“Shift and run! Now!” Hunter yelled a heartbeat before he began to shift himself, his jeans ripping as his body began to rapidly contort and reshape itself.
Then the lioness was on him again, and the morning air was suddenly filled with the roars and snarls of two apex cats as they locked together in a mass of snapping jaws and razor sharp claws.
Kylie sat a few feet away from the melee frozen in both horror and indecision. Although Hunter was the larger of the two, the lioness seemed to have the upper hand, her movements more deliberate and precise—trained.
Dammit! Although scared out of her mind, she knew she couldn’t just run off and leave Hunter and the dying wolf to the mercy of that monster. She started to take off the jacket Hunter had loaned her when suddenly six hundred plus pounds of tumbling cats came flying at her. Kylie yelped and tried to dive out of the way, but the back end of the lioness clipped her right side painfully hard, knocking her to the ground.
Gasping after a breath that was no longer there, Kylie tried to pick herself off the ground for the second time that day. Through tearing eyes, she saw the battling felines slam into a thick tree trunk dangerously close to the unconscious wolf shifter.
Shaking his head rapidly and obviously stunned, Hunter staggered over to the wolf, placing himself as a barrier between the wolf and the lioness, who had abruptly switched her attack back to the person who had been her target all along. There was a meaty sound as their bodies collided, but this time, as they tumbled to the ground in a tangle of limbs, only the lioness climbed back to her feet.
Kylie’s muscles throughout her body were already contracting as she opened her mouth to scream at the lioness, a scream initially meant to distract that quickly turned into a roar of pure rage that sounded unlike anything she had ever heard come out of her mouth. The lioness pivoted with a snarl, then froze with a look of confusion that had no business on the face of a lion.
Taking advantage of the enemy shifter’s bewilderment, Kylie shot straight for the bitch and lunged for her throat. Her jaws, however, met only air as the lioness somehow managed to twist out of the way at the last second. Kylie immediately turned and crouched low with a snarl, prepared to defend both her knocked out lover and the injured wolf shifter no matter what.
However, instead of attacking, the lioness gave a low grunt and slowly sat back onto her haunches. Then the muscles of her body began to ripple, and Kylie was utterly staggered when she realized that the lioness was shifting. Another thirty seconds and a short-haired, blonde woman couched in the lioness’s place, glaring fit to kill.
“What the hell is a lioness doing with the jaguars?” the woman angrily demanded in an alto voice the second she was able, spitting out the word ‘jaguar’ like an expletive. Her nostrils flared. “I can smell him all over you! It’s so strong that I thought you were one of them! That you would shame your alpha, your clan, by letting that piece of filth fuck you is just…!” She growled in utter disgust. “Traitor!”
Lioness…
If Kylie had been in her human form, all of her blood would have drained from her face in utter dread. She slowly lowered her eyes, the look on her face like someone expecting to see something gory and grotesque. As soon as two golden paws that were conspicuously free of spots came into view, Kylie jerked her eyes away. She’d seen more than enough.
The blonde woman’s eyes flickered to a point behind Kylie before she growled again, turned and dashed into the cover of the trees without another word. With the threat gone for the moment, Kylie wasted no time in shifting back to her human form.
“You’re—a Polyshifter.”
Kylie flinched at the utter flatness in the familiar voice behind her, at hearing a word she hated almost as much as the word ‘Deadend.’ It was a word that had the power to destroy, and already had destroyed, a multitude of lives. It was the hated label that had cost Kylie her parents.
For one desperate moment, she considered just dashing off into the trees, and then almost in the same thought, berated herself disgustedly for even thinking it. She owed it to Hunter to stay. She owed it to herself. She had to see what, if any, expression was on his face; she had to know…
She slowly stood up, turned, and faced him with her nudity fully on display. And there it was, one of her worst fears staring back at her in the form of a pair of hazel eyes full of suspicion and the first hints of betrayal.
In that endless, horrible moment, there were only two paths Kylie could see. Her days of feigning ignorance about the shifter world were now irrevocably over.
She could either shift back into a lioness and run to Paul and a life forever on the run, essentially ruining the life of a man who had taken her in without batting an eye and given her everything, or she could come completely clean and try to salvage the best thing that had ever happened to her no matter how impossible it now seemed.
“I am,” Kylie confessed softly, refusing to look away.
It was done. The next move was completely his.
TEMPTED BY THE JAGUAR #3: RAMIFICATION
Kylie knew from the beginning that getting romantically involved with Hunter was an extremely bad idea, and now because of the Pandora’s Box she inadvertently blew wide open in order to protect him, more than Hunter may now determine the consequences she and those she loves will ultimately end up paying.
Releases in February 2015
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ALSO BY CRISTINA RAYNE
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Urban and Epic Fantasy, writing as C.G. Garcia:
The Supreme Moment (A Fractured Multiverse Novel)
Black Crimson: Blood Fire Chronicles Book 1 (A Fractured Multiverse Novel) *coming soon
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UK CA AU DE FR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cristina Rayne is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author who lives in West Texas with her crazy cat and about a dozen bookcases full of fantasy worlds and steamy romances. She has a degree in Computer Science which totally qualifies her to write romances. As Fantasy is her first love, she feels if she can inject a little love into the fantastical, along with a few steamy scenes, then all the better. She is also the author of the Claimed by the Elven King and Erotic Tales from the Vampire Underground series.
Tempted by the Jaguar #2: Revelation (Riverford Shifters) Page 8