Chasing His Bunny (3 page)

Looking into the rearview
mirror, he met her big, baby blue eyes and felt his chest clench at
the same time as his wolf yipped happily, tongue hanging
loose.  Just looking at her had his inner animal - and his
cock - jumping to attention.

"Somewhere safe."

"That's not an answer," her brother
said grumpily.  Brady, that was his name.  Steele could
already tell that Brady was going to be a problem.  The big,
dark-haired bastard turned halfway in his seat to look at Bethany.
 "You shouldn't talk to him.  You don't want to encourage
him with this 'mate' bullshit."

The steering wheel creaked.

"Chill, Steele," Jordan
said, his voice a deep rumble.  He sighed, looking over his
shoulder at Brady to explain.  "It's not nonsense.  If he
says she's his mate, she's his mate.  It's not like he wants
one, so he has no reason to lie."

Bethany hissed, looking
affronted at the news that Steele didn't want a mate - even if she
hadn't seemed particularly welcoming of the idea.  He found
that encouraging.  On the other hand, his wolf was less than
amused by Brady's comments, which wasn't good.  He was already
having trouble controlling his animal side after all the fighting
and meeting his mate, then being rejected by his mate, and now
being in close confines with his mate but unable to touch
her.  The last thing they all needed was his wolf taking over
while he was in the driver's seat and they were on the
run.

"What the fuck does
that
mean
though?"  His mate said plaintively.  Next to her,
her sister was sitting in silence, her eyes and ears taking in
everything.  It was actually kind of creepy how quiet she was
compared to her siblings. Then again, as the youngest, maybe she
just never got a chance to get a word in edgewise. She was very
pretty, with big blue eyes just like his mate’s, but brown hair,
and she didn’t have the same kind of presence that Bethany
did.

"If he doesn't want a
mate, then what's the problem?"  Brady asked irritably. 
Steele gritted his teeth.

"The problem is he doesn't get a
choice now that he's found her," Kasim said, his brow furrowing as
he looked at the man sitting next to him and then the two women
behind him in confusion.  "Didn't your parents explain how
mating works?  How long have you been in that
compound?"

"No," said Bethany at the same time
Brady said, "Seven years."

A chill went through
Steele, followed swiftly by fury again as his wolf howled. 
Seven
years
?  They weren't that old... they must have been taken
when they were just fucking children!  Holy shit!

"Our parents are human," Bethany said,
resting her cheek against the top of Bailey's head.  Steele's
wolf calmed slightly at the sight.  He liked seeing how
protective and mothering she was over her sister.

Until he realized where
his thoughts had gone, and then he just wanted to kick himself all
over again. Mothering? Since when had he ever been interested in
how good a mother a female would be?  He didn't want a
mate!  Or pups! He’d just reacted without thinking when he’d
scented her! 

Although, like Kasim said,
he didn't really have a choice now, and as long as he was going to
have a mate, at least she was a sexy, little, blonde bombshell
package with some serious curves and a mean right hook... Things
could definitely be worse. Steele already knew he was going to end
up bowing to his wolf on this, it was just going to be a little bit
of mental adjustment on his part. Although, since she was so
independent and feisty, maybe it meant that this was finally his
chance to get the kind of mate he wanted. That perked him up quite
a bit. All he had to do was wait for the mating bond to bring her
to him, and it wouldn’t matter how autocratic, dictatorial, and
pushy he was. Unlike other women he’d been attracted to, who hadn’t
been interested in a man like him, she would be just as attracted
to him as he was to her. There would be no getting around
it.

Then he realized what she
had said.  Human?  How was that possible?  He could
smell the disbelief and shock rising off of his packmates. 
Emotions had to be very strong to be discernible, but then again,
what Bethany had just said was impossible. Although shifter genes
could be recessive and passed down along family lines, one of the
parents
must
be a
shifter for any of those genes to actually show up in the
children.

"Ah.  Hmm. 
Well, okay then."  Kasim cleared his throat, and Jordan turned
back around, apparently satisfied that Kasim now had things under
control.  The big grizzly looked poleaxed as he shook his
head, happy to hand things over to the lion.

Kasim decided to ignore the
impossible and to focus on the important matter that he did
understand.  "Fated mates are... well they're special. 
Any two shifters can mate, if they're willing to commit to each
other, and they share a claiming bite.  Doing that means that
you've given up on finding your fated mate and, honestly, it's how
most of us mate.  But if you
do
 find your fated mate,
well... your animal will know immediately, and they won't accept
anyone else after that.  Not unless you're already in love
with someone else and your animal had accepted them, and then you'd
better share the claiming bite with your chosen mate real fast
before your animal can change its mind.  The ah..."
 Kasim glanced warily at Brady sitting next to him, whose
expression was becoming harder by the second.  "The ah...
biological imperative to claim your fated mate becomes harder and
harder to resist until it's said to be impossible."

"Biological imperative?"
 Brady asked, looking furious. Obviously he’d picked up on the
fact that it meant the drive to consummate the mating.
Unfortunately, Steele’s erection wasn’t going to be going anywhere
anytime soon until he could sink it into his mate. Even then, it
was going to keep coming back, just as hard and just as demanding,
until they shared the claiming bite. Those commercials for calling
a hotline after an erection of four hours or more? Yeah, totally
useless for shifters.

"Well, it doesn't matter,"
Bethany said from the back seat, her voice matter-of-fact.
 "He smells… delightful,” (understatement of the century) “but
other than that, it wasn't anything special, so obviously he's
wrong about the mate thing anyway."

"I'm not letting some asshole talk my
sister into bed just because he likes the way she smells!"
 Brady practically roared, over his sister's words.

Steele's wolf howled, and
his claws popped out of the ends of his fingers.  

"Everyone
shut up
," he
roared.  He was seconds away from losing it, and he hadn't
lost control since the first week he started shifting. 
Dammit.  His mate was already making him lose it.  If she
kept rejecting him, she was going to find herself hauled off over
his shoulder caveman-style.  Just thinking about it sent a
wave of satisfaction through him.  "We're going to the
airfield where a plane will pick us up and take us to my pack's
lands.  We can give you a crash course in shifter society
there."

And he would talk to his
boss and find out just what the hell was up.  If the lab had
somehow managed to create shifter genes in humans, the world was
about to change, and in a really bad way.

Chapter 2

"They didn't create shifter genes,
they just... woke them up."  Eli Mansfield, Steele's boss,
told him.  Fortunately Steele's tech team had been working on
getting documents and notes scanned and sent to Eli ever since
they'd taken the compound.  Once he'd heard Bethany's
assertion that her parents were human, Steele had ordered them to
concentrate on the notes about the siblings.

He knew a lot more about
his mate now.  The Bunson family - taken when Bethany was
barely eighteen years old.  The youngest, her sister, had only
been thirteen.  Unfortunately, he also now knew that her
parents were no longer alive.  They'd had a suspicious
accident the night the siblings had been taken.  Jordan had
gone to break the news, and it physically hurt Steele that he
couldn't be there... but this was too important.  They had to
understand what this Dr. Montgomery had done and why, and, most
importantly, who he was working for.  Because someone had
funded his work, and it wasn't the government.

About a year ago, Eli had been
contacted by the U.S. government, when scientists had started
reporting that their work was being stolen.  All of them had
been working on some kind of research involving shifters. 
What had started out as simple recovery had taken a major turn
today when they'd found the Bunson siblings.  The other
compounds hadn't had experiments; they'd just been guarding and
continuing the research.  Some of it was focused on military
uses, but a lot of it also seemed to be geared towards the diseases
which had devastated much of the smaller shifter population in the
past few years.  The smaller shifters, who turned into prey
animals, tended to be pretty insular and scientists had theorized
that inbreeding may have contributed to the spread of disease and
the general weakness of those shifter lines. 

The larger predator
shifters could be somewhat insular as well, but they didn't mind
mixing with humans as much, or with each other.  Most of them
didn't take it to the extreme like Steele did with his pack, but he
liked having a mixed grab bag of shifters around him, rather than
just wolves.  Especially since his pack was made up of both
fighters and other shifters who wanted to support the fight; no one
like his sisters would make it very far in his pack.  Everyone
was expected to pitch in and lend some kind of hand whenever shit
went down.  Either you were a soldier, or you contributed in
some way by healing, cooking, logistics, tech support... everyone
had a job.  Everyone was useful.  Or they left to find
another pack where they could sit on their laurels and have
everything handed to them. It didn’t matter their place in the pack
– unlike his parents’ pack where the alpha and his family
definitely received preferential treatment and rarely had to lift a
finger unless they wanted to.  Which was probably why his
sisters never visited Steele; they waited till he came to visit
their parents’ pack to see him.

"What do you mean, woke
them up?" Steele asked, confused.  His hands were balled into
fists as he tried to control his frustration.  Fortunately,
his wolf seemed to understand the need to stay in human form right
now.

They needed as much information as
possible to protect their mate.

"The Bunsons have shifter
genes, way back in their ancestry," Eli explained, looking down at
the notes he had in front of him.  "No one in their family has
shifted for generations, it looks like, but the genes are still
passed down.  If any of them had mated with a shifter, there's
a good chance their children would have been shifters, because of
that."

Shifter-human pairings had
a fifty-fifty chance of producing humans or shifters.
Shifter-shifter pairings had a one hundred percent chance, but the
children always came out as one or the other animal when the
shifter parents were different animals.

"But they didn't," Steele
said. 

"No."  Eli said, his
face grim.  Blond hair and bright, green eyes didn't usually
do brooding well, but right now Eli pulled it off.  "But it
doesn't seem to have mattered.  It appears this Dr. Montgomery
figured out how to unlock the shifter potential in their
genes.  The process sounds... painful."  Steele's wolf
howled internally.  He was going to need to go for a long run
tonight to let his poor wolf work off some of its frustrated
fury.

"So, what are they?"

"We're not sure."

"What do you mean you're not sure?"
 Steele's jaw creaked as he gritted his teeth.

Eli sighed, rubbing his hand over his
face, looking more tired than Steele had ever seen him
before.  Even though he was dressed in a suit, as always, he
looked... rumpled.  Which was highly unusual.

"From his notes, Montgomery says that
he successfully unlocked their potentials.  Plural.  On
their mother's side, they have bear ancestors.  On their
father's, rabbit and... turtle."  Eli's mouth twitched. 
There hadn't been turtle shifters in generations.  They'd been
among the first of the smaller shifters to die out, in
fact. 

Holy shit... if Montgomery had been
able to unlock long dormant genomes... it was a medical
breakthrough of the miraculous variety.  Although his methods
sure as hell left a lot to be desired.

"So... which one do they
change into?"  His mind boggled. How special were his mate and
her siblings? “Do you think they could change into all three?”
Normally, an impossibility, but the Bunsons were already
impossible.

"We're not sure.  The
notes aren't conclusive, but they
can
shift.  It's possible that
their animals aren't fully developed because of the way they were
created or they might be stunted because of the variety factor,
which could explain why Bethany doesn't know – or is able to deny -
she's your mate."

Steele groaned.  "Is it possible
to fix that?"

"No idea.  I'm sure
it will work out in the end though, Steele.  And you can
always apply your world-famous charm."  Eli's amused grin made
Steele want to punch the other man in his perfect,
movie-star-good-looks face.  Charm was Eli's forte, definitely
not Steele's.