Bite of the Moon: Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance Boxed Set (54 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

In that fucking back hallway again, where Tabitha Vallins had smashed into Finn and stumbled onto her pretty round ass and right back into his life, the scout slammed her against the wall. She didn’t flinch when he punched the worn cinderblock beside her head. That made it worse. She’d sure as hell flinched for Mick, just the way the alpha liked it. Just the way Lebeau liked her.

Half a dozen curses tried to come out of Finn’s mouth at once, but there wasn’t room with his furious breath hissing through his clenched teeth. Why the fuck had she come looking for him—for the Sons? What in the hell would have made her think that transforming into a full shifter—a Fenris Wolf—was something she’d want? And why did her nerves dance and her heart pound when Mick so much as looked at her? Yet she could just stand there and glower at Finn’s temper with her bottom lip puffed out? Willful little lupa bitch!

When Finn brought his face right up to Tabitha’s, lording over her, instead of berating and threatening her, his mouth took hers with a fury that smacked her head back against the wall.

Tabitha’s whimper of shock and pain stabbed into Finn’s chest, like they were still teenaged lovers clinging to one another, like he was still her protector. Like he was still a stupid boy who didn’t know the beast within him was so much more than adolescent hormones run amok. As far away from all that as they were now, in this beer-stinking wolves’ den, Finn instinctively pulled back to keep from hurting her again. Without thinking about it, his hand slid up to cradle her head where he’d bumped her against the wall.

It was Tabitha who wouldn’t let Finn step back and break the kiss. Her hand in his hair made a fist to hold his mouth to hers. Her hot tongue met the challenge of his and slid between his lips.

Tabitha kissed like a fucking full-on she-wolf. Driving tongue, scraping teeth, rushing breath. But she tasted of herbs and musk and heat, just the way a doe tasted. Just like prey. If she was going to offer herself, Finn’s wolf was going to feast. The man, if he’d had anything to say about it… would have agreed.

Finn pushed forward again. His body grew more rigid with need by the moment. Firm, flexing muscle met the yielding softness of Tabitha’s form and burned for the familiar sensation of the silk of her skin against his. The hand that had cradled her head crept up those few inches to wrap her ponytail around his fingers. When he jerked back on her hair, her startled moan opened her mouth all the wider for him to drink in her lust and distress. She should have struggled when his other hand tugged at the shoulder of her tank top. Instead, she rolled her shoulder and her wide, lush hips as she groaned with desire.

It was second nature, the nature of the beast, for the biker to rip the flimsy material away and bare his female for his pleasure, for both their pleasure. The bliss of feeling Tabitha’s satiny smooth skin again was torment, too. It couldn’t ever be like it had been between them, not just because he was a wolf shifter but because he was one of the Sons. The value in that was the power and fear that came with the pack and its well-earned reputation. Finn wasn’t giving that up for Tabitha or anyone.

As quickly as the scout had stripped the woman half naked, down to those shorts and a bra so lace and thin that he could see the deep pink of her nipple as it stiffened and peaked, Finn shoved himself away from Tabitha. She mewed again, but it didn’t sound like it was from her shoulders hitting the wall. It sounded like a kitten when someone took away her milk.

“Damn but you have fucked us both, Tabitha,” he said and snarled as he combed his hands roughly through the ragged remains of his hair. Yes, and it was as sore a subject as Mick had hoped when needling Finn in the club.

She didn’t have the good sense to grab the scrap of her top from the floor to cover herself, so Finn had to turn his back, He breathed through the urge to tear the bra from the swell of her pale, gorgeous tits.

“So you remember me after all.”

Finn ground his teeth against the rise of his canines.
Pouty little….
He wouldn’t—couldn’t—turn to look at Tabitha. “You have no idea how many different ways you have put us both in danger, and the worst is giving the Sons even the slightest hint that we know each other.”

“Because then they’d know you were the one who told me about them,” she concluded.

“Oh, more than that,” Finn barked and spun on the girl without meaning to let himself face her again. She just pressed every button he had. He had no control with her and damn sure no control over her. Tabitha stood glaring at him with those light eyes piercing him through as sure as an Odin Wolf’s claws. “They’d suspect there was something between us before, and Mick would try to use that to get to me. If there is a bond between us and something to it and I bite you….” Finn shook his head, shook out even the thought of biting the girl.

“Why didn’t you tell me that’s how wolves turn?” she asked, indignant, like her marching into Skin and getting both of them into this mess was his fault.

“It’s not how all wolves turn, and there’s no way to tell just from a latent’s smell what kind they are. It moves in the blood, so we’d have to know who in your family was a shifter and what breed they were.”

“But I don’t have family left.” Tabitha pursed her lips down hard on that statement before adding, “I don’t have anyone.”

There was no faster way to make Finn mad than to order him around, like Mick did all the time, or to try to make him feel guilty. Especially if it worked. Coolly, he told Tabitha, “Joining a gang of biker werewolves is no way to change that.”

Without missing a beat, she countered, “At least I’d be able to protect myself.”

Finn wasn’t expecting to see the least sense to her logic, but there it was. The same reason as his own. Reluctantly he nodded, his shoulders relaxing to a weary slump as he let his weight rest against the other wall, facing Tabitha. “Able to protect yourself from men, yes, from
humans
. But now? Now you’ve got the Sons themselves to worry about.”

Instead of seeming concerned, like she was beginning to really understand in the least why this couldn’t happen, the she-wolf in Tabitha came out again. She lifted her chin in defiance that made him want to strangle her as badly as he wanted to kiss her. “That just means we need to hurry up and get it over with.” She actually turned and tilted her head a bit to one side, like Finn was just going to do it there in the hallway at Skin. Yeah, right, with a janitor out sweeping the stage and Jiminy downing scotch over his ledgers in the office. It wasn’t going to be that clean or that quiet if he did it. Which he wouldn’t.

When Finn chuckled sarcastically and shook his head no again, Tabitha huffed and folded her arms. He couldn’t ignore the way the pose pushed up her breasts no matter how hard he tried, not with how hard the sight made his cock.

“There’s a way of it, Tabitha. There’s a process and timing to it. I can’t just do it here and now.” When she rolled her eyes, he added flat and low, “I’m not going to bite you, period. Not ever. I don’t care what Mick says. I’m not taking on this responsibility.” Not risking the bond between them turning out to be something more, something neither of them could ever take back. And a tool for Lebeau to use to control, confine, torment Finn in a way the scout swore to himself would never happen again. “I’m not your rescuer anymore.”

The look of pain that flickered across her rounded cheeks and pinched her lips again showed Finn that he’d hit his mark. Breaking Tabitha’s heart was the only way he knew to make her leave. So be it. If breaking it permanently was the only way to make her stay away….

“You’re the Sons’ recruiter. You have to do it.”

“That’s not the reason Mick wants to make me bite you, and, no, I don’t have to obey him just because he’s an alpha who calls himself president of a biker gang.”

Finn would have been telling the truth about most orders from Mick—obedience from a Fenris Wolf one time in ten. This was that one time. Finn was going to have to come up with one hell of an excuse for not biting Tabitha. Maybe he could make it look like she’d gotten scared and run from him when an attack from Odin’s Wolves or government hunters from the Agency had Finn distracted. That assumed he could convince the willful lupa to cooperate with the ploy. He did have some savings to give her to get her out of town.

Jesus, he was doing it again. Rescuing Tabitha was a way of life for Finn, an instinct. He tried to comfort himself by concentrating on the fact that he was saving himself as much as he was saving her from life among the Sons, as a Fenris Wolf.

Uh-oh, that puffed out bottom lip again. “Then Lebeau will order someone else to do it, and they will,” she said. She tried to whirl and march off down the hallway with that declaration lingering in her wake. Might have been handy if she hadn’t been topless except for a bra, but she didn’t seem to care at all. Even with the rest of the pack gone with Ox back to the Sons’ house to talk about the club’s next run, Finn wasn’t going to let her walk around like that.

He strode after the girl and caught her from behind by her arms. Finn dragged her back against his body, grunting briefly when the line of her sweet, round ass in those thin shorts pressed flush to the ridge of his hard-on through his jeans.

His lips brought to the curl of her ear, Finn breathed, “If one of them bites you and you don’t turn, if your wolf’s blood isn’t the right kind, they’ll kill you, Tabitha.” At this, the girl stopped wriggling and went still and completely silent. Finn’s wolf let him sense the pounding of her heart as though he could hear it in his own head as surely as she was listening to it in hers. “That’s why Mick wants me to do it. The way he’s caught us looking at one another, and knowing you’re holding back information…. He wants me to be the one to kill you, if it comes to that.” It was a torment and test of loyalty, two things that were big with Lebeau.

The statement, the reality of the situation, took a few seconds for that to penetrate for the girl. Then goose bumps rose along her skin. The shifter felt her blood go cold. Something he’d said had finally gotten through to her.

As true as Finn’s determination was to leave behind the job of protecting Tabitha, protecting
anyone
, he still wrapped his arms around her when she slumped weak and confused back against him.

CHAPTER FIVE

Three firm, slow raps on the door. Then a few seconds and another three. Then again. Tabitha knew who it was, from the deliberate and ominous persistence. The knocking never grew more hurried or more forceful. It just methodically wore on her nerves until she cracked open the door of the faded but well-kept bungalow to peer out into the morning sun.

“Hey, Mick,” she said, then paused to clear the rasp from her throat.

Maybe he’d just think it was too early for her, hard night, too much to drink. That had to be believable to a biker, and a werewolf, for that matter. But just as believable was the fact that the sight of him sent paralyzing dread shooting down her spine, now that she knew that Lebeau would see her dead if she didn’t turn out to be a Fenris Wolf. The really hard part for Tabitha to swallow was the fact that the latent in her reacted more and more like a tabby cat in heat to the proximity of the alpha shifter. Adrenaline and hormones gushed into her system at the sight of him. It was every bit as nerve-wracking as seeing Finn, just in a different way. At least Mick didn’t make her chest ache with loneliness.

“Finn’s not here.” That was the dismal truth. In the few days Tabitha had been hiding out at his house, she’d hardly seen him. Plenty of time alone to come to grips with what she didn’t mean to him anymore.

The shifter’s broad chest shook briefly with a snort of amusement. Under his black denim cut with all the biker patches proclaiming him a thorough badass, Mick wore only a snug white wifebeater. That left his arms bare and the faint scars of gashes and what she suspected were teeth and claw wounds clearly visible. The man was… a magnificent beast tainted by the mind of one dangerous and vaguely evil motherfucker—as Tabitha had heard Finn describe him.

“I’m not surprised to hear that,” the MC president told her. “Finn stays on the road as much as possible, nearly as much as Ox does. It’s just in his blood to….” Mick chose his words with deliberation. “To roam the pack territory. Did you know wolves in the wild often have areas they claim of a hundred square miles or more? They’re always on the move stalking what’s theirs so no other packs or predators come in to take it from them. Could get lonely for you, though, couldn’t it, Tabbycat?”

“I’m good, thanks,” she said sharply, trying to cut off the path of that line of thinking before it got to the point where Lebeau expected to “tie up” with the new pack prospect.

He pushed the door open and stepped forward as he agreed, “Yes, you are, and you’re not bound to let anyone forget that.”

The shifter stalked into Finn’s house and took a few seconds sizing up the clean but minimal décor. Finn had chosen all the furniture in predictably masculine shades of sand and brown, and lacking in the throw pillows popular with females.

“Ah, Finn, how fucking domestic,” Mick chided under his breath.

Tabitha left the front door ajar and stayed near it. “Not your taste?” she asked without intonation, which was itself a veiled expression of disdain. If she couldn’t pretend not to be scared—and Finn had assured her all the Sons could smell her fear and her lust—she could at least impress Lebeau with the sheer magnitude of her hatred for being treated like a biker gang mama. “What does a club president’s house look like?”

“You’ll see. Yes, you will, soon enough,” Mick promised. “The guys spend most of their nights at the clubhouse. The wolves’ den, I should say. Pretty much what you’d expect with a full bar, pool table, wall-to-wall pussy on tap for the pack.” When Tabitha winced but otherwise did not respond, he went on. “Most of the guys keep their own little pads like this for when they need to tie one on or sleep one off away from pack demands. But this….” Mick opened his arms in gesture. “This place is downright homey. I’ll have to compliment Finn on his interior design.”

As pack alpha, as MC president, as Mick Lebeau stalking around looking as tall, dark, and dangerous as he did, he must have expected more amusement or at least deference from Tabitha. She gave him civility and silence and stayed next to that open door. The breeze that swept in did the girl a favor by clearing her nostrils of Lebeau’s alpha musk of spice and whiskey and fertile earth.

Mick sidled a couple of steps back toward Tabitha, within claw’s reach, so to speak. “So you’re staying here with Finn until the full moon?”

Tabitha’s throat went dry. She tried not to dwell on the significance of the question, but it was ridiculous to think she could avoid the matter, especially with Mick. With a slight, quick nod, she said, “Yeah.”

Lebeau huffed out a suggestive chuckle. “M-hm, for
bonding
before the main event.” The man obviously assumed she was sharing Finn’s bed, but she wasn’t. The scout, when he had been there at all, had been sleeping on the couch to avoid her and the issue of biting her while he looked for a way out of the whole situation. “Finn explained all that to you, did he? Taking you under his wing as club recruiter and beginning to form that connection that will make you a real member of the pack?”

“And turning me from latent to shifter with a bite on the full moon. Yeah, he explained.” Five days down. Four days left until the culmination of the moon cycle, and they crept by as Tabitha suffered through Finn’s constant rejection.

The alpha peered at Tabitha, as though wondering if Finn had explained what would happen to her if she didn’t have enough shifter blood in her or was the wrong breed of wolf. She didn’t let on, just folded her arms over her t-shirt and the sweats she’d slept in and forced a small yawn. That made Lebeau chuckle again.

“Get dressed, Tabbycat.”

She felt her eyes flare despite her best effort to hide her spike of apprehension. “Why?”

“Not healthy for a wolf—even a latent—to be cooped up too long. I’m seeing to some club business today. You have to learn about that, too, if you’re going to be, well, I guess a daughter of the Sons. Finn’s not going to teach you that, for damn sure.”

Tabitha creased her brow at the reference she didn’t entirely understand, the suggestion that there were some pack activities Finn didn’t join in on. She didn’t say anything, though, just padded barefoot back into the bedroom and shut the door. Then she gathered her clothes and took them into the bathroom to change, shutting that door behind her, too.

Out at the curb, Lebeau’s Harley crouched in wait like a huge chrome beast itself. The biker handed Tabitha a helmet. “Safety first.”

Who the hell was he kidding? The least dangerous aspect of Tabitha’s next few hours was the fact that she was experiencing her tour of the worst ‘hoods in town from the back of a weaving, speeding motorcycle being driven by an alpha werewolf biker who wanted to fuck her and kill her, probably in that order, but she was just assuming. Worse was the unsettling sensation of cruising around on the huge vibrating bike with her thighs spread wide and Mick fitted between them.

“You follow my lead, stay close, and keep your pretty mouth shut,” Mick instructed each time they made a stop.

On the back stairs of an apartment above an Asian market, a kid who couldn’t have been more than ten years old handed Mick a thick envelope through the door while what sounded suspiciously like Mahjong tiles clacked in the background. A flurry of voices indicated far too many people inside for a casual game. A cut of gambling proceeds, for protection maybe, Tabitha speculated to herself.

In the alley two doors down from a gun shop, a scrawny redneck came out the backdoor to talk about modified custom assault rifles that didn’t have the annoying restrictions on rate of fire or magazine capacity required in California. Mick wanted a dozen and knew people who wouldn’t mind the mark-up, he said. Tabitha wondered if he’d keep a few for the Sons, or didn’t they need firepower with fangs and claws?

Amid a dingy excuse for a suburb of dilapidated matchbox pre-fabs with tarp for curtains and the disturbing stink of harsh chemicals wafting from the backyards, the Harley wound through dusty, unpaved alleys. Mick made more cryptic small talk over the fence with a guy who had to pull down his breathing mask to chat.

“What do you want for this batch?” the greasy tweaker asked Lebeau.

“This one is special, for the ladies.” Mick looked sidelong at Tabitha. “What do you think, kitty cat? You like cherry or grape better?”

“Cherry or grape what?”

“None of your business. Answer the question.”

“Cherry, I guess.”

Mick nodded to Tabitha and then the lank-haired stranger. “Cherry, it is.”

“Cherry,” the man repeated in affirmation. “Give me a couple days and send someone around to the skate park. Not your sergeant if he’s still being a pussy about this.”

The reference to Garik snagged Tabitha’s attention. In front of her on the bike, Mick’s back stiffened.

“My enforcer is my concern, not yours. Don’t open your hole about it again.”

Once the guy had disappeared in skulky silence back into the glorified shed of a house, Tabitha asked through gritted teeth, “What did I just participate in?” She’d heard about drugs coming in a variety of favors, meth in particular, when intended to hook women.

“Don’t get all moral on me now, kitten. You’re the one who came looking for the big bad biker gang.”

And wasn’t that just a cold, hard truth she wasn’t at all prepared to consider? Further proof that looking for the Sons to turn her was an insane idea. What she really wanted to know, though, as she rode with Mick to the next stop with her hands twisting the denim of his cut in tense fists, was how much of this Finn took part in. Had he knowingly supported moving illegally-modified guns? Drugs? The boy she’d grown up with hated that gangster culture than churned and burned through street kids and foster kids, turning them into users or pushers, victims or victimizers, all eventually used up and discarded. Even after the night things had gotten so out of hand, and Finn had disappeared, she still had that image of him in her head.

Deeply disconcerted, Tabitha was happy for the moment to herself when Mick left her with the motorcycle in a cool, dim, quiet underground parking garage in a nicer commercial district. No gangsta’s or tweakers there. Manicured trophy wives toting bundles of boutique bags and stockbrokers with slender designer briefcases meandered casually back and forth between the elevators and European sedans.

Even as Tabitha’s thoughts wandered back dismally over all the fantasies she’d had as a girl about marrying Finn and living in a big Tuscan-style villa someplace with bars on the gates instead of the windows, she was alert enough to pick up on the place going silent. The three large men in black suits who came out of the elevator car all together weren’t like the other people she’d seen. Where had everyone else gone?

Knowing from experience that the only faster way to trigger a predator’s instinct to pounce than open challenge was quick retreat, Tabitha slipped nonchalantly off Lebeau’s Harley. She headed toward a garbage bin that also happened to be in the direction of the ramp up toward the street. In her hand, she held Mick’s extra helmet loosely by the chinstrap, ready to swing it, if necessary. Tabitha didn’t run until she had several large SUV’s and a thick concrete column to block the view between the hulking men and herself. The flurry of pounding steps behind her confirmed her instinct to flee.

The girl had her head down, ears perked for the sharp footfalls echoing behind her. The men had spread out, making her veer one direction, then another. Adrenaline revved Tabitha’s heartbeat and made it throb in her head, distorting her senses when she needed to stay cool.

At least that was Tabitha’s excuse for scurrying toward the ramp only to smack into a white-haired man in yachtsman-style upscale dress—designer deck shoes that matched his All-American polo while his slacks matched his sports coat. That style often passed in California as the middle ground between full suit and business casual. It just had to be expensive enough, and his was. At the foot of a set of steps she hadn’t seen landing perpendicular to the ramp, the two huffed out the impact of their shoulder-to-shoulder collision.

“Oh, my dear, please excuse me.” He steadied Tabitha with his cool hands gently gripping her upper arms as he apologized for her distraction.

Between the abrupt silence that fell behind her in the garage and his calming manner, a cross between Old Hollywood leading man and Harrison Ford, Tabitha found herself almost jarringly subdued just that quickly.

“I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t looking.”

Tabitha’s own regrets tumbled out of her with a chill of unexpected déjà vu. That moment might have been the first time, since she’d lost her parents to a violent accident almost before she’d had the chance to form any memories of her family, that she could recall her mother and the woman teaching her to call people sir and ma’am. In fact, the memory was so early that Tabitha could not picture her mother’s face. The feeling of a maternal presence had survived in her recollections only as a voice, a flash of a gold summer dress, a sense of warmth.

And how strange that the sense of warmth would automatically connect itself to the white-haired stranger—because he’d chanced upon her in a moment of distress, had steadied her, had smiled when he could just have easily barked at her over her carelessness in running into him.

“Please, I ask all the pretty young ladies to call me Thomas so I don’t feel so old. Mr. Poulsen, if you must be formal. Let me get a look at you now, dear,” he insisted. The senior made a peculiarly thorough survey of Tabitha, though without actually touching her and, thankfully, without even the least lascivious creeper vibe. “All in one piece? Nothing dropped? No scuffs or scrapes?”