Tempted by the Jaguar #2: Revelation (Riverford Shifters) (8 page)

“Hunter?” Kylie said hesitantly, reaching
out a hand to him, but unsure if she should touch him.

At the sound of her voice, utter shock
quickly turned to a frenzy of activity as Hunter yanked off his fleece jacket,
followed by the long-sleeved Henley he wore, leaving his chest bare. He then
proceeded to tear it apart at the seams before handing her the back piece.

“We need to try to stop the bleeding,”
he said, his voice thick with urgency. “Even if he screams, don’t stop putting
pressure on the wounds.”

Kylie wanted to question him about the
wolf’s words. It was obvious that just mentioning his brother had shaken Hunter
to the core. Instead, she just nodded, folded the fabric into a makeshift
compress, and silently set about to carefully apply pressure to the worst of
the gaping slashes on the wolf shifter’s lower back that were still oozing
blood. There were so many of them that it looked as though a monster cat had
decided to use his back as a scratching post. She had no idea how he was still alive.

The entire time, her heart was racing in
a new fear. She was too close to the blood, dangerously close. It was quickly
soaking through the layers she had folded into the cotton fabric, but
thankfully had yet to penetrate the outside layer. The wounded man wasn’t
human, so if so much as a drop got on her skin…

“The lions did this,” she stated, not
daring to take her eyes off her hands.

For a long, uncomfortable moment, Hunter
didn’t answer. Kylie could almost physically feel the gears in his head turning
as he considered her words.

“The fact that he mentioned my brother
guarantees it,” Hunter said finally, the reluctance still evident in his tone.

Startled, Kylie chanced a glance at him
and was surprised to see him staring intently into the trees towards the south
with his teeth clenched as if he was seconds away from snarling. She instantly
stiffened, wondering if he had seen or heard something just now. She couldn’t
smell anything but blood and more blood, and to a lesser extent, the scent of
wolf and jaguar.

“Hunter, wha—”

Without warning, Hunter shoved her
shoulder hard with both hands, sending her tumbling, as a large, golden mass
landed directly onto his back from somewhere above. A blood-curdling roar
shattered the silence behind her, and Kylie froze in the middle of trying to
right herself for a couple of heartbeats before an answering growl rose from
her throat.

Fueled by a surge of adrenaline, Kylie rolled
and scrambled to her knees. She raised her head in enough time to see a
cougar—no, a
lioness
—go flying as Hunter, pinned flat on his back and
dangerously close to having his throat ripped out, shoved her off him with a
brutal upward kick of his heavy boots to her midsection. She was horrified to
see a deep, double gash in his forearm as though the lioness had bit down and
tried to tear a chunk out of the muscle. He also had a few shallow slashes
across his chest where he had been clawed.

“Shift and run!
Now
!” Hunter
yelled a heartbeat before he began to shift himself, his jeans ripping as his
body began to rapidly contort and reshape itself.

Then the lioness was on him again, and
the morning air was suddenly filled with the roars and snarls of two apex cats
as they locked together in a mass of snapping jaws and razor sharp claws.

Kylie sat a few feet away from the melee
frozen in both horror and indecision. Although Hunter was the larger of the
two, the lioness seemed to have the upper hand, her movements more deliberate
and precise—trained.

Dammit! Although scared out of her mind,
she knew she couldn’t just run off and leave Hunter and the dying wolf to the
mercy of that monster. She started to take off the jacket Hunter had loaned her
when suddenly six hundred plus pounds of tumbling cats came flying at her.
Kylie yelped and tried to dive out of the way, but the back end of the lioness
clipped her right side painfully hard, knocking her to the ground.

Gasping after a breath that was no
longer there, Kylie tried to pick herself off the ground for the second time
that day. Through tearing eyes, she saw the battling felines slam into a thick
tree trunk dangerously close to the unconscious wolf shifter.

Shaking his head rapidly and obviously
stunned, Hunter staggered over to the wolf, placing himself as a barrier
between the wolf and the lioness, who had abruptly switched her attack back to
the person who had been her target all along. There was a meaty sound as their
bodies collided, but this time, as they tumbled to the ground in a tangle of
limbs, only the lioness climbed back to her feet.

Kylie’s muscles throughout her body were
already contracting as she opened her mouth to scream at the lioness, a scream
initially meant to distract that quickly turned into a roar of pure rage that
sounded unlike anything she had ever heard come out of her mouth. The lioness
pivoted with a snarl, then froze with a look of confusion that had no business
on the face of a lion.

Taking advantage of the enemy shifter’s
bewilderment, Kylie shot straight for the bitch and lunged for her throat. Her
jaws, however, met only air as the lioness somehow managed to twist out of the
way at the last second. Kylie immediately turned and crouched low with a snarl,
prepared to defend both her knocked out lover and the injured wolf shifter no
matter what.

However, instead of attacking, the
lioness gave a low grunt and slowly sat back onto her haunches. Then the
muscles of her body began to ripple, and Kylie was utterly staggered when she
realized that the lioness was
shifting
. Another thirty seconds and a
short-haired, blonde woman couched in the lioness’s place, glaring fit to kill.

“What the hell is a lioness doing with
the
jaguars
?” the woman angrily demanded in an alto voice the second she
was able, spitting out the word ‘jaguar’ like an expletive. Her nostrils
flared. “I can smell him all over you! It’s so strong that I thought you were
one of them! That you would shame your alpha, your clan, by letting that piece
of filth fuck you is just…!” She growled in utter disgust. “Traitor!”

Lioness…

If Kylie had been in her human form, all
of her blood would have drained from her face in utter dread. She slowly
lowered her eyes, the look on her face like someone expecting to see something
gory and grotesque. As soon as two golden paws that were conspicuously free of
spots came into view, Kylie jerked her eyes away. She’d seen more than enough.

The blonde woman’s eyes flickered to a
point behind Kylie before she growled again, turned and dashed into the cover
of the trees without another word. With the threat gone for the moment, Kylie
wasted no time in shifting back to her human form.

“You’re—a Polyshifter.”

Kylie flinched at the utter flatness in
the familiar voice behind her, at hearing a word she hated almost as much as
the word ‘Deadend.’ It was a word that had the power to destroy, and already
had destroyed, a multitude of lives. It was the hated label that had cost Kylie
her parents.

For one desperate moment, she considered
just dashing off into the trees, and then almost in the same thought, berated
herself disgustedly for even thinking it. She owed it to Hunter to stay. She
owed it to herself. She had to see what, if any, expression was on his face;
she had to
know
…

She slowly stood up, turned, and faced
him with her nudity fully on display. And there it was, one of her worst fears
staring back at her in the form of a pair of hazel eyes full of suspicion and
the first hints of betrayal.

In that endless, horrible moment, there
were only two paths Kylie could see. Her days of feigning ignorance about the
shifter world were now irrevocably over.

She could either shift back into a
lioness and run to Paul and a life forever on the run, essentially ruining the
life of a man who had taken her in without batting an eye and given her
everything, or she could come completely clean and try to salvage the best
thing that had ever happened to her no matter how impossible it now seemed.

“I am,” Kylie confessed softly, refusing
to look away.

It was done. The next move was
completely his.

TEMPTED BY THE JAGUAR #3: RAMIFICATION

Kylie knew from the beginning that getting
romantically involved with Hunter was an extremely bad idea, and now because of
the Pandora’s Box she inadvertently blew wide open in order to protect him,
more than Hunter may now determine the consequences she and those she loves
will ultimately end up paying.

Releases
in February 2015

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Cristina Rayne is a
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling author who lives in West Texas with her crazy cat and about a dozen
bookcases full of fantasy worlds and steamy romances. She has a degree in
Computer Science which totally qualifies her to write romances. As Fantasy is
her first love, she feels if she can inject a little love into the fantastical,
along with a few steamy scenes, then all the better. She is also the author of
the
Claimed by the Elven King
and
Erotic Tales from the Vampire
Underground
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