BAD BOY ROMANCE: DIESEL: Contemporary Bad Boy Biker MC Romance (Box Set) (New Adult Sports Romance Short Stories Boxset) (86 page)

Chapter 5

When night fell Bruce set out into the trees. The moon was getting closer to full, and he could feel its pull even though he didn’t have to answer to it. Maybe all preternatural creatures could hear the moon’s song, even though it was only the wolves and the vampires that had to obey it.

Bruce made his way through the trees again. The moonlight was so bright it made his movement easy, and the forest was alive all around him. It was as if the trees and the plants breathed, and the earth vibrated underneath his feet wherever he stepped.

He made the climb to the plateau where they would meet. He wasn’t the first to arrive.

Tara stood there, her hair hanging around her shoulder like a black cloak. When she heard Bruce arrive she turned and her eyes shone in the dark, eyes that were such a light blue they looked almost white. Her animal was very close. She must have been clinging onto her human form with her teeth.

“Bruce,” she said and her voice was a low growl rather than a human voice. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Bruce walked up to her and took her hand. He rubbed his cheek against it, a form a respect, a request not to take her temper out on him. He kissed her hand and then licked her knuckle the way he knew the wereleopards did with each other to honor their queen.

A smile played over her lips and he knew he’d pleased her. He stood up and took her into his arms. She folded her body against his and she was warm. Her body temperature would rise the closer it got to the moon, and even though she didn’t have to change on full moon either, she chose to give up her control then.

It was like being an animal was what she preferred.

Bruce was aware of her sharp teeth. They seemed more pointed than before, more like animal fangs. Tara spent a lot of time as a leopard. Too much time.

She stood on her toes and kissed him. It started off gentle, but then she became urgent, insisted his open his mouth. She licked him on his lips, and kissed him with so much passion it left him dizzy.

He was just about to lose himself in the throes of passion she was conjuring up in him, when she took his bottom lip between her teeth and bit down.

He made a sound that sounded a lot more like his bear, and he could feel the animal get angry and rear up inside him. He tasted his own blood, hot in his mouth, and there was a red smear of blood across Tara’s face.

Whatever she was trying to do a minute earlier, to draw blood she must have been pissed at him.

“What bothers you, my queen?” he said, trying to keep himself in a position of respect. But his voice came out as a low growl and the anger in him hung in the air, thick enough to touch. However much respect he was trying to show as a human, his animal wanted to challenge Tara for drawing blood.

“You’re too close to the humans,” she said and her voice was normal again. But when she spoke power washed over him and he could taste some of his own power lacing hers. His blood on her lips, the union that they had now that they were a couple, it let her tap into his reserves.

He didn’t like it. How much could she take if she really wanted to? What would that do to him, what if she decided to leave nothing for him? But he focused on her words.

“They don’t know what I am. They don’t ask questions.”

“That girl that oozes all over you, she’s too close. She wants more. She wants to know more. And if she finds out?”

Bruce felt himself harden inside, like a rock. He had to try and steel himself against her. He had to try and stop her from draining his power. She could have it only at his own will.

“She’s not a problem. She won’t find out,” Bruce said.

Tara opened her mouth to speak, but then she laughed instead. “You’re fighting this in vain, Bruce, but you’re not going to block me. I can take your power. You agreed to it when you agreed to becoming my mate. I can take what I want from you.”

His power, maybe. But not his people.

“I can’t leave the village,” he said. “They won’t find out. They haven’t in the last five years. That won’t change.”

Tara shook her head and paced in a figure eight like a leopard. Watching her was unnerving.

“I should have come to see them earlier. I would have forbid you to live among them for so long. It’s a risk. We can’t be found out. You know what will happen if we do. You have to leave the city because of the humans, because of their betrayal. If they find out again, even if they just think it, the Assassins will know. They’re stronger than us. Stronger than Dwayne. We can’t risk it.”

Crossing her now would be a bad idea. Bruce knew her actions, understood her body language. She was close to her change and if she turned into a leopard now, with her temper, she would be at his throat before he had a chance to do anything. His own change was slower than hers. He had to quadruple in size in the process. She only doubled.

It wasn’t fair but that was how it was.

“I won’t let you down, my queen,” he said, and went down on all fours. She stopped in front of him. His submissive stance must have pleased her, but she finally sighed.

“I don’t know why I let you, but I have a weakness for you,” she said. If that was her definition of weakness Bruce didn’t want to see strength.

Bruce heard a twig snap and he was on his feet and whirled around in a second. Tara was next to him and he could feel her power, feel it link up to his like a force of nature. He’d never felt it like this before. If it was the two of them, equal in power, the bond was spectacular. He felt the potential of their combined power and it nearly took his breath away.

“Do you feel what we can be?” Tara asked under her breath. But Bruce knew that she wouldn’t always be able to share like this.

Dwayne stepped out from the trees first. Bruce felt himself relax, and he could physically feel Tara unhook her power from his. They wouldn’t need their combined forces tonight. It was one of their own.

“What is it?” Tara asked. Dwayne had gone down on one knee in front of Tara.

“I feel them, my queen,” he said and Bruce wondered if he’d looked as inferior to Tara as Dwayne looked. Dwayne’s psychic powers and magical abilities were strong, but he didn’t have the kind of power a preternatural creature had. He couldn’t take any of them on, and it was only for his talent that he was allowed to stay.

“Where?” she asked.

“They have come into Rhodestown. But they are searching, it’s a strategy, not a planned attack.”

Tara glared at me, as if to say ‘I told you so’. When she turned her attention back to Dwayne I was relieved.

“How many?” she asked.

“Ten Assassins all in all, but only five stay in the town. The others are just passing through. Three I have felt before, when I was forced to flee.”

Bruce closed his eyes and tried to reach out his own power. He swept the land like his power was a giant hand, and he touched each of the villagers in the valley. But he couldn’t get further than the mountainside, the valley, the graves with their bones on the other side. That was what they had Dwayne for.

It took a lot out of him, but if he wanted to he could sweep the country.

The Assassins had driven each of them from their homes. Bruce had belonged to a group of shifters where most of them were bears when he still lived in the city. Bears were loners, they didn’t move in packs like other animals. But they stood together because they weren’t normal bears.

The Assassins had found them and killed three of the bears he knew before they’d realized what was going on. The Assassins had no mercy. They saw shifters as animals, not as people. They saw their job as pest control, not murder.

Coming to Williamsburg had been the hardest thing he’d ever done. The Assassins had been hot on his trail and he’d only lost them when he’d crossed into the state. The town was so small, so quiet. After being used to noise and people and the hustle and bustle of everyday life in a city, Bruce had nearly died.

Until he’d met the Family – all of them misfits, all of them on the run, all of them the only ones left of their pack. And they’d taken him in, given him a reason to cling onto life.

He thought of Tara’s words. He couldn’t leave the village behind. He couldn’t bare living in one of the caves as an animal. He turned into a bear almost every night. He killed for blood so that he could keep the beat under control. But he needed people, because he was still human.

He refused to give that up.

And Jenna. He couldn’t live without Jenna. He couldn’t go without seeing her ever again. He could never be with her, make her his own. But he would never be without her. He didn’t want to be.

“The others are coming,” Tara said and it snapped Bruce from his spiral of thoughts. He stood closer to her, ready to receive the rest of the pack that were no somehow beneath him instead of equals.

He hadn’t thought it all through properly. By taking Tara as his mate, agreeing to forging the bond with her, he’d put his Family below him. They used to stand side by side. There were no signs that they were upset about it, but who were they to complain? Tara could banish them, or worse, kill them.

And Bruce didn’t put it beneath her to try.

One by one they Family came out from the trees. Cleveland flew in, swooping low and Bruce felt the power prickle on the back of his neck before Cleveland fluttered down and changed into a human in a flash of light. His shift was the fastest of all of them.

Stephen and Rosa came together. Their eyes were the color of their animals’ eyes. This close to the full moon they were the closest to losing control. Their animals lurched right beneath the skin and it was up to Tara to control them.

At least Bruce wasn’t in that kind of trouble with her yet. He didn’t rely on her for his humanity the way they did.

Lori was last. She moved like she’d just changed to human form and she hadn’t shaken off her bulk yet. She was more butch than ever, walking with wide legs and shaking her head slowly from side to side.

The moment the Family was together, the pack was complete, the power circle flared up and their collective power washed over Bruce. He felt each and every one of them, a separate string. And he also felt them together, braided into a rope of power that was stronger than when they were apart. That was why it was so important to be a part of a unit.

If one of the strings were close to snapping the others held the rope so that it didn’t happen. They split the weight.

Tara called the Family together. Her call was like a tug at each and every one of them. She never used her voice. Instead she tugged at their lives, their essence, until they came to her.

Could she snap it?  There was a time when Bruce didn’t think so, but after what he’d felt her do to him, he wasn’t sure anymore. .

He realized how powerful she was, how dangerous she could be if she lost her grip on reality. If she became power hungry and shifted her focus from the pack to herself.

“The Assassins are close,” she said. Bruce felt the fear ripple through the Family. Some of them had lost more than others.

“But Dwayne has tabs on them, and we will know what will happen. We will know when to run. When to fight. They have not found us yet.”

The Assassins worked with human minds. They found shifters through humans. They searched human minds, and if the humans knew about them, the assassins could pick up on that and track them down. There was a reason Tara insisted they kill whoever found out about them.

To a point, Bruce agreed. It was kill or be killed. The fact that the humans were only a middleman didn’t make a difference.

But when it came to his people, his town, he would never let that happen to them. That was why he could never risk any of them knowing, especially not Jenna.

He couldn’t let her go the way her father had. Because that was what he suspected happened to him. After Jenna had told him the stories about her childhood. The stories her father used to tell, he would have been enough point out a shifter to an assassin. And that wouldn’t do.

“Bruce,” Tara said and he turned to her. “I hope you realize what this means.”

Bruce nodded. He knew exactly.

“If there is one human that knows about us, we will kill them all,” she said. Bruce’s body went cold.

“All of them?”

She nodded. “We’re not taking chances. They are nothing to us.”

“They’re something to me.”

There was a collective groan from the group. Tara rolled her eyes.

“That’s not our fault, is it? You insisted on staying down there instead of keeping to yourself the way we do. We’re not going to let you stand in our way. If I see there’s something that needs to be done, I will let the Family do it. And if you turn and fight, we will fight you too.”

Bruce took a breath to argue, but instead he nodded. He understood. He disagreed, but he understood. And there was no way any of them would find out what he was, or where he went, so that wouldn’t be a problem. He wouldn’t have to choose between his pack and his people.

But if it came down to it, Bruce knew who he would choose.

He banished the thought as soon as it came to mind. Tara could smell emotion, and a thought like that didn’t come without emotion. He didn’t want her to pick up on it.