Scandalous Shifters Paranormal Box Set

by Mia Taylor

  “It was brought to my attention that you have some strange transactions and I just wanted to ask you about them. For example, you paid seven thousand dollars to Bayonne Land Holdings. Did you get an apartment in Bayonne?”

  Evangeline’s bronze complexion turned waxen. Her eyes turned to stone and she dropped the papers.

  “Your Honor, this isn’t about me!” she complained. “Why is he grilling me?”

  “Indeed, Mr. Duvall. What is the meaning of this?” Judge Anderson agreed. Ryker smiled, retrieving the fallen papers.

  “I’m glad you asked, Your Honor. You see, Leah Waterson recently moved into a very luxurious condo owned by Bayonne Land Holdings. The rent on that apartment is five grand a month. Coincidentally, my ex-wife is currently paying the rent on that condo from her own bank account. I would say that is a very strange coincidence, wouldn’t you?”

  Judge Anderson’s eyes narrowed and she stared at Evangeline.

  “Is this true, Mrs. Mathers?”

  Evangeline looked about the courtroom for escape but even the ADA averted her eyes, pretending to be searching for something in the pile. Evangeline began to shake her head but did not speak.

  “Moreover, Your Honor,” Ryker continued, “there is a fifteen-thousand-dollar withdrawal here in cash. You will see that the following day, Joanne Kincaid paid off her credit cards to the tune of thirteen thousand, six hundred twelve dollars. There is no record of where Ms. Kincaid acquired this small fortune, but I can venture a guess.”

  The judge sat back heavily in her chair and sighed.

  “I do hate these Perry Mason moments during a trial,” she sighed. “Mrs. Mathers, I recommend you plead the fifth.”

  “No!” Evangeline screamed suddenly, smashing her fists against the wood. “I have something to say!”

  Shocked, the room trained their eyes on her contorted face.

  “You have no right to be angry with me! I am angry with you!” she snarled at her ex-husband, pointing her finger accusingly. “You used me, Ryker! You used me for a place in my father’s firm and then you dumped me like a piece of trash. You traded me in for a goddamn supermodel!”

  “Mrs. Mathers—”Judge Anderson urged, motioning for the bailiff to approach.

  “No! He has gotten away with everything his whole life and let me tell you about that life—”

  “Evie!” Even from where Victoria sat, he could hear the warning in her husband’s tone.

  Someone shut her up before she endangers us all! Victoria thought, horrified.

  “NO!” Evangeline screamed. “He’s used his charm and good looks and silver tongue to con everyone out of everything! I am supposed to be a senator’s wife, not her!”

  She gestured hatefully at Victoria, who watched the train wreck with morbid fascination. She couldn’t help but feel pity for Ryker’s ex-wife, but she was bitterly amused by what was occurring. Evangeline was not wrong about Ryker. He had used his charms to manipulate and he did deserve to pay, but not like this.

  “You always thought I was an idiot, but I almost got you, Ryker!”

  “She really is an imbecil,” Lenora muttered from beside Victoria, shaking her stark white hair and looking heavenward. The court officer shuffled Evangeline from the witness box and from the room, still screaming at Ryker.

  The judge cleared her throat and turned to the ADA

  “Well, given the circumstances, am I safe to assume that you want to dismiss the charges?”

  Marisol swallowed quickly and nodded.

  “Mr. Duvall, in light of the new evidence, the charges are hereby dismissed and you are free to go. The state of New York apologizes for the inconvenience this has caused you. Court dismissed.”

  Ryker turned and looked at his wife, his eyes lighting with happiness. He ran through the thick of people, pushing everyone out of the way, and enfolded Victoria into a warm hug of happiness. She buried her face in his chest, inhaling his scent deeply. For the first time in months, she felt safe and happy. She was exactly where she was supposed to be at that moment.

  It really is over.

  ~ ~ ~

  They lay in each other’s arms, spent from an exhaustive hour of lovemaking. Since Ryker had arrived home, they had been like teenaged lovers, unable to get enough of one another.

  I almost lost him, Victoria thought, running her fingers through his hair as she pressed her naked breasts against his back.

  She thought of the rollercoaster of emotions they had experienced throughout the past months and she was flooded with guilt. She remembered how she had considered divorce and how angry she had been with his stubbornness.

  I will never again underestimate this man, she thought lovingly. He began to snore gently under her caress.

  Good. Sleep. You need your rest.

  The next morning, he was being sworn in as New York state senator. The day following that, he would be presenting a bill demanding longer paid maternity leave for working mothers, one in a long line of bills to come.

  Over the ups and downs, they had managed to see their way to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  Of course, we are going to have to contend with a mess of angry Republicans now. The campaign donors are going to be especially livid.

  Victoria continued to caress her husband, feeling her own lids growing heavy.

  I can finally sleep, she thought blissfully, allowing the sweetness of the dark to overtake her body.

  But oddly, the last thought she had before drifting off to bed was not of the Senate or her husband.

  It was of Benjamin Hamilton.

  Chapter Ten

  To Burn or Not to Burn

  Burn it. You don’t need it.

  The pages stared up at him as if daring him to make a move.

  You have no use for these now, Benjamin told himself again. You are no longer employed by Victoria Duvall. If you must keep it, put it in the Ryker Duvall file. Just get it off your desk. You have work to do.

  Yet he couldn’t act. It was as if the information at his fingertips was mocking him, sticking to him like glue.

  What was his fascination with those people? Why did he care what became of the senator?

  The truth was, Benjamin Hamilton didn’t give a damn what became of Ryker Duvall.

  He simply could not get his tall, gorgeously cold wife from his mind nor had he been able to since the moment she had stalked into his office all those months ago.

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried to forget about her, but whenever Ben tried to sleep, it was her face he saw, replacing Jules in the dead of night.

  When he shifted for a hunt, he thought he could feel Victoria running at his side with him, as if she watched over him somehow, but of course, that was crazy. He hadn’t seen her since they’d settled his bill and he wouldn’t see her again… would he?

  Ben worried that he was obsessed with Victoria. She seemed to haunt his dreams, and often when he was out, he would catch a glimpse of her, only to discover it was someone else entirely.

  I’m becoming like a schoolboy, infatuated with a cheerleader, he chided himself, but it was so much more than that and he knew it. She was his mate. There was no other explanation for how he felt about her.

  After discovering who had framed Ryker, he found he was still looking for information about the newly appointed senator.

  That’s not fair, he corrected himself. I wasn’t initially looking for any more information about him. I just happened to stumble upon some things… which led to me discovering some other things… which, in turn, led to this pile of papers overtaking my desk.

  Benjamin sighed so deeply, the papers fluttered before him.

  I have to stop thinking about her. I will start by getting rid of this info. I will not pick up the phone and call Victoria Duvall and tell her what kind of man she married.

  But Benjamin did not move. He had a feeling that he had not heard the last of the Duvall duo.

  I’ll hold onto this stuff just in case.


  The hope inside of him was unbearable but it only barely shadowed the knowledge that he would be with Victoria again.

  Even if the idea filled him with shame.

  Chapter Eleven

  Matters Get Worse

  Victoria stared at the paperwork in disbelief.

  What the hell is going on? This can’t be right!

  She raised her coiffed blonde head and yelled out the open door.

  “Jade, get in here!”

  Jade Evans immediately appeared in the doorway to Victoria’s spacious office, her penciled eyebrows raised in surprise by the CEO’s tone.

  “What’s up?” the petite black attorney asked curiously.

  Victoria pointed at the page of financials which she had been poring over for the last hour.

  “This! This is up!” Victoria cried and Jade slowly walked toward the owner of Chic Apparel. It was uncharacteristic of the grey-eyed blonde to raise her voice. The hysteria in Victoria’s tone was shocking.

  “These numbers cannot be correct!”

  Jade peered at the papers and sighed.

  “You know what this is, Tori. The company took a huge hit while you were off. I tried to explain it to you, but you seemed to be consumed with Ryker’s campaign.”

  “A hit, yes,” Victoria choked. “Not a near bankruptcy!”

  Jade sighed heavily and shook her head.

  “It was going downhill almost from the moment you left, Victoria. You should have foreseen that this would happen. No one knows the company like you do. You built it by yourself.”

  “I am aware of that. This is a disgrace! I fail to understand how any of this happened! How am I going to rectify the damage?”

  “It’s bad, yes, but nothing you can’t handle now that you’re back in the driver’s seat,” Jade offered placatingly, but the alarm in her eyes was apparent.

  “Jade, I trusted you to keep this company afloat while I was gone. What the hell happened?”

  Jade bristled at the implication she had not properly done her job.

  “I did what I could, Victoria, but this is not my forte. I have not had my inventory and accounting since I started here twelve years ago. You threw me in blind with no help.”

  “You could have warned me that it had become this bad!” Victoria snapped, unaccepting of the woman’s explanation. “And if you needed help, you could have asked for that too!”

  “Victoria, let’s be fair,” Jade retorted. “You stuck your head in the sand for over a year and expected us to pick up the slack while you supported your pie—your husband’s quest to turn America into The Handmaid’s Tale.”

  Victoria’s eyes narrowed to the point where her eyes were barely visible.

  “What were you going to call Ryker? My piece of shit husband?” she hissed furiously. “Your incompetence almost brought my billion-dollar empire to its knees in one year and you want to blame my husband, the Senator?”

  Jade’s eggplant-colored face waned under Victoria’s scathing gaze and she immediately realized her mistake.

  “No, Victoria. I wasn’t going to say anything about Ryker,” Jade croaked, but the damage was already done.

  “Get out,” Victoria rasped.

  “Victoria…”

  “Get out!”

  Jade didn’t need to be told again. She whirled on her heel, eager to escape the wrath of her boss. She shot the CEO a look behind her shoulder as she left Victoria’s glass office space.

  I should never have agreed to take the time off to help Ryker with his campaign. My business is going to be in shambles and then where will we be?

  While Ryker was technically still a law partner at Chatham, Crowe and Fiend, things had been severely strained since Evangeline’s arrest.

  And the Senate isn’t going so well either. People still think that Ryker is a rapist despite Evangeline’s confession that she set him up out of spite. He is tarred. All our hard work was ripped out from under us because of that envious bitch.

  Evangeline Crowe was not someone whom Victoria liked to think about. It was more than the atrocious scandal Ryker’s ex-wife had caused with Leah Waterson and Joanne Kincaid.

  It was the testimony which Evangeline had provided during the trial which had stuck to Victoria like glue, the admission that Ryker and she had been spending a lot of time together, unbeknownst to her.

  Victoria had never asked Ryker about Evangeline’s words and he had never brought them up.

  What would he say? Would he deny it or agree that it was just something which had slipped his mind to mention to his wife of fifteen years? Is it only that they maintained a friendship or is there something more going on?

  Victoria told herself that with trying to overcome the stigma attached to Ryker’s trial and their tentative steps toward women’s rights, she had not wanted to bring more strain into their relationship, but the truth was scarier. She did not want to know the answers.

  She turned her attention back to the documents on her steel and glass desk, collapsing into the high-back leather chair.

  How could we have lost so much money? Is this a result of the trial?

  Victoria had become aware of the backlash on social media after Ryker had been arrested for sexual harassment. There had been boycotts and hate mail in spades, but never had Victoria imagined it would have reached the proportions it had.

  While she had expected possibly another attack like the one she had encountered in her condo’s underground, she had never foreseen her company suffering so dramatically.

  She punched the speaker on the stationary phone and hit the intercom.

  “Tricia, call Gregory Reverend up here immediately.”

  “Yes, Ms. Duvall,” her assistant replied in her usual clipped tone. She flopped back against her seat and stared at the ceiling, her mind racing.

  You need to focus. One problem at a time. The most serious one is your business. You can worry about Evangeline Crowe another day.

  “Ms. Duvall?” Gregory Reverend knocked gently on the outer door and Victoria gestured for the accountant to enter.

  “Come in, Greg. I have some questions about the books over the past six or seven months,” Victoria told him crisply. Gregory adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses and entered nervously.

  “Ah, yes,” he stammered. “The company took quite a hit.”

  “I can see that,” she replied. “Can you walk me through it?”

  Gregory nodded quickly.

  “It might take a while,” he warned her and Victoria smiled tightly.

  “I have nothing but time when it comes to my baby, Greg. Sit down.” Victoria meant it. If she had to stay up for a week straight finding the discrepancies in the accounting, she would do it.

  And so would Gregory Reverend.

  As the two began to pore over the numbers, Victoria shoved every other thought from her racing mind.

  Ryker can handle himself now that he is senator. He can deal with his own work issues and Samuel Crowe. I held up my end of the deal, taking the time to support him through his campaign. My only job now is to fix the company. I’m washing my hands of everything else.

  ~ ~ ~

  “You get better every time,” Evie gasped, flipping over to face him, her long, black tresses spilling over her full, bare bosom. She was breathing heavily and Ryker grinned, stepping back to pull his pants up.

  “I was going to say the same thing about you,” he told her, grinning disarmingly. “You’re becoming more beautiful too.”

  She pouted slightly, her generous mouth taking on childlike proportions.

  “You can’t just flatter me and expect everything to be okay, Ryker,” she told him petulantly.

  “What are you upset about now?” he asked, a slight smirk on his lips.

  She is a hundred and forty-five years old and whines like a six-year-old, he thought, rolling his eyes skyward.

  “I still can’t believe I sat in prison for two full days before Daddy could get me out,” she muttered.

  R
yker stifled a sigh.

  “You were in jail, not prison,” he reminded her for the third time. He was growing annoyed with her griping. “And some people are stuck there until their trials, which can take months. You should count your blessings.”

  “My blessings?” she echoed, yanking her ankle-length sundress over her head. “It’s your fault!”

  Ryker chewed the insides of his cheeks to keep from screaming at her.

  Only in her world can she find a way to blame her stupidity on someone else. She does take after her father.

  “Evangeline,” he started in an even tone. “I know you feel like it’s my fault, but you went too far this time.”

  The sultry beauty turned her ebony eyes on him, sashaying toward him.

  “I couldn’t help it,” she whined. “You drive me crazy! I can’t understand how you would leave me for her, especially when you knew—”

  “Evie, let’s not rehash ancient history. You are married to Gerald, I am married to Victoria.”

  Evangeline looked at him alluringly.

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” she purred, encircling her bronze arms around his neck.

  Ryker chuckled, genuinely amused.

  “Yeah?” he laughed, pushing her back. “Thanks to you, I’m under more scrutiny than I ever was. Your father is ready to kill us both and I think Victoria is beginning to suspect something. Not to mention that I am a senator now. I can’t very well go around preaching traditional family values and get a divorce now, can I?”

  Evangeline whipped her head back and glared at him.

  “From what I hear, you aren’t preaching traditional family values at all,” she snapped. “I hear you’re trying to pass some rather Liberal bills.”

  Dammit, who thought it would be a good idea to talk politics to this half-wit? Ryker wondered, gritting his teeth. He studied Evangeline for a long moment.

  Why do I keep doing this? She tried to ruin my life and yet, she is such a tigress in bed. The crazy ones always are. What would Victoria do if she found out about this? What would she do to me if she found out about everything?

  Unlike Evangeline, Victoria was bright, astute, and cunning. If his blonde wife found out about his ongoing affair with his black-haired ex-wife, a divorce would be the least of Ryker’s concerns.