by Selena Scott
Fucking great.
His cock stirred against his leg and he mirrored her pose and turned to face the wall. It was safer that way.
He slammed his eyes closed and tried to make his breaths even, his thoughts long and syrupy, the way they were before he slid into sleep.
"Anton?" she asked quietly and he felt her roll over. Her movement caused the covers to pull slightly against his skin and every cell in his body went on high alert.
He considered ignoring her, for his own sanity, but instead he just grunted to show he was listening.
"You'll be safe tomorrow, right?"
He furrowed his brow in confusion. "What do you mean?"
She paused and he knew she was biting her bottom lip back there. He just fucking knew it.
He stayed facing the canvas of the tent, knowing how close she would be if he turned. Inches. Her scent already filled the small tent. There was only so much he could be expected to take.
But if she didn't answer his question in the next ten seconds, he couldn't be held responsible.
"I mean, I know you have a lot of personal stake wrapped up in this. Because it involves Navuka.”
She paused and he grunted.
"But I just wanted to make sure that you," she paused again, searched for the words, “would be safe. Tomorrow."
It meant nothing. She cared about him. She always had. With the detached constancy of a family member. It wasn't news. He refused to let it warm him. That way led to madness.
"Okay," he finally said.
He could feel her wanting to say more. But the intimacy of being awake and so close and pajamas and god. It was too much. He was both incredibly relieved and incredibly disappointed when he felt her roll back over. The covers whispered over him like fingertips and he slammed his eyes closed. Used every ounce of his willpower to force himself into a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AJ stumbled through the woods, dirt on one of her cheeks and her hair pulled back into a messy bun. The collar of her loose t-shirt was frayed and torn. Mud caked her boots. She shivered against the chilly autumn air as she ran faster. She could see it up ahead. The cinder block shelter.
"Help!" she yelled, weakly at first and then louder. "Please! Help me!"
She crashed through a thorn bush and delicate lines of thin red opened on her arm like lace. Perfect.
"Help!" she screamed again. She fell upon the door, rusted metal with a small sliding opening at the top of it. Her fist rang out on the door with a heavy clang that echoed through the trees.
The metal slide opened, revealing a pair of heavily shadowed eyes.
"What do you want?" asked a man’s voice, accented and unrecognizable.
"Please, I need help. I've been lost for days. I'm so thirsty. I'm starving. I need help." AJ pulled her best desperate look and then allowed it to morph into one of sheer terror. "You have to let me in." She pretended to jump at a noise behind her and she scanned the trees. "There's something out here. An animal."
The voice at the door sounded almost bored. "Of course there are animals. We're in the forest. I'm sorry. I can't help you. Walk west. There's a town only a four or five-hour walk from here. You'll find it. They'll help you."
"No! Please!" AJ screamed as the opening began to slide closed again. "Please, you have to let me in. I know you won't believe me, but I saw something. It was- please, you have to believe me. It was a tiger."
The slide opened again with a satisfying snick.
"You saw a tiger? When?"
"Please let me in and I'll tell you all about it."
There was a pause. A long one. And then the door creaked open and AJ slipped inside.
"I don't like this," Anton said for the hundredth time from where they all watched in the woods.
"It's the only way to get in there, okay?" Dora snapped back, as tightly wound as the rest of them. "I would have done it except they know my face from the article."
"Hush," Glory interrupted, staring resolutely at the high thin windows at the top of the building. They were waiting for a signal from AJ. If her mother was being held in there, then AJ was going to find a way to flash the lights. Once. When it was time for them to storm the castle.
If not, she was going to come back out.
Simple as that. So all they had to do was wait.
But in their tense state, each second felt like it lasted a week. She'd only been in there a minute before all of them started shifting their feet.
The door to the cinder block dwelling opened. Glory felt twin shoots of relief and disappointment. AJ was okay, and leaving. Which meant her mother wasn't in there.
But it wasn't AJ who was walking out of the house. It was the woman. The woman on the picnic blanket who had lured Glory into capture all those days ago.
“That’s her,” Glory whispered to the group. “The woman who tricked me.”
They all watched as the woman slunk around the side of the dwelling, her eyes staring into the forest as if she were watching for something. She went around the back of the building and after a moment, they heard the roar of a truck start up.
The truck screamed around the side of the building and backed up immediately to the large metal door that AJ had just gone through.
The woman jumped out of the truck and around to the back where she flung up the back hatch. She opened the door to the building and disappeared inside.
“What the fuck?” Danil whispered, voicing what they all felt.
And then the truth hit Emin like a ton of bricks.
“They know we’re coming. They’re taking Glory’s mother right now.”
He was ripping off his clothes, shifting and racing forward even as they all heard it.
AJ’s voice sirened over the noise of the running truck. “Anton!” she screamed, just once, before she fell silent.
And then the clearing where they all stood exploded into a cloud of roars and fur and enormous animal bodies.
Dora stood alone, a second later, as she watched four bears and a tiger sprint through the woods to the dwelling.
“Holy shit,” she whispered in a single second of awe before she took off after them.
Danil went for the tires of the truck first. Even if they got that thing loaded, there was no way they were driving it out of here.
Maxim, the largest in his bear form, took a shortcut to that and just jammed one enormous shoulder into the side of the truck and tipped it with a loud, dusty bang.
Glory and Anton led the way. Glory’s lithe, dexterous body slid easily through the entrance of the building. Meanwhile, Anton had to tear at the bricks to fit through.
Emin caught up to him immediately and did some tearing of his own. There was no fucking way Glory was going into that building alone.
The two brothers tore a car-sized hole in the wall in seconds, jumping through with an earth-shaking roar.
The inside of the dwelling was one large room. There were cots and tables. Computers and some lab equipment. But it was obviously more of a prison for the tiger in a cage in the corner than anything else.
AJ lay in an inert heap in the corner, a trickle of blood on her forehead and Anton was there in a less than a second, standing over her.
Glory was on her back feet, her paws up on the metal cage that held her mother. A small, sick tiger. Laying on one side, barely able to lift her head.
Glory let out a horrible roar, ripping at the door of the cage with one paw.
Emin, meanwhile, looked on in horror at the two humans in the room. A man and a woman. They looked familiar to him. They both held long, thin rifles, one pointed at Glory and the other pointed at Anton.
Well. That made this decision easy for Emin. He rushed them, swallowing the guttural roar that threatened to tear him in two. He wanted nothing to distract him from destroying these two people.
With a sleek and sinuous move, Emin streaked across the room and swatted them both aside as if they were rag dolls.
The rifles s
lid across the floor and in the back of his mind, Emin was aware of Anton shredding them with his claws.
He didn’t care. He cared about the people who had trapped Glory. The two who had delivered her to the lab in Spokane. Where she’d been tortured and experimented on. An image of Anton as a young boy flashed in Emin’s brain. Happy and light and athletic. They’d stolen that boy just as they’d stolen Glory.
He loomed over the two humans who screamed and tried to scramble away from him. The man’s leg was obviously broken from where Emin had pushed him down. Good.
He raised his paw to strike them from the earth when a flash of orange lightning streaked in front of him. Glory.
She brushed Emin aside as she loomed over the two humans, swatting them with her enormous paws and crushing them together. The man yowled in pain. But not in terror. Emin watched the two familiar faces and didn’t see terror. He saw smugness. He’d seen it there before. He realized that these were two of the people who’d held Anton captive all those years ago in Belarus.
“You’re too late!” the man screamed, reaching out for the woman and dragging her with him as he crawled away. He laughed as a sickeningly recognizable sound echoed through the air.
“Helicopters!” Danil’s voice sounded in his brothers’ heads.
Emin’s blood shrank. Reinforcements.
Anton let out a roar of rage and pain at the noise. He’d originally been kidnapped by men in a helicopter. He damn sure wasn’t going to let it happen again. Emin watched as Anton scooped up the still unconscious AJ in his arms and scrambled for the door.
Emin swatted the two humans aside once more for good measure before lunging at the metal crate that held Glory’s mother. With a tremendous grinding and screeching, Emin ripped the door of the cage off its hinges. Glory’s mother huddled in the back corner of the cage for a moment but then slinked forward, limping out of the open door.
She and Glory exchanged one sweet bumping of heads before Emin knelt, picking up the mother in his arms like a baby. He could see that she was too weak and injured to escape on her own.
Glory and Emin dashed out of the dwelling. He was immediately dismayed to see a helicopter quickly losing altitude in the air, lunging toward them.
His brothers raced for the cover of the trees but he could see men with shiny weapons starting to lean out of the chopper.
Suddenly, Glory yowled and screeched. They all turned and Emin’s heart was in his throat. Had she been hurt?
But no, she was getting their attention. Streaking around the other side of the building, the bears all followed her. Emin watched in amazement as she scuttled around a small rock face and disappeared.
Stumbling after her, he realized that she’d gone down into a cave opening. Something whizzed past Emin’s face, barely missing Glory’s mother in his arms. He realized it was a tranquilizer dart, shot by the men in the chopper.
Now or never.
He lunged after Glory, screaming in his head for his brothers to follow.
They plunged into the damp wetness of the cave and the thunderous sounds of the helicopter quickly thinned.
They trudged through the cave system for almost an hour before Glory streaked toward a thin strip of light ahead of them. The cave spit them out about a mile from their campsite.
Blinking into the light, the bears bounded out of the caves, looking around for any sign that Navuka knew where the cave had led. But they were alone.
Silence beat down on them.
Maxim was already barreling through the woods toward the van. The rest of them, hobbled with Dora, AJ, and the injured tiger, followed along behind. The second the van came into view, Maxim driving like a madman, they shifted, jumping into the van and screaming down the road.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
There was a lot of panting, a lot of swearing, and a lot of nakedness. Oh. And one tiger who refused to shift.
“It’s okay, Mom,” Glory crooned, stroking her mother’s muzzle. “We’re safe. We’re safe.”
Emin grabbed one of the blankets from the back and tossed it over the tiger. “Serena,” he said, knowing her name from Glory. “I swear you are safe.”
Dora crawled over, a bottle of water in her hand. They all braced as Maxim screamed onto the highway, checking around for any followers. There were none.
“Serena,” Dora said. “We need you to shift so that if we get pulled over we aren’t smuggling a tiger across country lines, okay? It’ll also be easier to take stock of your injuries.”
Looking her daughter right in the eyes, the tiger shifted.
It wasn’t quite the same life-altering smack in the senses that Emin had experienced the first time that he saw Glory shift.
But damn. Serena was a good-looking older lady. Glory’s face, aged by 25 years or so, peeked out at him through a curtain of jet black hair, shot through with a few laces of silver.
Her eyes were ice blue where Glory’s were green. But they were both stunningly beautiful. Serena gratefully took the bottle of water from Dora’s hand and gulped. Behind them, AJ groaned and rolled over in Anton’s arms.
The collective attention switched to her. She sat up, blinking, and shielding her eyes from the light.
“Careful,” Anton growled. “You probably have concussion.”
She nodded, apparently agreeing, before she scrambled off his lap, realizing that everyone, including him, was stark naked.
“This is a really strange moment to wake up in,” she mumbled, brushing her hair out of her eyes.
“Tell me about it,” Maxim grumbled, searching the skies for the helicopters and booking it down the highway. As far as he was concerned, they weren’t stopping until they hit Spokane.
***
A month later, most of their injuries had healed. Well, their physical injuries. Serena, living in the guest bedroom at Ilya and Katya’s, had yet to speak much to anyone besides Glory. They weren’t sure what had happened to her in the previous months. Though Anton and Glory had a pretty good idea.
All of them put those worries out of their heads though, because last night it had snowed. A good snow. Gorgeously white and sparkling over the trees like jewelry. It was the new year. And most importantly, it was a wedding day.
Glory pulled AJ in for a huge hug where they stood inside Emin’s cabin. The rest of them waited outside on the front lawn for the ceremony to start.
“Are you sure you’re alright?” Glory asked AJ. “Your head doesn’t hurt at all? You swear?”
AJ refrained from rolling her eyes. It had been a really bad concussion. Sure. And she knew everyone’s concern had more to do with love than it did with underestimating her. But come on. She wasn’t a child. People got concussions all the time.
She was sick of talking about it. She was so grateful she’d gotten to be there that day. That she’d gotten to be part of the group in that way. But she deeply regretted having gotten hurt. The woman in the cinder block dwelling had conked her on the head really well. And now the Malashoviks fretted around her like birds every chance they got.
All except for Anton. Who, ever since that day, had treated her as if she had leprosy. He’d barely looked at her. Tersely asking how she felt once or twice. But that was it. That night in the tent, AJ had thought that something was finally gonna happen between them. But no. He was back to being even colder than he’d been before.
She craned back, caught sight of him standing on the lawn in a suit with his brothers. She sighed. Today wasn’t the day to be worrying about this. Today was Glory’s day.
“You look so beautiful,” AJ said to Glory, hugging her and deflecting her question. And she wasn’t lying.
Unable to settle for a white dress, Glory had chosen a deeply colorful dress with autumn leaves of every color all over it. She looked gorgeous. And no one else could have pulled it off the way she did. Emin was gonna lose his shit.
“Come on!” Dora said, opening the front door and tossing her head in. “Emin is gonna burn his own cabin down
if you don’t come out here, Glorious!”
AJ and Glory hugged once more before AJ scampered out of the house. Glory straightened her crown of holly in the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t a traditional wedding headdress, but she’d spotted it in the woods that morning and she’d just thought it was so pretty. The green set off her eyes perfectly.
Her mother stepped behind her and they locked eyes in the mirror. They were both so grateful to be reunited. To be alive and together.
“Let’s go get your man,” Serena said, holding her hand out to her daughter.
Together, they stepped out onto the porch. Glory’s eyes immediately searched for Emin’s.
She was everything, he thought to himself for the millionth time since he’d first seen her, naked and wondrous in his cabin. She was everything. And now she was really about to be his.
He couldn’t take his eyes off of her as she walked gracefully down the aisle, a playful, joyous glint in her eyes.
He’d finally found his tiger.
The End
Maxim’s Mate
PROLOGUE
She usually liked them dark and wiry and handsome. But she supposed this guy would do. For the night, at least.
He was a real grizzly, Ivy Greene thought, as she watched him pull out the scarred wood bar stool next to her, fixing to sit down. About 6’4” and at least 250. All of it muscle. Thick thatch of dirty blonde hair and eyes like honey.
He had a kind face, and that was really her main requirement. She’d come out to this bar to scratch an itch. She needed a warm body, not a love connection. She figured Andre the Giant would do.
Plus, if what they said about shoe size was even remotely true, she was in for a hell of a ride.
“Hey there, Andre,” she deadpanned to him as he settled back in his chair next to her.
He turned and looked at her in a moment of confusion. “I am not called Andre. I am called Maxim.”
