ROMANCE: SHIFTER: Shifter to the Max Collection (Dragon, Bear, Wolf and Panther Shifter Romances) (Paranormal Fantasy Romance Collection)

by C. J. Ayers

  He frowned. “Why would I’ve known you were going to be there?”

  “Because I left you a note,” Elie explained in disbelief. “I left it right on your front door.”

  “Oh. I never use my front door; my workshop is in the garage, so I always just go in through there…”

  Elie rolled her eyes, more at herself than anything. Of course he never used his front door. Of course anything that could go wrong had gone wrong. Stupid Murphy’s Law.

  But now, there was one more topic, one more elephant in the room, and Elie badly wanted to begin the subject, if only she could do it gently. Well, she’d try, anyway.

  “Jake?” He looked up at her, and Elie wondered if she really wanted to ask this next question. She figured she’d better do it quick before she changed her mind. “Can you tell me? I mean, what happened? What happens to you?”

  He looked at her thoughtfully; Elie thought this was better, at least, than him storming out at the audacity of her question.

  “You know,” he said, “you’re the only person I ever talked to about it at all.”

  Elie smiled a bit. “I might as well know the whole story.”

  Jake reached over and patted Jasper’s head; the dog quivered a little and whined, but didn’t resist the attention.

  “Jasper’s a real good dog,” Jake pointed out. “Most dogs—especially the little ones—don’t like me much now.”

  Elie snorted. “Jasper’s a wuss. Someone could come in to rob the house and murder us all and he’d either hide under the table or wag his tail and beg for pets.”

  Jake laughed; he had seemed to relax almost back to his normal self. “Well. I… actually I’d like it a lot, to tell someone what happened. Been carrying it too long, you know…

  “I guess it all started the year I got to the city. I just wanted to try something new. You’d run off to France, and I thought that was way too far for me, but just down the mountain wasn’t too much. I could still drive home when I wanted—just an hour or so away. Was tough in the winter, though.”

  “Is that when you learned about craft beer?” Elie teased.

  “Yep, that, and some other things,” Jake sighed. “I was working with a construction company building apartments, and I would go out with the guys. Especially a couple guys that just sort of… They were different, that’s all. I didn’t really understand it, but they would talk to me now and then, and they seemed like nice fellas.”

  “Seemed?”

  “Seemed,” Jake agreed. “Now, my Mom didn’t raise an idiot, I don’t sucker up to anybody just because they pat me on the back or buy me a beer. But I went out with these two—won’t even mention their damn names—because they liked to hike and camp, see, and well that was just perfect for me.”

  Jake twisted his mouth in reminiscence. Shook his head. “I figure you probably felt just like I did the first time I saw them change. Except when they turned, they came after me. I thought they wanted to tear me apart, but they just wanted to infect me. They made me like them, and those bastards didn’t even ask.”

  His fists were clenched on his knees; Elie couldn’t blame him. “If it’d been me, I’d’ve torn their damn heads off,” Elie snapped indignantly; she forgot, for a moment, about being quiet. “I can’t even believe how—how—! They didn’t think that maybe they should ask you before pulling a stunt like that?!”

  “If they told me before, they said, they couldn’t have been sure I wouldn’t give them away,” Jake explained in a low voice. “And I told them to do some things that I won’t repeat. I told them to get lost, and I didn’t ever want to see them again. Of course, I worked with them, but I told them not to say a damn word to me, and they didn’t.

  “I felt like I was going crazy, though, Elie. I don’t know how to explain it. You know those people who hear voices in their head? I felt like that. For weeks. Not like a voice, but like… like a… a feeling like something else was in my head following me. Stalking me. And every day I was terrified some men in black suits were gonna show up and ask me kindly to please come along with them, they have some questions, so on.

  “I know I was paranoid, and they started to notice it at the jobsite. Eventually I turned in my two weeks. I was afraid I was gonna end up getting someone killed. My boss didn’t say anything—he was a great guy, Mack—but I knew he was relieved I quit. I’d been drinking a lot, since alcohol seemed to keep the feeling away, and I’d shown up to work drunk twice. He would’ve had to fire me soon, and he hated to put a guy out of work.

  “I hadn’t changed, because I was doing everything I could to stop it. I thought if I got out of the city I’d calm down and it might go away, but I’d seen the other two change and deep down I knew it was coming. And I knew I needed to be away from people when it did.”

  He fell silent; Jasper wriggled a bit and Elie scratched his big ears.

  “So you came home,” Elie murmured.

  Jake nodded and Elie caught his eyes drop—for a fraction of a second—to the holes in her thin t-shirt. Then he was looking her in the eye again. “I’ve been here ever since.”

  Elie nodded and found herself patting him on the leg, like a pal. She winced.

  To her shock, Jake set a hand over hers. “I… I actually like it there, if it’s all the same.”

  Heat flew up into Elie’s face and neck, but she didn’t remove her hand; Jake was smiling, just a little, now, just enough to make her heart race. His thigh under her fingers tightened and flexed as Jake moved nearer, leaned closer.

  His beard brushed her neck first, and Elie shivered pleasantly. And then his lips. Hot and hard and relentless, they kissed and teased a line from her collarbones to her ear.

  “Jake…” Was it meant to be halting or sighing? Elie’s voice breathed out in a mix of the two. Jake paused and looked up at her.

  When he paused, she was able think clearly, and she took her hand from his thigh. Jake reddened.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered, blushing. He drew away quickly, as if afraid she might lash out. “I could just smell… I mean I could smell the lust on you, and I figured—” He skidded to a halt and just stared at the floor, jaw working restlessly. His eyes didn’t meet hers.

  Anger was in there, but Elie was feeling far too many things to do justice with a one-word reply. Anger, confusion, lust, yes there was lust, and fear. Could he smell that, too?

  “Look, Jake, I won’t tell your secret,” she whispered. “But I… This is all… I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  Jasper lifted his head and looked at her balefully, but Elie couldn’t stop now. “This is a lot to take in,” she went on, pulling the quilt up over her chest. “Hell, are you going to make me one, too?”

  Jake’s mouth dropped open. He looked up at her. “It’s not the clap!” he whispered back. “It’s not sexually transmitted!”

  Elie gasped; Jake’s brown eyes had melted into glimmering gold, like amber. He saw her reaction and looked away quickly. She was shaking; was he going to change? Here? Now?

  “Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t think… I don’t think I can do this.”

  Jake stood abruptly. “That’s fine. That’s just fine. First, I wasn’t enough for you. Now, I’m too much.” He crossed the room in three long steps and whipped the door open.

  Elie felt certain that she should stop him, but she didn’t. Jasper looked up at her and whined some more, and downstairs, she heard Jake making excuses to her mother for his sudden departure, and then the final closing of the front door. It seemed to echo, and for a while, no other sound broke the silence.

  Chapter Eight

  Elie didn’t stay in bed long after Jake left. Her internal cocktail of emotions was stirring like a blender and Elie had to get up and move.

  “Want to go for a walk Jasper?”

  At the word ‘walk’, Jasper’s huge ears perked up. Since he was allowed to roam around their yard freely, one would think he wouldn’t care so much about going for a walk. But in a second or two
he was leaping off the bed like an Olympic diver and skittering to the stairs.

  “Slow down!” Alison called after him as he raced through the kitchen; Elie could hear his nails clicking on the tile.

  “I’m taking Jasper out,” Elie told her as she followed the shepherd’s trail of through the house.

  Alison looked like she wanted to ask about Jake. There was a short list of possible topics that could have given Elie’s mother that boiling-over curious set of the face. But Elie shook her head and walked quickly to the front entry, where Jasper’s leash hung on the coat rack.

  “Go for walk?” Elie teased him as he spun circles in the tiny space. She clamped a hand on his collar and tried to clip the leash on. “Walk? You wanna go walk?”

  Jasper whined and quivered and growled sadly, as if begging her to stop this terrible game and just open the door already. Elie laughed and clipped his leash on.

  Just as she was straightening, there was a knock on the door; Jasper howled—more out of excitement than alarm—almost directly into Elie’s ear. Shocked, she clapped a hand over it too late; the sound still echoed through the bones of her inner ear as if they were stuck repeating it over and over.

  Half-deaf, she stuck her eye to the peephole. If it was Jake, she wasn’t answering it.

  It wasn’t Jake. Hesitantly, Elie turned the knob and swung the door open to see Bryan Mosley standing on her front porch. He’d dressed down today, jeans and boots and a white t-shirt. It wasn’t too cold, so no motorcycle jacket today. In fact, it seemed he’d walked here, since his motorcycle was nowhere to be seen out front.

  “What do you want?” she grunted. Standing here, now, all Elie could see when looking at this idiot was Brittany Langland and her skeleton-skinny meth-scarred arms.

  Bryan shrugged; her change in attitude since he’d last seen her clearly confused him, but he didn’t comment on it. “Just thought you might want to catch a bite or a drink or something.”

  Elie stepped out with Jasper, who sniffed Bryan, whined, and moved to Elie’s other side. “I’m taking the dog for a walk, if you want to come along,” she offered gruffly.

  “Sounds good,” he replied, and fell into step with her. Elie headed off down the street, with Jasper on one side and Bryan on the other.

  “What’ve you been up to?” he tried to start conversation.

  “Hanging around. Trying to find a job. Meeting old friends, that sort of thing,” Elie replied noncommittally.

  Bryan nodded, hands in his pockets. “Anyone I know?”

  “Probably not.”

  They lapsed into silence, awkward silence. Elie was simmering. She’d almost slept with this asshole, this user, this baby-daddy. She should have told him to get lost; why did she invite him along to walk with her? Stupid. Damn stupid.

  “Sorry about the other night,” he offered finally. They were moving away from the houses, now, towards the spot where Elie had seen that grizzly a few nights prior. Nervously, she checked again, but it wasn’t as dark now and she could make out the underbrush pretty well. No bear, at least not at the moment.

  And oddly, it occurred to her that that hadn’t been a bear. It had been Jake. She knew it without question. What a strange, serendipitous coincidence.

  “What? Oh, the other night,” Elie shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. They probably just wanted to ask you about the meth, right?”

  She raised her eyebrows and waited, and Elie was not disappointed. Bryan seemed to be half-listening, because it took him about fifteen full seconds before he stopped short and looked at her with a very unfriendly edge.

  “What did you say?”

  “You’re bringing meth up from town, right?” Elie laughed. “Or maybe someone’s cooking it for you out here. I doubt it’s Brittany, although she seems to be a regular customer. That’s why you don’t work at the mill. You already have a job.”

  The afternoon had grown very still, and it occurred to Elie that she had dropped this bombshell in a very thoughtless place. The distance to the houses in one direction and downtown Hemford in the other suddenly seemed much farther. Her anger had gotten away with her again; if she’d waited ten more minutes to snap this off at him… if only…

  Bryan wasn’t a big guy, not like Jake. But apart from some minimal self-defense, Elie’d never gotten in a real fight. At the moment, however, it looked like she was about to get her first shot at it, because it didn’t take a rocket scientist to read that glare that Bryan was shooting at her now.

  “Who’ve you told?” he hissed. “The cops? Was it you that tried to rat on me?”

  A shiver cascaded from neck to naval at the odd likeness of the question. It hadn’t even been an hour since someone else had asked almost the exact same thing. Elie snorted; she was trying to look confident. A scared target was a target half beat. “If I had a lick of proof I’d give it to them, but I don’t. Proof or no, I don’t want to see your face at my door again. I’ll call the Sheriff on you in a hot minute, and I doubt he’d need any proof to run you off for harassment.”

  Bryan stared at her for a long time; he seemed to be thinking. He seemed to actually be taking her threat seriously. Elie’s confidence had almost become real.

  But then he chuckled.

  Faster than Elie could have ever thought possible, he lashed out and caught the side of her head in a dizzying punch. She reeled; she’d squabbled with a couple drunk bar-flies before, but she’d never been struck so hard in her life. It almost felt like she’d been knocked right off the ground.

  Jasper barked, and it was the bravest sound Elie had ever heard him make. But it was followed by a harsh caw from Bryan, and Elie regained her vision in time to see him kick a boot into Jasper’s side. The dog scampered off, limping and whining, towards town.

  “Did you just kick my dog?” she shrieked, half hysterical. She must have taken brain damage, Elie thought later, because without much of a good reason she flew at Bryan as if her five-foot-five fight-virgin stature somehow could be overcome by mere vehemence. She must have surprised him, because her fist actually connected with his jaw, not once but twice, before he knocked her silly and Elie watched the world blink out.

  It didn’t seem to be gone long; a world of trees and sunlight, forest floor and leafy ferns underfoot, kept appearing and disappearing. But it had been a cool, breezy afternoon—why was it already half-dark? She wasn’t walking. She could see someone’s legs and boots. They were carrying her. It was Bryan. Bryan was carrying her. Oh shit.

  Elie’s limbs seemed very far away, as if she were trying to call them through a downed phone line. Her hands were hanging down Bryan’s back. She could see them, but the effort to make them move cost her snippets of consciousness. He didn’t even seem to notice her batting at his waist—in fact, he probably thought her arms were just swinging with the motion.

  It was getting dark out. So, so dark. With the situation being what it was, that made Elie heart-stoppingly nervous.

  Without warning, she was hauled off Bryan’s shoulder and onto mossy dirt. She blinked; they were within sight of the lake. A dock jutted outward against a liquid mirror, reflecting the sun as it began to set. Bryan appeared over her.

  Elie remained very still. Full consciousness had almost returned, and she knew she was in trouble up to her ears. She’d thought Bryan handsome at first; he still was, if you were into psychopaths. He stared down at her, calm of face, but with a glimmer in his eye that spoke insanity a little too clearly.

  She was so afraid to ask, but he seemed in no hurry to say anything, and Elie couldn’t handle the suspense. “What now?”

  He laughed, as if she’d told a joke. “Well, I’ll tell you, honey.” He crouched down and folded his hands, like an adult explaining to a child why it wasn’t nice to tell lies. “Right over there is my parent’s boathouse. It’s not much of one, or else I’d take you in there, but they do have a nice little canoe in that shed, and when it gets dark, I’m going to chain some cinder blocks to your feet and
take you out into the middle of the lake and throw you overboard.”

  Elie stared. In a hysterical way, this made perfect sense. Hidden Lake was a valley lake; its center was deep, much deeper than it appeared. She’d be fish food long before anyone found her body. What an irony. Her corpse was going to be hidden in Hidden Lake.

  What had she been thinking just last night? It would be slow, here. Slow, yes. Drowning was a rather slow death.

  Terror clawed at her insides, but it would have to do more than that before she’d beg. She wasn’t even close to scared enough to beg. Not from this scum. She glared at him, hateful.

  She told him to go do a few things that were rather unlikely, and perhaps not anatomically possible. Bryan grinned wider, and Elie did not appreciate that. She curled her fist into the moist earth beneath her.

  With an exhaled huff of desperate fear, Elie scattered a handful of dirt at Bryan’s face. He yowled and rocked back; it seemed she’d gotten his eyes. Scrambling, Elie gained her feet and tried to run for the lake. She’d be able to find her way back from there.

  But Bryan leapt forward and hooked one hand around her ankle. Elie broke free, but tripped and fell headlong into the mulch, and before she could jump up and try again Bryan’s weight was on her back, one hand fisted in her hair. He whistled.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he assured her, straddling her buttocks. Elie could feel him hard against her jeans, and struggled viciously to free herself, but he had her in a helpless position. “I wasn’t going to let your last few hours be boring. I have some fun planned before we go on out on the boat.”

  He was still holding her face in the dirt with one hand. Bryan struggled to loosen his jeans with the other, apparently wary of letting Elie have too much freedom. Her brain was shooting in every direction, but so far Elie hadn’t come up with a plan. The best she could do was try to throw him off, but he was heavy and wasn’t unbalanced easily.

  Exhausted, Elie fell still to catch her breath.