ROMANCE: SHIFTER: Shifter to the Max Collection (Dragon, Bear, Wolf and Panther Shifter Romances) (Paranormal Fantasy Romance Collection) (16 page)
Authors: C.J. Ayers
Emily Sanders always did seem to find the bad boys, but this one takes the cake. Her boyfriend, Cody, has put her in a dangerous situation that may very well turn deadly. It seems he double crossed the local mob boss, embezzled several million dollars and disappeared. The problem is, Emily was left holding the bag.
When she comes home to their apartment one night, she finds Cody gone and the apartment trashed. Minutes later, the door is broken down and two thugs grab her. That’s all she remembers until she wakes up to find herself bound in a warehouse and being questioned roughly by one of the thugs.
Markus Haynes is second in command of the local mafia, a wolf shifter, and an undercover FBI agent. He has spent years in his current undercover position and it has taken him every bit of that time to secure his cover by earning the trust of the organization. He is inches away from getting all the evidence he needs to shut down the local operation. All he wants to do at the warehouse is find the money Cody ran off with. He’s sure he can either get the captive girlfriend to talk, or scare her into keeping her mouth shut. There’s only one problem with that. As soon as he enters the warehouse, his wolf demands he keep her, protect her, and never, ever let her go. He suddenly realizes the woman bound to the chair is not just any woman, she’s his mate.
But, how will he protect and keep her safe in his dangerous undercover world?
How will he make her see that he is not the bad guy she thinks he is without blowing his cover?
And what’s more, how will he explain his wolf to her?
I turned over in my bed to find Cody standing at our window like he always did. “Cody,” I said, wincing at my own, groggy voice. I smacked my lips. My throat was dry. I had been snoring again, I could feel it.
I should have known something was wrong when he didn’t respond to me. He just kept standing there with his face practically pressed against the glass and his long, thin fingers pulling back the curtain. He was like a statue, his thin form hardly moving save for the gentle rise and fall of his chest.
I should ask him what he’s thinking.
I thought about that until it seemed the intention would simply burst from my lips. But I didn’t. I turned over instead. I didn’t need the rejection of not getting an answer first thing in the morning. With one, deep breath, I flipped the comforter back and sat up, swinging my legs over the side of the bed.
I took one more look at him standing there. What a picture we were, me by the foot of the bed, my long, dark hair ruffled by a night of sleeping, my lanky body draped in mismatched pajamas, him on a diagonal, seven feet away, his face trained at the window wearing nothing but flannel pants. I remembered the mornings before, before work got complicated, before my book tour wedged a space in between us, before we stopped talking.
“Coffee?”
He only shrugged.
I hated myself for considering that a victory.
After running a brush around my teeth, I made my way to the kitchen. As soon as I got the grounds in the machine and the scent of Columbia roast filled our stainless steel wonder house, I could feel my spirits already lifting. Coffee was the first thing I ever discovered we had in common.
I met him at a cafe.
He stormed into
Think Coffee
, his briefcase dripping with rain water, his blond hair almost white and practically pasted to his face, but his eyes. Oh his eyes. I wasn’t even looking at him at first. Nope. My attention was trained at the word document glaring in front of me. I had a book deadline looming and no idea how to end the third installment of the cozy mystery series I had been working on. I glanced up only to give my eyes a rest, but then I saw his.
He stood in the line of anxious twenty-somethings with an addiction to feed, but instead of looking straight ahead at the cashier with the nose ring and the purple hair, he was staring over at me. I almost did a double take, or awkwardly pointed at myself. My brow furrowed. You know, like they do in movies. But before I could even question myself, he was walking towards me, his pink lips curled into a smirk. I used to love that smirk.
Now it makes me want to rip his head off.
“God that smells good.” He stalked into our kitchen in his bathrobe with blushed skin of a quick shower.
I frowned. “I know it does.” Our first words.
Coffee always brought us together. I sat two mugs down in front of him and filled them, my eyes widening at the steaming caffeine.
He dragged the Economist towards him and settled in to read it, his hand caressed the mug the way I wished he would touch me.
I sat next to him, but instead of a magazine, I flipped open my laptop and started on a short story I had been working on:
Disillusionment.
Our kitchen was all too silent. I could hear everything bleeding in from the outside. On the 20
th
floor of any building, you shouldn’t ever have to hear ambulances or angry cab drivers or construction workers, but I did. My ears were so desperate, they sought out the noise.
“I have an early meeting today. Were you gonna write?” He said it without looking up.
I nodded, knowing fully well that he wouldn’t have been looking at me to see it. I wanted the pause, I wanted him to go searching for once.
After a short pause, I felt the air move next to my face. I glanced up to find him gazing at me.
I stared back. For a short second, I could see it again.
Those eyes…
That coffee shop.
“Uh, yeah. My editor wants to see me.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Again.”
I glowered. “I have a book coming out…”
“Wonderful.” He dropped the Economist, a sour look on his face. “Another tour.”
I couldn’t stop the retort from coming out of my mouth. “Did you even miss me last time?” I took another sip of coffee to avoid his gaze. All at once, the room was far too small.
When he leaned into me, I could smell the sharp scent of his pine aftershave. His morning funk had faded away to reveal the good-natured man I remembered moving in with. His hand traced the flowers on my pajama shorts, then the skin underneath. I pressed towards him, my arms finding their place around his neck.
He kissed me, his soft lips tickling mine, then devouring me from the outside in and the inside out. A shudder slipped out of my mouth, a groan out of his. His hands pealed my tank top up, just enough to reveal the skin of my belly. His fingertips sunk into all of our favorite spots. Goosebumps rose on my skin, heat on my face.
His tongue thrusted into my mouth and I was ready to have him right then and there. This was the moment. Four years of sex and we had perfected the dance. Completely predictable, yet still rather satisfying. This was the part where he…
But he didn’t.
I could almost hear his heart slow, feel his temperature fall. He slowly pealed me off of him, starting with my hands, which still hung around his neck, then my legs, which had wrapped themselves around his waist…
“Wha-…”
But instead of explaining himself, he held the back of my head and pressed his forehead against mine. I squeezed my eyes shut because I was afraid of the look that might be in his. Then, with one final kiss, he stepped down from the stool and disappeared into our room.
Right then and there. I should have known it was the last time. Looking back, it’s so obvious, with the brooding and the silence. We were like two eggs in boiling water, dying on the inside without a sign of it on the outside. I should have followed him into our room and demanded to know what he was thinking.
But instead, I stole into our closet, picked out my favorite 90’s sweater and snuck out to
Think Coffee
. That day, it was so much easier to be in a book than in my own life.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling really shitty, I put my characters through the ringer. I want them to suffer the way I am. I want them to work for their happy ending. It’s the kind of thing that always drew kudos for me. Publishers would rave about me keeping them on the edge of their seats like my style was some sort of calculated way to sell more novels and not just the sad sadist in me coming out to play.
After an entire day of downing every type of caffeinated drink I could stomach and clearing a whopping ten thousand words of my new book, I was feeling a little like I had purged: calm, satiated and a little lethargic. The angry, October wind was full force when I stepped outside so it took me almost five minutes longer to get back to the apartment. But I didn’t mind. In fact, I kind of liked the delay. It made it more likely that Cody would be home by the time I got there.
My heart pounded in my chest as I turned the key in the lock, but when I pushed the door open, no pool of light greeted me. There was no 80’s rock bleeding out into the main room, no sound of him feverishly answering emails. It was all silent.
I shut the door behind me, letting out a huff of breath before dropping my bag on the kitchen counter and flipping on the overhead lights. But what I saw stopped me in my tracks. “What the fuck?” I muttered to myself as I walked through to the main room of my house, which, frankly looked like it had been turned completely upside down.
“I can’t believe this.” There it was, my L-shaped couch. The one I had fought tooth and nail with Cody over in the middle of pottery barn. It was lying over on its side, a cut scratched all the way through it.
I crossed the room, running my hands along the gash. The cushion bled out of it, leaving little pieces of cotton all over the rug. All at once, my stomach dropped. I stepped back, glancing around me at the disheveled room. Our coffee table was smashed, my weekend bag dragged across the floor, its contents bottomed out. I furrowed my brow. Had we been robbed?
My heart throbbed. I should have been doing something, calling the police, calling Cody, running away, but I couldn’t. I just stood there, staring at the rip in that couch, knowing that something sinister had happened.
My hand reached into my back pocket, seeking relief from the sound of Cody’s voice. Maybe he had brought one of his friends from work, one of the ones who are always a little less capable of coping with the “stress” and always have a new drug down their throat. I thought that maybe they got into a fight and…
With a sigh, I sunk to the floor, holding the phone in my hand. My own depressing, make-shift story was falling apart in my head anyway. So I decided to call.
I didn’t even realize I had been holding my breath until it went to voicemail. I let out all the air in my chest, sucked in another deep breath and tried again.
Nothing.
Voicemail.
Tone.
Beep.
Beeeep.
Beeeeeep.
I must have called him twenty times before I collapsed onto the floor, a ball of stress, feeling like one of those cartoons that might just spontaneously burst into flames. My mind started working. It was at moments like those that I always felt like one of my characters… like there was a master writer somewhere above the universe putting me through the ringer before she let me have my happy ending.
But what was my happy ending?
I couldn’t tell how many minutes or hours had passed before I heard a sound coming from the hallway. I froze at the dangling of something metal on the other side of the door. A key?
My heart soared. I sat up, a smile playing at the edges of my lips as I had already started the format of the obligatory stream of compliments and apologies in my head. After being immerged in the idea of being alone, truly alone, of losing Cody when that’s not what I had planned, what I had chosen, I realized that maybe I could handle waking up another morning to him staring pensively our of our window.
The door blew open, slamming against the wall.
My heart skipped a beat. “Cody?” It was wishful thinking.
I didn’t have the stomach to look up, so I kept my head down, afraid of what was above me. I saw two sets of boots, black leather. Long legs. Beads of sweat sprouted on my forehead. Streams of sweat slid down the insides of my arms. I could feel my bowels moving, getting ready to purge everything inside of me.
“Oh God.” I breathed.
Just as those words slipped out of my mouth, I felt one of them grab a handful of my hair, yanking my head up and stretching my neck. I let out a grunt of pain at the sharp pang that shot through my scalp. “No…” I sounded like a whiny child.
I blinked my eyes. There were little dots in front of my face. My back was on fire with pain. “Please.” I whispered. I didn’t know what to do besides to beg them not to do whatever it is they had planned.
There was a large, rough hand on my face, pressed into my skin. My eyes flashed wide, a shot of anxiety running through me that I could hardly explain before…
With a crack, everything went black.