Serengeti Storm: Serengeti Shifters, Book 2

by Vivi Andrews

  “I’ll figure it out eventually. It’s not like you can keep me from wandering by the old stomping grounds to see who’s taken up residence.” Her face twisted like she’d tasted something sour. “It’s not some little girl you’ve been fucking, is it? In my bed. Probably calling my name when you come. Ugh. That’s disturbed, Caleb. There are counselors you can see about shit like that.”

  “Shay.” Her name was a warning.

  She ignored it. “I always felt bad about that,” she chirped, her cheeriness making the words a lie. “Ruining you for all other women. And at such a young age. It’s sad, really. Poor Caleb.”

  His tongue itched with the urge to say something about the way she’d ruined herself. There wasn’t a bed Shana hadn’t slept in, a lion she hadn’t spread her legs for, and the nastiest part of his nature urged him to call her every kind of whore.

  But they’d arrived at the empty bungalow, and part of him still believed there was a breakable little girl beneath her tough-as-nails front, so he said instead, “Here it is.”

  Shana looked at the medium-sized, decently appointed bungalow and tipped her head to the side. “Not bad. From the outside. What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing. Go on.” He would have shoved her up the path, under the porch overhang and out of the snow, but knowing Shana, she probably would have bitten him for his efforts.

  “Is it booby-trapped or something? Trip wire?”

  “Shana, for God’s sake, just go in the damn house. It’s a fucking blizzard out here.”

  She glanced up, seeming startled anew by the falling snow. “It’s barely snowing. Some Storm of the Century. Pathetic.”

  The devil of it was he couldn’t even disagree with her. The blizzard the weathermen had been talking about for days was turning out to be nothing more than an inch or two of lightly falling snow. No wind, no whiteout conditions, nothing. But even extreme torture couldn’t have made him agree with her at that moment.

  “Go, Shana.”

  She turned the same look on him that she’d given the questionable bungalow only seconds before. Then, slowly, her eyes grew calculating. Her tongue snaked out to wet her lips. “And what if I don’t?”

  He’d forgotten how exhausting it could be to deal with her. How nothing was ever easy. Even when he was balls-deep inside her, she was always testing his limits. Always pushing harder. His cock stiffened at the memory.

  The answer Caleb suddenly wanted to give her was rough and sexual and would take their relationship right back to a place he had sworn he would never go with her again.

  Shana must have sensed some shift in his mood, because suddenly she was three steps up the path to the abandoned bungalow, tossing him a disdainful glance over her shoulder. “Relax, tough guy. I’m going like a good girl.”

  She waggled her ass at him in a way no good girl had ever dreamed and he growled. Then she disappeared into the house.

  Caleb held himself still, fighting down the lingering urge to follow her into that house and show her what happened to little girls who teased men like him. The itch at the base of his spine simultaneously urged him to fuck and to shift. He fought both urges.

  Until he felt the slight air pressure pop from the house, indicating Shana had taken her lioness form inside.

  Caleb shifted involuntarily, the animal rising up fast and hard to claim his body.

  In this form, the urge to break down the door and fuck her into submission was a hundred times more intense, the animal in him pressing humanity to the periphery of his consciousness. His lion told him the female he’d once thought would be his mate needed to be mastered, that she would welcome his dominance, but the man was still present enough to keep his paws firmly planted on the snowy ground.

  When his animal snarled and snapped at his self-imposed tether, Caleb began a slow, prowling circuit around the house. Every fourth paw print was bloody from the bite of sweet Shana’s tender claws. He paced around the house until the track was a circle of red. Guarding. Whether he was keeping her in or keeping others out, he didn’t know. The animal in him didn’t see a difference. It just insisted that he keep prowling.

  So he prowled.

  Shana woke and stretched, reveling in the pleasure of being in her feline form.

  During her months away from the pride, she’d never had the luxury of sleeping as a lion—or really of living as a cat for more than a few moments of each day, safely behind locked doors and careful not to make any non-human sounds.

  Shana arched her back and rolled to all four paws, pushing up to stand. Just for the joy of it, she filled her lungs and roared, long and loud. She flicked her tail just to feel the air brush through the tuft.

  Tempted though she was to remain feline all day, Shana reluctantly shifted back to human form.

  She quickly pulled a fresh pair of panties out of her pack and pulled them on, along with yesterday’s jeans, bra and tank top. She’d get someone to bring in the rest of her clothes from the jeep today.

  Shana opened the door to her borrowed bungalow—it was only hers temporarily, until she got her own back—and stood looking out over the snowy morning.

  The big storm had only dropped a couple inches of snow on the ranch. Pale morning sunlight was already at work melting it. All signs of the so-called Storm of the Century would be gone by noon. Not far from her—borrowed—front porch, a pair of cubs rolled around in the slushy snow.

  Shana frowned at a rusty brown stain on the porch—matching a similar stain circling her bungalow. She sniffed. Blood.

  Trust Caleb to bleed out on her damn front porch instead of taking five seconds to have someone put a damn bandage on his arm. Goddess forbid he should disobey the Alpha’s command to keep her out of trouble even as long as it took to patch himself up.

  Of course, he wasn’t around now to keep her out of trouble. Shana craned her neck and scented the air just to be safe. But no. No Caleb. Either he was hiding downwind, or he’d run off after making himself sick lying there bleeding on her porch all night long in the cold.

  She had no sympathy for him.

  A sleek young woman appeared around the corner of a nearby bungalow, giving Shana a tentative smile and a sheepish little shrug of her shoulders as she headed in her direction. Shana gritted her teeth. Loralee. She had no sympathy for her either.

  “It’s good to have you back, Shana,” Loralee called, even her voice sounding pathetically subservient.

  Did the girl have no self-respect? Shana appreciated Loralee’s respect for power and dominance, but even doormats like pathetic little Ava demonstrated some spine once in a while.

  “Is it?” Shana asked. Her voice was harsh and she did nothing to moderate the icy thrust of the words.

  Loralee’s wary smile faded a few degrees. “Yes. I missed you.”

  “Sure you did.” Loralee’d missed having someone to fight her battles for her is what Loralee had missed. “Who’s in my bungalow?”

  Loralee’s face froze. She was never much of a quick-thinker and now she was trying desperately to figure out whether Shana was allowed to know the answer to her question. Which meant she acknowledged an authority higher than Shana. Unacceptable.

  “Who, Loralee?” she demanded.

  “Tyler!” Loralee bleated.

  “Shit.”

  Tyler. Caleb’s older brother. Not quite as big, not quite as rough, but not someone Shana could tangle with and win.

  "You could have just told me,” Shana snapped.

  “Alpha said we couldn’t. He said it didn’t matter who it was. It was the principle of the thing.”

  Of course. The principle. Trust the demented Alpha to make a big damned deal about principles when he could have just told her she didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning it back.

  Shana turned and looked at the borrowed bungalow. It actually wasn’t that bad. As a starting point. A few challenges and she could trade up—principles be damned. Even if she couldn’t get her own place back, that didn
’t mean she couldn’t get some nicer digs. And when she was the Alpha’s mate, even Tyler wouldn’t deny her. She’d have her place back. And her rightful place in the pride.

  Goddesses and queens did not beg. Or fight. People gave them things.

  “Your mother’s asking for you.”

  Shana flinched at Loralee’s softly uttered words. Her mother. Living proof that queens did beg. Pathetic, deposed, drunkard queens who had lost all claims on self-respect. “What does she want?”

  “She wants to see you,” Loralee said gently. “She’s missed you too.”

  Shana knew what Loralee had missed. It was a little harder to pin down what her mother might have missed in her absence. A handy chauffeur to the nearest liquor store? Someone to look down on when she’d sunk so low it was hard to imagine anyone lower?

  “She can go screw herself,” Shana whispered, barely mouthing the words.

  “What was that?” Loralee asked, sweetness and innocence and weakness personified. Pathetic.

  “I’ll go see her myself,” Shana said louder, brushing past the smaller female.

  She sloshed through the melting snow, her mind closed to the pleasures of the winter sun and the playfulness of a snowy morning. She was going to see her mother. Firing squads were more congenial.

  Serengeti Storm: Serengeti Shifters, Book 2

  Chapter Four

  Brenna Delray’s bungalow stood on the outermost edges of the residential compound, secluded and dark. There were no lights on inside, but Shana knew better than to think that had anything to do with whether anyone was home.

  She knocked on the door sharply. A small, cowardly part of herself she hated to admit even existed hoped Brenna wouldn’t be awake. Or had already passed out for the day, even though it was only mid-morning. Anything to keep her from having to walk through that door.

  “Shana, honey? Is that you?” A thin, reedy voice floated through the door.

  Shana closed her eyes for a second, slumping in on herself. She only allowed herself a heartbeat. Goddesses don’t wallow. Then she snapped her spine straight and pushed open the door. “Hello, Mother.”

  All the shades were drawn, but Shana saw her mother clearly enough in the dim light.

  Brenna never left the house, unless alcohol was being served in the dining hall. She hid behind her former position, using it as an excuse to ignore the unwritten rule that everyone contributed in the pride. The pride had its own doctor, carpenter, schoolteacher and mechanic, making it as self-sufficient as possible. Those who chose to worked in the nearby town or found opportunities to work online, like Shana did, to bring money into the pride. They weren’t work-obsessed—Shana had never met a lion who defined himself by his day job or cared more about fancy cars than his afternoon siesta—but everyone pitched in.

  Except Brenna.

  She sat in a threadbare armchair, curled in a ratty knit shawl, with both hands curled protectively around a tumbler glass filled with amber liquid.

  If it’s Tuesday, it must be Scotch.

  The air was musty and thick in Brenna’s bungalow, or Shana’s lungs were closing off, she never could quite determine which. She shoved a stack of Star magazines off a chair and perched on the edge. She was always on edge here. Her mother might be cheerfully buzzed now, sweet and docile as a lamb, but Shana knew better than to get comfortable. She knew what was coming at the bottom of bottle number two.

  “How’ve you been, Mother?”

  “Me?” Brenna batted her hand at Shana playfully. “Oh, you know me. Same old, same old. Did you hear about Brad and Jen? Breaking up like that? Isn’t that sad?”

  “That was years ago, Mom.”

  Brenna didn’t respond to Shana’s words. She just sipped her Scotch and sighed, shaking her head wistfully. “She was such a nice girl, that Jen. Not like that hussy, Angelina.”

  Shana braced herself for the inevitable comparison. She must’ve heard a thousand over the years. “No one respects a trollop, no matter how many African babies she adopts.” “You know better than anyone how a slut like that thinks.” “A skank is as a skank does, wouldn’t you agree, Shana?”

  But Brenna wasn’t quite that drunk yet. Still in her friendly first bottle of the day. Instead of the biting words Shana was braced for, she just shook her head and gave a misty smile. “So sad.”

  “Yeah. Sad.” Shana said nothing more. Words weren’t power with her mother. They always seemed to become weapons that would boomerang back to her, slicing her open. So she said as little as possible as her mother finished her drink and poured herself another with hands that were surprisingly steady.

  “You went away, Shana-bay,” her mother cooed. “You left me.”

  Shana swallowed back the guilt that rose like bile, involuntary and unwelcome. “I thought you’d understand why. You were always talking about the proud tradition of the lions. You said without tradition we were nothing. That we had to honor Leonus as the Alpha, even though he killed…” She paused and cleared her throat. She knew better than to say her father’s name. She’d already said too many words. Too many weapons getting ready to spiral back on her. “I thought you’d hate the direction the new Alpha is taking the pride.”

  “Of course I hate it,” Brenna said with a vacant smile. “That’s why you needed to stay. A strong mate can turn the Alpha’s head whichever way it needs to go. Why, when your father was Alpha, I don’t think he ever made a single decision without consulting me first.”

  Except the decision to accept a younger, stronger lion’s challenge and get himself killed. He did that all on his own. And then the pride belonged to that bastard Leonus. The words itched to jump out of Shana’s mouth, but she kept them tight to her chest.

  Now was not the time to speak out. Her mother’s nostalgic drunkenness came right after friendly drunkenness. And right before the worst part. At the rate her mother’s glass was emptying and refilling, the worst part wasn’t far away.

  “You have the blood of kings in your veins, Shana,” her mother mumbled dreamily, downing the Scotch like it was apple juice. “You were born to be the Alpha’s mate.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “You’re the strongest, Shana-bay. No one can take anything from you that you don’t let them take. That’s the beauty of the pride.”

  Shana studied the worn shag rug to keep from responding.

  Strength was the curse of the pride. Nothing was sure unless you were the strongest. And not even then. Her mother had been the strongest and look what had become of her. She’d won the Alpha as her mate and fought hard to keep him, but it hadn’t lasted. Nothing did.

  Lions rarely mated for life. The strong fought for the right to the best mates. In the pride, mating wasn’t just about procreation. It was about politics and dominance. Brenna’s position hadn’t been based on the Alpha’s love or devotion, but on her ability to dominate the other females.

  In her prime, Brenna had proven over and over again that she deserved to be queen. She’d ruled. And she had wanted nothing less for her daughter. Glory. Power.

  Choosing a mate wasn’t about love. It wasn’t marriage. It was survival of the species. The pride’s version of a divorce was more often than not a brutal brawl that left the unworthy without mating rights. The birth control shots the pride doctor provided could be a punishment for the weak just as easily as they could be prevention for lionesses like Shana.

  For the first time in years, Shana found herself wondering whether her parents had loved one another. She could barely remember them together. And from the way Brenna spoke of the old days, love didn’t matter. Tradition mattered.

  The same tradition that demanded Shana honor the man who had killed her father to become the new Alpha.

  She’d been spoon-fed tradition from the cradle, but it seemed only recently she’d begun to hate the word.

  “Why would you leave, Shana? Why would you walk away from the pride?” Brenna’s eyes locked on hers, the sudden eerie clarity in them warning Shana
to brace herself. “How dare you run away?” The words lashed out like a whip, cracking in the air. “This is a proud family. We rule this pride. We. Do. Not. Run. How could you sully your father’s name that way?”

  Shana locked down, pulling tight into herself. As a teenager, sometimes she would shout back. Scream that her mother had destroyed their father’s legacy more surely than she ever could, but the shouting only seemed to make Brenna’s rages that much worse.

  She’d been young when Leonus killed her father and assumed control of the pride. Only seven. She barely remembered the proud legacy her mother had dangled over her head for decades. She barely remembered a mother who hadn’t crawled into a bottle each morning.

  The drinking hadn’t been so bad at first. “Just something to take the edge off, Shana-bay.” But during Shana’s teen years, Brenna had fallen to the bottom of a well of booze and never found her way out again.

  “Are you listening to me, Shana? Listen to me!”

  The scream was close to her ear. Brenna had launched herself out of the armchair and stood, weaving, beside Shana’s chair.

  “I’m listening, Mother.”

  She always listened. The words pounded like spikes into her brain, bloodily embedded there forever, but she’d never been able to stop listening. No matter how hard she tried.

  “You are the Alpha’s rightful mate. You are the queen of this pride. You should be ruling and what do you do? You run away!”

  “I know, Mama. I’m sorry.”

  “Apologies are for the weak! Lionesses do not apologize. Queens do not apologize. But you aren’t a queen, are you? You’re nothing more than a coward and a slut.”

  Shana flinched. That word again, slashing at her viciously.

  “Oh? It bothers you to be told the truth of what you are? Slut. Did you think I didn’t know you lifted your tail for every lion in the goddamn pride and half the nomads to pass through?”

  No. She’d never thought her mother didn’t know. They’d had this conversation a thousand times, but she didn’t expect her mother’s alcohol-sodden brain to remember that. Any more than she expected her to remember that it was Brenna herself who had urged Shana to go after most of those men. “That one looks strong, Shana. He’ll be a good Alpha. He could challenge Leonus. He just needs a little push. The right kind of push.”