Bite of the Moon: Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance Boxed Set (52 page)

“Andi, are you all right?” Mac sounded far away. “Please answer me.”

Chapter Nine

“Sweetheart?” Mac’s somber voice was drenched with concern. “Open your eyes.”

Andi awoke.

Mac sat at her side with his legs off the mattress. He leaned over her with a glass of water poised in his hand.

“You’re not going to throw that water in my face, are you?”

“No.” A warm smile made the tiny lines around his eyes fan. “Your lips are dry. I want you to have a drink.”

Licking her lips, she noticed how parched they were. She hoisted herself onto her elbows. “Why am I so thirsty?”

“The pheromones of my bite burned through every cell of your body.”

“How long did I sleep?”

He extended his hand. “A couple of hours.”

She reached for the water and emptied the glass in one gulp, and immediately gave it back to him. “Would you get me more?”

Mac rose and walked to the sink to refill the glass. On his way to the kitchen, he opened the front door. A cool draft blew in. “Aside from being thirsty, how do you feel?”

Peeking beneath the sheet, she realized she was still naked. She wriggled her fingers and toes. “I feel fine—completely normal.”

Returning to the bed, he sat beside her and handed the water to her. “Normal as you knew it is over. Let’s get you acclimated to the new normal as soon as possible.”

Taking her time, she sipped the second glass.

“Hurry.” Mac looked as excited as a little kid waiting for the adults to wake on Christmas morning.

“Why?” Still thirsty, she wanted more water.

“I want to slip outdoors while it’s dark.”

“I would like another glass of water, please.”

“You can have all the water you want, lapped directly from the river.”

Shaking her head, she growled. “No, Mac. No more hiking. Not now.”

He laughed and took hold of her wrist as he pulled the sheet away. “Come on. Get up.”

Clutching at the sheet, she snarled. “I’m sleepy! Let me stay in bed.”

“You can sleep all day if you want to, but we need to do this now.”

“Do what?” She was terribly grouchy. “I need sleep.”

His hold on her wrist relaxed. “Look at your hand.”

Her gaze fixed on her hand. “So? What did you want me to see?” The flesh shimmered. For a second, fur covered the back of her hand. The palm widened into a big padded paw and long ivory claws sprouted from where her fingernails had been. “Whoa! Look at this. Already? I thought this process might be a gradual thing that would take months or even years to accomplish.”

“Nope. Essentially, it’s magic.”

“Magic?” Tipping her paw toward the firelight, she studied the changes. “I wish I had a scientific explanation for this.”

“Maybe magic is just the only word we have for processes that can’t be explained by science. All I know is, you’re more than ready for your first shift. Your hands have been flickering back and forth between fingers and paws for the last forty minutes.”

She planted her palm on the mattress and watched as a furry paw replaced her hand. “I’m going to be huge!”

“You’re going to be a silvertip grizzly like me.”

“I always hoped I’d end up with a powerful man.” She laughed. “I just wasn’t thinking about the sort of power that could rip the lid off a dumpster.”

“Being a bear is pure freedom.” He coaxed her off the mattress. “Find out for yourself.”

She slipped out of bed, the sheet trailing in her wake.

He grabbed the sheet and tossed it back on the bed. Gathering her into his arms, he kissed her lips. “Ready?”

“I’m not sure. What do I need to do?”

“Look into my eyes. Relax. You’re bonded to me now. As your mate, I am your mentor, at least in the beginning. Open your heart and trust me. All you have to do is take a deep breath and let it happen.”

Her heart hammered in her chest and her knees trembled. “I feel strange.”

Mac’s face began to change. His nose widened and a muzzle protruded from his face. His ears shifted higher on his head and became rounder. Golden-brown fur washed across his features. In a crackling
swoosh
of color and motion, he transformed into a bear.

Her body tingled and, as if magnetized to an irresistible force, transformed as well. A pinch, a crackle of bone, and a heartbeat later, Andi found herself lumbering around the floor on all fours, feeling as powerful as a bull. The transmutation took place with astonishing ease.

Making eye contact with Mac, she gazed directly into his eyes.

He stared back.
We can’t use human speech, but we have a type of instinctual telepathy.

She opened her muzzle and a loud snort
came out.

Let’s have a little adventure.
He led her out the open door into the darkness. The moon had set and blue-green Venus, the morning star, glowed brightly on the ridgeline. Padding down the steps, he headed for the dirt road. As soon as they were on the graded path, he loped at a brisk pace.

She sprinted to catch up. Her big, sure-footed paws seemed incapable of tripping in the dark. Glancing around, she noticed that, despite the shadows, her world seemed to be in sharp focus. Every pebble on the path shone in clear detail. The feeling of being in a big, strong body amazed her. Her heart pounded from the thrill of the situation as much as from the physical demands of running in bear form.

In little time, they reached the highway. Mac stopped to check for cars. At this hour, of course, there were none. He padded across the road and climbed over the side of the ravine. She followed, highly conscious that they were crossing the spot where they had first met.

Mac turned to grunt in acknowledgment.

She growled back. Who knew a mishap in a storm would lead to all this?

Hopping from boulder to boulder, they quickly reached the bottom of the ravine. On the riverbank, their paws pressed prints into the damp silt, obscuring the scars left behind by the crane.

Striding into the river, Mac splashed around and then lowered his head to drink. She waded into the icy water beside him and lapped up pure water with her very long tongue. Lifting her head, she licked Mac’s face as well. A shiver of pleasure rippled over his brushy coat.

Taking long strides, Mac led her farther into the tumbling water. She followed, her paws gripping mossy stones with ease. Like a pair of titans, they strolled upriver, relishing every new scent and sight. The ravine filled with chatter and song as the morning’s first birds skimmed the surface of the river.

Rounding the bend, Mac snorted and looked skyward. The silhouette of the summit loomed ahead. In the east, a golden ribbon of sunlight brightened the sky. A new day had arrived. Without need of words, she knew they had to return to the station. In silence and at the same moment, both she and Mac turned and went back the way they had come.

Mac walked close, affectionately bumping his shoulder against hers. Every now and then, he turned to glide his muzzle against hers or blow a puff of warm breath across her ears.

The presence of a mate at her side felt so right, her heart flooded with joy. This wasn’t exactly what her mother would have asked her to do with her life, but she had the strong sense that her mother was looking down smiling.

The End

Author’s Note

Did you enjoy meeting Michael MacBrun and Andi Brunell? Would you like to meet some more MacBrun bear shifters? Mac and Andi are a happily mated pair, but their lives together are just getting started. There’s a lot more to their story. Andi hasn’t lost her ambitions to refurbish the Bluebell Motor Lodge, but they are going to need a lot of help. Mac’s billionaire-financier twin brother is going to stick his bad-boy alpha-bear muzzle right in the middle of their business and stir the honey pot. Wait until you meet Hudson MacBrun. This playboy’s arrogance is unBearable! A private helicopter? Custom-tailored cashmere suits from Paris? Who the hell does this guy think he is? Find out what happens when a humble case of mistaken identity turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to this spoiled alpha billionaire, in
MacBrun 2
, coming 2016.

About Katalina Leon

Katalina Leon is an artist and author who can't commit to a single genre. Her favorite playgrounds are historical, sci-fi, contemporary, and most of all paranormal realms. Lately, she has wolf-shifters on the brain. Katalina brings a sense of adventure and a touch of the mystical to erotic romance. She believes there's a daring heroine inside every woman who wants to take a wild ride with a strong worthy hero.

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More from Katalina Leon

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, book 7, Black Hills Wolves, Decadent Publishing.

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, book 25, Black Hills Wolves, Decadent Publishing.

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, Scorpio, Fated Desires Publishing.

Coming soon:

The Virgin and Her Wolf, 1Nightstand, Decadent Publishing.

MacBrun 2

Ravenscroft-Vampire Picnic-Tales of an Irish Vampire. Free read available January 6th

A BBW PARANORMAL SHAPE SHIFTER ROMANCE

(Sons of Fenris MC – Book 1)

Erika Masten

CHAPTER ONE

This whole plan wasn’t just a bad idea. It was the mother of bad ideas. It was the fanged and furred, snarly, growly, tear-a-girl’s-throat-out father of all bad ideas. And it was all Tabitha’s doing, with no one else to blame.

Maybe that fact wasn’t entirely apparent just from the way Jiminy, the overdressed club manager cum psycho concierge, bellowed at her all the time. “Taffy! Taffy, front and center!” Tabitha knew well enough he meant her.

Taffy? Seriously? In the three weeks she’d worked at the dive strip bar, he’d only gotten Tabitha’s name right twice, by accident. But
Taffy
? What was it about the plus-size but still athletic waitress who made a point of never smiling and never flirting that came off as a Taffy? Was it the blond hair? Because that wasn’t a bleach job, and she didn’t have a My Little Pony tramp stamp or even neon pink nails with matching frosted eyeshadow, honest.

Perhaps, then, her folly should have been clear when the manager pounded his fist on the bar and shouted again over the suggestively thrumming music. “Taffy, get your ass over to VIP. You’re serving.”

Instead of really listening to that order—paying attention to where Jiminy was sending her—Tabitha fumed as she glared over her shoulder at the red-faced man. His fleshy, clean-shaven cheeks practically glowed over the stiff collar of his dress shirt. Bluster in a business suit. She had to wonder if he actually got those shirts starched, the ones he wore with his absurdly professional navy blue suits and ties. A little overdressed for presiding over bikers and petty thugs buying cheap beer and lap dances on a hole in the wall on the bad side of town.

Tabitha stood behind the bar with Jim Neece—Jiminy, the anti-conscience of the bar patrons—not ten feet away, as she wiped down the poorly washed glasses for the night. He scanned the crowd for his staff and skimmed right past her. Story of her life. The girl was always just one more warm body, someone to serve drinks, someone to kick around, a notation on the memo line of a foster care check, but no one who warranted actual notice or a name of her own.

Shaking her head with an irritated swish of her ponytail along her shoulder blades, the waitress whipped her dishrag down onto the bar and snatched up her tray. She used up every ounce of restraint she had resisting the urge to smack Jiminy in the back of the head with the plastic disk.

“Taffy!”

“I’m going,” she said, snapping back at the man she knew would forget her minutes later. “And it’s Tabitha.”

Jiminy didn’t seem to notice that last comment or her use of the tray to shield herself from his scrutiny as she slipped behind and past him. For the last few nights, he’d been after her over her waitressing uniform not being tight enough or small enough. Like a thin white tank top and a pair of flouncy black shorts qualified as a uniform. Only in a strip club. As it was, one good yank from an aggressive patron, and Tabitha was in danger of joining the lineup of strippers. She just didn’t see that working out for a girl with a little too much curve and, by her own estimation, at least one too many X’s on the size tag of her clothing. Not that the crowd at Skin seemed to mind; all the most popular dancers there were big girls. Go figure.

The fact that Skin even had a VIP section, a cordoned off alcove centered on its own stripper pole, seemed ludicrous to Tabitha as she dodged and wove her way through the club’s obstacle course of booths, tables, and handsy patrons. A maximum security block would have been more in order. It was a biker bar, for chrissake. Not just any biker bar, obviously, or she wouldn’t have taken a job there even to keep herself from starving. Getting into Skin as either a dancer or a waitress were the only options Tabitha had if she was going to find the men she was looking for without becoming one of their victims—and even this route posed its risks.

And
that
was what Tabitha should have kept in focus as she hurried up the steps into the VIP section with her high heels clacking loudly on the black tile. The floor reflected dingy flashes of color from the neon stage lights. She tended to keep her eyes trained on her order pad and those lights, to discourage patrons who equated eye contact with a come hither invitation to grope.

How long do you think you can keep this up, Tabitha?
She was hardly earning anything because she wouldn’t put out for these creeps. Carrying a baseball bat just to get back and forth from the club to her car. Did she really think getting tangled up with the Sons was going to change anything? Once a throwaway kid, always a throwaway kid. Maybe they just didn’t want or need another mongrel in their pack.

Anxious questions and doubts swirled in Tabitha’s head, but the only one she asked out loud was, “What can I get you?”

Avoiding eye contact as usual, she had asked the first pair of black motorcycle boots she’d found, on the VIP patron sitting closest to the steps up into the alcove. When she didn’t immediately hear an answer shouted gruffly over the music, Tabitha braced herself, pen poised. This was usually the pause before the smarmy pick-up line about whether or not she was on the menu. On bad nights, the rowdier clientele went straight for lewd propositions and graphic descriptions of what they’d gladly do to her in the alley behind the bar. With the way the guys in Skin behaved, a girl could have gotten to think that chubby was the new
in
thing. Or maybe that was just the nature of strip clubs, with the men there hitting on anything with a vagina.

Another few seconds passed with no response. That was the point when Tabitha looked up, and realized, and really truly entirely understood what a bad fucking idea all this was. With shaggy raven hair and shoulders out to there, Mick Lebeau, president of the city’s most brutal motorcycle gang—sorry, motorcycle
club
—caught Tabitha’s breath and heartbeat with the terrible intensity of a wordless black glare.

It was him. Them. The Sons. Shifters. Wolves.

Tabitha, for all the cruelty and beatings she’d taken in her life, had never flinched back just from a look, until then. His eyes did seem utterly black, though she knew they must have been very dark brown, set beneath a firm brow and careless waves of hair. Even knowing the man’s name, who he was and what he was, Tabitha hadn’t expected… any of this. Not the gleaming eyes or how much like prey she’d feel with them trained on her. Not the stony expression or the wide-set planes of his handsome face darkened by bristle so fine it was hard to tell stubble from shadow. Not the eerie motionlessness that so reminded her of a wolf studying a helpless deer.

A helpless deer. Yes, that was exactly what Tabitha felt like as she glanced quickly around her, judging how much space she had between this predator and herself. They were there with him, several more of the Sons, all watching one of the girls slithering up and down the VIP pole. Tabitha recognized Garik, the gang’s enforcer, black hair and light eyes and also too handsome to be entirely human. She had never seen that one live up to his role or his reputation, at least not in Skin, and that was just what put Tabitha on edge about him. He was never gratuitously violent with the other customers, and he never fucked any of the dancers openly for the entertainment of his pack brothers. Instead, the much burlier Jake and Vince, and the
truly
massive Ox when he was around, embodied pure biker trouble. With those three cracking skulls while Lebeau presided, no one forgot Skin was SoF territory.

Mick still didn’t say anything as Tabitha leaned away from him degree by degree, poised to flee, while he sat with only that broad chest expanding and relaxing with each measured breath. Beneath his unzipped leather vest, his gray t-shirt bore the image she had studied all those nights alone in her rented room designing this ill-conceived plan. The snarling wolf’s head that glowered back at her as silently as Mick Lebeau was the symbol of the SoF, the Sons of Fate.

In that moment, Tabitha was terrified that the man could tell she knew what SoF really stood for: Sons of Fenris. Descendants of the wolf Fenrir. The most savage breed of shifters hidden among—and preying upon—man. As beautiful as wolves, as wild, but more deadly for their mix of human blood and human vice with animal power and animal appetite.

Tabitha wasn’t sure which was more distressing, the flicker of crude appreciation in Lebeau’s dark eyes as his glance sized her up from ponytail to heels and back again, or the stony chill of his voice. “Jiminy took his sweet fucking time sending you back here.”

The first time Tabitha actually smiled at anyone in Skin and it was Mick Lebeau, because he terrified her and she had no other way to hide it. “I’m new, so I’m usually his last choice to work VIP. Guess he sent me ‘cause everyone else was busy.”

“He sent you because I told him to send you.”

Run
, the good sense she had left screamed in her head.

Tabitha’s mouth went numb and awkward, her heartbeat throbbing hard enough to pulse in her temples and her tongue and the base of her throat. “Why’s that?” she asked in a breathless rasp before her brain could stop her.

The seconds pounded away in Tabitha’s head while Lebeau watched her with narrowed eyes. It couldn’t have been more obvious he was studying her reactions, reading her, maybe even gauging which way she’d flee when he pounced.

Run
.

“Skin is ours,” Lebeau told her with a meaningful stare that drove his suggestion right into her belly. He meant both Skin the club and the skin that was hers. Deep inside Tabitha, a primal part of her that she did not yet understand stirred at the suggestion, wolf to wolf, perhaps. But this was not the right shifter, the right man, not the first, the one who….

Mick reclaimed that small sliver of Tabitha’s attention when he said, “You want to drink here, dance here, work here,
or fuck here
, it’s because the Sons say you can.” Every muscle in Tabitha’s body tensed when Mick included “or fuck here,” and he reacted to the flicker of anxiety she felt pass over her face by breathing out an amused chuckle. He held out his hands as though presenting the obvious. “And I’m the first son. Club president.”

The girl swallowed the knot in her throat. If she was going to stick to the plan, this was the moment to correct him. He could call himself club president all he wanted. What he really meant was pack alpha. Reveal that bit of knowledge when most humans didn’t even know shifters existed, let alone any of the terms for how a species organized itself, and he’d know Tabitha wasn’t there by accident. But what would Mick Lebeau and the Sons do with this little girl who knew their secret and had gone to an awful lot of trouble to find them
and join them
—at least long enough for them to trigger her own transformation?

For chrissake, run, Tabitha!

She took a deep, bracing breath before saying, “Sounds like you’re the man who gets only the good stuff Jiminy keeps under the bar. Black label?” Tabitha replayed her own voice in her head. Had she sounded impressed enough? Coy enough? Subtle enough? Or could he tell she was scared out of her head and just wanted to get away from him?
Hell, could he smell it on her?

The massive shifter sat back slightly on the curved faux leather couch. “Bring the bottle.”

Tabitha nodded and spun hard to head for the bar, even though she had no intention of serving the alpha either Jack Daniels or herself on that plastic platter. Later, when she’d calmed down and faced the prospect of her wallflower doormat church mouse life stretching out year upon year ahead of her, she knew she might regret this, but not at that moment. The instinct to flee was pounding in her head, and maybe
that
was her latent wolf finally shouting loudly enough to make itself heard over the club music and Tabitha’s hormonal desperation. Something inside Tabitha knew better than to stand face to face with Mick Lebeau and think this was going to go down anything like she’d planned.

Having ducked behind the bar and traded her serving tray for her purse and keys, without so much as a glance Jiminy’s way, the woman used the distraction of darkness and music and the haze of lust to skirt the wall of the club unseen. Tabitha headed toward the hallway to the bathrooms and the back exit. She didn’t care how many strange men she smacked into as she pushed her way through the knots of patrons waiting for the men’s room or sneaking a cigarette in the corridor. She didn’t care that they cussed and leered at her. And she didn’t look at who was slipping in the back door as she flung it open.

His scent hit Tabitha a split second before his body did, and that wasn’t because of any special wolf senses. Latents didn’t have those senses activated. She just knew that scent, really knew it, from spending half her damn childhood cuddled up to it. For years, that smell had meant warmth and protection in group homes that were little better than holding pens for unwanted bastards. He exuded a mixture of rich earth and fresh loam sweetened with musky amber that could not be covered with the lingering biker cologne of gasoline, oil, and cheap women.

Tabitha’s body clenched: her throat, her chest, her stomach, her suddenly burning hot pussy. And that was before she stumbled back on her heels and landed on the floor on her butt, to look up at him.

From so far down below the man, before the shifter, Tabitha panted out her panic and the surge of lust she felt heating her skin. Slowly, her gaze climbed from his scuffed black boots to his faded and oil-stained jeans, up his hard-muscled thighs. No way Tabitha’s attention should have lingered on the telltale outline of his cock pointing up long and thick at a slight angle to his zipper but no way she could help it, either. The enticing, threatening swell of his cock brought back memories of the last time she’d seen him, how badly she’s wanted him, how badly he’d hurt her, and how the events of that night had set Tabitha on the path that now led her to Skin and the Sons. That led her to him, but hadn’t she always thought it would? Hadn’t she
hoped
?