by A. C. Arthur
“If you knew so much about me, you’d understand that I’m still baffled about you having a mate,” Eli spat back without thinking of why he shouldn’t. Or possibly why now was not the best time to have this confrontation.
Ezra only blinked once, before a muscle in his jaw twitched. “That’s right. Dawn is my mate. I love her more than I’ve ever loved anything in this world and I would do anything to make her happy and to keep her safe. That’s what mating is about. That’s what shifters are supposed to find.”
“That’s a bunch of bullshit designed to make us just a little more unstable than we already are. I’m never taking part in that process, never putting myself in that position again.”
“That asshole bought his own death ticket, Eli. You were defending yourself and…” He paused. “You were defending a human.”
“Right! A human whose life I ruined!” he roared back. “By all accounts I should be in prison now, repenting for my crime. Instead I’m here and I’m walking around trying to do this job and you keep getting in my face about shit I don’t want to revisit.”
Ezra sighed and took a step back. “You’re right, Eli. You’re trying to do your job and you don’t need me in your face.”
There was a second or so of remorse for having yelled at Ezra, but it had to be said. Not only did he not want to be dragged down memory lane in the rain forest, Eli definitely did not want to remember the night he’d murdered a human and got off without any jail time thanks to Nick’s expert legal skills. He just didn’t want to deal with any of this shit, not tonight.
“Let’s just get this done,” he told his brother.
“Right,” a female voice added to the conversation. “X sent me inside to check on your progress. Neither of you were answering your radio calls.”
Eli immediately reached up to his ear to touch the small com link there. Then he pulled back his jacket sleeve to make sure he’d put his e-band on when he’d been donning this monkey suit. What he really was doing was trying like hell to keep his eyes off Nivea Cannon.
She looked like sex walking. In the few seconds he’d glanced at her, every item of her clothing, or lack thereof, had been emblazoned in his memory. The shoes were sky-high, a natural color with a gold spiked heel. The dress was short—fucking crazy blindingly short—barely coming to her midthigh, a copper color that made him think instantly of new pennies. Her long hair was pulled over one shoulder, exposing the line of her neck and giving her a sultry, come-get-me look that had him wanting to race across the room to do just that.
Instead, he turned and resumed what he’d been doing. Fifteen minutes later he yelled, “All clear!” and then went back out of the room and to the parking lot where the SUVs were parked. He did not look at her again, could not.
* * *
Eli Preston was an ass.
An arrogant, pigheaded ass that needed some sense knocked into his head. An hour after arriving at Rome’s pro bono defense fund’s charity event of the year, she stood against the wall near the front entrance, watching the hundreds of people mill about, but only able to think about one.
He’d slept with her, then quickly crawled back into that shell he loved to hibernate in. In all the years she’d fantasized about how their first time would be, she’d never thought the word regret would surface. After the most exhilarating sex she’d ever had in her life, Nivea was afraid she might have to think twice about wanting anything more to do with that bastard shifter.
But then she picked up his scent and it was like déjà vu. She could feel his thick length pressing into her, the sting of his fingers as they dug deep into the skin of her hips while he worked inside of her. Each thrust had left her breathless, each retreat sending shooting pangs of loss throughout her entire body. And just like that she wanted him again, needed to feel all of him, if only one more time.
She hated that fact and at the same time refused to cower from it.
Following the scent, she moved through the crowd. There were a few politicians in the room, some high-up law officials and of course, lawyers, all schmoozing around, eating great banquet food and hopefully writing huge checks to the pro bono fund. Briefly, she thought of her parents and of what they were doing. She hated having to keep their secret, especially when she knew without a doubt they were wrong. But telling would be worse, it would hurt the two people she cared most about in this world, her sisters.
With practiced restraint she pushed those thoughts aside. What the Cannons did was their business. That was the deal Nivea had made in return for the agreement to let her freely walk away from the freak show they called a family. No matter what Nick and Rome suspected she was loyal to them. She only wished she could show them by giving them information on her parents. But that would never happen.
She was across the room now, looking around, searching for the owner of the scent that had drawn her here. He was nowhere to be found. He’d looked so damned good in that suit, she’d wanted to run to him and wrap her legs around his waist when she first saw him standing in the ballroom. But he and Ezra were arguing so the air was filled with tension and the undeniable scent of two male shifters, their cats dangerously close to the surface. By their hushed, but volatile tones, she suspected they’d been talking about what had happened to them in the Sierra Leone rain forest. For years she’d wondered what had made Eli the closed-off shifter he had become. She’d heard rumors about his time in the rain forest with the Lormenian and Serfin shifters and thought maybe he’d been thinking of defecting to one of those tribes, even though he was a jaguar. But no, Eli and Ezra were inseparable. He would never leave his brother, or Rome and Nick for that matter. He would, however, give her enough of a cold shoulder that she couldn’t wait to get out of his bedroom, when she should have been still lying in his arms, basking in the afterglow of sex.
Heart-stopping, invigorating sex—
Nivea’s thoughts were terminated abruptly, her arm grasped hard, and her body pulled back through a door, all before she could think a coherent thought.
“Fucking insane!” Eli roared into her ear after he’d slammed her back against the wall. “You’re driving me insane!”
Nivea finally caught her breath, about two seconds before Eli’s hand was up her dress, thrusting past the barrier of her thong to slip between her folds.
“Eli,” she breathed his name.
His head was down, his forehead resting on the bare skin of her shoulder as his fingers—oh god, his magnificently talented fingers—stroked her clit, then sank back into her center, and then went back to her clit again. She opened her legs wider, had no other choice really because it felt so damned good.
“Why won’t you stop it? Why won’t you just leave this alone?” he asked. His voice sounded as tortured and ragged as she suspected he felt inside.
She wrapped her arms around him, rubbing her palms over the back of his head.
“I can’t, Eli,” she admitted hoarsely. “I don’t know why, but I can’t.”
“No,” he told her, licking along the cleavage bared by the bodice of her dress. “I can’t. This can’t be,” he whispered. “It can’t be. I want it to stop. But if you leave—”
His words halted abruptly as he sucked on the plump bulge of her breast. He sucked so hard Nivea was sure there would be a mark. Then she felt his teeth, the sharp pinprick breaking her skin. She moaned deep and long and came all over his hand.
When he jerked back she wanted to reach out and punch him because she saw the look on his face. It was similar to the blasé look he’d had in his room. But then he opened his mouth and Nivea knew it was different.
“They’re here,” he said, his voice thick, eyes roaming the area. “They’re here, right goddamned now!”
* * *
Tall, muscled, and seething mad, the Sanchez brothers were already at the entrance to the ballroom. Rather, they blocked the entrance, backs facing the guests. The one in the middle, Caleb, the youngest, was built like a battering ram. This last year of train
ing constantly at Havenway had beefed the younger shifter up, adding to his sharp Brazilian features and giving him a definite lethal look. To his left was Aidan, the oldest, his strong jaw locked, nostrils flaring as he held on to the shift that was battling for control. To the left stood Brayden, the strategist of the trio, the narrowing of his eyes a telltale sign that he was thinking of an attack plan.
“They’re in this room,” Eli said, coming up behind them.
Aidan nodded. “X and Ezra are in the back of the room. Whatever is in here will stay in here. Contained.”
“We’re going out to deal with whatever’s waiting,” Brayden told Eli.
“I’m going with you,” Eli announced sternly. His cat was scratching at the surface, the sure and certain scent arousing the hunter inside.
“There are too many humans here tonight. Too much collateral damage,” Caleb added.
“That’s why we’re going out, to minimize the damage,” Eli said, stepping around Aidan so that he was now in front, leading the guards as they went out to battle. “No shifting,” he said. Then he added with a wary look over his shoulder, “Unless absolutely necessary.”
The threesome nodded and they walked out of the ballroom, trusting their counterparts to deal with whatever was inside, while they handled whatever lurked out in the dark.
They were on the street in less than a minute, Eli’s shoulders bunching at the tension resting heavily over them. He inhaled deeply, knew that behind him the others were doing the same.
“It’s not quite a shifter,” he mumbled.
“No,” Aidan added. “It’s not.”
“Stinks just the same,” Caleb told them. “And the fucker’s coming right at us!”
The youngest guard was right, about twenty feet away and big as a bulldozer, what looked like a man stomped down Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Sonofabitch!” Brayden yelled. “They made another one.”
Eli rolled his head on his shoulders until his neck cracked. He felt the sting of his claws ripping through the skin of his fingers, the domino cracking of bones beneath that tight-ass suit he’d worn and growled in rage because he’d already ordered no shifting.
Instead he took off at a run, not bothering to listen for the steps behind him, knowing that the Sanchez brothers had been expertly trained to divide and conquer. They would move quickly, like blurs through the night and effectively disengage this scary-looking bastard before it had a chance to do whatever it planned to do.
As for Eli, all he saw were its eyes, an eerie green, bright and glowing. Its focus was intent, its goal death and destruction. Eli knew this because there was a strand running deep inside his body that was similar. The recognition was quick and cut through him like a heated blade, just as he rammed into the seven-foot monstrosity. It barely budged as Eli’s right shoulder yelled in agony from the contact.
The hybrid lifted an arm, swiping at Eli with his long and sharpened claws. They didn’t look normal, like that of a cat, but instead piercing and glinting, like steel. He’d escaped the cut of them by about three inches as he leaned as far back on his feet as he could without touching the ground. His right arm came around like a slash of lightning, his fist connecting with the hybrid’s chin, causing its head to jerk back at the assault. He followed with a left to the midsection and then another right to its face again. There was no sound of agony or even of contact. The thing simply reacted, throwing its own punches that slammed into Eli’s body like concrete blocks.
Inside his cat roared, teeth pressing sharply against his lips. His ears rang from the contact of each blow delivered by the hybrid, until what filled Eli’s mind was the sound of the rain forest, the scent infiltrating his nostrils now damp and tropical, his eyes seeing like the nocturnal cat through the human sunglasses he wore. There was a weakness in the hybrid, Eli sensed it and before the beast could strike him again he looked it up and down, assessing every spot he could for where it was until he found it. Right beneath its ear, where a thick green ooze had begun to drip. There was some sort of crack there, slicing down the hybrid’s neck and Eli simply reacted, not knowing for sure it would work.
With a vicious roar he came off his feet, claws bared, right arm reaching out and sinking into the hybrid’s cracked skin. More of the ooze spurted into the air, the hybrid releasing a sound that echoed through the night. At that very moment its legs were taken out, Brayden and Aidan used the strength they’d honed in their lower extremities to kick away the hybrid’s balance by attacking it at the knees. Caleb came next with a blow to its head and the monster crumpled to the ground. The ooze seemed to suck all of the insides out of the hybrid as right before their eyes it became a shell of a distorted body. Its face was a twisted mask of sharp teeth, whiskered muzzle, flared nostrils, and eerie eyes. The carcass still moved up and down as if breathing its last breath.
Eli caught himself mimicking the motion, air moving in and out through his lungs so that his chest moved in sync with the hybrid. Then the sirens sounded, screams erupted, and Eli turned back to see humans bursting through the doors.
“Shit!” he yelled and ran toward the hotel.
“Clean that up!” he shouted back to the Sanchez brothers, not wanting anyone to see what was left on the street. He wondered if there’d been any witnesses of the fight with the hybrid in the first place. He hadn’t thought for one second about spectators, only concentrating on dispatching the monstrosity before it could hurt any humans or shifters. Now, he raced toward the building praying that everyone was safe, and for the first time in he had no idea how many minutes, remembered he’d left Nivea inside.
Chapter 8
Chaos had broken out so quickly and definitively that Nivea had only a second to catch her breath from being extremely aroused to ready for battle. Every guard in the ballroom was on alert the moment she stepped from the stairwell alone.
Obviously she was the only one getting the memo a day late. At any rate, she was ready for whatever was going down in the next moments. Inhaling deeply, she searched for whatever had warned Eli. Her body trembled as the scent filtered through her. It was strikingly familiar, so much so she’d placed a hand to her heart to still its rapid beating. Swallowing deeply, she looked around again to make sure she’d seen the other guards on alert as well.
X and Ezra were on their feet at the back of the room near the table where Rome, Kalina, Caprise, Nick, and Ary were still seated. Jax, Leo, Zach, and Tobias flanked that table. There was an identical EXIT door across the room and Nivea noticed the guard standing there was poised for battle as well. Then her neck snapped to the left, her nose twitching as that familiar scent grew stronger. For one heart-stopping second she thought she’d see him standing there, dressed in that perfect suit, fitting him as if it had been made just for his expertly cut body. She found herself searching for those damned sunglasses, the tight line of his lips as he glared at her impatiently, the warmth that emanated from any place his hands touched her. Eli. The name was a whisper in her head.
But he wasn’t the one she saw. He wasn’t the owner of the scent. It was the enemy.
“Three o’clock. Black pants, white dinner jacket, long curling auburn hair, and green eyes. Glowing, green eyes,” she spoke into her com link, already moving toward the target.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the other guards moving in the same direction, following her lead.
“Do not engage,” she heard loudly through her earpiece. “Do not engage, Cannon!”
The directive was from Ezra. She clenched her teeth, totally prepared to ignore the Lead Guard. This wasn’t an invited guest, she knew that instinctively. She also knew without any doubt in her mind that whoever this was, he was somehow connected to Eli, or had been in contact with him in some way. Why else would they share the same scent?
She didn’t stop moving, had no intention of not saying something to this person, trying to find out what his connection to Eli was. But as she grew closer, and as he turned to her, locking her gaze wi
th his own, she started to reconsider her plan. Taking deep breaths and slowing her steps minutely she figured she’d approach him as if he were just a man and she was just a woman. She would talk to him, get information from him, then turn him over to the other guards—the ones that were moving through the guests as quickly and discreetly as they possibly could.
But the moment she reached him, her plan changed, for the worse.
The man opened his mouth, baring sharp teeth and a long thick tongue that rolled out as if on command. The growl was loud and rattled the chandeliers above. At first the guests froze, then they screamed, and panic ensued.
He reached for her, grabbing her arm with claws that immediately locked into her skin. Nivea didn’t think about how powerful this sonofabitch was, or how she planned to take him down. All she could do was react. With her left hand, her claws bared, she sliced at the man’s neck, twisting her body so that he would release her arm. He didn’t, so ultimately it felt like he was actually ripping her shoulder from its joint. With a slight bend she was able to propel herself into the air, turning quickly so that her free arm could wrap around his neck. Locking on, she pulled and pulled, all while searing pain radiated from her other shoulder. When he still didn’t let go she bent forward, teeth bared now, and bit the side of his face. The next roar was of rage, not pain, she was almost certain. The beast reared back and Nivea was once again air bound, falling back to what she was sure would momentarily be the floor.
If so, it was the best-smelling and warmest floor she’d ever encountered as strong arms wrapped immediately around her, holding until her feet were able to touch the floor.
“Stay back!” Eli yelled in her face before pushing her behind him and running straight at the beast.
Fuck that! she thought, rolling her head on her shoulders and mentally getting herself back in order. When she turned again Eli and Ezra were tag-teaming the beast, the two stronger guards attacking with timed precision. Eli knelt to the ground, sweeping the beast’s legs from beneath it while seconds later, Ezra straddled its neck as it hit the floor, punches raining over its face.