High Card: A Billionaire Shifter Novel (Lions of Las Vegas Book 1) (29 page)
Read High Card: A Billionaire Shifter Novel (Lions of Las Vegas Book 1) Online
Authors: May Ellis Daniels
I thumb to the next image. It’s a video file. I hit play.
The video’s only eleven seconds long. It opens on a black car racing down an empty highway. The camera seems to be directly above the car. The car pulls to the side of the road. Stops. A man gets out. The image is too pixelated to tell who it is. But as I watch the image focuses in.
I close my eyes.
It’s Landon.
Walking to the trunk of the car—
I hurl the phone in the front seat. “Bullshit. It’s a setup. Landon would never…where’d you get that?”
“Drone footage,” Alfie says. “US military in collaboration with DOD and Homeland. Your man made his early money selling AK’s to the Congolese. Made even more selling dark web internet routing tech to Iran. I looked at his company’s patents. Blue Line’s fuel cells can power a car, yeah. But feed them the right electromagnetic jolt and you know what they become?”
“Booms,” Maya says.
“Bombs,” Alfie corrects. “
Big
bombs that come in small, easily-concealed packages. There’s fear Landon intends to sell his technology to America’s enemies. Your billionaire boyfriend is an arms dealer, Summer. A fucking warlord.”
I remember the hissing sparks coming from the wrecked Bugatti’s engine. “You’re wrong,” I say. “Not Landon. Not him.”
“You’re being played, Summer.”
“All right, fine. Landon’s scum. But why me? A street-level grifter? What’s he want with
me
?”
Alfie lances at the rearview. Raises his eyebrow. “Hoping you tell us that.”
“I have no—”
But I stop. I
do
know what he wants. What any dude with money and power wants. More money and power. The Whisperer. If he’s right about what I am, Landon’s using me to stake his claim to Wildblood alpha.
The conning, two-faced bastard.
Makes me want him even more.
END BOOK 1, LIONS OF LAS VEGAS
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Finally, here’s an excerpt from my completed four book series. The All Encompassing is a high-octane paranormal romance featuring an outlaw motorcycle club Prez wolf shifter, a rookie cop and an ancient shifter prophecy that could bring them together…or tear them apart.
Thanks for reading and stay sane-ish!
May Ellis Daniels
The All Encompassing: A Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator Book 1)
FROM CHAPTER 5:
The wasp-thing is still staring, long enough for me to wonder what’s taking Trish so long in the cab and to hope she stays in there. My hands are clenched into fists, my fingernails digging into my palms. My right hand slides down to the small of my back, instinctively, to where my G22 should be.
Fucking shitballs.
Of course I don’t have it, and even if I did I couldn’t fire. How to end a cop career before it begins: gun down a civilian in the street, then try explaining you did it because she transformed into a
wasp
right before your eyes.
I keep waiting for the…whatever it is…vision, nightmare, hallucination, to vanish. I even blink and look away, hoping when I look back it’ll just be some working girl glaring at me, her sixth sense sniffing out the cop wearing platforms on the wrong side of town.
Big mistake, losing eye contact.
When I look up the wasp-thing is right in front of me, her face inches from mine. She smells too-sweet in a sickening way, like meat gone to rot. Her stinger brushes against my chest, right at my sternum. Her eyes are mirrored coal-black planes.
Inhuman. Merciless.
What about everyone else
, I think.
Can they see this thing
?
But I already know the answer. They can’t. If they could they’d be hoofing it out of here right quick, which is what I want to do…except I can’t move. Not just my feet. I can’t move a single muscle.
Can’t even scream. My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth.
I’m frozen. Paralyzed.
“I said hey bitch, what you staring at?” the wasp-thing repeats in my mind.
I’d like to say I’m staring at a wasp-bitch who mates in excrement, but I can’t move my tongue.
“You stare and stare,” she says, “but you’re fucking blind. You don’t see a thing, do you pretty? That’s gunna change. That’s gunna change real quick for you, and soon you’ll be seein’ more than you ever wanted. More than—”
The wasp-thing tilts her head to the side like she hears something unusual.
I listen, trying to figure out why she interrupted herself. I can’t hear anything out of the ordinary: cars droning past leaving wakes of mist above the wet roads, someone screaming in the distance, a police siren way too far off (never around when you need them, huh?) and a growl of Harleys in the distance.
It’s hard to tell, but I think the wasp-thing’s eyes widen.
Just a little.
And I think she’s afraid.
She dips her stinger to my chest. There’s a flash of cold so intense it burns. Then she walks a few steps backwards, whirls and sprints down an alley faster than any human has ever moved.
I clasp my hands to my sternum. There’s a tiny burn-mark in my sweater, and I don’t have to peer down my shirt to know it goes all the way through to skin.
“Cabbie tried to say he forgot to put the meter on. Liar. Tried to get forty bucks to go—hey Lil! You all right?”
I nod at Trish, still watching the alley the creature fled into and thinking of the drunks and homeless hidden in the shadows there, passed out, waking up to that thing straddling them, silencing their screams with a hand as she drives her stinger into their chests, drawing red-blue blood from their dying bodies.
“Yo Lil!” Trish snaps her fingers in front of my face. “Whats the matter girl? Had a change of heart? Good. Place is a dump. Here—I’ll hail another cab.”
The Harleys are getting louder.
The doorman at the Wilds opens the door and peers out.
That’s why the bitch fled
, I think without knowing why.
She heard them. The riders.
Then they’re racing past, three broad-shouldered men and a woman, a blur of gleaming chrome and roaring unmufflered pipes and black leather cuts, splitting the yellow and even dipping into oncoming traffic, going at least 100 mp/h on a city street and making the cop in me itch for a maxed-out unmarked cruiser to chase them down with.
Then he turns. The leader. The damn—what do the outlaw MC’s call the boss?
The Prez.
Needless to say, Mr. Prez isn’t wearing a helmet.
He turns his head as he whips by and let me just say, not for second do I believe in love at first sight. The entire idea makes me gag. The giggling school-girl romance of it all. Love isn’t a thing that appears out of nowhere and lives forever. It’s a series of small actions that build up over time, layer into feelings, until one day you wake up and realize the bedrock of your life is founded on those feelings. They’ve become your earth: what holds you up, nourishes and sustains.
But it sure doesn’t happen instantly, or even overnight.
Call me a cynic. I prefer the term pragmatist.
Or maybe ‘bitch with a broken heart’ is more accurate.
Either way, I’m too old to believe in fairy tales.
I tried that once and what did it get me? Penciled into some rich guy’s schedule.
But I see this guy, this…
biker
, for the love of all hell…and maybe for an instant I do believe. In everything. In all the fairy tales. In all the fantasies about a lonely heart snapped up and saved. And maybe that’s what love is, too: hope. Hope that love can exist independent and inviolable from the shit we live in, somehow both in the world and above it, like a soul living inside us yet linked to heaven.
Me and the biker Prez lock gazes.
The roar of the Harleys crash down like waves.
The rain starts again, misty, almost teasing.
He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. Even hunched over his Harley he’s tall and perfectly built: not puffed up like a juice-monkey but muscled wiry and tight, naturally powerful. He’s wearing soaked blue jeans that cling tight to his thighs, a black t-shirt and a black leather cut. That’s it. No jacket even though its damn cold outside and it must be freezing whipping around on that bike.
The rain has slicked his skin. He’s got serious biker ink lacing up his ripped arms. A narrow chin verging on stern, and a set of high cheekbones that make me think of aristocracy. Thick, full lips. Dark hair whipping in the wind. And his eyes? Damn. His eyes are a gorgeous arctic blue so bright they nearly glow high-lumen neon, and I can tell he’s no meathead, not your run-of-the-mill biker idiot, and for the second time in about five minutes I’m frozen on the spot, mouth hanging open, heart beating a mad staccato rhythm in my chest and warmth building between my legs that I haven’t felt in…ever.
Then he’s gone. Zoom.
Not a wink, not a nod, not a single obvious indication to show he knows I exist. But I turn around to make sure there’s no biker whore standing behind me that he was eyeing. Because the Prez threw me a look…yeah.
There was something in how he looked at me.
A promise.
I’d swear on my mother’s grave.
“Obnoxious pricks,” Trish mutters, stepping into the street and giving them the finger. “Idiots whose sole aspiration in life is to ride around on a loud bike. Perpetual adolescence.”
“Yeah,” I say, still breathless. “Not to mention riding waaay too fast.”
Trish gives me an odd look, and I realize my hands are resting on my legs, on my upper thighs actually, and I’m kind of slowly kneading the skin under my skirt, almost rubbing it. Trish looks about to say something snide when there’s a sharp squeal of tires and a sputtering roar.
Three blocks down the bikers have flipped a u-turn and are racing back up the street.
“Quick,” Trish says, waving at the dive bar. “Inside. Before the dumb-asses get the wrong idea about us.” She tosses me a glare that says what kind of shit have I gotten her into before striding past the bouncer and into the Wilds.
And right about then I’m thinking the same thing, and as I shuffle into the bar I’m surprised to realize I’m damn excited to find out.
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FOR MY FAMILY. Forever.
HI! I'D LIKE to say a heartfelt thank you to my family and fans for making this writing life possible. I write contemporary and paranormal romance with smoking hot bad dudes, strong females and lots of fast-paced thriller-style action and erotic heat.
When not writing I'm into hiking in the Pacific Northwest with my family, drinking tasty craft brews, and riding fast bikes (but not after drinking tasty craft brews).
If you enjoy my stories, please consider gifting my books some review stars. Reviews help me promote my books and help other readers find writers they like.
Stay sane-ish!
May Ellis Daniels
COPYRIGHT © 2015 May Ellis Daniels
All rights reserved.
High Card
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events portrayed in this story are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, shared, down-loaded, compiled, stored, or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the author.