Taking the Belle_A Shapeshifter New Orleans Romance

by Abby Knox

  Halfway into her eggs Florentine, and after about three mimosas, who should show up at the table but Rosemary’s mama, Betsy.

  “Mama! What are you doing here?”

  “I just came to make amends after last night. I’m not excited, but certain things have come to light and I wanted to let you know if you want me to help you plan the wedding, I’m in.”

  “Mama…” Rosemary was truly touched.

  “And if you want my blessing, then I suppose you have it. I can see now that this is the only way I’m going to get grandchildren out of you.”

  “Mama—”

  “Rosemary, let me finish. The bottom line is, whatever happens, I just want to be a part of your life, even if this is the worst idea you’ve ever had.”

  “That’s a wonderful vote of confidence, but I need to tell you something, Mama. Because I don't want you to think you’ve totally agreed to something before you have all the facts. I hate to tell you this…” Rosemary looked around at her cousins, who were all staring, each of them holding a champagne flute of mimosa up halfway up to their lips in anticipation. “Ash is like us. Except, he’s a wolf.”

  The cousins all gasped.

  Betsy looked at her daughter sympathetically and said, “I know, honey.”

  “You know?” Rosemary was stunned. “But how…”

  “Ashton came to see me this morning after he came to apologize to you. He said he was sorry for leaving last night and then he came clean. He said, ‘I have no choice but to protect your daughter for the rest of my life. If I don’t have your blessing, I’ll disappear. But I will be there, protecting her. I’ll watch over her house and future children like they are my own, but I’ll never interfere. If that’s my fate, then so be it. Take as much time as you need.’”

  Rosemary looked at her mother. Her eyes were shining. A lump formed in her throat. She could hardly imagine what it would be like for anyone to willingly give up their true love so selflessly because of some code of honor, dooming themselves to a life of sadness and noble misery. She would tan his hide later for even thinking that was acceptable. For now, Rosemary was happy to know that her mother was going to come to the wedding.

  “Well,” she said, looking around at GiGi, Chastity, her mother, and the rest of her shocked cousins. “What are we still doing here? Let’s all go uptown and get to dress shopping, y’all!”

  Betsy smiled. “If this isn’t gonna be the biggest, best damn wedding New Orleans has ever seen, then Lord, throw me headfirst into Lake Pontchartrain ’cause I’ve failed my life’s mission!”

  The bitch-ass cousins all cheered and clinked glasses. The wedding was officially underway.

  Chapter 9

  Ash

  Mama told me everything.

  Ash swallowed as he read the text from Rosemary and thought about how to respond.

  And?

  And she’s dress shopping with me right now. She’s on board.

  Good!

  But I gotta say something to you.

  What’s that, baby girl?

  If you ever even think about leaving me behind because my mama or daddy didn’t approve, and damning yourself to a sad existence of hiding in the shadows and stalking me like a sad, stray puppy? Then I am going to kick your ass so hard you’ll be going back in time to watch last year’s Mardi Gras parade.

  Got it. But it’s the wolf code, baby.

  Code schmode. And now you’re gonna have to be punished.

  He smiled mischievously at what she could possibly have in mind. “How so?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Fine. Have fun today. I’m picking you up for dinner at 7, so you better not let those girls wear you out. And while you’re shopping, pick yourself up a new dress, and make it fuckin’ sexy. “

  “Oooh, I like it when you’re bossy.”

  “Who’s your daddy?”

  “You are.”

  Rosemary

  Several hours later, Ash picked up a slightly toasted Rosemary, who was, as instructed, wearing a red crushed velvet mini-dress with cut-out shoulders. It was so tight she thought she could see her own pulse. That could also be inflammation from too many carbs and mimosas with Mama today.

  “All right, baby girl, what’s my punishment?” he said, shooting her a bad-boy smile across the table they shared at JB Chicken. Damn, this was not going to be easy. He had this way of looking at her with his steamy gaze that instantly made her nipples perk up. But she needed to get her point across.

  “No more pussy until after Lent.”

  “That’s cute.”

  “Is it?” She cocked her head to let him know she was not kidding.

  “You’re not serious.”

  “As a heart attack brought on by your daddy’s chicken-fried Monte Cristo sandwiches,” she said, looking over the menu.

  “You mean the ones dipped in ghost pepper jelly and dusted with cinnamon-cayenne sugar?” he asked.

  “That’s the one.”

  “God, I’m hungry.”

  “Are you reading what I’m saying, Ash? No more puss-puss from the kitty cat.”

  “Fine,” he said dismissively, glowering at the menu. Ash gritted his teeth. “You’re telling me you showed up in that dress and you’re not even gonna let me take a bite out of that tonight? I don’t like this.”

  “Then don’t ever talk about the possibility of leaving me again.”

  He thought for a moment. “So tell me the rules exactly.”

  “You can’t touch me or give me oral until after Easter. Think of it as your Lenten sacrifice. And also, still no penetration until the wedding.”

  “Baby girl, I ain’t no damn Catholic. And I ain’t converting, so you can forget about a church wedding.”

  “What are you then?”

  “I live only to worship you.”

  This caught her off guard, but it pleased her. She forgot all about being hungry for food and let this feeling wash over her. Nobody had ever said something like that to her before in her life.

  He pressed on. “Can I play with your ta-tas until you come?”

  She giggled. “Yeah, but I’m not likely to do that.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said.

  “But I can still go down on you,” she replied.

  “Oh, you’ll be going down. Tonight, in fact,” he said.

  She smiled wickedly. “I’m drooling already.”

  The server arrived and nearly dropped her notepad when she saw Ash. “Hey, Ash! Can I get your drink order?”

  “Hang on, Stephanie,” he said. “So, baby, those are the only rules?”

  “That’s it,” Rosemary replied.

  Then he turned back to Stephanie. “Yeah, I’ll have a whiskey sour and a Southern Comfort for the lady. Make it a double.”

  “Oh, sweetie, I don’t think I need any more booze tonight,” she purred.

  “Yes, you surely will,” Ash said. “’Cause tonight, your ass in mine. Literally.”

  The server quickly disappeared. Rosemary’s face felt flushed at the idea of another new sexual experience with Ash. “Fine,” she said. “But we should stop for some lube on the way back to your place.”

  Chapter 10

  Rosemary

  The night of Mardi Gras, which also happened to be the night before Valentine’s Day, the wolf pack surprised Rosemary and Ash with a surprise engagement party on the roof of his building overlooking Bourbon Street.

  That is to say, everyone in the wolf pack was there, except for Penny, who for some reason was still stricken by the news that her new friend was a shapeshifting feline. Rosemary suspected that Penny had always had a subconscious crush on Ash.

  “… and I think finding out that I’m… well, that you and I … are not just regular people but a different clan of shifters has made that little crush of hers manifest itself,” she was saying to her cousin GiGi, who was nodding sympathetically.

  “Well,” GiGi replied. “Just try to enjoy tonight. Look at this place
! Your fiancé has the best view in the entire French Quarter.”

  Rosemary nodded and followed GiGi’s gaze. She was right. It was a gorgeous, raucous night. There was also fresh crab, gumbo, jambalaya, and some insane appetizers that GiGi and her staff had made. Rosemary took one bite and had intended to give the wedding catering and cake job right there to GiGi. That was until Ash’s friend the celebrity chef Vann West, fresh from filming in Thailand, made an appearance. Rosemary felt bad about this guy showing up and stealing Gigi’s thunder, but in the end it was decided Gigi would serve as a bridesmaid and cake decorator.

  Aside from the competing chefs, this was also the first time that the Boudreaux clan and the DuChamps clan had ever been seen together in the same room publicly. Big Daddy Jimmy Boudreaux was there, as was Betsy. The absence of Lionel, who had closed himself in his office for the night — again — was felt by everyone.

  So, Betsy gave the toast in his place. When everyone had raised their champagne glasses, she said, “To my Rosie and Ashton. May this be the beginning of change. The beginning of friendship between the DuChamps clan and the Boudreaux clan. There can be only good things that result from love. Our differences make us interesting, and when we combine the best of us—and my Rosie and her Ash are certainly the best of us—we can only make each family that much better.”

  Rosemary was bawling. Ash put his arm around her, but she could tell he was holding back a hard little knot in his throat.

  Then it was Jimmy B’s turn: “I have to admit, when Ash told me he was going to marry a DuChamps, I thought that there would be no better way to stick it to my least favorite business rival than to give her the last name of Boudreaux. But then I met Rosemary and I chastised myself. She is a fine young woman and a good person. Rosemary, welcome to the family. I wish only that my sweet Charlene could have been here to meet you. Charlene would have fallen in love with you immediately.”

  Ashton’s siblings all raised their glasses and shouted, “Hear, hear!”

  Rosemary knew then what had to be done. Ash’s father was right, and so was her mother. She turned to Ash with a tear-streaked face and said, “Ash, you have to get my daddy to this wedding, come hell or high water.”

  Chapter 11

  Ash

  He liked to think of himself as a modern fellow, but Ash had exactly zero interest in the wedding other than doing what he was told to do: show up and bring Lionel DuChamps.

  He needed plan, even if it meant he had to do it by force. Hell, he wasn’t even sure of the date. He was just trying to make it through Lent without thinking about his girl’s lady parts. Parts with a scent he could track for miles.

  In the meantime, since he wasn’t getting the kind of action in the bedroom he really wanted, he did some digging into shapeshifting panthers in the southern Louisiana region.

  He was stunned to find, when he went to his favorite voodoo shop in the French Quarter, that this history was widely known. The shop owner, Lucy, actually seemed shocked that all of this new information about shapeshifting panthers was coming as news to Ash.

  “Oh yeah,” said Lucy, who knew the wolf’s secret. “The panthers go back over a century, when an unscrupulous voodoo witch was hired by a competitor to make Beauregard DuChamps suffer a mysterious and magical death.

  “But she wasn’t a very good voodoo practitioner, because she got her spell all wrong. Instead of causing him to die by being suddenly attacked on his nightly walk by a wildcat, he only got bit. And because the animal was under a spell, the black magic was passed on into the blood of the DuChamps family. Beauregard DuChamps himself was not a halfling or a shapeshifter, but his children ended up carrying the magical gene. They were doomed to a life of feline proclivities. They were prone to disappearing for hours every so often, whenever the urge to shape-shift came over them. To this day, every new moon, they run off to the woods to hunt.”

  Ash was gobsmacked. “How did I not know about any of this?”

  She smiled and handed him a sack of crystals. “Because you never asked. Forget vampires and zombies. This city is shifter central.”

  Lucy, herself a Voudon high priestess, told him to crush and burn the crystals with some sage just before the ceremony. She warned him that this would not make Lionel do his bidding, but make him more open to suggestion. Ash was looking forward to creating this awful smell at the wedding venue. Rosemary would not hate that at all. Nope.

  When he texted Rosemary to tell her what he had learned about her family’s history, she had replied that under no circumstances was he allowed to see her shape-shift.

  But fuck that. The wedding planning had kept them apart for weeks. The new moon was coming up, and he wanted to put his eyes on his soon-to-be wife.

  On the night of the new moon, Ash waited in an Uber outside her flat. He watched her exit the building, along with her cousin GiGi who had been helping to plan the wedding. Rosemary looking nothing like her usual self. He realized he had never seen her in yoga pants and a T-shirt before. And running shoes. He had to do a double take. She got into the back of a black town car and he paid the Uber driver extra to follow it. They drove all the way to the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, finally stopping at a secluded parking area inside Fontainebleau State Park. When Rosemary got out of the car, she paused and looked around, then nodded to the driver to wait. He waited for her to disappear into the woods.

  Ash had no problem catching up with her, as her scent was doubly strong that night. He stayed hidden in the trees as she stopped under a large mossy oak to take off her clothes. He watched her place her clothes and shoes neatly under the tree. Her naked body in the moonlight was almost too much. Ash was rock hard, and his beast demanded he go to her. But he held back. The next moment, he watched his woman transform into the big cat. It was startling, but not as disturbing as he’d imagined. She didn’t look as if it pained her. Her eyes spread apart and changed shape, her face turned into a golden snout. Her ears moved to the top of her furry head, and her little body was soon covered with golden fur and grew a long, curled tail. She was the most elegant creature he’d ever seen. He watched as she climbed up the tree and mounted a branch that overlooked the woods. She let out a wild roar at the moon, like she was suddenly a free female. Even the wolf in him could not help but worship this beautiful creature. Majestic and sleek, the wolves were not. He could barely admit it to himself, but the truth was before him. The panthers were a clan above the rest. Who was he, a filthy, woolly beats, to think he could be with such a creature?

  When Rosemary was finished hunting at the end of the night, she took a bath in the lake to clean off the scent of blood, then shifted effortlessly into her human form and returned to her clothes. She picked up her undies first, and that’s when she knew. Ash had been here. He had touched her clothes. Son of a bitch.

  Chapter 12

  Rosemary

  “Ash, what the fuck?” She was dabbing her wet hair with a towel as she rode home in the back of the town car, with Ash on speakerphone.

  “Babe, I’m sorry. What’s up?” he asked innocently.

  “You don’t even know what you’re sorry for.”

  “And yet I apologize. See, I’m pre-gaming for marriage,” he said, and she could hear the grin in his voice.

  “I told you I didn’t want you seeing the panther until we were married. I didn’t want you changing your mind.”

  “I haven’t changed my mind.”

  “Oh? What did you think?”

  “I think you’re too good for me.”

  She sighed. “See, that’s it. That’s exactly what I was afraid of. You’re going to bolt, aren’t you?”

  The car came to a stop in front of her flat. Ash was there, standing in a parking space just feet away, staring down the town car like a predator.

  Within seconds, Ash opened her car door and dropped his phone, sweeping Rosemary up in his arms and throwing her over his shoulder, caveman style.

  “Ash, why didn’t you listen to me? How am I sup
posed to trust you?” The questions came pouring out as he carried her upstairs.

  “I’m not going anywhere, do you understand that?. But I’m telling you, I’m not the same as you. I’m a big, hairy, rough monster. Do we even fit together? I mean, biologically? Can we even have children? Are you sure you want me? I took one look at you last night and I hardly deserve to be in your presence, let alone mate with you.” He punched in the security code to her flat.

  “You said yourself we were meant to be together,” she said once they were inside.

  “I said you were my mate. But if you don’t want me, I’ll understand. It’s the wolf code.” He set her down on the sectional sofa and covered her legs with a soft throw.

  “Ash, that’s very sweet but this wolf code thing is totally asinine and I will not allow it. And just to get my point across to you, I’m extending your consequences. No pussy until the wedding night. Forget about Lent.”

  Ash shook his head and gritted his teeth as he spoke. “Fine. When is this big damn wedding, anyway?”

  “June 15.”

  “That’s months away! You said a short engagement!”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Darlin’, this is the shortest got-damn engagement of anyone in the DuChamps clan since the cavewomen used a bone needle to hand sew an A-line bodice out of woolly mammoth hide. You should be thanking your lucky stars I’m not meaning June 15 of next year.”

  She could not read his face, but then he said, “Fine,” and set her down. I’ll go along with your ridiculous little games, Rosemary. But in the meantime, you’d better get in the bedroom, bend over that bed and hold on tight.

  She happily sprinted to the bedroom with the wolf not far behind, her body was already aching for his touch.

  Ash