by Diana Seere
The Billionaire Shifter’s Curvy Match
Billionaire Shifters #1
Diana Seere
Contents
The Billionaire Shifter’s Curvy Match
Copyright © 2016 by Diana Seere
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
Chapter 22
The Billionaire Shifter Series
About the Author
The Billionaire Shifter’s Curvy Match
by Diana Seere
Welcome to the most exclusive club in the world. The Novo Club. Novo is Latin for “change.” Our members prefer the word “shift” though.
It’s the hottest club in town.
The price of membership is your heart and your secrecy.
All you need to do to join is to be loved beyond your wildest imagination by someone powerful with an…alpha side so primal it’s in their blood.
Are you ready?
Good. Then let’s begin.
The Billionaire Shifters Club is a new series featuring the five Stanton siblings, four brothers and one sister who are all part of an ancient shifter family living in modern America. The subterranean club-within-a-club beneath the streets of Boston, Massachusetts holds secrets only the Stantons and their fellow shifters know.
When Lilah Murphy started serving drinks at the exclusive Platinum Club, she never expected she would be on the menu.
Biotech billionaire Gavin Stanton had one taste of the new, curvy server and his craving could never be satisfied until he had her fully. Completely.
Eternally.
Fate brought them together, but a centuries-old secret could tear them apart, for the Stanton family holds a shifter legacy that no human has ever threatened.
Until now.
Gavin Stanton is the billionaire CEO of a Boston biotech firm. He’s also a werewolf, the son of a large, ancient family with roots in the British aristocracy. His work is his life. But then he feels the Beat—an irresistible urge to mate with Lilah, a beautiful human who inflames his passions like no other—and he abandons everything he thought he knew in his need to claim her.
Lilah Murphy is broke and desperate. All she wants is a job to support herself, her sister, and her ailing mother. The last thing she needs is to get involved with a rich, powerful guy who would discard her after a few hot nights together and get her fired at her new, high-paying job. But she, too, feels the Beat. She hears him in her mind, feels him in her soul, and the urge to answer the ancient call is undeniable. Is she strong enough to embrace his secrets—and her own?
Content warning: explicit love scenes. The Billionaire Shifter’s Curvy Match is the first in an all-new series of hot romances about the billionaire shifters and the women they’re fated to love.
Copyright © 2016 by Diana Seere
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.
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Chapter 1
Lilah stared at the stack of bills in front of her. It was an inch thicker than her thumb.
The stack didn’t include the online bills, which were easier to ignore than the ones that stared out at her, crooked and intimidating, stalking her mailbox like a freeloading boyfriend.
Not that she had a boyfriend. In fact, soon she wouldn’t even have a mailbox.
Damn. She logged into her online bank account and stared at her balance. It was three figures. Five if you included the decimal points—which she definitely did. Her student loan payment alone was four figures, forget the decimal points—which she couldn’t because the loan agency kept reminding her every month with emails, threatening letters, and phone calls.
An exhausted sigh escaped her. She dug her fingers into her scalp, massaged the old scar at her temple, and leaned against the cheap desk she and her little sister, Jess, had found on the street last month. Every piece of furniture in their tiny studio apartment was street-picked, except for the futon mattress she slept on. She lined her windowsill with small, scented tea lights, the fruity citrus and calming vanilla masking the scent of desperation in her life.
She looked up to find her reflection staring back at her from the full-length mirror their neighbor gave them a few weeks ago before moving out. It was a tall antique that reminded her of something from a horror movie. Late at night she expected her own reflection to talk to her.
Right now it just showed her a generously curvy woman in threadbare pajamas and loose blonde hair that hung down to her waist. She wished her face didn’t always have that nervous smile on it, as if she were begging the world to be kind.
After sticking her tongue out at herself, she reached for her most recent temp-job paycheck. Processing mortgage paperwork had been more boring than watching paint dry, but it had come with a full-time paycheck for eleven weeks.
Until today. Next week would’ve been week twelve—but they’d chucked her overboard. Laid off. Technically, she wasn’t even laid off—that would have meant she could collect unemployment. But Lilah was a temp. She was just shit out of luck.
So. No more paychecks.
She opened the bank app on her three-generations-too-old smartphone and snapped a picture of her check, depositing it with ease. A photo, a log-in, and—bam!
Her bank balance increased by a few hundred dollars.
Not enough.
The late summer heat floated in through the third-story window of their tiny place in Waltham, making it feel like a sauna. A half-broken fan was all they had to stir the air. A window-unit air conditioner was so far out of their financial reality that it made Lilah laugh to even think about it. The windowsill outside was spotted with drips from floors above them, drops of water from people richer than she and her sister, people who could afford their cell phone bills and the electricity to power sixty-eight-degree coolness.
She kinda hated those people right now.
Kinda really.
Lilah trudged over to the kitchen, abandoning her bills, and opened the freezer. A bucket of ice greeted her. That was her and Jess’s version of air-conditioning. She tucked three cubes in a sandwich bag and put it on the back of her neck. Last week she’d done the same thing with a can of soda.
As if they could afford soda.
If it got any hotter, she’d need to tuck ice into her bra, but looking down at her overflowing rack made her snicker. Try finding room for ice cubes in a double-D bra, even one as old and stretched out as hers.
What she needed was a miracle.
A miracle attached to a pile of money.
“You home?” a familiar voice called out as the front door cracked open with the explosive sound of metal on metal, keys in locks, and the whump of something heavy being thrown on the table. Lila
h turned around to see her sister Jess standing there, pointing to an overflowing bag of groceries.
“What’s that?” Lilah asked. Jess worked part-time at the fancy organic grocery store four blocks away that gave her a small income while she took classes. Jess, like Lilah, already had a bachelor’s degree—and the student loans to prove it—but she’d decided too late that she wanted to go to med school. That meant taking catch-up classes.
Biology, chemistry, and physics filled Jess’s days. Those were the very classes that gave Lilah a case of hives. Her degree in hospitality management was more her style.
“We can’t afford groceries right now—we have to make rent!” Lilah stared at the bag of food. She opened the fridge and inventoried what they had on hand. A vanilla yogurt. Some carrots that had gone brown at the ends. A jar of mustard. An inch of ketchup in a clear bottle.
The cupboard held pasta and some rice. They’d find a way.
Jess rolled her hazel eyes. Like most days she worked at the store, she’d tied up her long honey-gold hair in a sleek ponytail. “We have to eat. Geez, Lilah, what’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong?” Lilah’s voice rose. “They didn’t hire me permanently at the mortgage company. I was let go today.”
“So? You hated that job.”
Lilah ran her hand through her long hair, yanking it in frustration. “Yeah, well, I loved the paycheck. Kind of like how I love having a roof over my—”
The sound of screeching rubber on asphalt drowned out the rest of her words. They both paused, expecting to hear cars colliding. Instead, there was eerie silence—and then the plaintive cry of a wounded animal.
A dog.
They both ran to the window. Outside, the usual neighborhood lowlifes loitered on their grubby street, where the most vibrant business was a check-cashing place. And a bar. Actually, a lot of bars.
And was that a limo? What the hell was one of those doing here?
The dog’s cries continued.
“Smoky!” Lilah gasped, turning away from the window, her heart pounding. “That bastard hit Smoky!”
Smoky was the neighborhood stray. He should’ve been ill-tempered, given his bad luck to live on the streets, but his was the friendliest face on the block, looking happy to see you, always eager for a pat, his tail wagging.
The limo might’ve killed the poor little guy. Taking three stairs at a time, Lilah flew down the stairwell to the stained security door and out the rusty gate to the sidewalk.
The usual drug dealer was standing on the corner, interrupted from talking to whoever was inside a parked silver Chevy. Under that car, only a few feet from him and still whimpering, was a huddled mass of pale fur.
Smoky.
Jess was right on her heels. “Oh, no.”
“We have to help him.” Lilah glanced up and down the street, preparing to cross, her long hair flying as she whipped her head back and forth to make sure it was safe.
Jess grabbed her arm. “You can’t! That’s the dealer who stabbed somebody last year, isn’t it?”
“Different guy,” Lilah said, although it wasn’t. She strode into the street just as the driver of the limo was getting out. She couldn’t leave Smoky to die in the street with those scumbags.
Then she saw the limo driver pull his arms back, hands on hips, revealing a barely-concealed gun on a holster around his chest. The window in the back of the limo remained up, and why shouldn’t it? Why would some rich dude want to get dirty? Why would he care if he’d run over some poor homeless dog?
The tiny scar above Lilah’s left eyebrow began to throb. It jolted her, making the scene before her look shimmery. Unreal. She pressed her fingertips into the tiny divot and hoped the throbbing would go away. The last thing she needed now was a three-day blinding headache.
And she’d run out of her meds. No money.
“What’s wrong, Lilah?” Jess grabbed her elbow and pulled her out of the middle of the street. She’d just frozen there, staring at the back windows of the limo.
Lilah could hear Smoky’s whimpering and the city traffic, but it all came as background noise through the throbbing in her head. It wasn’t quite pain. The pulsing felt like it pierced her brain, a second heartbeat she couldn’t quite follow.
Her vision was fine, and that meant it wasn’t a migraine. Then what was this?
And why did it worsen when her eyes flickered toward the back windows of the limo?
“Let’s get Smoky,” Lilah said, though her mouth felt like it was filled with cotton.
Jess had an arm around her. “I’ll get him. You’re about to faint.”
“I’m fine.” Lilah forced herself to move, shooting an icy glance at the neighborhood felon before she squatted down to the car’s rear bumper.
“Lilah, you look really pale,” Jess insisted, frowning. She looked so much like their mom when she did that.
“Here, puppy,” Lilah cooed, reaching out a hand. She knew the biggest danger was if Smoky ran away again and hid where nobody could help him, so she grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and pulled him as gently as she could out from under the car. Luckily, Smoky was a small thing, barely fifteen pounds, and she got him bundled up in her arms without having to drag him far.
He relaxed in her arms, his shivering more from fear than any injury. Thank goodness.
But as soon as she stood, the throbbing, pulsing pain returned. Her gaze was pulled to the back window of the limo, now open. To the man sitting in the shadows.
Him. Her head felt like someone had dropped a brick on it, her body filling with heat and lava.
It’s him.
What was the matter with her? She had to get Smoky inside. She didn’t know anyone who rode around in a limo, so why did she feel like she did?
Him.
It didn’t matter. She had to get closer. She had to see him.
Holding Smoky in her arms, Lilah took a step toward the limo, then another.
Jess snagged her elbow. “Lilah, no! You can’t! That driver has a gun—”
Lilah was beyond reason, the pounding turning into a word, a word that had no sound, no form, no sense.
Him.
Him.
Him.
That voice. It pounded like a hammer forging steel. She continued to advance on the shining black limo, barely noticing when the driver climbed inside and slammed the door. She was fearless in her uncontrollable need to see that face, to know he was real.
You’re real.
Jess was at her heels. “Lilah, please—”
The limo peeled out, its tires screeching as it drove past her only an arm’s-length away. Two bright blue eyes, glittering with otherworldly sharpness, met hers through the open window. Gold highlights tickled his hair, a honey brown that curved up at the neck, a little too long to be all business, with waves she wanted to sink her fingers into. A strong jaw, set firmly, and those wild, seductive eyes... oh.
Oh my.
And then the voice changed in an instant.
Mine.
Mine.
Mine.
Gavin Stanton ordered his driver, Manny, to halt in front of the small, shabby building in the heart of Waltham, a mere pit stop on his journey into Boston from his Weston meeting. The side trip had been a hunting expedition, of sorts.
Hunting for her.
The tall, curvy blonde came to him in a dream on the eve of his birthday, hands and mouth and body in supplication to him, submissive and offering more than any other woman could.
Not that they hadn’t tried.
The hot, late-summer night made him roil with repressed need, his body buzzing as if covered with fire ants. The rush to get to safety, to the exclusive gentleman’s club he sought, to be among his peers, weighed on him. Without that sanctuary, so much good could be undone.
In an instant.
The shock of recognition started in the base of his cock, a tingling that quickly turned to a hum, a vibration that spread to cover his shaking body, hands curlin
g to fists, nose raised to follow the scent.
The buzz turned into a bass drum, beating in time to her blood’s path.
Her.
Her.
Her.
My God, had he really found her? Weeks wasted, wandering down streets he had no desire to know even existed, nights spent aching for a woman his mind had surely invented out of pure need. And now...
The disgustingly dilapidated building, yet another of the triple-decker homes squeezed into a city block with small shops poking out of the sagging storefronts on the first floor, made him feel as if he were in another country. Another world, compared to the lush, rolling estate just outside the city where he’d negotiated another round of research and development for his prized pet project at his company, LupiNex, his biotechnology firm.
“Stop!” he’d growled, the timbre of his voice splintering inside, follicles stock-straight and at the ready, his body’s change imminent as he knew that yes—he had found her.
And that was all that mattered.
“But sir, we need to get you to safety,” Manny argued, no need to explain why as Gavin’s voice had already thickened with distinction. He sounded as if he were talking around gravel, the smooth, cultured British voice descending into something more animal.
“Halt!” Gavin demanded. It sounded like a growl.
Manny slammed on the brakes, a small thump registering in the dim recesses of what remained of Gavin’s human mind. In the cheap streetlight’s glow, Gavin could not tell what they had hit, and as his body pounded, blood pouring into limbs as they stretched and filled, joints loosening and lengthening as he shifted without control, he barely cared.
Twisting his head and resisting the urge to rip the door off its hinges and lunge up the building, he found her.
Her.
The throbbing beat in time with hers, an ancient sound neither could deny. Tale after tale had been told, in hushed tones and passed through more generations than anyone could count, over centuries or—perhaps—millennia, of the Beat, but Gavin had dismissed it. His own father said it was a fairy tale, a gibbering fantasy spewed by weaklings who believed in fairies and wood nymphs.