Rhyannon Byrd - Primal Instinct 05 (3 page)

“Oh, yeah. I’ll show you a lesson,” he sneered, his
stale breath nearly making Morgan gag. His beady eyes focused on the shape of
her breasts, a lascivious smile curling his damp mouth as he crouched over her,
trapping her arms against the floor. Deciding to fight dirty, Morgan hiked her
knee and watched his expression turn to one of comical horror as he clutched
his abused testicles with both hands. She’d just started to shove him off, when
Kierland was there, already having dispensed with the guards who’d jumped him.
Growling a deep, guttural sound that was pure animal, he hauled the guy off
her, his expression one of savage outrage as he tossed the heavy bastard behind
the bar.

“Thanks,” she rasped, moving back to her feet, but
Kierland had already turned, exchanging blows with yet another thick-shouldered
grizzly-shifter, and Morgan began to wonder just how many bodyguards the
blondes carted around with them. Then again, considering their personalities,
they probably pissed a lot of people off, so maybe she shouldn’t have been so
surprised.

“God, you still know how to cause a scene, don’t you?”
Kierland muttered, once he’d managed to knock out the guard.

She grimaced, knowing he was referring to the time
when he’d taken her academy class out to celebrate after they’d completed their
combat training. They’d been having a great time at a local pub, when a group
of Regan—one of the ancient clans who were well-known for their
troublemaking—had shown up and started hitting on Morgan and the other girls in
her class. When one of them had groped her backside, she’d responded with a
cracking punch to the guy’s long nose that had resulted in a huge bar fight
that Kierland had been forced to drag her out of.

“Wasn’t my fault then, and neither is tonight,” she
argued, sounding suitably insulted. “All I asked for was a chance to talk to
you!”

She doubted he even heard that last part, since
another guard came after them, though Kierland knocked the guy out with one
powerful blow to his jaw. Unfortunately, she could see that five more behemoths
were right behind their fallen comrade, pushing their way through the crowd.
Calls of encouragement were coming from the drunken, drugged-out, bloodthirsty
group of onlookers, and the blonde with the ponytail shouted, “What are you
guys waiting for? Rip her guts out!”

“Wow, those are some classy chicks you’ve got there,”
Morgan drawled when Kierland moved closer to her side.

At the edge of her vision, she watched a flat smile
twist the corner of the Lycan’s mouth as he rolled his head over his shoulders,
his narrow stare locked on the approaching guards. “What can I say? After
spending the last few weeks around you, they fit my mood.”

Before she had a chance to respond to his comment, she
was busy defending herself again. Although Morgan didn’t have a lot of meat on
her bones, what she did have was pure, lean muscle that had been trained for
combat. She was used to fighting opponents who were bigger than she was, as
well as stronger—but it was the crush of people that was messing with her mind.

She pressed her lips together and tried to control her
growing sense of panic as the crowd seemed to pull in closer around them. While
Kierland took on the brunt of the guards, two of the massive shape-shifters
separated them and drove her back, coming at her hard and fast, their claws and
thick, deadly incisors fully extended as they forced her deeper into the crowd
on the dance floor.

“We don’t have to fight, little one,” one of them
called out over the music, leering at her with a slick, sharp-toothed grin.

“That’s right,” the other one snickered. “We can go
somewhere and play instead.”

As they began to circle around her, Morgan’s sense of
fury finally overrode her panic. She wasn’t going to let these assholes bully
her. Knowing she could take them off guard with some offensive moves, the
female Watchman flew into motion, whipping her right leg around with a high,
powerful roundhouse that cracked against the jaw of the stockier guard. She
immediately pivoted, driving a swift side kick into the other one’s groin. The
first had already recovered from the jaw strike, and she swung her body in a
graceful dip to miss the sharp slash of his claws, then struck him with a hard
jab to his kidneys that brought him to his knees. Breathing hard, damp with
exertion, she then parried a savage onslaught of blows from the one she’d just
nailed in the groin, nearly losing her footing as he got in a cracking
backhanded hit across her face. The metallic taste of blood filled her mouth,
the inside of her lip broken open where it’d been smashed against the sharp
point of her fang.

“You little bitch,” he growled, grabbing her while she
was still reeling from the blow to her face. Damn it, she was screwing up, the
effort it took to hold back her panic making her slow, making it too easy for
this jerk to overpower her. She could no longer hear the music or the waspish
shouts of the blondes, the thundering of her heart and racing pulse the only
sounds that filled her head, as loud and thrashing as a ground-quaking storm.
The shifter pulled her too close for her knee to be effective, and her lungs
constricted at the feel of his heavy body mashed against hers.

Oh, hell. Here I go…

Her vision darkened…going hazy, the panic growing,
swelling, just seconds away from crashing over her in a black, suffocating
wave. Morgan opened her mouth, ready to scream for Kierland, her pride willing
to take the blow if it meant getting free…getting out of that closed-in
hellhole and away from the jerk-off who was about to do God-knew-what to her,
when a fist suddenly shot past her head, connecting with a hammering blow
against the bastard’s thick nose. Her assailant immediately let go, sprawling
unconscious on the floor, his partner crawling away with the rest of the
guards, and a new pair of hands grabbed onto her, spinning her around. In her
confusion, she continued to struggle, but the muscular chest she was suddenly
pulled up against smelled warm and delicious, the gaze that snared her wide
eyes burning the brightest, most breathtaking green she’d ever seen.

Kierland.

His big hands were like manacles around her biceps,
nearly lifting her off the ground, his body so close that she could feel the
violent pounding of his heart pressed hard against her breasts. For a split
second she was trapped in the scalding, fiery violence of his focus, thinking
he would shake her or shove her away in anger. But he did neither of those
things. Instead, he made a rough, animal-like sound low in his throat, and then
he was…kissing her.

Kissing? Me? Oh my God…

MORGAN FOUGHT TO MAKE SENSE of her dazed, disorienting
thoughts, but it was no use. Her abilities to reason or apply logic to the
situation had been obliterated, first by the encroaching panic attack…and then
by the shocking, searing touch of Kierland Scott’s mouth against hers. She knew
he could taste the blood from her smashed lip as he deepened the devastating
invasion, and it was an explicit kind of intimacy that made the carnal kiss
even more than a physical melding of mouths. A scintillating wash of anger and
hard male aggression hovered at its edges, but its main force came from
something even more potent…more savage than fury, though it eluded her. In that
moment, trying to grasp any kind of thought was like trying to hold on to an
ethereal wisp of smoke.

His breath came in sharp pants as his mouth worked
over hers, slanting for a deeper penetration as he licked inside, past her
lips, seeking and tasting with dark intensity, pulling up an unwanted,
frightening wave of pleasure from the churning depths of her body.

In a way, his effect on her—that magical, purely
masculine way that he’d always mesmerized her—was even worse now than it’d been
when she was that shy, gangly girl of eighteen. It didn’t matter that he was a
jerk and a jackass, her traitorous body still wanted him. That part of her that
had always hungered…always wondered what it would be like to kiss him, wanted
so badly to get lost in the physical details of him. The heat of his skin. The
rich, clean scent of his sweat. The hot, honeyed flavors of his mouth and the
aggressively possessive way his fingers clenched around her arms, lifting her
onto her toes. It was all beautiful to her, as painfully erotic as it was
seductive.

Nearly out of her head with the accelerating burn of
lust, Morgan was actually trying to crawl her way up his body, desperate to get
as close to him as she could, when she caught a whiff of the blondes’ perfume
clinging to his clothes.

And just like that, the fire went out.

From one second to the next, anger rose up like a
deep, boiling geyser, obliterating the pleasure haze in her brain. Wrenching
her mouth away, Morgan jerked out of his hold, fully aware that she was only
able to break free because he’d let her. Then her palm cracked against the side
of his face before she’d even realized she was going to hit him, snapping his
head to the side.

“Don’t even think about kissing me when you smell like
a couple of cheap hookers,” she panted, working to get her breath back.

“Don’t worry,” he muttered, pulling the back of his
hand over his wet mouth as he stared down at her through the thick veil of his
lashes. “They weren’t hookers. And they sure as hell weren’t cheap.”

Her lip actually curled. “And to think I honestly
thought you had better taste than that.”

“Don’t sound so outraged.” His drawl was smooth and
lazy, but the color in his dark face was still fever high. “I wasn’t looking to
marry them.”

She gave a soft snort and rolled her eyes, not wanting
him to know just how deeply the kiss had affected her. “Yeah, I know exactly
what you were looking for.”

“Careful, Morgan,” he murmured, clucking his tongue,
his eyes suspiciously narrow. “You almost sound jealous.”

“And you’re obviously drunk,” she shot back, looking
away from that knowing gleam glittering in his eyes. With the fight over, the
mass frenzy of writhing bodies picked up right where they’d left off, focused
on sex again rather than fighting.

“Oh, come on. Is she actually calling the cops?”
Morgan asked, noticing that the blonde with the ponytail was now holding a cell
phone to her ear, the woman’s scornful gaze locked onto Morgan with the
ferocity of a rabid pit bull.

Kierland looked over his bloodstained shoulder, then
cursed something crude under his breath. “Probably one of her brothers,” he
grunted with a thick dose of irritation. “We need to get out of here before her
entire pack shows up.”

Glancing at his hard expression, Morgan lifted her
brows, the corner of her kiss-swollen mouth kicking up with a wry grin. “Wow. I
never thought I’d see the day when the wolf was scared of a flock of birds.”

“Stop trying to pick a fight with me,” he muttered,
grabbing her wrist and pulling her along behind him as he began elbowing
dancers out of his way. “We don’t have time for it.” But as they broke through
the last of the dancers and she got a clear shot of the wide double doors that
led out to the street, Morgan could see that they were already too late.

THE ONLY THING STANDING between Kierland and Morgan
and the freedom of the street were five massive jackal-shifters, unless more
happened to be waiting outside the club’s entrance. Another quick look over his
shoulder showed Kierland that retreat wasn’t an option, since the bodyguards he
and Morgan had been fighting—at least the ones who’d managed to get up from the
floor—had huddled together at the rear exit.

The tallest of the jackals, a barrel-chested brute
with a shaggy head of black-and-brown hair, looked hungry for blood, his
ham-size hands fisted aggressively at his sides as the others fanned out around
him.

“Call me crazy,” Morgan murmured out the side of her
mouth, “but those guys don’t look like swans.”

He blew out a tense breath, keeping his attention
focused on the one in the center as he said, “That’s because the blondes are
adopted.”

“By a family of jackals?” she croaked.

He gave a tired sigh. “Yeah.”

“Wow.” Disgust laced her tone, but he couldn’t blame
her for it, considering the circumstances. “You really know how to pick them,
don’t you?”

“You have no idea,” he muttered under his breath,
while she moved to stand at his side.

Wearing expectant looks of aggression, the jackals
came forward, spreading out in a wide arc. Like the one in the middle, they
were all tall, with thick, stocky shoulders and square jaws, their eyes already
glowing with preternatural fire. “Get behind me,” Kierland said in a low voice,
fully expecting the order to be followed.

Of course, he should have known better, considering
who he was dealing with.

“Behind you?” she snorted. “Yeah, right.”

“This is no time to argue, Morgan.” He released his
long, razor-sharp claws, allowing his hands to transform into that deadly phase
that existed between man and wolf—the ones humans called “were”—then allowed
his fangs to slide from his gums. Kierland was fully prepared to fight as dirty
as he had to in order to get Morgan out of there alive, ripping out a few
throats if that’s what it took.

Just like I do for any of my fellow Watchmen, he
silently growled, obscenely irritated by his beast’s rumbling pleasure at the
idea of protecting this particular woman.