by Seere, Diana
The Billionaire Shifter’s Final Redemption
The Billionaire Shifters Club #6
Diana Seere
Copyright © 2018 by Diana Seere
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.
Cover design by Diana Seere
Cover photos from depositphotos.com
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Contents
The Billionaire Shifter’s Final Redemption (The Billionaire Shifters Club #6)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue (Part 1)
Epilogue (Part 2)
Go back to the beginning and read the complete series
The Billionaire Shifters Club Series
About the Author
The Billionaire Shifter’s Final Redemption (The Billionaire Shifters Club #6)
by Diana Seere
Welcome to the most exclusive club in the world. The Novo Club. Novo is Latin for “change.” Our members prefer the word “shift” though.
It’s the hottest club in town.
The price of membership is your heart and your secrecy.
All you need to do to join is to be loved beyond your wildest imagination by someone powerful with an…alpha side so primal it’s in their blood.
Are you ready?
Good. Then let’s begin.
The Billionaire Shifters Club is a new series featuring the five Stanton siblings, four brothers and one sister who are all part of an ancient shifter family living in modern America. The subterranean club-within-a-club beneath the streets of Boston, Massachusetts holds secrets only the Stantons and their fellow shifters know.
* * *
Asher Stanton has devoted his entire, long life to protecting the shifter world — but he couldn’t save his own beloved human wife and child. Walling off his emotions and turning his life into mission to consolidate power, he is ruthless, determined — and most definitely never falling in love with another human again.
Years later, a dark threat looms over the shifter world as Asher’s childhood friend, Tomas Nagy, becomes into his worst enemy. With the future of the shifter world in question, he must turn to a human scientist, the fiery, headstrong Dr. Samantha Baird, to help him fight the forces of evil.
Too bad he can’t fight his attraction to her, an all-consuming urge that strips him of his well-honed restraint. A man accustomed to being in control at all times, Asher finds himself unable to resist.
Her.
Fate has a funny way of showing up when least expected, and when an old prophesy predicts Asher and Samantha’s union, the family patriarch must accept the fact that he, and he alone, cannot protect her.
Samantha may be the shifter world’s greatest gift.
And Asher Stanton’s final redemption.
Chapter 1
“Where is she?” Asher Stanton suppressed an aggravated sigh, stifling it instead with a rather large mouthful of fine Glenfiddich single malt whisky while he waited for his security director’s reply. They stood in the library of a minor Stanton property, a comfortable fire lending a glow to the room that felt inappropriately cheery.
“Still within the city limits, sir.” The Stanton family’s long-serving employee, Manny Wachowitz, had recently been promoted to lead the ever-growing team of security specialists Asher had come to require as the shifter world faced its greatest threat in three hundred years. Hiring mercenaries was the easy part.
Teaching them to keep their mouths shut took a certain finesse. And a very healthy paycheck.
“Remind me, Manny. What is the name of this place?”
“Lincoln, Nebraska,” Manny said.
“Dear God. I keep forgetting.” The whisky did its job, burning his throat, though it didn’t quench his thirst. Nothing did, these days. Not since he first laid eyes on her.
“Dr. Baird’s parents live here. It is her birthplace.”
“I know that,” Asher snapped. He was aware of everything about Samantha Baird, or tried to be. When she’d been doing field research in Costa Rica the week before, he’d nearly gone mad with worry. But now she was securely home, visiting her parents in this seemingly safe city.
She didn’t need to know he’d flown to Lincoln to be nearby, just in case. He’d brought Manny and a few select security and medical specialists. Her well-being was not something he was willing to risk.
“They’re really glad to have her visit,” Manny continued. “According to the neighbors, it has been several years since she stayed for more than a few days.”
“I suppose, if one must voluntarily spend time in Lincoln, Nebraska, visiting one’s mother and father is as good a reason as any,” Asher said. An unexpected pang of sentimentality tugged at Asher’s heart. How many decades since he had spent time with either of his parents? They lived on in memory, in the arch of an eyebrow, the scent of his father’s pipe tobacco, their photos and portraits scattered throughout the estate.
And in small moments such as these. The warmth their memory triggered mingled with images of Samantha, giving him a curiously nostalgic sense that they would have liked her. Father would have been impressed by her mind, Mother her heart.
Both by her strength.
He stared at the small pool of amber resting in the bottom of his glass, the fire amplifying the rich red of the whisky, the color not unlike Samantha’s long, loose red hair.
Mad.
He was going mad, second by second, heartbeat by heartbeat. Rather than contemplate, he acted, moving swiftly across the room, needing to be in motion. His blood itched, pumping against his skin as if his body were a bass drum, heart trapped inside. Ever since the deadly fight with Mason Webb and his old friend, Tomas Nagy, Asher had felt off. Stroking the scar on his right hip, he leaned against the enormous fireplace mantel, willing himself to regain control. Flames licked at the edges of stone, the heat warming his shins. Flexing his arms, he bent his face down, closing his eyes against the lush orange and burnt copper.
Memory is a fickle beast. Asher could not subdue it when images of a luscious redheaded vixen who would not be tamed came to mind.
Dr. Samantha Baird was simultaneously gorgeous, intellectually stimulating, infuriatingly transgressive, exceptionally loyal, but while all of those qualities were endearing—aside from the annoyingly disobedient parts—she was, above all, one hundred percent off-limits.
Yet as he turned away from the fire and poured himself his third whisky in a row, he felt the pull once more.
Restraint was an art form, one that Asher had mastered many years ago. But this threat. This threat involved her.
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“Where, exactly, is she right this very minute?” This he did not need to know, but it was prudent, after all. His job was to keep everyone of importance safe. Sound. Alive.
And Samantha was very much a person of importance.
On a strictly professional level, of course.
Manny looked at a smartphone with a wireless earpiece. He frowned. “She is at a movie. A romantic comedy called—”
“I do not need that level of detail, Manny. I assume she is with her parents? A friend? Is the location secure?”
Manny frowned again, displaying the slightest level of uncertainty. “Um, sir, she—”
“Say it.” Manny was not one to stammer.
“She is with a man.”
“A man?” Asher paused, silence feeding his attention. Perhaps he’d misheard.
Then again, he never misheard.
“According to our operative who is tailing her, she is on a date.”
“A date?”
“Yes, sir.”
“A romantic date?”
“Well,” Manny said, clearing his throat, a red flush creeping up his neck. “His arm is around her shoulders as they sit next to each other in the movie theater.”
Possessive confusion ripped through his body with extraordinary speed, boiling his blood, pumping his lungs with quick breaths that made no sense. “She is with a man who is touching her?” Asher clarified.
“Yes, sir. That’s generally how dates go.”
Asher threw the whisky glass into the fire and slammed his hand on his thick oak desk. “I know what a date is, Manny,” he said through gritted teeth, control fading faster than it should. Collecting himself quickly, he reassembled the shell he showed to the world, letting emotion roil underneath, where it belonged.
Where it always lived.
“Pardon me, sir.” Manny paused. “How would you like to proceed?”
“I-I—” Now it was his turn to stammer.
“I have live video of her, if you’d like to see.” As Manny extended the smartphone, Asher’s eyes narrowed, vision going pinpoint sharp. While he could control a shift, anger had a way of making him bridge the difference between human and shifter in a way that thinned the line.
A dark movie theater. People in small clusters. A man and a woman, sitting together, the flicker of the screen illuminating them.
Samantha.
Being pawed by an asshole.
An asshole who wasn’t Asher.
He frowned. “Take me to her. Now.”
“Sir?”
“Now!” Grabbing his suit jacket, Asher marched toward the double doors leading to the patio and beyond that, in an empty stretch of manicured lawn, his emergency transportation.
Manny stood in place.
“You’re coming with me,” Asher ordered.
“It’s not that. I know. But there is more.”
“More?”
Pressing his earpiece, Manny cocked his head, listening. Interminable seconds passed. The wait was not the difficult part.
The assault on his mind was intolerable.
Images of Samantha being touched by someone else, someone not him, ripped through his consciousness like the claws of a cat. As his eyes moved involuntarily, accessing individual compartments inside his brain, Asher felt himself unravel, processing each detail, pattern matching to make a whole.
None of the details mattered, he told himself as the thick, painful scar on his hip began to throb. Manny’s news would have to be set aside in the face of this new development.
Manny closed the distance between them with lightning speed, passing Asher with a whiff of air as he opened the doors to the outside and gestured, uncharacteristically, with deep impatience.
“We need to leave. Now,” Manny urged.
Incredulous, Asher went cold. “Of course we do. I ordered you to do so.”
Dark, serious, impatient eyes met his own. “The man on the date with Dr. Baird is one of Tomas Nagy’s operatives.”
The sprint to the helicopter came in a flash of fur and bone.
And nothing more.
* * *
Fake laughs are like fake orgasms. Both are social niceties, but you generally use them to get out of awkward situations.
“I could tell you liked the movie, Sam. You always did like those chick films,” Tim said as they walked down P Street, headed for the Italian place where they’d gone to prom. His call earlier in the day had been a complete shock. Over a dozen years of no contact from the guy who dumped her on the most important night of her senior year in high school and suddenly—he asked her out?
Her mom and dad had grinned like mad fools when he’d arrived. Tim had taken over his father’s insurance company. Local, steady, dependable—and could they mention local twenty more times? Sam got the hint.
More than got the hint.
Leaving Lincoln when she was seventeen had been the most liberating moment of her life.
Hang on.
Second most liberating.
Watching Asher Stanton change into a wolf had toppled her escape from her stifling hometown off its perch.
“Cat got your tongue?” Tim teased as they walked in silence, approaching DiLilio’s, the door swinging open, one of his hands sweeping in a “ladies first” gesture.
Not cat. Wrong animal.
Wolf.
“Just thinking how nice it’s been tonight. Catching up.” Banal small talk was not her forte, but it came back naturally after about an hour back home. Tim was nice. Just nice. Boring and cocky. She would have invented a rescue text by now if she were on a date back in Boston.
Here? She just had to suffer through it.
A loose plan formed in her head, the same kind of blueprint that always took over on a mediocre date. Either escape or think ahead to the benchmarks she’d need to face.
Dinner? Pay for herself.
Drinks after? Confess to a headache.
Invite him in at her place? Beg off because of a fictional roommate.
With Tim, she’d need to make adjustments, but as the scent of garlic made her resolve weaken, she figured it couldn’t hurt to carb up and enjoy the famous chicken parmesan.
If you had to go on a crummy date, the consolation prize should be good food.
“I’m just pensive. Thinking about work,” she finally said, realizing Tim had developed a mildly irritated expression, one that she knew well. More than a decade might have passed, but he’d stayed the same. Her lack of a response failed to feed some part of him, and it was a part that wouldn’t be satisfied by an extra basket of the restaurant’s delectable Italian bread.
“The lab you work in?” he said sharply, with a surprising dose of interest.
“Run,” she replied automatically.
“Excuse me?”
“The lab I run.” Steel filtered into her voice, hardening the soft edges that blurred her whenever she came back to Nebraska.
“Of course,” he said. “You always were a brain.”
“Thank you,” she said firmly, making it clear she took his snide dig as a compliment. Back in high school, she’d thought his bad attitude was sexy. Now she saw him for the insecure jerk he was.
“What kind of work does the lab do?” With a polite smile, he lifted the wine bottle and refilled her glass.
“Come on, Tim,” she said, tiring of the act. She stifled a sigh with a bite of bread. The date had gone on long enough, and they hadn’t even gotten their appetizers yet. “You don’t really care about my work.”
“Of course I do.” He frowned, looking genuinely angry. “Just because I’m in insurance doesn’t mean I’m too stupid to care about biotechnology and DNA and whatever.”
“That’s not what I—”
“I’d think with your own father working in the insurance industry, founding his own firm, you’d have a little more respect for those of us who choose to follow in his footsteps.”
Her entire life, Sam had had to hide her intelligence to get along
with people, pretend she was normal, especially when she was with men. In fact, when Tim had dumped her on prom night, he’d accused her of showing off her academic achievements in front of his friends, intentionally humiliating him. It was true she had answered a direct question about her SATs—she learned later to lie about her perfect scores—but she hadn’t initiated the conversation.
The old feelings rose up in her like acid indigestion. She pushed aside her bread plate. “We study and work on mapping the sequence of the chemical components of the human genome, with particular attention to rare manifestations of latent and recessive elements.”
His eyes brightened. “Rare? Like what? Physical things? Superpowers? What?”
She’d thought her elaborate bullshit would shut him up. Why was he so curious tonight? He’d never been interested in science before. More than once when they were dating, he’d made fun of her for getting excited about her AP Bio class.
A strange sensation came over her, one she’d never expected with an old high school flame.
Fear.
She took a moment to compose her thoughts by lifting her wineglass and making a show of swirling the glass and inhaling the aroma.
Taking the bait, he snorted. “Aren’t you fancy, sniffing your wine instead of drinking it.”
She smiled sweetly, hiding her roiling emotions, and took a sip. “It’s really good. You picked a good one.”
That seemed to irritate him even more. “A friend suggested it.” He grabbed a chunk of bread and tore at it with his flat teeth. His flat, boring, human teeth.
