by Michelle Fox
Tabitha glared at Finn and flushed and opened her mouth to reveal gritted teeth.
That’s right, baby girl. Tell me to shove it and march out on those heels.
If he had to keep watching her strut around in that barely-there tank top and shorts, Finn was going to start something that more than one of his pack brothers would have expected to finish, publicly and brutally.
The sound of Mick’s guttural laughter interrupted Finn’s plan and Tabitha’s outburst. “Finally out of your stupor, pretty boy? I guess you drank enough to get over the haircut?”
Lebeau turned his attention to Tabitha to explain. “My boy Finn here is a scrapper. Isn’t that right? He might look like a sparkly vampire, but he fights like a motherfucker, and every chance he gets, too. We’re very proud. Thing is, he had all this long pretty brown hair. Flowing. Really, it was fetching.”
“Fetching? Fuck you, man.”
From far behind Finn, Jake and Vince and a handful of the anonymous prospects not important enough yet to warrant names hooted and whistled and made kissy sounds in the scout’s direction. Inside Finn’s head, the real problem was the abrupt rise of the memory of Tabitha running her fingers through his hair. All those nights when he’d snuck into her bed, no matter if she’d been down the hall or across town in a different group home, she had combed his hair hour after hour with her fingernails and a touch so light it made his scalp tingle—then and now just thinking about it. For her part, Tabitha looked stricken, eyes gleaming wet like she might have been ready to cry.
Was that memory running through her head, too?
Mick clearing his throat made Finn realize that he and Tabitha were staring at one another like the only two people in the club. “Pity,” the alpha said, sighing. “Finn here nearly got his narrow little butt kicked when someone got a good handful of that hair. Pulled a bunch of it clean out of his head. Had to cut most of it off after that.” Lebeau made a waving gesture to one side of his one face, the side where Finn’s hair still came to his chin. “Kept a little, ‘cause he’s sentimental that way.”
“Someone” was an Odin’s Wolf from the Central Coast Pack, most condescending werepricks imaginable. And Finn didn’t think so simply because they were the natural, mythic, sworn enemies of all Fenris Wolves just on principal.
“But before Finn so rudely interrupted us, kitty, we were talking about how much you’d like to be one of the Sons’ little mamas. You got the body for it; that’s for sure.”
Instead of telling Mick to stop leering at Tabitha, Finn surged forward and grabbed her by the shoulders to shove her backward. “Fuck, Mick. Bang the stripper already.” The scout lowered his head and glowered at Tabitha. “Jack. Black Label. Two bottles. Now.”
Despite her jaw dropping open at Finn’s tone, Tabitha looked like she might just possibly maybe stomp off—to get the bottles or to rant about him to the other waitresses or to tell Jiminy she quit, he didn’t care which. But the girl on the floor picked that moment to snake her hand up along the crotch of Finn’s pants and suggest she could take both him and Mick.
Her ego obviously bruised beyond toleration, Tabitha stood her ground. Glaring at Finn, she said, “I’m a waitress, not your slave.” Then to Lebeau, reining like the barbarian king on his throne of fake leather, she continued, “And I’m not here to be cute or someone’s mama or whore or whatever. I’m a latent, and I know you know what that means, and if you think you’re ever going to get me to join you, you all need to show a little fucking respect.”
She’d said all that with a steady voice and a stiff back that the wolf, the man, and the natural outlaw in Finn had to find impressive. The girl might also have just slit both their throats.
CHAPTER THREE
Skin felt spent and empty in those early morning hours after the bouncers had kicked out the drunken stragglers of last night’s crowd. Tabitha had never seen the place by the light of day; sunlight sifting through cracks and doorways had no color or warmth once inside the place. The barest little part of her wondered if that had something to do with the men convened around her in a threateningly silent semi-circle, a feature of their supernatural nature, but that was a pretty far-fetched thought.
The girl breathed out in mirthless amusement at herself. What was far-fetched anymore, really, in a world secretly inhabited by the supernatural species of faerie tales and nightmares?
Well, other than the whole idea of bluffing her way into getting the Sons of Fenris to help her realize her shift. By the flat, colorless, comfortless light of day, that alone did seem like a naïve fantasy now.
Time to face the reality of the situation she’d walked herself into.
From left to right arrayed before her, Sons enforcer Garik Hagen stood a step removed from the other men, his arms crossed and dark head bowed as he regarded Tabitha without comment from under his brow, with Vince leaning back on the legs of a wooden chair between Hagen and Lebeau. Then Jake crouched with bulging arms balanced on bent knees. This brought the burly shifter down almost eye-level with Tabitha where she sat stiff-backed in one of the VIP leather chairs. She kept her hands folded on her knees to keep herself from bouncing her heels anxiously. As though just for the occasion, the 6’5” bear of a man they called Ox, their road captain, had rolled in to help preside over this interrogation. Having seen an awful lot of bad behavior from Jake and Vince and Ox, wolf shifter biker behavior, she wasn’t near enough as far away from them as she’d have preferred to be.
The only more immediate cause of concern was Mick Lebeau himself, sitting square in front of Tabitha with his chair turned backwards and his arms folded at rest on the wooden back. Well, that and the fact that Finn had distanced himself as soon as she’d had her outburst. And what girl wouldn’t have reacted, even overreacted, with one man barking orders at her while the MC president kept angling the conversation in the direction of Tabitha putting out for the whole gang? The man who had been her childhood protector was now no protection at all. Off to the right, he faced away from her and leaned on the archway atop the steps down out of the alcove. Like he had no interest in what the rest of the Sons were going to do to her. Like he had someplace else he wanted to be and this matter of dealing with the female latent was just an irritating holdup.
The burning in Tabitha’s gut was adrenaline mixed with bile and fear. The ache in her chest and the base of her throat was the welling pain of finally getting the answer to a question that had hounded her for four years: had Finn McCaffrey disappeared on her to protect Tabitha from what he had become, or had the big bad wolf outgrown his attachment to the little girl he was always having to rescue?
“Tabitha.”
Another first, she thought, someone getting her name right in this place. Too bad it was Mick Lebeau and in that particularly cool, flat tone. No point in avoiding the very thing that had brought her to Skin. Tabitha pulled her gaze and her pained thoughts back from Finn with great effort and the determination not to give in to the tears welling behind her smoke-burned eyes. What a waste that would have been, crying in front of a pack of werewolves after she’s had the spine to snap back at them and pronounce herself a latent. The spin of telling them they’d have to work to get her to join them was a stroke of genius, but she hadn’t quite pulled that one off yet. It was crucial she establish her value to them as a she-wolf before they decided all she was worth was fucking.
Mick stared expressionless, but no less threatening for it, as he asked Tabitha, “What is it you think you know about us? And how?”
She concentrated on not glancing in Finn’s direction. “It was a few years back. I met someone like you.”
“Like what?” Garik interjected. His voice was deeper, gruffer, more thoughtful and more calculating that Mick’s. Was that a glare she saw pass between the MC president and his sergeant-at-arms?
Lay it all out, Tabitha. Tell them everything, except….
“Shifters. Werewolves. Fenris Wolves.”
Little twitches of tension in muscle
s and expressions among each of the men proved the truth of her information. It hadn’t been a dream or hallucination or a trick of Tabitha’s mind to deal with the only man she’d ever loved abandoning her.
“And what do you think that means?” Garik asked, again beating his leader to the punch and earning another black stare.
“It means….” Tabitha realized she didn’t know most of what it meant to be a werewolf. “Well, I know it’s not like the movies. You don’t shift because the moon is full. And you live in packs, with an alpha leading you.”
“And a Fenris Wolf?” the enforcer persisted. “What does it mean to be Fenris-blooded?”
Mick was just studying Tabitha now, eyes tracking every movement and expression. In fact, they all were. A quick, longing glance at Finn told her even he was holding his breath for her response.
At length, Tabitha shook her head. “I know it’s a mythological reference. The Fenris Wolf, Fenrir, fights the Norse god Odin at the battle at the end of the world.”
“And Odin Wolves?”
Tabitha shook her head again at the enforcer.
This time Mick spoke up. “Your helpful source wasn’t that helpful after all, was he?”
In the distance behind Lebeau, Finn stiffened. The muscles of his back flexed and bulged even under the gray hoodie and denim vest she’d heard bikers call their “cut” for the way they’d taken off the sleeves. Even with her stomach churning full of resentment, Tabitha felt the automatic urge to run her hand soothingly down his spine. She could practically still feel the smooth firmness of his body.
Was it odd that a werewolf didn’t have a hairy back and chest? Or just odd that the thought would occur to her at a time like this?
The MC president snickered. “Who was it exactly who told you about Fenris Wolves and, more specifically, who told you that was what we were? How’d you find us?”
“It was stuff he said about a biker g—.” Tabitha checked herself when she saw Mick and Jake both clench their jaws. “A motorcycle club and the neighborhood, about a bar where you all hung out. It wasn’t that easy to find you; he didn’t say a lot.”
“Who was it, Tabitha?” Lebeau demanded.
“I don’t know him. Just some guy.”
“And he told you this because?”
“Because I’m a latent, I guess. He knew that, too. He said he could smell it.”
The memory brought a twinge of pain to Tabitha’s belly, thinking about that last night. For weeks before, Finn had been so erratic and even wilder than he’d always been. More fights and impulsiveness. He had always been prone to disappearing for a day or two, but it had become a whole week sometimes. Then he’d come back that night drunk, enlivened, practically electrified by some private victory. And hungrier for Tabitha than he’d ever been, kissing and caressing her ravenously, raving about the smell of her—of a latent lupa, an unturned she-wolf. Tabitha had thought he was too drunk to know what he was saying, until he had shown her.
“So he was a varg?” Mick asked, jerking Tabitha abruptly out of her memories.
“I don’t know what that is.”
Smirking, the MC leader told her meaningfully, “A lone wolf. Even among our breed, we don’t tolerate vargs. A wolf has to have a pack. A were who bonds with pack brothers and then turns his back on them?”
Mick shrugged while Tabitha tried not to show distress at how symbolic it was to have Finn standing off from the rest of the gang. Could she keep her dread hidden, really, when all it took was the smallest flare of her eyes or nostrils or the flush of her skin to give her reaction away? Best she could hope was that they’d mistake her fear of revealing Finn for her fear of them. Did different kinds of fear have different scents? She’d have to survive this morning and her transformation to wolf if she was going to find out.
“We hunt vargs down,” Mick told her. “We put them down.”
This time it was Tabitha’s turn to shrug. With calculated feigned nonchalance, she responded, “Makes sense, I guess.”
“Glad you approve,” Mick said, caustic amusement below the growl in his voice. “’Cause he didn’t do you any favors sending you toward us.” Finn hadn’t sent her, really. Tabitha had always known Finn had told her what he knew in an excited rush, and largely in warning. “He didn’t even tell you how a Fenris Wolf becomes.”
“You’re assuming,” Tabitha corrected him, trying to summon up enough bluster to bluff her way through.
“So you’re saying you’re good with it?” Mick asked pointedly, head tilted slightly in doubt. The fact that Finn actually turned around to watch this exchange, fists clenched at his sides and an angry slant to his weight on one hip, set off alarms now screaming in her head.
Walked yourself forehead first into that one, Tabitha.
Last chance to back out, she thought, hands hot and damp with how long and how hard she’d balled up her fists under the mounting scrutiny of the shifters. Every muscle in her body had wound tight over the last few minutes, so subtly that she hadn’t even realized it was happening, and now…. Now an abrupt wave of weakness, confusion, and fatigue forcibly loosened Tabitha’s shoulders and arms. She was done for after that. Everything came undone, muscles, even thoughts. Tired, uncertain, and aching with the acidic gnawing of old memories eating away at her flesh and bones, she just wanted to go back to her dingy room and go to sleep. Completely unable to think straight, Tabitha was bound to say or do something stupid, and then the Sons would pounce.
“Yeah, sure I’m good with it,” she said numbly, and Tabitha heard her own weakness in her voice. More stiffly, she insisted, “Sure I am, or I wouldn’t have come here.”
Amid a chorus of growly snorts and chuckles, the circle of shifters broke, as the men and their tension loosened.
“You heard the girl. She wants it,” Jake said in an amused growl as he stood up, stretching, smiling. God, she hoped she hadn’t just promised herself to them for sexual service.
Distress flared in Tabitha at the sound of Jake’s beastly deep voice and even more so as Ox took a step toward her, saying, “I’ll do it.” Even Hagen looked concerned at this announcement.
Mick came up off his chair to put a restraining hand on the oversized shifter’s chest, and even then he had to shove Ox back—hard. “Not this time. If she’s not one of us, then….” The unspoken promise to the road captain brought Tabitha up fast from her own seat, ready to put the chair between her and Ox. As though furniture would have stopped him, or any of them.
Lebeau had ahold of her by the front of her top before she could take a single step. If she moved away now, it would mean leaving half her clothes behind in his grip, in front of this pack of wolves. Mick’s crooked smile said he knew as much. He was getting off on being able to hold her still by something as flimsy as a strip of cotton.
“Easy, lupa,” he growled like it was suppose to soothe her when they both knew that it wouldn’t. “You’ve been brave enough up to this point. Don’t let Ox there scare you.” When Lebeau clearly wanted to be the one to do that himself. “You have guts, Tabbycat. That’s what it takes to come in here.” She flinched and gasped, pretenses lost, when Mick used his other hand to trace a line along the side of Tabitha’s neck. “To take the bite.”
The bite?
From the corner of her eye, Tabitha saw Finn coming at them in a hard stride, like he was going to barrel into them. It was Mick who pulled him up short, too, and as effortlessly as the alpha had halted the girl’s retreat.
“Finn, you’re up. Deal with her.”
The angry shifter reared back and stared at the leader of the Sons, with Finn’s rich green eyes flared. Then finally, after a second of standing there panting in temper, he snarled.
“The hell I will.”
CHAPTER FOUR
In that fucking back hallway again, where Tabitha Vallins had smashed into Finn and stumbled onto her pretty round ass and right back into his life, the scout slammed her against the wall. She didn’t flinch when he punched
the worn cinderblock beside her head. That made it worse. She’d sure as hell flinched for Mick, just the way the alpha liked it. Just the way Lebeau liked her.
Half a dozen curses tried to come out of Finn’s mouth at once, but there wasn’t room with his furious breath hissing through his clenched teeth. Why the fuck had she come looking for him—for the Sons? What in the hell would have made her think that transforming into a full shifter—a Fenris Wolf—was something she’d want? And why did her nerves dance and her heart pound when Mick so much as looked at her? Yet she could just stand there and glower at Finn’s temper with her bottom lip puffed out? Willful little lupa bitch!
When Finn brought his face right up to Tabitha’s, lording over her, instead of berating and threatening her, his mouth took hers with a fury that smacked her head back against the wall.
Tabitha’s whimper of shock and pain stabbed into Finn’s chest, like they were still teenaged lovers clinging to one another, like he was still her protector. Like he was still a stupid boy who didn’t know the beast within him was so much more than adolescent hormones run amok. As far away from all that as they were now, in this beer-stinking wolves’ den, Finn instinctively pulled back to keep from hurting her again. Without thinking about it, his hand slid up to cradle her head where he’d bumped her against the wall.
It was Tabitha who wouldn’t let Finn step back and break the kiss. Her hand in his hair made a fist to hold his mouth to hers. Her hot tongue met the challenge of his and slid between his lips.
Tabitha kissed like a fucking full-on she-wolf. Driving tongue, scraping teeth, rushing breath. But she tasted of herbs and musk and heat, just the way a doe tasted. Just like prey. If she was going to offer herself, Finn’s wolf was going to feast. The man, if he’d had anything to say about it… would have agreed.
