by Jade White
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
STRANDED WITH THE SNOW LEOPARD
A PARANORMAL SHAPESHIFTER ROMANCE
JADE WHITE
Copyright ©2017 by Jade White
All rights reserved.
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About This Book
Amelia Lark was backpacking across Europe when she came across a handsome WereLion who was cute but could not take no for an answer.
Thankfully, she was saved from danger by an even more gorgeous man named Aibek.
Aibek was not a WereLion but a WereLeopard. A snow leopard to be exact.
But the WereLions were always going to come back for Amelia and with the snow on the mountain piling up she was now stranded with her hero snow leopard.
However, for Amelia and Aibek the inevitable battle with the WereLions could wait.
For now there was only one thing to do whilst they were waiting for the snow to clear. And it was something they would be doing over and over and over again...
Warning: This is an extra steamy paranormal shapeshifter romance. This is for adults only.
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 ONE
When it came to backpacking, Amelia Lark could probably be considered a pro. The Australian outback. Parts of southern Africa. Mexico. Canada and Alaska. It was not a new hobby for her. She knew some people would consider it dangerous, especially since she had first picked up the hobby as a junior in high school, but she saw no reason to let that stop her.
Twenty years old and on winter break from school, she started her journey in Greece, with a handful of basic phrases floating through her head and a translation app always open on her phone. She knew a few languages—English, Shona, French, and some Italian—but Greek was not one of them. She was patient, adaptable, and good at charades, though, so she wasn’t particularly concerned.
With her backpack, her wallet, and her phone, she set out. She breezed through Athens like lightning, determined to see it but unwilling to pay the cost of staying for more than one day. In some places, reasonably priced hotels were plentiful. Athens, Greece, was not one of those places. She found her money would be better spent ferrying herself between the Cyclades and hopping between the islands. True, the islands weren’t as idyllic as they always looked in movies and on television, but she thought it was worth it.
On the first night, she slept in a bed and breakfast owned by a small family after a day of riding buses and taking pictures. The next morning, she met up with Riley. A classmate from college, he had similar hobbies, interests, and financial means, and when they had discovered that they planned on being in Greece around the same time, they had made a point of figuring out how to meet up with each other.
On the second night, the two of them pooled some money and slept in a hotel. True, it wasn’t a grand, expensive suite, but neither of them wanted to spend more than absolutely necessary. They got breakfast and lunch and took so many pictures in between them that Amelia was convinced they could have wallpapered most of the ruins, and then they parted ways.
Amelia slept in a hostel that night, and the next morning, before the sun was even rising, she was off to Albania. She met up with Bailey, an old friend from high school until her family had moved to Eastern Europe, and together they discovered that Turkish coffee was possibly the best thing that had ever happened to either of them.
The chill was minimal, and it seemed only natural to explore the beaches. Bailey laughed, “Did you think you’d wind up using your Italian this much?”
(The answer was no; Amelia hadn’t expected Italian to be such a big deal outside of Italy or a classroom.)
Bailey pointed out everything and anything that seemed even the least bit remarkable as she dragged Amelia around by the wrist, save for a pause at lunch to scarf down a burek, (stuffed with cheese, in Amelia’s case, though Bailey had always been an odd duck and preferred her pastry stuffed with spinach) and a longer pause at dinner to finally sit down in a restaurant. The mutton was fantastic, though they hardly stopped talking long enough to actually taste their food.
By the time they spilled into Bailey’s living room that evening, Amelia was exhausted and her camera had been through the best workout of its short but well-loved existence up to that point. Amelia passed out on the couch almost as soon as she lay down, and she slept straight through until morning so heavily that it almost seemed like she had been beaned over the head with a baseball bat.
The next morning, after a rushed breakfast and a drawn-out goodbye, Amelia was on a bus across Albania, stopping halfway to explore whatever she had time for in the city of Elbasan before hopping right back onto another bus that night. She slept for most of the ride, and when she woke up again to disembark, she stepped off the bus in Macedonia.
She had no friends to join her in Macedonia—her friends, much like her, were all college students, and most of them could barely understand what the words ‘disposable income’ and ‘family money’ meant, let alone conceive of actually having such things—but she didn’t actually have any trouble making friends on her own.
She spent much of the day with a middle-aged man who had been on the same bus as her, both of them stumbling their way around good-heartedly as they could only speak to each other in fractured Italian. Neither of them spoke Macedonian, and whether or not they ran into anyone who spoke English was rather hit or miss. He was good company, though, and the instant a stranger’s hand had touched Amelia’s backside, her newfound friend had chased the bastard off like a guard dog.
They parted ways after dinner that evening, and Amelia spent the night in a monastery. It was beautiful and surprisingly comfortable, at least when compared to a few hostels she had stayed at in the past.
She was up and on her way bright and early the next morning, buying a snack in town because no one in Macedonia seemed to believe in a proper breakfast, before she hopped onto another bus and road it clear through to Serbia.
As soon as she left the bus station, her passport still in hand, Ayomide all but crashed into her, sweeping Amelia off her feet in a hug that probably would have cracked the ribs of a normal person.
Wheezing in the a
ftermath, Amelia squeezed one of Ayomide’s arms and cautioned, “You need to stop working out.”
“Nope,” Ayomide returned cheerfully. “Now come on, let’s go. Time’s wasting, and you’re only here on a stopover.”
With that decided, her old summer camp friend seized her by the hand and began dragging her along like she was trying to lead a show dog through its paces.
It was an eventful day, being shepherded through the streets until nightfall, when they finally parted ways at the door of the hostel. Amelia was cordial with the guests and the workers, but once she was in the dorm room, she face planted into her bed and didn’t move once until the next morning when she got up to shower, eat a lightning fast breakfast, and hop on yet another bus.
Next up was Bulgaria. She didn’t have any friends to meet there, but she wasn’t worried. She was sure she could get acquainted with someone while she was there.
*
Amelia was in Bulgaria when she met him. She was settling down for dinner at a hostel, chatting with the other guests as the owner and his wife cheerfully doled out food. They were a pleasant, slightly manic couple, and the guests ran the gamut from a free-range sixteen-year-old to a man in his fifties trying to make a dent in his bucket list.
One guest, perhaps five years older than her, was…not human. He looked human—shifters always did—but Amelia could smell that he wasn’t.
He was tall and dark-skinned—the same shade of dark chocolate as her mother, rather than Amelia’s own cocoa powder color—with amber eyes just a few shades darker than Amelia’s golden eyes. At 5’5”, Amelia was not exactly towering, but she was willowy, her build consisting of about eighty percent long legs, while the man looked as if he could have taken on a rhinoceros and walked away victorious. While Amelia’s own loose, bouncing curls looked black at a glance, they were shot through with auburn and mahogany in the right light, but his close-cropped curls were as black as coal.
And from the way he watched her across the table, she knew he could tell that she wasn’t human either.
She spent the meal watching him, barely tasting the food she put in her mouth. Afterward, as some of the guests moseyed off to bed and most of them gathered around the owners to listen to the missus tell a particularly embarrassing story about the mister, Amelia stepped outside and began to follow the sidewalk. Just as she suspected, within a few moments, the other shifter sidled up next to her, falling into step with her.
“Sooo,” Amelia began slowly, sliding him a sly, sidelong glance, “what are you?” She grinned when he looked startled, as if he had been expecting her to beat around the bush a bit more. “Don’t worry,” she soothed. “You tell me yours; I’ll tell you mine.”
That got a laugh out of him, at least. “Names first,” he decided, in a voice deeper than the ocean and smoother than oiled glass. “I’m Darius.”
“Amelia,” she offered in reply. She loped a few paces ahead and turned around so that she was walking backward in front of him, and then she offered him her hand. When he shook it, his grip was just a bit too tight. “So, what are you?” she repeated, her eyebrows rising expectantly. She folded her arms over her chest once he relinquished her hand.
There was a low chuckle, and he held his hands up in a pacifying motion. “I’m a lion,” he answered with a grin, his elongated canine teeth on display, much like Amelia’s own. “You?”
“A cheetah,” she answered easily, finally turning to walk forward again, dropping back to walk beside him. “What are you doing here in Bulgaria?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” he fired back.
With a roll of her eyes, she returned, “I’m on vacation.”
“Same here. My younger sisters are both around somewhere or other.” He slid her a speculative look. “Want to do some sightseeing tonight?”
Amelia’s steps stuttered for a heartbeat before she fell back into step. “Well, that was abrupt!” she laughed. “You definitely don’t beat around the bush. Ever heard of foreplay?” she asked with an impish smile.
“Can you blame me?” he asked, just a touch defensive. “It’s been years since I ran into any shifters outside of my family.”
“Fair point,” she agreed mildly. “Did you have anything in mind?”
Darius shrugged, evidently unconcerned with a minor thing like ‘planning.’ “Wander and see what looks interesting?” he suggested, and he offered her his arm as if her agreement was a done deal.
Amelia rolled her eyes, but she did loop her arm through his. “Alright, King of the Jungle,” she sighed with good-natured exasperation. “Show me a good time.”
“You sound so enthusiastic,” he drawled dryly as he started leading.
“I like to keep my expectations low,” she returned wryly, one side of her lips quirking up. “It comes in handy in case I get disappointed.”
Darius’ expression twitched into something like a scowl before evening out again. “Presumptuous, don’t you think?” He folded his arms over his chest. “What if someone surprises you?”
Amelia shrugged lackadaisically. “Keeping my expectations low also means it’s really easy to pleasantly surprise me.” Darius didn’t seem to have an argument for that.
As they walked, there was remarkably little sightseeing going on. They passed by some lovely architecture, some beautiful landmarks, some fascinating shows, and some very excited crowds, but they stopped at none of them. Darius simply continued walking with a purpose. Despite his claims about wandering and seeing what looked interesting, it was painfully apparent that he had a goal in mind. On the handful of occasions where Amelia slowed to actually enjoy some of the scenery or to try to talk to someone, Darius just kept right on walking, forcing her to jog after him if she didn’t want to lose him entirely. It was a tempting thought to just stop and let him go be impatient somewhere else, but curiosity at how far he was going to walk carried her onward.
He wanted to see Amelia transform. She could guess that much, though she wasn’t sure why he seemed so focused on it. He had siblings, so unless he was the only shifter in the family, she found it hard to believe that he had never met another shifter before. Maybe he had simply never met another type of shifter. Amelia supposed she could understand some anticipation or excitement, but him blatantly misrepresenting his intentions was still not something she appreciated.
Considering all that, it was not a surprise when a stretch of forest rose ahead of them. It was winter, true, but that had little effect on the evergreens, and they hung thick with needles, making for an easy curtain of green to hide in.
Just as Amelia expected, Darius made an expectant motion and led her into the woods. She paused long enough to take a look around and decide that she would still be able to get away if he decided he wanted trouble before she followed him.
It felt inevitable when they left their clothing stashed in a bush and transformed deep in the trees and far from prying eyes. They circled each other for a few moments, sniffing curiously and taking in what they each looked like. Darius was more curious than Amelia was, but she supposed that made sense.
She had never seen a lion in person, true, but everyone knew what a lion looked like, and Darius looked like a lion: large, golden, and with a dark, shaggy mane. While the argument could be made that most people knew what a cheetah looked like, Amelia was not an average cheetah; she was a king cheetah. Her coat was a bit thicker than a standard cheetah’s, and most of her spots were mottled together until they looked more like stripes, including three long stripes along the entire length of her back.
While he was distracted staring at her, she lifted one paw and set it on his head, and then she turned and bolted into the woods, declaring ‘Tag, you’re it!’ in the only way she could when she didn’t have a voice.
She heard a brief noise, almost like a startled bark, and she could hear Darius crashing through the underbrush behind her with all the grace and finesse of a monster truck. She pranced ahead of him, always just a few paces ahead. She
wished there were fewer trees and flatter ground, so she could really stretch her legs out and show off. It wasn’t often she had a chance to really show what she could do.
Granted, as she peered over her shoulder and watched Darius narrowly avoid a messy impact with a tree, she supposed it was probably for the best that she could only go so fast for the moment.
She slowed to a halt after a moment, watching him coyly over her shoulder, her tail swaying gently. She gave him just long enough to get close enough that she could have touched him with her tail before she burst into motion again.
She heard him growl in discontent as she breezed out of his reach again, and she rolled her eyes to herself before she slowed to a halt again, turning to face him once more. When he came to a halt, he was nearly nose-to-nose with her.
He really was enormous. He squashed the grass beneath his paws flat, and there was a visible trail behind him, documenting his every step. Conversely, Amelia knew that if she lifted her paws, the grass would eventually spring back up. She was sleek, lean, and lithe, and she knew the art of moving in silence.
