Mail Order Tiger Bride Wars: A Scorchingly Hot BBW Shifter Romance (12 page)

ELLEN: (astonished)
You are?

COLE: Yes, I am. And a whole lot of other things too. I’m proud of the way you stood up to your sister. Not because of me, but for yourself.
I’m proud of the way you’ve decided to go back to work. I think you’re a great worker and you throw your heart and soul into everything. I’m inspired by you to be a better person.

JULIA: (standing up and facing Carter)
You know, you might have told me he’s in love with someone else.

(
throws down her napkin)

I told my father it was a bad idea and I’m right, as usual.
This is the last time I’ll ever listen to someone else in matters like these. I’m going home. But first, I’m going to have a holiday on your expense.

SHARON: No, please don’t go!

CARTER: Julia, you don’t have to go. My son is a rebel, as always. He doesn’t know what he wants.

COLE: For the last time, Dad, stop speaking about me as if I’m ten years old!

CARTER: (standing up too) He isn’t in love with anyone else.

COLE: (standing up)
Come on, Ellen. It’s apparent we can’t have a decent conversation with my father. We’re leaving.

CARTER: You leave and I’ll cut you off!

COLE: You know what I’ve decided? I don’t care if you cut me off anymore. My life is mine to live and mine alone. So go ahead. Cut me off.

CARTER: Done!

ELLEN: Cole –

COLE: It’s OK, Ellen. Let’s go.

ELLEN: But what about the dig?

COLE: We’ll fund our own dig. I’m not going to stay here and let us be insulted by him.

SHARON: Cole, no. Carter, please don’t! He’s our only son.

Julia stalked off.

“Wait!” cried Carter.

Whoever her father was, he sure had to be important, Ellen decided.

That was when the
French windows turned dark. At first, Ellen thought a cloud had blocked the sun. Then she saw what was at the windows.

Or r
ather . . . who.

31

Several guys in T-shirts and
dirty, ripped jeans framed the French windows. Their heads were wrapped in ski masks. They carried various tools – hammer, wrench, iron rod, mallet, gun.

Ellen stared, as did everyone else in the restaurant.

The guy carrying the gun stepped in, as did the others. Little screams erupted among the guests, and some of them dived for cover under the tables.

The guy said in English, “We want no trouble here.”
Then he pointed the gun at Ellen and Cole. “We only want them.”

Ellen froze.
Whaaaat
?

“Carter,” wailed Sharon, “what’s happening?”

Someone who looked like the manager came running over. He held his hands up very slowly.

“Please, we don’t want any trouble.”

One of the men raised his mallet and smashed a table upon which cutlery and plates had been laid. The people at the table screamed and fled to cower by the walls. Others were petrified.

“What is this?” Carter demanded. “What’s happening?”

Cole held up his hands. “If it’s me you want, then you don’t have to involve anyone else. I’ll go quietly with you.”

“No!” Ellen cried.

The gunman came up to Carter. “Are you a shifter?”

“No,” Cole immediately said.
“There’s no one else here who’s a shifter. There’s only me.”

The gunman smiled.
He was a very tall man.

“You come with me.
And her.”

He pointed at Ellen.

“She’s not a shifter,” Cole said.

The other men approached with an air of menace, their weapons held high.

“Come,” the gunman said.

“Wait a minute.” Carter stepped up.
“This is
my
son. You’re not taking him anywhere without me.”

“No,” Cole said. “This has nothing to do with you.”

The gunman pointed his gun in the air and fired a shot. Women screamed and ducked to hide under the tables.

“
Woah, woah, woah, easy there,” Cole said, holding up his hands in the air in a gesture of surrender. “I’m coming with you. No one needs to get hurt.”

The gunman gestured to Ellen and Carter and said something to the rest of his men in his native language.
Then one of the men grabbed Ellen by the hair. Another did the same to Carter.

“No!” Sharon cried.

“Keep quiet,” her husband thundered.

They herded the three of them
out of the French windows. Ellen was glad they left Sharon and Julia behind. She was certain that these men were shifter haters. Where was hotel security? And was the manager calling the police?

They
were led to a van outside in the gardens. From the broken branches and twigs and wheel marks on the carefully tended grass and flower beds, the van had obviously crashed its way in.

Two of the men opened the back doors of the van.

“Get in.”

Ellen almost tripped as she was pushed in.

“Hey, watch it,” Cole said, reaching out for her.

But
the guy with the wrench clubbed him on the back of his head.

Ellen screamed as Cole
stumbled and fell.

Then they were all bundled
into the van. The doors slammed shut behind them.

32

Terry watched th
e live feed from the video cam. Part of her squirmed when she saw her sister being manhandled like that.

The three of them – Cole, Ellen and another
older man whom Esai said was Cole’s father – were in a room. They were tied up and seated against the wall, their butts on the cement floor. Terry could hear everything that was going on.

The men in the room still wore their ski masks.
The recording was going on – to be uploaded later to YouTube or whatever news channel would take them.

Esai
was waving the gun around. Terry thought he was entirely too comfortable with it. She squirmed again.
Don’t kill the girl
, she remembered saying.
I just want to scare her and her boyfriend
. But she honestly didn’t know how far Esai would take it.

She didn’t know, for one,
that Esai was going to hurt Cole.

But what did you expect?
her inner voice told her. These people are a shifter hate group. They are like the Ku Klux Klan. How do you expect them to treat shifters?

Still, she had thrown the dice. She had to stay resolute.

Besides, she betrayed you. She didn’t want to go with you. She didn’t want to stand by your side like a sister should.

She let a man come between you.

Oh yeah.

Terry pursed her lips.

Hell, she wasn’t going to intervene if Esai got a little rough. After all, that was what the fates had in store for people who did not dance to her tune, right?

33

“You’re a shifter,” said the gunman. “So shift.”

Cole was bruised. He had been hit on the face and head repeatedly with the butt of the gun, among other weapons. The blows were not very damaging, inflicting mostly bruises and flesh wounds. A cut above his right eyebrow leaked blood into his eye. But other than that, he was fine. No broken bones so far, though a tooth felt kind of loose.

The blows were to needle him. To goad him into
shifting, he knew.

And they were working. There were several times
when the compulsion grew so strong that he had to literally curl his toes to quash it. Because if he shifted, then what? Would they kill him? He was well aware of the video cam trained on them, operated by one of the guys.

“Go on, shift,” the gunman repeated.

If only he had a dollar for every time the guy said ‘shift’. Then he wouldn’t need anyone to fund his dig anymore.

“Why?” he croaked. “So y
ou can get your kinks by watching?”

So far, he was thankful that all their attention was focused on him.
Because that was what he intended – that they should shower all their curses and anger and fists and rusted weapons on him and not on Ellen and his father.

For answer, the gunman struck his temple again with the butt of the gun.

“Stop that,” his father roared.

The gunman turned on the older man.

“No, no, he didn’t mean that,” Cole said. The blood from the cut was really irritating his eye. He tried blinking, but blood was thick. It couldn’t be just blinked away like tears.

He was bu
ying time.

Ellen said quickly, “
Leave him alone. He’s had enough. What are you trying to prove? You want to film us shifting?”

She made it sound like a dirty word.

Cole said, “Ellen, don’t say anything.”

“Why not?
I say lots of things all the time. Why do you have to be the one to do all the talking? And I meant that in a totally respectful way because I know you’re trying to draw their attention.”

“Ellen,” Cole groaned. “Stop talking.”

“I won’t, because I’m sick of them hitting you, and hitting you, and hitting you, and I don’t believe I’ve said that three times.”

“I don’t believe it either.”

“Shut up,” the gunman said. “You talk too much. That’s why you can’t shift.”

Cole suddenly
thought of something. “Wait, wait . . . she can’t shift. You’ve got to let her go. Ellen, I mean. She’s got something in her that stops her from shifting.”

“So what’s it to us?” demanded the gunman.

“So you can let her go. She can’t shift. She’s of no interest to you. No interest whatsoever.”

The gunman wore a ski mask, but Cole could swear that he was smiling behind it.
He wondered if he had made a mistake.

The gunman said something to one of his men, who was holding a
tire iron.

Oh shit. He had made a mistake.

The man with the tire iron came over and seized Ellen by the arm.

“Hey,” Cole said. “Leave her alone. She can’t shift!”

“I can’t shift,” Ellen echoed as she was jerked up from the ground.

“She can’t shift?” Carter said incredulously. “That’s a bad, bad thing, son. You
don’t want to have a girlfriend who can’t shift. You’ll have children who can’t shift.”

“
Woah, how did we get from ‘girlfriend’ to children?” Cole said.

“He doesn’
t want to marry me,” Ellen said. “You don’t have anything to worry about, Mr. Devereaux. Ow! Let go of me.”

“This is all very interesting,” the gun man said, “but I don’t give a flying fuck, as you Americans call it.
Flying fuck. Get that?”

He guffawed at his own joke, as did the other men.
Cole supposed it was best to laugh at the jokes made by the guy with the only gun in the room. How many bullets did that thing have anyway?

He gauged the distance between himself and Ellen.
His mind was making glib of the situation, but his adrenal glands were pumping and pumping and pumping.

The gun man pointed the gun at Ellen, who was struggling in the grip of the other man with her hands tied behind her back.
He turned to Cole.

“You shift, I don’t shoot her.”

“What?”

“You don’t shift, I shoot her.”

“Come on, you don’t have to shoot anybody. You want to shoot anybody, you can shoot me.”

“Cole, no!”

“This is going around in circles.” Cole stood up with difficulty. He was judging. Calibrating.

Get the man with the gun
.

“Look,” he said, “
if I shift, you let both of them go. Is that a deal?”

“You don’t make deals here,” said the gun man.
“I’m the one giving the orders. I decide what to do.”

“So you want me to shift. You want to capture me shifting on video. Then what? What’re you going to do? Shoot me? Murder me so that you can
put me on YouTube? What are you trying to prove? They don’t carry that kind of stuff on YouTube anymore. You can get your account banned.”

“What?” The gunman sounded like he thought Cole was crazy. 

Maybe I am crazy, Cole thought. But he was desperate. And now he understood why desperation made Ellen babble.

“So what’s your point?
You want to murder all shifters? Or just American shifters? You’re not a murderer. You don’t look like a murderer . . . from the little I can see from underneath your ski mask.”

There was nothing he could see under the ski mask.

“You don’t want to create an incident with Uncle Sam. That’s America, just in case you didn’t know. They don’t like their citizens being captured. They could retaliate, and that’s not what you want.”

“You talk too much,” the gun man said.

He raised the gun and pointed the barrel at Ellen’s head.

“No, no, wait, wait.”
Cole said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I talked too much.”

He started to undo his buttons
frantically. The trouble was that he could not get a good read on them. There were shifter hate groups around, of course. Especially in the African continent, where local prejudices took root.

He wondered if Mobutu had anything to do with it.
If so, it was time to fire the guy. But he had to be fair about it, of course. Provided they all actually lived through this.

He took off his shirt, and then he wrenched his shoes and socks off.
Everyone was staring at him.

“Son,” his father said in a broken voice, “you don’t have to do this. I’m sorry for everything I said to you.”

“It’s OK, Dad. Nothing’s going to happen.”

Cole sounded a lot more confident than he felt.
He had stripped down to his boxers. He looked at Ellen, with the gun pointed at her head. Her eyes were frantic.

He stripped off his boxers.
He did not feel embarrassed. He never felt embarrassed about nudity. He was a real shifter that way.

Ready to shift anytime.

The guy with the video cam zoomed in closer. Right at his genitals, it seemed. He wondered if they were going to pixelate his penis out when the clip aired.

Go
.

He
felt his bones changing. Becoming more compact. Becoming stronger. He crouched – an animal on all fours. Fur sprouted on his skin. Orange, white and black fur. His nose elongated into a muzzle and his ears curled. His teeth sharpened and became fangs.

The men jabbered in fear. They raised their weapons.

He growled.

The gunman pointed the gun at him.