Authors: Vivi Andrews
“Then who is in my fucking bungalow?”
At that moment, she almost wished he would say he had taken over her home, though she didn’t care to examine why that thought was so appealing.
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. Somebody. It’s a nice place and it was empty. You know how things are in the pride.”
Shana ground her teeth. She knew. Oh, did she ever know.
Possessions were community property in the pride. If you wanted something to be yours and yours alone, you had to be strong enough to keep it, fighting off all comers. Clothing, bungalows, mates—the best of everything went to the strong. At least, that’s how it used to be.
“I thought your precious Landon was going to change our barbaric ways.”
Caleb shrugged again. Goddess, how she hated that shrug. His fucking nonchalance. As if every shift of his shoulders was more proof that he didn’t give a shit about her and never had. “We are what we are. Change is slow.”
“So some asshole just usurped my bungalow?” Her shock was feigned, but her outrage was real. She’d had one of the nicest places on the ranch compound before she left, totally decked out, complete with a fireplace and a Jacuzzi in the bathroom. And she’d had to kick her fair share of asses to get it.
She’d known she was leaving it undefended when she’d stolen, or rather borrowed, the jeep and driven off the ranch. But, at the time, she hadn’t planned on ever coming back.
Still, just because she’d walked away without a backward glance and hadn’t been home for seven months didn’t mean she was okay with someone else sleeping in her bed.
“You actually intend to stay?” Caleb asked.
“I have unfinished business.”
And she’d been so lonely outside the pride; she’d discovered that homesickness could actually make you physically ill.
This was her home. She wasn’t about to let some undersized bitch and the undersized bitch’s demented Alpha lover run her off.
Caleb must have seen her resolve in her expression. He sighed heavily, the poor put-upon Hercules, and turned to walk toward the ranch. “Come on,” he called over his shoulder, not even glancing at the bags piled into the back of the jeep.
She grabbed the knapsack she’d packed with the absolute essentials and moved quickly in front of him, putting an extra little twitch in her walk just for his viewing pleasure. As she strutted toward the only place that had ever been home with the only man who had ever tied her up in knots marching along behind her, she thought she heard him mutter something under his breath, but she must have been mistaken. It had sounded a lot like, “Today’s as good a day as any to commit suicide.”
Caleb had told her he wasn’t suicidal, but there was no other explanation for what he was doing.
Shana was back. And he was taking her toward the ranch. Where she would be staying. Indefinitely.
He groaned aloud at the thought.
She looked like hell, but Shana looking like hell was still Shana—still hot enough to have him half-hard from the second he’d scented her in the night.
Caleb shot off a quick prayer of thanks to whatever unnamed gods were listening that he’d been patrolling in human form. Facing her for the first time in seven months stark naked after a shift was not an experience he ever wanted to have.
She sashayed along the rutted drive leading to the ranch’s main compound, swinging her tight little ass. Her long red hair was loose, the ends flicking around her hips like tongues of flame. Most lionesses were blonde, their hair perfectly matching the color of their pelts, but Shana had to be different in every way. She stood out like a fire in the desert, unique and untamable. And dangerous as all hell.
The memory of those flame-red tresses tangling around him as they slept rose up in his mind, but he shook it away.
She was a viper. No matter how lush her body was. No matter how intoxicating her scent or how wicked the things she could do with her tongue.
Caleb barely bit back another groan. If only memories were as easy to fight as enemies.
She never once glanced back at him as they walked, but he knew she was aware of him. Unfortunately, the feeling was mutual. He’d always been hyperaware of her. His body had never cared that she’d become a soulless, manipulative bitch.
The entrance to the ranch’s residential compound rose in front of them. There was nothing ostentatious or distinctive about the low, open gate bordered by a cattle guard. Nothing to indicate there was anything extraordinary about the group of families who lived and worked at this particular ranch.
None of the nearby landowners or businessmen in the small town twenty miles down the road had any idea the residents of the Three Rocks Ranch could take the shape of menacing predators. Through the constant vigilance of the pride and with the help of a few technological gadgets Caleb didn’t pretend to understand, no one in their little corner of Texas had any idea fifty lion shape-shifters lived among them.
Fifty-one.
As Shana swung her ass through the gate, she turned her head toward the large tree where the gate guard would be perched in lion form. Caleb saw her flash a small feline smile in the guard’s direction and give a little shimmy.
The sound of claws scrabbling for purchase on wood sounded from the tree a fraction of a second before a young male lion with his mane not fully grown in hit the ground with a thud.
Shana gave a low, wicked laugh that was like claws scraping up Caleb’s spine. The juvenile male leapt back into the branches. Caleb closed the distance between himself and the troublemaker, making a mental note to talk to Landon about giving young Ryan a less critical post if he was going to be felled every time a lioness looked his way.
Caleb ignored the fact that he would have probably fallen out of the damn tree too, if he’d seen Shana walking through that gate again after seven months.
He caught her arm and nudged her toward the mess hall, where the rest of the pride was likely still gathered after dinner. The Three Rocks Ranch had originally been built as a summer camp and the communal dining arrangement worked well for a lion pride.
Shana slid her arm out of his grip and headed toward the hall. Caleb let her go, his fingers tingling from the touch of her bare skin, even as he wondered what kind of a fool wore a tank top in a snowstorm. Their body temperature might be a couple degrees higher than a human’s, but that didn’t make them impervious to cold. She could come down with hypothermia just as easily as the humans she looked down on.
Not that he cared. Not that he was concerned for her. She’d done far too much to kill any feelings he’d ever had for her.
The mess hall was by far the largest building on the compound. Light and the raucous sounds of the pride spilled out of it into the night through windows kept open, even in a snowstorm.
He knew Shana too well to expect she would betray any sign of hesitation. She didn’t disappoint.
She strode up the steps and threw open the double doors, head held high, the queen returning.
The reaction to her entrance was instantaneous. Silence rippled out around her until the only sound was the scrape of chairs as those in the back of the hall stood, craning for a better look.
She slammed her hands onto her hips and scanned the room, aggression in every line of her body. Caleb tensed, ready to tackle her to the ground if she went for his sister’s throat, but her eyes passed right over Ava, dismissing the Alpha’s new mate.
Instead, her eyes locked on the more dominant females, who bristled under her challenging glare. One or two dropped their eyes in submission, but more than would have dared only months before met her eyes head-on.
“That’s right,” she snapped. “I’m back. Now, which one of you bitches stole my house?”
Shana kept her eyes locked in prepare-to-have-your-ass-kicked fashion on the three most likely bungalow thieves. She heard the door shut behind her and felt Caleb’s heat as he crowded behind her—doubtless so he could take her down before she could rip out any throats—but she didn’t blink.
Loralee finally dropped her eyes, but Shana made note of the fact that the uppity little bitch had dared question her dominance for as long as she had. Mara didn’t last nearly as long, which left only Zoe.
Shana felt a growl start low in her throat. She should have known it would be Zoe who’d stolen her slot in pride dominance. The Alpha’s bitch sister had been asking for an ass-kicking for too long.
Shana hadn’t challenged Zoe when she and Landon first joined the pride, because she’d been trying to butter up the Alpha and snag the slot as his mate. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t take the Viking bitch down. The blonde may be just a fraction bigger and stronger than Shana in her lioness form, but Shana was fast and she fought dirty. As Zoe was about to learn.
Shana crouched forward slightly, letting the growl ripple out of her throat as her fingernails morphed sharply into claws. Zoe’s eyes narrowed and Shana saw her muscles tense in anticipation of the fight, even though she made no move to step away from her table into the open center of the room.
“Enough!”
The bellow held an edge of authority Shana reacted to instinctively. Her claws retracted suddenly. The Alpha had spoken.
Landon stood, the scrape of his chair against the wooden floor loud in the echoing silence. He sat at a table among the lesser members of his pride, not bothering to separate himself according to rank as his predecessors had. Shana hadn’t even noticed him sitting there. Until he stood.
When he rose, the mantle of the Alpha fell on his shoulders. He radiated dominance and authority. And disapproval.
“We do not fight for housing privileges anymore,” he announced, his voice ringing out across the room.
Shana fought the urge to cower. And won. She was not so easily cowed. She met the Alpha’s eyes across the room and did not blink.
“She doesn’t have to fight me. She just has to give it back.”
The Alpha growled, the low sound traveling the room to grip her spine, urging her to bend in submission. Shana stood straight.
“That isn’t how we do things anymore,” Landon rumbled.
“Our instincts don’t change, no matter how human you might try to make us.” Shana spat the word “human” in the direction of the Alpha’s spineless mate.
When little Ava flinched, Shana wanted to crow her victory. The Alpha’s weakling mate would never be strong enough to keep him. Only Shana had the strength to rule beside him. Her rightful place in the pride was so close she could taste it, sweet and bright on her tongue.
“You are welcome to return to the pride, Shana,” Landon said, the welcome sounding forced and borderline violent. “But the same rules still apply. We are not a pride of animals.”
The abrupt laugh burst out of Shana’s mouth before she could stop it. “We aren’t? What are we then?”
“Civilized,” Landon snarled, sounding anything but.
“Yes,” Shana purred, laughter rolling around in her voice. “I can see that. Just look how civilized I make you feel.”
She wallowed in his anger. Anger was a kind of passion. There was power in it.
The Alpha’s mate did nothing to defend her claim, tiny Ava shivering in her chair. But Zoe’s lips drew back from her teeth and her body tensed. Shana’s claws snapped out, eager and ready.
An arm locked around her stomach, hard and unmoving.
Caleb.
She hadn’t for a second forgotten his presence at her back, but she never would have suspected he would interfere with a challenge. It simply was not done in the pride. Here, honor was found only in a fight, with fur and claws flying. No one stood in the way of that.
“I know an empty bungalow,” he said to the Alpha, speaking past her shoulder. “She can sleep there, until she decides if she is willing to obey the new rules.”
Shana hissed, so low only Caleb would be able to hear her, at the word obey. “I would rather sleep in a scorpion nest than lower myself to sleep in your sister’s hovel,” she whispered.
He ignored her, listening obediently as the Alpha gave his verdict.
“Fine. Just keep her out of trouble.”
Shana snorted. “I’d like to see him try,” she said, loud enough for the Alpha, and Zoe, and Ava, and anyone else who might be stupid enough to think she was cowed, to hear.
Caleb’s arm tightened minutely around her waist. She knew he was stronger than she was, knew he could force the issue if he chose, and, for a moment, she almost considered fighting him. The only thing that stopped her was the fact that the entire pride was watching. She did not want her triumphant return to claim her place as the Alpha’s rightful mate to be sullied by a scuffle with Caleb. She had her image as the future ruler of the pride to think about.
But, she also couldn’t afford to be seen as weak.
Shana’s claws flashed out, fast and lethal. She slashed at Caleb’s forearm and twisted out of his grip before the blood had time to splash out. She’d always been eerily fast. Her size was an advantage in fights, but her speed was what made her dangerous.
Blood dripped from the gashes on Caleb’s arm as the big, slow ox reached for her. Instead of dodging back, she darted toward the double doors. “Come on,” she snapped irritably over her shoulder. “Show me where this empty bungalow is. I don’t have all night.”
She didn’t have to look over her shoulder to know every eye was on her as she swept out of the hall.
She didn’t want to look over her shoulder to see the slow fire she knew would be in Caleb’s eyes. She had a feeling he wasn’t going to take her little scratches lightly.
And he didn’t forgive easily. She knew that all too well.
The sight of blood dripping onto the pristine white snow blanketing the ground was oddly beautiful. Or it would have been.
If it hadn’t been his blood.
Caleb flexed his fingers, feeling the pull against the bloody gashes on his arm. Even healing as quickly as shifters did, Shana’s little love scratches were going to leave a mark.
His own fault. He’d learned long ago that she wasn’t afraid to use her claws, especially when she was trying her damnedest to prove she wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone.
She started to turn up the narrow path leading to Ava’s old cabin, but Caleb caught her eye and jutted his chin toward the main walkway. “This way.”
Shana stopped at the T in the path. “Dream on.” She planted one hand on her hip and flipped her long red hair, shaking off the snowflakes caught there. “I’d rather sleep with scorpions than in your sister’s bed, but I’d rather sleep there than in yours.”
Caleb told himself he didn’t give a damn where she slept, ignoring the feral urging of his lion to prove her words a lie. He’d scented lust on her earlier. Even if she had just clawed him, Shana’d always liked it a little rough. Drawing blood was probably a goddamn turn-on.
“Not Ava’s bed and not mine. This way.”
Shana gave a little sniff and fell into step beside him. Her eyes flicked down to his bleeding arm. He knew she was going to say something about it before she spoke.
Shay’d always hated to be proven wrong. She couldn’t tolerate any hint of weakness. Any time anyone bested her in any way, she had to remind everyone she was tough. Always.
“Gosh, Caleb, that looks like it smarts,” she purred, right on cue. “You really should put something on it.”
“It’s fine.” It was better than fine. It was a necessary reminder that Shana was walking, talking poison.
“Are you sure?” She shot him a rabid smile. “I haven’t had my shots.”
Caleb just kept walking, stalking silently through the snow.
Shana bounced on the balls of her feet at his side, the movement jostling loose a memory. His Shay sprawled across his bare chest. His fingers tangled knuckle-deep in her red curls. She twisted and bounced the bed, still energized after he’d done everything humanly—and inhumanly—possible to wear her out. Her happiness spilled around them, sunny and easy. “I love that you’re so silent, Cale,” she announced out of the blue, fingers then claws lightly flexing into his pectoral muscles to test his strength. “There shouldn’t be two talkers in a relationship. I can talk enough for the both of us.”
He hadn’t said anything then. At the time, the only thing he could have said was that he loved her. What a nightmare that would have been. Thank God he’d kept his mouth shut.
“Are we going to that bitch Zoe’s place?” she asked, jarring him out of the depths of his thoughts and back to the present. “I’ll just bet it’s empty if she’s in mine.”
“She isn’t in yours.”
“No? Mara, then.”
Caleb said nothing, but she’d always been able to read his silences better than anyone else.
“Not Mara, either? Not Loralee. Pathetic little bitch. I’ve been kicking her ass since the fourth grade.”
Caleb didn’t call her on the lie. Loralee was the closest thing Shana had to a friend in the pride. For years, she’d followed Shana around like a duckling and Shana’d made sure no one laid a finger on her. Their friendship hadn’t soured until Landon had called a moratorium on challenges and Loralee hadn’t needed Shana’s strength anymore. Loralee stealing her bungalow would be another painful betrayal.
Though, knowing Shana, she would never admit to feeling pain.
“Not Loralee.”
“Good.” Shana frowned and worked at her lower lip with her teeth. “Then who? One of the males? Doesn’t matter. I can still take him. Whoever it is.”
“Drop it, Shana.”
“You sure it wasn’t you?” she persisted, ignoring his demand. “I can just see you, moving into my old place because it smells like me. Mooning over what might have been. Jacking off into my underwear drawer. That’s what happened, isn’t it? And you’re too much of a pussy to admit it. Don’t worry, baby. I won’t hold it against you.” She gave a little snickering laugh. “Much.”
“Not me. Shut it, Shay.” She was trying to hurt him, but he told himself not to take it personally. Hurt them first before they hurt you. That was Shana’s motto, pounded into her by a lifetime with her toxic mother.
“I’ll figure it out eventually. It’s not like you can keep me from wandering by the old stomping grounds to see who’s taken up residence.” Her face twisted like she’d tasted something sour. “It’s not some little girl you’ve been fucking, is it? In my bed. Probably calling my name when you come. Ugh. That’s disturbed, Caleb. There are counselors you can see about shit like that.”
“Shay.” Her name was a warning.
She ignored it. “I always felt bad about that,” she chirped, her cheeriness making the words a lie. “Ruining you for all other women. And at such a young age. It’s sad, really. Poor Caleb.”
His tongue itched with the urge to say something about the way she’d ruined herself. There wasn’t a bed Shana hadn’t slept in, a lion she hadn’t spread her legs for, and the nastiest part of his nature urged him to call her every kind of whore.
But they’d arrived at the empty bungalow, and part of him still believed there was a breakable little girl beneath her tough-as-nails front, so he said instead, “Here it is.”
Shana looked at the medium-sized, decently appointed bungalow and tipped her head to the side. “Not bad. From the outside. What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing. Go on.” He would have shoved her up the path, under the porch overhang and out of the snow, but knowing Shana, she probably would have bitten him for his efforts.
“Is it booby-trapped or something? Trip wire?”
“Shana, for God’s sake, just go in the damn house. It’s a fucking blizzard out here.”
She glanced up, seeming startled anew by the falling snow. “It’s barely snowing. Some Storm of the Century. Pathetic.”
The devil of it was he couldn’t even disagree with her. The blizzard the weathermen had been talking about for days was turning out to be nothing more than an inch or two of lightly falling snow. No wind, no whiteout conditions, nothing. But even extreme torture couldn’t have made him agree with her at that moment.
“Go, Shana.”
She turned the same look on him that she’d given the questionable bungalow only seconds before. Then, slowly, her eyes grew calculating. Her tongue snaked out to wet her lips. “And what if I don’t?”
He’d forgotten how exhausting it could be to deal with her. How nothing was ever easy. Even when he was balls-deep inside her, she was always testing his limits. Always pushing harder. His cock stiffened at the memory.
The answer Caleb suddenly wanted to give her was rough and sexual and would take their relationship right back to a place he had sworn he would never go with her again.
Shana must have sensed some shift in his mood, because suddenly she was three steps up the path to the abandoned bungalow, tossing him a disdainful glance over her shoulder. “Relax, tough guy. I’m going like a good girl.”
She waggled her ass at him in a way no good girl had ever dreamed and he growled. Then she disappeared into the house.
Caleb held himself still, fighting down the lingering urge to follow her into that house and show her what happened to little girls who teased men like him. The itch at the base of his spine simultaneously urged him to fuck and to shift. He fought both urges.
Until he felt the slight air pressure pop from the house, indicating Shana had taken her lioness form inside.
Caleb shifted involuntarily, the animal rising up fast and hard to claim his body.
In this form, the urge to break down the door and fuck her into submission was a hundred times more intense, the animal in him pressing humanity to the periphery of his consciousness. His lion told him the female he’d once thought would be his mate needed to be mastered, that she would welcome his dominance, but the man was still present enough to keep his paws firmly planted on the snowy ground.
When his animal snarled and snapped at his self-imposed tether, Caleb began a slow, prowling circuit around the house. Every fourth paw print was bloody from the bite of sweet Shana’s tender claws. He paced around the house until the track was a circle of red. Guarding. Whether he was keeping her in or keeping others out, he didn’t know. The animal in him didn’t see a difference. It just insisted that he keep prowling.
So he prowled.
Shana woke and stretched, reveling in the pleasure of being in her feline form.
During her months away from the pride, she’d never had the luxury of sleeping as a lion—or really of living as a cat for more than a few moments of each day, safely behind locked doors and careful not to make any non-human sounds.
Shana arched her back and rolled to all four paws, pushing up to stand. Just for the joy of it, she filled her lungs and roared, long and loud. She flicked her tail just to feel the air brush through the tuft.
Tempted though she was to remain feline all day, Shana reluctantly shifted back to human form.
She quickly pulled a fresh pair of panties out of her pack and pulled them on, along with yesterday’s jeans, bra and tank top. She’d get someone to bring in the rest of her clothes from the jeep today.
Shana opened the door to her borrowed bungalow—it was only hers temporarily, until she got her own back—and stood looking out over the snowy morning.
The big storm had only dropped a couple inches of snow on the ranch. Pale morning sunlight was already at work melting it. All signs of the so-called Storm of the Century would be gone by noon. Not far from her—borrowed—front porch, a pair of cubs rolled around in the slushy snow.
Shana frowned at a rusty brown stain on the porch—matching a similar stain circling her bungalow. She sniffed. Blood.
Trust Caleb to bleed out on her damn front porch instead of taking five seconds to have someone put a damn bandage on his arm. Goddess forbid he should disobey the Alpha’s command to keep her out of trouble even as long as it took to patch himself up.
Of course, he wasn’t around now to keep her out of trouble. Shana craned her neck and scented the air just to be safe. But no. No Caleb. Either he was hiding downwind, or he’d run off after making himself sick lying there bleeding on her porch all night long in the cold.
She had no sympathy for him.
A sleek young woman appeared around the corner of a nearby bungalow, giving Shana a tentative smile and a sheepish little shrug of her shoulders as she headed in her direction. Shana gritted her teeth. Loralee. She had no sympathy for her either.
“It’s good to have you back, Shana,” Loralee called, even her voice sounding pathetically subservient.
Did the girl have no self-respect? Shana appreciated Loralee’s respect for power and dominance, but even doormats like pathetic little Ava demonstrated some spine once in a while.
“Is it?” Shana asked. Her voice was harsh and she did nothing to moderate the icy thrust of the words.
Loralee’s wary smile faded a few degrees. “Yes. I missed you.”
“Sure you did.” Loralee’d missed having someone to fight her battles for her is what Loralee had missed. “Who’s in my bungalow?”
Loralee’s face froze. She was never much of a quick-thinker and now she was trying desperately to figure out whether Shana was allowed to know the answer to her question. Which meant she acknowledged an authority higher than Shana. Unacceptable.
“Who, Loralee?” she demanded.
“Tyler!” Loralee bleated.
“Shit.”
Tyler. Caleb’s older brother. Not quite as big, not quite as rough, but not someone Shana could tangle with and win.
"You could have just told me,” Shana snapped.
“Alpha said we couldn’t. He said it didn’t matter who it was. It was the principle of the thing.”
Of course. The principle. Trust the demented Alpha to make a big damned deal about principles when he could have just told her she didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning it back.
Shana turned and looked at the borrowed bungalow. It actually wasn’t that bad. As a starting point. A few challenges and she could trade up—principles be damned. Even if she couldn’t get her own place back, that didn’t mean she couldn’t get some nicer digs. And when she was the Alpha’s mate, even Tyler wouldn’t deny her. She’d have her place back. And her rightful place in the pride.
Goddesses and queens did not beg. Or fight. People gave them things.
“Your mother’s asking for you.”
Shana flinched at Loralee’s softly uttered words. Her mother. Living proof that queens did beg. Pathetic, deposed, drunkard queens who had lost all claims on self-respect. “What does she want?”
“She wants to see you,” Loralee said gently. “She’s missed you too.”
Shana knew what Loralee had missed. It was a little harder to pin down what her mother might have missed in her absence. A handy chauffeur to the nearest liquor store? Someone to look down on when she’d sunk so low it was hard to imagine anyone lower?
“She can go screw herself,” Shana whispered, barely mouthing the words.
“What was that?” Loralee asked, sweetness and innocence and weakness personified. Pathetic.
“I’ll go see her myself,” Shana said louder, brushing past the smaller female.
She sloshed through the melting snow, her mind closed to the pleasures of the winter sun and the playfulness of a snowy morning. She was going to see her mother. Firing squads were more congenial.