Lone Tiger And Cub: BBW Weretiger Shapeshifter Paranormal Romance

by Lizzie Lynn Lee

To Bed A Goddess

  The Last Siren

  The Donor

  The Alien King and I

  Dangerous Curves: Wet

  Lions of the Serengeti: Jennifer’s Lion

  Lions of the Serengeti: Sarah’s Lion

  Bound to Me: Fever Lust

  Private Sessions

  Lions of the Serengeti: Caly’s Lion

  Faerykin

  Werebeasties

  Dragon Hunts

  Night of the Lions

  Chain of Lust

  Taken By a Nymph

  Maiden and the Lion

  Dominate Me with Noelle Ashford

  To Blackmail a Billionaire with Noelle Ashford

  Her Dragon Billionaire

  Kidnapped and Claimed

  Her Tiger Billionaire

  Raven’s Bride

  Her Lion Billionaire

  Bad Dick

  Naughty Librarian

  Lions of the Serengeti: Yazmina’s Lion

  Naughty Boys

  Scorched

  Tamed

  The Man with the Dragon Wings

  Tiger In Her Bed

  Hot Like Fire, Cold As Ice

  Animalistic

  My Boss is a Lion

  Fairy Godlover

  Wicked As He Comes

  Tiger Speed Dating

  Romance Warfare

  Spotilicious

  Special Preview from Tiger Mate

  Prologue

  Viola Norris stood in front of her editor’s desk, waiting for him to stop glaring at his computer screen. She was too irritated to sit because the look on his face was more sour than usual. He wasn’t about to give her good news.

  She ran her fingertip across the nameplate that read “Peter Chapman, Editor,” and frowned at the little gray spot of dust she came away with. She stared at him, hoping that scrutiny would prompt him to look up, but his frown only deepened. So Viola focused on the way the fluorescent light made the bald spot on top of his head almost appear to be glowing.

  I’ll bet if I leaned forward just right, I could see my reflection. Yeah, it’s that shiny…

  “I can’t run this,” he barked, finally meeting her gaze. “This is an editorial, not an article. I don’t pay you to write opinion pieces, Norris.”

  Viola’s first thought was, you don’t pay me anyway, the publisher of HuffPo does. Barely. But she managed to keep that thought safely inside her head. She considered that a win, because sometimes her tongue got away from her.

  “It’s not an opinion piece, Peter. The facts are there. Who, what, why, when, how—”

  “It’s facts and the opinions you formed based on them.” His tone was harsher, probably because she’d always suspected he hated it when she called him Peter. Everyone there did, but Peter Chapman had made it clear from Viola’s first day on the job that he doubted she had what it took to be a good reporter, and he didn’t think she was going to last. Fortunately, other people who had the final say saw her differently.

  Peter didn’t like her tendency to ask a lot of questions, and he didn’t like the purple streak in her dark hair, and most of all, he didn’t like how she’d argue her point.

  But a good reporter asked a lot of questions. And she wasn’t going to change her hair to suit him, or the way she dressed, which was office-appropriate while still maintaining her individuality. She tried to be less argumentative, but that was kind of in her blood. If she ended up wrong, she’d admit it and apologize. But if she knew she was right, she held her ground. Another good quality of a reporter, as far as she was concerned. Peter apparently disagreed.

  “Look, Norris, just about everybody on this planet is sympathetic toward the Syrians and the hell they’re going through. It’s awful. But as reporters we deal in facts, not what we think ought to happen, what we think has happened, or what our government needs to do next. That’s the stuff of Internet bloggers and letters to the editor.”

  “I never said what I thought the government should do. Stating that “some kind of outside intervention may be the only hope many Syrians have to cling to” isn’t opinion. I didn’t say who should intervene or how, just that the refugees desperately need help! That’s well within journalistic—”

  “I’m not running it. Reframe it and put it on a blog or Facebook, but it’s not going on the site.” He spun in his chair and grabbed a file folder off a small table behind him. “Here. New assignment, one a little more up your opinionated alley.”

  He tossed the folder across his desk. Viola picked it up, but before she glanced at it, she asked, “What about the Syria piece?”

  “I’ll give it to Todd.”

  Viola bristled. Todd McKinney was Peter’s favorite reporter, which had more to do with the occasional beer they shared after work than Todd’s skill on the job. He was the worst kind of teacher’s pet, too—he knew it, and regularly took advantage of it.

  “I can rework it myself.”

  “No, you can’t, because you’re going to be busy writing a salacious article about a deviant billionaire. I need that ASAP, so get crackin’.”

  He grinned at her, and she knew she was going to hate this assignment just because he seemed to love it so much.

  She scanned the file. Derek Chandler. Reportedly not seen in public for an entire decade, and the rumors truly were salacious. Tabloid articles and Internet rumor-mongering told stories of how he kept sex slaves, as well as exotic animals. Some even claimed he fed the sex slaves to the animals when he was finished with them.

  “This is ridiculous.” Viola tossed the folder back onto his desk. “Sex slaves? Really?”

  Peter’s eyebrows went up innocently. “You think human trafficking is a joke?” he asked, a smug expression on his face.

  “Of course not. But the idea of a billionaire feeding his personal sex slaves to what, lions and tigers? This is tabloid stuff, Peter.”

  “No, it’s your stuff, so keep your opinions out of it and report the facts you uncover.”

  Viola opened her mouth to protest again, but he held his hand up. “Or you can find a job somewhere else and, if you’re lucky, write articles part-time about spelling bees and who won the bake-off at the county fair.”

  Don’t let him see you pout.

  “Fine. But these rumors are so outlandish, there’s not going to be any story. When I get to meet him, I’ll discover he’s a boring, asocial billionaire who spends all day counting his money and insisting the help scrub his floors with a toothbrush or something.”

  “Then that’s your story, Norris. Setting the record straight about reclusive billionaire Derek Chandler. Hop to it.” He grinned, and if he’d had a cigar in his mouth, Viola knew he would have chomped it.

  She took the folder and headed back to her desk, already disliking this Chandler simply because she had to waste time on him when there were important issues she could be writing about.

  This assignment was already the worst.

  Chapter One

  “I thought this assignment was the worst,” Viola mumbled to herself as she leaned forward over the steering wheel, squinting into the falling snow. “Boy, I didn’t know the half of it.”

  She’d done some research on Derek Chandler that made it seem possible he wasn’t the ogre she’d imagined at first. In all fairness, she was unhappy with the assignment, so she projected that onto him. As it turned out, he was in his thirties, and last reports from about ten years ago said he was tall and handsome, and quite charming, even though he tended to avoid social situations most of the time. To counter that, he lived in the Bear Mountain area in a mansion that one couldn’t approach unannounced, and if one announced oneself, chances were one-hundred percent denial.

  Supervillains prefer isolated mountain lairs, don’t they?

  She laughed at herself, and thought it was more likely he was a comic supervillain planning world domination than a man who kept slaves for sex and exotic animal food. What was wrong with people that they couldn’t find better things to do
than make up stories about a rich recluse?

  Her car fishtailed, and a quick flick of the wheel sent it skidding in the other direction. After a few slower maneuvers, Viola regained control of the vehicle. Her insides shook with adrenalin.

  Damn Peter for sending me on this ridiculous wild-goose chase.

  She blinked her eyes and forced herself to focus. She hadn’t slept at all the night before but had stayed awake doing research and being irritated at having to chase up such a stupid story. Her mind just wouldn’t slow down, so she’d started out tired and knew she’d be a zombie by eight o’clock.

  It had been snowing when she left New York City that afternoon, about two hours earlier, but the snow hadn’t started coming down thick and heavy until she started up the long, winding road that led to Chandler’s home. If the information about the location was even correct, she reminded herself. The snow fell so quickly that the road had disappeared underneath inches of white, and no car had passed ahead of her recently enough to leave tire tracks for her to follow. In places, it was hard to see the edge of the road, and the danger was getting too close and hitting the soft shoulder or a slight drop.

  She had to go extra slow on curves, but she feared slowing too much with the incline and her tires, which had probably passed bald some time ago. Linda, her best friend, had told her she needed to stick a quarter in the treads to see if they needed to be replaced, but unless she could replace a tire with that same quarter, checking wouldn’t have mattered. She needed a new car altogether instead of her nineties-model beater with a heater, but she wasn’t exactly raking in the cash. And she normally didn’t have to drive up mountain roads in what looked like a blizzard. A car passed her, chains on the tires, and Viola realized how ridiculous it was to have driven her car with its bad tires in these conditions.

  Turning around, however, seemed impossible. Not only was there no place to turn around, if she found a place and pulled off, chances were good she’d end up stuck there.

  She took a deep breath, and drifted to the edge—I hope that’s the edge—as she rounded another curve.

  The oncoming car veered too far into her lane.

  Viola instinctively turned the wheel, aiming away from it as the car tried to pull back to its right, and they managed to miss each other by what had to be no more than mere inches. When she tried to ease back to the left, the car had another idea. She jerked the wheel, panicked, but her rear-end fishtailed clockwise. As she hit the brakes, she went into a slide that spun her to face the way she’d come.

  Stop, stop, stop!

  But the car didn’t stop. The front end slid off the edge of the road, and the weight and momentum sent it into the rusted guard rail and rolling over it. Viola tucked her head between her arms and white-knuckled the wheel, screaming until the car slammed to a stop, her driver’s side window filled with white, an airbag pressed against her chest and face.

  “I’m okay. I’m okay,” she repeated as she pushed the airbag down to get a sense of where she was. The car tipped, and she braced for another roll, trying not to imagine herself falling into a ravine. But the car slammed down onto its tires, mercifully upright again, the horn giving a defeated haaaaan before going silent.

  She was on semi-flat ground, the passenger side of the car up against a tree. At least she could see the area around her through the cracked front and back windows. No ravine, no drop-off, not even enough incline that she was likely to start sliding or rolling, at least not with the passenger side of her car crunched up against a massive tree.

  Viola closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. She was okay. There was no need to panic, so she tried to slow her heartbeat and calm herself enough to stop trembling.

  She reached for her phone, which she kept in the console between the front seats. It wasn’t there. After a few seconds of scrabbling for it, she found it in the floorboard near her feet, screen shattered. She tried to turn it on, but it wouldn’t even flash.

  Viola thanked her lucky stars she’d worn two pairs of extra-thick socks and her heaviest coat, and had blankets and extra gloves in the trunk, just in case. She’d grab a blanket and the extra gloves, and make her way back to the road where she could flag someone down for a ride back into town.

  Everything was going to be okay.

  Her door had been crunched during a roll, and not even feet against it while pulling the handle could budge it. The tree she’d landed against crunched both front and back doors on the passenger side. The placement couldn’t have been more perfect for catching both of them equally. She frowned at the tree, as if it had deliberately blocked her exit.

  Viola crawled into the backseat and tried the door on the driver’s side, but it had been damaged the same way the front door had been. She tried the passenger side, even though it looked impossible. Who knew, maybe a few kicks and the door would just fall off, making way for her? Maybe it would budge enough she could squeeze out?

  That didn’t happen.

  All of the windows were cracked or broken, so she could break one out to climb through and go for help. But the driver’s side roof had been crunched down enough to break those windows but not leave enough of an opening for her to crawl through. And on the passenger’s side, even if she finished breaking out those windows, she wasn’t sure she could fit between the tree and the window frames. It had to be the shattered windshield or back window, which was already narrow but even more so now.

  The windshield it was.

  After several tries at slamming her heel against the spider-webbed glass and barely budging it, she tried to start the car in hopes of running the heater, but it made a metallic noise of protest and finally stopped clicking at all.

  “Damn it!” She kicked at the windshield a few more times. Viola knew that she could get it eventually, but she needed to rest for a minute. Maybe she could go through the backseat to the trunk somehow, get the blanket and supplies to stay warm. Or the tire iron! That would make easier work of the windshield.

  She huddled her arms around herself and told herself everything was going to be okay. Even if she couldn’t get out of the car (and she was sure that in time she could), someone would see her. She wasn’t that far from the road. If nothing else, Linda would worry when she didn’t answer her texts. It seemed they never went more than an hour or two without some form of communication. And Linda knew she was headed up the mountain today, and would put the bad weather and lack of a response together, easy peasy. It didn’t matter that it would be dark soon and harder for anyone to see her there. If she decided she couldn’t get to the road, she could turn on her lights, making it easier to be spotted. Someone would find her before the battery died, surely.

  She’d be rescued before she knew it. But she was going to start kicking that windshield again in just a few minutes, after some more deep breaths. She just needed to rest her eyes and muster her strength. And the blizzard conditions wouldn’t last forever. If she could hold out until the weather cleared a little she could probably get anywhere.

  She spared a thought for the other driver. Maybe he realized before he disappeared around the curve that her car was out of control? He might have already called nine-one-one or was making his way down the embankment to help her right now.

  Everything was going to be fine.