My insides ignited and I could smell my own arousal permeating the room.
“What would you have done, Sir?”
“Ah. The Sir is back. Nice to hear it again. Let’s hope you don’t screw up in the near future so you find out what happens. I much prefer fun spankings to the punishment kind.”
Chapter Six
Squatch
We ate breakfast the next morning, and then I dropped her off at her place. No sex yet, because I didn’t want her to be bruised to hell and back the first time we had sex as a couple.
I asked Dementor to meet me in the clubhouse, and we discussed how to work things at Blaze to keep me away from Kitty as much as possible while she worked. With Bobcat away, I’d been spending more time at Blaze, and some of that had been spent going next door with the girls to make sure the johns don’t get out of line. Obviously, this was no longer ideal. I’d do it if there wasn’t a way around it, but my wolf wasn’t going to deal well with it. At all.
Three months after the battle, I’d pitched in at the restaurant when they were shorthanded, which was most of the time, and I’d divided the rest of my time between Blaze and the spa. Once we had more people and more employees, I also floated at the bike shop and construction company. The idea is that I can step in and manage any of our companies for a short time. I know the employees and the routines. In reality, it would take me and Mad Dog combined to do Velvet’s job at the restaurant, and we still wouldn’t do it as good as her. I could probably handle eighty percent of what Frost does at the construction company, but I don’t have an engineering degree, and I wouldn’t try to hold my own in a negotiation with architects, engineers, and subcontractors on change orders. Still, I can step in and keep things running a day or two.
The other companies, I can run as long as necessary. Thankfully, Dementor was doing a decent job at Blaze, but I was spending more time there than the other businesses. Big D could manage the people, but I was handling payroll, staying on top of inventory, and making sure the accountant got everything he needed at the end of each week.
“You going to be okay watching men stuff money in her G-string while she dances? Watching her leave Blaze with the men she’s about to fuck? How about when she comes out of the back room with a man who smells like he just got his rocks off? Or when someone comes back from next door broadcasting the scent of your woman’s cunt?”
I shook my head, opened my fist, and wiggled my fingers. He was trying to get a reaction out of me. If I punched him, it’d prove I couldn’t handle it. “I’ll have to be. She’s a stripper. It’s what she does, not who she is. She’s damned independent, and there’s some baggage there, so she’ll never be fully dependent on someone else. I’ll lose her if I order her to quit. Has to be her decision.” There wasn’t a doubt in my mind she’d find another job once she wasn’t dancing anymore. She was probably never going to let me support her, and that was fine, but I couldn’t deal with her stripping for too long.
Dementor nodded. “Yeah. She’s living in a war zone until she has enough money saved so she can be sure she’ll survive okay if she has to get a regular paying job. She says she hasn’t had this one long enough to feel comfortable with her job security.”
I knew this already. She’d told me the same thing. “Her parents live in the middle of nowhere. Bumfuckistan, Alabama. I can’t see where she has any contact with her family at all.”
He lifted a brow. “You snooping in her phone records?”
I shrugged. “Mac might’ve accidentally used the backdoor he has into her phone provider to get that information for me.”
He crossed his arms and gave a small shake of his head, as if he clearly thought I’d lost my mind.
“Go back to the schedule you had before Bobcat’s dick took hold of his life. Stay in his office when you’re with us. I mainly just need you for the paperwork shit. Two half-days with us should be enough for you to do that, right?”
I considered what I’d need to do, and shook my head. “Two half-days during the week, but I’m going to need to be there to help out Friday and Saturday nights. You can’t use prospects without risking they’ll find out about the girls going next door. With Bobcat gone, you’ll need me. Try to keep me on the door, or maybe helping out at the bar, if you can. If not, I’ll do whatever is needed.” I shrugged. “I’ll be in Bobcat’s office towards the end, before closing — handling the counts. Need to do that whether I come in earlier to help or not.”
He ran his hand through his hair. “Yeah. Okay. It isn’t a long-term solution, but hopefully Bobcat will be back soon, and you can stay away.”
Kitty
One person in Birmingham knows my secret — Brooke, the Master Vampiress of Birmingham. Going to her had been a calculated risk, but it’d worked out better than I’d dreamed possible. I feed her every three weeks on a schedule, and she lets me use some of her land to change and run. I’m also under her protection. No one knows that last bit, but I can pull it out as warning if I need it. It’s true that she may decide to use the knowledge of what I am as a chess piece at some point, but I don’t think she’ll do so lightly. Others see her as just short of evil, but I see a young girl forced to grow up way too fast, who still has a lot of baggage from it.
And who can blame her for that?
I called Brooke’s daytime assistant and asked if I could use the property. He gave me the go-ahead, thank goodness. I can change in my apartment if necessary, but the cat needed to run and hunt.
Someday, I’ll have my own land, and I’ll raise feeder rabbits, pigs, and goats. Until then, I have to buy them. Thankfully, I have a few sources.
I drove outside of town, purchased a sixty-pound pig, and put him in the dog crate in the back of my piece-of-crap SUV. The farmer does something to make them take a shit before I pick them up, so I’ve never had to deal with shit in the crate. It won’t be the end of the world if it happens, but I’m thankful for his little trick.
The land I’m most often directed to use has a tall stone wall around it, and an automated gate. I punched in the last five digits of my cellphone number, and a voice asked me to verify my identity. I looked into the camera and gave my name. The male voice asked if I was alone. I confirmed I’d brought a feeder pig, but no one else. Fifteen seconds later, the gate opened.
Their security system must have a way to listen for heartbeats or to find body heat, because I’d said I was alone the first time, and had been converged on by eight large shapeshifters. I hadn’t made that mistake again.
I have a favorite corner of the property, and I made my way there, disrobed, let the pig loose, and then changed. The pig ran, of course. My tiger played with it a little — herding it, scaring it. We didn’t wound it though — it would be tragic to lose any of the yummy blood.
This property was around twenty acres, and I was fairly certain there were underground buildings. The cat had picked up on enough scents, I could probably find the entrances if I wanted, but I didn’t want to. I was allowed to hunt and play every time I’d made the request, and Brooke only asked that I didn’t feed from the wildlife on the property.
I ate my dinner and then sunned on a large boulder near a beautiful man-made lake. A decent sized stream ran through the property, and someone had put in an earthen dam. The tiger often swam after she ate, but today, we lounged on the boulder and cleaned our self the old-fashioned way.
When I finally changed back to human, I put my contacts in first, while my hands were clean. Next, I put my hair in a bun, wrapped a black bandana around my head, and then put a cap on. The riskiest part of this is the drive home. The second I was home, I started the process of bleaching strips of hair with a strong solution, and then all of it with a weaker mix. Once that was rinsed out, I spent an hour and ten minutes with the dye on it during the final step. I don’t have to worry about damaging the strands, since it’ll be good-as-new the next time I need to do this.
I checked my messages while I sat with my head in plastic, and a
towel wrapped around the plastic to keep it warm. I responded to Soul, our lead dancer, to let her know which songs I preferred of the ones she suggested, but nothing else needed my response. The dancers have a group chat, but thankfully, it doesn’t get too bogged down with personal shit.
I packed enough clothes to last two weeks at Squatch’s apartment, and then focused on makeup and hair needs. Holy cow, I have a lot of beautifying products. Thankfully, most of my heavy-duty stuff stays in the dressing room at Blaze, so I could scale it back enough to fit in two large makeup organizers.
Squatch was going to completely shit when I took his bathroom over.
While I rinsed my hair and conditioned it, I considered how I felt about the fact Daffodil had been in his apartment when I called for help.
I’d learned more about how the sweetbutts fit into the club when Crystal and Enigma were hired. They get to hang out with the club, but they’re basically available to whoever wants them, whenever they are wanted, however they are wanted. Many of them live in an apartment in the complex since they went to the front of the line once they were accepted. I also got the idea that most of them were hoping to eventually snag a biker and be someone’s ol’lady. I had to wonder how often that actually happened. Most guys are interested in the women they have to work for. Or that’s what I gathered. Admittedly, I knew little of how the world actually works in that regard.
That wasn’t just because I’d been raised in the ambush though. As a general rule, tigers don’t really worry about that sort of thing. We have flings. Rarely do we engage in long-term relationships. I assumed I’d spend one to three months with Squatch and get him out of my system.
So the truth was, I didn’t care that he’d been fucking someone else when I called. In fact, it’s possible I was pleased, since he’d obviously kicked her out of bed and come to me, even though I hadn’t told him why I needed him.
Mad Dog had told me I needed to consider the ramifications of dating a monogamous wolf, and it seemed to me, Squatch and I needed to have a conversation about that. I was prepared to promise not to have sex outside of my job for the month he kept talking about, but I wasn’t going to ask him to stop fucking the sweetbutts. In fact, I needed that to continue, so he wouldn’t resent the attention I gave to the men at Blaze.
My father had raised me. My mother lives in an ambush near Niagara Falls, but she’d only been allowed to visit me a few times a year. My father hadn’t allowed me out of his control. Not until I’d run away, which means he hadn’t actually allowed it, even then.
I’d made my escape a few weeks before I was due to meet my third cousin at an ambush in Utah. He’s from Texas, but he’s so young, we’d need to go to Utah to keep it legal-ish. We’d been introduced once, years before, and I barely remembered him. I didn’t want to have cubs with him, but the scientists matched us, and our fathers had come to an agreement, and so it was going to happen.
There’s no way I’d have made it out of the ambush before the battle, but we were low on guards. The Celrau had attacked us and we’d lost too many people. I’d been responsible for giving cash to the men who left the ambush to shop for us — groceries, lumber, plumbing supplies, pool chemicals. I’d managed to hold back a little cash here and there for the past seven years, so it wasn’t noticed. I had nearly two thousand dollars when it was finally time to leave.
My escape had probably made things harder on the other females. Anyone else escaping would have been bad, but for me to leave... I wondered if my dad was still the leader. I knew that his inability to control his own daughter would be seen as weak, but I didn’t know if it would be enough for them to call for an election to put someone else in place.
My family is considered royalty amongst my kind, which meant that even though we don’t officially have a ruling class, I was kind of a princess, and my dad was the natural choice for leader. Think of it like the Kennedys. I didn’t have an actual tiara, but much was expected of me, and my dad wanted a lot of grandsons. The deal with the Texas ambush would’ve given the first female and first three males to my dad, and any other offspring to be divided up between our ambush and the Texas ambush per a detailed agreement.
That wasn’t acceptable to me.
So, I escaped the ambush in South Carolina and ran to Brooke, The Master Vampire of Birmingham, and asked for help. She’d set me up with a new identity, helped me rent a cheap apartment, had one of her people teach me how to strip, and then had one of the eagles vouch for me with Mad Dog. The MC thought my family was from a backwards part of Alabama, a little over an hour south of Birmingham. It worked out okay because I’d have been homeschooled if I’d been part of that family, and I was homeschooled in the tiger ambush I’d lived in. My naivete was explained.
I was crazy for risking everything for a fling with Squatch, but I couldn’t help myself. I needed what I knew he could give me.
Squatch
When I returned from taking Kitty home, I stopped by Mad Dog’s apartment. I was trying to figure out what was up with Kitty, and I knew Mad Dog knew about other species. His great-grandfather had been in a pack in Germany before WWII. They’d fled to Austria, and eventually, Britain. Mad Dog knew all kinds of things he’d learned from listening to his great-grandfather.
He let me get partway through my story before he turned on a radio, the television, and a white noise machine.
When I finished with everything I knew, he said, “I think that what I’m hearing is that we have one of the rare tigers dancing for us, and we can’t use it as promo.”
“Rare tigers? What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “It’s just legend, as far as I know, but there are supposedly rare tiger species that have to stay in hiding because there are... collectors. They live in secret groups, which is unusual for tigers. The rumors make them sound backwards and...” He shook his head. “Male dominated society where the women have no rights. The women are expected to procreate, and their fathers arrange for who they’ll have cubs with.”
“Cubs? Not kittens?”
“Big cats have cubs. Small cats have kittens. I think it has to do with whether they purr or roar. Anyway, the point is, legend has it that these cats are worth millions on the black market. Their enclaves are called ambushes. An ambush of tigers.” He shrugged. “If you can lead a bounty hunter to the ambush, you can collect tens of millions of dollars without lifting a finger to help capture them.” He blew out a breath. “If I remember correctly, there was something about a lot of inbreeding, and genetic issues because of it. Kitty seems fine, so maybe I’m wrong about her being one of them.”
“What makes them special?”
“In animal form, they’re marked differently, and are different colors than ordinary tigers. As people, their hair has different colors and patterns. Collectors try to get one of each. I can’t remember the colors. Silver, gold, and black, maybe?” He shrugged. “We lost so much when Opa died. I miss him something terrible, but we all miss the wealth of information he had in his head. My dad is getting video of my grandfather telling some of his stories, but I don’t dare ask them specifically about the rare tigers. Like Kitty said, it might draw attention our way.”
“I got the idea there are two things she’s hiding as a human.”
He nodded, and I could tell he’d remembered something else. “Hair and eye color. My guess is she wears colored contacts to hide her eyes. I remember that they are brilliantly colored.”
“So she’s hiding in plain sight? A stripper tiger. No one will ever consider she’s one of the rare, valuable tigers. I wonder how she managed to get permission to get away from her ambush?”
“My guess? She didn’t. I’ll ride with you to her parents’ address and we’ll sniff around. I’m guessing we won’t scent tigers. We can do it one evening, while she’s working. She’s probably using a fake identity, and we have no idea where her parents actually live.” He sighed. “It’s a good one though. Nothing popped on our background check, but she’s young, so th
ere wasn’t a work history, and she was homeschooled, so no school records.”
“So, if she left the group and put herself in danger, maybe it’s because she didn’t want to have cubs with whoever her father ordered her to? She said only her father or uncle could tell me her secret, and that it would never happen — that they’d be more likely to try to kill me.” I shook my head as something else occurred to me. “I’m due to feed Brooke on the next full moon. I risk her reading this in my head.”
Our chapter had a deal with Birmingham’s Master Vampire — one of us would feed her every other month on or near the full moon, and in exchange for this, she and her people were available for us to buy their services. It put us on friendly terms, though not friends. I’d volunteered initially, when she’d first moved to town, and then had kept going. She wanted to feed from me without sex, and it felt like she wanted to make sure I wasn’t turned on by the thoughts of sex with her. Since she’d been turned into a vampire somewhere around the age of eight, there was no danger of that. I’m not into kids. At all.
“Then we’ll send someone else.”
I sighed. “I think I work for her because I’m not at all interested in fucking the body of a child, and yet I respect the soul inside the body for her power and wisdom. We’re going to have to be careful of who we send. I get the idea that anyone who wants to fuck her will be considered a pedophile in her eyes, and that this would be bad.” Because if she kills one of us, we’ll have to go to war with her. No way around it.
We were back in the realm of legends again, but Brooke had supposedly been sold to pedophiles her first hundred or so years as a child vampire. She’d been forced to be a child prostitute, so she had good reason to hate pedos. And, of course, she’d been turned by a pedophile vampire. She’d had to wait centuries before she was strong enough to have a chance of living when she killed her maker. Most vampires need longer than mere centuries, but she was pretty damned focused in her hate for the fucker.
Squatch (Rolling Thunder MC Birmingham Book 4) Page 5