Craving Her (Keeping Her Series Book 4)

CRAVING
HER

by
Kelly Lucille

Text Copyright Kelly Lucille 2015

All
Rights Reserved

CHAPTER
ONE

Leaning against her
helicopter, Cleo slapped another bug away from her neck and wondered at the
insects here in Columbia.  You would think even in the dense wet jungles of the
Amazon they would have better sense than to try and bite a lion-shifter.  She
squashed another mosquito before it could land and then had to flick off the
dead mosquito gunk from her hand. 
Apparently not.

She wiped what was left
on her green cargo pants and glared at the dense foliage surrounding her.  The
humidity during the second rainy season of the area had her clothes sticking to
her skin.  Twice now while she was waiting it had rained, cooling it off for
about a minute, and making the heat that followed feel ten times worse.  She
was out of the direct rain, but it didn’t seem to matter when she was sweating
so much her socks were squishing in her combat boots.

There’s a reason lions stick
to the grass lands of Africa
, she thought
, at
least it’s a dry heat.

Not that she wouldn’t
welcome a shift and run here in the wild primitive jungles of the Amazon, but
she had a job to do.  Her first official paying
combat
gig for
Lionsgate, so stripping down her weapons and clothes and going for a jaunt
would be a bad idea.  Of course, if those monkeys kept screaming at her and throwing
disgusting things, she might do it just for the satisfaction of eating the
little bastards.  They never got close enough to actually hit her, but still .
. . it annoyed.

Sigh. 
It
had been an exciting idea, a real combat position, a chance to use all of her
extensive training, until they arrived and she was told to stay with her helo. 
Even then there was the slim possibility that she would be challenged to fly
them out under fire.  But after six miserable hours of boredom and flying
monkey excrement, she was ready to get back home, where at least
something
was always happening.

“Helo, you copy?”  The
com blared and she threw herself through to the cockpit, grabbing for it like
the lifeline it was.

Her slick thumb slid off
the button but she got it depressed.  “This is helo, over.”

“We’re coming in on foot
with the target.  FARC passed us by and may be bearing down on your position. 
They have anti-aircraft, recommend you take off and we will hump it to the
secondary location.”

Logan McCord was a tall,
rangy, broad shouldered, 6’ 2” cowboy.  Normally he talked slow and smooth. 
Right now she could hear the tension in his voice.  He might have been
recommending an action, but what he meant was move your ass out of here.  There
was little chance the guerrillas would not find her either.  This was one of
the few places with open space for a chopper. It was slowly being reclaimed by
the encroaching jungle attesting to its lack of recent use, but they would
still be aware of its existence, since they were the ones who likely cleared
the space for their drug planes to begin with.

And since he was an ex-Navy
SEAL team captain, wolf-shifter, when Logan said something she listened.

She opened her mouth to
agree, already hopping into the pilot seat and buckling in.  Then she heard the
motor in the distance and cursed.  “Looks like it’s too late for that.  If they
have anti-aircraft they will be on me before I can get out of range.”

She heard quite a bit of
colorful cursing on the line, before Logan spoke again.  “We’re on the way. 
Shift and hide in the jungle until we get there, over.”  There were two things
wrong with that scenario.  One was that her modified Black Hawk, one of three
she regarded as close members of the family, may or may not be here and in one
piece when she shifted back; and two, the chopper was on a small patch of high
ground, and they would not shift with the human rescue they brought with them. 
They would be at a disadvantage in a fire fight. Not that Cleo had any doubts
they could handle it. Even if it was just Logan on his own, he could handle
more than a car load of drug runners, but with Shawn Ryan with him, she almost
felt sorry for the rabble.  But again, her Black Hawk would be at the mercy of
drug running thugs for however long it took them to get here, and they would be
shooting towards it when they arrived.

She unbuckled her belt
and pressed the com.  “I’m heading into the jungle.  Maintain radio silence.  I’ll
lead them away from the helo until you arrive.  Don’t shoot me when you get
here.  Over and out.”

There was more cursing on
the line, this time the whiskey warm voice of Shawn Ryan could be heard as
well.  As always, the sound of that seldom heard voice sent shivers to all her
girly places, and as always, she ignored them.  She didn’t plan on sticking
around to argue, but she imagined they would be moving fast.  Right now she had
heavily armed drug runners from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia to
deal with, also known as FARC.  The angry overprotective shifters would have to
wait.

Cleo pulled her HK P30 and
checked the clip.  Snapping it back into place, she pushed in the code to
disable the weapons and navigations on the Black Hawk.  It was an Eli
modification that ensured no one used their own equipment against them.  Their
computer guy, Eli Ramsey, was something of a genius with computers.  Someone
with his know-how might be able to hack it, in a month or so, but the FARC
guerrillas coming this way, in the small window they had? Not a chance.

She grabbed her rifle,
canteen, and emergency pack and headed for the jungle.  She made the dense
foliage and found a tree that looked likely.  She climbed it nimbly, finding a
high perch and setting up her rifle.  Then she waited, watching the sorry excuse
for a road and what was left of the landing strip.  She didn’t have a long
wait.

The Jeep Rubicon came
into sight kicking up dust.  She counted eight armed fighters with everything
from automatic weapons to machetes bristling out the windows.  They stopped at
a distance from the Black Hawk, but with her keen hearing, she could hear the smattering
of conversation in Spanish.  They were expressing curiosity and avarice at the
sight of the shiny black copter.  Along with a whole smattering of curse words,
some she had heard before, some were brand new.  They also discussed all the
ways they were going to kill the men who flew it.  They were graphic and spoken
with relish, making her lion want to chuff in irritation at their threats to
her pack.  They left the Jeep, fanning out across the landing strip.  One in
particular was fingering his knife and talking loudly in Spanish about how he
was going to “destripar ellos como un pez.”  Roughly translated: “Gut them like
a fish.”  He had more to say but she was through listening.  Sighting
carefully, she took him out with one shot between the eyes.

Everybody scattered.  She
took out three more likely looking sociopaths the same way before the rest
frantically found cover, and then she pushed her rifle behind her across her
pack, and jumped from her high perch to the ground.  If she had been a normal
human she would have broken bones.  Since she wasn’t a normal human, she was
running almost before her feet hit the ground.  She heard the yelling and the weapons
firing behind her, but even in human form, she was fast and light on her feet. 
She was deep in the jungle long before they sent a missile into the trees,
raining fire that could be seen for miles.

With only four guerrillas
still alive, tracking her through the jungle, no one was left to bother the
Black Hawk.  From a new hiding place significantly farther than where they were
looking, Cleo waited and smiled.  She buried her pack and rifle in the hollow
under a fallen tree where she could find them later.  Four down, four to go. 
Cleo went hunting.

***

Shawn Ryan heard the
explosion and felt every muscle in his body lock up.  If he considered the
situation, chances that Cleo would be caught in it were slim to none.  She might
be twenty-one and green where combat was concerned, but she was a lion-shifter
and smart, not to mention she had been trained by the whole of the Lionsgate
pack since birth in weapons and tactics, among other things.  But, while his
head was telling him she was fine, he could not seem to convince his body, which
had been trying to shift ever since he heard the vehicle pass and knew the drug
runners would get to Cleo before them.  He looked at Logan, and what he was
feeling must have been clear in his eyes because Logan reached around him to take
his pack. 

“Go,” he said, “I’ll stay
with the target.  Come back when Cleo is safe.”  Logan dropped the heavy gear
along with his own and the two-hundred-plus-pound rescued hostage to the ground
with equal care.  He pulled his gun and checked the clip, chambering a round. 

Shawn didn’t ask him if
he was sure.  He removed the gear he needed to and shifted, leaving the rest of
his camo and weapons to float away from his smaller hawk form.  He wasted no
time flying towards the gun fight he could hear in the distance, leaving their
target passed out on the ground and bleeding from multiple torture wounds with
only one to watch him.  It was unprofessional as hell, but right at the moment
he did not give a fuck, and neither apparently did Logan — not when it was Cleo
under fire.  They would deal with her anger at the special treatment when they
had her safe and headed back home to Napa.  Why the hell her father would send
her on this mission in the first place, he had no fucking clue.  She may be the
best natural born pilot any of them had ever seen but she was not a soldier.

***

Cleo took out one of the
guerrilla’s from above.  Before he could react other than to grunt at her
weight dropping on him, she had slit his throat and rolled away.  The last
three were a little trickier as they were clearly better trained, keeping cover
and sticking close together.  She was contemplating her choices when she heard
one of them scream.  She moved up in time to see his legs disappearing into the
thick jungle brush overhead. 

Classic Shawn move. 
Other
shifter types made the mistake of thinking a bird was not predator enough to
frighten.  She had seen him lift fully-grown wolf-shifters in those razor sharp
talons, carrying them struggling to panic-inducing altitudes and then dropping
them from heights guaranteed to leave them broken and bloody on the pavement. 
Humans didn’t stand a chance.

The other two were
shouting and firing above their heads at their disappearing friend, so Cleo
took the time to take out the one not obscured by brush with a quick pistol
shot to the throat.  He gurgled his next scream and grabbed for his throat. 
Cleo turned to see his friend had disappeared.

Before she could move her
position, a large freshly-shifted, and therefore, naked male dropped down on
her just when a shot came her way from the brush.  The bullet thunked uselessly
into the tree behind where her shoulder had been moments ago.  Unfortunately,
she forgot all about the gunman in the jungle when faced with being crushed to
the ground under a very naked and ripped Shawn Ryan.

Three inches taller than
her at a whipcord and lean six feet; when she wore heels, which was rare, they
were eye to eye.  Right now, with his hard body pressed along the deceptive
softness of hers, she felt at a distinct disadvantage.  Especially when her
nipples beaded so that he had to feel it through the thin lace of her bra and
t-shirt.  His eyes shifted to raptor gold even as she thought it.  Eye to eye,
chest to chest, and groin to groin, neither of them moved, and it was not long
before she was aware of just how happy he was to be right where he was.

Cleo dragged in a ragged
breath and watched as his eyes glued themselves to her lips.  In a moment, she
would be perfuming the jungle with her need, and wouldn’t that be as
embarrassing as all the years she spent mooning over this particular man from a
distance.  There was a gunman escaping about ten yards away, Logan was around
somewhere with the target, and all she could think about was those hard lips so
close to her own.  She wanted so badly to taste them; she had since she knew
what kissing was, but he had made it abundantly clear he considered her too
young, and nothing to him but her father’s daughter.

Cleo couldn’t care less
if he was 37 to her 21.  She needed him to make a move.  Had needed him for so
long. Having that hard erection and hot skin pressed to her most girly of
places was making her yearn to rub all over him like a cat in heat.

“Are you going to do
something sailor, or keep pretending you don’t want me?” she said, her voice
breathy beneath the challenge.

He narrowed those heated
eyes and growled just a little.  “Big words for a little girl.”

That voice. Smooth, low,
and dark, every word out of his mouth was like prolonged foreplay.  If he didn’t
speak so rarely, she probably would have jumped him as a teenager.  She purred
without thinking, and he cursed, starting to push himself off.  She wrapped her
legs around his lean hips, wrapping him up tight.  Even with all her weapons in
the way, she could feel the size and heat of him through her cargo pants.  She
might as well be naked.  He cursed and she leaned up and nipped his lower lip
in retaliation, licking her own to get the small taste of Shawn it afforded
her.

Whatever had been holding
back the tide broke, because as soon as she licked across her lips he was right
there, taking her mouth, every part of it.  With tongue and lip and teeth.  The
taste of him was hot and smooth.  His hands fisting in her hair held her in
place and made her want to purr again.  That quickly, he took everything that
she had to give and then demanded more, grinding his hips against her softness
with no thought to the hard ground or weapons he bruised them against.  He
savaged her, and Cleo reveled in it.