Her Warriors
Authors: Bianca D'Arc
Tags: #vampire, #shapeshifter, #bbw, #selkie, #cat shifter, #romance bbw
String of Fate
by
Table of Contents
Love triangles are always more
interesting when they come equipped with claws…and
flippers?
Beau has anger issues, but not
when he’s around Jacki. The fierce tiger shifter has been following
her around like a puppy, but she hasn’t taken notice of him. Until
now.
No matter how long Geir has lived in the
States, he’s still the odd man out. A tiger shifter native of
Iceland, he is a Master of his craft, training other warriors the
skills he has perfected. When he sees Jacki for the first time, he
knows she is the one for him.
Jacki is the privileged daughter
of a prominent shifter Clan. Most of her relatives are lion
shifters, so she knows how to handle cats on the prowl, but she is
a much rarer selkie—a seal shifter—imbued with magic and surrounded
by mystery. When an opportunity arises to step into a key role in
shifter society, she is uncertain, but willing to try. And when
she’s told she doesn’t have to choose between the two tigers, but
rather, can have them both, she is more than intrigued.
But someone is stalking their path and they
must work together to nullify the danger, all while trying to
figure out a complicated relationship that has all three of them
questioning fate.
Warning: This story contains
graphic language and menage a trois between two tiger shifters and
one very special selkie woman. Rawr.
Dedication
Many, many thanks to my friend, Peggy
McChesney, for taking the time to humor a crazed writer. Your help
and support have been invaluable, as well as your friendship.
I think this time, I also have to thank the
characters that just wouldn’t let me end what had been planned as
the
String of Fate TRILOGY
from the very beginning. Somehow,
when I finished writing
Jacob’s Ladder
, these three
characters just wouldn’t let me go. They wanted their story told
and I didn’t get the usual downtime I take between books. No, these
characters just kept doing stuff in my head to the point where I
feel almost as if the two books are one giant book in my heart.
Many thanks to Dad for putting up with
canned/frozen dinners and eating out a lot, because I was hijacked
by my fictional characters, and unable to interact with my family
in the real world for a few weeks. The really sad part is, I’m not
sure he actually noticed. LOL! Guess I’m not much of a cook anyway,
so he was probably better off.
This book is a work of fiction. The names,
characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s
imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be
construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead,
actual events, locale or organizations is entirely
coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to
other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If
you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not
purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Copyright © 2014
Bianca
D’Arc
Cover Art by
Valerie
Tibbs
Smashwords Edition November 2014.
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this
book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles and reviews.
Prologue
Geir Falkes, training master of those who
would try to become Royal Guards for the queen of the
pantera
noir
, was stuck. Not physically. There was little in this
mortal realm that could slow down the man who was master of his own
body and trained others to be the same. No, he was stuck about what
he should do.
The Nyx—the queen he had chosen to serve—had
been running all her life, until just recently. Last week, they had
defeated her enemy in a fierce battle on a mountain ridge in North
Carolina. This week, he was on another mountain, upstate New York,
checking out a house he had just bought.
The house had a giant barn on the grounds.
Few knew, that the so-called
barn
was really a
state-of-the-art dojo and training center. It was the perfect place
for him to teach new Royal Guards and work with those who were
already qualified to protect the Nyx. Now that her most troublesome
enemy had been dealt with, she was able to settle in one place. In
fact, she had just bought the house near the top of this very same
mountain, and all the land around it.
The place had been set up by the former king
of tiger shifters, Frederick, and his wife, Candis. They had been
in exile here in New York for decades, but their fortunes had
recently changed. A new king had fought Frederick’s
brother—something Frederick could not do—and won. As it turned out,
the new king was an old friend of Geir’s, a former Royal Guard
named Mitch.
Mitch had mated the tiger princess,
Frederick and Candis’s only daughter, Gina. Shortly thereafter, the
queen Geir served had mated a human warrior. Everybody was settling
down, two by two. It felt like only Geir was still alone.
He finally had a home of his own, and no
mate to share it with.
He had met a woman recently. She was a
fascinating woman that made his tiger claw at his insides to be
nearer to her. But she was already being courted by another of
Geir’s kind. Another tiger shifter. A soldier with anger issues,
named Beau Champlain.
Beau was everything Geir was not. Younger.
American. Handsome. Easy with his words. Geir had watched him
interact with her—Jacki, was her name—and Geir had been envious for
one of the few times in his life. There was no doubt Geir held
higher rank among their people than Beau, but in this instance,
Beau had it all over the Icelandic tiger who had spent all his life
learning how to fight and teaching others to do the same.
Geir wasn’t suave. He wasn’t sophisticated.
He wasn’t very experienced with women outside of the encounters his
inner tiger drove him to initiate. Geir lived the life of an
ascetic for the most part. He had studied hard to become the master
of fighting arts suitable to train the Royal Guard of the Nyx. And
that was about all he had going for him, which didn’t seem like a
whole lot when he was interested in a woman as amazing as Jacki
Kinkaid.
“The house is very large,” Geir said to Tad
Miller, one of the grown Miller children who had been raised on the
property Geir had just bought. Tad was overseeing the transfer of
the house and grounds for his parents, who were in Iceland.
“It had to be big with so many cubs in the
family, plus all the strays my folks took in.” Tad smiled as they
walked through the empty house. “This was a good home. Filled with
love and learning. Discipline and care. I think that permeates the
building still, and maybe one day you’ll raise your own cubs
here.”
Geir wished that were so. But if he never
got off his duff and found a way to speak to a woman—one special
woman in particular—he would have a hard time fulfilling that
dream.
“I’d have to find a mate first,” Geir
answered noncommittally. “If the Goddess so blesses me.”
“No reason to think She won’t.” Tad smiled
jovially. “I met Mandy young. In truth, we knew each other from the
time we were both children, but we didn’t recognize the fact that
we were mates until we were older. When the time was right. And the
Lady has already blessed us with our first cub. The first of many,
we hope.” Tad gazed into the distance for a moment, a smile on his
face, before returning to the matter at hand. “As you can see,
there’s plenty of room in the main house. We’ve used this building
as home, hospital, and boarding house for some of my dad’s top
students, among other things. You get the idea—it can serve many
purposes. And there’s lots of room to expand.” It was clear the
building had been well-used and much loved.
“Your parents don’t ever intend to come back
to the States?” Geir asked. He knew the elder Millers had moved
back to Iceland and most of their grown children had become Royal
Guards for the new tiger king. It was Mr. Miller who had trained
all the Royal Guards for the tiger Clan—both before leaving Iceland
and after he had chosen to go into exile with the true king.
It was more or less the same role Geir
played for the Nyx, and this house and grounds would work nicely
for his purposes. It had been built by tiger shifters and Geir
himself was a tiger shifter, even though he had devoted his life to
the smaller, more mysterious
pantera noir
Clan.
“They’ll only come back for visits now, I
think,” Tad answered. “Their true home is in Iceland, but they
raised us kids as Americans, so the younger generation might want
to come back occasionally. Which is why we’ll sell you everything
except the small cabin down at the lower end of the property, and
my house, which is right next to it. Mandy and I are going to try
splitting our time between here and Iceland for a while and figure
out where we want to raise our cubs. Her parents went back to the
old country too, but we were both raised here and it’s a bigger
adjustment for us.”
“I can understand that,” Geir agreed. “I was
born in Iceland, but left at a young age. I’ve lived many places
and though I could return to my birthplace now, it probably
wouldn’t feel like home.”
“Well, this is a good place to settle,” Tad
observed. “It was good for us. We were happy here and I hope you
will be too. Come on, let me show you the dojo.”
They walked out of the main house and toward
the very large barn that was set at some distance from the house.
Geir liked the climate here. It was early autumn, and dusk was
almost upon them. The air was cool and crisp at this elevation and
Geir knew there would be plenty of snow come winter. He liked
snow.
He had left Iceland barely a man, and
wandered for a time before settling down with his aunt’s adopted
Clan. The
pantera noir
had made him welcome even though he
was a golden tiger, a
tigre d’or
. With the tiger monarchy in
chaos for the past few decades, Geir had had no alternative but to
seek his fate elsewhere. He had found purpose for his life and all
his training, in protecting one of the most vulnerable of the big
cat monarchs.
Until the defeat of her greatest enemy just
last week, Ria—the young Nyx—had lived her life constantly on the
run. Never staying in one place too long, she needed
round-the-clock protection by the most skilled of elite fighters.
Royal Guards.
Geir had been training Ria’s Guards for
years now and he took pride in his work. His goal was to turn out
warriors that would think outside the box and use a myriad of
different skills and adaptations to keep their charge safe from
harm. They had done their job well and Ria had been able to
confront her enemy with her Guard at her side.
The battle had been ferocious. The mage who
had been hunting Ria for years had an affinity for water and the
creatures that lived in it. His strange tactics had worked for a
while, but then Jacki Kinkaid had stepped in and done her magic. It
was pure and good, and the tone of it sang through Geir’s heart
long after her spell had done its work.
Geir had admired Jacki’s courage and
marveled at her strength, even as he was staggered by her beauty.
She had the kind of beauty that stunned. It shone from within, and
the light in her soulful brown eyes was that of a creature who saw
the good in all of creation. If she wasn’t already, Geir had no
doubt that Jacki would soon become a priestess of the Lady. Her
soul was that pure. That good.
