The crew had helped her insulate her shed for the winter, and added a woodstove in the corner opposite the bed to keep her warm. Flynn, their lion-shifter alpha, and Tank, their grizzly bear Protector, were contractors, and they’d built her a big skylight in the roof, one that opened all the way and was big enough for an escape route.
Now she didn’t have to leave the shed door open at night, like she had before.
She pulled on some sweats and a hoodie, wincing as they caught on the scabs from her fights. Some of those would need most of the day to heal. She shoved her feet into a pair of rubber clogs and opened the door.
And was assaulted by Christmas.
She’d trained herself to tune out the noise from the rest of the crew, so she hadn’t been paying attention to what was going on outside.
The compound was a big circular clearing in the middle of the acres of forest land that made up their territory. The main house was a gorgeous two-story log cabin with huge windows, originally built by a billionaire who didn’t like to rough it on his hunting weekends.
The same billionaire who’d held them captive for months and tortured them. Payback was a bitch.
The cabin had a wraparound porch and a state-of-the-art stone-built barbecue area and fire pit. The rest of the compound wasn’t so fancy.
The outbuildings were rough boards, and dirt paths led to the secondhand singlewide trailers where Xander the panther and Sloan the snow leopard lived. Beat-up trucks were parked at haphazard angles wherever there was space—or wherever the drivers had felt like leaving them.
And right now, it looked like Santa’s sleigh had exploded mid-air and rained decorations onto the ground.
The sleigh itself—a cheesy plastic version—was lying sideways on the porch roof, with the reindeer dangling off. Boxes of lights were scattered everywhere, waiting to be put up. More reindeer dotted the ground—the kind made out of wire and lined in lights—mixed in with colorful two-foot-high elves and nutcrackers.
Holy Christmas hell.
Lissa. This was Lissa’s doing.
She was Tank’s mate, the newest member of the crew, and she was obsessed with holidays. And family. And turning the crew into some demented version of The Waltons or some other smarmy Hallmark-worthy TV show.
Right now, she was setting up a line of inflatable snowmen along the edge of the fire pit, assisted by Tank, who was so fucking besotted he’d do any idiot thing for her. She looked tiny next to his huge bulk, and ridiculously girly in her pink winter jacket and bunny boots. Her face was all rosy with the cold, eyes sparkling as she gestured to Tank.
Lissa finished anchoring a snowman and began walking back to where Tank was inflating the next one with his air compressor. A hunting knife flew out of the oak tree across the clearing, towards the snowman Lissa had just set up, and landed point-first right between his eyes. There was a loud ‘pop,’ and the snowman began deflating with a hiss of air.
Maniacal laughter came from the oak tree.
Lissa turned and stared at the snowman, and then up at the tree, where Xander was lying stretched out on a huge branch.
“Xander, you miserable Christmas-hating elf-fucking panther,” she yelled. “You killed my snowman!”
She stomped over to the deflated snowman, pulled the knife out of it, and headed for the tree, yelling the whole way. “Come down out of that tree, you sneaky pussypanther! I’m going to bleed you.”
“Come and get me, Ursa Minor,” Xander called. “I just wanted to add a little realism to the display. Did you know, studies have shown that the number of deaths increase around the holidays?”
“There’s gonna be one more when I get my claws on you,” she snarled. Growls started emanating from her throat.
Tank raised his eyes to the heavens and shook his head. He ran after Lissa and grabbed her jacket, sliding it off her shoulders as she walked. She kicked off her boots, and then she exploded into a black bear and went straight up the tree after Xander, her jeans and t-shirt shredding off her body.
Xander yowled as her claws got him in the flank just as he Changed. He tumbled out of the tree. Lissa leaped after him, and they rolled around on the dead grass, clawing and snapping at each other.
Tank patrolled the perimeter, scooping elves and wire reindeer out of their way, hampered by the pink jacket tucked under his arm. Jasmin detoured to go past him, silently holding out her hand.
Tank handed the jacket over. “Thanks. She loves that jacket.”
It was the first pretty, girly thing Lissa had ever owned, and Tank had bought it for her. Even though it was stupid, it meant a lot to Lissa, and Jasmin didn’t have the heart to see it get ruined in a brawl.
She scooped up the ridiculous bunny boots and took them into the main cabin as well, hanging the jacket on the coat rack and dumping the boots underneath it.
She stepped into the living room and almost got her eye poked out by a branch from the twelve-foot pine tree lying haphazardly in the middle of the floor.
“What the fuck?” she snarled, ducking underneath the branch and stomping toward the open kitchen. Every surface seemed to be covered with lights, garlands, and ornaments that had yet to be put up.
Sloan was standing at the kitchen island, blond hair mussed and morning scruff on his face, breaking eggs into a bowl. He looked hopefully at Jasmin.
She ignored him. As a former professional chef, she did most of the cooking for the crew, but she didn’t cook in the mornings.
Fuck mornings.
Especially when they were full of Christmas cheer.
“Who left a goddamn pine tree in the middle of the floor?” she demanded, pouring herself a giant mug of coffee.
“Flynn,” Sloan said. “He was pissed off because they tried to put it in the dining area.”
“What the hell’s wrong with the dining area?”
“The trapdoor to the weapons locker is under it.”
Jasmin’s hand stopped with the mug halfway to her mouth. “He thinks we’re going to be attacked at Christmas?”
Sloan crossed his arms, widened his stance and deepened his voice in an imitation of Flynn. “It’s not even three months since the Nashville pack tried to kill us. What if there’d been a fucking Christmas tree on top of the weapons stash then?”
Jasmin gave a half-shrug. “He has a point.”
It was true. The only reason they weren’t dead was because of those weapons—and because of the Nashville rebels that had turned on their pack and come to the rescue just in time. The rebels had their own territory now, out in Idaho, led by Donnie Jenkins—the only son of the old Nashville alpha who wasn’t somewhere between a complete asshole and downright evil.
Sloan shrugged. “When they’re done brawling, I’ll help Tank set it up in the other corner, next to the fireplace.”
Jasmin took her coffee and went to the window. “It’s already over,” she said.
Xander was still in panther form, licking the scratches on his flank and sending Lissa baleful glances.
Tank had taken off his shirt and was wrapping Lissa up in it, oblivious to the blood seeping through from her own wounds. They must be minor—Tank ruffled her hair, grinning, and said something that made her laugh. Then he scooped her up in his arms and headed for the house.
Jasmin tried to ignore the little icicle that stabbed through her heart. It wasn’t like she was jealous. The last thing she wanted was a mate. Mates were selfish and demanding and stomped on your heart if you were stupid enough to open it up to them.
But all that gooey love was hard to be around. The rest of them were still messed up, still missing their old lives and everything they’d lost.
Tank’s and Lissa’s happiness was making everybody antsy. Or maybe nauseous.
Still, she watched as the two bears stopped for a moment on the porch, seeing Lissa whisper something to Tank, watching the sappy smile spread over his face, heart in his eyes as he looked at her.
He’d always been the softest of all of th
em, despite being a terrifying brawler. Jasmin wasn’t soft like that, she told herself.
But something still ached in her as she watched them. A little empty place that seemed to have opened up overnight. And that brought a vision of long blond hair and Viking cheekbones, one of them cut by a scar.
Fuck Brody Jameson. She was one jaguar, alone. She turned away from the window.
“Rough night?” Sloan asked, glancing at her bruised and scabbed-over face. He began stirring the eggs with a fork, stabbing at the yolks in a way that made the chef in Jasmin wince.
She shrugged. “Better than some, worse than others.”
“Uh huh.” He gave her a level look, but didn’t ask any questions. Sloan was the quiet one, the only non-dominant in the crew, and he was not a fan of oversharing.
Jasmin liked that about him.
Sloan put a frying pan on the stove and melted butter in it. He had the heat on too high, and the butter immediately started to burn at the edges. He held the bowl of eggs above the pan, preparing to pour them into overheated burned-butter oblivion.
Jasmin caved.
“Stop!” she commanded, freezing him in his tracks. “Fine. You win. I can’t stand it.”
She came around the island and took the pan off the burner with one hand, while taking the egg bowl away from him with the other.
“Go over there and grate cheese,” she said, pointing to the other end of the island. “Cheddar or Jack, whatever we’ve got. And slice some mushrooms.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” Sloan said, smirking.
“And you’re an asshole, because you know I don’t cook breakfast.”
“Aye, aye.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Cooking soothed Jasmin’s temper, the way it always did. She sautéed the mushrooms and mixed a touch of cream into the eggs, and then made cheese and mushroom omelets. She didn’t even jag-slap the smug look off Sloan’s face. Pecker.
When she and Sloan had finished eating their omelets, she made him slice and grate some more, just to get him back for suckering her into morning cooking.
And because she couldn’t stop thinking about Brody Fucking Jameson. The way he’d looked at her. Touched her. Kissed her. The look on his face when he realized his money was gone.
Not my problem, she told herself for the tenth or eleventh time. But she couldn’t stop thinking about ways to get his money back. Get my money back, she amended. They stole my fucking money.
She went over in her mind everything she knew about the Nashville pack, bits and pieces she’d picked up at the fights. Things Noah Reilly had told her, when he stayed with the Bad Bloods. Where the Nashville wolves hung out. What they did there. What was the best way to get to a cowardly prick and his prick friends, who owed her seven hundred dollars and a few pints of blood.
When she looked up, she realized she’d made four more omelets. She put two in the oven to keep warm, because Tank and Lissa were busy fucking in the mansion-sized shower again.
Then she pulled her phone out of her hoodie pocket and texted Xander.
Cheese/mushroom omelet. Hot. Come get it before Sloan eats it.
A text alert immediately came in on Sloan’s phone. He looked at it and grinned.
“What did he threaten you with?” Jasmin asked. She put the fourth omelet on a plate and poured another mug of coffee, this one with cream.
“The usual,” Sloan said. “Death. Drowning in the well, to be specific.”
“Nice. Points for creativity.”
Jasmin picked up the coffee and the omelet plate and started up the curving stairs, heading for Flynn’s quarters. As the alpha, he had the master suite in the loft. There was a balcony/office, and then a bedroom and bath behind glass walls, which could be tinted for privacy or clear to take advantage of the views out the windows set in the peaked roof.
Right now they were tinted as dark as they would go.
Jasmin, hands full, kicked the door a couple of times by way of knocking.
Flynn’s grumpy voice came from inside. “You can’t come in. I’m naked.”
Jasmin shoved the door open with her foot. “Like you fucking care. You wouldn’t wear clothes at all if we didn’t give you so much shit about having to look at your pink shriveled dick.”
She walked in, her cat’s eyes adjusting to the dimness. Flynn was, indeed, naked, lying on the king-sized bed writing on a legal pad in a small pool of light from a desk lamp.
“Dude. Cover up the junk, would you?”
Flynn sighed and pulled a sheet over himself. “What do you want?”
“For you to eat.” She handed him the plate and set the coffee cup on his nightstand. Then she perched on the side of the bed.
Flynn picked up the fork, looking at her suspiciously. “You don’t make breakfast.”
“You were sulking, and Sloan was mangling the eggs. Desperate times, desperate measures.”
He gave a snort and a half-grin. “Sucker. Better be careful, you’ll go all soft and motherly on us any minute.”
“Fuck you.”
Flynn started shoveling eggs into his face. It was good to see him eat. Flynn was having trouble adjusting to being alpha, despite having an outsized sense of responsibility and a caring streak he tried his damnedest to hide. He’d been landed with this messed-up crew by default, and he was doing his best by them, but she knew he had demons of his own he was battling.
That meant he drank way too much, and spent way too much time alone. She wished he’d realize how much he needed the crew—and how much the others needed him.
He was the glue that held the crew together.
He took a gulp of coffee. “So what do you really want, Jungle Kitty?”
And he was almost impossible to fool.
“What would you say would make somebody need about two thousand a week, cash, and make them scared when they didn’t have it?” she asked.
Flynn raised his eyebrows, then frowned. “The usual,” he said. “Drugs. Gambling debts. Some other kind of debt that makes somebody borrow from loan sharks, like bringing illegal relatives into the country. Blackmail.”
Shit. She’d never even thought about blackmail. What the hell was Brody into?
“Can I borrow your truck again tonight?” she asked. “I need to meet some people at a bar.”
Flynn eyed her, taking another drink of coffee. “Any of them the people who did that to your face?”
Jasmin shrugged. “I need to help out a friend.”
“The kind of friend who needs a shit-ton of cash?”
She shrugged again.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Okay then, yeah.”
Flynn put his plate down. “I’m not in the mood to dance around with you today,” he said. “I know about the cage fights, because it’s my business to know about blood being shed between my crew and other shifters, whatever the reason. I haven’t said anything because they seemed to keep a tight control over it, and it didn’t look like there would be any blowback on the crew.”
Jasmin looked away. She hadn’t realized that Flynn knew, but it didn’t surprise her. He was sneaky and paranoid, and he was right—it was his job to know what was going on inside his territory, and around it.
“But messing around with this other shit—drugs, loan sharks, blackmail—I can’t have that in my crew.”
Jasmin nodded.
He eyed Jasmin’s cut-up face. “You’ve been fighting more since we became an official crew. The others have calmed down, but you’ve gotten worse.”
He left that open-ended.
Jasmin didn’t answer. She knew it was true. A few weeks ago they’d all pledged to Flynn as their alpha. That meant they were officially recognized as a crew by the Shifter Council, but it was more than that.
Their crew had bonded with a special kind of magic that was usually reserved for wolf packs. It gave Flynn the power to protect their territory and draw on the power of the land and the crew bond to defend them.
It also bound them together in a way that sat uncomfortably on Jasmin’s shoulders. She hated feeling so entwined with the rest of the crew. So… helpless inside a net of obligations and expectations and magic and love.
It reminded her way too much of the way her mother had been bound to her father. For better or for worse—and with every jaguar couple she’d ever known, it had just gotten worse.
She knew that network of obligation sat uncomfortably on Flynn as well.
The silence stretched out, with only the sound of Flynn’s fork scraping the plate.
Finally she said, “It’s not as satisfying beating up on the crew now that we’re bonded. Plus, watching Tank and Lissa do all that sappy love shit just makes my jag want to bleed things.”
Flynn snorted. “I hear that. Listening to them fuck all the time is driving me crazy, not to mention the cloud of pheromones that follows them around. It’s enough to make a person sign up with one of those online hookup apps.”
Jasmin tried to picture Flynn on Tinder—tangled dreads, bare feet, naked half the time.
“You have to wear pants to date, I’m pretty sure,” she said.
“Not if you’re hooking up,” Flynn said. “Isn’t the whole idea to end up not wearing pants?”
Good point. She suddenly wondered if Brody Jameson was on Tinder. Because that made not wearing pants suddenly seem like a good idea.
Dammit.
At that moment, a blast of Christmas music came through the wired-in speakers in Flynn’s room. A second later, both their phones buzzed with text alerts.
MANDATORY CREW DECORATING. EGGNOG. COOKIES. ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES. WAIT, THAT’S WHAT EGGNOG IS. COME DOWN AND BE HAPPY OR I’LL HAVE TANK DRAG YOU OUT AND THROW YOU OVER THE BALCONY. LOVE, LISSA
P.S. NO TURNING OFF THE CHRISTMAS MUSIC. I’VE BLED PEOPLE FOR LESS.
Jasmin sighed and got to her feet. Flynn reached out suddenly and grabbed her wrist.
“I know you’re brawling to keep your jag from going wild,” he said. “Do I have anything to worry about?”
Jasmin gazed into his eyes. She could feel his alpha energy enveloping her. Not the dominance that forced obedience, but the bond forged when she’d pledged her loyalty and he’d pledged his protection.
Bad Blood Wolf (Bad Blood Shifters Book 2) Page 3