Luring the Vagrant's Heart [Leopards of Leopold 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)
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Leopards of Leopold 1
Luring the Vagrant’s Heart
Casey Hart and Desmond James are desperate cats on the prowl. The death of their old king and lover didn’t just fracture both their hearts, but also their pard. Leopard pards don’t function like wolf packs. The king, queen and their consort operate as a triumvirate. The arrival of Lars Marsden, a powerful, inked and biker rogue panther is just the answer to their prayers.
A road vagrant who refuses to be tamed, Lars wants nothing to do with the alluring leopard queen and her cunning consort. They don’t just want to seat him on an empty throne, they’re also dead set on conquering his heart. Cas and Des’s confidence in him stumps Lars, and he’s petrified of failing them. Can a solitary cat shoulder the responsibilities of leadership, and make room in his heart not just for two, but an entire pard?
Genre: Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Paranormal, Shape-shifter
Length: 20,341 words
LURING THE VAGRANT'S HEART
Leopards of Leopold 1
Fel Fern
MENAGE AMOUR
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage Amour
LURING THE VAGRANT'S HEART
Copyright © 2014 by Fel Fern
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63258-581-3
First E-book Publication: December 2014
Cover design by Harris Channing
All art and logo copyright © 2014 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
Letter to Readers
Dear Readers,
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DEDICATION
To Siren Publishing, for giving my new leopard shifter series a home. To readers, I hope you enjoy reading this book as much I loved writing it.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
About the Author
LURING THE VAGRANT'S HEART
Leopards of Leopold 1
FEL FERN
Copyright © 2014
Prologue
The winds of change blew across the gathered mourners clustered around the simple oak casket. Pregnant silence followed, as they watched the casket being lowered to the ground. The wind ruffled black coats, black trousers and black dresses. The wind brought with it a ripple of unease, and everyone there felt it.
The wind didn’t taste right. It tasted tainted, and had an ominous air about it.
Aside from the oak casket, five other caskets were lowered earlier. They now lay side-by-side in a straight line. Flowers lay at the foot of each gravestone in lurid colors, as if mocking the living for trying to give meaning to the meaningless deaths.
A woman’s shrill cries went on unattended, and a man stood to one side, his face hooded with grief. Another was still where they left him, sitting on his knees in front of the tombstone of his dead mate, unable to see, feel or hear anyone around him.
Grief heavily weighed down in Casey Hart’s stomach. Unlike the rest of the mourners, unlike the rest of the leopards, she couldn’t shed her tears so openly. She was their leopard queen, a third of the heart that ruled their pack.
Des clasped her hands firmly in his in a nearly bruising grip, but she was thankful for the uncommon roughness. Pain was the only thing keeping her tethered to reality, even to the reality that their leopard king was dead.
“Hush, baby. It’s going to be all right,” Des whispered to her ear.
His words provided her no comfort. She wanted to scream at him, wanted to rake her claws against him, but where would that lead?
It would only affirm the eventual truth they were terrified to face. Besides, she couldn’t be needlessly cruel to him. Des wasn’t just any other leopard. Gerald had been king and lover to them both. Most feline pards functioned as a triumvirate, with the king at the top and his queen and consort beneath him.
At the death of their leader and their most powerful cats, their pard, the Leopold Pard, was continually being pulled at the seams. She could almost see the pard magic, the threads holding their pard together being stretched tight, so tight it could break. First, one cat would leave, then another and another.
Cas wasn’t sure she and Des could keep their pard intact long enough to find a new ruler.
Their loyalty would hold them for a while, but fear of the unknown would cause them to drift. Gerald’s death, as well as the death of their best enforcers, wasn’t just needlessly cruel or random. Some powerful and sinister force wanted their pard fractured.
She looked over at her cats there, and her gaze rested on one muscled, red-haired enforcer. Noticing she was looking at him, Trig licked his lips and Cas shivered for some unexplainable reason. Even now, she wasn’t sure if it was her own pard she had to be worried out, or other nameless outsiders.
; “Cas?” Des asked, lifting her chin so she looked back at him.
“Yes, it’s going to be fine,” Cas murmured.
Des blinked, surprised by the newfound iron in her voice.
“How are you so certain?” His voice was a mere whisper.
They decided it was best their pard didn’t need to know they were uncertain and as lost as the rest of them.
“Because Gerald chose both of us. He trusted us to keep the pard intact and safe, even if he’s gone.” Cas didn’t believe the words herself, didn’t believe she was strong enough, but Des didn’t need to know that.
Perhaps if she convinced herself and Des long enough, they’d begin to take the lie for the truth, and eventually be able to draw strength from the deception.
Cas stood on tiptoe. She brushed away the strands of dark blond hair that fallen across Des’s handsome face. Gazing into his startled green eyes, she let him see the forced determination in her own dark eyes, and then kissed him.
The kiss began awkward. There was no helping it. They hadn’t known each other long. Gerald was the one that brought Des home a few months ago. Cas still couldn’t forget the delight in Gerald’s eyes when he told her he had finally found their third.
Des didn’t need to stay, but he did, and Cas was grateful for that. The kiss began awkward, but it soon smoldered into familiar lust. Sucking on Des’s bottom lip, their tongues met and tangled.
Cas’s grieving leopard stirred from its metaphysical cage, feline eyes gazing into the soul of her third. Both woman and beast still grieved the empty space where their dominant king had been, but they couldn’t and didn’t lose hope. Des’s own cat was reflected in his eyes and his steady gaze calmed her.
The faltering magic running through their entire pard weakly thrummed, lifting some of the dejected spirits of some of the cats. Smiles and nods were exchanged in their direction, but Cas noted how delicately fragile they were. Burrowing her head against Des’ chest, she closed her eyes painfully.
“That’s enough crying, my queen,” Des murmured against her ear, beginning to stroke her hair.
Cas could keenly feel the empty space where Gerald would’ve stood. Her two men would often hold her like this, with Des looking down at her, smiling, and Gerald’s firm, solid body at her back. The thought nearly made her burst into tears, but she vehemently buried her grief inside her.
She could dig out the grief another time, when she was alone and no one was watching her.
“You’re right,” Cas said, brushing the tears gathering in her eyes.
“Gerald would’ve tied you down to his favorite spanking bench and smacked your wriggling ass silly,” Des said against her ear.
A familiar ache of desire speared through her body and swiftly moved down her loins, making her pussy twitch. Des just sometimes knew the right things to say. A difficult and uphill task lay ahead of them, one she wasn’t even sure she could manage. Des was with her, at least, and that made it a little easier.
“Yes, yes he would.” Cas found she could breathe easier now. “Thank you for deciding to stay.”
“Leopold City is now my home, and I promised Gerald I’d keep you safe.” Des gave her a heartbreakingly handsome smile. “We’ll find a new king. It’ll be hard as hell, but we have to make sure he’s the right one.”
Chapter One
From the moment the lights dimmed, the racy music boomed, and the woman on stage began to dance, Lars Marsden was captivated. Knocking back his third bottle of beer for the evening, his eyes devoured every inch of the tiny redhead.
He feasted on her perfect, round breasts, on the leather corset that did little to hide her sensuous curves, and her shapely legs. Most of all, Lars was captivated by her face. Her dark eyes were lost to the dance and the sway of the music, giving nothing away but her passion. Those eyes didn’t belong to a stripper dancing to earn some extra cash. They were the eyes of a genuine dancer.
Lars’ cock stirred inside his battered jeans. Looking at the other tables nearby, he could tell the stripper had successfully stirred the other men’s libido. The stripper’s stage name was Dazzle, but Lars had no interest in knowing her stage name. What he wanted was to form the syllables of her real name on his lips.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?” said a quiet voice.
Lars didn’t hear or notice the man who joined him at his table. Pretty odd, given that shifters, especially leopard shifters, were sensitive to even the tiniest movement. Some part of him, the vagrant road-nomad part of him, told him he should be a little bit worried about this intrusion. Lars silenced the voice. He wanted to watch the dance and the woman.
“Fucking shut up and watch,” Lars said to his unwanted company with sheer annoyance.
That was just how good the damn stripper was, able to blow both his concentration and his guard. His skin prickled slightly, but he ignored it again. There was just something away about the woman on stage. Each of her movements seemed deliberate and hungry, punctuated by an eerie grace Lars would’ve almost called inhuman.
Before the song completely faded away, the instantaneous applause and hoots came. Lars didn’t fail to notice how the applause was louder compared to the others.
“Damn,” Lars muttered, leaning back against his chair to nurse his beer.
“Do you want to meet her?” came the stranger’s voice. “I can take you to her.”
Lars had nearly forgot about him. Narrowing his eyes, Lars swiveled his head to study the man. Years alone on the road trained him to be observant. He’d had his share of fights and enemies. Most humans and shifters distrusted lone bikers and it always paid to be cautious.
His prickling skin was a warning from the bestial half lurking inside his metaphysical soul. The black leopard wasn’t bearing its canines or snarling, though. Instead, the cat’s jet-green eyes stared back at the stranger evenly. The speaker had a tall, slender but compact build. For some reason, Lars knew if he lifted up his shirt, he’d find his chest, stomach and abdomen padded with firm muscles.
Curious and intelligent green eyes stared back at him from a mess of black hair and a lean, almost hungry face. There was something about that face that made Lars look longer.
Most men would flinch from the gaze of an enormous, inked shifter biker, but not this man. He looked back unblinkingly at Lars, a secret smile on his lips. Soft, tasty lips. The right kind of lips, Lars realized, he’d like to taste and thrust his tongue into.
Desire coiled inside Lars’s belly. If his cock came awake at the sight of the dancer, it was definitely alive now and bulging in his strained jeans. Suspicion made him stay his hand from simply dragging the man up, finding a shadowed corner, and wiping the damn grin off his face.
“Who the fuck are you, her pimp?” Lars asked bluntly.
Anger briefly clouded the other man’s eyes, telling Lars a number of things. There was also something about the way his face grew hard and defensive. The woman was certainly something to him, but she wasn’t his whore. She was something quite special to him.
Anger cleared and the man’s face smoothened again, but his voice still came out tight. “I don’t usually make this offer to everyone, because I don’t usually care to share her.”
While Lars couldn’t sense any bad intention coming from him, and he did clearly love his woman, he couldn’t fathom why the hell he’d ask a stranger something like that.
“Oh yeah? Then why make it to me in the first place?”
“Because you’re the right one, and we know it,” the man explained.
Lars raised one eyebrow. “We?”
“Cas and me. Look, I’m only asking you to come talk with us. If you like what you hear, stay. If don’t, leave. No harm done.” The man held out his hand and Lars distrustfully shook it. “I’m Desmond James. You can call me Des. I’ll introduce you to Casey.”
“Lars,” he answered, not providing anything else, but Des didn’t push or ask. “That’s the stripper’s real name, then? Casey?”
Des o
nly nodded.
“What’s she to you? Is she your wife, and this is some kinky fetish for you two, propositioning a biker?” Lars had to ask.
Des regarded him for a bit, his face uncommonly serious and intense, as if he was given a very hard question. Just watching the other man think made Lars feel like grabbing a fistful of the other man’s hair and jerk Des’s to his mouth for a taste.
“She’s my life,” Des answered him finally.
The confident and quiet way the other man said those words unwillingly coaxed something inside Lars. It felt like a damn fist just created a hole in the dam where he kept years of loneliness and yearning at bay.
Fuck. He really means it. He must really love his woman. Knowing that’s enough for me to fucking say yes.
“Better be going, then. We don’t have all night and I’ll be leaving first thing tomorrow.”
“Follow me, please.”
Despite his better judgment, Lars agreed, and followed the man past the tables into the private section of the club. His unease grew as they wove thorough a series of corridors and past dressing rooms.
The entire setup smelled and felt like a trap, although his leopard disdainfully shook its head and assured him it wasn’t. He trusted the beast with his life, and more than often trusted it saved his life, but damn, this entire thing felt dodgy.
Chapter Two
When Des opened the door to the dressing room, Lars was ready to come up with an excuse and bolt. He was certain the couple had no suspicious motives other than fulfilling their sexual fantasy of having a threesome, but he kept to his rule of avoiding complications.