Forbidden Shifters Complete Series (Books 1-6): A Wolf Shifter Paranormal Romance

by Selena Scott

  “Oh my God.” She covered her face with her hands. “We’re in love. This is so freaking crazy.”

  There was a rising churn in her gut, the giddiness was back, her heart was trying its hardest to grow wings and fly away.

  “I think this is that delayed reaction thing again,” she murmured.

  Raphael gently pulled her hands away and she was greeted with the sight of his smiling face. “Just like with our first kiss.”

  “What a bad freaking first kiss.”

  “What a hot freaking second kiss.”

  He kissed her this time and it was uncountable. This kiss sprawled out effortlessly, endlessly. Their clothes were removed slowly, piece by piece, but later, neither of them would remember getting naked. They were simply lost in one another. Cocooned in this space between them that they’d finally let grow. When they came together, it was fierce and sweaty and unrelenting. And when they rolled apart, finally, they tipped their heads to the side, to catch one another’s eye, and burst out laughing.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Raphael kissed Nat goodbye at her car the next morning and stood in his driveway with his hands in his pants pockets. They’d spent a semi-lazy morning waking up slowly, making love again, kissing for a long time in the kitchen. He told her he loved her at least eight more times. She, on the other hand, had been a bit more shy and only told him she loved him once, right before he kissed her goodbye, as if she were nervous about saying it, but didn’t want to miss her chance either. He’d loved it, eaten it up.

  When her car was out of sight, he turned a slow circle, taking in his lazy neighborhood. There was more privacy here than in other parts of Boulder. The houses were farther apart, the driveways were longer, there were higher shrubs lining everyone’s property.

  He turned the rest of the way and looked at his house. Really looked at it. He’d bought it a few years ago because Seth and Jackson had bought their own houses and it seemed like the thing to do. Seth and Jackson had both put a lot of work into their homes since. Seth, in order to make his perfectly suit him, and Jackson just to make his perfect. Jackson’s house was too perfect, sterile even. And Seth’s had just seemed like so much work. Both had been a deterrent. Raphael had never really gotten around to fixing up his own house.

  He looked at it now, the weeds in the flowerbeds, the peeling front door, the lopsided basketball hoop over the garage door that had been installed by the previous owners. Raphael realized, with a small start, that he really didn’t want to leave this house. Actually, he wanted to fix up this house. And he wanted to do it with Natalie.

  It was hard to picture Nat living anywhere but her cramped little apartment with Kaya, but if there was ever going to be another place, it would be this house. They’d fix it up and make a royal mess out of it, of that he was certain. But it had a nice backyard and there was a second bedroom in case they wanted to have a kid.

  He cleared his throat and shook his head a little bit. He… wasn’t quite ready for that. But even so, he couldn’t fight down the rising feeling inside of him. He jogged back inside and grabbed his car keys, deciding that breakfast at his mother’s house seemed like the thing to do. As he drove across Boulder, the feeling within him only grew. He drove past his old high school. He took a detour and drove through Seth and Sarah’s neighborhood, which he loved almost as much as he loved his own.

  He even drove past the home where Natalie and Kaya had grown up. It didn’t have particularly good memories for him, considering what dipshits their parents had always been, but it still brought forth a wave of protectiveness within him. That was where Natalie had lived until she was twenty-three years old and Kaya was finally old enough to move out. And for that alone he found affection in his heart for the property.

  He drove past the vet’s office and saw that Jackson’s car wasn’t in the lot, which probably meant he was at Elizabeth’s for breakfast. He spotted Kaya’s car in the lot at the health clinic and made a mental note to check in with her; they hadn’t talked much lately.

  Lastly, he drove up the wooded, twisty back road that led to his mother’s house. The same house he’d lived in since he was three years old. The house where he’d shifted for the first time, scared as hell. It was his first memory. Shifting back for the first time, once the full moon had started to wane, he’d run straight into Elizabeth’s arms, crying for his mother.

  He parked his car and turned it off in her driveway, clicking his teeth together and thinking. By the time he slammed his car door, he knew he’d made up his mind.

  As he’d expected, his family was sitting at the breakfast table.

  “Raph! I was hoping you’d join,” Elizabeth called, pulling a chair out for him. They were most of the way through the meal, but there was food enough for Raph. Sarah kissed him on the cheek and piled eggs three inches high on his plate.

  “Hi,” she said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  He pulled her into a side hug and looked around at the rest of his family. Seth and Bauer argued good naturedly about something, Elizabeth spooned fruit salad into bowls for everyone, Jackson scowled down at his meal as if in great concentration over a problem he’d never solve.

  “I don’t think we should leave.”

  The table quieted at Raphael’s words. He understood the trepidatious looks on the faces of his family members. They’d spent damn near three hours hashing all this out just the night before. It wasn’t a conversation any of them were eager to repeat.

  “I’m going to do my best to convince you all that we should stay here in Boulder. But I’m not going to do it now. I’m going to do it tonight when our whole family can be together.”

  Jackson looked around, as if taking attendance.

  “Kaya and Natalie aren’t here and they weren’t here last night,” Raphael said firmly. “This decision affects them as much as it does us.”

  Jackson looked like he was going to argue but Raphael put up a hand.

  “They’ll come with us if we leave. They deserve to vote.”

  “He’s right,” Elizabeth said immediately. “It didn’t sit well with me last night that we made the decision without them.”

  “Me neither,” Seth chimed in.

  Jackson looked mutinous and Bauer was silent, his eyes cast down, methodically eating his way around his plate.

  “It’s decided, then?” Raphael asked his family. “We’ll talk about it again tonight?”

  “It’s decided,” Elizabeth said, with a nod of her head.

  ***

  The family sat in the living room that night. Because she was who she was, Elizabeth had made a gigantic meal for everyone, but also because she was who she was, she wanted the conversation over with before dinner so it wouldn’t make for an awkward meal.

  “You called everyone here,” Jackson said to Raphael from across the room. Jackson leaned on the doorframe between the living room and the kitchen even though everyone else was sitting.

  Seth and Sarah shared an armchair, Bauer sat on a chair dragged in from the dining room in front of the fire and Elizabeth sat in the rocking chair. Raphael, Nat and Kaya sat on the couch. It was a little snug for the three of them which meant that Nat was pressed into Raphael’s side. Which, of course, he didn’t mind at all.

  “Thank you for inviting us,” Kaya said suddenly. “I think it goes without saying that we were gonna follow you all wherever you ended up going, so it’s nice to be included in the decision-making process.”

  “Of course, love,” Elizabeth said, reaching over and patting Kaya on the knee. “I only wish we’d done it sooner. You deserved to be here last night. When we had the first conversation about all this mess.”

  Raphael cleared his throat. He opened his mouth to say one thing, to explain why he’d called everyone here. To reason out why they should stay. To present his case as calmly and categorically as possible. Instead, a completely different thing popped out of his mouth.

  “Uh. I just wanted to say… that Natalie and I
are in love. We’ve been together for a little while and it’s the real deal. And, yeah, we’re probably gonna get married. Hopefully soon.”

  If shock were a color, say, crimson red, that room would have been a bloodbath.

  “Holy guacamole,” Sarah eventually said, breaking the silence. She reared on Kaya. “Did you know? You knew! Oh my God, you must have been dying with that secret. Dang, girl, you’re a vault. I know who I’m coming to with my next big secret.”

  “For how long?” Seth demanded, though there was joy dancing in his expression.

  “A few weeks,” Natalie responded, slipping her hand into Raphael’s.

  “And you’ve… been in love this whole time, like forever?” Seth asked.

  Nat and Raphael glanced at one another and burst out laughing. “Um. No,” Raphael eventually answered. “It was very much a surprise to both of us that this was something we wanted.”

  “You’re not joking,” Elizabeth said quietly.

  When Raphael turned to look at her, he saw that she was shaken with emotion. She had one hand up to her mouth and her eyes trembled with shiny tears.

  “We’re not joking.”

  “Come here.” Elizabeth beckoned to them.

  Nat and Raphael immediately rose up, walking over to her. Elizabeth rose up too and her arms went around Nat. Elizabeth whispered something into Nat’s ear and both women burst into tears. Then Raphael was being tugged down to his mother and then the three of them were all wrapped up together.

  “You’re such a good boy,” Elizabeth told him. “I knew you had such a big heart for a reason. It was so that you could match up with the other biggest heart I know.”

  Elizabeth put soft hands on either side of their faces and then promptly administered a sharp smack to each of them.

  “Don’t screw this up because there’s going to be a hell of a lot of family dinners that you’re both obligated to come to until the end of time.”

  They laughed and kind of collapsed back down on the couch together, their hands lacing together and her head falling onto Raphael’s shoulder.

  Seth just kind of stared at them, wide-eyed. “This is so freaking crazy.”

  Raphael dared a look up at Jackson, expected to see a scowl. He was surprised to see a look of sad support on his brother’s face. Jackson nodded to him. Acceptance. But the look bothered Raphael. It told him that his brother was happy that Raphael had found happiness, but that he’d resigned himself to a life of loneliness.

  Which was exactly what Raphael had brought the family there to talk about. He was done letting the members of his family resign themselves to half-lives.

  Jackson was chained in the basement every full moon, living in a boring-ass house, and never letting anyone but his brothers get close enough to even laugh with him. And his mother was actively turning away from love, because she’d done it for so long that she didn’t even know how to accept it anymore.

  Maybe it made him smug, maybe it made him condescending, but Raphael didn’t care. All this bullshit ended here. And it ended tonight. His family was not a family of cowards. It was time to stop living in fear.

  “Sorry to drop that bomb on everyone like that.”

  “A little warning might have been nice, Raph,” Natalie said drily. But when he turned to her, she was smiling.

  “Right. But I couldn’t think of any other way to explain how important this is to me. That we don’t leave. That we stay here. I need you all to know that my feelings on this matter are coming from a real place. Not a theoretical place.”

  “Why don’t you explain your feelings, then,” Elizabeth said. “So we can all follow you.”

  “Right. Okay.” Raphael gathered his thoughts. “Growing up a Durant, I felt like the luckiest kid on earth. I’d been adopted into the most loving, protective family of all time. Ma, you were supportive without letting us cling to you. Seth you were there for almost every significant event in my life. You’re my best friend. Jackson, you had to be both my father and my older brother and you were freaking great at both of those things.”

  Jackson looked stricken. His hands fell from where they were crossed over his chest and just sort of hung loosely at his sides.

  Raphael kept going. “I’m so grateful to be a part of this family. But no family is perfect. And how could we be when so much of our family culture is built around keeping this shifter secret? When all of us, from a young age, have been taught to hide who we really are?”

  “Don’t you criticize your mother for doing what she had to do,” Bauer said sharply. It surprised the whole room that he would speak up for Elizabeth so intensely.

  Raphael shook his head. “I’m not complaining about the way we were raised. Not one bit. I think she did what she had to do to keep her children safe. Who’s to say that I would have done any different?”

  “It’s shifter culture, son,” Bauer said, notes of anger still in his voice. “This is how every single shifter has been raised.”

  “How would I know that? How would any of us know that? Because the system is so fucked up, we’re all required to live in secrecy, and we can’t even do it together.” Raphael took a deep breath. “Are there other shifters in the community? We don’t know. Are there other shifters who are as out of control as we were before you helped us, Bauer? Who knows? Are there young shifters out there who are alone or scared or in need of help? We can never know because we are all living in secret. And that will never change, unless we do something to change it.”

  “You’re saying you want to come out about being shifters?” Seth looked incredulous.

  “No.” Raphael sighed and shook his head. “I mean, I wish we could. But that’s suicide. I know that. What I’m saying is that I can’t run and stay who I am on the inside. Hiding for so many years has chipped away at me. At my soul. It started to change who I am. And I refuse to let them take that from me. I’m saying that I can’t run anymore. I won’t.”

  “That… actually makes a lot of sense to me,” Sarah said. She turned to her husband. “Seth, do you remember how weird you were when you had to keep this secret from me? Seriously, it was ruining you. I agree with Raph, I don’t think we’re in a position to scream it from the mountaintops, that would bring the feds down on us. But the fact that this guy, whoever he is, has come onto your property, left these traps behind, and now we’re expected to completely uproot our lives and move on? Nah. I’m not into it. I think it’s bullshit, actually. I’m with Raph on this one.”

  Seth knocked his knuckles against his leg. “I mean, if my twin and my wife both think this is a good idea, I’d be a fool to look away from it, right?”

  “You can’t be serious,” Bauer growled. “You can’t all be taking this idea seriously, can you?”

  He looked around incredulously at everyone, but Raphael was the one who answered him.

  “This—what I have with Nat—it means something to me, Bauer. It deserves roots. It deserves a home. If we start running right now, do you think we’re ever going to stop? Do you actually think that at some point we’ll find any place that doesn’t have people who fear us, who want to turn us in? Do you really think that there is any place in this world that is safe enough for us to live out our lives without us making it safe?”

  “What do you mean ‘making’ it safe?” Jackson asked. Raphael was surprised to see that he actually looked quite moved. He’d expected his older brother to obstinately stick to the plan to kick them all out of Boulder to greener pastures. But he actually looked interested in what Raphael had to say.

  “I mean that whoever this guy is, he set traps for us, right? But he may or may not have realized that those traps are traps for him as well.”

  Jackson’s eyes lit with interest. “You want to find another trap and manipulate the sensor.”

  “Manipulate the sensor?” Bauer asked, frowning.

  This time, Seth jumped in. “Raph wants to set off one of the traps and see if the person who set the trap comes to check it.”
>
  Raphael nodded. “I think we’ll be able to figure out who the hell is doing this.”

  “And why, exactly, does it matter who is doing this?” Bauer asked, his voice low.

  Seth looked confused by Bauer’s question; apparently the answer was obvious to him. “Because if we know who is doing this, then we have a better chance of figuring out their motives. Of knowing whether or not they’re an actual threat to us. If there’s more than one of them. If we actually need to leave town.”

  “Trust me,” Bauer said, re-crossing his ankles, his face set in a gnarled, stubborn expression. “You boys need to leave town. The details don’t matter. All we know is that there is someone out there threatening to crack your secret wide open. And when they do—when, not if—y’all are going to be regretting this plan when your registered asses are sitting in a shifter camp.”

  “If things start to go south, then we run,” Raphael cut in, resolutely. “But I refuse to believe that our first reaction to any threat should be running, hiding.”

  “So, hold on here.” Nat held her hands up and looked at Raphael square in his face. “Your plan is to lure this guy someplace and… what? Catch a tiger by the toe? There’s so many things that could go wrong at that point.”

  Because he could, because he couldn’t stop himself, because he loved her, Raphael leaned over and kissed her temple. “I’ve been thinking about that. And I’m pretty sure I’ve got a plan.”

  He leaned forward and the rest of his family leaned with him.

  ***

  After the hubbub, after all her children had driven back to their houses in twos and threes, except for Jackson, who was alone as usual, Elizabeth still sat in the living room, watching the end of the fire die away.

  The coals were a soothing, calming red. She’d never thought fire looked angry. And even though she was alone in the living room right now, even though she knew exactly where Bauer was and what Bauer was doing, she wasn’t angry either.