by Cecilia Lane
Untamed Mate
Book Six: Shifters of Bear’s Den
Cecilia Lane
A Shifting Destinies Novel
Copyright © 2018 by Cecilia Lane
Cover Art by Kasmit Covers
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Untamed Mate: Shifters of Bear’s Den #6 by Cecilia Lane September 2018
Contents
Untamed Mate
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
New Series
Newsletter
About the Author
Also by Cecilia Lane
Untamed Mate: Shifters of Bear’s Den Book Six
A Lioness in Peril.
Three years ago, Mara watched helplessly as hunters killed her brother. The men promised not to harm others if she complied with their evil demands. Now, she's serving time in a cell beneath Bearden, trying to atone for the crimes they forced her to commit.
Mara's penance brings her face to face with a fierce and rugged and heavily tatted bear shifter, Hudson Vaughn.
He stirs all sorts of feelings inside her. Desire. Yearning. Need. But now is not the time for that foolishness. The hunters have returned. Their demands are even more sinister. They want shifter children, and they want her too.
Mara intends to confront the hunters. Alone. But Hudson has a different plan...
Together they'll attend a shifter auction, posing as handler and leashed pet. It's all just a fake act. A ploy. And her yanking his leash and taunting him is part of the act too. It's working fine. Right up until the end of the night when all pretense falls away, the lights dim and the growly bear-shifter crowds her into a corner and makes a promise...
I don't need my bear to make you submit, kitty...
Hudson Vaughn has a plan to set his mate free. First, he must convince Mara they're fated to be together. Then, he needs to convince her he'll protect her from every threat. Even the shifter-traffickers that murdered her brother.
What starts as a plan to infiltrate the hunters' auction, becomes something so much more. Mara poses as his handler, but she seems to enjoy her role a little too much. The entire evening, she delights in snapping his leash and full-on flirting with him. None of that was part of the plan.
Little tease.
His mate has a wild side. A naughty side he never imagined, but one he likes very much. His bear snarls and snaps, hungering to make Mara his.
Hudson must destroy the evil forces that stalk Mara, so he can finally claim his sassy, curvy fated mate...
Step into the world of Shifting Destinies, where the men and women you meet might just be a little more than human. Their towns are protected by magic, and their hearts are open and ready for love. But watch your step - more than darkness lurks in the shadows.
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Chapter 1
Crack!
Hudson Vaughn unleashed his fury in a series of sharp jabs and punches. The thick sound of his fists meeting flesh brushed fur against his mind. His bear loved this work. They were good at it. And this scum deserved to bleed.
Hudson pulled his last punch.
He couldn’t let his inner animal run away with him. The asshole held information he needed. A dead man could tell no secrets, and he was no longer anyone’s hired gun.
The tension in the man relaxed in halting increments. He expected more punches, but his body couldn’t keep up. His head drooped between his shoulders, hair sliding forward to cover his eyes.
“Come on, Zip. Give me something,” Hudson urged.
“Zeph.” He coughed, then spat blood. “My name is Zeph.”
“Zip. Zap. Zep. I don’t give a shit. You’re a fucking annoyance.” Hudson grabbed a handful of the man’s hair to pull his head up. Hatred glared back at him. Hudson grinned. “Annoyance, that’s your new name. Fucking Annoyance, when I’m pissed. And right now, Fucking Annoyance? Right now, you’re the one they left holding the bag.”
He twirled his finger in the air at the empty seats just outside the caged ring. The dirt under his boots smelled faintly of blood. How many shifters and other supernaturals fought and died in that same space? Fucking hunters and their hard-on for blood made him sick.
He figured if he had to question one of them, he might as well do it in the very place they demanded a good show. Hudson had his demands, too. “So why don’t you be a good little boy and tell me everything you know. Come on, Annoyance. I know Ronnie is still running the circuit. Other men stronger than you have given me that much. I need what’s in the thick skull of yours.”
Zeph stared at him from his one good eye.
“An address, buddy. Give me that, and you can be on your way. Head to the bar, grab a beer with your hunter friends, commiserate over getting your ass kicked by a different species. Get yourself nice and riled up, and feel justified over it. I’m stronger than you. I’m an animal. There’s no controlling my kind.” He shrugged. “At least it isn’t a girl ready to rip off your balls. Small blessings, right? Because Ronnie is the only ball buster you allow in your life.”
“Fuck you. Someone will come for me. Do you know what they’ll do if they know I talked?”
“They don’t give a shit about you, Annoyance. And I don’t mean to brag, but I’m the bigger predator, and you’re in my claws right this moment.” He patted the man’s cheeks with more force than necessary. “Where’s Ronnie hiding out these days?”
“Who’s Ronnie?” Zeph played dumb, and almost pulled it off, too. The stink of his lie gave him away.
“It’s just us, Annoyance. You don’t need to hold anything back. Especially not for a bitch that’d leave you right where I’d find you.”
He didn’t normally like talking bad about a woman, but there really was no other word for Ronnie. Oh, he was sure there were some deep psychological scars feeding her hate. She didn’t get hugged enough as a child, or her vampire boyfriend dumped her for her best friend, or some other bullshit. He wasn’t a trained brain doctor; he solved his problems on the physical plane.
Ronnie ran the hunter ring that snatched up Mara. She was at the very top of Hudson’s
list of targets. If he found her, he’d easily find all the shifters Mara unwillingly provided for her masters.
Hudson’s bear rumbled in his head. He let the noise trickle out of his throat and pushed back against the images sent from the beast. Yeah, he wanted Mara’s smiles and freedom and his mate mark on her shoulder. None of those were happening anytime soon.
His bear snarled at him.
Hudson threw a frustrated punch right into Zeph’s stomach.
Mara. She had a name like some old-timey newspaper reporter. Mara Malone. She sometimes spat out her words just as fast as someone hocking them on the street. Those days were fading as the time of her imprisonment piled up.
People like Ronnie and Zeph were the reason why he couldn’t go home to a happy mate. Hunters of their ilk captured shifters and whatever other supernatural they could get their hands on, caged and chained them, and forced them to fight in their disgusting rings. They sometimes held specialty matches, like fox hunts or big game safaris. Death, that was the end result for many that found their way into a hunter’s clutches.
Mara was one of the lucky ones, though she didn’t see it that way. She bargained for her life and the lives of the family that remained to her after they killed her brother. Ronnie turned her into a sniffer. She tracked down shifters on the outskirts of society and handed them over to Ronnie.
That was how she entered Bearden. The hunters were looking for a little payback and to continue fucking shit up for shifters. Mara found a target in the mate to one of Hudson’s clan. She succeeded in snatching Becca and Nolan, but the ring was busted up after some careful tracking and brutal fighting. That night reminded Hudson all too much of his time overseas.
Hudson’s bear snarled once again. No matter the certainty that Mara belonged to them, the beast hated that she’d betrayed her own kind almost as much as he hated to remember those hot, dark nights with nothing but sand stretching out around them.
She acted under duress, he reminded the bear. Her only options were obedience or death.
He had no words of comfort for his own sins.
Of the seven lives Mara blamed herself for ending, the fate of four were still a mystery. Hudson had already rescued three. He was determined to find the others to ease his mate’s soul.
“Ronnie. Tell me where she is,” he ordered Zeph with another punch to the gut.
Mara held a wealth of information inside her head. She knew where camps were hidden away and how often they were used. Hudson dismantled them one by one, burning them to the ground and sending a message to the assholes that hurt his mate.
Hell waited for them. He’d light the pyre himself.
One punch. Another. Hot fury boiled in his veins and bubbled over with the shots he took against Zeph. He couldn’t brush his fingers against his mate’s skin, so he planted his fists in Zeph’s chest and ribs. The light in Mara’s eyes faded a little more every day she spent locked up for her crimes, so he used Zeph as a punching bag. Ronnie evaded him and he had nothing to show for this little trip into the darkness? Zeph would pay for that, too.
“I don’t know!” Zeph gagged on his strangled shout. “She hasn’t been here in weeks. She cleared out with the last of the livestock for a roadshow. That’s all I know. You have to believe me!”
Livestock. Hudson clicked his tongue against his teeth. Hunters didn’t even see them as people.
Tears leaked from the man’s eyes and left clean streams through the dirt and mud on his skin. Hudson turned away in disgust.
He dug deep and wrapped his hands around his waning rage. He’d like nothing more than to slit Zeph’s throat and be done with it. Zeph’s pathetic whimpers wouldn’t let him.
No killing. That was Mara’s rule. Not that he gave a shit about hunter lives, but she made a case for not acting as judge and executioner. She insisted she had blood on her hands and wouldn’t stain his. Too bad his were already dirty.
“Why don’t you hang around, Annoyance?” he called over his shoulder to the man strung up by chains. “I’ll get some new toys. If you won’t open your mouth, I’ll just drill some holes in myself.”
The smell of piss stung Hudson’s nose, and he beat a quick path for the door.
Outside, the cool night air washed over him and chilled his remaining anger. He was a long way from home and an even longer distance from the man he used to be. There was a woman sitting alone in a cell staring at a tiled ceiling while he looked at twinkling stars.
He needed to set her world right. The prowling, unruly beast in the back of his head would allow nothing else.
Too bad the leads were coming up as dead ends. Ronnie had moved on, and Mara’s list of hunter camps were dwindling.
Hudson flexed his fists and sank into the soreness of his knuckles. Nothing to do but keep moving, keep trying, keep his eyes and his heart focused on the future.
He tore his gaze from the sky and shot off a text message.
Got another one for you.
He followed up the text with an address and shoved his phone into his pocket. He trusted few people with his missions outside of Bearden, and certainly none of the fucks in the so-called Supernatural Enforcement Agency. The SEA were more concerned with putting supes behind bars than protecting them, so he relied on Judah Hawkins, Bearden’s Chief of Police, to find him a sympathetic officer to collect the prizes he left behind.
His skin tightened as he stalked away from the barn containing Zeph. His bear wanted out, claws and fur and all. The beast wanted to coat his muzzle in blood and hear the final sighing breath of prey. Each step Hudson took carried them further away from something that deserved death.
Hudson kept walking. He had a good hike ahead of him before he reached his truck. He hadn’t wanted to pull right up and send Zeph scurrying for cover.
Under his justifications was a deeper truth. He’d had enough of death. He wouldn’t let a little weasel like Zeph goad him into more sins.
His phone vibrated, and he dug it out, but it wasn’t the confirmation of his text he expected. The device buzzed again with the second ring of a call. Axel’s name displayed across the screen in a stark reminder of bad days gone worse and Hudson ground his teeth in frustration.
Axel wasn’t on the mission that drove Hudson to seek his discharge papers; he’d already abandoned the squad by then and said to never look him up. Axel made it clear that he wanted no part of strolling down memory lane and talking to a fellow merc brought back too much shit.
Hudson rejected the call without hesitation.
Maybe Axel was right. Hudson already had too many thoughts swirling in too many directions. He spoke with only a few of the men that survived, used them to help track down the hunters that stole Mara’s happiness, but they weren’t ever going to be on grab a beer and gab about their day terms.
He used to be good at that life. He used to be good at turning everything off and living for the next fight. Hudson was happiest when he felt the emptiest, but that all changed when he caught the first whiff of her scent. Mara threw him off his game from the moment she walked back into the hunter camp with her hands on her head and gave herself up.
That took courage. She had his respect from the first moment.
He couldn’t let her down. He had to find the others she gave up. He needed to hunt down the men and women that forced her into working their dangerous, deadly fights.
Hudson tried to think of the lack of new leads as the natural decay of old intelligence. Mara had been out of the game for a year. Ronnie and her crew had a year to move around and change their tactics.
But he wasn’t sure if the trouble didn’t reside in him, too. He was distracted by red hair and curves he couldn’t touch and how many hours it’d be until he saw her again. She made him feel and care too much. The safe numbness of his life burned as hot as any of the fires he’d battled since he came home with honors he didn’t deserve.
He sent a silent promise into the world.
Mara. I’m coming home.
> Chapter 2
The morning lights brightened with a suddenness that didn’t allow extra sleep, no matter how much Mara wished she could slip back into her dream. She blinked back the bleary wishes of mumbling for five extra minutes and strong arms wrapping around her middle to seduce her into awakening. Neither were possible in her current imprisonment.
That didn’t stop her skin from feeling too tight or an ache springing to life in her core. The dark nights haunted her with dreams she couldn’t touch and thoughts of the one man left alive she could disappoint.
Hudson Vaughn.
She’d thought him unremarkable the first time she caught sight of him. Big, but all bears were. Nondescript coloring. A nose broken a time or two. No scars she could see, tattoos up and down his arms, but nothing that would point him out from any other big, brawny bear.
But his scent. That kept her awake at night and pacing her cell during the day. Earthy, evergreen, the scent of a man who worked hard and wasn’t afraid of getting dirty. It made her mouth water.
He thought they were mates. She was too weak to push him away. They were on a collision course to a fiery, terrible ending where she wrecked his life.