by Lynn Red
Tucking a wayward lock of hair behind her ear, he hoarsed, “My love.”
She blinked at his words and the tears that had been threatening spilled over. Burying her face in his neck, she murmured something he didn’t understand. He let her hide for a moment before pushing her back.
“What did you say?” He cupped her face, his thumbs brushing away a couple of stray tears.
“I’ve never done this before”
He looked like she’d just punched him in the stomach.
“You were…a virgin?”
She blinked again and burst out in hysterical laughter.
“No, no! Oh God, that’s too funny,” she choked out when she finally caught her breath. “I just meant that, well, I’ve never had a mate before. I’ve never felt this way, this emotional and physical connection. It’s so intense that it scares me. I can’t imagine ever being with anyone else again, Arnaud. Is that normal?”
He pulled her into him, tucking her into the nook of his shoulder and kissing the top of her head. She felt at home there, like it was perfectly designed to fit her. KatieKat purred and turned circles inside her, finding her own comfy spot.
“You mean that feeling like you’re a big hunk of iron and the other person is a magnet? That you’re inexorably drawn to them? Like you didn’t know anything was missing in your life until that other person showed up and blew your carefully constructed delusion to pieces? Is that what you mean?”
All she could do was nod.
He kissed the top of her head again. “It’s perfectly natural, my darling, and absolutely perfect.”
The question burned inside her. She was pretty sure she knew the answer but she had to hear the words. To know for sure.
“Arnaud?”
“Hmmm?”
“I need to know if…if you feel the same. I know you loved your mate but I was wondering if…if there’s any room in there for me.”
She pointed at his chest, then held her breath to wait for his answer. It was a short wait.
“Katie, don’t you know? You have it all.”
He pulled back to scrutinize her intensely. “I was so entrenched in my grief that I couldn’t allow myself to hope that I’d ever find another mate. But someone gave me a reality check that opened my eyes. You’d already opened my heart, I was just a little late in figuring it out.”
“So…?”
He laughed and hugged her tight. “You’re mine, babe. I felt it the instant I saw you.”
Katie sighed. “I love you, Arnaud.”
“I adore you, Katie. Never forget it.”
They rested against the desk like that for a few more minutes, their naked limbs entwined. Finally, Katie sat up and started gathering her clothes — what was left of them.
“Holy shitknockers, what am I going to wear?” she asked, holding up the tattered remains of her golf shirt.
“I’d be happy if you never dressed again,” he teased, ripping the shirt from her hands and tossing it in the garbage can. “Two points!”
Katie laughed. She’d never seen Arnaud so playful. Guess that’s what great sex with a hot pussycat can do for a guy. Rawr!
“Really? You wouldn’t mind other guys checking out the twins, huh?”
His expression grew dark and his eyes flashed with jealousy as she pushed her boobs together. “Here, wear my shirt,” he barked, thrusting his Oxford at her, clearly not amused by her joke.
Once they were dressed — Arnaud made due with the plain white tee he’d worn under the button-down — he gathered her into his arms and tried to read her face. All she could muster was a sad smile.
She hated the thought of leaving Haven, but she was more upset that she’d disappointed Mr. Roarke. He was her mentor, the only father figure she’d ever really had, and now she’d broken his most important rule, as well as his trust.
“Are you ready to go face the music, Katie?”
In Arnaud’s face she saw her future. As much as Mr. Roarke had done for her, he was no longer the main man in her life. That honor belonged solely, and forever, to Arnaud.
“With you as my mate, I can face anything.”
Epilogue
Mr. Roarke had just finished the story when Haven’s guest boat rumbled into the tiny bay, bringing a fresh batch of visitors. “Excellent timing,” he said, “and this is a perfect vantage point from which to observe our new friends’ first impressions of Haven.”
He and Ms. Davids were standing at a small picket fence off to the side of the ferry landing, spongy ground cover under their feet. Any spot on the island offered a stunning view, but this one was close enough to the landing that you could see the expressions on the new arrivals’s faces yet was surrounded by enough lush plant life that observers were hard to spot.
“If I’m not mistaken, that gentleman is what I believe is called a ‘frontman’ for a heavy metal rock and roll band,” Mr. Roarke said, pointing to a good-looking, if slightly scary, guy with long black hair, tattoos covering his arms and a bad attitude that would be visible from outer space. He strutted down the gangway with his arm draped casually around a bored-looking young woman with her bouncy bits poured into a barely-there, skin-tight red dress.
Mr. Roarke smiled almost mischievously. “And that young woman—“ he directed Ms. Davids’ attention to a bookish young woman dressed in a flowing long-sleeve dress and enormous sun hat “—she runs a small, privately funded center for abused female shifters.”
“Wow,” said Ms. Davids. “That’s quite a disparity in income and status.”
Mr. Roarke nodded. “Naturally, her fee was much lower than the singer’s, but she will receive the same five-star treatment. I believe those who commit their lives to helping others deserve to be treated like royalty as much as someone who makes oodles of money.”
Ms. Davids raised a teasing eyebrow and smirked at him. “Oodles?”
Mr. Roarke chuckled and patted her shoulder. “I like your sass, Ms. Davids. Don’t ever change.”
Turning her back toward the central building, he said, “Why don’t we go meet your supervisor, Mrs. Simpson.”
“Mrs. Simpson? I though Miss Prodo was the Activities Director.”
Mr. Roarke shook his head sadly. “No, I’m afraid I had to let her go. Mrs. Simpson was promoted to her position.”
“Promoted…” Ms. Davids thought for a moment. “You mean Katie O’Meghan? The housecat shifter? I thought she was the one who was fired for fuc— er, fraternizing with a guest!”
Mr. Roarke looked shocked. “Why, of course not! What gave you that idea?”
“Well, your rule…”
He waved away her comment. “Mr. Simpson wasn’t truly a guest. Though he didn’t know it at the time, I was evaluating his performance as a potential candidate for Haven’s in-house counsel position. I’m thrilled to say that he not only performed admirably, but he also accepted the position. He and Miss O’Meghan wed just last week on the bluff overlooking the bay.”
Ms. Davids’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “So you fired Miss Prodo? Why?”
“Corporate espionage.”
Miss Davids looked as if he’d just said the moon was made of goat shifter cheese. At her shocked expression, he explained.
“She and Mr. Chase, Haven’s staff counsel, were attempting to smuggle some of my specially formulated Haven Heat off the island and to a private lab. They were trying to replicate the recipe so they could market and sell it themselves. I developed that cream through trial and error over the course of years, and the only place in the world it can be found is here at Haven. I intend to keep it that way.”
“Sounds like they almost got away with it.”
He shook his head, a lock of dark hair flopping into his eyes. Brushing it back in place, he said, “I’m afraid not. There’s not much that goes on at Haven that I don’t know about. I got wind of their plot early on and carefully monitored their goings-on. I didn’t want to believe someone — two someones, in fact — would bet
ray me like that so I required proof before I would allow myself to fire them.”
“So that’s why you had Katie do that special inventory of med kits! I wondered what that was all about.”
Mr. Roarke nodded, a twinkle in his eye. “That and…other reasons. But regardless, her report, along with some documentation Mr. Simpson found, were all the evidence I required.”
“I can’t believe it. That must have been some scene.”
“Indeed. When Miss Prodo burst into my office with her tawdry tale, she groused for so long that Miss O’Meghan and Mr. Simpson arrived before she’d taken a breath. I can assure you, Miss Prodo was not pleased when I interrupted her in order to examine Miss O’Meghan’s inventory sheets. She was even less pleased when I summarily dismissed her. She and Mr. Chase were on the next boat off the island.”
“Did she shift and attack Katie again?”
His expression grew stern as he stopped and turned to Ms. Davids. “If she had, she would not have left Haven in one piece. Once I heard about their altercation, I immediately instituted a new rule.”
He waved his arm at a wall that had a fancy engraved plaque at the top reading Haven’s House Rules. Row after row of rules followed by plenty of blank space left for new rules. She started reading from the top but he pointed to the second to last one.
The killing, attempted killing, mutilation, abuse or humiliation of fellow shifters is strictly prohibited.
Just below that was another.
True mates are exempt from Rule #1.
THE END
About the Author
New York Times & USA Today Bestselling Author Marina Maddix is a romantic at heart, but hates closing the bedroom door on her readers. Her stories are sweet, with just enough spice to make your mother blush. She lives with her husband and cat near the Pacific Ocean, and loves to hear from her fans.
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Also by Marina Maddix
Laid Bear [Amazon]
Laid Bear: The Kodiak Clan [Amazon]
Bearly Hanging On [Amazon]
Tiger by the Tail
By Jessica Sims
Mandy's been turned into a were-tiger, but her biggest problem isn't her tail - it's the bossy men in her new life. No one ever lets her decide what she wants to do, so when sexy Adrian makes a bet that he'll get her to shift in the next three days, she jumps at it. If she wins, she gets to go free. If she loses, she'll end up his mate. But if Mandy wins…will she finally get what she wants…or does she already have it?
“All right,” Vic Merino said as the entire Merino tiger clan sat around his kitchen table. “We have a problem.”
All eyes turned to Mandy Petersen, who then rolled her own eyes and crossed her arms. It took a lot of bravery to stand up to the tiger clan, but Mandy was sick of them, every last stripy bastard of the lot.
Really, Mandy shouldn’t have even been at the meeting. She should have been back at college, safely tucked in her dorm, helping her old sorority handle rush week, or meeting a roommate. Something normal. She shouldn’t be at a meeting in a stranger’s kitchen about whether or not she could grow her own tail. She shouldn’t have had the slightest clue about tails or shifters or the mysterious Alliance network of shifters that populated North Texas. Nope. Nor should she have known that every one of the tall, good-looking Merino men was a were-shifter, and that they all turned into tigers when they felt like it.
She shouldn’t have even known that shifters existed.
Of course, if she had known all that, she would have never started dating Johnny, a twenty year old reckless guy with a devilish look in his blue eyes. She would have continued to hold Johnny at arms length for forever. Better yet, if she had known he was a shifter, she would never have gone out with him at all.
Because if they hadn’t dated, he would have never bitten her on the neck and transferred his shifting ability to her. He hadn’t even warned her that there was a possibility. She’d just thought he was a little too forward.
But he was a shifter, and he’d bitten her hard enough to break skin, and that was apparently all it took. When she’d immediately started to sprout fur, brought her home to his alpha - an alpha!!! - all proud and telling everyone that he was now her mate and she was his mate and that they should accept it.
There were two problems with this scenario - one: humans weren’t supposed to know about shifters and were definitely not supposed to be changed into shifters.
And two - nobody had ever bothered to ask Mandy if she wanted to be a tiger.
Scared out of her mind, Mandy hadn’t protested when they’d shipped her and Johnny to Alaska. She was too busy growing fangs and claws and other terrifying things to stress about her living situation. When things finally did stop growing spontaneously quite so often, Johnny (who was still unsuccessfully trying to get into her pants) casually mentioned that oh, she was now part of the tiger clan, and since ‘they’ had broken the rules, they were now exiled to Alaska. Forever.
Again, no one had asked Mandy how she felt about snow.
Needless to say, she wasn’t happy.
It turned out that ‘forever’ was only a few weeks, and the long-standing rules against humans were tweaked a bit, and Mandy and Johnny were allowed back to Texas. And then Johnny - who, two weeks ago, had been swearing he was her forever mate and had changed her because he wanted to be with her always - started seeing a brunette because Mandy ‘just wasn’t working out’.
So now she was a tiger. An unwanted tiger. And dumped. Back in Texas, but still a tiger.
And still, no one had bothered to ask Mandy how she felt about any of this.
So the fact that they were now having a meeting about her and the fact that she didn’t feel like shifting? Well, they could all go suck a bag of dicks, as far as she was concerned.
But she didn’t say that. She sat and crossed her arms and looked pissy. Because now that she was a shifter, she also had this weird, awful new problem: she couldn’t oppose her alpha. It was something in shifter blood, Johnny told her. You bowed to the man in charge. And lucky her, she was now a shifter.
Her alpha was Vic Merino, the man currently trying to decide what to do with her. Vic was not her favorite person. He was tall, muscular as hell, and covered in tattoos. His mate was the equally tall Estrella, who was blonde and sweet and extremely pregnant at the moment. Because Estrella was pregnant, she was told that Vic tended to have a rather bad temper because his protective streak was getting the better of him.
Considering Mandy had only known Vic for about a month? She’d never seen him in a good temper.
“You need to shift, Mandy.”
“No.” She crossed her arms over her chest.
“Yes.”
“I don’t have to.”
“You haven’t shifted in weeks. You’re overdue.”
“Nope. I’m fine. I don’t feel the need to shift at all.” If she did, she quickly squashed the sensation. Fuck them for thinking they could tell her what to do.
Vic’s jaw clenched. “You need to shift regularly so you can learn to control it.”
“I don’t need to shift at all,” she told him stubbornly. And that was the end of that. She was not going to shift for him like a good little puppet.
“It’s time for all of us to be adults about this,” Vic said, in what she assumed was his ‘reasonable’ voice. “As much as you would like to put this past month behind you, Mandy, I’m afraid it’s just not going to happen. Like it or not, you chose this lifestyle, and you can’t go back on it now. Becoming a shifter is a one-way street.”
Chose? She chose? What a joke. She hadn’t chose anything. She hadn’t even chosen Johnny, not really. He’d just made all the decisions and Mandy was left trying to pick up the pieces of her life. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me--”
“If Johnny told you I chose to be changed, he’s delusional.”
Vic gave Johnny a hard look.
Johnny just shrank lower in his seat.
Mandy shook her head. This wasn’t getting anyone anywhere. “Look. Just forget it. Just let me go, all right? I don’t want anything to do with any of you,” Mandy said. “I want to go back to college. I would be perfectly happy if I never saw any of you ever again!” She uncrossed her arms and clasped her hands in front of her breasts. “Please, please, please let me go back home. I just want to be normal again.”
Vic’s jaw tightened, and she saw Estrella place a hand on his arm, soothing him. Okay, so maybe that had been the wrong thing to say. She looked around the table at the rest of the Merino faces, all unsmiling. As a one, they were good looking men, but Johnny’s face now filled her with loathing and rage. Why was she the one being punished when he was just going around doing whatever he wanted? It didn’t seem fair.
“You absolutely cannot go back,” Vic said.
“I don’t see why not,” Mandy replied.
The vibe around the table became extremely tense. Estrella petted Vic’s arm again, and as Mandy watched, Vic’s nostrils flared. Okay, she was starting to get that awful crawling feeling on the back of her neck when she knew she was being a bad tiger. The urge to crawl under the table and hide intensified, and she averted her gaze from him. Unfortunately, it landed on his second, Adrian.
Adrian was an entirely different awkward sort of problem for her. Ever since she and Johnny had parted, he watched her. All the time. She suspected it was because he was expecting her to spontaneously stripe-up (as she liked to call shifting) but sometimes, she wondered. Like right now. Adrian watched her with a pair of darkly lashed, intense blue eyes. His eyebrows were thick, heavy slashes that made him seem as if he was frowning at her at all times…and maybe he was. He wasn’t the kind to smile much. A few inches taller than his alpha, Vic, he was the quiet one you had to watch out for compared to Vic’s assertive alphaness.
“You don’t see why not?” Vic’s voice was dangerous, and Mandy’s attention snapped back to him. “What do you mean, you don’t see why not?”