by Jessica Sims
Tiger By The Tail
By
Jessica Sims
Copyright © 2014 by Jill Myles
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in
any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Tiger By The Tail
Were-tiger Adrian Merino is determined to see the newest shifter on the block, Mandy, become his mate. But it’s got to be her idea first… Can he convince her that what he wants is what she wants, too? Or is Mandy too stubborn to see what’s before her whiskered nose?
This 15,000 word Midnight Liaisons novella was originally published in On the Growl.
Beauty Dates the Beast
Desperately Seeking Shapeshifter
Vixen
Undead in my Bed
Speed Mating
Single Wolf Female
Must Love Fangs
Bear Naked
Claws & Effect
Wanted: Wild Thing
Tiger By The Tail
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Tiger By The Tail
“All right,” Vic Merino said as the entire Merino tiger clan sat around his kitchen table. “We have a problem.”
All eyes turned to Mandy Petersen, who then rolled her own eyes and crossed her arms. It took a lot of bravery to stand up to the tiger clan, but Mandy was sick of them, every last stripy bastard of the lot.
Really, Mandy shouldn’t have even been at the meeting. She should have been back at college, safely tucked in her dorm, helping her old sorority handle rush week, or meeting a roommate. Something normal. She shouldn’t be at a meeting in a stranger’s kitchen about whether or not she could grow her own tail. She shouldn’t have had the slightest clue about tails or shifters or the mysterious Alliance network of shifters that populated North Texas. Nope. Nor should she have known that every one of the tall, good-looking Merino men was a were-shifter, and that they all turned into tigers when they felt like it.
She shouldn’t have even known that shifters existed.
Of course, if she had known all that, she would have never started dating Johnny, a twenty year old reckless guy with a devilish look in his blue eyes. She would have continued to hold Johnny at arms length for forever. Better yet, if she had known he was a shifter, she would never have gone out with him at all.
Because if they hadn’t dated, he would have never bitten her on the neck and transferred his shifting ability to her. He hadn’t even warned her that there was a possibility. She’d just thought he was a little too forward.
But he was a shifter, and he’d bitten her hard enough to break skin, and that was apparently all it took. When she’d immediately started to sprout fur, brought her home to his alpha – an alpha!!! – all proud and telling everyone that he was now her mate and she was his mate and that they should accept it.
There were two problems with this scenario – one: humans weren’t supposed to know about shifters and were definitely not supposed to be changed into shifters.
And two – nobody had ever bothered to ask Mandy if she wanted to be a tiger.
Scared out of her mind, Mandy hadn’t protested when they’d shipped her and Johnny to Alaska. She was too busy growing fangs and claws and other terrifying things to stress about her living situation. When things finally did stop growing spontaneously quite so often, Johnny (who was still unsuccessfully trying to get into her pants) casually mentioned that oh, she was now part of the tiger clan, and since ‘they’ had broken the rules, they were now exiled to Alaska. Forever.
Again, no one had asked Mandy how she felt about snow.
Needless to say, she wasn’t happy.
It turned out that ‘forever’ was only a few weeks, and the long-standing rules against humans were tweaked a bit, and Mandy and Johnny were allowed back to Texas. And then Johnny – who, two weeks ago, had been swearing he was her forever mate and had changed her because he wanted to be with her always – started seeing a brunette because Mandy ‘just wasn’t working out’.
So now she was a tiger. An unwanted tiger. And dumped. Back in Texas, but still a tiger.
And still, no one had bothered to ask Mandy how she felt about any of this.
So the fact that they were now having a meeting about her and the fact that she didn’t feel like shifting? Well, they could all go suck a bag of dicks, as far as she was concerned.
But she didn’t say that. She sat and crossed her arms and looked pissy. Because now that she was a shifter, she also had this weird, awful new problem: she couldn’t oppose her alpha. It was something in shifter blood, Johnny told her. You bowed to the man in charge. And lucky her, she was now a shifter.
Her alpha was Vic Merino, the man currently trying to decide what to do with her. Vic was not her favorite person. He was tall, muscular as hell, and covered in tattoos. His mate was the equally tall Estrella, who was blonde and sweet and extremely pregnant at the moment. Because Estrella was pregnant, she was told that Vic tended to have a rather bad temper because his protective streak was getting the better of him.
Considering Mandy had only known Vic for about a month? She’d never seen him in a good temper.
“You need to shift, Mandy.”
“No.” She crossed her arms over her chest.
“Yes.”
“I don’t have to.”
“You haven’t shifted in weeks. You’re overdue.”
“Nope. I’m fine. I don’t feel the need to shift at all.” If she did, she quickly squashed the sensation. Fuck them for thinking they could tell her what to do.
Vic’s jaw clenched. “You need to shift regularly so you can learn to control it.”
“I don’t need to shift at all,” she told him stubbornly. And that was the end of that. She was not going to shift for him like a good little puppet.
“It’s time for all of us to be adults about this,” Vic said, in what she assumed was his ‘reasonable’ voice. “As much as you would like to put this past month behind you, Mandy, I’m afraid it’s just not going to happen. Like it or not, you chose this lifestyle, and you can’t go back on it now. Becoming a shifter is a one-way street.”
Chose? She chose? What a joke. She hadn’t chose anything. She hadn’t even chosen Johnny, not really. He’d just made all the decisions and Mandy was left trying to pick up the pieces of her life. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me–”
“If Johnny told you I chose to be changed, he’s delusional.”
Vic gave Johnny a hard look.
Johnny just shrank lower in his seat.
Mandy shook her head. This wasn’t getting anyone anywhere. “Look. Just forget it. Just let me go, all right? I don’t want anything to do with any of you,” Mandy said. “I want to go back to college. I would be perfectly happy if I never saw any of you ever again!” She uncrossed her arms and clasped her hands in front of her breasts. “Please, please, please let me go back home. I just want to be normal again.”
Vic’s jaw tightened, and she saw Estrella place a hand on his arm, soothing him. Okay, so maybe that had been the wrong thing to say. She looked around the table at the rest of the Merino faces, all unsmiling. As a one, they were good looking men, but Johnny’s face now filled her with loathing and rage. Why was she the one being punished when he was just going around doing whatever he wanted? It didn’t seem fair.
“You absolutely cannot go back,” Vic said.
“I don’t see why not,” Mandy replied.
The vibe around the table became extremely tense. Estrella petted Vic’s arm again, and as Mandy watched, Vic’s nostrils flared. Oka
y, she was starting to get that awful crawling feeling on the back of her neck when she knew she was being a bad tiger. The urge to crawl under the table and hide intensified, and she averted her gaze from him. Unfortunately, it landed on his second, Adrian.
Adrian was an entirely different awkward sort of problem for her. Ever since she and Johnny had parted, he watched her. All the time. She suspected it was because he was expecting her to spontaneously stripe-up (as she liked to call shifting) but sometimes, she wondered. Like right now. Adrian watched her with a pair of darkly lashed, intense blue eyes. His eyebrows were thick, heavy slashes that made him seem as if he was frowning at her at all times…and maybe he was. He wasn’t the kind to smile much. A few inches taller than his alpha, Vic, he was the quiet one you had to watch out for compared to Vic’s assertive alphaness.
“You don’t see why not?” Vic’s voice was dangerous, and Mandy’s attention snapped back to him. “What do you mean, you don’t see why not?”
Mandy quailed in the face of Vic’s fury, shrinking down lower in her seat. Could an alpha kill one of his tigers, she wondered, even if she wasn’t really officially a tiger? Just sort of acquired by them?
“Vic, baby,” Estrella said in a soothing voice. “You’re scaring her.”
“She needs to be fucking scared,” Vic roared. His hands clenched on the table, and then one shot up and pointed at Mandy’s face. “You need to fucking realize who you’re putting in danger with this shitty attitude of yours—“
“She knows,” Estrella said, her voice still placating and soft. “I’m sure this is all a lot for her to take in.”
“If you lose control, you risk all of us. If you shift in public, you endanger every-fucking-one.” Vic’s voice was sounding more and more animal, and the urge to flee was growing greater and greater. Not so discreetly, Johnny scooted his chair away from Mandy.
Coward, she thought. God, what had she ever seen in Johnny other than a pair of blue eyes? Thank goodness she’d never slept with him.
Vic slowly rose from the table. “I’ll not have my wife and child in a fucking zoo—“
“I’ll handle things,” Adrian said. His voice was utterly calm compared to Vic’s rage, and everyone immediately turned to him. He didn’t get up. Didn’t look in Mandy’s direction. Just shrugged his big shoulders. “I’ll handle things. Give me the week off of work and I’ll handle Mandy.”
‘Handle’ Mandy? She bristled, but remained silent. Vic was ragey enough as it was.
“Are you sure?” Estrella looked a little concerned. She kept glancing over at Mandy, her eyes sympathetic. Maybe she understood what Mandy was going through, as she was an outsider to the Merino clan herself. She was a liger who had been taken in when she’d mated Vic, or so Johnny had told her. It was one thing that had spurred him on to changing her – jealousy over Vic and Estrella’s mated happiness. “Maybe I can help—“
“No,” Vic said, voice dangerous. His big arms – yikes, they were big — crossed over his chest. “It’s decided. Adrian can handle her.”
Mandy’s brow wrinkled as she glanced over at Adrian. Tall, gorgeous, utterly confident. Why was he bothering with her? From what Johnny had told her about the tiger clan, Adrian tended to stay out of the messes. And she was pretty sure that she was considered one of their ‘messes’.
There had to be a catch here somewhere. Just what exactly it was, she hadn’t figured out yet.
“All right,” Estrella said, a hint of a smile returning to her lovely face. She kept smiling even as she looked over at Mandy. “We’ll let Adrian handle things.”
“You have a week off of work,” Vic told Adrian.
“Week’s all I need,” Adrian replied in that utterly calm voice. “I’ll mentor her into shape by then.”
And there she was, bristling all over again as they talked about her over her head. Like she was nothing. Tiger Barbie, their newest play thing. That was all Johnny had ever considered her to be, right? “What about what I want?”
Vic snarled, but Adrian was already on it. Those cool blue eyes looked over at her. “It doesn’t matter what you want.”
She huffed and sat back in her seat. That seemed to be the story of her life. No one ever cared what Mandy wanted.
~~ * ~~
Adrian studied the redhead that sat across from him at the churrascaria restaurant. He’d taken her here for two reasons: one, because she wouldn’t cause a scene in public no matter how much she might pout; and two, because meat tended to trigger a shifter’s instincts. So what better place than all-you-can-eat Brazilian barbecue?
They’d been silent on the way over to the restaurant, Mandy sitting with her arms crossed in the passenger seat as he drove. He didn’t mind the silence; he wasn’t normally the biggest talker anyhow. He left that for Vic. Actually, he left most things for Vic. His brother was a year older than him and Adrian was content to let his headstrong, charging-head-first brother take control of everything. Most times. But when Adrian saw something he wanted, he went after it.
And he wanted Mandy for himself.
He’d never considered having a mate, not really. Female shifters were rare enough as it was, and Adrian had never thought of himself as particularly ‘lonely’. He had his clan, he had the garage he helped Vic to run, and if he had a particular itch, that was what bars were for. You dated a nice human girl, you hooked up once or twice, and then you never called her back. He never took a girl home to meet the family. Never met one he was particularly interested in bringing home before.
But then Johnny had brought home Mandy, half-transformed and trembling with fear. She hadn’t understood what was happening, and she looked just as shocked as the rest of them when Johnny had declared her his mate. And sure enough, she even wore a mate mark on her neck.
And for the first time, Adrian had seethed at Johnny’s headstrong carelessness. He’d ruined this girl’s life because he wanted to get his dick wet. Adrian had continued to stew on things as the tiger pair had been sent into exile, and then both Johnny and Mandy returned a month later.
And it was clear that they were no longer a couple. Johnny, his stupid, irresponsible brother, had complained that he’d turned Mandy hoping it would make her jump into his bed. In fact, it had done the opposite. Mandy wanted nothing to do with Johnny, and for some reason, that had made Adrian glad. Somewhere in the past month, Mandy had found her spine, and she was standing up to everyone. Even Vic, which Adrian found rather endearing. She was terrified, and yet she found the inner strength to lift her chin and protest how she was being handled.
It was that tiny lift of her chin that had sealed her fate. Adrian wanted her, a bolt of lust and possessive need shooting through him so powerfully that he’d had to clench his jaw to control himself. Outwardly, he might show nothing, but inside, he was a seething mass of lust. His tiger saw Mandy, a female tiger in his territory, unclaimed and alone, and it wanted her. And the human part of Adrian liked that she was brave even when scared, her tiny jaw set to a mulish angle as they decided her fate.
So he’d stepped in. Offered to mentor her. It’d give him time alone with her. Time to woo her into seeing that maybe a tiger wasn’t such a bad thing to be after all. Johnny had never even given her a choice in the matter, according to Mandy’s protests. Now the choice was ripped from her – you couldn’t go back once you’d been turned – but Adrian would show her that it wouldn’t be so bad to be a tiger’s mate.
Because she was definitely going to be his. His tiger had never craved a mate before, but now that he’d decided, it was taking everything he had to remain calm when every instinct in his body was screaming for him to place his own mate mark over the fading one on her neck. To take her as his own. To claim her.
‘Course, he had no idea how to woo a girl, not really. But stopping a moody Vic from snapping her neck was a good start. Not that Vic would. His brother was a lot of bluster more than anything else…but his mate was also pregnant, and Vic’s protective tendencies were in o
verdrive. Best to just defuse the situation himself by claiming her as his own mate before someone else could get that idea in their heads.
He parked his car in front of the churrascaria restaurant and looked over at her. “You know to keep your mouth shut about clan things in public?”
That cute, stubborn little jaw was clenched. She glared at him. “I’m not stupid. And I’m not hungry.”
Her stomach growled, loud enough for both of them to hear, and her cheeks flushed a bright red. Adrian raised an eyebrow at her.
“Oh, shut up,” she snapped and stormed out of the car.
He bit back his grin and followed her into the restaurant.
Mandy was silent as they were seated, but he could tell she was irritated. Her movements were jerky, her normally pleasant scent was slightly acrid in his nostrils, and she snapped her cloth napkin as she laid it in her lap. “Why are we here anyway?” she asked him as they sat down at the table. “I thought no one wanted me in public until I was ‘handled’?” She made air quotes. “Remember what the psycho alpha said?”
“You’re with me,” he said simply. And it was true. Vic trusted him. He probably suspected what Adrian was up to, and not standing in his way also meant that he approved at some level. All of which worked perfectly for Adrian. Now that he had his future mate in his sights, the only thing standing in his way was convincing her that she belonged with him. “As for Vic, he’s a little unhinged because his mate’s pregnant with their baby. Her hormones are affecting him, and with a new shifter in the clan, he’s losing his temper. A lot.”
“Lucky me,” Mandy drawled.
“Mandy!” A voice squealed a moment later, interrupting his thoughts. “Oh my God, it’s you! Where have you been?” A woman walked up to their table, about the same age as Mandy. She was wearing a pink football jersey and her blonde hair was pulled into a puffy knot atop her head. “You’ve been missing out on all the Tri Delta fun lately.”