by Erika Masten
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
Text copyright ©2015 by the Author.
This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Eliza Gayle. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original Southern Shifters remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Eliza Gayle, or their affiliates or licensors.
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DANGEROUS PREY
(AN AESIR SHIFTERS / WINDEMERE STALLIONS / SOUTHERN SHIFTERS BBW PARANORMAL SHAPE SHIFTER ROMANCE)
by
Erika Masten
Contact: [email protected]
Website: http://erikamasten.com
Blog: http://erikamasten.blogspot.com
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CHAPTER ONE
Keeping a hairstyle in a humid Greenville summer. Being a big girl twisting and bouncing her way through an hour of Zumba with an instructor who’d make half of her. Living in a state known for barbecue, hoppin’ john with smoky pork over carolina gold rice, and a dozen different ways to make sweet tea a sin and not ending up with a backside that didn’t stop swaying ‘til a full three seconds after she did.
Anyone who thought those were a feat had never tried to run away from home and a family full of psychics.
Mama peered across the pink formica kitchen table at Kendra with a look that, at the best of times and in the most mundane of households, said the woman’s mothering instinct was fixing to home in on something her baby girl wasn’t telling her. Having a mama who was a psychic, from an entire danged clan of them, added a whole ‘nother kind of distress to seeing that sharp gleam in her eye.
It didn’t help when, bristling under the glare of the once formidable Sherry Hennessey—make that Owens now that Kendra’s stepfather had put his name and his stink all over everything that had been her father’s—Kendra started to hear her heartbeat in her ears. It was the sound of pressure building in her head, made worse by sleepless nights plagued by reoccurring dreams obviously related to her time, her mating call. A second later, an electrical crackle preceded the lights starting to blink on and off. The blender turned on and revved to the highest speed, something that sounded like it could have chewed up metal and made the clunky old thing shimmy across the counter.
“Kendra?” Her mother’s brown eyes grew wide as the woman gasped her daughter’s name.
“It’s nothin’, Mama.” Kendra made a show of rubbing the bulge of her tummy through her thin blue summer capris. “You know how I get when it’s that time of the month and the cramps are bad.”
But Kendra knew what her mama feared and what everyone in the clan suspected. And they were right. Kendra would have gone to her grave right then to deny it. Might not have been much use in that, she knew; there was a good shot she’d end up there anyway, soon.
A few deep breaths, not obvious, calmed the erratic outburst of undirected Tallan psychic energy. Kendra had been practicing. A lot. It was her only hope of hiding the change long enough to decide what she was going to do about it.
Slowly, Sherry’s look of suspicion and distress softened to one of motherly concern. “You want me to fix you a cup of my raspberry tea, baby?”
“No.”
Yes. Yes, she did want a cup of her mother’s herbal tea, in her grandmother’s floral china cup with its hairline fractures of age. She wanted it to be a rainy spring outside instead of a sultry-sticky summer, with three generations of Hennessey women sitting around that pink-flecked table while they made pecan pies ahead of the clan’s spring social.
“No time,” Kendra said instead, as she stood up from the table and slipped on the light jacket that made the capris set professional enough for work. “The Monday commute traffic around Greenville is always the worst. Hour and a half’s drive, but I’m lucky if it doesn’t take me an extra fifteen or twenty minutes once I get onto the 183.” It was the only true thing Kendra had said to her mother that morning.
Mama stood up from the table, too, as Kendra started past her toward the back door. “You be careful, baby.”
Was it Kendra’s imagination, that note of sadness in her mama’s warm southern voice? There has been a time when Sherry Hennessey’s reputation within the clan had rested on her ability to concentrate on a mood and will it onto another, a constant source of delight for her daughters. Now it seemed like Kendra was the one around the house with that touch to her, only all she ever felt these days was anxious, sad, fearful. It wasn’t Kendra’s power, just her nature—to break her poor mother’s heart.
“Kendra, you’re forgetting.” The girl turned at the summons from her mother and found the woman holding her purse. A wide, beach-style tote, it had room for everything a girl could need. When Sherry hefted it up onto Kendra’s shoulder, the picture frames inside clanked loud enough to make the girl cringe. She should have wrapped them in t-shirts, but all the clothes she dared take with her were already hidden in the trunk of her car.
“Thank you, Mama,” Kendra whispered, then forced a smile. “I’ll see you Friday.”
She could tell her mama wanted to say something more than “safe drive” or “take care around those humans in Greenville.” Mama wanted…. Well, Mama was want itself, it seemed these days. She wanted Kendra to restore the Hennessey line with the clan by growing into a psychic of true power, like they had been years and years back. She wanted Kendra to look kindly on the attentions of Bradley Wilbanks, grandson of the eldest Nacey matriarch, despite the devious shit he was. She wanted Kendra to carry forward all the hopes that had been dashed as the Tallan powers of the Hennessey women had faded, and when Papa had passed, and when Paul Owens had turned out to be a mean and ambitious little man instead of the protector he’d promised Sherry he’d be when she made him her mate and husband.
Want. That was what Kendra knew. That was her Tallan gift, to sense what people wanted—really wanted—even if they themselves didn’t know. But the real skill was to use that knowing to reach a person’s heart, make a true friend and ally, something she was going to need when the clan realized what she’d done.
“This weekend, Mama,” Kendra said again when she couldn’t take another second of the woman’s silence without bursting into tears and confessing her plans. “I’ll see you then.”
“Sure,” Sherry said. She tucked a long, errant strand of the Hennessey molasses brown hair behind her daughter’s ear before slowly drawing her hands away from Kendra’s overly heavy bag to her sides. It wasn’t the best moment for Kendra to notice how thin her mama seemed, especially at the wrists, how light and frail the skin, how much older and frayed the woman had grown these twelve years without Papa. The man had delighted in how radiant and voluptuous and vibrant his wife had been. “I’ll see you, baby.”
The tires of Kendra’s old Camaro kicked up dust as she stamped down on the accelerator too hard. No time to say goodbye to her baby sister, Sage. It was summer, and nothing was getting a teenager out of bed before eight or ten until August. As it was, Kendra had barely held it together in front of her mother. The kid’s wide-eyed enthusiasm about Kendra’s privileged position as one of the clan’s Eyes, the psychics who lived and trained and did business among humans to support and protect the clan, was more than she could have handled just then.
Petal down, Kendra didn’t plan on stopping ‘til Knoxville, if then. She pressed on past Candler on the
40, but not far past that was where the wave of anxiety hit her so hard that she had to pull into a truck stop. Tears blurred her eyes, and she liked to hit a semi as she swerved through the parking lot to a space some distance from The Bad Pony Diner. As soon as she slammed the stick into park, though, she felt a wave of sudden relief and knew her Tallan was at work, directing her in its not so gentle way. Something there she was supposed to see or do or someone she was meant to meet, apparently. The idea didn’t sit so well in her stomach, but she knew better than to resist this otherworldly urging.
Kendra shuffled into the pony-themed, polished wood diner with hot and cold chills coursing her spine. She wasn’t one for remembering her dreams, but sheer repetition of the ones she’d been having since the mating call and the deterioration of her powers had come upon her? Well, dreams that hot were hard to forget for a girl with a love life running so cold. There wasn’t a man in Nacey who was gonna challenge a Wilbanks over Kendra, and since she wasn’t having Bradley for the last man on earth and sure as heck couldn’t date a full human, that made for a lot of lonely nights.
Now flashes of steamy images and caresses so enlivening they seemed real at the time flickered through Kendra’s mind, and part of her dared hope those memories had something to do with why her Tallan had inflicted her so out on the road. “Which one of you is here?” she whispered under her breath as she scanned the diner interior and mumbled her assent to being seated at the counter for her cup of coffee. “Which one of you is real?”
Which one of the three, that was. Kendra had pieced together enough fragments over the last few weeks to realize she’d been dreaming about three different fantasy men. The dark-haired one, the blond, the one with such bright eyes. The abrupt sense of warm fur, the primal musk of beast in her nostrils even as she sat there in her swivel seat all alone at the counter, made Kendra think again that one of her dream men was a shifter. Dirty animals, Bradley would have said and a large part of the clan with him. Kendra’s body and the ache between her legs said different.
The gleam of canine teeth. That was what Kendra thought of as she peered as nonchalantly as she could over her shoulder at the other diners scattered among the booths and round wooden tables. Incisors sinking slowly into her shoulder and a long, thick cock parting the lips of her throbbing sex to sink deep into her. She felt that dreamy memory, yes, but she also saw in her mind’s eye the broad, sleek flank of a beast that didn’t fit that feeling.
Kendra’s gaze settled on a group of three men sitting just inside the door. High and tight haircuts, broad shoulders, henleys and open buttonfronts over snug t-shirts—likely to hide their guns. They looked like law and wanted like hunters. Kendra would have laid down money they were plainclothes sheriffs meant to keep watch over visitors and the tourists dollars flowing between the Appalachian trails and the resort areas that huddled in around the lakes of South Carolina’s Upcountry. The men might not have outright known about the shifter and psychic clans dug in around Tennessee and the Carolinas, but there had been enough incidents with huge beasts and strange doings that they must have suspected at least some of the folk tales of the area were alive and well prowling the forested mountains.
When one of the three men cast a smile and a wink at the curvy girl, she snapped her head back around to stare into her cup. Libido be damned, last thing she needed was a sheriff’s attention when she was on the run and her powers were on the fritz. Just keep your head down, Kendra.
But the bell over the door rang out clear then with a tone that made every nerve and thought inside Kendra pique. As much as she didn’t want to turn around, for fear of catching that sheriff’s eye again, the prickle along the flushed skin of her cheeks and neck and chest told the woman her appointment had arrived. When she tried to shoot a quick glance over her shoulder at the glass door, Kendra gasped and gaped instead.
Two of them. Two men from her dreams lingered just inside the door. The big big blond one with the ponytail down to his shoulder blades leaned slightly on one hip with arms folded and brow perked while the lean, dark-haired angry one squared off at him and shook a finger in time with a devil of a scolding. Though Kendra had made such a point lately of restraining her Tallan in public and around the clan, her sense reached out from the deepest part of her to feel the men, these dream phantasms made flesh. Her stomach and her hands trembled so bad she had to put down her coffee cup. She reached blindly toward the counter so she wouldn’t have to turn away. What if they were a delusion leaking out from the cracks in her mind, desires conjured by the mating call? What if she blinked and they disappeared and left her again to wonder how the hell she was going to get through this without losing her mind or her clan putting her down?
Why is that easier to believe than the idea that one of them is actually meant to be your mate? It was times like this, questions like that, that made Kendra wonder if her Tallan was entirely just her or the voice of something else inside her.
Her sense connected with the men so suddenly and so solidly that Kendra only dimly registered the crackling sound off somewhere behind her. A small appliance like a mixer or a blender whirred in metallic fury in the kitchen past the classic swinging door. More solidly than any other time in her life, Kendra fixed upon the want of the strangers, like she could feel not just their desires but the act of being them.
The tall blond man, well over six feet, might have looked intimidatingly nonplussed with his fellow. In truth the façade covered such boyish amusement, such a desire to needle and vie and befriend the other man, that it was all Kendra could do not laugh out loud. It helped that her gaze led her attentions across the bulging expanse of his heavily muscled chest, down along obliques that were astoundingly pronounced even through the thin cotton of his light t-shirt, to the most amazing, thick thighs and athlete’s ass she had ever seen in well-worn jeans. Catching herself staring at the suggestively large ridge at the blond stranger’s groin embarrassed Kendra enough that the flush burned off her nervous giggle before it got away from her.
The dark one, though, there was nothing pretend about his bluster. He was angry, bone deep mad, and had been for so long that his single greatest desire was to rage, to unleash his beast on the world he so resented. Every taut, sinewy muscle of his tight, lean body thrummed with barely contained fury, even bloodlust.
Bloodlust…. The term jogged her memory with an image of gleaming fangs. Sensations of heat and savage penetration tore through every other thought in Kendra’s mind, leaving only the realization that she was looking at—had been dreaming about—a werewolf. Her chagrin at letting herself check out the blond’s package like she was shopping for a quick hook-up was nothing compared to feeling her body soak her panties at the fantasy of the brown-haired shifter brutally spending his animal passions between her legs.
This mating call is gonna bring you nothing but trouble, girl.
Kendra had just the time to scold herself before the blond stranger turned his broad, boyish face to look straight at her, like he’d felt her watching him, like he’d heard the thought. The sense of power and animal grace in the blond one, too, as he launched into a quick, smooth stride toward the counter made Kendra think he had to be another shifter. That was, until she understood he wasn’t just coming toward her but to her. Then she couldn’t think at all, not anymore than a rabbit could think with a hound bearing down on her in an open field with nowhere to hide. With those blue eyes trained on hers, Kendra felt everything inside her flutter from her pulse beating wildly at the base of her throat to her heart in her chest, from the pit of her stomach to her pussy. She tensed and froze and blinked so rapidly it seemed like the room was spinning, like time had slowed, like the lights around her were flickering on and off in time with her frantic heartbeat.
When the brown-haired one homed in on her as well and fell in beside the other man a half-step behind him, it was too much for Kendra. She forced herself to slide down from the swivel stool to her feet. Her knees liked to have collapsed under her, but p
ure adrenaline shot her forward. Kendra dipped between and past the two shifters just as the blond one tried to say something to her. Lord have mercy, but the heat of them as she slipped past, without even touching them!
She’d have made it. Kendra would have shot out that glass diner door and dashed for the Camaro if that flirtatious linebacker of a sheriff had let her. Instead, he stood up from his booth and tried to catch her against his chest.
“Whoa there, ma’am. Are you all right?” Only the smallest little sliver of Kendra had the mind to realize he was trying to help. “You know those men? Are they bothering you?”
No, no, no, get out of my way. Kendra couldn’t say that or anything else. Her pulse thundered in her ears, a tempest beating at her temples inside her head. She put her arms out, not to touch the man or push him, just to ward him away.
It didn’t seem real at all when the hulking, 180-pound man flew back from her like a doll she had thrown across a room. And through the shattering window.
CHAPTER TWO
Bad timing all the way around on Rory’s part, he had to admit. Oh, not the insistence that they had to pull off the I40 for a truck stop burger, regardless of the fact that they’d had pancakes at another place two hours before and regardless, too, of Martin’s foul mood. In eighteen hundred odd miles, Tucson to Tennessee, that hadn’t changed and wasn’t bound to anytime soon. There was just no way Rory was going to pass up a slice of roadside Americana with a name like The Bad Pony Diner. The wolf’s predictable jibes about a stallion shifter eating there were a small price to pay.
But the cost was getting steeper by the moment.
Rory had made no secret of bridling at the thought of making constant use of the telepathic gifts that were rare even among the dying breed that was horse shifters. Only thoroughbreds ever turned out to be psychopomps and only a fraction of them, setting Rory Galloway apart as soon as he’d hit puberty and his shifter transformation. If the big bad wolf here had his way, Rory would have had his senses wide open and maxed out 24/7. Galloway wasn’t having it. He’d do what he had to in order to help the Odin’s Wolf, keep himself open to the pull that had guided them eastward across the country in pursuit of the Agency cell and the supernatural weapons cache the agents were carrying. What he wasn’t going to do was try to read every waitress, trucker, and state trooper between Arizona and South Carolina.