by Marla Monroe
Shifting Desires 1
A Lynx in Their Den
When an old foe wants Serenity as his son’s mate, Creed and Shayne have to convince her that they are the only ones for her. But that may take more time than they have with hunters on her tail and her shifter lynx balking at sealing the deal.
Serenity believes that as long as she can’t give them a full mating, she’s just a liability to them. She runs, planning to hide so that the hunters can’t find her and the bears will have a chance to find another mate without her issues, but mother nature already has other plans and Serenity finds herself overcome by her mating heat without her mates to help her.
Will they give up on her and try to break the bonding that has already started to form or will they go after their finicky feline and save her from her misguided attempt at saving their sanity at the expense of hers?
Genre: Contemporary, Ménage Trois/Quatre, Paranormal, Shape-shifter
Length: 79,349 words
A LYNX IN THEIR DEN
Shifting Desires 1
Marla Monroe
MENAGE EVERLASTING
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage Everlasting
A LYNX IN THEIR DEN
Copyright © 2014 by Marla Monroe
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63258-114-3
First E-book Publication: July 2014
Cover design by Les Byerley
All art and logo copyright © 2014 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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www.SirenPublishing.com
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
About the Author
A LYNX IN THEIR DEN
Shifting Desires 1
MARLA MONROE
Copyright © 2014
Chapter One
What on earth is that god-awful noise?
Serenity Jones squinted at the time on her computer monitor and sighed. It was nearly eleven p.m. She’d been working on the last part of the program for nearly four hours straight. No wonder her back hurt. But what was making that terrible racket at this time of night?
She shuffled down the hall to the living room and pushed the curtain aside to look outside. At first nothing really jumped out as unusual to her. She lived in a cul-de-sac at the end of a long road outside of the small community of Talmadge, Montana. There was only one other house in the cul-de-sac, and it was empty right now. She liked it that way.
“What the…” Unfortunately, it looked like someone was moving in.
Serenity groaned. Until now, her nearest neighbor had been nearly half a mile down the road. Now she had someone living directly across from her. She could only pray they would be quieter once they got moved in. And why were they moving in the middle of the night, anyway? Usually you moved out in the middle of the night, not in.
She turned on her porch light and unlocked her door to step outside. The night air had turned much cooler since the sun had gone down some six or seven hours ago. Summer in the mountains was much different than it had been in the south growing up. Where the sun sank all the way to the ground down there, up where she lived now, the mountains tended to hide it much sooner.
A large moving van had backed up to the garage, and the horrible noise she’d heard earlier had probably been them opening the back or pulling out the ramp from the bottom of the truck. Now she could see several very large men milling around in the light coming from the garage. She wasn’t able to scent if they were human or shifter with the wind blowing the wrong direction, but at least it wouldn’t be blowing her scent in theirs if they were shifters. Why hadn’t anyone told her someone had bought the house across from her? Serenity had hoped it would remain empty for a little while longer. Maybe she should have bought it when she had the chance.
Then the house would have slowly deteriorated, bringing unwanted attention to her. If she’d kept it up despite no one living in it, the costs would have been more than she was willing to part with as big as the place was. It didn’t matter now. The place wasn’t on the market any longer, and now she had new neighbors to worry about.
Sound carried in the cooler night air in the mountains, but the men gathered at the edge of the garage spoke softly enough that she wasn’t able to make out their words, just that they were talking. She tried to count how many there were but only managed six before they started moving around so that she couldn’t tell if she’d already counted t
hem or not.
After another five minutes of discussions, the men finally started unloading the van. As they walked back and forth between the van and the garage, it became obvious that they were shifters with enormous strength and agility. They easily moved the furniture without the normal grunts and curses humans made when they moved. Serenity could appreciate the fact that they were trying to remain quiet despite the initial cacophony of screeching metal when they’d first arrived.
She sat and watched them for about thirty minutes before deciding she really needed to get in bed. The program she was working on was due to her client by Monday morning. It was now nearly twelve thirty Saturday morning. If she stayed up much later, she wouldn’t be able to get out of bed at a decent hour to get back to work on it.
Serenity prided herself on always delivering her completed, flawless products on time. Her reputation as a programmer earned her more work than she could handle at a price that kept her more than comfortable. When she stood up from the chair to head back inside, her back reminded her that she’d neglected to move around enough and would be stiff and sore the next day because of it.
Or I can take a nice hot shower and sleep in my lynx form tonight. I’ll be right as rain in the morning.
She smiled to herself and walked back inside, making sure to turn all three deadbolts before she padded back down the hall to her bedroom and en suite bathroom. In less than a minute, she had her clothes off and the water going in the shower. As it warmed up, Serenity thought about the big shifters across the road. What flavor of shifter would they be? They all looked much too large to be wolf, which was the most common of the shifter groups. Still, there were some large wolves out there. She’d seen them.
Once the water reached her favorite heat level, barely below scorching, she stepped in and sighed at the invigorating sting of the shower against her sensitive skin. After washing off, she turned and let the pulsing showerhead do its thing to her back and shoulders. She swore that next spring she was going to have her bathroom completely redone into one of the luxury spas she’d coveted on HGTV. She had enough money to redo her entire house now if she wanted to, but that would mean allowing strangers into her sanctuary. So far, she’d talked herself out of a new bathroom two years in a row. Would she make it three?
When the hot water began to cool to warm, Serenity growled and turned it off before stepping out of the shower. She quickly toweled off and brushed her teeth then, after turning off the light, walked back into her bedroom. Already her back felt better, but sleeping in her lynx form would have her loose and relaxed when she woke up the next morning. With that thought, she picked up the large pet bed that was shaped like a cave of sorts and positioned it on the bed so that she could see both the window to her right and her bedroom door through the narrow opening. Then Serenity let out a breath and relaxed into the magic that brought the change.
She hardly ever felt it anymore unless she hurried it. The breaking and tearing and splitting that went on during the shift no longer affected her as it had when she’d first started learning to control the change. As a kit, babies followed their mother’s change, flowing into and out of their lynx without thought or pain. It wasn’t until they grew old enough that they had to control it that the pain came. While they learned to master their shift, the interruption of the flow caused pain. Once they could control without thinking about each part of it, the pain went away except in times of stress or when trying to hurry the shift along.
In less than half a minute, a golden lynx shook out its fur and stretched on the floor before walking around the room to check that everything was in its place. Once assured that everything was as it should be, the lynx hopped up on the bed and nosed the added sanctuary until she was happy. She slipped inside, turned around a few times, then lay down and covered her nose with her tail to sleep.
The lynx had wanted to go check out the intruders across the road, but Serenity refused. The lynx didn’t understand why the human side of her wasn’t much more upset over their territory being invaded. The human side couldn’t make the lynx understand that, for humans, there were boundaries that had to be observed called property lines. They weren’t on hers, so she couldn’t do anything about it.
They lynx didn’t care about property lines or boundaries. She’d marked her territory, and the others were in her area. She slept, but she was never unaware of everything around her. If they tried to breech her den, she’d know.
* * * *
Creed North stretched after unloading the last box from the moving van. His brother Shayne set the one he had carried off next to it. They exchanged looks and nodded in agreement. Unpacking could wait until they woke up later. It had been a long day of driving, and everyone was ready to crash.
While they’d been unloading, two of the others had been putting together beds complete with sheets and pillows. With the ten of them, the work had gone fast. It was only a little after three, so they could easily get a good five hours of sleep before needing to get up and start unpacking.
“Is the fridge cool enough we can unload the coolers?” Shayne asked one of the others as they walked inside the house.
Eason, a hybrid black bear and grizzly mix, opened the fridge door and checked. “Feels cool to me. I think we can do that.”
Shayne and Zeth, a black bear and the youngest of the group, carried the first of the coolers over and set it down in front of the huge industrial-size refrigerator and started unloading it. Creed and Warren pulled the other one over and opened the lid. Warren was a grizzly bear who seemed to have a special connection with Eason, who most thought was unstable because of his bear mix. Together, they were a team who could deal with most anything that came up, and Creed trusted them.
As soon as his brother and Zeth had finished the first cooler, Creed carried the empty one out on the carport and left it on its side to drain overnight.
“As soon as you finish that one, call it a night, and let’s all get some sleep,” Creed told them. Turning to his brother, he nodded. “Let’s check the area before settling in to grab some shuteye.”
Without needing to be told, Shayne shifted to his bear form. Creed followed as soon as Shayne had finished. Zeth let them out the back door, and they immediately began combing the area surrounding them for any hint of a threat. Both he and his brother were Kodiac bears with Creed being the Ursus of his sleuth and Shayne his Zashchita, or second. Normally he would have had his Ruka, Locke, a grizzly bear, with them, but it had been a long hard day for all of them, especially Locke.
As Ursus, Creed was the leader, or alpha, of the group, which with bear shifters was called a sleuth. He saw to it that they were all cared for and followed shifter rules. His brother was his second-in-charge, known as the Zashchita of a sleuth. He helped Creed maintain order and helped run the sleuth’s main businesses and handle minor problems among the sleuth.
His Ruka, Locke, was the enforcer of the sleuth. He saw to their safety and was a personal bodyguard for Creed, though he rarely needed one. Locke took care of anything major among the sleuth and any threats from outside as well.
As they circled their new den, a scent crossed his nose, setting his bear on edge. It took all of his control to rein in brother bear. He wanted to go after the scent. Female—mate. She belonged to them.
Shayne suddenly reared up on his hind legs and growled, turning toward Creed. Aw, hell. Shayne’s bear had also caught her scent. With both bears reacting, Creed had no doubt they’d locked onto their mate’s scent. If Shayne was having nearly the amount of trouble that he was keeping the big Kodiak from giving chase, his brother seemed to be winning.
Creed shuffled over to his brother and butted his head at the other bear’s side to get him to stand down. He knew there was no way their bears would allow them to return to the den without locating the origin of the scent first. He led the way with his brother following close behind. Despite their size and weighing close to two thousand pounds, they were relatively quiet walking through th
e trees and brush as he tracked the origin of the sweet smelling scent of their mate.
It led them in a roundabout way to the only other occupied house on their street. She literally lived right under their noses. The sweet scent translated to a mixture of honey and cinnamon on his tongue. The next thing that hit him was that she was feline. He wasn’t sure what type of cat, but she was definitely of the feline side of the shifter world.
Shayne chuffed at him, obviously wanting a closer look. With the house appearing dark and the late hour, he decided it wouldn’t hurt to get a bit closer. They couldn’t hide the fact that they’d been this close anyway, they might as well go for broke and trespass onto her personal territory as well. He nodded, and his brother eagerly shuffled ahead.
Creed watched Shayne move in closer to the house but remain clear of the more open area surrounding the structure. With her blinds drawn, they wouldn’t have been able to peek anyway. At this point, a bear with the scent of his mate would stoop to just about anything to get a glimpse of her. Still, he was pleased that they wouldn’t be crossing that bridge of depravity.
He turned toward the other side of the house and explored in that direction, knowing his brother was under control. When their mate woke later in the morning and ventured outside, she’d know immediately that they’d been there and what they were. Hopefully it would prepare her to accept them as mates. Had she been a sow instead of some type of cat, he wouldn’t have worried about her acceptance of them, but he knew next to nothing about felines and their breeding habits. With there being so few bear shifters, interbreeding was fairly normal among his clans, but usually the opposite mates tended to be wolves or even African wild dogs. Hell, their aunt Sonya had been a panda shifter. Rarely had there been a feline mating that he could recall.