Lyin' Heart

by Erika Masten

  Still gripping poor Mason Lowe by the neck, that mutt Nate Brennan snarled out a low chuckle. “Big important bear clan leader,” he scoffed. Then he glared through the artificial light at Aubrey. “And the kitty cat superspy. What a joke. A school kid could have guessed you’d set up here, and here you are right on time.”

  “Why is that, Nate?” Ty asked. “What’s the deal?”

  Nate snorted, and even from ten feet away, Aubrey could smell the liquor on his breath.

  “It can’t be that hard to figure out, Abrams. How many shifters in the territory do you imagine really enjoy living on your leash? You think I like saying yes sir, no sir to a bear? And one with a badge, to boot.”

  As his rant when on, Nate’s obviously pathological hatred of anything resembling authority had Aubrey thinking back to what he’d learned in the Agency and from dealing with the wolves in Vanessa’s mate’s pack. She had married an Odin’s Wolf, a disciplined shifter soldier literally trained to take animal form using arcane magical techniques passed down by a Norse war god himself.

  On the other side of their battle lines were Fenris Wolves, nearly feral thugs who drew their bloodlines back to the monstrous Fenrir beast. They were killers and criminals, every one. They barely even tolerated one another, and when they organized it was into gangs and mafias. The hatred that ran through Nate Brennan? It came from blood deep. It was in his nature. And that was the kind of shifter that Aubrey had gladly put down as an Agency hunter.

  But then Nate Brennan said something that Aubrey hadn’t expected to hear, something that made the werelion question his assumption that the Grayslake bear clan had been exposed to the Agency and marked for extermination.

  The wolf shifter laughed as he said, “The money they paid me to get you here doesn’t hurt, either. A territorial alpha and a Panthera spy all tied up with the bow neat as can be.”

  A financial transaction, Aubrey realized. Money exchanged. Money.

  “They paid you,” the werelion said. He glared sidelong at the obvious Agency officer among them. “Paying a confidential informant is against Agency regulations. It leaves a trail. They won’t give you money for that.”

  “How would you know—?” one of the human hunters started to say.

  “This is a rogue operation,” Aubrey realized and announced aloud. “It’s a glory run. A covert, unauthorized operation that ambitious Agency hunters use to gain promotions by bringing in high-value targets on their own time and their own dime.”

  “How do you know that term?” their officer asked with his voice tight. He had to have realized at that moment that Aubrey knew their weakness, the crack in their foundation.

  There was no time to explain, so Aubrey hoped that his werecat companions—especially Dhakal—were following along and that the bear shifters would take their lead.

  Aubrey’s voice transformed from a human shout to a feline growl. “The Agency doesn’t know they are here.”

  Or about Grayslake, about the bears, about the Panthera… or about Ellie and Mason. This whole mess could still be erased. By killing every Agency hunter in the room.

  The man’s lion leapt into form from within him. The transformation was faster for werecats than for any other species. Only a split second after the shimmer of his shift appeared to glow golden along Aubrey’s skin, a five-hundred-pound, nine-foot-long Asiatic lion pounced on the rogue Agency officer from halfway across the room.

  From the corner of his eye, Aubrey’s lion saw the swirl of black hair as a shadow in the gloom took Nate Brennan from behind and left Mason Lowe standing shocked and alone—and unharmed. The boy screamed and folded himself down into a tight little ball as a massive tiger leapt over his head and into the sudden eruption of gunfire, claws, and fangs.

  Chapter 13

  Ellie had been crying alone quietly in her bedroom on the second floor of Garden Gate for about forty-five minutes, ever since Aubrey Drummond—or Dreyer or whoever he was—had pulled his 4x4 away from the curb and driven out of her life. Mason was with Ida sleeping at a friend’s house for a couple of days, hidden away for his peace of mind and until Ellie could be sure the Grayslake bear clan didn’t plan on taking her son away from her entirely. Ty had promised they wouldn’t, but that had been that night, right after…. She didn’t want to take the chance he’d change his mind once he’d had time to think and Caroline Heath had had the chance to convince him otherwise. With luck, Caroline was still in Ty’s bad books.

  A series of so many small defeats: that was Ellie now. That was the whole of her being. Her one victory was all that mattered now—that she had Mason back safe and that she keep him that way. Other hopes, other dreams, those of a woman as well as a mother…. It was time to let those go, after tonight, her one night to mourn her secret hope that she’d ever have with anyone what Ty had with Mia. What she had thought she could have with….

  The sound of a familiar engine, a 4x4 she knew pulling up in front of the B&B, made Ellie catch her breath. Heart racing, her head swam just a little bit as she sat on the edge of her bed and held her breath and listened. She wasn’t supposed to be hoping. She wasn’t supposed to care. But her body and its reactions freely admitted what Ellie didn’t dare consciously acknowledge in her own mind. The idea that Aubrey had come back to the house was making her heart race double-time.

  Cautiously, because she didn’t want to let herself get excited, and because she wasn’t sure her reaction should have been positive at all, Ellie left her room near the back of the house. From one of the upstairs rooms that would’ve been for guests, the wildcat gazed out the window and down at the walk where Aubrey Drummond stood.

  Lord, but the sight of him always thrilled something deep inside her. It wasn’t just because he was as strikingly handsome as any male werecat she had ever seen. It was something he exuded, a sense about his presence, an aura of protectiveness. That had appealed so much to the part of Ellie that was tired of fighting every battle in this world alone. When Aubrey held her, she had felt like she finally had something more.

  The woman wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do now or why he’d come back. So she just stood there, staring down, trying to puzzle out the sullen emotion saddening his face.

  It had to have been ten minutes or more, maybe fifteen, of Aubrey just standing there looking up at her and Ellie down at him before he finally called up toward the window. “Please come down and talk to me, Ellie.”

  Again, she thrilled. And that exasperated her. Why did she need an invitation to go downstairs in her own house to talk to a visitor? Because it was Aubrey, of course. Because he was part of something that she’d wanted so badly but was passing away, out of her life. She couldn’t let herself try to hang on to it anymore.

  Still, Ellie padded slowly down the steps and out the front door, down the porch to a little shady rose garden off to one side of the walk. Aubrey didn’t look at her straight away when she came up to him. It took him a couple of breaths to look up, to turn those heartbreaking blue eyes on her. The expression he wore for her was so soft, almost like he’d just dried his eyes. Ellie had to fight back as strong a desire to comfort and hold him as she would’ve felt if it were Mason in front of her, and that scared her terribly. This was going to hurt for so long.

  “I thought you’d gone,” she told him, trying to keep her voice steady, flat, noncommittal without having to resort to sounding cold to hide her feelings.

  “I had,” he admitted in a hoarse whisper. “I felt like I had to stop by the police station and tell Ty was leaving, that I was keeping my word to him. And taking all the trouble I brought with me.”

  Ellie’s instinct was to tell Aubrey that there had been trouble here before he’d arrived and that, for a time, he’d made her feel like her troubles had lessened. Instead, she just nodded very slightly.

  Aubrey let out a short, hard breath. Ellie obviously wasn’t helping with whatever he was trying to get out and off his chest, but she purely didn’t know how.

 
“Ty told me something I didn’t expect to hear,” Aubrey said tentatively. “Even though he’d made it clear that helping find Mason and deal with Nate wasn’t going to earn the Panthera anything in his eyes or convince him that there was some value to letting us stay….” Aubrey shook his head and ran his hands through his hair, then shrugged his broad shoulders as though at somewhat of a loss. “Well, that’s exactly what it did. He has reconsidered letting the Panthera stay and even letting us establish a counterintelligence base in Grayslake, so long as we keep it small and highly discreet. And put ourselves at his clan’s disposal when needed.”

  Ellie blinked and reared back a little. “Really?” she asked.

  “Ty’s one caveat to the offer was that he would only allow it if I remain here to oversee the operation myself. He appreciates the hit I was willing to take with my people to strike that temporary alliance with the clan.”

  Again, Ellie blinked, screwing up her face as she tried to process this information and understand why Aubrey was telling her all the details of his exchange with the Itan. Then it dawned on her.

  “You still want to buy Garden Gate,” she realized, unable to keep an edge of accusation from her tone. Lord, but the woman had been so stupid, thinking maybe Aubrey Drummond had come back for her.

  But the lion shifter shook his head vehemently no. “Not the way you think, Ellie. Just give me a second and listen to me, because it all has to fit in with what Pietr said to me when I called him after that. There’s only one way he will agree to assign me to Grayslake.”

  Ellie didn’t ask. She didn’t want to know. It wasn’t her concern. She probably couldn’t have just sold Garden Gate even if she’d wanted to. She’d had to accept Ty Abrams’s conditions that she move her family to the bear clan compound and let someone help her run the B&B. At least the Itan had agreed that it wouldn’t be Caroline Heath. Ellie had already started pulling empty boxes out of storage to pack her things and Mason’s. Ida was making arrangements to move in with a roommate closer to her school.

  “Do you want to know what he said?” Aubrey asked. “Would it matter?” The tall, muscular shifter took a step toward Ellie. Even a foot away from her, he loomed over her in height. In presence. “Would you want me to stay if I could?”

  The woman didn’t look up at him and didn’t respond. Don’t hope, Ellie. Don’t fall for it.

  But it was impossible not to look at Aubrey Drummond when he went down on one knee at her feet and blinked up damp-eyed at her. Ellie gasped and swayed back but didn’t step away from him.

  “Pietr will only let me stay if I fulfill my promise to him,” Aubrey confessed in a quick, breathless rush. “I had given my word about something a long time ago. I was someone else then, and I was doing some things that I’ve been ashamed of until that night in the switching station. I used to be an Agency man, Ellie. I was a hunter for them, I want you to know that. I killed rogue shifters for the government, and I used my position to monitor intelligence and make sure they didn’t know about me or my sister. When I could, I protected other innocents, but when they weren’t innocent, I killed them and I wasn’t sorry about it.”

  “That’s how you knew,” Ellie said. “That’s how you knew those men with Nate wouldn’t lead back to Grayslake once you’d kill them.” And Aubrey nodded.

  “Back in California, the Agency learned I was a mole and that I had a sister with shifter blood in her, too. We were going to have to go into hiding, and the Panthera offered protection but at a price.”

  Ellie were sure she knew where this was going. She remembered Caroline’s awful comment back at the Abrams house, downstairs in the basement. When the she-bear had wanted Ellie to think that Aubrey’s only interest in her had been to make her pregnant because Pietr Achieli had ordered it, against Aubrey’s will.

  Lord, please, don’t let that be true.

  “Werecats, especially the ones in the Panthera, aren’t like many of the other species with their tendency to mate and bond,” Aubrey explained.

  Ellie already knew that, but she was one of those rare she-cats who yearned for a mate that was never meant to be and that other werecats never even wanted.

  Aubrey explained, “My sister was already mated to a wolf, and Pietr wasn’t happy about it. She’s a latent with valuable genetics for helping werelions overcome physical weaknesses that have cropped up with so few of us out there reproducing. The Panthera was only going to give her protection in exchange for her willingness to breed with another lion, and I couldn’t let Pietr make her do that when she wanted to be with her wolf.”

  “So you promised him you would do it instead of your sister. Please don’t say you told Pietr Achieli that you would breed with a chubby little Grayslake wildcat,” Ellie said through her clenched teeth, through the noise of her breaking heart.

  Aubrey came to his feet and took Ellie by the face, sending chills all along her skin and down her back. “God, woman, would you please just listen to me? I’m not talking about breeding you. That’s Pietr. I’m talking about marrying you and having a family with you. Pietr might get his precious breeding, but Mason would be getting a brother or sister, and we’d be getting a home. If you let us. If you want this.”

  For once in her life, Ellie Lowe might have been speechless.

  Aubrey took advantage of the rare opportunity after tentatively chancing the softest brush of his lips against Ellie’s gaping mouth. “The Panthera operation would still be at Garden Gate, but that means the B&B would be operational and a viable business. The werecats would have to help you get it up and running, and the Panthera would have to pay for it. The place would still be yours. It would still be ours. Ellie, please say something. I’m trying to ask you to be my mate—trying to ask you to marry me.”

  When Ellie didn’t answer, it was because she couldn’t speak, because she couldn’t breathe. It was only when defeat and disappointment spread over Aubrey’s handsome face and he started to pull his hands away that Ellie threw herself against the man and locked her arms around his neck. A second later, she realized he had his own arms around her and wasn’t letting go.

  “That’s a yes, isn’t it? Tell me that’s a yes. Ellie, please. Don’t make me go.”

  Don’t make him go? Ellie had been waiting all her life for a man who wouldn’t go. And now there was Aubrey, if he was real, if she dared hope.

  “Say it,” Aubrey whispered warm and soft into her hair. “Say you’ll be my mate and my wife, and we will make this ours, this place and this family.”

  “I will,” she choked against his neck. “I will. I’ll mate with you. I’ll marry you.”

  I’ll take this chance for all it’s worth. For all I’m worth. For me and for Mason.

  Upstairs in her bedroom, after all the fuss and tussle of the two feverishly lustful werecats stripping one another, feeling Aubrey against her was different this time. It was softer. It was warmer. And yet it was so much more emotionally intense than even her fantasies of hot, rough sex with the lion shifter.

  Tangled on the bed with Ellie, naked on top of the bedspread, Aubrey seemed to want to feel every inch of her skin with every inch of his. His hands sensually roamed every curve of her body, as though he was memorizing her. His lips followed, and his warm tongue. And as warm as the afternoon was, Ellie shivered against him, underneath him.

  “Don’t be nervous, Ellie,” he told her, and she realized he must’ve taken her shudder of pleasure for fear. “What we’re doing right now, this moment, it’s just about how much I want to feel you and be inside you and make you love it. We’re not going to use that word, Pietr’s word. It’s not ours. When it’s time for us to think about that, it’s just about our family, about us having a baby together and giving Mason a brother or sister. Baby, please don’t cry.”

  She hadn’t even realized she was crying until she felt Aubrey use his thumbs to gently smooth away the tears trickling from the corners of her eyes. “I’m not sad,” she promised him. “I’m not scared. I just waite
d so long to have this, and I….”

  “Please say it, Ellie,” Aubrey begged her as he buried his hands in her hair and nuzzled his smooth-shaven cheek against hers. The scent of amber and forest overwhelmed her. “I don’t deserve it, but I need to know you feel it for me. If you feel it for me. Please say it.”

  It helped that Ellie had her eyes closed. Looking into Aubrey’s face, she might’ve been too scared to say it this first time. “I’ve waited so long to really fall in love,” she said. “But I do love you, Aubrey.”

  A wave of emotion in furious kisses broke from Aubrey instantly. “I love you, baby,” he vowed between kisses. “I love you, Ellie.”

  The torrent of kisses and caresses flowed over Ellie’s skin as Aubrey used his mouth to send hot and cold shivers over her breasts. He sucked and licked at her aching nipples not teasingly but ravenously, adoringly. Lightheaded, Ellie could only lace her fingers through his soft golden-brown hair and writhe beneath him.

  “Oh, God, Aubrey,” she sighed at the first lick of his velvety tongue between her legs. His hands roamed her plump thighs lovingly as he kissed and laved the smooth lips of her pussy and made her tremble inside. And when he began to suck hard on that most tender flesh and slid his tongue into her deeper and deeper…! Ellie pushed her hips up, pushed herself against his face, and felt Aubrey’s groan of pleasure reverberating all the way up through her groin and stomach.

  Those trembling waves became Ellie’s first hard orgasm in longer than she could remember. It made her gasp in surprise, in distress and delight. She thought she might have called out Aubrey’s name, but even she couldn’t quite tell what she said in her chorus of mews and moans. Aubrey’s response was to drive his tongue deeper up her pussy as the sheath of her sex rippled and contracted rhythmically with the burning pleasure of her climax. When she cried his name now it was a plea, a cry for mercy from too much pleasure all at once.