Big Bad Bite

by Lane, Jessie

  Big Bad Bite

  Jessie Lane

  Dedication

  From Crystal: To my grumpy grizzly. Your love, support, donation to our kids DNA, and general Alpha overbearing you-will-get-this-shit-done attitude is the thing that keeps me getting up every day with a full heart, and going to bed knowing that I am absolutely blessed.

  Thank you my love.

  From Melissa: To my other half, my hubby. Your humor in everything you see, your impeccable timing with those stop-what-you’re-doing one-liners that keep me laughing all day long. Here’s to you for always telling me that I can do whatever I want and not let anyone or anything stop me.

  “I shall call him Squishy, and he shall be mine. And he shall be my Squishy.”

  Dory from Finding Nemo.

  Thanks babe! Love You!

  Acknowledgements

  We are so blessed to be surrounded by so many who wish to see us, and this book, succeed. So here’s a shout out to just a few of those individuals, to let you know how much we appreciate your love, help, and support.

  To our editor, Jackie McPherson, you will always be The Queen of Awesome to us! We’re absolutely sure that one day you’ll be one of the most famous editors on the planet. Thank you for your hard work, dedication, and extreme patience for our goofiness.

  To the ever-cool Crystal at Reading Between the Wines, you rock sister! (No really you do!)Your input was a lifesaver. To the rest of our beta readers, our Moms (Hi Momma!), Samantha, and Fiona…lots of love ladies! Thank you for tagging along with us on this occasionally stressful, but ultimately very cool ride in life.

  To the reviewers we respect, such as Laura at Little Read Riding Hood and many others, who have spread the word in their blogs about the good vibes they have about our books, we adore you! Seriously, reviewers make the world go round.

  Lastly, to our readers, thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting us! You are amazing. We wouldn’t be here without you.

  Big Bad Bite

  Copyright © 2013 by Jessie Lane

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Jessie Lane, except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.

  Published by Jessie Lane

  Cover Art by Jessie Lane

  Edited by Jackie McPherson and Crystal Folk

  ISBN: 9781301993611

  Big Bad Bite is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Big Bad Bite

  Big Bad Bite Series, Book 1

  Jessie Lane

  Published by Jessie Lane at Smashwords

  Copyright © 2013 by Jessie Lane

  Edited by Jackie McPherson and Crystal Folk

  Cover Art by Jessie Lane

  ISBN: 9781301993611

  If you have purchased a copy of this eBook from Smashwords or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book. This purchase allows you one legal copy for your own personal reading enjoyment on your personal computer or device. You do not have the rights to resell, distribute, print, or transfer this book, in whole or in part, to anyone, in any format, via methods either currently known or yet to be invented, or upload to a file sharing peer to peer program. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Such action is illegal and in violation of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. If you no longer want this book, you may not give your copy to someone else. Delete it from your computer. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Big Bad Bite

  Who said the wolf was what you had to worry about.

  Welcome to the real world.

  Chapter One

  Sweaty gym socks. That’s what the inside of the Wilmington Police Department’s SWAT van smelled like. Which in a word was… nasty. Tamping down on the overwhelming urge to reach over and grab the offending socks so that she could shove them down the owner’s mouth before giving him a stern warning to wash them, was downright hard. But somehow, Jenna O’Conner managed to keep herself in check. Because overpowering a two hundred plus gym jock when you were a woman of only five feet four inches who looked as if you might weigh a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet, would be hard to explain. So sometimes it seriously sucked to be her.

  Sitting on the steel bench seats running the length of the black van with bulletproof dark tinted windows, she did her best to ignore the eyes that were staring at her. Being the new girl on a testosterone overloaded team was more than awkward. It was a pain in the ass, but she couldn’t complain because it came with her dream job. Sandwiched in between two guys on her left, another guy on her right, and four sitting across from her made it feel as if she was drowning in caveman stupidity.

  Jenna could deal with their basic Neanderthal urges of women being inferior, but she utterly hated being stared at. It’s annoying, and not to mention rude. It made her hand down right twitchy to punch someone. Didn’t their moms teach them some manners? She could keep calm though. They were just curious if the new girl on the force could hang with the big bad asses they all thought they were. Little did they know that this little woman could kick every single one of their mammoth muscled butts. That was part of her little secret though.

  Being a woman who is also a dedicated cop was sometimes hard. People tended to assume that you’re going to be the weak link in the chain. Not strong enough. Not fast enough. Too compassionate. None of that applied to Jenna. But these guys didn’t know that yet. Perhaps she couldn’t show them that she was capable of bench pressing a hell of a lot more than all of them, combined, but she had no qualms about using some of her abilities to outrun them if the need arose. And she sure as hell wasn’t known back in her old department for compassion. Heck, if she hadn’t been related to the Police Chief back home, then Jenna would have been arrested or fired for her behavior against a couple of drunk abusive backwoods bums.

  None of that here though. She had to keep her temper in check. Keep her secrets safe. Not to mention that she was not going to flush four years of a Criminal Justice Bachelor’s degree, six months at the Police Academy, five years of busting-her-ass on-the-job experience and her life’s dream down the toilet. She had to prove to her family that she could live out from underneath their thumb without fucking it all up.

  All of that may not seem like much of an accomplishment to the other guys sitting in this van with her, but that was because they didn’t know her circumstances. Not that she would share those circumstances with them anyways. When they eventually found out how young Jenna was, they would inevitably shoot her dubious looks of disbelief. More than likely they would begin to doubt that someone so young would be cut out for the job.

  Her over protective family h
ad home schooled her in their exuberant efforts to keep her hidden, and safe. So sitting at home with nothing to do but study with her mom, she managed to obtain her high school diploma at the tender age of fifteen. After graduating, Jenna enrolled in an online University where she finished a four year degree in three, since her mother obviously didn’t trust Jenna to be out of her sight without doing something monumentally stupid to get herself ousted for what she was. So at the age of eighteen, she had a high school diploma and a Bachelor’s degree.

  When Jenna then told her mom that she wanted to be a cop like Uncle Rick, her mother had no problem shipping her off to the academy, because that didn’t mean Jenna was out of her family’s sight for six whole months. No, her Uncle Rick had a friend at the academy that knew just enough to keep an eye on her, but not enough that he would be a danger to her. So now at twenty-three, almost twenty-four, Jenna was the youngest member of this SWAT team with a whole lot of job experience, but almost no life experience.

  Leaving the small town of River Bend for the bigger city of Wilmington, North Carolina had always been a goal of hers. It only took five years to prove to her Uncle Rick that she could handle what he considered to be big city problems, without outing herself to the populace. When his friend, who happened to be the Captain of one of the Wilmington precincts, told him that he was interviewing for a new SWAT team officer Uncle Rick threw her name in.

  A month after a stringent application process and many, many tests, here she was sitting in the back of this van in black BDU’s with a bullet proof vest on. She had a standard issue duty weapon strapped to her waist, an assault rifle in her hands and a solid fifty pounds of equipment strapped to her body. Just like the nine other officers in the vehicle. Black hair that fell just past the bottom of her shoulder blades was secured in a tight bun at the base of her neck, and the lower part of her face was covered with a black mask that only left her eyes visible. A helmet strapped onto the top of her head completed her uniform, she was clearly ready for action.

  Heat was pumping along with excitement at the thought of going out on a suspect retrieval mission the first day on the new job. This was the kind of shit Jenna lived for. Most women wanted to bask in the luxuries of shopping, high heeled shoes, and days at the spa. Definitely not her. Sure, she had sexy clothes and shoes in her closet, but most of it was bought for undercover work. Instead of the usual womanly highs, Jenna got off on the chase of a suspect. It was the best high of all. If she got to tackle the suspect to the ground, and accidentally elbow them in the head, well that was just a bonus.

  Silently running through the particulars of the suspect they were going after kept her occupied so that she didn’t get the urge to look any of the guys in the eyes. It wasn’t that she was afraid of any of them. Jenna could kick their ever lovin’ asses from here to China, but she didn’t want to intimidate any of them either. Yet. Most men weren’t used to having a woman stare them down. It unnerved them. Not to mention gave them a bum rap with other guys. So she just stared off into space, in no direction in particular, while mentally going over the facts.

  Suspect was a white male in his early thirties. Approximately five feet eleven, so he was seven inches taller than her. Weighed approximately one hundred and ninety pounds, sixty pounds more than her but still not a problem. Blond hair, blue eyes. Wanted for the murder of a woman whose husband was still listed as missing. Suspect is supposed to be apprehended alive to be interrogated for information regarding the missing husband.

  “Hey O’Conner.You nervous yet? Should we drop you off somewhere so you don’t piss your pretty little pink panties?” Moron. Note to self – trip jackass into a wall.

  Oops. Did my foot get in your way?

  Turning her head to look the idiot straight in the eyes she sneered, “I’m good Dubinski. But maybe we should stop at the store and buy you some big boy diapers. So that when you scare yourself shitless, it will be an easier mess to clean up.” The men surrounding them snickered as Dubinski gave her a grudgingly respectful look.

  With a smirk, Captain Nelson barked from the front passenger seat, “Keep it down kids. ETA is in three minutes so let’s go over the basics one last time.” As the Captain rattled off the same information on the suspect that Jenna had just been over in her head, she took the opportunity to get a subtle whiff with her nose, testing the air. The inside of the van smelled like sweat, leather, gun oil and anticipation. No one smelled scared, just a little anxious. Good. No one here was a threat to freak out and freeze in a dangerous situation. Having a super sniffer of a nose sometimes came in handy. If one of these jerks started leaking sweat out of his pores as if he was trying to help keep up with the water supply at Niagara Falls, she would have had to worry about him accidentally shooting her in the back. That would make it hard to concentrate on the mission. Luckily this wasn’t the case.

  The van rounded a corner quickly as Capt. Nelson wrapped up the specifics. “O’Conner, you’ll be right behind Kent, so third through the door. The entrance is a vacuum due to the enclosed space so we have to break the door down quickly and catch the bastard before he does something stupid. After O’Conner, it’s the usual line up. Everybody ready?”

  The team nodded their heads in consent as the van jerked to a stop in front of the target’s temporary residence. As one, they flew out of the van and raced towards the front door. A few seconds later a group of bodies were piled up with Capt. Nelson at the front, Kent behind him, and Jenna third in line with the rest of the team at her back. Less than ten seconds later, the Captain kicked down the door while screaming ‘Police’. Moving quickly through the entrance hall, she used her nose to smell the air again. There was a whiff of something out of the norm. Two distinctly different male scents that filled her nose, and she was positive they were not human.

  Moving quickly through the house, the SWAT team started clearing rooms as they spread out through the small ranch home. She followed where her nose happened to lead her, with Kent behind her, towards the back of the house where the scents became stronger. Three doors were ahead of them, and she could hear sounds of a struggle coming from behind the closed door at the end of the hall. Pushing forward with Kent at her back, she kicked a foot out, knocking the door halfway off of its hinges and barked, “POLICE! FREEZE!”

  Before her stood a massive guy with mussed auburn hair that stuck up in almost every direction and rippling back muscles. The blond hair, blue eyed suspect stood across the room from all three of them facing Mr. Messy Head with a gun pointed at his head. In the split second that Mr. Messy Head was distracted, the suspect took the opportunity to tighten his finger on the trigger. He was seconds from sending a bullet into his rather large opponent who still stood between them. Dropping the aim of her riffle from the suspect’s head to his hand instead, Jenna squeezed off a round just as his finger started to compress the trigger of his pistol. Mr. Messy Head jerked his body to the side, avoiding the bullet by a hairsbreadth, before an explosive spray of red misted the air where half of the man’s left hand had been. A cry of pain filled the room as the gun thunked to the carpet. The suspect stared at his remaining thumb and trigger finger connected to the remnants of jagged bones and uneven ripped flesh that was still bleeding profusely. The stranger shot into action, leaping to tackle the suspect to the floor. In less than a minute, he had their man belly down to the ground and hands bound behind his back with flexi cuffs, while she and Kent stood blocking the door with their guns aimed at the pair.

  Kent yelled, “Freeze! Hands in the air, now!”

  Hands slowly lifted to the air as the red head looked up at them. Bright amber eyes bored into Jenna’s as she looked down the barrel of her gun at him. Caught slightly off guard by his startling, strong, handsome face she dragged in a subtle breath, but what she found there made her nervous. It was a smell she hadn’t experienced in a very long time. A smell that she had been taught most of her life to avoid at all costs. It was the clean, fresh scent of the outdoors that was unique to shif
ters alone with an underlying spice that could only be singular to Mr. Messy Head. It wasn’t the latter of those scents that bothered her. It was the other smell that meant trouble. This guy on his knees with his hands held calmly in the air in front of her wasn’t human. He spent his spare time in some kind of fur, whether it was cat, bear, or wolf, she wasn’t sure. He was Other. Whatever it was though wasn’t beneficial for her to be around too long. So she needed to get this guy away from her, pronto.

  She was praying however that Mr. Messy Head hadn’t caught any of her scent. She’d been told by one of her Uncles once that it was remarkably light, and hard to define, but to an experienced shifter it could be figured out. Observing his sudden, subtle flaring of nostrils she was guessing that he was trying to do just that. Damn. Booted feet pounded the hall behind them as a few of the other officers poured into the room to apprehend the two men in front of her. After Mr. Messy Head had been cuffed and pulled to his feet, along with the suspect, she slipped out of the room and followed Capt. Nelson to the back of the van. Jenna’s keen senses telling her that Kent was following directly behind.

  Watching as two patrol cars pulled up on the street behind their van, the Captain ran his hand through his hair. “What happened, O’Conner?”

  Giving him a quick debriefing of the incident, he watched Jenna with amusement, and a little bit of surprise on his face. After ending her spiel with the arrival of the rest of the team into the occupied room, Kent piped in behind her. “You’re one hell of a shot, O’Conner. That’s impressive. Makes me grateful that you’re on my side.”