by Michelle Fox
Anxious questions and doubts swirled in Tabitha’s head, but the only one she asked out loud was, “What can I get you?”
Avoiding eye contact as usual, she had asked the first pair of black motorcycle boots she’d found, on the VIP patron sitting closest to the steps up into the alcove. When she didn’t immediately hear an answer shouted gruffly over the music, Tabitha braced herself, pen poised. This was usually the pause before the smarmy pick-up line about whether or not she was on the menu. On bad nights, the rowdier clientele went straight for lewd propositions and graphic descriptions of what they’d gladly do to her in the alley behind the bar. With the way the guys in Skin behaved, a girl could have gotten to think that chubby was the new in thing. Or maybe that was just the nature of strip clubs, with the men there hitting on anything with a vagina.
Another few seconds passed with no response. That was the point when Tabitha looked up, and realized, and really truly entirely understood what a bad fucking idea all this was. With shaggy raven hair and shoulders out to there, Mick Lebeau, president of the city’s most brutal motorcycle gang—sorry, motorcycle club—caught Tabitha’s breath and heartbeat with the terrible intensity of a wordless black glare.
It was him. Them. The Sons. Shifters. Wolves.
Tabitha, for all the cruelty and beatings she’d taken in her life, had never flinched back just from a look, until then. His eyes did seem utterly black, though she knew they must have been very dark brown, set beneath a firm brow and careless waves of hair. Even knowing the man’s name, who he was and what he was, Tabitha hadn’t expected… any of this. Not the gleaming eyes or how much like prey she’d feel with them trained on her. Not the stony expression or the wide-set planes of his handsome face darkened by bristle so fine it was hard to tell stubble from shadow. Not the eerie motionlessness that so reminded her of a wolf studying a helpless deer.
A helpless deer. Yes, that was exactly what Tabitha felt like as she glanced quickly around her, judging how much space she had between this predator and herself. They were there with him, several more of the Sons, all watching one of the girls slithering up and down the VIP pole. Tabitha recognized Garik, the gang’s enforcer, black hair and light eyes and also too handsome to be entirely human. She had never seen that one live up to his role or his reputation, at least not in Skin, and that was just what put Tabitha on edge about him. He was never gratuitously violent with the other customers, and he never fucked any of the dancers openly for the entertainment of his pack brothers. Instead, the much burlier Jake and Vince, and the truly massive Ox when he was around, embodied pure biker trouble. With those three cracking skulls while Lebeau presided, no one forgot Skin was SoF territory.
Mick still didn’t say anything as Tabitha leaned away from him degree by degree, poised to flee, while he sat with only that broad chest expanding and relaxing with each measured breath. Beneath his unzipped leather vest, his gray t-shirt bore the image she had studied all those nights alone in her rented room designing this ill-conceived plan. The snarling wolf’s head that glowered back at her as silently as Mick Lebeau was the symbol of the SoF, the Sons of Fate.
In that moment, Tabitha was terrified that the man could tell she knew what SoF really stood for: Sons of Fenris. Descendants of the wolf Fenrir. The most savage breed of shifters hidden among—and preying upon—man. As beautiful as wolves, as wild, but more deadly for their mix of human blood and human vice with animal power and animal appetite.
Tabitha wasn’t sure which was more distressing, the flicker of crude appreciation in Lebeau’s dark eyes as his glance sized her up from ponytail to heels and back again, or the stony chill of his voice. “Jiminy took his sweet fucking time sending you back here.”
The first time Tabitha actually smiled at anyone in Skin and it was Mick Lebeau, because he terrified her and she had no other way to hide it. “I’m new, so I’m usually his last choice to work VIP. Guess he sent me ‘cause everyone else was busy.”
“He sent you because I told him to send you.”
Run, the good sense she had left screamed in her head.
Tabitha’s mouth went numb and awkward, her heartbeat throbbing hard enough to pulse in her temples and her tongue and the base of her throat. “Why’s that?” she asked in a breathless rasp before her brain could stop her.
The seconds pounded away in Tabitha’s head while Lebeau watched her with narrowed eyes. It couldn’t have been more obvious he was studying her reactions, reading her, maybe even gauging which way she’d flee when he pounced.
Run.
“Skin is ours,” Lebeau told her with a meaningful stare that drove his suggestion right into her belly. He meant both Skin the club and the skin that was hers. Deep inside Tabitha, a primal part of her that she did not yet understand stirred at the suggestion, wolf to wolf, perhaps. But this was not the right shifter, the right man, not the first, the one who….
Mick reclaimed that small sliver of Tabitha’s attention when he said, “You want to drink here, dance here, work here, or fuck here, it’s because the Sons say you can.” Every muscle in Tabitha’s body tensed when Mick included “or fuck here,” and he reacted to the flicker of anxiety she felt pass over her face by breathing out an amused chuckle. He held out his hands as though presenting the obvious. “And I’m the first son. Club president.”
The girl swallowed the knot in her throat. If she was going to stick to the plan, this was the moment to correct him. He could call himself club president all he wanted. What he really meant was pack alpha. Reveal that bit of knowledge when most humans didn’t even know shifters existed, let alone any of the terms for how a species organized itself, and he’d know Tabitha wasn’t there by accident. But what would Mick Lebeau and the Sons do with this little girl who knew their secret and had gone to an awful lot of trouble to find them and join them—at least long enough for them to trigger her own transformation?
For chrissake, run, Tabitha!
She took a deep, bracing breath before saying, “Sounds like you’re the man who gets only the good stuff Jiminy keeps under the bar. Black label?” Tabitha replayed her own voice in her head. Had she sounded impressed enough? Coy enough? Subtle enough? Or could he tell she was scared out of her head and just wanted to get away from him? Hell, could he smell it on her?
The massive shifter sat back slightly on the curved faux leather couch. “Bring the bottle.”
Tabitha nodded and spun hard to head for the bar, even though she had no intention of serving the alpha either Jack Daniels or herself on that plastic platter. Later, when she’d calmed down and faced the prospect of her wallflower doormat church mouse life stretching out year upon year ahead of her, she knew she might regret this, but not at that moment. The instinct to flee was pounding in her head, and maybe that was her latent wolf finally shouting loudly enough to make itself heard over the club music and Tabitha’s hormonal desperation. Something inside Tabitha knew better than to stand face to face with Mick Lebeau and think this was going to go down anything like she’d planned.
Having ducked behind the bar and traded her serving tray for her purse and keys, without so much as a glance Jiminy’s way, the woman used the distraction of darkness and music and the haze of lust to skirt the wall of the club unseen. Tabitha headed toward the hallway to the bathrooms and the back exit. She didn’t care how many strange men she smacked into as she pushed her way through the knots of patrons waiting for the men’s room or sneaking a cigarette in the corridor. She didn’t care that they cussed and leered at her. And she didn’t look at who was slipping in the back door as she flung it open.
His scent hit Tabitha a split second before his body did, and that wasn’t because of any special wolf senses. Latents didn’t have those senses activated. She just knew that scent, really knew it, from spending half her damn childhood cuddled up to it. For years, that smell had meant warmth and protection in group homes that were little better than holding pens for unwanted bastards. He exuded a mixture of rich earth and fres
h loam sweetened with musky amber that could not be covered with the lingering biker cologne of gasoline, oil, and cheap women.
Tabitha’s body clenched: her throat, her chest, her stomach, her suddenly burning hot pussy. And that was before she stumbled back on her heels and landed on the floor on her butt, to look up at him.
From so far down below the man, before the shifter, Tabitha panted out her panic and the surge of lust she felt heating her skin. Slowly, her gaze climbed from his scuffed black boots to his faded and oil-stained jeans, up his hard-muscled thighs. No way Tabitha’s attention should have lingered on the telltale outline of his cock pointing up long and thick at a slight angle to his zipper but no way she could help it, either. The enticing, threatening swell of his cock brought back memories of the last time she’d seen him, how badly she’s wanted him, how badly he’d hurt her, and how the events of that night had set Tabitha on the path that now led her to Skin and the Sons. That led her to him, but hadn’t she always thought it would? Hadn’t she hoped?
When she finally looked up past the lean lines of his runner’s torso, his white t-shirt clinging to the pronounced definition of his abs and pecs, Tabitha bit back a sighing gasp. Of relief and distress. It was him, absolutely, but different. The smooth cheeks she remembered feeling against her own face were now shaded in brown stubble that did less than he probably intended to roughen up his pretty-boy face. God but his jaw was hard and sharp, like a high school girl’s YA wet dream, and eyes so green…. But what had he done to that beautiful long hair that used to feel like cool liquid sliding over her skin? It was cut ragged now and short except for the front part along the crown of his head. Long fringe hung to one side of his face, skirting his jawline and shadowing his eyes as he glowered at Tabitha. It was him, absolutely, looking like some wild neo-viking. Finn.
For one second, just one, his brow knit in… surprise, doubt, concern? He certainly wasn’t looking at Tabitha the way a road-hardened biker and a savage, practically feral Fenris-blooded werewolf looked at a clumsy girl who’d just barreled into him. He stared at her like a man who was seeing the ghost of a life he didn’t live anymore, in the form of the first girl he’d ever loved—or said he loved.
Then Finn McCaffrey, four years older and infinitely rougher than the man who had left Tabitha that night, wiped the recognition off his face. He curled his upper lip in an irritated snarl before stepping over the girl and stalking into the club.
“No,” Tabitha said in a disbelieving breath as she sat there alone on the grimy floor. “No, that’s not how it was supposed….” Finn was going to pretend he didn’t know her after everything? After his change had nearly killed her? After he’d ripped away the curtain that hid the world of shifters and witches and faeries—the Otherworld—from the everyday world of… of hustlers and foster kids and waitresses barely making ends meet?
“Oh, hell, no.” Tabitha clambered to her feet and snatched up her purse and keys. She traded them one more time behind the bar for that damn serving tray. “Hey,” she said to Jiminy where he stood head bowed over his cell phone trying to hear a call or message. “Hey,” she said again and jostled his shoulder.
When the manager looked up, predictably red-faced and cross, Tabitha cut off his tirade. “The good stuff. A bottle. It’s for VIP.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Finn, get over here.”
Go fuck yourself, Mick, Mr. President, pack motherfucking alpha.
As the club recruiter, probation officer, prospector, what the fuck ever, any road warrior title but what Finn actually was—the pack scout—he was used to being alone on the road more than anyone except a few nomads and their road captain, Ox. Alone on the road and out from under Mick. Finn wasn’t planning on earning any fucking red cross patches for sucking up to or sucking off the alpha whenever Lebeau got his hackles up, usually over some perceived insubordination.
Insubordinate as hell, Finn kept his back turned to Mick and his eyes on three mamas putting on a show in the Sons’ leather-and whiskey-stinking VIP area in Skin. Two girls pressed up to the stripper pole and rubbed on each other while another was on her knees going back and forth between blowing Jake and Vince. The bottle of Jack in Finn’s hand was down to a mouthful or two, but he barely felt it. That stamina and resistance was the nature of the beast, his beast. A second bottle probably wasn’t going to lift his mood, his dark fucking growly Fenris Wolf disposition, but maybe the third and a couple of mamas all to himself later that night….
“Finn!”
Fuck off, Mick. I’m drunk and thinking about sex, and the music is too loud, and I can’t hear you. La la la la la. Get it, you asshole?
In a real biker gang, a human one, Finn’s attitude issues toward his president and other officers wouldn’t have been tolerated, he knew. At minimum, a beat down would have been in order. But the Sons weren’t human and weren’t just any shifters. If a Fenris Wolf did what he was told one time in ten, and no friendlies got mauled in the process, he was practically paper-trained.
When the pack alpha did not persist in snarling orders, Finn sank back into his mood. He drank alone, slouched in a deep leather chair with his semi-hard cock throbbing in frustration in his jeans. The scout filled his mouth with the last swallow the bottle had to offer and wiped his bottom lip on the sleeve of his gray sweatshirt jacket. It was the one he always wore under the denim cut with his colors.
The lingering stink of old whiskey, of oil and gas, with the musk of wolf and stripper pussy wasn’t enough to cover the smell of her when she came up the steps into VIP. That was why Mick had stopped hollering; the asshole was scoping Tabitha.
That girl. Finn gritted his teeth and refused to turn his head to look. That girl was thick in the head to come here, to Skin and VIP and the Sons. Tabitha getting a job at the bar? The idea made Finn’s shoulders tense and tighten with the pain of his urge to shift and kill something. She was parading around the club week after week while Mick and Jake and Vince eyed all that and licked their chops? Just like Finn was trying not to do, as the muscles of his arms and thighs and his cock twitched, ready for the hunt he wasn’t going to let happen. What the hell was she thinking after… after everything?
Finn snorted and tried to take another drink from the now empty bottle. In a temper, he flung it out over the heads of the crowd beyond the alcove, followed by a muted crash and a lot of cussing. All of it hardly audible over the music and pounding of blood in Finn’s aching head, behind his temples.
Tabitha Vallins would not get out of his head. Girl was thick, he thought again, closing his eyes and rubbing his scalp. As thick in the head as she was in the waist, and wasn’t that just the wrong thought to think? Finn couldn’t stop picturing Tabitha’s curvy hips and that round ass and how pale and soft and perfect her skin was along her naked belly and thighs. She’d been a lush young girl coming into her physical beauty four years before. Now she was a woman with substance to those curves, just the way shifters liked them. Voluptuous and hapless and as yet unspoiled, Tabitha was the perfect example of a werewolf’s preferred prey. She was the equivalent of a lone doe, and what she thought being a latent was going to change about that Finn just plain couldn’t figure.
Don’t look, man. Stay out of it. You saved the girl how many times?
From beatings at one group home or other, from violation in one foster home or other. For ten years, ever since the first group home they’d ended up in together when she was eight and he was twelve. That was enough. Now she had come to the one place, the one group of people, of animals, he had warned her away from in the direst of terms?
“Come here, Tabbycat.”
Caustic as the delivery might have been, Mick had an endearment for Tabitha. After a month? Finn had been on the road her first three weeks at Skin, as she’d scoped out the Sons and as they, little known to her, had scoped her out, too. Like they couldn’t smell a latent from the minute she hit the door. Like she didn’t leave that mouthwatering scent of prime, unturned she-wolf o
n everything she touched. Finn very intentionally pressed the back of his sleeve to his nose, to cover the scent of vanilla and honey with the smell of Jack. Damn the appetites of a Fenris Wolf, the wild breed even among beasts. The combination brought his cock to full attention.
“So tell me, kitty,” Mick went on, knowing full well that Finn wouldn’t have had to strain to hear if the scout was listening, “what you think about being our club mascot?”
No, no, no. Not your problem, man.
“You know the difference between a club cutie or a mama and an old lady?”
In one fluid movement worthy of a wolf, Finn brought himself up from the chair while reaching out to grab the stripper sucking off Jake and Vince. With some amount of snarling but without missing a beat, they just took the two girls off the pole. One bitch was as good as another for them. The scout used his hold on the first stripper’s permed curls to fling her across the VIP area to the floor at Mick’s feet. Topless and flushed, she sprawled in a jiggling, tantalizing tangle of sweaty skin and tousled red hair. Finn himself had used all that long red hair often enough to rein in the wriggling dancer while he’d tied up with her from behind. That was what she was for the Sons, a mama, sexually available for any club member at anytime, by her own choice. And a cutie? That was even worse. That was a girl for a gangbang, and often unwilling. Not to Finn’s taste.
With a snarl, Finn glared at Tabitha where she stood stunned a couple steps back from the prone stripper, who was giggling up at the club president. There was higher status among mamas who established themselves as Mick’s favorite, so Finn had just provided her quite the opportunity.
“How about you stop flirting long enough to bring us another fucking round?” Finn suggested accusingly, even knowing the smell he caught coming off Tabitha was ninety percent fear and ten percent her body’s instinctive reaction to the presence of male wolf shifters. If he made her mad enough, maybe she’d throw that tray at him and flip him off and quit like any sane woman. Only problem with that plan was that she was herself a latent shifter—something Finn should never have told her.
