by Mel Teshco
Scratch
Mel Teshco
Alexia is determined to honor her father’s memory by proving shape-shifting big cats exist. But she never prepared herself to face Blake, the beyond-handsome man who just might be the link to the proof she needs. Their attraction is instant and undeniable, but before they have an opportunity to act on the chemistry simmering between them, danger closes in.
Running for their lives from those determined to exterminate Blake and all those like him, Alexia and Blake are forced to rely on each other. Between dodging bullets and lying low, Alexia and Blake explore more than the mystery of his heritage. Every passionate encounter and mind-blowing orgasm escalates their relationship, turning lust and attraction into something far more valuable. As the danger closes in, Alexia is going to have to choose what’s more important to her, honoring the father she adored or protecting the man she loves.
A Romantica® paranormal erotic romance from Ellora’s Cave
Scratch
Mel Teshco
Dedication
To my incredible critique partner, Alissa Callen, I couldn’t have done these rewrites without you. And to my very clever editor, thanks for making this story shine.
Chapter One
Alexia Leigh watched the last of the dark-suited mourners drift away from her father’s graveside, her eyes dry and a chill icing up her insides. She’d cried herself empty these last five days. Cried long and bitter tears until there were no more tears to give. Until the once vibrant spark of life within had sputtered and died, leaving her cold. Empty.
Her only solace was that her mum and dad were together now, bound for eternity in their own piece of heaven. Just what her father had always wanted.
A snow-white rose clasped to her chest, she pressed a kiss to its velvet-soft petals, the scent stirring up a memory of her late mother’s perfume. With unsteady hands, she placed the rose onto her father’s smooth granite headstone. “Rest and be at peace,” she whispered. “I will prove the critics wrong.”
Her father had been so jubilant when he’d found real, tangible proof that shape-shifters—at least, big-cat shape-shifters—really did exist. He’d told no one about his findings except Alexia, who’d been his assistant even when she’d been too young to earn more than pocket money.
Of course they’d kept the information top secret. They’d wanted to first decipher the writing in the leather-bound journal that had been found beside the big cat bones whose skull and skeleton showed decidedly human characteristics. The old-world language inside the journal had matched none of the data found anywhere else on the planet.
The ancient book had been the key to her father’s success. Not that it’d mattered in the end. Thomas Leigh had been Australia’s leading archeologist and held in high regard…until someone had broken into his townhouse and leaked word of his research notes. The cemetery was empty of all but its headstones by the time she slung a leather-clad leg over her Ducati motorcycle and fired it to life. It was only as she was about to pull on her helmet that it became apparent she’d been mistaken.
She wasn’t alone.
Liz Hemlock, flame-haired bitch and piranha reporter, approached her with narrowed eyes and the clack-clack of high-heels. The reporter’s most acclaimed articles had featured Alexia’s father’s downfall. And his subsequent suicide.
Alexia’s gut churned, fury and grief reawakened as she twisted on her motorcycle to face the other woman. “What do you want from me now? Isn’t my father’s death enough for you?”
The other woman’s stride didn’t falter, though her face flushed a little. Probably more from heat than anxiety. Liz dragged a notebook from her jacket pocket, her red-lacquered fingernails sharper than talons. “I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. Leigh, but I’m doing my job with the same degree of passion you do your own.” Her green eyes flashed. “My readers only want the truth.”
Alexia took in slow, steadying breaths, pushing back emotions she’d thought had been cried out with her tears. No matter how much it hurt to hear, she needed to know how far the other woman had been willing to go to obtain her stories. “Does that include breaking and entering to get your readers what they want?”
Liz averted her gaze for perhaps a second, while the faint flush of earlier became twin flags of red. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Alexia closed her eyes as the full realization of the reporter’s deception hit her front and center. It had been Liz who’d leaked the information. How the hell did the woman live with herself?
She’d been so damn distracted by her father’s downward spiral from glory, she hadn’t had the time to draw breath, let alone dwell too much on the perpetrator or his or her motives.
She blinked back a red haze. Her voice cracked. “Why?”
Liz pressed a hand to her belly, as though the conversation upset her.
Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
Alexia’s world had been turned upside down when she’d found her father’s inert body slumped over his desk, but it was a waste of time even trying to express her loss. No sacrifice would be too great for Liz to get a breaking story and rave reviews.
The Ducati’s engine thrummed in the thick silence, before the redhead finally shrugged. “Cryptozoology is gaining attention in Australia, with more sightings and hard evidence of panthers and other big cats.” She tipped her head to the side. “Your father was the top of his field. He was my best choice for finding the facts.”
“Stealing the facts,” Alexia said bitterly, before she pulled on her helmet and clipped together its chinstrap.
Thank god she’d hidden the journal, which her father had found beside bones at the entrance of a cave guarding ancient Dreamtime aboriginal drawings. Apparently the images inside the cave had depicted half-human, half-panther beings. The ancient transcript above the drawings had taken her father much less time to translate.
Illawatti.
The reporter’s voice rose in volume. “You call it stealing. I call it sharing of information.”
“Stay the fuck away from me.” With an unforgiving glare at the other woman, Alexia gave the Ducati a rev and whipped the sleek motorcycle around with a roar. Ignoring Liz’s aggrieved shout to stop, she headed away from the outer suburbs of Newcastle. Away from her grief. Her pain.
Destination, Sydney. And to the one name her father had deciphered from a list of five in the journal.
* * * * *
Some four hours later she parked the bike opposite yet another decrepit apartment block. Flickering streetlights fizzed and hissed in the twilight, attempting to chase away the shadows of the dank, poor outer-suburb of Sydney, but succeeding only in fraying her already stretched nerves.
Blake Powell had not been an easy man to find, despite the embellishments from ex-neighbors and acquaintances of his amazing good looks and wealth.
So, what was he doing in this dive?
It hadn’t taken her long to discover that he’d started to move around a lot in the last few months, never staying in one place for too long. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was a man on the run.
Except, even if Blake was a descendent from a name on the list, it didn’t mean he knew anything more than she did. It didn’t mean he was suddenly a wanted man because of his name’s association with her father’s research.
Nothing added up and nothing made sense. But unless she wanted to use a linguistics expert and risk blowing every single piece of research out of the water, Blake was the only name deciphered from the list, and therefore her only lead. Her one glimmer of hope.
Her hands clenched and her chest went tight. She only hoped the critics were proud of the damage they’d wrought on her father, a brilliant and ethical man who’d done nothing but spoken the truth. In her heart s
he knew the criticisms had killed something inside him long before he’d taken his last breath. Still, she’d never once thought things had gotten so bad he’d take his own life and leave her to face the world alone.
She bit hard into her bottom lip. Grief was doing her head in and not allowing her to see things straight. Maybe a week from now…a month, she’d reason things through, if such a thing was even possible.
She took a steadying breath, refocusing once again as she checked the latest address she’d scrawled on the inside of her hand. She climbed concrete steps, the heels of her booted feet then clacking along a narrow, railed corridor that ran the length of the block of tiny apartments.
If the journal really was as old as she suspected, was Blake even connected? It was a common enough name. She sighed. Maybe she was doing nothing more than chasing her own tail.
Guns N’ Roses blared from inside nondescript Apartment 14. She took a deep, calming breath as adrenaline surged within. What if she really had found an ancestor to the name in the journal? She raised a fist and hammered on the flimsy, peeling wooden door.
The music shut down. A baby wailed a few apartments down, a small dog yapped into life inside another. Heavy footsteps approached from the other side of the door.
“Yes?”
One word. One deep, masculine, primal intonation.
Her pulse jerked in response, her nipples tightening beneath her black leather jacket and burgundy singlet. She swallowed hard. If this was what he could do to a woman with one monosyllable behind a closed door, she could only imagine what he could do with a whole sentence, and up close and personal.
She cursed under her breath. She’d clearly been too long without a man, someone to ease the heavy ache of her breasts, the deep throb between her thighs. Just as well she wanted nothing more from him than answers.
Hesitating for a beat, she asked, “Mr. Powell?”
She closed her eyes at his long, drawn out silence. Through the thin door his heavy sigh was audible before he said wearily, “Who wants to know?”
Impatience drummed a loud tattoo behind her skull. Damn it. A migraine was all she needed.
“I’m here on behalf of my father. He is,” she swallowed back a wave of bitter loss and grief, “was an archaeologist. You may have heard of him? Professor Thomas Leigh.” At the thick, almost suffocating silence that followed she continued more loudly, “He believed in the existence of human-panther shape-shifters—”
She gasped as the door flung open and she was jerked unceremoniously inside.
“Enough already,” Blake growled.
She hissed out a breath at the current of electricity sizzling through her arm’s every nerve ending, at the cheek of him dragging her inside. She tugged free, and looked up…and up.
Beneath scruffy dark-blue jeans and a white t-shirt the man was a mountain of fluid muscle and sinew, repressed energy that vibrated with emotion and patently raw sex appeal.
“Are you mad?” she asked through gritted teeth, all too aware of her moistening pussy and tingling breasts as she stared at the man who pushed every one of her buttons and then some. “All I wanted was a civilized discussion, not to be dragged inside as if I’m nothing more than…than a cave woman!”
He slammed the door shut behind her and pushed home a large bolt. When he peeled off his dark sunglasses—ludicrous inside the near dark room lit only by a naked bulb—she took an involuntary step back. His eyes were an unnatural gold-yellow. Beautiful, but deadly. A gaze that was way too compelling for her peace of mind.
She sucked in some oxygen, forcing a calm she didn’t feel. Damn it all to hell, he really was sinfully delicious, with more vague hints of darkness beneath his honey-warm skin that tantalized and teased even as it repelled.
“I know who you are,” he said.
She searched his stare with a frown. “You do?”
“Yes.” He blew out a heavy breath before tunneling a hand through his thick, dark hair that was an inch away from scruffy. “I’m sorry.”
“Wh…what?”
“About your father.”
“Why?” Her voice rose an octave as repressed emotions churned within. “Because like everyone else you think the world is better off without another crackpot and his loony beliefs?”
“No. I’m sorry because he was a great man who thought above and beyond the restrictions of science.”
Hostility fled her body, leaving her oddly drained and a little disorientated. How long had it been since someone had said something good about her father? Too long, clearly, for her to appreciate even a scrap of praise. Snide remarks and innuendos had become part and parcel of their life from the moment the news had been leaked about her father’s amazing discovery.
“You look about ready to collapse.”
Somehow his silky rich voice stroked her senses, hummed along the nerve endings behind her eyeballs and soothed away her stress to revert it into another tension entirely. A tension she didn’t even want to contemplate. If only her nipples would quit standing up like soldiers.
“Please. Take a seat,” he murmured with a glint in his eyes.
She managed the couple of steps needed before all but flopping into a ripped, vinyl two-seater lounge.
Classy, Alexia, real classy.
Except she wasn’t there to impress anyone, least of all the one man who just might provide the answers she needed, the one man who was also about the hottest male she’d seen since…forever. She crossed her arms over her breasts, then swung one leg over the other in an attempt to ease the throb in her pussy.
What was wrong with her? Her father lay cold in his grave and already she was giving into carnal needs? She cleared her suddenly raw throat. “You knew my dad?”
“No, not personally. But I read all his articles. He was ahead of his time. A gifted and principled man.”
And look where that had got him. Mocked and ridiculed until he’d been stripped of all his dignity, his beliefs. His life.
A wedge of hair dropped over her eyes from her scraped back ponytail. She pushed the dark-blonde length behind one ear. “Then you know why I’m here?”
He moved into the tiny kitchen, where a half-empty bottle of scotch resided on the counter. He poured them each a glass and she tried not to notice the way his t-shirt stretched taut across his shoulders, the way his jeans clung to his firm ass. He handed her the drink and she took it gratefully, gulping the scotch down as though it was a tonic for all the ills in the world.
He smiled and took a mouthful before nodding. “I gather since your father uncovered the bones, he also found the journal and deciphered the names on the list?”
So he knew about the journal and the names in it? Her heart rate accelerated, even as she conceded carefully, “Only yours.” Her father’s long held view of honesty being the best policy had burrowed deep into her psyche, despite its obvious pitfalls. “What else do you know?” she asked.
She’d come too far to back down now. She needed answers, needed to know why his ancestor’s name was one of five on a list inside an old parched book.
Her father might be dead but his once flawless reputation was still very much on the line. She’d do whatever she had to, to prove he’d been right and the critics wrong. Even without her pledge to him, she owed him that much at least as his only child and the one person who’d encouraged him in his work to ease his grief after his wife’s death.
He raised a dark brow. “That now you’re hoping to track down the Illawatti tribe.”
She blinked. He knew more than she’d ever thought possible. If such a tribe still existed, she’d find them. “So…you don’t think I’m a raving lunatic?”
Just like my dad.
Blake stalked over to the window and peered between the moldy, almost transparent curtains. His profile revealed shadowed stubble and sensual lips that were made for kissing…all over. A smattering of goose bumps littered her flesh at the thought, even as his dark eyebrows slashed downward and he peered harder out
side.
“No. Actually, I don’t,” he murmured abstractedly.
Was he for real? Did he know more than he let on? She pushed for more. “So you agree there’s a good possibility the Illawatti tribe exist—”
“We need to leave,” he growled.
She frowned. “Not until I get some answers—”
The breath whooshed hard from her throat as he threw himself at her. His weight knocked her to the ground simultaneously to the window shattering, glass raining down as if blades of ice.
The dog a few doors down once again took up its relentless yapping. She closed her eyes, stunningly aware the muscled bulk of Blake’s body sheltered her. If it had been any other time she’d have taken advantage of the situation, perhaps pressed her soft curves against his hard, masculine body, her mouth against the tanned column of his throat.
What was she thinking?
The fact this man could absolve the mockery that had become her father’s name was the least of her concern right then. A bullet had torn a hole through the opposite wall. Shock consumed her, pushed her heart rate into high gear. “Someone is shooting at you!”
He effortlessly scooped her up and half-ran into what had to be the only bedroom. “No,” he corrected grimly. “They’re shooting at us.”
She jerked her head up, straining to read his expression. The pool of light leaking into the bedroom allowed her to note his composure, his strange-colored stare that scanned the room to seemingly consider every possible option before he acted. “What the hell are you saying?” she asked in a loud whisper that somehow enhanced the sudden spike of her blood pressure.
She was a target?
He glanced down at her. “I apologize in advance. Your hellish day isn’t about to improve any time soon.”
Bloody hell.
In a couple of strides he was across the bedroom. After putting her back on her own two feet, he snapped open the doors of a small built-in closet before he dragged out some clothes. In an undertone he instructed, “Get dressed, quickly. Change your appearance in any way you can.”