by Ann Gimpel
Wolf Born
Underground Heat Book 2
Ann Gimpel
Published 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62210-030-9
Published by Liquid Silver Books, imprint of Atlantic Bridge Publishing, 10509 Sedgegrass Dr, Indianapolis, Indiana 46235. Copyright © Published 2013, Ann Gimpel. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Liquid Silver Books
http://LSbooks.com
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.
Blurb
In a futuristic California that’s almost out of resources, Max leads a double life. A Russian wolf-shifter, he heads up the State of California as its governor—and the shifter underground. He took on the governorship to help his people. Threatened with genocide, many shifters have gone into hiding. Some blame Max and the underground for their plight, rather than the governmental edict that’s meant death for so many.
Audrey works for Max. Unlike most humans with low levels of shifter blood who bless their lucky stars they avoided the purge, she wants to be a shifter. If she could find a way to finesse it, she’d quit her job in a heartbeat and go to work helping the shifter underground. The only sticking point is Max. She’s been half in love with him forever.
Against a dog-eat-dog political backdrop where no one knows who their allies are, Max and Audrey spar with one another. Max fears she’s part of the group trying to kill him. Audrey has no idea about Max’s double identity and worries she won’t be able to walk away from their fiery attraction to help the underground.
After a second attempt on his life, Max faces critical choices. Should he follow his head or his heart?
Chapter 1
Maximillian Sigayev loped up the steps two at a time as he moved from the bottom floor of the shifter underground safe house to the hovercraft port on its roof. He could have taken the elevator but knew he’d be cooped up in the aircraft for an hour. Any exercise was better than none. He caught himself whistling and grinned as his fingers curved around the ritual mating stone buried deep in his pocket. It had been a pleasure to join Kate Roman and Devon Heartshorn in the traditional ceremony. He’d have to return to complete the ritual once the wound in Devon’s side was completely healed, and he could shift again.
Max laid his palm on the glass plate next to the door that opened onto the roof. It beeped softly; the locking mechanism released. Ever cautious, Max sent his lupine senses swirling outward to make certain no one lay in wait for him. Breath whistled from between his teeth. Up until now he’d been very lucky. His double life was bound to catch up to him.
“For God’s sake, find us a mate before your penchant to take risks does us in,” his wolf side growled.
“You’ve been pretty quiet,” Max observed, not wanting to engage in a discussion about mated ones. It wasn’t as if he could simply look on the vid feed or place an ad. Shifters were persona non grata. No one admitted to having more than 50 percent shifter blood if they wanted to live.
“That’s because I’m smart enough to shut up unless I have something important to say.”
“We can talk once we’re airborne.”
“It’s safe. I already checked.” As it often did, his wolf’s tone held a supercilious edge.
Max trusted his wolf, but he still peered cautiously around the barely cracked door. His silver hovercraft gleamed in the morning sun. Walls rose around it on all sides to shield the safe house roof from casual eyes below. While they made landing in high winds a little tricky, the added safety was worth it. Satisfied, Max strode forward, unlocked the craft’s door by depressing a button on his wrist computer, and settled into the craft. Even that quick glance at his computer showed over a hundred voice and text messages. Max sighed. He hadn’t been particularly forthcoming about his whereabouts when he’d left Sacramento the previous night. Employing a bit of shifter magic, he’d snuck away like a cat burglar. No one liked it when they couldn’t find him.
He engaged the onboard generator. The craft sputtered and moved upward as soon as the electric motor developed enough torque. Getting it out of the Berkeley city airspace unobserved would be a trick-and-a-half. As California’s governor, he had latitude in terms of the air quality laws, but he didn’t like to flaunt his power. He set a course due east, past Hayward, to get him beyond the Bay Area corridor and over the foothills as soon as possible. Once there, he’d turn north.
He’d just settled in to review messages when his wolf snarked, “I thought you were going to continue our conversation once we were underway.”
“Look,” Max kept his mind-voice mild, “I’d like to find our mated one just as much as you. We don’t spend much time with shifters.”
“You always have excuses. There will be a lot more of us once everyone gets dosed with that serum.”
Max pursed his lips. The wolf had a point. The intravenous infusion developed by law enforcement scientists to give cops an edge sniffing out shifters had actually pushed the ones with more than 10 percent blood to full-blown shifter status. Thanks to quick thinking on Kate Roman’s part, the serum was now in the underground’s hands and being parceled out to strengthen and swell their ranks.
“Now you’re the one who’s quiet,” his wolf persisted.
“Sorry. Just thinking.”
“That’s the problem. You think too much. Shifter partner or not, do you even remember the last time we had sex—with something other than your hand, that is?”
“Point taken. I do not want to talk about this. I have things to do.”
“Finding a mate for us will never happen if you don’t prioritize it.” The wolf hesitated. Max hoped he was done, but he went on, “Kate’s wolf had to tell her Devon was her special one. She would have missed it otherwise.” The contemptuous undercurrent was back in spades.
Max clamped his jaws together. One of the problems with these conversations was they reminded him how desperately under-fucked he was. Ever since the U.S. government had decreed shifters were to be imprisoned—or killed outright—two years before, he’d kept to himself. Before that, he’d been extremely selective, limiting his amorous escapades to other shifters since human women rarely turned him on. In his two hundred and twenty years, he’d never come across his mated one. Not that he’d looked very hard, but there weren’t many candidates, either.
He grimaced. The wolf wasn’t far wrong about his tendency to bury himself ass over teakettle in work. Max liked tasks where he could tweak the probability of success in his favor. Finding a mate had always seemed as unlikely as spinning flax into gold. Because he hadn’t liked the odds, he’d focused his attention elsewhere.
He glanced out the hovercraft window and punched a course correction into the onboard computer system. He’d be back in the state’s capitol in about half an hour. No point in antagonizing his wolf, particularly when he was probably right. “Once we get to the other side of this war, you have my word I will work on finding us a mate.”
The wolf subsided into snarls, apparently done with trying to convince Max of anything. “It’s not an empty promise,” Max added.
“Talk is cheap.”
Max snorted and bit back a laugh. No shit. If he had a nickel for every slick line he heard from the politicians in Sacramento, he’d be a rich man. He tugged off his wrist computer and att
acked the message stack, texts first, then voice. By the time he landed at the hovercraft port atop his building in the state’s capitol, security was waiting for him, ringed around the landing pad.
He stepped from the craft, grabbed his computer and briefcase, and straightened. “What?” He leveled a glance at the half dozen guards. “You’re unhappy I ran off and left, so you’re going to dog me so it doesn’t happen again?”
“That’s about the size of it, boss.” Loren, the lead security expert, sauntered forward, his lean six-foot frame encased in an immaculately pressed uniform. Dark hair was shaved close to his head. Shrewd blue eyes didn’t miss much. It looked like he wanted to snap off a salute and was holding himself back.
“Well, my office will be much too crowded with all of you in it. Once we get there, you’ll need to draw straws to see who guards the door.”
“You got it, boss,” another guard with a blond crew cut said.
“Glad you’re back,” Loren offered. “It would have, ah, looked bad if something had happened and none of us even knew where you were.”
Max winced at the censure in the man’s voice. Loren was trying to do a job, and Max wasn’t making it very easy for him. He let his gaze settle briefly on each man. “While I understand your concern, I will not be a prisoner. I appreciate that you take my safety very seriously. Believe it or not, so do I. This job is hard enough without feeling like I can’t even take a crap without an audience.” He pushed past the group, opened the door into the building, and walked briskly down the hall, knowing they’d follow him.
His office was at the far end of the hall. He spoke a word so the voice-activated electronic lock would open. With one hand on the latch, he turned. “Have someone fly my hovercraft back to my house. The activation codes are in your files. Two of you at a time outside my office. No more unless there’s some special public event.” He closed his door on the chorus of, Yes, sirs and shook his head. He’d had to pull shifter magic—and leave from his home in the middle of the night—to escape his watchdogs. With the uptick in violence, they were fiercely protective of him. Too much so for comfort.
“You could quit,” the wolf commented.
Max nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I could, but we need the power of this office to make sure shifters can walk free again. Between this and heading up the shifter underground, it feels like I’m living on borrowed time. These double life things have a way of imploding.”
“For once, I agree with you. What are you waiting for? Get to work.”
* * * *
When Max looked away from the wall screen, light was fading from the room. He’d set Do Not Disturb flags on every electronic account to ensure uninterrupted time to consider legislation, e-sign critical documents, and make a dent in the never-ending cavalcade of petitions from legislators. Reluctantly, he took down the flags and waited for the onslaught. It came almost immediately with a knock on the door.
“Enter.”
The door flew open. Audrey, a tall, leggy, strawberry blonde with hazel eyes, charged into the room. At five feet ten, she was only a few inches shorter than him. As usual, her long hair was drawn into a severe bun that accentuated the exotic Slavic bone structure in her face. Her tailored black suit hugged considerable curves and exposed a lot of leg. She’d come with the job when he’d won the election eighteen months before and was as close to a personal assistant as he had. Over those months, Max had expended a lot of energy not focusing on her full breasts, slender waist, and rounded rump. Today wasn’t any different; he dragged his gaze reluctantly from her perfect body.
“Sir.” Barely concealed reproach danced beneath her words. “I’ve been waiting for you to take down your privacy curtain.” She may as well have yelled at him for getting in the way of her doing her job.
“Tell me what you need.” He quirked a brow, considered telling her he wasn’t in the mood for her jibes, but bit back the words. She was a hell of a fine looking woman. It always defused his ill-humor. Sexual tension simmered in the air between them, all the more palpable because he forced himself to ignore it.
“Where do you want all this?” She jiggled a large stack of documents.
He rolled his eyes. “Why are you carting paper around? Why not have someone scan them and e-send them to me? For that fact, why weren’t they electronic in the first place?”
She shook her head. “These need immediate attention. They’re really, really, uh, sensitive. If someone—”
“If we don’t have a secure vid feed hookup here, then nowhere is safe. Dump them over there. I’ll get to them tonight.”
She put the stack where he’d pointed and balanced from one high-heeled foot to the other. He stared at shapely calves disappearing into stocking-clad thighs and then forced his eyes back to her face.
“Um, I was wondering if…” Her voice ran down. She started over. “See, you’ve been in here all day, and—”
“Whatever it is, Audrey, just spit it out. Obviously,” he gestured toward the foot high stack of reading material she’d just offloaded, “I’m far from done for the day.”
Color stained her fair face. In a flash of insight, Max knew what she wanted and was sorry he’d pushed her.
“She wants sex. I smell it.” The wolf chortled.
“I can’t. She works for me.”
“Who made that rule?”
“Is something wrong, sir?” Audrey looked at him oddly.
“Nothing at all. Why?”
“I don’t know. You just got this faraway look in your eyes for a moment. It was as if part of you wasn’t here anymore.” The color in her face deepened. “Sorry. That didn’t come out quite right. It’s really none of my business.”
“You never did tell me what you wanted to say.” Max softened his voice. She truly was a stunning woman. Single, too, after a long, drawn-out divorce.
“Well.” She dropped her gaze to the carpet embossed with the State Seal. “You have to eat dinner some time. I was thinking we could catch a bite and then come back, and I’ll walk you through what’s in those documents. I wasn’t sure I should read them, but I’d already begun,” she shrugged, looking uncomfortable, “and so, I just finished them.”
“Not a problem. You had to qualify for a top secret security clearance to work as my administrative assistant.”
The edges of her mouth twitched into half a smile. “Funny, but it’s the same thing I told myself.”
“Dinner is an excellent idea.” Max managed a smile. He didn’t really want to take a break but saw the wisdom in an hour away from the unending flow of work. Sitting across a small, intimate table from Audrey had undeniable appeal, too.
He was worried about the underground. No one had messaged him for hours…Crap! It’s because I had the flags up. Audrey had blasted through the door within seconds of him taking them down, so he hadn’t had a chance to check the secure feed on his wrist computer. He pushed to his feet. “Tell you what. Just give me a minute to throw some cold water on my face and wash up. I’ll meet you at your desk.”
The smile she shot him could have lit an entire city. “I’ll make us reservations somewhere. Do you have a preference?”
He thought for a moment. “Sure. Call the Schenectady Steakhouse. They have sound-shielded rooms. We can bring your document pile with us and kill two birds with one stone.”
Her smile faded a few lumens. “Of course, sir. I’ll just gather them up—” She took a step toward the file folders.
He waved her away. “Never mind. I’ll bring them with me.”
Max breathed a sigh of relief when the door closed behind her. He hoped she didn’t have ulterior motives, or at least, if she did, that she’d be subtle enough to keep them under wraps. He didn’t want to have to tell Audrey he found her attractive, but—
“If she wants us, we should fuck her,” his wolf yapped from the sidelines.
“What? You’ve lowered your standards. She’s not a shifter.”
“She has some shifter blood. I
scented it.”
“Yes, well so did I, but not enough to turn into anything.”
“So give her some of that serum and see what happens,” the wolf suggested snidely.
“Hush. Let me see how the rest of us are doing.” Max clicked buttons on his wrist computer and scanned messages from the safe house he’d left that morning. The group of cops was assimilating well. There’d been some problems with one man’s wife. She wasn’t thrilled to be married to a bear, even one who promised he’d spend as much time in his human form as he could. Kate and Devon thanked him for marrying them. He clicked a quick, You’re welcome, still feeling warm and fuzzy from having conducted their mating ceremony. Both mountain lion shifters, they made a strong couple.
In just a few minutes, he set the computer to standby. Thank Christ there weren’t any pressing issues that required his immediate attention.
He trotted to the restroom that opened off the back of his office, splashed water on his face and rinsed his hands. Strands of hair had escaped the queue he habitually wore. Max pulled the elastic band, re-secured his shoulder-length blond hair, and tucked it beneath his suit jacket. The blue eyes that stared back at him in the mirror looked tired. He rubbed them, but it only made them more bloodshot. A quick rummage through a drawer produced eye drops.
By the time he scooped up the stack of paperwork, locked his office, and headed for Audrey’s desk one floor down, he felt downright chipper. Waiting for him, bag slung over a shoulder, she held out her arms. “Here. Give me some of those.”
“Nah. They’re not heavy. Did you get us reservations?”
She nodded. “They weren’t busy. It’s only a couple of blocks; would you like to walk?”
“Not a bad idea—” he began.
“Nope.” The security officer du jour’s voice rang from behind them. “We’re driving you.”
Max turned and raised a curious eyebrow. “Why? I was only gone for a few hours this morning. What the hell happened around here?”
The security officer blew out a tense breath. “Ever since things blew up at the Berkeley cop shop, criminals here have gone wild. Guess they’re anticipating things will go south here, too.”