She couldn’t let any of that affect her. When she was a prisoner in Alexander Fucking Grant’s shifter-experimentation lab, the guards had paraded all the women around with no clothes, shocking them with stun weapons and spraying them with fire hoses to force them into obedience.
Touching them whenever they wanted.
She was impervious to all of it.
She had to be, or they would have broken her. She’d seen other shifters break, but not her—never her.
Women are soft. She’d heard that all her life. Women were soft, and soft meant weak, and weak meant you were at the mercy of everyone stronger than you.
Like the female jaguars were at the mercy of the males.
Her mother had suffered from being too soft, and Jasmin knew the only way she would get out was to grow up hard. Her mother’s legacy had been greater than she ever knew, because without that steel inside her, Jasmin would never have survived Grant’s cells.
Jonesing for a brawl now and then was a small price to pay for the kind of strength that meant no matter how deep and dark your prison, a part of you would always be free.
If only she didn’t have to keep proving it.
As the gate opened, she let her jaguar have her skin—tawny fur with clusters of black spots. She didn’t bother to wait for the announcer.
Rules were for pack animals. She was one jaguar, alone.
At the other side of the cage she saw a huge wolf, black as midnight, with just one white paw.
There was crazy in this one’s eyes, too.
Good. She liked the crazy. And no one here had as much crazy as a Bad Blood.
The announcer got on the PA.
“And now for the moment you’ve been waiting for,” he said. “Our star attraction, the Demon Queen of the Amazon, versus the Rabid-Fire Wolf.”
Stupid name, Jasmin thought. But the audience cheered wildly.
Cheer while you can. This isn’t going to last long.
Jasmin let out a snarl, showing her fangs, knowing her eyes were glittering green-gold. In her nostrils was the smell of blood and canine fur, the stink of wolves.
But deeper than that, far down in her brain, was the smell of the turgid jungle air, humid and lush and filled with decay.
She’d always been told the jungle law was eat or be eaten, kill or be killed.
Now she knew better. You could kill all you wanted, but until your enemy submitted, you hadn’t really won.
With a feral snarl, she aimed for the wolf’s huge neck, and attacked.
Chapter 3
Brody should have left when he had the chance. But he’d stuck around to watch Jasmin, the Demon Queen of the Amazon.
She’d won her fight, like she always did. Her jaguar had looked sexy as hell doing it, like she always did. Which reminded him how long it had been since a woman had touched him with love, or even just lust, and that reminded him again how far out of his league this particular woman was. Like it always did.
And Rabid-Fire, aka Justin Dangerfield, had ended the fight by Changing back to human and tapping out.
Like they always did.
She never went for the knockout. He knew wild jaguars sometimes killed their prey by suffocating it. Not that he’d researched jaguars on the internet, or anything. He would have expected she’d use that instinct to her advantage when she could, cutting off her opponent’s air until he passed out.
But she seemed to want them conscious. She needed their submission, like an alpha wolf out of control. Not the kind of woman you wanted to mess with.
Damn, though, there was something about that sinuous, sexy jaguar that made him feel alive, as if he could fix what was broken inside just by being near her. A fire burned in her belly, and he wanted that desperately. Wanted to touch her, wanted to burn.
Yeah. Like that would happen.
He headed for the door. He usually made sure to leave before Bastian and his minions, because they had a habit of waiting in the parking lot and mugging outsiders for their winnings, especially when they were in a bad mood. And Bastian was going to be in a hella bad mood tonight, after that run-in with Jasmin.
Brody had to grin at that, even though it hurt his cut-up face. The sight of her slicing the boobs off Bastian’s tattoo was priceless.
But tonight he’d stayed too long, and they were nowhere in sight, which meant they could be waiting for him. He stepped cautiously out into the frosty December night, head lifted, scenting the air for danger.
He was right about the danger—it just wasn’t aimed at him. From over in a shadowy section of the gravel parking area he heard jeering laughter, and then a woman’s voice in a mix of English and something that sounded Spanish, but wasn’t quite.
She was cursing someone out. In Portuguese.
Fuck. Jasmin.
She can take care of herself, he told himself. She’s undefeated in the cage. Not to mention that video he’d seen on the internet. A normal Brazilian jaguar killing a big-ass crocodile in the wild and dragging it off by the neck to eat it.
A crocodile, for fuck’s sake.
And Jasmin was half again the size of a normal jaguar.
But his legs were already moving, because what kind of an asshole was he if he just drove off and let four guys gang up on somebody who’d already been in a cage fight tonight? And yeah, because she was a woman, and that made his protective instincts kick in.
And maybe a little bit because he wanted to be a hero. Her hero.
By the time he got there, he’d recognized the voices. Bastian, of course, with his sidekicks Jimmy and Trace, and that little weasel Anton who followed them around, licking their cowboy boots and doing their dirty work.
He also heard the sound of fists meeting flesh.
Brody skidded around the tail end of a pickup truck and straight into the fight, punching Jimmy in the kidney. He waited for him to turn around, and then punched him in the face.
“Don’t shift!” he yelled to Jasmin, who was fighting like a trained martial artist, kicking and jabbing in a graceful blur of movement.
That was their MO. They wanted her money, and if she shifted, she’d leave her bag and her clothes on the ground for Anton to go through while the other three bled her.
She flicked a glance at Brody, and then ducked under Bastian’s arm and kicked him in the stomach. Trace knocked her feet out from under her, and Bastian kicked her in the ribs.
Brody’s focus was divided between worrying about Jasmin, and fending off Jimmy. He didn’t sense Anton behind him until the last minute, and he didn’t quite duck in time. The tire iron glanced off his skull and got him in the shoulder.
Sneaky fucker.
He swung around and kicked the tire iron out of Anton’s hands, but the asshole dodged between the cars before Brody could take him down. Jimmy had climbed to his feet and was pummeling him. Brody got him with a sharp kick to the side of the knee, ripping the ligaments and sending him to the ground. That would take some time to heal, and in the meantime he wasn’t going anywhere.
Behind Jimmy, he heard a snarl, and then bones popping as the jaguar ripped out of Jasmin’s clothing. There was a series of oh fucks, and then wolves were busting out all around him.
Brody had no choice. He Changed, just stopping to unzip his jeans and shove them far enough down so his legs wouldn’t get tangled. His t-shirt ripped off his back.
Then it was all teeth and claws and blood and growls, everyone rolling around between the vehicles, the scent of blood and fury permeating the night.
It was all over in less than ten minutes. Bastian and his buddies had counted on an easy three-on-one victory—three on two was too much for their pansy asses. Especially when one of the two was the Demon Queen of the Amazon with murder in her eyes.
Anton screeched up in a jacked-up pickup, and Bastian and Trace dragged Jimmy into the bed. Jasmin leaped at the truck, her claws raking across the fenders and making huge gouges in the shiny paint as they sped off.
When they were
gone, Jasmin stayed crouched, ears pricked, as if listening for another attack. The only sound was a muffled cheer from the barn as another fight ended.
Brody Changed back, his joints and muscles protesting. Fuck, everything hurt. And his life was now a pile of steaming shit with kitty-cat footprints all over it.
He turned on her. “Damn it all, Demazon, I told you not to shift!”
She turned on him with a spitting snarl, and Changed. “Why the fuck not?” she demanded in that throaty, sexy voice. “Why would I fight as a human when my jag can rip them apart?”
“Exactly, sucker,” Brody said. “Go check your bag and your clothes, if you can find them. Wherever you put your winnings, they’re not there now.”
Jasmin emitted a low growl, her eyes slitted, and stalked off between the cars.
Brody started looking around for his clothes.
Sure enough, his stuff had been dragged off and scattered. He found his boots under two different cars, his bag tossed in the mud, and his jeans flung in the back of someone’s pickup.
He went through the pockets, trying to hold onto some hope, but he already knew what he would find. Nothing. Not one damn dollar.
While he was fighting for a woman who probably didn’t even need his help, that little shithead Anton had stolen his money.
“Fuck it all!”
He slammed his hands against the tailgate of the truck, not even caring that he dented it. He dragged his jeans on and stomped his feet into his boots. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
He linked his hands behind his neck, his mind racing. All of it wasted. The blood, the punishing fights, and now it was gone, all the money he counted on to keep him going, and everything was going to come crashing the hell down.
“My whole bag’s gone, money and all. They take yours too?” Jasmin was behind him, wearing her pants and dragging her shirt over her head. She looked massively pissed off.
“Of course they did,” he snarled. “Not the bag, just the damned money. And you’re fucking welcome, by the way.”
“Fuck you,” she snapped back. “Why did you barge in at all?”
Was she kidding? He hadn’t been expecting a parade and a medal, but a little appreciation would be nice. He was bleeding from half a dozen new places, and his right ear felt like it had been ripped half off.
He just shook his head. “Why do you think? Because—”
She didn’t even let him get the words out. “Because I’m a woman. And weak. Women always need a man to protect them.”
Seriously? He was having the don’t-underestimate-women conversation with the Demon Queen? She could probably take him apart without even getting serious about it.
He sighed. “You’re not weak,” he said. “You’re a cage champion, for fuck’s sake. But there were four of them—”
“I could have taken them,” she muttered.
Fine.
“Good for you, Demazon,” he said bitterly. “Next time I’ll leave you to it. I might even say something nice at your funeral.”
He shouldered his bag. “So unless you know where I can get another seven hundred cash by Sunday night, I’m just gonna take my shredded ego and my broke-ass self and go home. Have a nice life.”
He was walking away when he heard her voice behind him. “What happens Sunday night?”
He stopped, but he didn’t turn around. “None of your damned business. But I’ll give you a heads-up. It won’t be pretty.”
Silence. He started walking again.
“You need to get that ear stitched up before it starts to heal, or it won’t reattach. Want me to do it?”
He stopped and touched his right ear, which burned like fire. Fucking Bastian really had torn it half off, and she was right—shifter healing was awesome, but his ear couldn’t knit together flapping around like that. And by the time he got one of the Nashville healers to look at it, the edges would have healed over and it would be too late.
Not to mention having to explain what happened to him.
He turned around. “Unless you carry a med kit in your pocket, Demazon, I think I’m shit out of luck.”
She just rolled her eyes and walked over to an old beater truck parked a few spaces away. She pulled open the passenger door and dragged a battered tackle box from behind the seat.
“Sit,” she said, jerking her head at the truck seat.
Dammit. With a sigh, Brody walked over and parked his butt on the edge of the seat, legs splayed out into the parking lot with his bag between them. Jasmin was already rooting through the box, which did in fact look like a full med kit.
“You carry that everywhere?” he asked.
“I’m Bad Blood,” Jasmin said absently, tearing the wrapper off a gauze pad and soaking it with disinfectant. “We don’t have a terrifyingly over-decorated mansion and our own clinic. We have six fucked-up brawlers, four of us dominant, and one a newbie with a hair trigger. We bleed each other a lot.”
She started wiping the blood off his ear with the gauze. He flinched away. “Shit on a stick!” he ground out. Whatever she put on it stung like a mother.
“Sheesh,” she said. “White Tornado, the mighty cage fighter. Don’t be a—” She grabbed the back of his neck and held his head still. “—baby,” she finished.
She dabbed at his ear, careful not to pull on the torn flesh. Her hands were strong, but her touch was surprisingly gentle. He felt warmth spreading through him, and the pain seemed to lessen.
“I thought you were going to say ‘don’t be a pussy,’” he said, giving in to the urge to mess with her.
The illumination from the dome light was pretty dim, but he could have sworn he saw the faintest smile touch the corner of her mouth.
She guided his hand to the gauze and had him hold it around the wound while she threaded sutures onto a surgical needle. “If only you were,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t be such a fucking crybaby.”
She moved his hand with the gauze back down to his lap, and he felt her line up the pieces of his torn ear. “You know what they say,” she added. “Balls are fragile. Pussies can take a pounding and come back for more. So try to be a pussy, okay?”
He snorted, but he held still, clenching the bloody gauze in his fist while she sewed up his ear. He was almost painfully aware of how close she was, the warmth of her taut muscular body, the wild musky scent of her, overlaid with blood and sweat.
And her hands, gentle and sure, her whole attention on getting the stitches just so.
“There,” she said, leaning down and biting off the thread. He felt an overwhelming desire to turn his head and capture her lips, to see if she tasted as sweet and wild as she smelled.
Then she stood up and the moment was gone, but he still felt an uncertain ache in the center of his chest. Like he’d lost something important.
She stood back and looked at him. “A day or so, and you’ll be as pretty as ever.”
Did she really think he was good-looking? Nah, not with that scar on his face. It was just something to say.
“That’s not saying much,” he grunted. He stood up. That place in the middle of his chest still ached, worse than the rest of his wounds because it felt so empty. Lonely.
She was still looking up at him, her eyes uncertain.
Ah, hell. His whole life was going to be destroyed anyway. Might as well go out with a bang.
He slid his hand around the back of her neck, and leaned down to taste her lips.
Wildness rose in him when they touched hers, and he angled his head to taste her better, kiss her more deeply. Heat rushed through him, and he felt that fire he’d been longing for.
It was so hard to pull away, but this wasn’t something that could ever really happen. He brushed her lips once more and pulled back, resting his forehead on hers. “Thanks for fixing me up,” he said softly. “Sorry I yelled at you about the money.”
He shouldered his bag and walked away, not looking back. He wanted to remember that moment, the way it felt. And if she was going t
o rip his throat out for touching her, he didn’t want to see it coming.
But when he got to his car and walked around to open the driver’s door, she was still standing there silhouetted by the dome light of her truck, staring after him, her eyes glowing green in the dark.
Chapter 4
Jasmin woke up the next morning still thinking about the White Tornado. Brody Jameson.
Why the fuck had he kissed her?
Before, he was nothing to her. Less than nothing. An enemy, in or out of the cage. A Nashville wolf.
But dammit, now she wanted to know things about him. Why he fought, if it didn’t make him feel better. Why he looked so sad and defeated, even when he won.
Why losing the money was so devastating to him. What kind of trouble he was in.
Why a single kiss filled her with wild heat, and made her want to wrap her legs around that taut waist and feel him thrust inside her…
Oh, no. A big ‘hell no.’ No way was she messing with a Nashville wolf.
Even though Bastian had called him a traitor, which meant he couldn’t be all bad, right? Because the Nashville pack were professional-level douches. So a traitor to the pack might even be a decent guy.
She wondered what he’d done to make them hate him. She wondered if there was any way she could help him get his money back, and get revenge on those thieving assholes who’d stolen from them both.
No. Not wondering. Not caring about the wolf. His problems were not her problems, just because he’d jumped into that fight thinking she needed him, or some shit.
She did not need an outcast wolf. What she needed was coffee, so she could think straight and mornings didn’t suck so much.
She stretched all four legs and Changed out of jaguar form. She couldn’t sleep as a human—not since they’d escaped from Alexander Grant’s cells. That’s why she still lived in a converted shed while everyone else had trailers, or lived in the main cabin.
Her cat needed a Spartan space, simple and clear and uncluttered, and open to the outside. All she had was a futon in the corner, which worked for sitting or sleeping. A couple of side tables, and a shelf on the wall for her books. A small dresser and a few hooks for her clothes.
Bad Blood Wolf (Bad Blood Shifters Book 2) Page 2
