Bear Outlaw (She-Shifters of Hell's Corner Book 4)

by Candace Ayers

  When BB came back to the ruined clubhouse, Eduardo was waiting for him in a lowered Cadillac.

  Eduardo departed from the usual Mexican physique. He topped six feet four in height and 240 pounds in weight. He met BB in the middle of the road. “Where’s the blonde?”

  “I haven’t got her. She escaped.”

  “This is bad, bro. I already called my people in Guadalajara. They’re expecting a blonde next week.”

  “I can get them a blonde. Not a virgin, but a few days of sex and drugs will make her compliant and ready to whore.”

  “That will do. The money will be less, but they won’t be angry.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Inez was dreaming about men and knives and blood when she felt a sting in her arm. She woke up with wild fear in her eyes. She tried to scramble across the bed but another brutal man stopped her. She said, “What...” and fell back on her pillow. She stared at the ceiling and tried to breathe.

  Eduardo tore the sheet down from her body. Inez liked to sleep in the nude. Eduardo brought a man and a woman with him. The man was stupid, brutal muscle from Sinaloa. The woman made Inez look like a nun. She wore all leather.

  Inez mumbled, “Wha... What are you... doing?”

  BB leaned over her. “I’m afraid what’s her name, the other bitch got away. Eduardo needs a blonde for his people in Mexico. Since she's not here, you’re nominated.”

  Inez felt cold fear enter her heart. She became almost alert enough to make sense. “No. I hate men. Don’t make me do this.” The heroin took over again and stopped her from talking or struggling. Her eyes jerked back and forth.

  Eduardo motioned to the woman who took off her clothes. He grabbed Inez by the jaw and turned her toward him. “You hate men. That’s alright. I brought a woman just in case.”

  “No. I hate women just as much.”

  “Damn. Well, babe, I tried.”

  Inez murmured, “What are you going to do to me?”

  “It won’t hurt. You won’t have a brain left when we're done, but it won’t hurt. We’re going to keep you high on smack for three days. We’ll give you more sex, both men and women, than you’ve ever had before. The drugs and the sex will erode your mind enough that you won’t mind the long lines of men who will fuck you for money.”

  The woman crawled up on the bed between Inez’ knees and buried her face between Inez legs. Inez looked like a spider had crawled into her feminine opening. She pushed the woman’s head, weakly, trying to make her tongue leave her alone. It didn’t work.

  She didn’t stop trying for another hour and another shot of heroin. After that, she was cooperative for the next three days. She wasn't in pain. Her body wasn't damaged, but she didn't know her name. She couldn't count to ten, even using her fingers.

  She caught a sexually transmitted disease sometime in the next six months and died alone and unloved in an alley in the worst section of Guadalajara.

  BB thought he’d done all right with the sale of Inez. He’d made six thousand dollars and had a ready market for more blondes.

  For three days, he drove around town close to the high schools, looking for a blonde teenager in a vulnerable situation. He spotted the perfect girl on the third day. She had natural blonde hair and a good body. He followed her until she walked down a deserted street then shot her with a stun gun.

  He picked her up and dropped her in the back of his rented van. She didn't scream after he plucked out the little darts that carried the electricity. She looked at him with a small smile on her face. She said, in a completely normal voice, "You're fucked."

  BB shoved her skirt up to her waist and ripped off her panties. She didn't flinch or squirm. He shoved his hand between her legs. "Don't panic, bitch. I'm just checking for a cherry."

  "I don't have one."

  "Damn. Well, I can still get a couple of grand for you. You are blonde. That's good enough." He didn't tie her up. She didn't seem to need it. He drove off while she sat on the floor of the van in the back. She examined her ruined panties and grunted. She said, "Do you know how much these cost?"

  "No. I don’t give a fuck either."

  A very large SUV came up beside BB's van and forced it off the road. Three men, who looked fiercely nasty to BB, surrounded his van and pointed pistols at him.

  One of them said, "Out." He got out, and they forced him to his knees. The same man said, "Hands behind the head, sport." BB complied. The last time he'd been to church, he'd just started beating kids up for their offering money. He tried to remember a prayer. His mind went blank.

  A fourth man, older and fatter than the other three, got out of the back seat and walked around in front of BB. He had a pistol as well. He pointed it at BB's forehead and flicked the safety off.

  The blonde ran to the big man's side. "Don't kill him, daddy. He put his hands on my little kitty. He has to suffer more than that."

  The big man thought for a few seconds and boomed out with laughter. He took out his cell phone and dialed three numbers. "Hello, operator. I'd like to report a kidnapping." He paused. "No, I apprehended the kidnapper. Send the cops to take him away."

  He grinned at his three thugs and his blonde daughter. "Why should we deal with this garbage when the system will do it for us." He bent over until his face was inches away from BB's. "You put your hand on my little girl's private place. I could cut your balls off, but that's not enough. You're going to prison. I like prison. I've been there a few times, made some good friends. I'll get word to them to make your stay an interesting one."

  He watched BB face turn white. "By the way, my daughter's phone has a tracking feature. We always know where she is." He turned to his daughter. "We got a few minutes to burn until the cops come. Anything you want to do to this guy?"

  The little blonde girl took two steps, planted her left foot next to BB's right knee and swung her right foot up between BB's knees and into his groin.

  The big man said, "Good job, precious. Good weight shift and balance. Those karate lessons help, don't they?"

  "Yes, daddy. They do."

  BB lasted just a month at the state prison before he lost his temper in front of the wrong man. The guards found him the next morning. He was very broken, very bloody and very dead.

  THE END

  Honor

  A NAVY SEAL ROMANCE

  STORY DESCRIPTION

  There’s only one thing of importance in Navy Seal Connor Mitchell’s life—his job. Everything else is secondary. When he’s not overseas, defending his country, life feels meaningless.

  And that’s a problem. After a disastrous mission that killed several men on his team, including his best friend, his commanding officers want him to take a breather. And worse than that, they want him to go for therapy. Therapy he insists he doesn’t need.

  Enter Dr. Everly Willis, a psychiatrist who grew up an Army brat, she’s just as tough as he is, and sexy as hell. She’s going to find a way to help him, one way or another…

  1

  The sun was scorching, sending heat waves shimmering up from the pavement as Connor parked his Harley. Despite the heat, Connor was wearing long sleeves—which he quickly shed—along with a helmet. Ironic, he thought, that the same military that had sent him to risk his life again and again would insist that he not ride a motorcycle without protective gear. He complied though. Most everyone in the military did, truth be told. The navy had a way of making your life hell if you didn’t. If there was one thing Connor could do, it was follow orders.

  Once his gear was stowed safely in the bike’s saddle bags he hung the helmet on a handlebar and made his way across the parking lot. The sun seared his shoulders, the west coast heat almost painful in its intensity. Once, he thought with a mirthless smile, he’d found the sun to be a comfort. Now, it seemed like the heat did nothing to warm him inside. Now it only kept the nightmares close to the surface. The desert sun had beat down on him during damn near all the worst moments of his life. Not surprising, considering his Navy se
al team had performed more covert ops in Iraq than anywhere else.

  Africa, too, had that same harsh, pitiless sun. It was as if the penetrating rays leached the humanity out of a man the way they leached the color out of everything that lay exposed to its relentless abuse. The men in Africa had been monsters too, some of them. Not all, of course. Some had just been good men in a bad situation, doing their damnedest to survive. Connor had been following orders, fighting for his life as well. Still, some days had him wondering if he was one of the men or one of the monsters.

  With an effort, he withdrew from the bleak thoughts. He wasn’t a monster. Yes, he’d done some of the very things that made one more beast than man, but the reason he’d done them mattered. The reason mattered. He had to believe that. Because if he didn’t…

  No. He wasn’t going there. He wasn’t. The navy was what he lived for, after all, the only thing that leant meaning to his solitary existence. He wasn’t a monster at heart, but sometimes one had to become a monster in order to hunt them. He was, he reminded himself twisting his lips at the irony, a damned hero.

  However, he was a hero without a cause at the moment. What a fucking mess. He realized—better than any other soul on Earth—that his last mission had gone to shit. He hadn’t needed his commanding officer to tell him that. It wasn’t the first mission that had gone seriously sideways, but his losses were few and far between. That was why they had given him a task that was damned near impossible. He’d followed orders, though, and done the impossible. And now? Now they were punishing him for doing as ordered. Had they expected that shit to go down without a single mother-fucking casualty?

  They hadn’t called it a punishment of course. They’d just looked at him with sympathy—the fastest way to piss him off—told him that it had been a rough run (understatement of the fucking century) and that they needed him to take a knee for a few months. That alone he could have handled. He had some leave saved up and could have spent the time on a beach somewhere, beautiful women at his side and a drink in his hand. He lived for the job, but surely with enough distraction the time would have flown.

  They wanted him to see a shrink, though. That was just fucking insulting. He’d been handling everything they’d thrown at him just fine on his own for 10 years, since one week after he’d turned eighteen and bid his hometown—and the string of foster homes he’d been placed in, one after another—goodbye. He’d never needed a shrink before. Why now?

  Anger made him push the door to the 6 D’s Lounge harder than he should have. It rebounded off the wall, but it was sturdy, designed with drunken sailors in mind, and didn’t seem any worse for the wear. It was the only real bar on post. There was another, but it was used primarily by higher ranking officers to host functions that Connor had no interest whatsoever in attending. Let someone else follow their CO around like a lost puppy. He preferred to let his work speak for itself. He was far more interested in kicking ass and taking names for Uncle Sam than in furthering his position in the navy.

  The dark atmosphere robbed Connor of his sight momentarily. He found himself reaching for a rifle that wasn’t there. Not being aware of his surroundings unnerved him. His eyes quickly adjusted and he stalked to the bar. He took a seat on the far end, where he could swivel so that his back faced the wall and he could scan his surroundings.

  Connor let the whiskey burn down his throat while his skin cooled, adjusting to the milder temperature in the dimly lit bar. The place didn’t boast much in the way of atmosphere. It was built with the same generic cinderblock walls that characterized older military buildings across the country. It didn’t need to be pretty, though. The navy men—and a few navy women as well—just wanted somewhere close to the barracks where the liquor was cheap. This place fit the bill, so it did a steady business.

  Connor was just finishing his fourth shot when a breathtaking woman walked through the door. He usually reacted to women the way he did everything else in his life. He enjoyed them, of course, but they didn’t matter. Work was the only thing that really did. Women loved him, and he never had any trouble finding a companion even on base, were the men outnumbered the women by quite a bit.

  This woman, though…damn. She was beautiful, though not in a classic sense. Her bold eyes and high cheekbones would do any model proud. From there on though, she was no model. She was more. Her lips were full and just imagining what she could do with them had Connor shifting uncomfortably, his pants a little more constricting than they had been just a moment before. And her body…that wasn’t the body of some half-starved child model. Her ebony skin looked impossibly smooth. He could tell without touching that it would be soft and firm beneath his hands.

  The woman had full curves. Breasts that bounced slightly with every step she took, and hips that swayed in time with her path across the room. From the smirk perched on that pretty mouth as she took the stool next to him, she knew exactly what Connor had been thinking, too. He turned back to his drink, determined not to act like a lovesick teenager.

  Her voice, when she spoke, was sultry and Connor tried not to imagine what it would sound like when it was laden with passion.

  “I’ll take a shot of Jack Daniels, please.” Hell, she even drank his drink.

  Connor spoke before he was even fully aware that he’d changed his mind about his earlier resolve to let her drink in peace.

  “Make it two, Jake,” he said to the bartender, “Her drinks are on me.”

  2

  Everly had noticed the man sitting on the corner bar stool the moment she’d walked through the door. Sexy, confident...but she didn’t date military men as a rule, and she definitely wasn’t quite as sensitive to their charms as the average woman. She was a military brat herself, and being born and raised around them had made her somewhat immune to their appeal. Not to say that she found young, attractive men in uniform unappealing…it was more that she’d learned to look beyond the uniform to what was underneath.

  So, she noticed him…it was hard not to when he was sitting there, all brooding and dangerous. She would still be going home alone tonight, but a little eye candy while she had a drink or two to unwind from a day spent unpacking her belongings in her new apartment couldn’t hurt. Her new job at the mental health clinic would start tomorrow, a job that she knew would fulfill her on so many levels.

  Her drive to become a counselor began back when Everly had been in high school. Months after returning from the Middle East, her older brother had committed suicide. While logic told her that there was nothing she could have done—she’d still been a child at the time, and he hadn’t been stationed close enough to home for his family to realize how much pain he was in—there was still a part of her that felt like she should have done something, that somehow she should have known.

  While she couldn’t rewrite that tragic chapter in her family’s history, it was the driving force behind her decision to help men and women with PTSD. In providing them therapy, she found comfort. Thinking of her brother still hurt, but she comforted herself with the thought that every day on the job, she might be sparing someone else from the pain she’d felt at losing him.

  So here she was, checking out a new bar in a new home. She’d just have a drink or two with the hot sailor sitting beside her and then go home to turn in early before her first day on the job. She hadn’t expected to be so attracted to him, hadn’t expected his rough, deep voice to send a shivers of up her spine.

  Before she knew what was happening, she’d had more than a few shots, though she insisted on paying for her own when he offered. She found herself staring into his eyes just a little too long, leaning toward him suggestively as they talked about everything and nothing. All too soon though, it was that time. She needed to head home before she ended up hung over on her first day of work…not to mention before she made a bad decision and ended up in bed with the hottie whose name, she’d learned, was Connor.

  “Well Connor, it’s been…interesting, but I’m going to have to get going. Take care of yo
urself, okay?”

  But when she reached for her purse to pay the bill, she was dismayed to realize that she’d left it in the saddle bag of her bike. Connor’s sharp eyes watched her motions.

  “I’ve got your drinks; the offer still stands.”

  “No, no, I’ve got it. I just need to run out and grab my purse.”

  “Well, at least let me walk you out,” he said with an easy smile. “I’d hate for you to be harassed by drunken sailors in the parking lot.”

  She couldn’t help chuckling. “Not likely.”

  “Have you seen yourself? I would say that it’s entirely likely. Besides, I need to grab something from my bike anyway, and the company can’t hurt.”

  Everly shrugged and followed Connor out the door. She wasn’t surprised to find that he rode a Harley. He seemed like the type who wanted to feel that power beneath him, who liked the edge of danger that traveling on a powerful machine could give you. She could hardly fault him when she rode one herself.

  Connor paused as they passed her bike, which was parked right next to his own. He eyed it with obvious appreciation.

  “Da-yum, that’s nice.”

  “Why thank you.” She couldn’t help smiling with pride. Her bike was a beauty.

  “No…that’s yours?”

  She nodded with a smile.

  “You are my kind of woman. I may not be able to let you go after all.”

  The tone was light and teasing, so Everly thought nothing of it. When she opened her saddle bag, though, she bent over a little farther than necessary, vain enough to assume that he would enjoy the view. She wasn’t expecting him to be standing so close when she turned around.