The Alpha Men's Secret Club 4: Intrigue: A Shockingly Hot BBW Paranormal Shifter Romance

by Steele, Dawn

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “Teddy came up. He wanted to touch me. He asked Rust’s permission . . . and Rust asked me. Rust is good in that way.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I – don’t remember. Maybe I didn’t say anything.” The whole night’s memory was a rush to Kate. So much had happened.

  “So what did Teddy do then?”

  “He . . . stroked me.”

  “Where?”

  Kate peered into the detective’s eyes. Was he deliberately trying to embarrass her?

  “My . . . pussy.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I . . . didn’t do anything. I was tied up. I just let him touch me.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “I . . . I think so.” Kate’s cheeks were furiously heating up. The detective must think her a slut of the highest degree. And that was what she was, really. A slut.

  “Then what happened?”

  “He got excited. H-he wanted to fuck me. I panicked. I told him ‘No’.”

  “Was he upset?”

  “Yes, he was. He called me a ‘cock tease’. Or something in that vein, I don’t really remember. Rust intervened.”

  Lance leaned forward. “How?”

  The recollection of both metamorphoses shot through Kate’s mind, as vivid as when it had happened. First, the wolf. And then, the tiger. Both animals facing each other, growling, snarling. Her palpable fear that something would happen to Rust.

  But something was happening now, wasn’t it? As much as she didn’t want to admit it, something was happening to Rust. He had tried to warn her. Even tried to break up with her. But she refused to heed his warning.

  She said, “He shielded me from Teddy. He led Teddy off.”

  “Were any words exchanged?”

  Kate blanched. She was phenomenally bad at lying. “I-I don’t think so. I was so scared, I can’t remember if anything was said.”

  She could tell that Lance Horner was watching every twitch on her face. Every muscle. Every tic. He knows I’m not completely telling the truth.

  “Did they fight?”

  “No. Aaron Mitchell came up and stopped it. He said some words to Teddy . . . something to sway him, and Teddy backed off.”

  “What happened to Teddy?”

  “He walked away, back towards the house.”

  “Did anyone follow him?”

  “No.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Aaron Mitchell was very gracious. He apologized for his son’s behavior and asked us to stay for the rest of the party.”

  “Did you see Teddy again that night or the next morning?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do for the rest of the night?”

  “I . . . Rust and I went somewhere else in between the trees. We talked some, and then we . . . we had sex.”

  “Did anyone see you?”

  “No. I don’t recall anyone else being there.”

  “After you had sex with Rust O’Brien, what did you do?”

  This was the part which made her squirm. “We talked.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Uh . . . relationship things.” Kate could tell that the detective knew she was lying. Lance’s eyes were so penetrating. So impossible to hide from.

  “Did you argue with your boyfriend?”

  “Not really.”

  “Was he with you the whole night?”

  This was when she was stumped. She didn’t know what Rust told the detective. How could she tell him that Rust began to transform into the tiger even as he was buried deep inside her? How could she tell him that Rust realized what was happening and quickly took off before he could hurt her?

  Damn it! She didn’t know what Rust told Lance Horner. They were separated and watched by the police at the airport before they had time to rehearse what to say.

  But wasn’t that exactly what the NYPD had in mind? That was why they arrived at the airport en masse. It was not an arrest, and yet it had all the trappings of an arrest.

  She had to be very careful now. One word wrong and she would condemn Rust.

  If only she knew what Rust had been up to when he vanished last night!

  “Ms. Penney?” Lance’s eyebrows rose.

  She knew she had taken too long to answer. He was suspicious now, and she was desperate. Desperate to say the right thing.

  She said, “Y-yes. He was with me the whole night.”

  Lance’s face betrayed nothing. “What did you do for the rest of the night?”

  “We stayed for a long time in the woods.” Fear was making her stumble over her words now. “Then we went back to our hotel.”

  “The Four Seasons?”

  They were bound to have security cameras and such at the hotel. The security camera would show that only she walked through the lobby to the elevator banks. Oh, oh, oh, she had made a mess of it now. But it was too late to take it back.

  “Yes.”

  “So he was with you the whole night?”

  “Yes.” What did Rust tell him? Under the table, she clenched her fists so hard that her fingernails made indents in her palms.

  “Were you sleeping in your hotel room the whole night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you wouldn’t recall if he got up in the early hours of the morning to leave the hotel room, would you?”

  Was that what Rust told him?

  She swallowed. “I don’t think he got up. I’m a light sleeper. I would have known.”

  Lance smiled pleasantly. “Thank you, Ms. Penney. You’ve been very helpful. Very helpful indeed.”

  I have? she thought faintly. She could only pray that Rust had said pretty much the same thing.

  Lance got up. “Don’t leave town. We might ask you further questions.”

  “But I have class tomorrow. I have to be back at my university,” she said in dismay.

  “I’m afraid you will have to call your university and tell them that you may be a possible witness to a homicide, or at least the events surrounding it. We’ll let you go back once we have no further questions for you.”

  She could only sink back in her chair and wonder what she had done wrong.

  4

  Kate was going to find out soon enough.

  Neither she or Rust were detained any further. When Hector arrived outside the police station to pick them up, they escaped thankfully into the confines of the limo. That was when they exchanged notes.

  By the end of it, Kate was ready to open the limo door and hurl herself out.

  “I lied to them!” she cried. “I thought I was doing the right thing by you!”

  Rust clasped her forearm. “You didn’t know,” he said fiercely.

  “But I lied to that detective. He knows now that you haven’t been with me.” Her heart was beating so painfully against her ribs that she was sure they must be bruised by now.

  “Kate, it’s all right.” He averted his eyes. “I wasn’t sure where I went when I left you. All I know is that I remember very little of it.”

  Kate felt her veins grow cold. It was as she suspected. What had Rust done?

  “Tell me everything,” she said.

  *

  They waited till they were out of the limo and in their Four Seasons suite, which he had hardly slept in, before he sketched out the details for her.

  He was running in the woods. Trees and boughs swept by. He was in his animal form. She could almost smell the blood lust and ravenous hunger in him as he described it. And her spirits kept sinking with each word, especially as the words tumbled out, forming a dreadful picture in her head:

  Periods of blackout.

  Blood on my teeth.

  The taste of flesh on my tongue.

  Can’t remember.

  At the end of it all, Rust’s shoulders were slumped. She had never seen him so broken.

  “I don’t know if I killed Teddy Mitchell,” he confess
ed. “I might have. When the tiger takes hold of me, I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s been happening a lot more lately. I can’t account for large swaths of missing time. That was what I was trying to tell you at the airport. You’re not safe with me, Kate. Nor is anyone else.”

  “But it doesn’t mean you killed Teddy,” she pleaded. She wanted it to be true.

  ‘It doesn’t mean I didn’t either.” Rust got up and went to the large ceiling to floor windows and looked out into Manhattan.

  “You have no reason to kill Teddy.”

  “I did. Even if the rational human part of me didn’t, the animal one does.”

  She knew that what he said was true.

  Restlessly, she got up and went to him. She took hold of his hand.

  “Come to bed, Rust.”

  “I can’t. You’re not safe with me. Didn’t you hear me earlier?”

  She took hold of his face and stared into his beautiful green eyes.

  “No, Rust. You can’t live like this. No one can. You can’t isolate yourself from everyone, least of all me. I’ll just follow you.”

  He shook himself from her grasp.

  “Don’t be a fool, Kate,” he said harshly. “You know I’m dangerous to everyone, most of all myself.”

  She knew he was going to be this way. He was going to extricate himself from her with his excuses. And if he had not been asked to stay in town for police questioning, he would have likely left North America. With all his money, he could go anywhere and his parents would be none the wiser for it.

  It was ironic that the only thing still holding him back was the murder of Teddy Mitchell. Which she wasn’t sure he did not commit, to her deep foreboding.

  He said in a firm voice, “I’ll stay with you for as long as I can make sure you are OK. Then I’ll get you the first flight ticket out of here. Go back, Kate. Go back and forget you ever met me.”

  Her heart sank.

  5

  Lance Horner surveyed the CCTV footage of the cars coming in and out of the gates of the Mitchell homestead. The home CCTV was designed to catch the license plates of the cars, not the people in them. At least, not when it was so dark.

  Anyone could clearly see that Teddy Mitchell’s Lamborghini left the premises at 10.45 p.m. The shadows from the trees made it too difficult to see who was actually behind the wheel or any of the passenger seats. Then five minutes later, the black limo which had been rented by Rust O’Brien came out and swept down the same road the Lamborghini had disappeared.

  The CCTV could not catch any other cars on the outer road.

  Of course, it was just circumstantial. According to Rust O’Brien, he never left the premises until morning. According to his girlfriend, Kate, Rust was with her in the limo.

  Geraldine Brickford, his rookie, came in. She was a pretty redhead in a dark charcoal suit.

  She said, “I’ve got the CCTV footage from the Four Seasons.”

  She inserted the thumb drive into his laptop and played it.

  They both watched. At 11.52 p.m., Kate Penney walked into the grand lobby. No one else was with her. She headed for the elevator bank, pressed a button, and went up when the doors slid open. She didn’t wait for anyone else.

  “Rust O’Brien never walked through the Four Seasons lobby,” Geraldine Brickford said. “I checked the rest of the footage.”

  “Is there any other entrance he could enter from?”

  “He would still go to the elevator bank. Unless he took the stairwell. Which is not likely.”

  Lance leaned back. “So Kate Penney was not telling the truth.”

  But he already knew that. He was an experienced interrogator, and he could sense that neither Rust nor Kate was telling him the whole truth.

  “She was protecting Rust O’Brien, very likely. Or thought she was protecting him. He’s lucky to have someone who loves him that much.” There was a wistful tone in Geraldine’s voice.

  Lance was chagrined. Women and their love trysts. There was no end to the amount of homicides those sort of trysts caused.

  His cellphone rang. He picked it up. It was the coroner’s department.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “The results of the autopsy are in,” said the voice on the other side. “And we found something else you’re going to be very interested in.”

  6

  Rita Cunningham was at a quandary. The news of Teddy Mitchell’s murder was all over the place. And she was at the crux of it.

  On that fateful night, she was busy stalking Rust’s limo. But when she found that he wasn’t in it, she doubled back. She figured that either Rust or Kate had a fight with each other and Kate left in a huff. Whatever it was, Rust hadn’t left the party.

  Now how was she to find him?

  She had a sense that she was very close to the truth.

  She got back to the party and the closed forbidding gates. Surely there had to be a better way to access the party.

  She drove around the entire perimeter of the Mitchell estate. The six-foot high walls soon gave way to wooded forest. Forest covered the gently sloping hills behind the Mitchell grounds and blended into government reserve land. It was going to be very difficult to navigate these woods towards the house.

  Difficult, but not impossible.

  She parked the car at the side of the road. She had a GPS and she had gotten very good at finding her way throughout her years as an investigative reporter. She was dressed in suitable clothes and she had on her hiking boots. She had a flashlight and she was very fit from a daily routine of gym training. Besides, she had learned tracking from her father, an Appalachian redneck. She had learned everything she could from him before he killed himself in an alcoholic haze.

  If anyone could find Rust O’Brien, she could.

  *

  But still, it was dark, and the woods were immense. Rita made a beeline for the Mitchell mansion, using her GPS as a guide. The woods here were not dangerous, in general. There were no grizzly bears, although people have claimed that they had heard the howl of an occasional wolf.

  Rita was more than prepared for wolf encounters. She had her father’s gun with her. And she was a great shot.

  It was 3.34 a.m., according to her watch. The moon was full in the almost cloudless sky, and the wind carried with it the scent of fresh water from the creek which wounded through the woods. It was then she heard the crashing through the woods – the rustle of low-hanging boughs and dry leaves as an animal ran through.

  She froze.

  It was really dark, and the moon was obscured by the tops of the trees. She glimpsed the sight of something furry crashing through the undergrowth, but she couldn’t determine what sort of animal it was. It wasn’t wise to shine her flashlight in its eyes either. Although she had a gun, she didn’t want to use it on a wild animal.

  The wolf (?) vanished, but was soon followed by another animal. Once again, Rita froze and hid behind a tree. How many wolves were there in these woods? She didn’t think someone like Aaron Mitchell would stand for having predators around his home. Or maybe he encouraged it. Billionaires were eccentric that way.

  Was the other animal a wolf? It seemed heavier. More agile. More feline than canine. Her heart thrummed against her ribcage, and she was suddenly aware of her own mortality. She was not afraid of wild animals, but her father had taught her to respect them and be wary of them. A wild animal, when cornered, could be very dangerous.

  Rita waited until she could hear no more disturbances.

  Then she moved again.

  It was another twenty minutes when she came upon something else. A patch of moonlight shone on something which slept beneath a tree.

  Rita held her breath.

  It was a tiger.

  This was certainly one wild animal she didn’t want to cross. Her mind ran with all sorts of possibilities. How did a tiger – a very Asian animal – get into the woods of New York State? Of course, it was on Aaron Mitchell’s grounds, and she wouldn’t put it past someone
like Aaron Mitchell to actually have a menagerie of wild animals on his land. A tiger could possibly be prowling around on a routine basis. Which was highly dangerous, because the woods connected to the outer roads and to the suburbs beyond.

  This could be another story right here!

  She didn’t have her camera, but she had a cellphone. She could take the tiger’s photo. If he didn’t eat her first.

  She fished out her cellphone from her pocket and pressed ‘Record’.

  The tiger’s chest rose up and down in its sleep. It was magnificent. She had never seen anything so beautiful before out of a zoo. And it was large. Larger than she thought possible.

  She had to get closer. Even with ‘zoom’, she couldn’t frame as much of it in as she desired.

  Then the tiger stirred.

  Rita froze.

  She had gone three paces away from the cover of the tree bark she had been standing behind. If the tiger opened its eyes now, she would be a dead woman. Assuming it wasn’t a tame tiger, of course.

  Was it too late for her to back away?

  The tiger lifted a mighty paw and swiped its nose with it.

  Rita found herself taking three quick paces back to hide behind the tree again. She fumbled in her jacket for her gun. She might have to defend herself if things got rough.

  The tiger shuddered, sighed, and then went back to sleep again. Rita heaved a sigh of relief. She really, really didn’t want to have to use that gun on anyone or anything tonight.

  Then something weird happened.

  That was the only way Rita could describe it. Weird.

  The tiger began to transform, like in all the legends of old. Its fur withdrew and melted into pale flesh. Its limbs lengthened and became human-like. Its ears retracted. What he became in a span of seconds totally floored Rita, and her hand shook as she trained the aperture of the cellphone camera on the whole scene.

  She was so glad she was recording this, because she sensed no one would believe her otherwise. And even then, they were bound to question the validity of the video footage.

  The sleeping human form which appeared at the end of the metamorphosis was a strikingly handsome man. Rita held her breath as she studied the smooth planes of his beautiful face, the mild flutter of his closed eyes as his eyeballs moved in REM phase sleep and his long, naked body. His body was marvelously sculptured in all the right places, and his front was turned towards her – offering her a sumptuous view of his impressive genitals.