Axe considered it as they left Vincent’s office. “Fuck. You’re probably right. We sat here filling out that goddamned form on the same day I met Angel.”
Vincent rested a hand on his shoulder, his usual show of support. “There you go. So completing the form and wrapping it up with a neat little bow may get your mind refocused again, or at least less fixated. It’s entirely reasonable to think about them. And about Nancy too. Have you been in touch with her?”
“My sister wants nothing to do with me or anything that reminds her of our parents. Or shifters.”
“That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”
Axe stopped in the middle of the large all-marble foyer. “Have you spoken to her lately?” he asked, only slightly surprised to hear his voice echo around the space.
Vincent nodded. “A few days ago, yes.”
“Did she tell you how long it’s been since she shifted to bear form?”
“She didn’t mention it.”
“That’s crazy.” Axe shook his head as they stepped outside. “She still believes we can suppress or completely ignore our animal side. It’s not healthy. Our shifter side is not some addiction to be managed like a twelve-step program.”
“We all have our ways of coping, Axe. Go easy on her. She misses you, you know?”
“Is that what she told you?” Axe asked, wiping a rough palm down his face.
“Not in so many words, but yes.”
“I’ll believe that when I hear it from her mouth,” Axe said. “Anyhow, Vincent. Thanks for listening, man. I can’t say if that blow by blow made a difference, but I appreciate you trying to help.
“Anytime at all, son.”
Axe studied Vincent’s face for a moment, and smiled at the irony. Vincent had been a father figure all these years, yet he looked no older than twenty-five, which was around the age he was bitten and turned into a vampire three and a half centuries ago.
“Soon I’ll be the one who’ll have to call you son, dude,” Axe said as they shook hands.
Vincent smiled broadly. “I’ll always have age on you, kiddo, no matter what I look like. See you soon.”
“Later bud,” Axe said, climbing onto his bike.
His phone started ringing as he reached forward to start the engine. He fumbled in his pants pocket for the phone, but by the time he got it out, it had stopped ringing. Pissed off at the inconvenience, he didn’t bother checking the voice mail. He shoved the phone back in his pocket, started his ride, and drove off in a semi-baffled state.
Axe wasn’t quite sure how his aimless driving led him away from the clubhouse, let alone to the parking lot of the public library where Angel worked. As he turned off his engine and climbed off, a sudden sensation caught in his gut. Something was up. For a moment, he rationalized that he had no right or obligation to worry about Angel. She wasn’t his problem. He had other shit to do today, and stalking her around her place of work after two or three hookups was all kinds of wrong.
Axe stood in front of his bike in the dark, telling himself to get on his ride and leave. Except something stopped him. A twig snapped in the distance. He scanned the empty parking lot, relying on the only two functioning overhead lights and all his other senses. One bulb’s light twitched, flashing across his closed eyelids as he concentrated on his surroundings. He sniffed the cool evening breeze, forehead crinkling.
As he launched one leg over the side of his bike, Angel screamed from the far end of the parking lot behind the library. Every part of him reacted on a molecular level until it seemed like all of him was being torn apart at one time. His inner beast unleashed a roar that vibrated through his bones. A growl leaked past his lips, muscles taut beneath his flesh as he scanned the area for her location. He had no idea how he knew it was Angel. He just did—and he had to protect her right this instant.
9
Axe
“Help, someone! Help!”
That was Angel, all right.
Fuck. She was being hauled off by four panther shifters in their human form. Great. Them again. Why were panthers after Angel anyway? They pushed her into the back of a van in the shadowy far corner of the parking lot. Axe pivoted and sprinted at full speed toward them. Halfway there, his world morphed, expanding and contracting, stretching and tearing fabric, and relieving his feet of boots all at the same time. His beast was no longer hidden, coming to the forefront quicker than ever—until he was a full-sized bear in a few short strides. His paws pounded the parking lot as he unleashed a primal roar that vibrated off the library windows in their casings.
His jaws crunched into the first guy’s arm before the man even had a look at him. He was too busy flinging him across the parking lot like a large piece of meat as his paw bitch-slapped another mother fucker halfway across the tarmac on his ass. Neither of them was struck with a lethal blow, a detail which clung to the edge of his bear’s mind. The bears, wolves and panthers in and around the Red Ridge were supposed to be in a temporary truce. They were supposed to be hands-off, but Axe’s bear was not going to stand there and let them manhandle Angel. He didn’t care if Silas, Death Adder and Kit Reese had signed a fucking peace agreement or miraculously became allies. Axe was protecting what was his.
Two down, two to go. How did these idiots make it so easy for him? Normally, panthers knew full well that they were better off attacking as a group when dealing with a bear opponent. These guys weren’t fighting smart, and so far, it worked in Axe’s favor. The two shifters with their noses in the dirt were howling with pain. The sound barely registered. They would heal up like brand new as soon as they took on their panther form. Axe ran purely on instinct, keeping track of Angel even as one of the remaining two men dropped his firearm and started to shift to his animal form.
Angel had managed to wiggle away from the last one, who was still in human form, and with adrenaline-filled terror, she gave him a run for his money. She was a fighter, all right. The clown would try to haul her off, and Angel would sink her nails into his face or neck. She kept flinging herself in different directions, and dragged out of his grasp, struggling and kicking the shit out the man at the same time. Every time she landed a blow, he would come at her again. The shifter would not back down, and did not appear to be ready to give up or turn tail just yet, even after Axe had so easily taken down two of his buddies.
Axe squared off with the fully shifted panther who charged him. Instinctively, he drew up on all fours. Just as the cat pounced on him from the front, he lowered down on top of the animal, pinning it to the ground with the substantial weight of his bulk. The feline’s teeth gnashed into his rib cage, and Axe ignored it long enough to answer back with seven or eight blows to the panther’s head.
Three down. One to go.
Axe closed in on the shifter still clinging to Angel’s waist, with one hand buried in her hair to keep her under control. All he needed was an opening, a good angle to do damage on the attacker without hurting her in the process. She grunted and threw all her weight back into the guy’s chest, stretching out one leg for balance at the same time. The man lost his footing and went sprawling backward, hitting his head on the van’s bumper on the way down. He was out like a light.
Angel moved away, running a hand under her nose as she looked out at the parking lot, squinting to see who else was left. Her eyes didn’t scan him once. In fact, she didn’t seem the least bit scared or concerned to have witnessed men turning into panthers and bears. Even under the dim lights, Angel saw everything, and she should not have been this cool. Her nonchalance about the situation was alarming at best.
Not quite ready to return to human form, Axe huffed out a snarl in Angel’s direction as she leaned back on the side of her car, catching her breath. Yet again, she was unruffled. She just leaned there for a minute, still breathless, but was way too levelheaded. The woman picked up everything that had been thrown from her purse, and casually began to fix her lipstick in a tiny mirror. This made no sense at all. She had to have known about shif
ters before this. Maybe Angel did know about Dean Roman and his cousin after all.
Opting to give her a few minutes to collect herself, Axe lumbered over to the passed out panthers. One by one, he dragged their unconscious bodies to the side of their van, using his teeth to get a grip on one guy’s clothes or in the turned panthers cases, by the scruff of their neck. He didn’t care if the fuckers got road rash. They’d heal, and hopefully the ordeal would be enough of a lesson for them to back off. For whatever reason these sons of bitches had taken it upon themselves to attack someone he cared about, yet again. He grunted, padding back over to the final shifter in human form, sprawled our on his back halfway across the parking lot.
This guy had hit his head pretty good, so the odds of him making any trouble were relatively slim. Axe bent down to latch his bear teeth into the attacker’s hoodie, and something flashed out of the corner of his vision. He jerked his head to the side just in time to avoid getting cut across the muzzle by a blade in the man’s hand, but not fast enough to escape the stab that sliced through his shoulder. He growled out a roar that echoed across the parking lot and stamped on the idiot’s forearm with one paw, relieving him of the knife. Axe batted it away, then he flashed his teeth to remind the man what he was dealing with. The shifter didn’t move again, so Axe slowly removed his paw. Just as he predicted, the second his weight was off the shithead, the man tried to bolt. Axe had no choice but to bring his paw down like a battering ram on the side of the guy’s forehead, and the shifter was out like a light.
These four panther shifters were just lucky he didn’t straight up annihilate them for touching Angel.
“Excuse me, um, Mr. Bear dude…sir?” Angel said from behind him, giving Axe a startle as he heaved this last guy to the side of their van.
Axe’s head swiveled around with the panther’s hoodie still in his mouth. The results left him holding half a chunk of torn fabric between his jaw as he blinked at Angel. She stood less than ten feet away from him, and was waving with one hand. How in the fuck was she not freaking out right now?
He let out a muffled bear noise in the back of his throat, hoping not to startle her, and continued dragging the unconscious shifter toward his other buddies. Clearly he didn’t scare her, because Angel walked beside him on his way to the van, not at all perturbed about unconscious, bleeding men or a passed out panther all in one pile.
“I’m not really sure how you did that,” she stated, “but thanks for the help. If you can understand me, I need to close up the library. Will you wait here?” she asked, pointing back toward the half-lit building.
Axe canted his head toward the library, giving a nod, although he was pretty sure to Angel it would look like a bear moving its head really awkwardly.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
Axe kept his gaze on her for her short walk to the back entrance of the library, before resuming his work. As he dragged the last man over, a sheet of paper fell out of his shirt pocket. He scooped it up in his front claw, and headed back to his bike for the change of clothes he kept in the storage compartment under the seat of his ride for precisely these unexpected incidents. Only one question drilled at his mind while he healed his injuries and shifted back to his human form. The same question lingered as he got dressed. Was Kit Reese, the head of the panthers MC, involved in this attack? Why would he let this happen during a temporary truce? It made no sense at all.
Back in human form and wearing his change of clothes, Axe squinted down at the note under the dim light beside his bike. It contained all of Angel’s information, including the library address, her home address and her phone number. At the bottom of the sheet, someone with different handwriting had scrawled in Axe’s name and the words ‘Retrieve girl for leverage’ beside it.
Why in the hell were the panthers looking to gain leverage on him, and why now? The timing couldn’t be worse, considering the bears and panthers were closer to allies now than they had been in years. Since the Kit Reese shooting, where Tate’s old lady, Molly, had nursed Kit back to health, relations had been pretty smooth. Nothing about today’s attack made sense. The only possible explanation was that these shifters today were either rogue, or not from Kit’s MC at all.
Whoever it was, he couldn’t take the chance leaving Angel on her own. More of them could be after her Scratching his head in confusion, Axe headed back to Angel’s car to wait for her.
“Well, well, look who it is,” Angel chorused. “So my suspicions about you were true!”
“What suspicions? And why are you all excited about…about what you just witnessed? You should be terrified as fuck.”
Angel was practically glowing as she babbled on about wolf shifters and Yeti.
“Whoa, hey, slow down, doll,” Axe said, scrubbing a dirty palm over his face. “So you know about shifters.”
“I always suspected it.”
“Then you know Dean Roman is a wolf shifter?”
“Sorry, what? No I did not know that. Wait, does this run in the family? Because that would mean his cousin, Sonya, has been keeping it from me all this time. No, she can’t be, but that would explain why—”
“Angel, you’re talking so fast, it’s making my head spin.”
“Well, you asked,” she reminded him.
“True. My bad. Listen, save the details for later. At the moment, we need to get the hell out of here, in case their reinforcements show up to finish what these yahoos started.”
She blinked at him, arching a brow. “Why do you believe that?”
“I’m not sure yet, but we’re better off away from here. And we can’t stay at your place for too long.”
Angel cocked her head and took a step backward. “Uh, excuse me?”
“They know where you live. Speaking of which, can I take a look at your phone?”
“Sure.” She opened her purse and lifted it out, passing it over to him. “What are you looking for?”
Axe flipped open the back cover of the phone and slipped out the sim card. “Just this part,” he explained, dropping it to the ground and grinding it under his boots.
Her eyes widened as she stared down at the pieces. “Why did you do that? I’ve got all my contacts stored in there!”
“Yeah. Contacts and your twenty-four-seven GPS coordinates. I’ll get you a new one as soon as I can, okay? Don’t freak out.”
“But…why?” she cried out.
“If they know where you are, they can find you again,” he informed her. “Get whatever you can fit in your purse from the car. We’re leaving.”
Her mouth fell open for a second, but the danger looming around clicked all of a sudden. Pivoting on her heels, she returned to the passenger side of her car to pick up the rest of the things that had fallen out of her purse.
“Who’s going to fill in for me at work while I’m gone?” she asked. “How long will we be gone, anyway?”
“As long as we have to. Trust me. Your boss will figure things out. No one is after them, all right?” Axe gripped her forearm and slammed her door shut. “Let’s go,” he barked, practically dragging her over to his bike.
“Can we at least stop at my place for a change of clothes?”
“We’ll see.”
“You’re not being very nice right now,” she whined.
“I never suggested I was nice, and can pretty much promise I won’t ever be that, especially not while I’m saving your life, doll.”
“Great. I can look forward to you being an asshole, then.”
He nodded and straddled the bike, stretching out his hand to help her on behind him. “Pretty much. So we’re good?”
Scowling, she took his hand and hiked her stretchy form-fitted skirt up her legs to climb on. She pressed up against him with her hands around his waist, her heart pounding at his back, and full, soft breasts at his shoulder blades.
“Just ride,” she groaned into his ear, digging her nails into his abs.
Axe smirked as he rode off, ready for a wild ri
de with the mouthy, blonde vixen.
His Angel.
10
Axe
“Really? Here? No way. I bet those rooms have bedbugs.”
Angel’s sweet, sultry voice got Axe’s attention, even if she was complaining. Axe had to drag her out of her house kicking and screaming after she had convinced him she couldn’t leave her dogs and had to give her keys to her neighbor so they’d at least be fed. While they were there, she had scrutinized every outfit she owned before he suggested jeans, t-shirts, a couple of sweat suits, and a pair of loafers would be more ideal than leather, lace and stilettos. They went back and forth until Axe ended up grabbing a backpack and shoving stuff from her chest of drawers to get them on their way.
Angel had pouted for a while during their thirty-minute drive on the I-15 south, but calmed down before they made it to Glendale, Nevada. But now, she took one look at the seedy motel and muttered her vehement disagreement to spending a single night there.
“You can always walk back home and take your chances with the men who are after you,” Axe told her, cutting off the engine. “We’re staying here,” he reiterated firmly, only slightly annoyed. For the most part, he was horny as hell after all this time with the gorgeous, feisty woman who’d been pressed up tight to him like a second skin for the entire ride.
“Christ.” She climbed off in a huff.
“I’ll get us the room,” he told her, pushing down the kickstand before getting off. “You watch the bike.”
He was at the motel office and back with the key in a few minutes, but Angel was still pissed. Her arms were crossed over her breasts, her nostrils flared, and her eyes narrowed as she glared at him. “I guess I parked in a good spot,” he told her, ignoring the tantrum in waiting. “Follow me.”
They stepped up on the pavement and only had to walk a few feet to get to their room. Angel pushed past him when he unlocked the door. “Just as I thought. I imagine I’ll need a shower before and after sleeping in that bed,” she said, dumping her backpack on the sofa and heading to the bathroom at the back.
Bruised MC Bear (Beartooth Brotherhood MC Book 3) Page 6
