by C. D. Gorri
Grrr.
His devil was not happy with that idea, but too damn bad. He was there to find a missing person, not play hide the salami. He could tell by her flush and the growing scent of embarrassment in the air that she was as disturbed as he was by the encounter.
It was baffling. Really odd. Tony hadn’t done anything besides kiss her. Yet he felt equally frustrated and angry at himself. She deserved better than a near mauling against a door.
“Tony? Are you going to answer it,” she questioned from her new position a few feet away from him.
Shit. When did he get sappy? From the hardness in his pants, he could tell the strength of his desire for Sofia wasn’t ebbing in the least. He was not used to feeling this way. Looking down at his cell phone, he let out a growl of exasperation. Was the old woman ever going to let up?
“No. It’s no one,” he grumbled.
“The screen said Grandmother.” She widened her eyes.
“Yes.”
“Well, is she okay?”
“She’s fine for a meddling old woman.”
“Ouch. That’s a pretty harsh thing to say about a family member.” She placed her hands on her hips and gave him a once over that made him feel lower than dirt. “Especially one who should be revered and loved. My own Granny is just the sweetest little woman, and I would never talk to her like that. If I did, Mom would have my hide,” Sofia chittered angrily and straightened her petite shoulders.
“Look, my family isn’t typical,” he explained, hoping this wasn’t a deal-breaker.
“Obviously not. Still, I doubt they would encourage you to sass your own grandmother?”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“You’re right.” She looked hurt, and he hated himself for saying that to her. “Sorry, I guess I let my emotions run away with me. It won’t happen again.” She turned away.
Shit. Tony felt like he’d been sucker-punched.
“Sofia, wait. Look, I’m sorry. My family is complicated.” He waited for her to turn around.
“Everyone’s family is complicated, but who talks about their grandmother like that?”
“A devil might,” he muttered.
“What did you just say? Are you being facetious?” She asked.
“No. I am not being facetious. What I said was that a devil might. Truth is, I was not raised by my grandmother or any member of my own biological family. Truth is, I didn’t even know about them until I was already a teenager.” He ran a hand over his hair, plucking the elastic off the end and refastening it after he’d gotten his breathing back to normal.
“Tony.” She moved closer to him, and he stilled. “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Might as well get this out in the open, considering the fact I just had my tongue down your throat.”
“Look, that was a mistake.” She bit her lip and lowered her head, avoiding his eyes.
The devil inside him didn’t like that one bit. He wanted her laughing out loud, or even spitting angry jumping his bones would be best, but not nervous and shy with him. He wanted her to feel comfortable around him. He would never hurt her. Ever.
He took her chin between his fingers and gently raised her face till she was looking at him once more. “If that was a mistake, then I plan on making it again. Often and soon.”
17
Sofia swallowed audibly. Did he really just say that?
Yeah, he did. Holy crap! No man had ever spoken to her like that before. Sofia ran a hand over her messy head of curls. Grooming was compulsive for most chinchillas, but by this time of day, attempting to tame the massive amount of hair was not a task for the faint of heart.
Her cheeks grew warm, her heart skipped a beat inside her chest. The way he was looking at her, as if she were some sort of siren, set off bells in her head. Not typical warning ones, though. These were more like holy-shit-I-can’t-believe-he’s-into-me bells.
It wasn’t that she suffered from low self-esteem. Not in the least. As a chinchilla shifter, she possessed one of the most sought after coats of all time. Her dense furriness was the ultimate in cute. And she knew it.
Of course, on her human legs she tended to be a bit plumper and shorter than most. Typically, she got treated like the little sister or was permanently friend-zoned. Sofia was the type that a guy felt comfortable opening up to. The guys from the office had no problem sharing their many sexploits, real or imagined. Blech.
Now, it wasn’t that she didn’t like sex. She did. Sofia dated, and she was not a virgin. No way. That ship had sailed when she was in her freshman year of college in the basement of her parent’s summer rental on the lake.
The son of a vacationing couple from D.C. had done the honors. Sofia recalled the instant attraction she’d felt to the slender youth with dark hair and brown eyes. But even the lure of teenage lust for a cute boy and the desire to experience sex for the first time had nothing on the pull of sheer animal magnetism she felt for Tony Leeds.
Her pulse sped up, panties moistened, even her breathing became labored. Might she be feeling something more than just sexual attraction?
Eep! Her inner chinchilla squeaked excitedly at the thought. She fiddled with her hair some more as she tried to distance herself. Sure, she had the hots for the guy, but Sofia was not the type to fall in bed with strangers. No amount of squeaking, chirping, or nerve-induced grooming, she scolded herself as she forced her hand down, was going to change that.
“Something wrong, doll face?” Tony treated her to the kind of smoldering look that could melt the panties off a girl.
“Uh, no, I’m fine. So, uh, what kind of shifter are you?” She groaned as soon as the words left her mouth.
That was really smooth, Sof. It wasn’t often she turned into a bumbling idiot, but she was not to blame. The smooth-talking PRIC had her all tied up in knots. She could be in serious trouble here. Even her chinchilla was acting strange. She was surely trying to tell Sofia something with all her frenzied chittering, but was she ready to hear it?
“Never mind. That was rude.”
“Nah, I don’t mind. Just wanna know how you’re doin’ first is all.” He looked concerned. Those dark eyes of him were so deep and inviting, like a bottomless pool she wanted to dive right into.
Of course, she ignored the fact that he sounded just like the guy from that old sitcom. Joey was not the smartest character on television, but he sure knew how to make a girl drool. Still, he had nothing on the six-foot-plus shifter in front of her.
She breathed deep, trying once more to figure out just what class of animal he belonged to. It was just out of reach. Chinchilla’s weren’t exactly known for their super sense of smell. Still, there was something enticing about the smoky, spicy flavors that seemed to cling to him.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she began, uncertain if she wanted to know anything more about him lest her heart get even more involved.
He turned to her with his smoldering good looks, full lips quirked in a half-smile. Despite her assurances that it was fine to keep his private life, er, private, Tony began to tell her all about himself.
“I was kidnapped when I was a toddler from my family. We’d been on a camping trip deep in the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey.” His dark eyes seemed to turn black as he raked them over her from head to foot. Nodding more to himself than to her, he began to tell his story.
“Oh my! That’s awful.” She placed a hand on his arm.
For some reason, she wanted to comfort him and offer her support. Stepping into his embrace was for that reason alone. It was definitely not because he was big and muscly, and she wanted to cop a feel. She was a shifter, not an animal.
“Yeah,” he murmured and dropped his forehead to hers just as he rested his big hands on her waist.
“You don’t have to continue,” she said.
“I want to,” he told her. “For some reason, I want you to know. Anyway, I was taken from my family, and after a few days, I managed to escape my
captors. I don’t recall how. I was barely able to talk at the time. I just remember being hungry and lost in the woods.”
“You poor thing.” She rubbed his shoulders, soliciting a rumble from his massive chest.
“A shifter family from Philadelphia found me.” His voice was deeper than normal when he picked up the story.
“That was a stroke of luck, huh?”
“Yes. They took me in, raised me as their own. It wasn’t until almost ten years had passed, just before my first shift actually, that my biological grandmother tracked me down. She told me who I was and what.”
“And what’s that?” She asked.
His skin seemed to turn a deep shade of red, and she felt bad for causing him any embarrassment. Tony breathed deep and rolled his neck before looking her in the eyes.
“You sure you’re ready to hear this?”
“Of course,” she said cautiously.
“I’m a devil.”
“You’re the devil? Oh, Tony.” She closed her eyes, not wanting to add crazy to the list of things she was beginning to think about this man.
“No. I’m not the devil. I’m a devil.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Sofia, I am a Jersey devil.”
“Is that a real thing?”
“I’m here, right?”
“Yeah but–”
“Sofia, I am telling you the truth. I’m a Jersey devil.”
18
“But that’s just a myth, like Nessie,” she began, utterly confused.
“I don’t know about ol’ Loch Ness, but I assure you Jersey devils are not just a myth.” He sighed and backed up.
Sofia took that as a sign and also backed away from his oh-so-tempting body. She ran a hand over her curls and watched him do the same to his dark head of hair.
The feel of those dark silky locks under her hands was branded in her memory. She had a thing for guys with thick hair. She wondered if he would be hairy all over. Nothing like a thick pelt to run her fingers through.
Sigh. Naturally, now that they’d made out like a couple of sex-starved teenagers in her hallway, all she could think about was naked, sweaty, dirty, amazing sex. With him.
Shit. Heat flooded her cheeks and she bit her lip only to have it tugged away by his thumb. His eyes seemed to bleed completely to black with a reddish glow circling the irises. He watched her carefully, his attention unshakeable.
“You were saying?”
“Grandmother Leeds told me all about my heritage. What I am is actually quite a long tale.” He shook his head, but she wasn’t going to let him get away with it that easily.
“So, tell me,” she encouraged.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. Okay look, Jersey devils aren’t exactly common.”
“How do you mean?”
“We don’t exist in nature. Chinchillas can be found in the jungle, right? Well, you won’t find a Jersey Devil running around any forest or desert. We only exist in the supernatural world.” He blinked, and his eyes returned to normal, but his voice retained that husky quality she found so mesmerizing.
“Well, yeah, but you’re not the only kind of shifter that’s unique. Dragons exist, but humans don’t know about them.” She shrugged.
“Funny you should say that. You see, there was a mad scientist, much like the now-deceased FUC enemy number one Mastermind, who is actually responsible for my kind. He lived over two-hundred years ago.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Wembley Ranklinger was his name. From what I uncovered about the man; he was nothin’ but a crackpot scientist. A human who had stumbled upon the existence of shifters and decided to try and improve upon what nature had managed to create.”
“Oh my, I can’t imagine that was a good thing.”
“No. Still, I guess he was a genius in his own right. He’d managed to discover a dragon shifter on the shores of the new world amongst the hundreds of immigrants just before the American Revolution. Somehow, he captured her and imprisoned her.”
“That’s awful!”
“Not as awful as what he did. You see, Ranklinger wanted to be able to create shifters at will. He didn’t want to rely on propagation. He developed a serum derived from the blood of other shifters he’d captured. From the records I’ve uncovered, at the time he was performing his experiments, there was a large migration of goat shifters from Austria during the years he was most active.”
“Goat shifters?”
“Yeah. A whole trip of them, actually.”
“A what?”
“A group of goats is called a trip. Anyway, he somehow developed a serum and injected the woman, the dragon shifter, with it. She was his first unmitigated success. She was also my great-great-grandmother.”
“Wow. What happened to her?”
“That’s the part where legend and fact blur. The family believes she escaped and mated a man who was rumored to be a demon. The demon was understandably pissed that his mate had been imprisoned by a madman. Together they took their revenge on Ranklinger, killing him with an injection of his own serum.”
“Poetic justice.”
“I am glad we’re simpatico, doll face.” He winked before continuing. “Their offspring was rumored to be unusual, to say the least.”
“Unusual?”
“Actually, my great-great-grandfather was deemed an unholy devil by the other shifter families that had settled that part of New Jersey. A few humans caught on to the tale, and it became legend.”
“Holy shit! So, you’re telling me Jersey devils are actually real?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, so Jersey devils were basically created by a murderous madman whose experiment escaped and mated with a demon, then came back to kill him?”
“Yeah. Sort of. There is some family history of witchcraft too. But, uh, doll fa–, I mean Sofia, that was a long time ago.” Tony’s face seemed to lose all trace of emotion. He reached out for her tentatively but dropped his hands last minute.
“Not that long.”
“I know what you’re thinking, but I am not a danger to you–”
“Wow. Wait, what?”
“I assume you are worried I’ll hurt you?”
“No way. I’m not worried.” She could barely contain her excitement. “Can you tell me if you are a hybrid result of genetic mutation or a cryptid shifter? Has anyone done tests?”
Sofia’s natural curiosity was one of her more annoying features, or so she’d been told. Still, she couldn’t help herself. She practically bounced up and down in her haste to ask Tony as many questions as possible in under a minute.
“Um no. At least, I don’t know. No one knows what happened when I was in the custody of the kidnapper.”
“That must have been awful.” Sympathy surged through her, as well as a fierce need to hunt down the person responsible and nibble him or her into dust! She might only be twelve pounds when shifted, but those ever-growing teeth of hers could gnaw through bone if need be.
Grrr. Chtt Chtt.
19
“Aren’t you upset by all this?” Tony asked, his head cocked to the side in curiosity. She smiled dreamily at his thoughtful expression. He was just so adorably sexy.
“No. Why? Should I be?”
“Most people don’t take it so well.”
“I guess I’m not like most people.” She shrugged.
“No, you certainly aren’t.”
“Good.” She nodded and chose to ignore certain tingly pink bits. “Now that we have that settled, tell me again why you need the cadet files?”
“Oh.” He shrugged as she led him to the sofa. She figured they might as well be comfortable if they were going to talk.
“Please.” She gestured to the couch and watched as he elegantly sunk into the cushions in a maneuver that belied his immense size and robust frame.
He patted the seat next to him, and though she knew better, she we
nt, unable to help herself. Maybe she was just starved for physical contact. Maybe it was something deeper than that. Something Sofia wanted to ignore for the time being.
“I’m on the trail of a missing shifter. The subject disappeared eighteen years ago and would now be twenty-one years old. Though, he might not know his exact age. His parents are fox shifters, and he was kidnapped out of the same general area of South Jersey where I was taken.”
“Wow, are you sure?”
“I’ve spent my whole career tracking down the bastard who took me and murdered my family.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know they were killed.”
“I don’t remember what happened, but I read the files. They were tranquilized and shot point-blank while they slept.”
“Oh, Tony. I am truly sorry.”
“I’ve had a while to get over it.” He shrugged, but she saw the truth in his devilishly red eyes. “What’s important now is that I make sure whoever’s behind these abductions is stopped.”
“How many children have been taken?” Sofia asked, hating that the bastard had hurt Tony. It was unthinkable. A monster who preyed on innocents was still out there, and he was possibly stalking and experimenting on them right at that exact moment.
“So far, I’ve tracked eighteen abduction cases to Scarab’s same signature.”
“You call the kidnapper Scarab?”
“Something from a clue I found once.” He shrugged again, and she found she really liked those wide shoulders of his.
He was built without being overly muscular. Unlike many of the shifter males she knew, but it was his elegance of movement, like a dancer or professional athlete, that really struck a chord with her. He seemed perfectly at ease in his skin, and that, in turn, made her comfortable.
Sofia was totally into loving herself and her curvy little figure, but she was never completely at ease in a man’s company. It was amazing how good she felt in front of Tony. She wasn’t worried about sucking in her belly or trying to hide her short stature with borderline dangerous high heels.