Wanted: Wild Thing (Midnight Liaisons) (24 page)

He chuckled against my neck and nipped lightly at the scales on my throat, sending skitters of pleasure through me all over again. “I am pleased you think so.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said dreamily. “If you were any better, they’d have to scrape me off the floor of the forest here.”

He laughed again. “I do not know what that means, but I think it was a compliment.”

I gave his chest an affectionate pat. “It was.”

Hugh looked as if he wanted to comment on something, but a distracted look crossed his face. He tilted his head and lifted his nose into the air, sniffing.

“What?” I asked, worried. I clung to his shoulders. “What is it?”

He looked down at me and grinned. “Are you hungry?”

“Well, I could eat, but I don’t know . . . why?”

He pressed a finger to my lips, indicating silence. I fell quiet, and he let me down from where he had me pressed against the tree. He crept forward a step, hunched behind a nearby bush, and indicated that I should do the same.

Curious, I followed and squatted next to him. My fingers curled around one of his big biceps. Any excuse to touch this big, delicious man. “What are we looking at?” I whispered.

“Our next meal,” he murmured in a low voice. “Just wait.”

We waited. A few moments later, a creature stepped out of the brush and headed toward the stream.

It was white, with four long, slim legs, a gleaming mane, and a single, spiraling horn on its forehead.

A friggin’ unicorn.

“Delicious,” Hugh murmured.

“Oh, my God, no!” I said, and I began to laugh. I’d thought Hugh had been messing with me when he’d said his favorite meal was unicorn. This was unreal. “We can’t eat that!”

The unicorn had bent its head to drink, but at the sound of my laughter, it went on alert. It remained still for a moment, then bolted back into the woods.

Hugh grunted. “You are not much of a hunter, my Ryder.”

I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop giggling.

A unicorn. A real, live unicorn. Unbelievable.

H
ugh led me to a stream that, he assured me, was quite safe. We drank our fill as I tried not to think about waterborne parasites, then we washed up. Heading back to the primordial camp and stinking of sex? Not the politest gesture, so I was glad it was no longer a worry. I wished we could find some clothing, but I supposed one couldn’t have everything.

My muscles ached and my legs were completely stiff. In addition, certain parts of my anatomy felt a bit bruised. This made walking agonizingly slow. Hugh was patient, though. He held my hand—since I insisted on not being carried like some sort of caveman’s captive bride. I gladly held his hand, since I wouldn’t have this luxury when we returned to the human world. That made me a little sad, though, but it was what it was.

The caves came into view sooner than I wanted, and I instinctively moved a little closer to Hugh. “Do you think they’ll like our suggestion to come to the human world?”

“I do not know.” His voice was surprisingly grim.

“Well,” I said cheerfully. “All we can do is ask.” And I gave his hand a reassuring squeeze.

The greeting we received from the others was downright frosty. Two dozen eyes watched us emerge from the brush, but no one acknowledged us. All were silent, even as Hugh strode through the midst of the camp with me at his side.

I began to doubt our plan just a teensy bit. What if we were making all these grand schemes to save guys who didn’t want saving?

Artur strode forward, his ugly face a welcome sight. “So you have returned.” He moved to Hugh’s side and clasped forearms with him in greeting.

“To gloat?” another called. A man stepped toward us, his wild, dark hair and savage expression almost as alarming as his large, muscular build.

Artur glanced backward, seemingly dismissing the man’s anger. “That is not well done, Cahal. Would you not have made the same choice if presented with such a lovely woman?”

Cahal went silent, though he crossed his arms over his chest and glowered at Hugh.

“We do not all resent you, brother,” Artur told Hugh. His craggy face held a note of concern. “But I do not know if it is best that you remain here.”

“My mate has a suggestion,” Hugh said, and he turned to look at me with such fondness and affection that I knew we’d both made the right choice.

“So she is your mate now?” Artur asked.

“Of course she is,” Cahal said, striding forward to confront Hugh. His lip curled as he looked at me. “Did you not see the way she waddled into camp? She has been well used by our brother.”

Oh, wow. If the earth could have swallowed me up into a sinkhole at that moment, I wouldn’t have objected. Embarrassed, I took a tiny step behind Hugh again, wishing my hair was long enough to cover my breasts . . . or other areas that were totally naked. Waddled?
Waddled
? How humiliating.

“That is my mate you insult, Cahal,” Hugh growled, stepping forward. “My mate who even now thinks of ways to retrieve our mates from the fae. You would do well to be kind to her.”

Artur’s heavy brows drew together, and his attention turned to me. “You know of a way?”

“I have an idea,” I told him. I stepped forward, doing my best to pretend that I wasn’t totally naked and in changeling form. These men had never seen me otherwise, so it wouldn’t be as awkward to them as it was to me. “The fae need you guys. From what Hugh has told me, they have you do their dirty work and make you think you’re beholden to them because of this realm they created for you. But the human world is different now. You primordials have been gone for a long time. A long,
long
time. Humans aren’t living and hunting in packs any longer. They’re domesticated. They hold jobs and farm. And shifters mingle with them and live in safety right under their noses. You don’t have to stay here. Hugh has a necklace that can make a portal. Like it or not, Finian’s given you a way out of this place. You can leave and come to my world with me.”

“And what of the women promised to us? What of those mates?” Cahal demanded.

Clearly Cahal spoke for others. I could see several angry nods in the background.

“That’s the beauty of it,” I told him. “You come with me for a few days. The fae figure out that you’re gone, and now they need to offer you something to make you come back. You can then bargain for your mates in exchange for returning here.” I gave a tiny shrug. “Or you can stay in my world. There are lots of women there.”

All eyes riveted on me with an intensity I found a bit unnerving.

“Your world is full of women?” Artur asked.

“Primordial women?” Cahal wanted to know.

Well, that had gotten their attention. “No primordial women. There aren’t any primordials other than you guys. There
are
shifter women, though they tend to be rarer than shifter men. But yes, there are single shifter women. I work at a place where our job is to make matches between single men and single women who are shifters or other supernaturals. There are also lots of human women.”

“A lot of them,” Hugh agreed. “Enough that they will tackle a man and give him sex simply for delivering food to her door.”

All eyes widened.

Oh, dear. I suspected that the porn Hugh had watched had given him a skewed concept of courting rituals. “Not exactly, but—”

“We wish to go to this place,” Cahal demanded.

“Aye,” Artur agreed, glancing back at the others. A chorus of nods followed. “Either way, it does not sound like we can lose.”

“There’s just one problem,” Cahal said. “How do we get the fae to realize that we have gone?”

“Finian will be coming back to look for me,” I told them. “We’ll just use me as bait. Right, Hugh?”

Silence.

I turned to look at Hugh and noticed he was frowning fiercely at me.

“You are not safe around Finian,” he said. “I do not like this aspect of your plan.”

“Perhaps she should stay here while we venture to her world. Then, once things are established, we can return her to her home.”

“Whoa, whoa,” I said, holding up my hands. “I’m not staying here. Not without Hugh.”

“We need Hugh to lead us through the portal,” Cahal explained. “It is keyed to him. No one can enter or exit without him going through first.”

“She cannot stay here alone,” Hugh said. “Ryder is helpless in this place. She has no defenses.”

I put my hands on my hips, not exactly liking Hugh’s words, even if they supported my stance. “No one is staying behind. We’ll just have to lay a trap for Finian or something.”

“It’s dishonest,” Hugh said, frowning.

“It’s genius.” Cahal rubbed his hands together. “Bring us to this land of eager women. I will feed them.”

Chapter Eighteen

T
here was nothing like having two dozen naked men in your bedroom to put a new perspective on things.

Hugh and I had been the first ones to go through the portal back to my world. The rune was keyed to Hugh and only Hugh, so he’d had to go through the portal first. He hadn’t allowed me to enter until he’d gone to the other side and determined that everything had seemed normal. Then I’d been permitted to join him.

After that, the rest of the primordials followed. Cahal was the third one through, followed by two blond men, then another so tall he made Hugh look normal-sized. Then shifter after shifter continued to push through the portal Hugh had made (in my closet once again) and into my pink, girly bedroom.

I tried to count heads, but the room was rapidly filling up with big, naked bodies, and everyone was insisting on picking up and handling my things. As I watched, one jerked my alarm clock off the table, hauling it to his face so he could look at the bright red numbers, ripping the cord out of the wall in the process. Another, I was pretty sure, was drinking from the toilet. I followed as many as I could, slapping hands that went into my underwear drawer out of curiosity, keeping others from wandering outside, and generally trying to corral the chaos until all of the primordials arrived through.

It had been less than two minutes, and it was already a nightmare.

The primordials were like kids on Christmas morning. My apartment was a wonderland, and they were determined to get into everything. I pulled one of my pink ruffled pillows away from a man who was trying to bite through it, clearly thinking it was some sort of treat.

I was going to need help with this. Pulling dozens of men through to my world to save them had seemed like a great idea until I’d realized they were all suddenly my responsibility and they knew absolutely nothing about this world. I began to feel overwhelmed as I wrestled my favorite pink lipstick out of another man’s hands. “Hugh?” I called.

An arm snaked around my waist.

I panicked, momentarily, until a kiss was pressed to the side of my face and I smelled Hugh’s warm scent.

“I am here,” he murmured in my ear. “You sound troubled.”

“I’m just freaking out a little,” I told him, leaning into his embrace. “Everywhere I look, there are naked buns.”

“They are not the only ones unclothed,” Hugh said even as he pressed a kiss to my hair. “You are changing back.”

So I was. I groaned in dismay as my protective scales retreated and left me more naked than ever. It had felt like I’d been wearing something even when I’d been naked. Now they were going to see my very human, very naked, flesh.

Unless Hugh kept touching me, of course. And there was so much going on that it would be near impossible to ensure that.

I grabbed clothes, shooed the men out of my bathroom, and dressed. By the time I emerged, I was fully human again and Hugh had most of the men in the living room of my small apartment. I could hear him describing the “wondrous cave” that produced cold food. While he kept them busy, I needed to get organized.

First thing on the agenda—clothing. Hugh had half a dozen pairs of casual workout clothing, but it wouldn’t be enough for all the men currently filling my living room. I still grabbed all of his clothes and some of mine. Maybe they wouldn’t realize that my pink bathrobe or my yoga pants weren’t exactly “guy” clothes. I just needed something to cover their parts so I wouldn’t spend the next few hours blushing wildly.

Next, I pulled out my gear bag that I brought to every dating event. It had a clipboard that I could glance at easily, which I used for recording names. I also had name stickers. Both would come in handy.

Then I emerged from my room and set to work.

A
few hours later, we’d ordered so many pizzas and sodas that we’d finally maxed out my last credit card. Everyone was dressed in either underwear, shorts, a bathrobe, or a towel. Everyone also wore a name sticker (some stuck on bare chests), which allowed me to carefully record them on my clipboard, along with their shifter type, just so I knew what I was dealing with.

Twenty-three men, not including Hugh. There was Artur, who, along with Hugh, seemed to take on a leadership role. He told me his shifter type, but I didn’t know what “horned armored beast” was, so I just wrote
rhino.
A lot of them seemed to be cats, bears, and wolves, based on their descriptions, though most didn’t match up with cats, wolves, and bears that I was familiar with. But if Hugh was a saber-toothed tiger, then it was possible that they were all some sort of Ice Age breeds.

They all politely ate the pizza, though it was clear that none of them were enjoying it particularly. Of course, pizza also led to different questions. Was this the food that made women so crazed with lust? What was it about this particular food that made them so wild? I tried to explain that it was simply a story line in an admittedly bad movie, but the mention of movies brought entirely new questions to the foray, so I gave Hugh the remote and let him explain to the rapt men crowding my small living room.

“Ryder,” he told me a moment later, frowning at the sitcom on TV. “Give me a kissing story, female. I wish to educate my men on how to please their mates.”

Oh, jeez. Blushing, I helped him pull up a pay-per-view and ran out of the room.

While the primordials were busy, I decided to call work. Bath would be there, and if there was anyone that was good at organizing unruly people, it was my boss. I pulled out my cell phone, intending to call her, only to find it was dead. A sinking feeling hit the pit of my stomach. How long had we been gone for? I plugged my phone into the charger and fired up my laptop, waiting for the date to pop up.

I gasped when the calendar popped up. Two weeks. We’d been gone two weeks. My birthday was tomorrow.

My boss was going to think I was dead.

I drummed my fingers as the men exclaimed in the next room over something on the TV, then checked my phone again. A sliver of a red bar. Close enough. I dialed work.

“Midnight Liaisons,” Bath answered.

“It’s me, Ryder,” I said. “I need to explain.”

“Ryder! Oh, my God. You’re all right!” Bath sounded like she was about to burst into tears. “We’ve all been so worried about you. No one’s been able to find you since the night of Marie’s party. You just vanished with that big bruiser guy. We wanted to call missing persons, but you know that’s a last resort, considering our business.” She bit her lip, clearly feeling awful about that. I knew what she meant, though. Supernaturals tried to stay out of the sight of the law, since the last thing they wanted was the police investigating a group of people who tended to make their own societal rules and grew furry from time to time. And since I worked with them, I was included in the “No police unless absolutely necessary” category. “I was going to call tomorrow if you didn’t show up, though.”

“I’m fine,” I soothed her. “Really. There’s just a lot going on that needs explaining. A
lot
.”

“I’d say there is.” She sounded a mite annoyed now that the initial relief was out of the way.

“And I totally want to explain everything,” I told her. “But I need your help.”

“Are you coming in to work?”

“Not unless you know where I can find a school bus,” I said, only half joking. “Can you come to my apartment and bring two dozen pairs of extremely large men’s clothing?”

Bathsheba was silent on the other end of the phone for so long that I wondered if she’d hung up.

“Hello?” I ventured.

“I’m here,” she said. “I’m just . . . trying to imagine why you’d need a school bus and two dozen pairs of men’s clothing.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I said.

“Try me.”

“I have two dozen overgrown Ice Age shifters sitting in my apartment because they’re trying to blackmail the fae into giving them women.”

She was silent for a moment. “You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

“Figured.”

“I’ll be over there in an hour,” she said, sounding mystified.

“I’ll be here.”

T
here was a knock at my door precisely one hour later. With relief, I bounded for the door and got the attention of every single pair of eyes in the room.

Bathsheba Ward-Russell stood at the door, smiling, a big laundry basket in her arms full of neatly folded clothing. Behind her stood Beau and Savannah, curious looks on their faces. “We’re here,” Bath said, stepping forward as I opened the door wider. “Though you’re going to have to tell me what’s going . . . on . . .”

Her voice died as four men, clad only in Hugh’s borrowed tighty-whities, sprinted for the door.

“I saw her first,” one bellowed.

“I claim her for myself,” yelled another, pushing people aside to get to the door.

“Mine,” growled a third at the same time.

Bath’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped, just a little.

I stepped in front of Bathsheba, protecting her from the overzealous primordials. “No one is claiming anyone right now,” I said, my voice so shrill it was almost unrecognizable. “Go sit down!”

“I have pizza,” Cahal said, joining the crew of men surging toward poor Bathsheba.

There was an audible groan of dismay as the others realized they had been trumped. “Now she will go wild and offer him sex,” one muttered. “He has pizza to give her.”

“What . . .” Bathsheba said, baffled. She shrank back a step or two.

“Don’t ask,” I said. “And whatever you do, do
not
accept the pizza.”

“What’s going on?” Beau pushed forward, edging around Bath and her laundry basket and giving my widespread arms a curious look. “Someone’s trying to claim my mate?”

“They don’t know any better,” I said, even as more mutterings began.

“Already claimed,” one said behind me. The name sticker on his bare chest said HI, MY NAME IS BEVAN. Bevan sounded incredibly disappointed.

Cahal lowered the slice of pizza in his hand. “Someone has already fed her pizza?”

“Back off,” I said. “She’s mated, and this is her mate.” I pulled Beau forward with an apologetic smile. “I am so, so sorry about all of this.”

“It’s okay,” Bath said, sidling a little closer to Beau. Her eyes were wide. “That stuff you said on the phone—”

“Not a joke,” I told her. “I have twenty-three primordial shifters who are staying here for a time. They will be going back to their world, or dimension, or whatever it is, once we force the fae to give back their women. Until then, they’re staying with me.” I took the basket from Bathsheba with a wry smile. “And we need clothes and food. And help.”

“You look incredibly stressed, Ryder,” Bath said sympathetically. “Is this where you’ve been for the last two weeks? Not that I’m not still furious about that, but I’m starting to understand.”

“Actually,” I said with a heavy sigh, “that is just the tip of the iceberg. I have a lot to tell you. Come in and we’ll see if we can find you a seat.”

I led Bath and Beau into my tiny, overcrowded apartment.

“Did you see the mark on her neck?” one primordial muttered to another. “He claimed her with a bite.”

“Barbaric,” agreed the other.

W
e managed to squeeze our way to my tiny kitchen. From there, we sat down with a pot of coffee—coffee, how I’d missed it!—and talked. Hugh sat at my side, his chair pulled close to mine and his big hand resting on my jeans-clad thigh, as if he was afraid they might somehow snatch me away from him.

I understood that worry. For some reason, I had the same dread in the back of my mind—that Finian would show up and somehow steal Hugh away from me as punishment. I didn’t know how the fae prince would react to what we’d done, but considering he gave no thought to destroying my life? It was a pretty safe bet that he wouldn’t just shrug his shoulders and walk away.

I wanted to hold Hugh’s hand, but I knew I couldn’t. Not right now. Not in front of the others.

Savannah, to my surprise, had quickly taken charge of the primordials. They sat in the living room, talking, and I could hear her laughingly, but politely, declining pizza. It was interesting, the way that the primordials treated Savannah in comparison to Bathsheba. Bath, they’d tried to claim.

Savannah, they were in awe of.

Her rounded belly and something in her scent told them that she was carrying a child, and they treated her with the utmost respect—to the point that Beau hadn’t felt alarmed at the thought of leaving his cousin in the other room with them as we talked. They fawned over her, insisting that she sit down in the best seat in my living room, and they hung on her every word as she softly chatted with them and passed out the clothing that they’d brought.

Thank goodness they were listening to
someone
. Even now, I heard Savannah’s amused voice gently explaining about why she was pregnant and yet had no mate mark.

“So you’re a changeling?” Bathsheba asked, interrupting my thoughts. “You’re sure?”

I frowned. “Pretty darn sure. Two thieving fae princes can’t be wrong.”

Hugh’s hand tightened on my thigh. “Do you accuse my mate of lying?”

“Hugh, sweetie,” I said. “It’s okay. Really.”

A flush rounded Bath’s pale cheeks. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to insult. It’s just that we don’t have anything like a changeling in our database, and I thought we’d run across everything at this point.”

“Can you . . . show us?” Beau asked, and I knew he’d phrased it as delicately as he could. He wanted to see for himself, though.

“I can.” I sucked in a breath, hating the anxious knot that formed in the pit of my stomach. Why was I so nervous? Beau and Bath were here, listening to me. They weren’t running away screaming. They weren’t even mad. They just wanted to understand. So why did it freak me out so much?

“I am here, Ryder,” Hugh said in a soft voice. “Do not be frightened. I will not let anything happen to you.”

I knew that, but hearing the words come out of his mouth made me feel better. I clasped his hand in mine, lacing our fingers tightly, making my decision.

He lifted our intertwined hands to his mouth and gave the back of my hand a kiss, and I felt the prickle of my transformation begin. Fangs popped out of my gums, and I felt my horns push through my forehead. Scales climbed up my arms, and I felt the press of my wings and tail as they struggled to get out of my restrictive clothing. I didn’t turn to look at Bath and Beau; my fingers woven with Hugh’s, I just waited for the transformation to finish. My nails grew, and the decorative spikes that lined the length of my arms made my sleeves tighten.