by Jessie Lane
A woman afraid to love …
Nikki knows what it is to lose those you love. With her focus on her orphaned sister, she hasn’t given herself the chance to process her own grief over the loss of their parents. Life is chaos and the last complication she needs is a mate.
A lion alone for too long …
Joe Miller knows chaos. Being orphaned as a child, he’s never had a family to call his own. Crashing with a friend for the holidays, he’s hoodwinked into playing Santa Claus at a local mall. The last thing on his mind is finding a mate.
A love worth the risk …
With her baby sister on her hip, sadness in her eyes, and a longing in her heart, Nikki waits in line with her sister to see Santa. From the moment he scents her, Joe is in deep. It’s going to take everything he has to convince Nikki the love outweighs the risk to her heart. Luckily for Joe, he has fate and Nikki’s adorable baby sister on his side. After all, who can say no to the Purrfect Santa at Christmas?
Purrfect Santa
By Jessie Lane & Chasity Bowlin
Copyright © Jessie Lane & Chasity Bowlin
Published by Whiskey Girls Publishing
All rights reserved.
Edited by: Evil Eye Editing
Cover Design by: Jessie Lane
Cover Images by: © Clarissa at Yocla | gpointstudio | Shutterstock
Copyright © 2017 by Jessie Lane & Chasity Bowlin
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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.
Trademarks: This book identifies product names and services known to be trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of their respective holders. The authors acknowledge the trademarked status in this work of fiction. The publication and use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
This book contains mature content not suitable for readers under the age of 18. This book contains content with strong language, violence, and sexual situations. All parties portrayed in sexual situations are over the age of 18.
Other Titles From Jessie Lane
Ex Ops Series
Secret Maneuvers
Stripping Her Defenses
Mission Delivery
Sweet Agony
Sweet Recovery
Sweet Eternity
Bullets and Bluebonnets
Regulators MC Series
(co-written with Chelsea Camaron)
Ice
Hammer
Coal
Big Bad Bite Series
Big Bad Bite
Walk On The Striped Side
Big Bad Bite Returned
The Demon Who Loved Me
Hot Fur Series
Hot Fur the Wolf
Star Series
(co-written with M.L. Pahl)
The Burning Star
The Frozen Star
Standalone Stories
The Alpha’s Secret Family
Kindle World Stories
Lone Wolf Wanted
Sassy and a little Bad-Assy
Bears Do It Better
Other Titles From Chasity Bowlin
The Bourbon & Blood Series
Bennett
Ciaran
Clayton
Carter
Quentin
The DuChamps’ Dynasty Series
Been Loving You Too Long
Have A Little Faith In Me
I’ll Take Care of You
The Bearadise Lodge Series
Two Tickets To Bearadise
Almost Bearadise
Bearadise By The Dashboard Lights
The Dark Regency Series
The Haunting of a Duke
The Redemption of a Rogue
The Enticement of an Earl
A Love So Dark
A Passion So Strong
A Heart So Wicked
The Lost Lords Series
The Lost Lord of Castle Black
The Vanishing of Lord Vale
The Missing Marquess of Althorn
Standalone Stories
The Beast of Bath
The Last Offer
Worth The Wait
Purrfect Santa
by
Jessie Lane &
Chasity Bowlin
Dedication
To my readers. I am sincerely grateful for each and every one of you.
To Chasity, thanks for taking this crazy ride with me!
Love, Jessie Lane
Thank you Jessie for taking on a crazy historical romance author who wants to write shifter romance! Thank you to the readers for taking a chance on me to.
Love, Chasity Bowlin
Acknowledgements
We’d like to thank Chelsea Camaron and Evil Eye Editing for making our story shine! Thank you ladies. And also we’d like to thank Laramie Briscoe for introducing us so that we could bring this very special story to you all.
Table of Contents
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
Epilogue
Note from the Authors
About the Authors
Paranormal Reads from Jessie Lane
Paranormal Reads from Chasity Bowlin
Howls Romance
Chapter One
If one more kid tried to pull his beard, he was going to roar.
Joe looked at the small spawn of Satan currently sitting on his lap and held in the urge to growl. The kid was maybe five years old, had blonde hair, blue eyes and dimples galore. His first thought was she was adorable. Now, after she’d pulled on his Santa beard during the picture, he knew better. She was nothing but trouble. If he really were Santa, he would give her coal in her stocking and a letter advising her parents to put her in the naughty corner.
“Smile, Santa!”
The photographer’s words were more of a warning than a cue to get ready for the second picture. So Joe played his role, ho ho ho’d, and smiled for the camera while the brat on his lap asked him for a pony.
There had been a time when Joe hadn’t dreaded Christmas so much. Back when he was a kid and everything about Christmas had still seemed so magical. Not so much anymore. It sucked when you spent the holidays alone. To say h
e was a bit bitter about the holiday season was an understatement.
Which was part of the reason he couldn’t believe he was here at The Mall of the Smokies, being the damn Santa. How had he gotten wrangled into this position again?
His buddy Sam. Buddy. So much for never leaving a man behind, he thought. There he sat, covered from head to toe in red velvet that was none too fresh and none too clean, thanks to the boozy sweat of the previous wearer. Of course, he’d also had more than one kid with a leaky diaper on his lap that day.
And Sam, where was Sam? Nowhere to be seen.
Joe and Sam had served together in the Marine Corps, but once Sam had completed his term of service, he’d come back home to help run the family business, a lodge in the mountains of East Tennessee. Joe, having nowhere to go after getting out of the service himself, had taken Sam up on his offer to crash at the Bearadise Lodge.
There was just one catch. The Lodge was sponsoring Santa’s Workshop at the local outlet mall, and they were short one Santa. Apparently, the old Santa had been fired for drinking on the job.
Damn that Sam!
After only one day of being Santa, Joe could see why the previous hire had been driven to drink. These kids were hell on his nerves. Like the blonde brat who was once again pulling on his beard. He was just about to give her a little growl when she hopped off his lap and ran giggling to her mother, who gave him an unapologetic glance before dismissing him entirely.
This job would have been so much easier if he were in a shifter-run community. Then he could growl all he wanted. Instead, he was dealing with humans and had to keep his feline traits under wraps.
As the next kid, a little boy about the age of four, climbed on to his lap and proceeded to fart, Joe did his best not to cringe. Bullets and bad guys he could deal with. Snot-nosed kids were apparently his downfall. He’d only been at this for a day and he was thinking of telling Sam he could shove this Santa job where the sun didn’t shine. Joe didn’t even want to think about doing this until Christmas Eve. Three days away. Three long, miserable, endless days of bratty kids, droopy diapers, and disaffected parents more interested in their phones than their kids.
In fact, as the next kid proceeded to sneeze all over him, Joe considered walking out right then.
But then something happened that kept him glued to his seat. His sharp lion senses caught a new smell among the crowd. Peppermint and sugar cookies.
Mate, his lion roared inside his head.
The one person that was cosmically meant for him and him alone. The woman that Mother Nature deemed his. He scanned the crowd until he finally saw her at the end of the line, waiting to come see him.
Short, with generous curves that would fill his hands, she had black hair pulled to the top of her head in a messy bun. He wondered what color her eyes were, being too far away to see them. Scanning the rest of her body, he suddenly stopped when he came to the thing that shocked him the most.
A kid on her hip.
Was it her child? From this far away, he couldn’t scent the small one. Had someone already laid hands on his mate? His lion roared again, only this time it was in protest. No one should touch his mate but him! He would slaughter the man who had dared give his mate a cub.
“SANTA!” the elf behind the camera shouted.
Joe snapped his attention back to the man he was going to eviscerate for taking his concentration away from his mate, only to find a scared human staring at him. It was then he realized the child on his lap was shaking in fear.
The elf inched forward to whisper so the others in line couldn’t hear. “You growled at him, Santa! Say you’re sorry.”
His stomach sank. To say he felt like a colossal piece of shit was an understatement. He had been so wrapped up in his emotions that he had let his lion slip out a little in public, which was a big hell no in the shifter rules. Joe looked at the little boy on his lap and gave the kid a big smile, trying to play off what had happened. “How would you like a stuffed lion for Christmas? They go grrrrrrr.”
The little boy looked at him with wide eyes that slowly turned from fear to curiosity. “You can make a stuffed lion that growls?”
Joe nodded. “Sure can. I can put the elves to work on it right away if that’s what you want.”
The little boy scrunched his face up in thought but then shook his head no. “I really want a bike for Christmas, Santa. Can I have that instead of the lion?”
Relieved that the boy was no longer scared, Joe gave him a big grin and a wink. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Yippee!” The boy squealed as he jumped off Joe’s lap and ran to his mother, who was waiting for him next to the photographer.
Joe watched as the boy happily walked away, then quickly turned his attention back to his mate, who was watching him from the back of the line with big wary eyes. The mating scent was too strong. He couldn’t tell whether or not the child was hers, but that didn’t matter.
She was his.
And if that meant he had to accept another man’s cub into his home to claim his mate, then that’s what he would do. Although he would take great pleasure in rubbing his scent all over both woman and cub every chance that he got. Just to make sure that everyone knew that they were now his and his alone.
Chapter Two
Christmas music jingled in her ears. The smell of pinecones and sugar cookies invaded her nose. Yet it hardly felt like a jolly Christmas to either Nikki or her sister Sarah. It was hard to feel joy after they had just lost both their parents.
Nevertheless, here was Nikki, standing in line with her little sister on her hip waiting to see Santa Claus. She would do everything she could to make sure that Sarah had a good Christmas, and what little kid didn’t want to see Santa?
Looking down at the three-year-old girl who was sucking on her thumb, Nikki sighed. “You need to stop doing that, baby. You’re a big girl now, remember? Big girls don’t suck on their thumbs.”
Sarah turned her head and stared at Nikki with those big light-green colored eyes with gold flecks that reminded her of their mother. The sight caused her heart to squeeze in pain. As Sarah stared at her with vulnerability, Nikki sighed again, this time in resolution. There was no way she could enforce the no thumb rule right now. Not when it had become her sister’s security blanket after their parents’ death.
The best she could do was distract Sarah and hope the little girl gave her thumb sucking up that way. Looking around at where they stood in the line, Nikki caught sight of the large Christmas tree in the center of the mall. Pointing at the tree, she spoke in a soft murmur to her sister. “Look at the tree, baby. See all the pretty lights?”
Her sister turned her head and looked at the tree. Sarah silently watched the tree for a long moment before whispering “pwetty” around her thumb. Nikki watched her sister as the little girl stared at the twinkling lights. Maybe the sight of the gorgeous tree hadn’t persuaded the girl to give up her thumb, but Nikki could tell by her big eyes and the small smile that tipped the side of her mouth that it made her happy, and that was all that really mattered. She would do anything to make the little girl happy again.
Nikki was just about to point out the candy canes at a nearby vendor when a growl from the front of the line caught her attention. The sound had been low, too low for human ears in fact, but her sensitive shifter hearing had picked up the vibration. That sound could only mean one thing—there was another shifter here. Turning her head, she locked eyes with Santa himself, who was staring at her as if she were prey and he the predator.
Oh shit! Santa was the shifter.
But what was his deal? Why was he growling like that? Suddenly the line moved forward and Nikki moved along with it. As she took a few steps up, it finally hit her. His smell. Warm aroused male musk wrapped up in cinnamon and spice. A shiver racked her body and the juncture of her thighs began to throb. There was only one thing that could make her body react like this.
The mating scent.
Santa was her
mate!
Caught somewhere in between awe and shock, Nikki didn’t know what to think. Her mind whirled with all the implications. The man sitting on the seasonal holiday throne in front of her was the man meant to be her life partner. He would more than likely want to seal this mating as soon as possible with a romping round of sex and then move on to building their lives together.
It was at that moment that Sarah pulled on her sleeve. “Sissy?”
The small action was like a bucket of ice cold water being poured over her head. Looking back to the Santa, who was now talking to the little boy on his lap while watching her from the corner of his eye, she felt reality slap her in the face.
Sarah had lost too much already. Everything in the poor kid’s life had been turned upside down. The last thing she needed was for her big sister, the person who had overnight become solely responsible for her, to get distracted by a guy. Nikki didn’t have time for a mate.
End of story.
The line moved again. One step closer to the presumably sexy shifter. It was hard to tell under cheesy red velvet and a fake white beard. But he was a shifter, after all, and sexy was typically part of the bargain. Despite her best intentions, Nikki found herself scanning him from head to toe beneath her lashes, looking for any hint of what he might be like under his holiday disguise. Realizing what she was doing, she gave herself the equivalent of a mental head slap.
No way, no how. Nikki had a little sister to raise and that meant she had no time for mating, sexing, or building a life with someone new. Hell, she barely had time to brush her teeth some days. There was no way she could fit someone else in her life.
Mate or not, she was just going to have to walk away. She started to do just that when Sarah tugged her sleeve again. “Sissy, I wanna see Santa!”
Nikki looked down to the little girl with torn feelings. She didn’t want to come face-to-face with the man she was telling herself she couldn’t have. The man who was already tempting her more than was good for her or Sarah. And that was without even knowing what he looked like! But dammit, she had promised Sarah they would see Santa today and now the little girl’s heart was set on it. What was she going to do?