Shifters Gone Wild; Collection

by Skye MacKinnon

  She scrubbed her eyes, her actions small so he wouldn’t notice, and looked at his laptop. “Emailing a few shots to one of my sponsors. I need money so I can move location.”

  He moved into the room, and cold swept over her as he grabbed his computer and she caught the darkness in his eyes, the twist to his expression that said he wasn’t happy about that.

  Her emailing her sponsor some pictures, or her leaving?

  She stood and tried to take the laptop from him. “You can’t snoop in my emails.”

  He turned a thunderous glare on her. “I can when you’re emailing people photographs of my land.”

  That glare only darkened as he returned it to the screen and clicked, clicked, and clicked.

  His irises turned stormy grey, the corners of his mouth twisting downwards as his jaw tensed and his eyebrows dipped low.

  “I said no pictures of the cabins. I said just the river and the bears.” He spun the laptop to face her and barked, “You want to explain this to me?”

  Ivy tensed, her heart lodging in her throat, hammering there as she stared at the screen, at the image of the river and the mother bear with her cubs, and realised that in the corner of it, one of the cabins was visible.

  “I didn’t… I wouldn’t… I didn’t notice.” She lifted her eyes to his, but the darkness in them left her cold, the rigid line of his jaw telling her that her excuses weren’t going to fly.

  She backed off a step, her pulse pounding faster as his eyes turned more gold than grey, and her fight or flight instinct kicked in.

  Telling her to run.

  The savage twist to his expression as he closed in on her didn’t help, only made her want to bolt.

  “What do you know about this guy you sent the photographs to?” he snapped and towered over her, a wall of muscle that exuded the rage she could see in his eyes and hear in his voice. “You sent him pictures without my permission… pictures that show a cabin and the peaks… those fucking peaks can easily be used to identify this location!”

  Ivy flinched and leaned back, curled into herself as she tilted her head away from him, tears lining her lashes as she closed her eyes.

  Her voice came out small and weak, uncertain. “He’s just my sponsor. He funds my work, and other wildlife photographers too.”

  “That’s not telling me what I want to hear, Ivy. I want to know who the fuck he is and I want to know now. Is he a hunter?”

  “No!” She whipped her head up and glared at him. “He’s just a man with too much money and he gets tax breaks by funding us. That’s all. He has galleries where he displays our works, runs benefits and fundraisers using them to show endangered species in need of help.”

  “Sounds like a fucking saint.” He waggled the laptop at her, his face only darkening. “But even saints can have another agenda, Ivy. How well do you really know him?”

  Not as well as she had thought, that was for sure, but she wasn’t going to tell Rath that.

  “You’re being unreasonable.” She shoved past him, heading for the door, her temper at boiling point as she remembered how he had treated her when she had arrived on his land, a reminder she had badly needed to clear her head and her heart of any misplaced feelings for him. “Not everyone is a hunter, Rath… but then I don’t think you’ll ever understand that. You think everyone is out to get you… or at least almost everyone. I guess some people are welcome here.”

  “Where are you going?” he growled. “We’re not done here.”

  “We’re done.” She lashed the words at him with all the anger, all the hurt she held inside her, but refused to turn on him like she wanted, because she wasn’t strong enough to look at him right now, not without wavering.

  She had made her decision.

  Tomorrow, she was leaving, and she would never see him again.

  She stepped out into the rising darkness before he could say another word, shoved her feet into her boots and didn’t bother with the laces as she hit the grass, striding down it towards the river, her blood on fire and her heart thundering as anger swirled with hurt, mixed with bitter disappointment and a hell of a lot of self-reproach.

  Ivy swiped at her tears, cursing them as they fell, cursing herself with them.

  Fuck, she had been such an idiot again, getting swept up in someone.

  She blew out her breath and sucked down another as she wrestled with her out of control feelings.

  Part of her screamed to leave now, to grab her camera and backpack and just start walking away from Rath, but she shut out the tempting words, listening to the voice of reason instead.

  The one that said heading out in the darkness while her head and her emotions were all over the place was a sure-fire way of running straight into trouble.

  She slammed into something near the river.

  Something warm and muscular, and big.

  She tipped her head up as she stepped back.

  Moonlight turned the immense man’s eyes silver as he stared down at her and threaded his softly spiked sandy hair with white highlights.

  “Sorry.” She scrubbed the heel of her right hand across her cheeks and went to step around him.

  “What are you doing here?” He caught her arm, his grip gentle.

  His voice wasn’t. It had a hard note that made her think of Rath, and how he had questioned her when she had first arrived on his property.

  More tears came.

  Hell, she hated them.

  Hated feeling weak and stupid.

  “I just needed some air.” She rubbed the new tears away, sucked down a breath and exhaled hard, struggling to centre herself and stop more from coming.

  She was done with them. No more tears.

  No more crying over men who didn’t deserve her.

  “Air?” The man cocked his head to his left and regarded her with a curious look as he released her arm and adjusted his pack on his shoulder.

  Another visitor?

  He looked a little like Rath, but he was bigger, not in height but in build, packed with muscle beneath his dark jacket and jeans. He was a good few years younger than Rath too, looking more like early thirties than late.

  She nodded.

  “Why are you here anyway?” He had asked that question before, and she realised now he hadn’t meant why was she storming hellbent towards the river, balling her eyes out like some heartbroken girl?

  He wanted to know why she was in the area, on Rath’s land.

  He looked and sounded too much like Rath to be anything other than one of his brothers, and clearly the obsession about this parcel of land ran deep in all of them, had them struggling to trust anyone they found on it that they didn’t know.

  “Are you going to start accusing me of being a hunter too? Because I’ve been through that with Rath,” she snapped and frowned at him, her anger rising again, drying up her foolish tears. “I’m here photographing the bears.”

  She tried to leave it at that, but everything surged inside her, and she couldn’t stop her mouth from motoring along without her consent as it all crashed over her again.

  “I was feeling good about myself for the first time in a while too… my photos are great… and it’s so peaceful and relaxing here, and then he ends up shouting at me and I’m not even sure what I did wrong.”

  She was ranting, but the man didn’t seem to care, just kept his steady gaze on her, his handsome face placid and unreadable.

  “Rath?” he said, and she nodded, and a flicker of a frown danced on his brow.

  “He let me photograph the bears after I explained to him that I wasn’t a hunter.”

  The man went to touch her shoulder.

  Rath’s hand clamped down on his wrist and pulled his arm away from her before he could make contact, his voice as hard as diamonds and his expression matching it as he looked at the man. “It’s late, and you need to go check on your cabin.”

  The man looked at him and a slow smile teased his lips as he dropped his gaze to her. “Don’t let him boss
you around.”

  With that, he was gone, walking away. She turned and watched him go, tracking him as he crossed the grass, heading towards the far corner of the clearing, near Rath’s cabin.

  When she looked at Rath, he was scowling at the man’s back.

  He lowered dark eyes to her. “You need to go back to the cabin.”

  “No.” She stood her ground when he glared at her. “I’m not going anywhere until you explain what’s going on here… why you shouted at me.”

  He huffed, scrubbed a hand over his dark hair and looked around at the clearing. “This place… it’s meant to be a secret. It’s sacred… a sanctuary that my family is responsible for protecting. The photographs you sent… Ivy, someone could use them to identify the area.”

  Did he want to protect the bears or the people who owned cabins here?

  The thought of him wanting to protect the people seemed ridiculous, so she settled on it being the bears. He had been adamant about hunters, had been convinced she had been one until he had seen her photographs. She could understand his passion for protecting the wildlife from people who illegally hunted it.

  “Do you get a lot of hunters?” she said, and when his face darkened, she wanted to sigh, because she felt sure they were going to end up arguing again, and she was tired of it, just wanted things to be as they had been earlier today, when he had smiled at her and been nice. “I know they’re a problem in some parts, and I can see why they might be a problem here too. It’s nice you want to keep the animals safe, and I’m sorry I sent the pictures without showing them to you first.”

  His face softened, some of the darkness lifting from it, and he sighed and looked off to his right, to the river and the mountains.

  “Ivy,” he murmured, his voice like honey, smooth and rich in her ears, and his gaze swung down to her. “I need to know about this man… I need to know everything.”

  She nodded.

  She would tell him what she knew about Alexander, so he could see that he wasn’t a threat to this place and so they could move past what had happened tonight.

  But she was damned if she was going to tell him everything.

  Chapter 9

  Rath didn’t want to know about this male Ivy had sent the photographs to, one who had been quick to respond to her email with a promise that she could have the funding she needed to go in search of spirit bears, but he needed to know, even when he was sure her answers were only going to anger him.

  Not because the male was a danger to his kin, and this place, but because he meant something to her.

  “I met Alexander maybe three or four years ago now, at a benefit.” She turned her profile to him and looked at the river, and the moon as it rose full and beautiful, casting pale light over her skin and turning it milky, and her eyes almost blue. “One of my other sponsors introduced us. I can tell you about him too if you want?”

  She glanced at him.

  He shook his head. “I’m only interested in the one you sent the pictures to.”

  The one he felt sure he needed to kill.

  “He funded me on a trip to photograph snow leopards in the Himalayas, because a few of my sponsors couldn’t afford the expense that year. We kept in touch as best as we could given the remoteness of the area I was trekking through to find them, and when I returned, he was so pleased with the photographs I had managed to get that he invited me to display them at a gala he was hosting to raise funds for protecting them.” She sighed, a hint of a smile on her lips that he didn’t like, because it stemmed from this male, from something he had done for her, complimenting her and her work, and giving her the means to do what she was passionate about. “The benefit was a big success, and he asked me to do a series on tigers next, because many of the species are on the brink of extinction.”

  “Sounds like a real hero,” Rath drawled and weathered her glare.

  She regarded him with eyes that gave none of her feelings away, were devoid of emotion and almost cold. “He’s just doing what he can to protect the big cat species.”

  He suspected otherwise, but kept that to himself, because he was tired of her being angry with him. When she had shouted at him, lashed out with words that had cut deep because they had been heavy with truth, and had stormed out into the night, his first urge had been to chase after her.

  He had ended up licking his wounds instead, giving her time and space that she needed.

  The email had come in from the male, and he had read it, and checked the photographs again, hoping that the bastard wouldn’t be able to identify the location from them.

  He had closed his computer and forced himself to relax, to let all his anger bleed out of him.

  The moment it had dropped from a raging boil to a simmer, he had sensed his brother, and had stepped out onto the deck to look for him.

  The sight of him close to touching Ivy had hit him hard, and he had exploded from the deck, had crossed the distance between them with all the speed he could muster.

  Damned if another male was going to touch his female.

  His brother was lucky he had tamped down the need to fight him.

  He had caught the look in Storm’s eyes as he had told him to go to his cabin though, the one that had questioned him at the same time as it had revealed he knew the female was something to him, had him rattled and on edge, wanting to fight for her.

  “Look, Alexander is just a man who likes to do what he can to help wildlife.” Her soft words did nothing to soothe him.

  They had the opposite effect, stoking the anger he had managed to leash.

  “Your email was curt, not the sort of way you would speak to someone you like and admire, someone who has been kind to you.”

  She averted her gaze.

  “He did something to upset you.” Rath knew it, because he was in the same boat, on the receiving end of the same cold and business-like manner because he had upset her.

  “It’s not really any of your business.”

  Those words hit him hard, had a growl curling up his throat as that restless feeling returned, urged him to make her see that it was his business, because he could read between the lines.

  Something had happened between her and this son of a bitch.

  He reached for her arm, determined to take her back to the cabin, to continue their conversation there and uncover just what had happened between her and the male she had emailed.

  “Rath?” Ember’s gentle voice came from the darkness and Ivy tensed, her shoulders going rigid and her eyes darting away from him, lowering to the grass. “I need to speak with you a moment.”

  Not now.

  He had more pressing matters that needed his attention.

  That pressing matter strode away from him, heading back towards his cabin so quickly it was as if her ass was on fire.

  Godsdamnit.

  “What is it, Ember?” he bit out, and she flinched away from him. “I don’t have time for this. I told you I’m not interested. Find another male.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at her cabin. “Mother wants it to be you.”

  She didn’t though. He could see that. She wasn’t interested in him as a mate, or even as a male. Her mother had always made it sound as if she was, but now he could see her mother was as meddling as his parents had been. They had picked his mate for him, and while he had come to love her in the short time they had been together, part of him had always wondered if he would have picked her for himself.

  Or whether another female would have been the one to win his heart.

  He looked off to his left, towards Ivy as she disappeared into his cabin. “I’m sorry, Ember. It’s a no.”

  He turned away from her, damn near sprinted back to his cabin, determined to do something about Ivy. He just wasn’t sure what.

  When he reached the door, all he could do was stare.

  Ivy moved around the living room, shoving things into her backpack.

  “What are you doing?” His words sounded distant, as hollow as h
e felt inside.

  She unscrewed the lens on her camera, placed a cap over the hole in the body and on the bottom of the lens, and packed them away. “I’ll leave at first light.”

  The ice in her tone sent a chill down his spine.

  She didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes on her work, every item she placed in her pack tearing another piece of strength from him, pushing him closer to the edge as a need to make her stay ignited inside him.

  “Why are you so eager to leave now?” he bit out as he stepped into the room, that hollow feeling growing stronger every second, making him feel as if everything was draining out of him. All the light. All the warmth. It was all leaving with her. “You want to photograph the bears in the morning.”

  She didn’t answer him, just shoved her brown trousers into the bottom of her backpack with such ferocity that he wanted to cross the room and make her stop, wanted to hold her and make her talk to him, tell him why she was doing this.

  She couldn’t leave.

  Not yet.

  He needed more time with her.

  “The bears will come, and you’ll miss them.” It was a poor attempt to make her stay a little longer, just a few hours more, as much time as he could get with her before she needed to go for her own safety.

  He felt like a bastard when she paused at her work for a heartbeat and tears spilled onto her cheeks, her hurt going through him.

  He hadn’t meant to wound her, or maybe he had. Maybe he had used the one thing he could to make her remain with him, her love of the bears, the excitement she had been buzzing with all day because she had been looking forward to tomorrow morning and seeing them again.

  She pushed away, taking her black bag with her, turning her back on him.

  “I’ll go with you. My brother is here now to take care of—”

  “No,” she snapped and her shoulders shook, her voice wobbling. “It’s best I go alone. Maybe I should just go now.”

  Like hell that was going to happen.

  “Why are you so hellbent on leaving now?” He slammed the door of the cabin shut behind him and stormed over to her, grabbed her arm and spun her to face him.

  Her bloodshot hazel eyes lifted to his for a second and then she turned her face away from him, lowering it so he couldn’t see them.