Tiger Betrayed

by Tressie Lockwood

  “Then let me stroke it.” He snaked his tongue out at her. “And lick it and…”

  “You’re bad, and you’re going to get me in trouble.”

  “Not if no one knows. Come here. Now!” His patience had worn thin. The hard-on between his legs demanded attention, and he would get it from her before the end of the day.

  She dropped the last garment and stood before him naked, then crawled up from the bottom of the bed. From the moment she lay on her back, he rolled atop her and took the pleasures she offered so freely. He would not stop until he had his fill.

  Deja pulled the door to city hall open and passed into the cooler interior. She tugged a square of tissue from her purse and scrubbed it across her forehead. Strolling down the hall toward Ward’s office, she adjusted the minidress she wore, thinking of Heath rather than his father. She’d come hoping to get the latest info on the killer since Heath had taken to spending nights in his office and not coming home until the early hours just before dawn. He’d stick around long enough to have breakfast with her and the girls, and then he was off again to chase down clues to his case. Knowing they were close to a break would give her hope, especially since she stayed home full time with the girls. One-year-old daughters were great in their way, but not when a woman needed adult companionship. Coreen was a savior in more ways than one. Deja could spend time with their grandmother or ask her to babysit at any time, which she took advantage of from time to time. Heath didn’t need to know she sometimes felt the need to get out of Siberia. As long as she returned before night, she broke no rules.

  When she reached Ward’s closed door, it finally occurred to her that she picked up more than her father-in-law’s scent just on the other side. Her husband, Joe, and Tina, the skank who’d tried to steal him before they were married, were also present. Deja didn’t bother knocking but barged in. The closed expression on Heath’s face, mirrored by his father’s, said the conversation had been so engrossing none of them had noticed her approach. Joe appeared guilty, and Tina’s pursed lips and clenched hands raised Deja’s suspicions.

  “Good morning,” she said and shut the door. “Is something going on I should know about?”

  “No,” Heath and Ward said at the same time.

  “Yes,” was Tina’s echo.

  Joe remained silent.

  Deja folded her arms over her chest and leaned all her weight onto one leg. She glared at her husband. “Heath?”

  He remained stoic. “I said no, Deja. I’m handling it.”

  “Handling what?”

  “I challenge—”

  “Be quiet, Tina,” Ward erupted.

  The skank’s teeth clattered together, and Deja guessed it must have hurt from the grimace on her face. She felt no sympathy. The woman was up to something, and Deja wouldn’t leave before she found out what.

  “We can have a staring contest all day.” She crossed the room and slid back on Ward’s desk so her feet dangled. No one disregarded Ward’s status like she did, and Ward never seemed to mind. She knew the man had almost as soft a spot in his heart for her as he did for his eldest son. “I don’t mind at all.”

  Ward sighed.

  “See? She doesn’t even deserve her position,” Tina snapped. “It’s my right, Ward.”

  Deja narrowed her eyes. “What’s your right, and what does it have to do with me? Heath, you better start talking. I mean it.”

  Tina opened her mouth as if to speak again, but Ward cast her a glance that shut her up. He dropped into his chair. “Tina has asked to challenge you.”

  Deja blinked.

  “She…” He eyed Heath and forged on. “She wants to fight you for Heath and Maia and Neve.”

  Deja burst out laughing. Tina wanted to fight her for her husband and daughters? Was the woman crazy? “Yeah, right. Stop playing and tell me what this is really about.”

  No one disputed the claim, and Deja eyed Heath, waiting for him to speak up. When he didn’t, she whirled on Ward. She jumped to her feet and slammed a hand on the desk.

  “Are you out of your damn mind even letting this bitch stand here suggesting such a thing?”

  “Deja,” Joe warned.

  She glared at him, silencing the man. He compressed his lips, but something told her if she acted on her impulse to smack Ward’s face, he would stop her before her palm made contact. Not that Ward couldn’t take care of himself. The man might be in his sixties, but he could pass for thirty-something easily. The genes of the shifter, she knew.

  “Why would you even entertain this nonsense?” Deja insisted. “Tell her to go find her own man. Better yet, I’ll tell her.”

  She turned to Tina ready to get in her face and set the skank straight, but Heath stopped her. Disbelief flooded her system at his hand on her arm, holding her back. “It’s not as simple as telling her no,” he explained.

  “Funny, seems like it to me.” She studied his handsome face, the familiar sweep of love and desire mingling inside. “Unless you have a confession to make to me.”

  He frowned. “Of course not.”

  “Then make it plain, Heath, because I thought we were husband and wife, mated, forever and all that.”

  He hitched his shoulders, but she refused to acknowledge the obvious tension between them. Let him stress. He deserved that and more for letting this mess go on without cutting Tina down to size long before Deja had arrived.

  “Remember when I told you I believed we shifters existed hundreds of years ago and how I believe Spiderweb, the organization that made us what we are now, tapped into that gene pool?”

  She shrugged. “More or less. You said it governed how you felt about me, that you had no choice but to love me until death because you’re tiger born and not made like many of the rest of us.”

  He nodded and hesitated again. Her own tension built, and she resisted the urge to harangue him to continue.

  “We’re learning every day that there are certain…laws…to what makes us what we are, what I guess you can say…what rules our actions.”

  She didn’t like the sound of this. From her perspective, it sounded like he made excuses for why he or Tina could get away with doing whatever they wanted. Still, Tina was not tiger born. She was no more pure-blooded than Deja, despite her often superior attitude.

  “I don’t follow.”

  Tina stepped forward and cast a weary glance at Ward. “I believe I can explain. Please, Ward?”

  He nodded. “I’m interested in how you obtained your information as well.”

  She thumped a messenger bag on the desk where Deja had been sitting a few moments before and opened it. The thick, dusty-looking tome she pulled out increased Deja’s curiosity.

  “I found this in a rare books store I visited recently, and I’ve been staying up late reading it. At first I thought it was just interesting fiction, but some things began to click.”

  “I bet they did,” Deja spat. She eyed the Bengal tiger on the worn leather cover. They were all Siberian white tigers, but she supposed in Tina’s mind, that didn’t matter. Neither did the fact that the book must be the product of a skillful imagination.

  Tina ignored her comment and continued. “I was able to deduce from what I read and from my own personality that I have alpha blood in me.”

  Deja snorted. “Alpha blood? Really? That’s what you came up with from some dusty old book?”

  “The laws here that governed our ancestors are clear. Those with alpha blood can challenge for position.”

  “Then you’ve got the wrong person. I’m sure Ward will happily wipe the floor with your ass if you challenge him as leader. I’m just a regular wife and mother.”

  “You are,” Tina agreed, sweeping a glance over Deja.

  “Oh no you didn’t.” Deja took a step in her direction, and once again, her husband stopped her. She shook to dislodge his hold, but he held on and then drew her into his arms. Deja fought a little longer and then stilled to bide her time.

  “Heath is alpha worthy,
and he obviously has alpha blood. I am a good match for him.”

  Deja swore. “When are you going to give up this pointless pursuit? He don’t want your ass? Don’t you have any self-respect?”

  “He will want me once we’re mated.”

  “Damn, she’s warped. Ward, why don’t you talk to her?”

  Ward moved to Tina’s side and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. A shift in the room’s atmosphere said he’d released his ability to soothe and calm those under his care. He used the power on Tina, but instead of relaxing, she bristled all the more.

  “I have a right! I challenge you, Deja Hunter, to fight for who will be Heath’s wife and mother to Maia and Neve.”

  Deja blinked at her, and in his shock Heath’s hand fell away. Deja sprang forward. “My husband and my kids are mine!” The growl erupted in her throat, and from the slight burn in her eyes, Deja knew they’d started to change. Tina held her ground, coiled energy radiating from her being. All she waited for was a word from Deja, and they would throw down.

  “Tell her no, Ward, before I kick her ass,” Deja warned.

  Ward took the book from Tina’s hands, but when he did, he gasped. His gaze, full of shock, zipped to his son’s. Heath moved past Deja and reached out as well to touch the ancient leather. The jerk in his being made Deja pause.

  “This can’t be,” Ward muttered.

  “What can’t be?” Deja licked her lips. She considered going over to touch the book, but her feet wouldn’t budge.

  Ward met Deja’s gaze. “Understand I love you, and you’re like the daughter I never had. Having three sons makes me appreciate you all the more, especially the way you stand up to me. It keeps me on my toes.” He halted his little speech. Again, he stared at Heath. She knew he loved all three of his sons, definitely the two teenage boys by his human wife, Coreen, but he’d never known Heath existed until a little over a year ago, the son of Ward’s true mate, a shifter who died when Heath was a child. Anyone who saw Ward with Heath knew he was the favorite. “I want to tell her no.”

  Deja’s stomach knotted. “You want to?”

  “Before I touched the book, my tiger stirred,” he explained. “The challenge rang true from the second she spoke the words.”

  “Hell to the no!” Deja shook her head so hard, her braids swung back and forth, slapping her in the face. Bile rose in her throat. “I’m not even taking this seriously. You don’t get to decide, Ward. I don’t give a fat rat’s ass who you are. This is my life. Mine, Heath’s, and our daughters, who by the way, I suffered in labor with and brought into this world!”

  As much as she railed at him, Deja felt it too, that thing in the pit of her stomach that said she couldn’t say no to the challenge. How absurd. So what. She shifted into a tiger. She was a lab experiment from an evil company that ruined people’s lives for their own selfish goals and their god complexes.

  “Take it back,” Heath demanded out of the blue. The hatred in his gaze, which he’d directed at Tina, made Deja shiver. She’d have crumbled with a broken heart under the weight of such a look if he’d aimed it at her, but displaying no more than a wobbly chin and a trembling lip, Tina stood straighter and raised her head.

  “I won’t.” With the tip of her finger, she tapped the worn pages of the book Ward held. “The law states, anyone of alpha blood may challenge another of the same or higher rank for their position in the group. The victor takes possession of all the loser owns, including mate and offspring.”

  “Well there you have it,” Deja snarked. “Heath doesn’t own me or my girls.”

  Tina continued. “The alpha cannot deny the challenge as long as all conditions are met. Neither can the challenged or their mate.”

  The triumph in Tina’s expression stirred Deja’s desire for violence, and the fight didn’t sound so bad. The problem was, she had also suspected before now that Tina had alpha blood in her. The very fact that Deja’s tiger squirmed inside of her said truth existed in the words, but surely as half human, they could ignore the absurdity of these ancient laws. On some level, they were all made. Heath might have been born to two shifters, but both of the shifters were manipulated into being. No one knew where the original shifters started or if they had existed at all as Heath insisted they did. The twenty-first century should mean they were not bound to the past.

  “You’re going to let this idea go,” Ward told Tina, and Deja’s knees buckled a bit under the weight of his power going out. Tina dropped to a kneeling position, and she bowed her head. Hope rose in the human side of Deja, but she experienced no break in the feline side. As if her cat paced behind the iron bars of a cage, she fought a sense of anxiety.

  “I don’t have to,” Tina said. Her voice never rose above a whisper, but the defiance held. She, nor any other shifter in Siberia, Texas, the town Ward founded when he escaped from Spiderweb, had been able to stand against the alpha’s direct order. Most didn’t even try. As if built into their DNA, they respected the man, and his word held as life and law.

  Law. Deja’s thoughts echoed with the word, and she gritted her teeth. How could a law exist or hold that the alpha didn’t agree with? Surely, with just a word from him, all obligations to it would dissipate.

  Ward seemed to think along the same lines she did. “I dissolve any and all laws that would allow anyone to take another’s mate against their will.”

  Nothing happened. The strain in Deja’s being did not lessen, and the frown on Ward’s face never altered. Behind her, Heath swore. “I love Deja, Tina. You need to accept it and find someone of your own. Nothing you do or say will change that fact.”

  “May I rise?” she asked Ward rather than answer Heath.

  Ward blew out a wearied breath. “You may.”

  She stood and pinned him with a glare Deja would have been proud of if it came from any other person. “I do not take back my challenge, but I will give her time.” The focus shifted to Deja. “You have one week. Prepare yourself.”

  With that, she left the office and didn’t look back. Once the door shut behind her, every one of them let out breaths as if they’d been holding them, and Deja dragged an arm across her forehead. She sagged in Heath’s arms, and his embrace tightened. His lips touched her cheek, but he didn’t move to kiss her. The fact that he stood close gave her strength.

  “You’re letting this pass?” Joe questioned for the first time.

  Ward dropped into his chair and placed the book on the desk. He bent over it, studying the pages. “No! I don’t know why we can’t just dismiss it, but I believe the way around the challenge is in here, and I will find it. Make no mistake about that. She gave us a week, so that’s a good thing. Don’t worry, Deja.”

  “I’m not.” She lied. Worry sat like a stone in the pit of her stomach, but no one other than Heath needed to know it. She turned to him. “See me home?”

  “Of course. Dad, I’ll come by later.”

  “Sure.” Ward didn’t look up, and Joe walked with them to the exit.

  Chapter Three

  At home, Deja stood in Heath’s arms, enjoying the feel of him holding her, his scent, and the sound of his beating heart. A tremor rose inside her, and her hands shook. She fought to control both, not wanting him to know how much Tina’s challenge affected her. Logic said ignore the woman and not to take her seriously. After all, if they were both human, she’d wipe the floor with Tina’s skinny ass. The problem was, they were no longer human, and a sixth sense, if that were the right term, told her a fierce strength existed in Tina, one that could mean defeat. Of course, if they were ever to fight, Deja wouldn’t back down. She’d give it everything to show Tina once and for all Heath would never be hers.

  “Hey,” Heath called above her head. “Stop.”

  She looked up at him. “Stop what?”

  “You’re worrying. I can feel it.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Boy, please. She’s nobody. I can take her.”

  He caught her face between two huge but gentle palms, fo
rcing her to meet his gaze. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

  “I’m not scared of Tina!”

  “I know you’re not.”

  She tugged from his hold. “But you’re acting like she’s got a good chance of beating me.”

  “She’ll do whatever it takes to get you out of the way.”

  That thought gave her pause. “You think she’ll try to kill me?”

  A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I would kill her first.”

  Deja stared. She’d never heard him talk that way, not about a woman. He held a lot of compassion for others, a quality an alpha needed to guide his people, but Heath didn’t always think logically regarding her. The protectiveness had grown exponentially with the birth of the girls.

  He drew her close and wrapped his arms around her waist once again. A spark of desire raced down her spine, and the answering chuff that tigers often made rose in his throat. A thumb hooked beneath her chin, and he raised it until his lips met hers. The featherlight kiss lasted an instant but rocked her.

  “You are mine, and you always will be,” he whispered. “Remember I said I can’t live without you. That still holds. She can’t break that bond. Not now, not ever.”

  The tension stirring in her belly eased, and she smiled up at him. “Yeah, it doesn’t matter that we might have to follow some ancient law. An equally ancient law is the one true mate thing. We were meant to be, and we accepted that fact a long time ago. We sealed it as shifters and then according to human law. She doesn’t have a prayer.”

  His eyes twinkled. “I’m feeling a need to reassert it.”

  “Oh you are, are you? How so?”

  He shrugged, and his hand traveled from her waist to her ass to give it a slight squeeze. “I have a few ideas.”

  “We need to pick up the girls from Coreen.”

  “After.”

  Deja had no more chance to protest when he tossed her over his shoulder and stalked toward their bedroom. She laughed and pretended to struggle, beating fists on his back. “Heath, put me down. Don’t you have to go back to work?”