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As a daughter, granddaughter, and sister of veterans, military men and women (and their sacrifices and families' sacrifices) have a special place in my heart.
My dad is a Vietnam veteran. I was their "welcome home" baby. Mom told me they "tried for three years to have me." Thanks, Mom, that's what every kid wants to think about. Their parents "trying" for three years.
Mom used to say Dad came back different. Not the man she fell in love with. He had a drinking problem for a few years. Nightmares. My dad told me sometimes he wished he had died over there.
Both of their stories break my heart.
Claiming her Leopard is a love story inspired by and dedicated to my parents. Because sometimes, happily ever afters feel a mile away.
xoxo
Summer
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Chapter One
Nick
The man within the leopard came to life. Not with a slow opening of a flower or the gradual warming of spring but all at once. Like the pop of opening a can of beer, he went from sleepy and dozing within his leopard form to high alert and near panic.
Memories cascaded into him like colors of the dawn. The Drill Instructors who once pushed him through their paces. Their job was to break them down in order to create fighters. To build warriors. Killers. In his mind, his hands clenched. Like a muscle memory over fifty years old, he remembered firing his military issued rifle until the barrel turned white and burned his hands.
Meeting Dottie on leave with one of his buddies. Nick’s parents in Pennsylvania were out of town, so the two men drove through the night and into the next day for a three-day leave in Maine.
There had been a dance. At a high school, maybe? The VFW hall? It was so long ago, he couldn’t remember. But there she’d been with her long straight hair and her mini-skirt.
She’d been so young. Nick snorted, surprised to hear a strangled sound coming from his leopard’s throat. He’d been in leopard form more than his human body for the last few years.
Like a shield, Nick’s mind didn’t want to think about why he preferred being in his leopard form. Some memories were best buried.
Instead, his mind returned to the girl who would become his wife. She was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. They’d both been young. Babies, really, but their love made them invincible. He’d proposed almost immediately and got her to a local judge as she’d said yes.
He hadn’t wanted to give her the opportunity to change her mind. But more than that, he’d read the contract for undergoing the DNA splicing operation. Wives were definitely not an option.
But Nick had always been a beg for forgiveness over asking for permission kind of man. Their under-the-radar marriage happened only days before he’d signed the paperwork to become spliced. What else could the military do but accept it?
More memories. This time, it was the unforgettable pain of recovering from the surgery which changed his life forever. The agony he’d felt as his muscles and tendons moved with his first shift. During his time at the Lusty Leopard, Nick had talked to later generations of shifters. The doctors and scientists had improved their methods and training. It didn’t hurt as much anymore, he’d been told.
Once the man allowed the memories to course through, they turned into rapid-fire snapshots of his life. His buddies in the unit he was assigned to, relying on his leopard’s senses to determine friend from foe in a country nine thousand miles away from home.
There were the smells, too, of course. With his enhanced sense of smell, he could still remember the way cordite hung in the air after a firefight. The pungent odor of rice paddy mud. The mud in Vietnam smelled foul. Ancient. The iron smell of blood as it clung to your skin, stuck and drying. No, those memories were always nearby.
Other memories. Laughing with his buddies as they were clearing brush to create a camp. A peculiar word he and his fellow grunts used. Buddies but never friends.
There’s an unwritten rule in war. Don’t get close to men who are going to die. Friends were too intimate. Too close.
And in a jungle so far away from home, Nick Lowell had learned to put distance between himself and the men surrounding him.
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