by Lauren Dane
He started to argue but she ignored him, hoisting him up on her left side, letting her cat surface enough to power her to that door. Damn he was solid and heavy, like a freaking truck.
She took a chance that the elevator would work as she punched the button for the fourth floor. It shuddered a moment and squealed, but they did arrive safely and she hustled him to her apartment.
“Don’t get blood on anything. My brother is pissy about that stuff.” She managed to get the door unlocked and him inside.
He focused narrowed eyes on her. “You’re a cat. Did you come in with the others?”
“I know it hurts but don’t snarl at me.” She laid a blanket over her bed with her free arm before she put him on it. She rustled through her things in the closet until she found her kit. She didn’t bother with gloves, they were both jaguars and he was going downhill very fast.
“Did you come with Bertram’s cats?”
“Who the fuck is Bertram?” She pulled her belt off and put it between his teeth before she got to work digging out the first bullet. “This is going to hurt.”
He growled, his cat glowing in his eyes, watching her warily.
“What’s your name?” Keep him conscious.
She ignored the complaining muscles in her right hand as she had to work to keep the wound open to dig out the second bullet. His body continued to try to heal around the wound, fighting her.
“Gibson de La Vega.”
Oh wonderful.
She dug out the second bullet and realized there was one more just below the waistline of his pants. “Three times? You must have really made someone mad. I need to turn you over. This last one is too deep.” She did it as she said it, not wanting to waste time.
She cut his jeans off quickly when she couldn’t pull them off fast enough. The last bullet came out, the wound already ugly.
The poison would already be rampant in his system. The bullets she’d removed would have also exploded silver through him on impact. At this stage, what he really needed was to let his cat take over. The shift would cleanse his system.
It’d be far easier if he did it nude. His boxers were easy to pull off and set aside before she leaned down close to his ear. One of the ropes of his dreadlocks brushed against her cheek. Her cat responded immediately, rising at the scent of another cat. A male cat. A hot male cat. Enough of that. Still, he came out of his stupor a little as she’d hoped. “You need to shift. It’ll help with the healing.”
Shirtless, his tats showed against the dark chocolate of his skin. She’d seen the pierced nipples when he’d been on his back. Dreads. She’d been halfway across the world and this was the most badass thing she’d ever had in her bed. She tried to pretend not to look at his ass, which was quite honestly a thing of beauty. Hard and muscled like the rest of him. He was nearly unconscious after all, it wasn’t like he was going to know she was objectifying him or anything.
She only knew of one other way to bring his cat besides having his Alpha right there to do it. And since she didn’t have Max de La Vega’s phone number on speed dial, there was one option left open to her.
BENEATH THE SKIN by Lauren Dane
Available wherever Carina Press eBooks are sold
Fall 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Lauren Dane
Also available from Lauren Dane and Carina Press
Second Chances
Believe
Goddess with a Blade series
Goddess with a Blade
Blade to the Keep
Blade on the Hunt
At Blade’s Edge
Diablo Lake series
Diablo Lake: Moonstruck
Diablo Lake: Protected
Cascadia Wolves series
Reluctant Mate
Pack Enforcer
Wolves’ Triad
Wolf Unbound
Alpha’s Challenge
Bonded Pair
Twice Bitten
de La Vega Cats series
Trinity
Revelation
Beneath the Skin
Cherchez Wolf Pack series
Wolf’s Ascension
Sworn to the Wolf
From Lauren Dane and HQN Books
The Best Kind of Trouble
Broken Open
Back to You
About the Author
The story goes like this: while on pregnancy bed rest, Lauren Dane had plenty of downtime, so her husband took her comments about “giving that writing thing a serious go” to heart and brought home a secondhand laptop. She wrote her first book on it before it gave up the ghost. Even better, she sold that book and never looked back.
Today Lauren is an award-winning New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of over sixty novels and novellas across several genres.
Find out more about Lauren’s books at laurendane.com, Twitter.com/laurendane or Facebook.com/authorlaurendane.
Introducing the Carina Press Romance Promise!
The Carina Press team all have one thing in common: we are romance readers with a longtime love of the genre. And we know what readers are looking for in a romance: a guarantee of a happily-ever-after (HEA) or happy-for-now (HFN). With that in mind, we’re initiating the Carina Press Romance Promise. When you see a book tagged with these words in our cover copy/book description, we’re making you, the reader, a very important promise:
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Craving more sexy paranormal romances from New York Times bestselling author Lauren Dane? Don’t miss these!
The Diablo Lake series
In Diablo Lake, Tennessee, a town populated by werewolves, witches and more, magic woven deep into the earth protects the town’s secrets from outsiders.
DIABLO LAKE: MOONSTRUCK (Diablo Lake, book one)
DIABLO LAKE: PROTECTED (Diablo Lake, book two)
The Cherchez Wolf Pack series
Follow the Cherchez werewolf pack in Washington’s North Cascades National Park as everything in their world changes.
WOLF’S ASCENSION (Cherchez Wolf Pack, book one)
SWORN TO THE WOLF (Cherchez Wolf Pack, book two)
“WOLF’S ASCENSION is paranormal perfection—with a sexy alpha werewolf who worships his queen, and a fast-paced story full of mystery and suspense.”
—Fresh Fiction
The Cascadia Wolves series
RELUCTANT MATE (Cascadia Wolves, book one)
PACK ENFORCER (Cascadia Wolves, book two)
WOLVES’ TRIAD (Cascadia Wolves, book three)
WOLF UNBOUND (Cascadia Wolves, book four)
ALPHA’S CHALLENGE (Cascadia Wolves, book five)
BONDED PAIR (Cascadia Wolves, book six)
TWICE BITTEN (Cascadia Wolves, book seven)
The de La Vega Cats series
TRINITY (de La Vega Cats, book one)
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Want more paranormal wolf stories? Look no further!
MATED: A Paranormal Romance Shifter Anthology is available now!
MATED: A Paranormal Romance Shifter Anthology
by Kerry Adrienne, Sionna Fox and Shari Mikels
This anthology includes:
SAVING HIS WOLF by Kerry Adrienne
A woman born blind and without the ability to shift yearns to seek her own fate away from her watchful, devoted wolf pack. Vulnerable and stuck in human form, she’s alone and at risk when she’s rescued by the bear shifter who is her destiny.
WOLF SUMMER by Sionna Fox
An accident forces a werewolf to change the best friend he’s loved for years...or leave her for dead. There’s no reason to hide his true self anymore—but can she ever forgive him?
DRAWN TO THE WOLVES by Shari Mikels
A pack alpha finds that rescuing his fated mate from a violent confrontation with two wolf shifters is easy. Helping her move from fear to acceptance of the animals—and him—is a challenge.
Stories also available for purchase separately.
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ISBN-13: 9781488081200
This is the revised text of the work Revelation first published by Samhain Publishing in 2010
This edition published by Carina Press, 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Lauren Dane
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
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