Lyin' Heart

by Erika Masten

  “Elizabeth Lowe, I cannot believe your behavior. How you can possibly think you should be carrying on like that in public—.”

  “This isn’t in public, Caroline. You’re in my house, without announcing yourself, again. You come and go like you own everything, including my son, and I have had near all I’m fixing to take of it.”

  As the Heath woman stepped forward, with her eyes flared and lips curled back from her elongating teeth, Ellie felt the huge, warm presence of Aubrey Drummond at her back. She didn’t want to feel reassured that he was back there behind her. Ellie could handle this herself; she had to. He wasn’t her man. He wasn’t her mate. No one was. It was up to Ellie to be the protector she and her son needed.

  “You don’t want me in your house?” Caroline asked, the snarl of the bear lowering her voice. “That is fine by me, little cat. But this is no place for Mason and nothing he should be seeing, so I’m taking him with me.”

  Before Ellie could forget she wasn’t a manifested shifter, tempted to rip Caroline Heath limb from limb with her bare, human hands, a tiny voice interrupted behind the women.

  “No, no, no, no, no.”

  A shard of pain stabbed through Ellie’s heart at the sound. “Mason?” She heard the child’s pounding steps as he ran away. “Mason!”

  Both women ran out the front door after the boy, all the way around the side of the house toward the back yard. Ellie paid no mind to the fact that the werelion had run the opposite direction, out the back door. They found Mason as Aubrey was scooping the child up, having circled around the other way. It was just like the day when the man’d had his visitors, the first time she’d really seen the shifter being so protective of her son.

  “No one is taking me from Mama,” Mason yelled from his perch in the crook of Aubrey’s arm. It was the strangest thing to see, the way her son seemed to take strength and calm from being near this man neither of them really knew. “I’m staying here. You go away, Auntie Caroline. You go and come back when you can play nice again.”

  That was what it took, a scolding from a six-year-old boy, to make Caroline Heath draw back. The woman straightened her shoulders and stiffened her posture before glaring first at Aubrey Drummond and then, with significantly more threat in her countenance, at Ellie.

  “I’ll be sending Ty Abrams about this.”

  Chapter 6

  Ellie Lowe wasn’t speaking to him again, and that was fine with Aubrey. After all, he had a job to do in Grayslake, something a little more pressing to the Panthera clans than standing up for a wildcat who didn’t want anything to do with him. Something more important than pretending to be a surrogate father to someone else’s cub. And a hell of a lot more important than hanging around waiting for a couple of angry bears to show up and start arguing with his disagreeable landlady, especially when one of those werebears had the power to derail this entire assignment.

  So Aubrey was at a loss to explain to himself why he paced all evening along the walk outside the carriage house while keeping an eye on the goings-on over in the faded blue Victorian B&B. Every time a car door slammed in the distance or bird called out, he jumped, thinking Caroline had come back with the police or her family in tow. Even after it got dark, he sat brooding out in one of the wooden Adirondack chairs facing the fountain and the back of the house. A twinge of strange, dull pain stirred in his gut when Mason’s light went on upstairs and then went out, followed soon by the same in Ellie’s bedroom.

  A hard woman to love, he thought to himself, then amended that. Too hard to let herself be loved was more like it. Suitors abounded, and she didn’t seem to care. Werelion or not, Aubrey’s own natural magnetism held no sway over the woman. Wolf shifter Jared Brennan looked after her puppy-eyed every day, and Ellie never seemed to notice. Aubrey had to wonder if it was the same with Sam Heath.

  What was that like, being loved so much by Ellie Lowe that she’d have his cub?

  Now her heart belonged only to Mason Lowe, Aubrey supposed. His lion nature could not fault her for that. Cat shifters might not have been known for the romantic fidelity, but their families were another matter. The things they’d do…. The lengths they’d go to…. The mistakes…. The flat out crimes, at times….

  Like Aubrey spending so long lying to his sister, Vanessa, about her shifter nature, thinking she was better off not knowing about herself at all since she was a latent who would never manifest. Hiding the fact that their parents had been slaughtered by Agency special marshals, hunters like the one Aubrey himself had become as the ultimate cover.

  Leave it to a damn werewolf to come along and fall in love with Vanessa and get her tangled up in shifter politics for the first time in her life. Aubrey had wasted a lot of years hiding as a special martial within the Agency, hunting shifters and witches and fey for the government, for the sake of secrecy, disguising himself among the enemy to safeguard his sister.

  So, yes, he understood what Ellie was willing to do for Ida and Mason. If she ever decided to mate, to pledge that kind of devotion to a male…. He tried not to think of it, of what a lucky man that would be.

  Sleepless, Aubrey showed up the next morning at the police station asking after Ty Abrams and meeting the leader of the bear clan behind closed doors in a back office.

  Looking tired and haggard himself from behind a desk, Ty Abrams ran a hand through his thick brown hair. “Let me guess. This is about Caroline Heath and Elizabeth Lowe.”

  Aubrey slumped just as deeply in the chair on the other side of the desk as he nodded. “Are they always like this? Southern women?”

  Ty snorted a brief, hard laugh. “Oh, yeah, but ours more than most.”

  “She-bears, you mean?”

  “Ursine, feline, lupine, what-have-you. Shifter females. Around here, Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, we make them fiery.”

  “Whereas, in California, we tend toward defiant and sneaky,” Aubrey muttered under his breath as he thought in particular of his sister dating a werewolf behind his back.

  Ty agreed, “That’s got to be just as much fun.”

  “Getting to the point,” Aubrey said, “has Caroline Heath been to see you yet?”

  The deep breath the werebear took told Aubrey more than he expected to hear in words. “Let me start by saying this.” But then Ty paused for several long seconds, considering. “The side of me that’s law enforcement is not particularly interested in the spat between these two women unless they get out claws and fangs. And don’t think for a minute that I believe Ellie Lowe is incapable of fiercely protecting Mason even if she can’t shift.”

  Aubrey studied Ty carefully as the werelion asked, “But as the Itan?”

  “In that regard, I have to take into consideration that Mason Lowe is a cub from my clan, and his family is having an especially hard time right now.”

  “His family?” Aubrey asked. “You mean the Heath side or the Lowe side? I’d like to think you’re not playing favorites based on species.”

  “I’m not. This is my territory, and I take a level of responsibility for every human and shifter in it. You may not like Caroline, but take into consideration that she’s lost her twin brother, and her every bear instinct is telling her that Mason should be raised among other bears at the den.”

  “And would Sam have stood for that? For his sister bullying the woman he loved, his mate?”

  “No, no.” Ty shook his head. “It wasn’t like that between Sam and Ellie, just like you know it isn’t that way between most shifters. Only a few are actually fated to be mates.”

  Aubrey took note that Abrams glanced at the photograph on his desk of a brown-haired, brown-eyed beauty. The werelion had seen the woman and knew her to be the Itan’s mate. Another strange pang twisted low down in Aubrey’s stomach, but he couldn’t have said if it was a hint of wistfulness at how lucky the other man was to have that kind of bond with his own woman or an unexpected reaction to learning that Sam Heath had not been the love of Ellie Lowe’s life.

  “So
are you thinking there’s something you can do to help Ellie?” Aubrey asked tentatively.

  Ty cocked one brow. “Nothing she’s going to take well. That B&B is a godforsaken mess, and Jared Brennan may be a good fellow, but his brother is a drunk, mean idiot. It’ll be a miracle if they can get Garden Gate in working order before Ellie goes bankrupt and ends up on the street with Ida and Mason. She’d be better off letting Caroline staff it and oversee it. Sam’s sister is surely a bitch, but she’s a sharp businesswoman and the only hope that Garden Gate has of ever competing against the B&B across the lake. These women are, after all, family now. In the meantime, Ellie and her sister and Mason would all be welcome to live with us in the compound. We have plenty of room, even something more private away from the others’ houses.”

  “With the bear clan,” Aubrey repeated. “With half the clan thinking of them as skins and only tolerating Mason because he’s part bear?”

  This comment got a glare from Ty Abrams that was the first indication of temper or even true irritation that Aubrey had seen from the man. The werelion supposed that having to be law enforcement as well as leading a whole clan of bears would have to make a man more patient—or would lead to an early death.

  “Mr. Drummond, if you honestly thought that of my clan, why in the world would the Panthera come to me about letting you establish a safe house for werecat fugitives in my territory?”

  The honest answer to that question wouldn’t have done Aubrey any favors, so the werelion took that particular moment to excuse himself and get to work—at both his jobs. He took his forest service 4x4 out on the road past the lake, beyond all the designated public campsites, further back into the woods than the pavement went. When the dirt roads ran out, and even an off-road vehicle couldn’t navigate the underbrush, Aubrey got out of his vehicle and out of his uniform to let his lion loose.

  God’s truth, it felt good to be on four legs again. After years hiding from the government amidst its own extermination teams, every opportunity to shift felt like luxury. The woods out here were thick enough to let the lion run. Run he did, as long as the heat would allow, his kind being sensitive to body temperatures running too high.

  That was part of why Vanessa was so valuable to Pietr Achieli, the genes in her that made her heat tolerant, a latent genetics that the Panthera leader wanted bred back into the bloodlines. If Pietr couldn’t get it from Vanessa, and he couldn’t, it was going to have to be from Aubrey.

  The werelion didn’t want to think about that just then. Aubrey wanted the entire world to just be those woods and the dirt under his paws. Other species often lost their capability for human thought when they shifted. Aubrey envied those shifters. For him, it took more. It took the hunt and a very specific prey—the human kind.

  Only when Aubrey’s lion crouched atop a sheltered hill overlooking a remote water station and the covert human comings and goings of obvious Agency personnel was he able to stop thinking about the manipulations and machinations of Pietr Achieli. And about the strange, dull pain attached to any thought of Ellie Lowe.

  Whether the reservoir station Aubrey was watching held only intelligence staff or housed an actual strike team he couldn’t yet say. The agent made his way back to the 4x4 and dressed before getting out his cell phone. He kept a variety of inconsequential numbers stored in the phone—take-out joints and such—to hide the fact that not a single contact on his list was a real contact. Aubrey tapped in a number from memory.

  “We have new activity at a remote reservoir northeast of the location,” the agent said, dispensing with greetings and small talk.

  “As you anticipated,” Pietr agreed with that particular, elegant accent of his. “Your instincts never fail us in that regard. Time spent among them, living and working with them as one of them, has helped you think like one of their hunters.”

  Aubrey was fairly sure Pietr was praising him, but it still hit a bitter note for the agent. As much as Aubrey pressed that fine distinction—hiding in the middle of the Agency—the persistent ache in the bottom of his gut reminded him that he was Agency.

  He had hunted shifters down for the government. Yes, most of those had been psychopaths preying on humans. He always tried to get those assignments. But he hadn’t always been able to erase or alter the files on the innocents who’d just been caught out by their own mistakes, shifting at the wrong moment, trusting or falling for the wrong human. Sometimes he was the one lagging in the rear of the strike operation, investigating suspicious movement, checking around back, held up until after the target had been hit. Because he’d been too much of a coward to own his choice and pull the trigger on some terrified she-fox or a teenaged male delinquent faery who’d flaunted his glamour too much to stay hidden.

  “Agent, are you still there?”

  It took Aubrey a good second to snap out of his thoughts. “Yes, I’m here.”

  He was back in the moment, not thinking about the sins of the past and how much Ellie Lowe would have hated the real Aubrey, Aubrey Dreyer.

  “The operation is small, but not small enough to be a strike team, in my opinion. We could be talking anything from a strike team support base to an intel pass-through using those massive old concrete walls to shield server power usage from detection without new construction tipping off the enemy. Their supply lines take them west, so they aren’t passing through the clan territory.”

  “So the location remains a viable option for a mission command at the establishment you scouted?” Pietr meant Garden Gate, of course. “With the added protection of it being inside the territory of an unusually strong clan that would see any danger coming far in advance. And now, it could be a possible listening post as well.”

  Every point Pietr made in favor of establishing a Panthera intelligence team in Grayslake, to monitor Agency activity in the southern states and move wanted werecats out to California or north to New England, weighted Aubrey’s stomach down more and more.

  “Are we able to move on acquiring the establishment yet?” the lion leader asked. It was the question Aubrey had been actively avoiding. After a few moments of silence on Aubrey’s end while he tried to think up another delay or alternative to pressuring Ellie to sell, Pietr said, “Or perhaps you have another idea? The owner of the business…. There is a strong attraction between the two of you, is there not?”

  Achieli couldn’t see Aubrey’s upper lip begin to curl back into a snarl.

  “Seduction is always a legitimate tool for intelligence work, agent. I suspect I don’t have to educate you on that point.”

  “No, you don’t,” Aubrey agreed, trying to cut off that line of thinking before it led to….

  “And she is a latent. Obviously fertile. Beautifully fertile,” Pietr commented with schooled nonchalance.

  For a second, a surge of possessiveness blurred Aubrey’s thoughts. He hated that Achieli had laid eyes on Ellie, had met her, when he also knew that the Panthera leader appreciated the more voluptuous female shifter figure as much as Aubrey did.

  “If you bred her, it would kill two birds with one stone—fulfill your commitment to the Panthera and secure her loyalty to you.”

  Raising his voice abruptly, Aubrey forgot himself and growled. “I’m not getting Ellie pregnant to cheat her out of her home!”

  “Agent!” The natural authority in Pietr’s voice flipped a switch in the life-long soldier, and Aubrey got ahold of himself. The agent was practically standing at attention, even if Achieli couldn’t see it. Then, as though almost nothing had happened, Pietr said, “Be mindful of what you say, agent. You can never be sure, even on secure lines. Consider your options and contact me again when you have a proposed course of action for securing the establishment for our operations and arrange the meeting to seal our agreement with the clan.”

  After the Panthera leader disconnected, Aubrey stood for… for he didn’t know how long breathing through his anger and the inexplicable but mounting sense of guilt. The werelion was just doing his job, and yet�
�.

  It was only because cat shifters didn’t experience the exhaustion some other species felt upon returning to human form from their animal selves that Aubrey was sharp enough to catch the movement. It flitted along his peripheral vision through the woods. A flash of something golden or light brown. Fur? Or something metallic, like a camouflaged rifle?

  “Dammit,” he grumbled under his breath. He was already dressed and didn’t want to shred the uniform with nothing else in the 4x4 to wear. The only choice was taking partial form and ripping seams but freeing enough of his lion’s abilities to give chase to whoever or whatever had been watching him. In a matter of seconds, Aubrey’s human frame had given way to the form of a seven-foot-tall lion-headed, golden-furred biped straight out of ancient Egyptian wall paintings. A primal savagery just as ancient coursed through the shifter’s veins as he leapt toward the movement of prey. Kill, it said, and Aubrey’s human thoughts only half-heartedly told it catch instead.

  The hot pursuit, figuratively and literally, took its toll on Aubrey’s body. It was too soon after he’d fully shifted to lion and back to man. The physical strain slowed him down just enough that whatever he was chasing stayed ahead of him. And that in itself told Aubrey it had to be another animal, perhaps another shifter. One of Ty’s bears? Surely he couldn’t have lucked out with something as simple as a mundane wolf or mountain lion.

  Lion half-form was too large for Aubrey to chance getting closer than about a half-mile to the most remote campground. That was where he left off the chase and had to look for a good high vantage point in hopes of spotting whoever had been spying on him, if not actually catching them physically.

  Nothing. That dread hit Aubrey’s gut again as his half-form slowly receded. Had one of the bear clan members followed him? How much had they seen—the reservoir itself and Aubrey’s lion watching it? More importantly, how much had they heard?