by Erika Masten
They’d only all gotten as far as the upstairs hallway when Ellie and Ida turn to rush back into Mason’s bedroom and closed the door.
“That’s fine,” Ty said and started down the stairs with Aubrey close behind. “I’ve had a few minutes to talk to the boy, which is all I wanted.” The police officer and bear clan leader paused on one step to look over his shoulder at the werelion. “I’m not surprised Ellie didn’t want to let me talk to Mason, but I had to anyway. I hope we both understand that.”
“I understand you’re within your rights as Itan to handle any sign of disrespect a hell of a lot more forcefully than you just did.”
“Females,” Abrams sighed.
Aubrey waited until both men had gotten out the front door, past questioning glances from the Brennan brothers looking up from one power tool or another. But on the porch, Aubrey said, “This thing between Ellie and Caroline….”
Ty nodded pensively. “It’s tricky,” he agreed. “Sam’s been gone since right before Mason was born. A car accident, head-on collision.” It would have to have been something that serious to overcome the natural healing ability of a shifter, Aubrey knew. “Anyone told you? About Sam?”
Aubrey shrugged. “That he was gone, I heard. And I’ve gathered that his family wasn’t crazy about Ellie.”
“Not that most bears are the kind to settle down,” Ty told him. “Something else I’m sure a lion can understand. Still, Sam’s family didn’t have the opportunity to see him with his son. It set up a weird dynamic after Mason was born. I guess they kind of felt… cheated, especially Caroline, being his twin sister.”
“She doesn’t feel like she has enough say in her nephew’s life?”
This got a brief chuckle from Abrams. “Caroline Heath doesn’t feel like she has enough say over anything.”
“Enough being all and final?” Aubrey asked.
Ty nodded. “Seems you’ve met her.”
“I have, and I’m sure I’m the reason she came to you telling tales out of school. I’m just a guest here renting a room, I realize, but—.”
“But it’s not in your nature, or in any of us, to watch someone like Caroline dressing down our females, especially in front of cubs.”
Our females? The werebear’s choice of words pulled Aubrey up short as he was walking down the front path with Abrams toward the patrol car parked at the curb. “No, wait. I’m sure Caroline Heath had a lot to say on the matter of me staying here, but I want it on record that I am just—.”
“Renting a room, yeah, I know,” Abrams responded, but he didn’t sound convinced. Nor did he sound particularly concerned. “Look, so long as whatever you’ve got going on with Ellie Lowe is being handled like adults and not right in front of Mason, it’s none of my business. My concern for the child….” Abrams paused to pointedly rephrase himself. “My authority over the boy is that of a police officer and the Itan of this whole region but specifically of the bear clan his father’s family belongs to. Caroline’s innuendo is something I’ll leave for coffee shop gossip until such time as I see it’s otherwise.”
“It’s not otherwise,” Aubrey said flatly.
Again Ty nodded. “Good,” he said as he took his sunglasses from the pocket where they were hanging and settled them across the bridge of his nose. “Can I assume the next time we speak it will be about our arrangement with the Panthera and not about Ellie Lowe trying to do something stupid to Caroline Heath?”
“Yeah.” At least Aubrey hoped as much.
That was the conversation, however, that Aubrey was going to have to have with Ellie, both for her sake and his own. He didn’t need this family situation making political matters too sensitive for the successful completion of his mission. And he didn’t want these inexplicably protective feelings he was having toward Ellie making him act any stupider than he already had.
Aubrey turned back toward the Garden Gate B&B just in time to catch Nate Brennan staring out one of the front windows at him. The werelion’s instincts flared, and not just because he smelled dog. Aubrey’d already had to get used to that with his sister mated to a werewolf back in California. He wasn’t saying that whole incident had soured him on dealing with wolf shifters. But it had. That and all the years he’d spent as a special marshal hunting them for the government while hiding his own identity as a shifter.
As much as Aubrey would have expected the scruffy werewolf to skulk back into the gloom once he’d been seen, Nate Brennan surprised him by having the balls to stalk out the front door and down the walkway.
“Can I help you with something?” Aubrey asked, but his tone was anything but helpful or friendly. Under his words, a subvocalized growl met the same from the wolf shifter glaring back at him.
“Nah, I don’t think so,” Nate answered, shaking his scruffy head. And still reeking of the cheap whiskey he’d drowned himself in the night before—and had probably used as mouthwash this morning. “Something we can help you with, Ranger? I mean, what are you doing here, imposing on this woman and her family? A dozen other places you could be renting in Grayslake, but you’re here. And talking to Ty Abrams an awful lot lately. I hear tell you spend a lot of time up around the lake, some of it patrolling that federal land of yours.” He paused before adding, “Some of it not. You got a special interest in that bear clan compound they built up there?”
Despite the shifter laws about revealing themselves out in the open, in broad daylight where humans might see, Aubrey extended his fangs and made no effort to dull the shimmer of his shift glowing against his skin. The werelion stepped up nose-to-nose with Nate Brennan.
“Let’s get this straight, mutt. We’re not brawling in some roadhouse parking lot like good ol’ boys, and we’re not pissing on trees to determine our territory. This is bear territory, and we both understand that, right? My people have business with Ty Abrams and his people. That’s why I’m here in Grayslake.”
“Is it?” the elder, grizzled Brennan growled back. “Is your business with the bears the same business they think it is? Because, I mean, werecats aren’t known for always being straight up in their dealings outside their clans, are they?” Then he chuckled, a low, guttural sound that Aubrey would’ve expected out of a dog like Nate. “Same thing with women. Say one thing, do another. Get what you want, move on to the next.” Then he shrugged and stepped back from Aubrey as though he wasn’t tempting the werelion to shift right there and pounce on him. “Love among alley cats, I guess.”
“Nate!” The scolding call from the open front door of the B&B made both the wolf and lion shifter turn to look. From the doorway, Jared Brennan was glaring at his older brother. “This work ain’t doing itself in here. You think you might see your way clear to put in a solid hour before you feel the need to take another break?”
“Better listen to him, mutt. In you go. Tail between your legs.”
Walking away, knowing Aubrey’s sensitive hearing would pick it up just fine, Nate muttered under his drunken breath, “Better watch your own tail, kitty cat. Your friends from last week aren’t around these days, are they? Just a lot of bears and wolves, from what I can see. You enjoy that pussy while you can. All the better to keep my brother away from that cheap alley cat skin.”
Aubrey couldn’t hear Nate’s steps on the pavement as the wolf shifter walked away. He couldn’t hear the light traffic buzzing past behind him along the lane where the Garden Gate B&B sat in the shade. The cycling growl of his lion was too loud in Aubrey’s head to let anything else through. It took everything he had just to think his way past the instinct to shift and maul Nate Brennan’s back, turned to Aubrey so temptingly.
But Aubrey had obviously let his beast do too much of his thinking for him lately if everyone from Ty Abrams to Nate Brennan to Caroline Heath could sense his lion’s growing hunger for Ellie. Fucking Pietr Achieli probably knew it, too, and he was the one he could do the most damage to Aubrey with it. After all, Ellie Lowe was a latent werecat shifter, someone with the blood but no ability to
shift. The speciest good ol’ boys around here might have derided her by calling her skin, but to Achieli she was a jackpot of recessive genes he wanted bred as strongly as possible into werelion bloodlines to combat natural weaknesses.
The Panthera spy didn’t even want to think about the promise he’d had to make Pietr to keep the werelion leader from blackmailing Vanessa into a breeder agreement in exchange for protection from the Agency and its hunters. It had to be an even trade to free her, though; if Vanessa wouldn’t breed for them, Aubrey had to. Thus far, Achieli hadn’t called in that marker and set Aubrey up in a breeding pair. The last thing Aubrey needed was Pietr getting into his aristocratic Greek head that Ellie was a good candidate for making Aubrey live up to his promise.
When the first thing Aubrey should have done to calm himself down was to get out into the woods and away from Ellie Lowe, he did the last instead—prowl back into the house looking for her. Aubrey found her alone sniffling in the backyard while Ida played upstairs with Mason to keep the child distracted.
What are you going to do, Dreyer, Aubrey asked himself but had no idea. Give Ellie his notice and find someplace else to stay until the Panthera had finished negotiating its agreement with the bear clan for an approved enclave of werecat shifters within their territory? Apologize for trying to do Ellie a favor and put Caroline Heath in her place? For opening up this Pandora’s box? For letting his attraction to Ellie cloud his better judgment?
He had no idea until he got right up to her, ready to talk to her, ready to turn right back around and walk away from her—when he saw the wet streaks of tears painting Ellie’s full cheeks.
“Stop that,” he murmured, gathering the exhausted woman against him for what was only going to be a moment of passing comfort she so obviously needed.
Aubrey wasn’t even sure he could blame his lion for the fact that he kissed Ellie Lowe instead. He only knew that she tasted like sweet cream. That her lips were soft and her mouth was warm. That her tongue slid against his so naturally as he took her mouth with his in the kiss. That his hardening cock fit against the curves of her body perfectly through their clothes and amid their sudden moans, mouth-to-mouth and breath-to-breath. And that his lion demanded more, everything she had to give.
Chapter 5
Ellie must have looked like the proverbial drowned kitten. Ponytail soaked and the usual flyaway waves that passed for bangs now a dark blond mess clinging to her wet cheeks. Denim button front shirt soaked clean through, down to her white tank top and bra under that. Water dripped down her hair and her nose and off the curve of her pouty lower lip as Ellie stomped back around from the side of the house and up the back porch steps toward the flooding kitchen.
Yes, that was the state Aubrey Drummond found her in. It was the perfect day for the kitchen pipes to burst, while Jared and Nate were off for a couple of days on another job. The perfect day for Ida to be at class and Mason to be staying with his Aunt Caroline after school and going into the weekend, leaving Ellie to deal with the emergency all by herself. The perfect day for the infuriatingly sexy werelion renting her carriage house to come home early from work and find Ellie and her life a mess again.
Huffing out a long, hard breath, Ellie closed her eyes and held her hands up before Aubrey said or did anything. She counted to ten silently in her head before she told him, “Stop. Don’t say anything. Not one word.”
She only opened her eyes once she had cautioned herself not to give in to the recent urge to look him up and down, to smell him, to touch him, to think constantly about him kissing her again as he had that once, two days before. That was enough to make her a little mad again, even if mostly at herself for wanting Aubrey Drummond to kiss her and even to do more than that. Glaring, she held up her finger at him, stiff and cautioning.
“Just don’t.”
As she stomped up the steps and across the porch past him, the lion shifter growled moodily. “God forbid the independent Elizabeth Lowe let somebody help her.”
She had warned him.
Now Ellie spun and reared on the man. “Help me? Like getting me even more on Caroline’s bad side than I already was? Like riling up Nate Brennan so he’s even more of a bastard to me than he was before? I wouldn’t be surprised if he messed with the pipes before he left so they’d break while he and Jared were gone.”
Adrenaline, anxiety, and a thrill she didn’t want to acknowledge coursed through Ellie’s body as Aubrey Drummond reacted by accepting her challenge and stepping up to her. “No, actually, I was thinking more about protecting your honor when that Heath woman was suggesting you’re running a one-woman brothel instead of the B&B.”
Ellie’s jaw dropped open, and she felt her palm itching with the need to slap him for even voicing that lewd suggestion. Didn’t matter it wasn’t his accusation. He was using it against her now, throwing it in her face as cruelly as Caroline would have.
“I was thinking about the financial help of being the only paying guest around here.”
The fact that he was the only paying guest and that she really did need that help made this barb all the sharper and had Ellie biting the inside of her cheeks.
“I was thinking that I actually do know how to use a wrench and could have helped you when the shut off valve in the kitchen didn’t work.”
Ellie clenched her fists to keep herself from hitting Aubrey, from grabbing him, from clawing at him with the force of about six and a half years of pent up frustration. “I do not need—.”
“Oh, we both know what you need, Miss Lowe.”
“Oh, do we?” She was yelling now, right into that handsome face, and taking a lot of satisfaction in watching it get nearabout as red as hers must’ve been.
“We do,” Aubrey said with the force of a promise, a curse.
Without warning, he ran his large, warm hands up Ellie’s wet cheeks and through her hair, down the back of her head and her soaked ponytail, until he could take her hair in his fist down low by the nape of her neck. Instinctively, her head fell back and her mouth fell open in a sigh of a groan.
“You need someone who actually knows how to fix this house, someone to stand up to Caroline and even to Ty Abrams, and you need someone to fill that mouth of yours with a good hard kiss when it’s running too much.”
Drummond illustrated his point by doing just that, by taking Ellie’s mouth again the way she’d remembered, wanted, dreaded. The man tasted like…. God, she didn’t know what. Like all the things the werecat inside her, the wildcat inside her, wanted to taste. Like heat and blood, sex and flesh. His tongue drove into her mouth, but she felt like it was him driving into her in other ways, all ways. The werelion held her by the hair, with his other hand gripping her jaw, moving her head any way he wanted, in any way he needed in order to plunder and possess her mouth with his tongue. It made her pulse throb in her temples, in the tips of her fingers, in the pearl of her clitoris.
With his lips against hers, brushing her mouth with every word, tasting her every breath, Aubrey purred, “You need someone to hunt you down and take that gorgeous curvy body like a werelion fucks and mates.”
Ellie’s heart stopped, or at least her breathing. And it was the same for Aubrey. As soon as he used that word—mates—they both went still and quiet. It just slipped out, she could tell. But why? Why would he even say…?
Still lingering just a breath from him, Ellie whispered raggedly, “Don’t you ever say that word to me ag—.”
She didn’t get to finish that warning before Aubrey was kissing her even more feverishly, and she was kissing him back. Ellie was a wet, panting, breathless mess. With Aubrey rubbing his taut, tense, muscular body against hers, it wasn’t long before he was just the same. That tan uniform didn’t stand up well to being wet. It went nearly as see-through as a wet T-shirt contest, revealing every sculpted inch of his hard-defined muscle from biceps to pecs to abs. Without thought, Ellie’s hands began to trace every ripple of muscle on Aubrey’s body, and it responded with flexing heat an
d hunger and the pronounced ridge of the demanding erection that mounted in the front of those pants.
With leonine grace, the male shifter spun Ellie around and took her down to the wooden planks of the porch. Lord, but he was a beautiful predator, skilled and smooth as any lion in the wild. Ellie was willing prey but still tussled and bucked up under the man as he used his knees to spread her legs and settle his weight between her denim-clad thighs. Aubrey held her hands pinned above her head as he pressed his body down over hers and his mouth to her lips again.
“Mama?”
“Elizabeth Lowe!”
Fuck. Fuck, no. Ellie knew those voices, both of them.
In a split second, Aubrey had rolled off of Ellie and brought them both back to their feet. They furiously straightened clothing and hair as they stared up to the second floor of the house, toward Mason’s open bedroom window. Beyond the worn frame stood the six-year-old with an armful of stuffed animals he must have decided he wanted for the weekend and his glowering, disapproving bitch of an aunt standing behind him.
Ellie could hardly get the back door open fast enough before she ran into the house. Steps ahead of her pounded their way down the main hall to the front door.
“Mason,” she called, panicked. Then she gulped a breath, telling herself no. Stay calm. Don’t let him see you flustered. As weird and scary as that must’ve been for Mason, with Ellie never even having kissed a man since before he was born, the worst thing she could have done was make the six-year-old think he’d seen something he shouldn’t have, done something he shouldn’t have.
In the hall, it was Caroline Heath who squared off in front of Ellie in the doorway between the woman and her son.
“Mama?” Mason asked again. Ellie could see him wandering back and forth, agitated on the porch, the she-bear blocking his view of his mother.
“Stand aside, Caroline,” Ellie told her civilly but flatly. The women didn’t need to get into something violent in front of the boy, but Ellie wasn’t going take much more of the she-bear getting in her way.