by Danica Avet
He planned to teach little Miss Colette Robicheaux a lesson. If he decided he wanted her, she should accept that as gospel. He was well aware how arrogant the thought seemed, but he didn’t retract it. He was practically a connoisseur of women, yet she thought he was, what? Playing with her? Humoring her? If she only knew. When it came to fucking, he didn’t play.
His upper lip curled over his fangs at the thought. He was going to spank her cute little ass bright pink for that. The fire in his veins flared to a scorching inferno as he followed his instincts, searching for her. He’d driven as far as the first bridge leading to Bayou Ange before shifting and taking to his paws for the rest of the trip. He didn’t want the entire community to know there was a predator among the sheep.
Not yet at least.
The scent of the woods here was of natural animals, a complete change from what he was used to living among so many shifters. Scenting a fellow shifter was part of life, allowing them to recognize the animal lurking beneath the human skin, but here there was none of that. Just the soothing scent of earth and stagnant water mingled with abundant vegetation and the animals that lived here. It was peaceful and he would have lingered if he hadn’t had a greater mission.
The tiger’s eyes narrowed against the darkness as he crept closer and closer to Bayou Ange. Following the directions he’d gotten from Daisy, he knew he was close, but even if he hadn’t known, he would have by the smells, the scent of food cooking and the animal musk of dogs. Full dogs too, not wolf shifter assholes like the wildlife agent who’d arrived in Maison Rouge the day before.
He snorted in disgust. It never failed to amaze him how, when a new male arrived in the area, the single females suddenly swarmed as though they’d never seen one before. Like the human he had his sights on. If Colette had looked at that wolf any longer, Zach would be sitting in jail right now for ripping the fucker a new asshole.
He rumbled in displeasure and paused to test the wind. He was downwind of the dogs and the community that was backlit against the shadowy night. He didn’t see anything special, nothing that suggested this was a community of crazy people. The houses sat on nine-foot pillars, which would protect them in case the bayou flooded, but it was the smaller home set away from the other houses that caught his attention. The scent emanating from it belonged to Colette while the truck parked beneath the house looked to be the same make and model she’d driven earlier that afternoon. Bingo. If he had been in his human form, his smile would’ve made Colette’s knees knock together with nervousness even as it made her pussy cream.
He sneaked closer, staying downwind of the hounds, and rounded Colette’s truck, intent on reaching the stairs leading to the house level when he came face-to-face with a wolf. He and the canine slid to a stop, staring at each other with growing awareness and, on Zach’s side, mounting possessiveness. There was no mistaking the frigid blue eyes of the big wolf, or his pretty red coat. The tiger’s lip curled in disgust, a dangerous growl rumbling in his chest.
The wolf, the game warden, had the nerve to return Zach’s warning growl as though he had every right to be here at Colette’s house. The sound caused the tiger’s hackles to rise and his body to tense. It, along with Zach, wasn’t happy to have this ball-licking, tail-chasing canine at his female’s house. The wolf didn’t belong here, sniffing around Colette, and the tiger would make damn sure the dog knew he wasn’t welcome.
* * * * *
Colette stepped out of the shower, shivering at the cooler air in the bathroom and reached for her towel, her hands shaky. Rivulets of water streamed over skin gone rosy from a combination of scalding-hot water and a powerful orgasm aided by her detachable showerhead. Her heart slammed against her rib cage as she dried herself, patting at her sensitive skin rather than rubbing briskly the way she normally did. God, she had to stop thinking about Zach or she’d never leave her house. This intense and insane hunger she had for him was not helping her.
She wrapped the towel around her torso, tucking the edge under her arm to hold it in place while she finished the rest of her nightly ablutions. After piling her hair up on the top of her head, she brushed her teeth. Once done, she opened the container of very expensive moisturizer her cousin Kanda had recommended. It would probably surprise the people of Pointe-Aux-Chat to know just how much time she spent moisturizing her skin. With as much time as she spent outside in the elements, she needed as much moisture as she could slap on her face. The constant humidity in the area helped a lot, but it only did so much.
Once she finished basting herself with the moisturizer and then her favorite lotion, she grabbed her brush and strolled out of the bathroom and down the hallway. The house was silent. A welcome change from the way it’d nearly rocked off its pilings earlier. Colette bit back a groan as she flopped on her sofa to brush her hair. Her dad and uncles had called a powwow at her place to discuss the game warden and the baker. She smirked. It sounded like some kind of weird book title, but her smile soon faded because both men were bad news. Just in very different ways.
She pushed thoughts of Zach from her mind, concentrating on a stubborn tangle as she pondered the newest trouble in Pointe-Aux-Chat Parish. The game warden was the bigger threat. There had been pointed interest in the way he watched her and her family, a calculating speculation in his gaze that had nothing to do with suspicions of illegal hunting. With the Schumacher brothers at his side, it just gave her the frissons. And not the kind of frissons she felt when she thought of a certain sexy tiger shifter.
“Dammit.”
She bounded off the sofa, the brush falling to the floor as she hurried to her eat-in kitchen and the pitcher of ice-cold water she kept in her fridge. Her water bill was going to be outrageous this month from the number of hot, and cold, showers she’d taken and the gallons and gallons of cold water she’d consumed in the hopes it would douse the fire in her blood. It never worked. She suspected the only thing that would cool her off would be having a certain man between her thighs. Pounding away at her with that big dick. Her pussy gave a slow, hard clench at the thought. It didn’t matter what she did, or didn’t do, her mind always circled back to Zach and how he made her feel.
Colette hefted the pitcher out of the fridge with a groan. She should pour it over her head and be done with it. A couple of droplets hit the tops of her feet and she shivered, some of the desire fading. No, that was okay. She wasn’t couillon enough to douse herself with ice like one of those polar bear club swimmers. She reached for one of her insulated mugs when she heard a low snarl.
The heat between her legs was forgotten at the dangerous threat in the sound. She carefully placed the pitcher on the counter and crept across the house to the front door, not wanting to alert the animal making all the noise. It wouldn’t be the first time a cougar had found its way to her house, or one of the natural black bears that roamed the woods and swamps, and come looking for something to eat. But it didn’t mean she wanted any of them rooting through her trash, tearing shit up.
Colette grabbed the BB gun she kept next to the door. She had no intention of killing anything that might be scavenging for food, but she sure as hell could make its ass hurt. She opened the door, giving silent thanks to her brother Anton who was nearly obsessive-compulsive when it came to squeaking doors. He’d gone after every hinge in her house earlier that evening with a can of lubricant, spraying and spraying until they all opened without a sound. She did a quick check left and right to make sure the animal wasn’t on her porch. As she suspected, it was all clear.
Carefully, using the stealth she’d honed after years of hunting, she eased down the first few steps leading to her carport. The snarling was much clearer now, but as she crept down the stairs, BB gun at the ready, she realized it wasn’t one animal down there, but at least two. Her heart pounded and her palms grew damp as she prayed two bears weren’t about to start fighting. That would require more than the BB gun.
She approached the carport level of her house and her mouth dried. The snarls
were interspersed with growls and what sounded like scrambling claws. Fuck, they were fighting. She paused a moment, trying to decide if she should just head back up and get a bigger gun. Then something reddish brown rolled across her line of sight, appearing out from beneath the house and crossing the ground-level landing to her stairs. A wolf. Not indigenous to the area. They had coyotes and sometimes a stray red wolf would pass through, but both canines were half the size of the big fucker she’d just seen.
And that meant only one thing. It was a shifter.
She shook her head, confusion taking over some of the fear. What the hell was a wolf shifter doing at her house and what was it fighting? Then she saw a familiar striped body charge after the wolf. She lowered the gun, shock and anxiety swirling inside her. The two shifters disappeared under the house again, a massive ball of fangs, claws and fur. Whatever they were fighting over, it looked as though they had every intention of killing each other.
She eased down one more step only to see the wolf latch on to Zach’s throat, his teeth sinking deep. Her breath caught. They were trying to kill each other. Colette forgot everything but the desperately stupid crush she had for Zach. It didn’t matter that he’d only been amusing himself at her expense, or that her daddy would root for the wolf to finish the tiger off, or that he was being attacked by a strange shifter. It only mattered that she put a stop to it somehow.
She lifted the BB gun and aimed, but they were moving too fast for her to get a good bead on the wolf. She couldn’t kill him and not just because her BB gun wouldn’t do any good. Although the wolf was hurting Zach, he was still human. Sort of.
“Shit,” she whispered, the sound not breaking into the intense battle going on beneath her house.
The two males—she could tell that much when the wolf flipped over to go after Zach again—rolled right into her truck, which groaned beneath their combined weight. She winced. But before she could shout to get their attention, they rolled in the opposite direction and slammed into one of the beams supporting her house, making the entire structure shudder. Colette’s eyes widened as she stared at the beam that now listed to the side. They were going to destroy her damn house.
Outrage replaced some of her fear. It was fine for him and whomever the damn wolf was to have some kind of pissy shifter fight under her house. What did they care if they were destroying everything she worked hard for? They’d trot back to Maison Rouge and leave her with a disaster. The more she watched them rolling around, hitting her truck, bumping into her boat trailer and repeatedly wrapping each other around the pilings of her home, the angrier Colette grew. But it wasn’t until they knocked over her crab traps, crushing the fragile wire beneath their heavy asses that she finally had enough.
She stomped back upstairs, muttering under her breath, no longer caring if they heard her or not. She almost hoped they did hear her, because then they’d know they were in deep shit.
“Goddamn arrogant shifter men,” she mumbled to herself as she stormed into her house.
Her eyes shot around the somewhat clean space, looking for something, anything to teach them a lesson. She was so tired of shifter men thinking because they were “alphas” they could just trot right over everyone, shifter and human. Smug bastards.
She could get a shotgun and scare the hell out of them, but she didn’t want to alert her family about their unexpected visitors. For whatever reason, she wanted to keep Zach’s appearance beneath her house a secret and it had nothing to do with the curl of arousal that returned, stronger than ever now that she knew he was here.
The house shook again and she became a little more desperate to find something that would stop the fight. Then the pitcher of ice-cold water snagged her attention.
Colette didn’t need a mirror to know her grin was evil because she could feel it. It was full of an unholy glee that would’ve made her cousin, and Our Lady of Angels’ Father François make the sign of the cross and call for an exorcism. The Bayou Ange church might not be as big and fancy as St. Patrick’s in Maison Rouge, but her cousin took his duty to his congregation, and family, seriously. She marched across her house and snagged the sweating pitcher. It worked to break up fights between domesticated cats and dogs, didn’t it? The ice cubes she’d thrown in before her shower clinked softly against the sides of the pitcher as she carried it across her kitchen and out of her house.
Stomping down the steps to the halfway mark, she looked over the shifters still fighting and snarling and throwing fur all over her carport. They were both bleeding, but the more she studied them, the more she realized the wounds were superficial, as though they didn’t want to hurt each other too much. Her blood pressure shot through the roof. While they didn’t seem to want to kill each other, they didn’t seem to mind destroying the things she used to make her living. The crab traps were flattened mounds of wire and Styrofoam, her battered truck was more battered than before and she was almost positive the piling holding the very center of her house was listing even more than it had a few minutes before.
The fuckers.
Colette hefted her pitcher and waited for the perfect moment. Condensation from the ice melting in the sticky heat dribbled over her fingers to splatter on the wooden steps beneath her feet. But still she waited, willing the idiots to roll in her direction.
As though they heard her, Zach did a kick with his hind legs she’d seen housecats do, sending the strange wolf hurtling in her direction. Luckily for her, and them, the canine caught himself before he hit the wooden steps. He hopped to his feet and waited for the tiger to come to him, almost as though he was taunting the cat. Zach, of course, answered with a muted snarl. The minute the two males tangled up together right beneath her, Colette leaned over the railing and emptied the bracingly cold water over both of their hot heads.
* * * * *
Really, he shouldn’t have been enjoying himself so much, but it’d been a while since Zach had a fight as perfectly balanced as this one. While he’d never go so far as to say the wolf was a tough opponent, he would admit that the canine didn’t give up. He outweighed the wolf by at least a hundred pounds, but no matter how many times he swatted the wolf away, the canine would bounce right back to his feet and come back for more. It was as though he had some stake in the outcome, as though this fight was for a mate. The thought wiped out any feelings of camaraderie he might have felt for the wolf. The ball-licking bastard could just forget about going near Colette.
He had no idea how long they fought, only that once in a while he caught the strong, drugging scent of Colette, which only fired his blood even more, fueling his strength when he might have tired. This fight, it was for her. She’d probably never know the lengths he’d go to protect her, to make her safe and to mark her as his. And that was fine with him. The fight didn’t matter. It was a small step in the direction his tiger demanded he go and Zach was damn tired of fighting the cat.
Pinned under the wolf for a moment, he kicked out at his opponent’s belly, flinging him across the carport. Unfortunately, the bastard still didn’t give up, scrambling back to his feet. Zach had to admire the wolf’s spunk. There weren’t many who’d go up against him in his cat form and keep bouncing back like a Weeble. But that didn’t mean he would just let the wolf taunt him, the way it was doing now. Zach read it in the cold, blue eyes, the clear, smug fuck-you attitude that had kept this fight going longer than normal.
He was tired of it. Tired of the fight, tired of this wolf thinking he had some kind of right to be here and he was damn tired of being down here when the luscious woman he smelled was upstairs. He hadn’t come here for this. He’d come here to somehow get that woman in bed, not play with wolves. It was time to end this. Now.
Zach launched himself at the wolf, covering the fifteen feet between them in two bounding leaps. The canine must have realized this was different because when they clashed, there was a new strength in the animal. They wrapped up in each other, claws digging into fur and skin, fangs extended, muscles straining for sup
remacy. Battle heat and bloodlust filled the air around them. Someone was going home hu—
Ice-cold water rained down on both of them. The shock of the freezing water, complete with chunks of solid, square cubes, slapping him in the face made him let out a ridiculous squeak. He would have been embarrassed by the sound except the wolf yipped like a puppy spanked with a newspaper. Just like that, the fight was over. He and the wolf separated, shaking and flinging the icy water from their fur. If he had been in his human form, goose bumps would have sprang up all over his body. It was like jumping into a cold shower after being in the sun all day. Sudden, painful and unwelcome.
“Now that I have your attention, do you mind getting the fuck off my property before I call the police? Or my family?”
The sweet, husky voice shouldn’t have surprised him. He’d known she was crazy, but now he had proof. She’d stood up to him in the swamp last week and marched through a crowd of predatory shifters as though they were sheep in a petting zoo. But looking up to see Colette Robicheaux standing on the stairs above them in nothing but a towel, a towel that did nothing to hide her lush, pink charms from him since she was above him, left him wondering if crazy wasn’t a good thing after all. Because she didn’t seem to realize, or care, that she was flashing him and the wolf, that they could see straight up the towel to the lush center of her body.
The wolf. Zach shook off his pussy stupor and rounded on the wolf still peering at the delicate petals of Colette’s sex. The cold water had stopped the bloodlust, but it did nothing for the possessive jealousy that raged through Zach. He slammed one massive paw across the wolf’s head, spinning the canine around a hundred and eighty degrees. That was fine with him because it meant he was no longer looking at Colette.
