Primal Heat--A Paranormal Shapeshifter Werejaguar Romance

by A. C. Arthur

  Each of them came forward, as if a switch had just been turned on in their heads. They moved in perfect sync toward Nivea and Caleb. Aidan and Brayden came up behind them, extending an arm and latching onto a hybrid’s neck with their claws. Caleb jumped forward, doing the same with the one closest to him. There was another and it was coming right at Nivea.

  She knew how to kill them, but this one was much taller and wider than the others she’d seen. She had to get up close enough, high enough to sink her claws into its neck. Too late, he picked her up by the neck, pushing her back until she slammed into the wall, all the air in her lungs expelling in a quick whoosh that left her dizzy.

  With futile efforts she swatted at the hybrid’s arms but it was too strong, her blows going without any real impact. She lifted a knee and groaned when it only reached its lower chest. Her eyes were watering as he continued to choke her. She wanted to shift but wasn’t sure she had enough air in her lungs to do so. When she felt herself falling forward she had only seconds to realize it was because Caleb and Brayden were attacking the hybrid at the legs from behind. The big bastard tilted back, taking Nivea down to the floor with it, still holding her by the neck. She’d just managed to come up on her knees, staring down into the ugly face of the hybrid. She was preparing to propel herself forward when the splash from its mucus guts pouring out slapped her in the face. The hands let go of her neck and Nivea fell backward. Climbing down off the hybrid quickly before it turned to ash she wiped at her eyes and headed to where she could see her sisters huddled in a corner.

  She ran to them, yanking quickly at the chains that were wrapped around them. When Amina and Serene were free they both hugged her so tightly she stumbled back, tears streaming down her face and emotion welling in her chest. All that she’d done, all that she’d endured to keep them safe and this is how they finally end up, captured by hybrids and rogues, and for what?

  “Why did they take you?” she asked immediately. “What did they say when they came to the house?”

  Serene was shaking her head, crying inconsolably. Amina kept her arm wrapped around her as she replied, “Nothing. I mean, I didn’t hear anything. When I sent you that first text it was after hearing Mom yelling at them. I think she let them in.”

  Nivea immediately looked to Michele Cannon who was wiping down the front of her wrinkled pantsuit as if this were just a bad fall.

  “Did you let them in?” she asked, but the question was never answered since there was yelling from the other side of the room.

  “We got one!” Aidan yelled. “The others are down. Get them out into the first SUV and we’ll be right behind you.”

  Nivea still had questions for her mother but wasn’t about to stand in this house a moment longer trying to get the answers. “Let’s go!” she told them, pushing Amina and Serene in front of her, then reaching a hand out for her mother. Michele looked at her hand, then away, and moved quickly behind her two older daughters. Nivea didn’t let it bother her, at least she didn’t think she had. She ran quickly in front of them, opening the back door to the SUV she and Eli had ridden in together. She was just about to slam the door closed when Michele slipped back out, extending her hand and slapping Nivea across the face.

  * * *

  Eli’s chest was heaving as he’d just finished loading the tranquilized rogue into the middle seat of the second SUV. He’d grabbed sweatpants and shoes out of one of the many duffle bags they always kept in the trucks just in case shifting became absolutely necessary. Only he and Ezra had shifted this time and Ezra had pulled on jeans and shoes as well. They were going to ride in this truck with the rogue, along with Caleb. Brayden and Aidan were going to drive the females. He’d been all set to climb in so they could get moving when out of the corner of his eye he saw a woman hit Nivea.

  He was in motion instantly, hearing bits of the conversation.

  “It’s all your fault! You ungrateful brat!” Michele Cannon was saying, both of her hands going around Nivea’s neck. “All we did for you, all we gave you and this is how you repay us! You’re nothing but a backstabbing whore!”

  Nivea had grabbed her mother’s wrists, not having to use much of the strength Eli knew she possessed to push the woman back against the truck. She pulled her mother’s hands away from her neck easily and stared into the woman’s face.

  “He’s an animal,” she told her in what to Eli sounded like a dangerously calm voice. “You chose to protect an animal over your own daughter.”

  “You’re the animal!” Michele spat back. “Wanting to run around with that whole tribe, changing into beasts and walking on all fours. You never wanted to stay in the place we made for you, never wanted to be what we were.”

  “You are what I am!” Nivea yelled back. “You are a Shadow Shifter just like me. We share the same blood!”

  Michele shook her head. “I don’t share anything with you, ungrateful bitch!”

  Michele lunged again but this time Nivea grabbed her arms, wrapping them behind the older woman and keeping her in a choke hold.

  “How is refusing to be abused by your father being ungrateful?” Nivea asked her. “How can you stand here and say these horrible things to me after all I sacrificed, all I did to keep you and them protected!”

  “Don’t … need … your … kind of protection,” Michele sputtered through the little bit of wind that Nivea was allowing to get through to her lungs. “Don’t … need … you.”

  Nivea’s entire body vibrated with those words, her eyes staring ahead, past Eli. She wasn’t seeing but she was definitely hearing and she was steadily choking the life out of her mother.

  “Let her go now,” Eli said, coming around to stand beside Nivea. He tapped her arms. “Let her go, Nivea.”

  “I needed protection,” she was saying. “I needed protection from him. My mother should have protected me.”

  “You’re right,” Eli said, still trying to unravel Nivea’s hold on Michele. “You are absolutely right, she should have protected you.”

  “I always had to fend for myself, always had to do whatever was necessary to make myself happy,” Nivea continued, her head shaking back and forth.

  “Baby, don’t do this,” Eli pleaded. “Let her go, Nivea. Please.”

  Her arms began to shake from holding so tight and Michele’s fighting began to cease.

  “Nivea!” Eli yelled. “Let. Her. Go!”

  He knew he was loud, knew that the fierce edge to his voice was enough to scare an entire forest of shifters. As for Nivea, she simply turned her head to face him, her eyes filled with tears that seemed to refuse to fall. “She didn’t protect me.”

  Eli nodded. “I know, baby,” he said slowly and caught Michele as Nivea abruptly let her go.

  She walked back to the second truck without saying another word and without turning back to see if Michele lived or died.

  * * *

  Eli put Michele Cannon into the truck and made sure the woman was still breathing normally. The sisters had looked shocked by what had taken place and when they tried to assist their mother, she’d pulled away from them, shrinking into the corner of the seat. With a shake of his head, Eli slammed the door and walked to the second truck, wondering how Nivea was doing. How she’d been able to keep all this bottled up inside over the years without completely breaking.

  They drove for about a half hour before Eli reached out a hand to touch Nivea’s leg. She pulled away so abruptly he yanked his hand back as if he may have hurt her.

  With a frown he tried something else. Turning sideways in the seat he looked at her, using a hand to smooth down the back of her head. She stiffened.

  “Don’t,” she said simply.

  “Listen, I know what you were feeling, Nivea.”

  She shook her head vehemently, her gaze still focused on the tinted window. “No. You don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “No!” she yelled. “There’s no way you can know how I feel because you’ve never endured what I did.”


  “You are right about that. I’ve never been abused by one parent and deserted by another. But Nivea, I do know about feeling helpless to stop the rage boiling inside. I know exactly how it feels to have shit happen to you that you don’t deserve,” he told her.

  “But you got over it, right?” she asked. “You found some cure and you were better and your life moved on.”

  “No,” he told her quietly. “You’re wrong.”

  Eli inhaled deeply and let the breath out slowly.

  “I’m not better. I pretend and I deny reality. But you, you’ve done a phenomenal job overcoming your past. You’re a great guard and you’re trustworthy and loyal. You are so much better than they are, Nivea.”

  “But I’m a part of them. I’m a part of the man that kills his own kind. Or now, is selling them to the highest bidder. For the last five hours I’ve been worried sick that the woman who would blame me for her perverted husband was going to be killed. I’ve spent all these years away from my sisters in order to protect them. I didn’t send his ratchet ass to a human prison because I loved my sisters and my mother too much. What does that make me, Eli? How impossibly screwed up does that make me that I could let him get away with what he did?”

  Eli moved across the seat, chancing the anger he could almost see emanating from her body, and choosing instead to try and soothe the hurt that was so evident in her voice. He wrapped an arm around her, tried to pull her against him. She didn’t budge, but she didn’t pull away again either.

  “It makes you stronger and better than any of them, Nivea. It makes you the woman I’m damned proud to have standing beside me in battle.”

  She’d turned to him then, staring into his face so intently Eli thought she might see right through him.

  “Right,” she said quietly. “Thank you for saying that, Eli. Thank you very much.”

  Chapter 18

  For the first time since she was seventeen years old Nivea Cannon was confused. As she sat on the edge of the bed in her room she wondered why she was here at Havenway. Why, with all that had happened to her, had she come here and trained to be a guard? She could have gone anywhere and done anything.

  Still, leaning forward with her head hung low, she was unable to figure out why here, why with these people, and why on earth was all of this coming down on her now?

  It had been two hours since they’d returned. She hadn’t been able to get out of that truck fast enough. Her throat was raw from her heavy breathing because she’d felt like she was going to suffocate on the trip back. Eli was so close to her and saying so many things, she wanted to remember them all, to believe every word, and yet she couldn’t.

  She wouldn’t. Ever again.

  Once she’d been safely behind her closed bedroom door she’d convinced herself that she needed to shake off the self-pity and go check on her sisters, but that had been thwarted by another female that she wanted to put into a headlock.

  “Orders are no visitors,” Rayna told her with a smirk.

  Nivea really hated this chick. For one, she looked at Eli like he was a piece of steak cooked just right and she couldn’t wait to sink her teeth into him. Well, to be fair, she looked at most of the shifters around Havenway in the same manner. Tramp! And two, Nivea didn’t trust her. She didn’t like the glint in her cool blue eyes and that wasn’t because she was a Lormenian either. Nivea was not prejudiced by any means. There was just something about her that screamed “watch your back” each time Nivea was in her presence. The fact that she’d managed to save Shya Delgado may have bought her some get-out-of-jail-forever tickets with Rome and Nick, but Nivea was still holding strong to her instincts.

  “They’re my sisters,” she’d retorted, really not in the mood for this female today.

  “That doesn’t change my orders,” Rayna insisted, folding her arms over breasts that were barely contained by the tight-ass shirt she wore.

  “That’s not the uniform,” Nivea said without her usual calm. She’d been up for hours. A hybrid had tried to choke her out. She’d seen her sisters tied in chains and oh yeah, her mother had bitch slapped her and called her a whore. Yeah, today was really not her day.

  “It’s my uniform,” Rayna fired back.

  Nivea’s fists clenched at her sides and then she exhaled slowly. “Look, just give me five minutes.”

  “I’ll give you three to get your ass back to your room.”

  And that was it. Nivea was in her face, hands gripping the Lormenian’s shoulders as she pushed her out of the way. Rayna went along with the shove but put her leg out so Nivea stumbled, almost smashing her face into the door.

  “Whoa, hold on. What’s the problem here?” X appeared, pulling the females apart and directing his question to Nivea.

  She heaved and pushed the hair she’d left hanging loose back from her face. “I want to see my sisters.”

  “You know the drill, Cannon. They’re being debriefed,” he told her.

  “Then I should be in there.”

  X shook his head. “You should be in your room.”

  Nivea’s lips went into a thin line, anger boiling just at the surface. She would respect X for the position he held but he might just get cussed out if he didn’t hurry up and move away from that door.

  “So I shouldn’t be a part of my sisters’ debriefing and I shouldn’t have been a part of the meeting with all of you head honchos even though I’m personally involved in what’s going on. I should just close myself in my room like a good little female.”

  “A good little bitch you mean,” Rayna said from behind X.

  Nivea didn’t even bother to jump at her because she knew X wasn’t going to let her punch the tramp in her face.

  “It’s protocol,” X told her.

  “You’re lying,” she fired back.

  He sighed.

  “Okay, it’s Eli’s call. He said he was going to come talk to you about everything that went down. He’s probably waiting for you in your room now.”

  “Bullshit!” she yelled. “I don’t have to sit around and wait for him like a good obedient—”

  “Bitch, like I said,” Rayna added.

  “You!” X shouted over his shoulder. “You’re relieved. Go. Now!”

  Rayna didn’t look at all bothered by the Lead Enforcer’s reprimand, simply slunk her trashy self away, having the audacity to look over her shoulder at Nivea and smile. Nivea simply shook her head, rubbing her temples in the process.

  “Look, X, I get it. I know the protocol, but I just want to make sure they’re okay.”

  “They’re fine. Ary checked both of them out and they’ve been given some food. Kalina and Caprise are talking to them now and I’m sure one of them will fill you in on what’s being said. But for right now, you just need to go back to your room and sit tight.”

  He’d rubbed her shoulder as he said that, like a big brother. She figured it was the equivalent of patting her on the head. Deciding it just wasn’t worth it to stand here and keep arguing with him, she simply turned away without saying another word.

  Now in her room again she couldn’t do anything but think and hate her thoughts and wonder why she was even having them in the first place. She’d come so far, had healed so much and yet, these past few weeks had felt like she’d gotten on the treadmill and run backward a kazillion miles. It was heartbreaking and she wanted to cry.

  But she didn’t.

  She raged, she thought, she made her decision and when he knocked on her door, she didn’t even move to let him in.

  “Hi,” Eli said when he finally used his override code to enter her room. She hated that he had the authority to do that.

  She did not speak to him, did not lift her head. She just couldn’t at the moment.

  “Listen, Rome is going down to talk to Cannon again, to see if he’ll give up who the buyer is. We were thinking it was Crowe but after checking the man’s financials, it doesn’t jibe. No way does he have the thousands of dollars that Cannon was being paid to deliv
er those shifters. There has to be a middleman.”

  Eli continued to talk and Nivea only half listened.

  “It’s possible the middleman could be a rogue. When you told Kalina that you saw the tattoo your father used on one of the dead guys at the cabin, she contacted one of her cop friends in Cecil County and learned the names of the dead men. Of course they only recovered one body, the one with the tat had been removed. But there was a wallet with an ID at the scene that the cops were still searching. The name sounded familiar to Kalina so she ran it through the shifter database. It was Kegan Charles, brother of Darel Charles who was killed about a month ago. Darel was in deep with Sabar, if you remember. So we’re really working the rogue being the third man angle.”

  He paused, took a deep breath, and wondered why she hadn’t spoken. Nivea looked up then, staring directly at him.

  “Do you want my applause?” she asked him. “Or should I simply be grateful?”

  He actually looked perplexed. “What?”

  Nivea came to her feet, confidence surging through her bloodstream like a drug.

  “Do you want me to thank you for coming to give me this information? For allowing me to sleep in your bed, to receive your sexual prowess, when you know damned well you never intended to mate me?”

  The look of surprise turned to annoyance and then to muted anger, all in the span of about ten seconds. Nivea almost smiled with amusement.

  “I don’t understand,” he said finally. “I thought we were talking about your father and how he’s connected to what’s going on with us.”

  Nivea shook her head. “No,” she told him. “I know my father is a betraying asshole and that everything he’s done his entire life has led him and his family to this exact point in their lives. But thank you so much for relaying the highlights from today’s meeting to me. Even though none of that comes close to talking about what’s going on with us.”

  Eli took a step back, literally and physically. She watched him brace himself, legs spread apart, muscled arms coming up to cross over that broad and well-defined chest. He had the perfect body—slim waist, washboard abs, thick bulging muscles in his chest, biceps, and thighs. She could actually visualize him naked and aroused standing there in front of her. But she didn’t. Instead she saw the shifter that had taunted her with his presence, albeit not intentionally, for more years than she could count.