Ladies Prefer Champagne Alpha Male Romance Mega Bundle (2 page)

Vicious

The big man reached into his jacket and pulled out not a gun but a long, cruel looking Bowie knife. He took a swipe at the other stranger, who ducked and sent the bottle of wine crashing into the big man’s face.

It shattered, slicing the cruel, ugly face, sending rivulets of blood into the man’s grey beard. He howled, sounding more like a wolf than a man.

“That’s it, you little son of a bitch. You’re asking for it.”

And then, to my horror, before my very eyes, he began to… Change. He grew taller, the hair on his face grew thicker, and his nose became longer and longer, growing into a snout. He was turning into a wolf, a real wolf, standing on his hind legs, before my very eyes!

The wolf creature’s hand shot out and grasped the young man around the neck, lifting him clean off the ground. I stopped trying to process what was going on.

Instead, I leapt over the bar and crawled over to where we kept the shotgun. It was a short, ugly, double-barrelled monstrosity but there was no way it wouldn’t do the job. With trembling fingers, I loaded two cartridges into the breech and then vaulted myself over the bar.

The young man was struggling against the big wolf’s grip, digging his fingers into that hideous, hairy hand.

“You wanted to know my name, boy?” the wolf growled, its voice otherworldly and terrifying. “I’m the wolf they call Vicious.”

The young stranger tried to kick the wolf man in the face, his legs flailing uselessly as he hung there in the air, struggling.

Without thinking, I marched right up to the wolf and pressed the double barrels of the shotgun against the beast’s head.

“Your steak’s getting cold,” I growled and then squeezed my eyes shut as I pulled the trigger. Both barrels went off at once.

I felt a hot shower of blood splatter over me as the best crumpled, slamming into the floor boards with a crash almost as loud as the gun’s report.

“That bitch killed Vicious!” the one-eyed man screamed after a second of stunned silence.

“Kill her! Fuck her up!” one of the other bikers yelled. I suddenly wished I had stuck a few more rounds into my pocket. The bikers stood directly between me and the bar. How the hell was I going to get over there?

“OUT!” came a terrifying, horrifying roar. I looked over to the beast’s corpse and crouching over it was another wolf: smaller than that huge monster but somehow even more terrifying, more muscular, saliva dripping from his long fangs.

“What the fuck is that?!”

“He’s like Vicious!”

“Kill the fucker!”

In a moment, knives, pistols, and clubs were drawn but the smaller wolf leapt into the air, crashing into the table where the bikers sat. He had two of them by the throat and hurled them into the bar, bringing down a storm of brightly colored liquors. 

One of the bikers threw a poorly considered right cross at the wolf that just slid off his snout before opening him up to a brutal bite to the throat.

The wolf came charging at me, bounding on all fours, and I screamed as he grabbed me, standing up suddenly, a sharply clawed paw closing around my arm. I marveled for a moment at how much his paw felt like his hand when he had grabbed my wrist earlier. Somehow, it made me feel safer, more secure.

Even with everything that had just happened, I felt weirdly safe now that he had me. He dragged me out the door and as we tumbled into the parking lot, me still dragging the shotgun and him dragging me, he began to shrink, returning to his human form.

But his jacket was in tatters, revealing his well-muscled torso, covered now in bruises and cuts.

“Get on the bike,” he ordered as we came to what must have been his. Without waiting for me to comply, he leapt onto it, and it roared to life, growling with high-octane rage between his legs.

“Where are we going?”

“Don’t ask questions. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Who are you?”

“Don’t ask questions! Do you want to die? You saw what happened in there!”

I didn’t need to hear anything more. He was right. Whatever happened in there just proved that everything I thought I knew about the world was wrong. Why the hell shouldn’t I get on this motorcycle with this handsome, practically shirtless stranger?

You know, when you phrase it like that, that always seems like a good choice.

On the Run

I tried to interrogate him for the first few miles we roared down the highway but I couldn’t hear his answers over the scream of the bike’s engine so after a few muffled answers, I just gave up.

I nestled my face into the back of his neck, taking some comfort in how warm he was, how strong his muscles felt beneath his skin, stretched tight and tensed. He was well slicked with sweat and he smelled, well, just like he looked: like he’d just come from one hell of a fight, with the added scent of cheap red wine and steak.

And how the hell was he able to drive so well after drinking an entire bottle of red wine in less than an hour? This boy had some answering to do.

After about an hour of charging through the night, we pulled off onto an off ramp.

We cruised through the darkened streets of a no-name, no-future town and finally pulled into the parking lot of a filthy looking motel that promised a pool, cable TV, and ice, according to the flickering neon sign outside.

“Get us a room,” the stranger ordered. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. “I’d do it myself but I think they’d have too many questions if they saw me now. Let me in once you’ve gotten the keys.”

“Who are you?” I blurted out, refusing to move from the back of the bike, there in that silent parking lot.

“I told you, on the highway.”

“I couldn’t hear you.”

“Frost. My name is Frost.”

“That’s a dumb name. What’s your real name?”

He paused before sighing.

“I also go by Joey. Joey Smith?”

“That’s an even dumber name.”

He cracked a toothy smile. “Tia isn’t a dumb name? What are you, some sort of stripper?”

“Hey, at least it doesn’t sound made up like some people’s names.”

I hopped off the bike, satisfied for the time being, and strode off towards the office. I could feel his eyes on me, following my body. I was glad I had left the shotgun with him. There was no way I could take the into the motel office.

And no way I could go in looking like I did. I stopped and checked my nappy, slightly disheveled hair, my face in the rear-view mirror on an empty parked car.

Most of the blood had landed on my face, in droplets that were easy to scrape off.

A couple droplets had splattered over my shirt but they weren’t readily identifiable as blood. It just looked like maybe, just maybe I was too messy with my barbeque.

I got a room no problem. Places like this weren’t in the business of turning down a desperate looking customer with a lot of cold, hard cash on hand.

The halls of the motel were dingy, dusty, and smelled like age and neglect and old peanut butter. Our room wasn’t much better. It was a single bed, a TV, a nightstand and a few chairs that looked like they could use a new upholstering.

Hold on. A single bed? But there were two of us. This could get interesting.

On the other hand, I definitely wasn’t opposed to the idea of sleeping in the same bed as this handsome stranger, this… Frost. I wouldn’t say I was excited about it either, but I definitely wasn’t opposed to it, so long as conditions were right…

I opened the door to the outside and waved to Frost from across the parking lot. He strode over, carrying the shotgun.

“You didn’t get any more rounds for this thing, did you?”

“No.”

“Damn it. What use it is then?”

I glared at him.

“Um, excuse me. Who saved your sorry ass when you were being strangled by a… A wolf… Creature… Thing?”

“I would have been fine,” he insisted, not meeting my eyes.

“Uh-huh. Sure.”

“Really. I’ve fought worse than that guy.”

“What the hell is going on? I think you owe me an explanation. I…” And then it struck me: I’d killed someone. Or something. Really, a someone: it seemed like it was a person, at one point, somewhere along the line. It had been a human being. Somehow, I didn’t feel that bad about it. But I wanted answers.

“You shouldn’t have gotten mixed up in all this,” Frost said. He still refused to meet my eyes. I reached out and grabbed him by the face, turning him to meet me, his eyes really a dark, glowing crimson—not the brown I thought they were originally.

“I know I shouldn’t have. But now I am. So I want to know what’s going on.”

“I’m a… werewolf.”

“A werewolf? You expect me to believe that?”

He stared at me, mouth open slightly.

“Okay,” I relented. “After everything I just saw, maybe, just maybe, I’m willing to believe that.”

“You should. Because it’s true.”

“So you’re a werewolf. It’s not a full moon. How did you transform and all that?”

“We can do it on command. Not on command, really, it takes a lot out of you. I needed a good meal before I could do it.”

That explained the steak and the wine, I guess.

“And who the hell was that… That Vicious guy?”

Frost took a seat on the bed. Concern drew across his darkened face.

“He’s… He was… another werewolf. A very powerful one. He was involved in some drug running operation. That’s why he was hanging out with those bikers.”

“Were you following him? What was it to you?” This was too ridiculous for me now. I couldn’t even begin to process everything that had happened and now, this handsome wolfboy was telling me that I had just killed a super-powered werewolf drug dealer? Yeah, right.

“He killed my father.”

My face fell.

“Really? I’m… I’m sorry.”

“It was several years ago. There was a deal that went bad and…”

Frost trailed off, once again refusing to make eye contact with me. I laid my hand on his strong arm, feeling his hot skin through the tears in his jacket.

“Was your dad involved with this stuff too?”

Frost sighed.

“To be honest, most werewolves are. We’re not really the law and order types. Drug running, arms smuggling, racketeering… Most every major criminal organization in the country has at least a few wolves on the payroll and there are a handful of groups that are only wolves. Like the one my father was in.”

“So, your father was in a werewolves-only gang?”

Frost shot me a grin, as beautiful as it was unexpected.

“It sounds ridiculous when you put it like that, doesn’t it? But yeah, that’s right. And he struck a deal with this Vicious guy, a lone wolf—someone unaffiliated with a gang or a Clan—“

“What are the Clans?”

“Like… Big families. It’s important, for us, to know who’s related to who. You’re in a pack, like a Louisville pack or a St. Louis pack. And then there are bigger Clans, six or seven of them, maybe more that I don’t know about, spread out all over the country. But there are some, you just don’t know where they come from. They show up out of no where and sometimes, they make their mark.”

The grin faded.

“And then, if we’re lucky, they disappear just as suddenly as they appeared.”

“The bikers Vicious was with—are they wolves too? Werewolves, I mean.”

“No. If they were, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here right now. I could have taken two of three of them, but never that many. And wolves, we hunt in packs. The more of us there are, the more deadly. Exponentially. Three wolves are a hundred times more dangerous than two.”

I was struggling with all this. My head was beginning to hurt. I realized all of a sudden that my family must have no idea where I was—they would have heard about what happened at the bar and they’d be worried sick.

“Just a minute. I need to make some phone calls.”

Frost shot out his hand and placed it on mine.

“Don’t tell anyone where you are. I don’t know for certain that Vicious wasn’t working with any other wolves. If he wasn’t, you’ll probably be fine to go home in a few days. But if he was… You might have to get out of the state. Out of the country, even.”

My mouth dropped open.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Your life could be in more danger than we know. Vicious was a lone wolf but he was a legend. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been hired by a wolf gang as an enforcer, or even to manage a drug running operation. If he was, they’ll be after you.”

“And what about you? Aren’t they after you?”

Another smile, tragically beautiful.

“That goes without saying.”