp sitting, and didn't actually grab her. On one hand, Tara appreciated that. On theother, he looked very strong and supportive and she thought she wouldn't entirely mind being rescued by him if she was really falling down. She said, "Um," and, with a sheepish twist to that roguish smile, he sat in the dirt across from her.
"I'm Declan McCarthy," he said. "And I'm a shifter. It's not the sort of thing a fellow usually leads with in a conversation, but now I've no secrets from you."
Tara nodded a couple of times. "That seems unlikely."
Declan McCarthy gave a big laugh and shrugged his nice wide shoulders as he turned his palms up. He had big hands, too, a little rough-looking, like he worked with them. Tara, who didn't quite consider herself a prude but who wasn't prone to thinking things likeI could think of a few places I'd like to feel those callouses,thought exactly that, and blushed. Declan leaned in, conspiratorial and smelling incredibly good. "All right, I might have a secret or two left, but I'd be lying if I said that wasn't the big one."
"Yes, that, I can…" She was having a very hard time getting through sentences. "I can see that. I, um. Tara? Tara," she said more decisively. "Tara Lynch."
His dark eyebrows rose and a fresh smile splashed over his face. "Tara Lynch, is it. You couldn't be more Irish, with that name, could you?"
Tara whispered, "No, not much, but…American," as if Declan McCarthy who could turn into a peacock hadn't figured that out all by himself.
