Alice’s
Alphas
Wolf
Clan Shifters
Book
One
Ann
Gimpel
Dream Shadow Press
Release
Date:
3/29/16
41K words
Genre: Shifter Ménage Romance
One
virgin + three wolf shifters = e-reader ecstasy.
Book
Description:
It’s 1936. Thirty-year-old Alice
has given up on finding a husband. Between civil engineering and mountain
climbing, her interests are so masculine, she scares men away. A poor route
choice strands her—lost, hungry, and scared—next to Lon Chaney’s cabin deep in
the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Jed senses a woman stumbling down
the steep, inhospitable mountain behind his borrowed cabin. Her scent
tantalizes and excites him. Mates are scarce these days, and if his nose is
right, she’s his fated one. His and his two pack mates, that is, who are mercifully
gone at the moment. Jed crafts a careful strategy, knowing the mate bond might
not be enough to convince her to stay once she finds out it will link her to
all three of them—forever.
Alice adds Jed to her list of
problems when he melts out of the shadowed darkness. At first she declines his
offer of help, but he keeps talking until she ends up inside the cozy log cabin
in front of a roaring fire. His skilled hands and a shot of whiskey heat her
blood to molten, and her carefully tended world explodes into desperate hunger
to make love with the man rubbing her weary feet.
As caught up in lust as Alice, Jed
takes a chance. A big one. Will mating with her before disclosing everything
turn out to be a huge mistake?
Excerpt
from Alice’s Alphas:
Her breath
whistled loud in her ears. Brent had told her to hightail it for the car, but
she had a feeling something bad had happened to him. No matter how she felt
about him running off, it wasn’t right to just leave him. It had been dark for
hours, and she wondered how late it was. Even if she stumbled the few miles to
her car waiting next to Glacier Lodge, she was too tired to drive anywhere. The
lodge wasn’t any help. It wouldn’t open for the season for another couple of
months. There might be a phone inside, but she’d have to break in.
Alice considered
her options. If she made the lodge, she’d crawl into her car and fall on her
face from exhaustion. It would easily be mid-morning before she got back up
here to even begin searching for Brent. Survival in the mountains often hung by
a thread. She was the only one who knew where he was.
He may have
abandoned her, but she couldn’t do the same and desert him. Not and live with
herself afterward.
Alice moved toward
where she thought the trail was, intent on setting up a fireless camp to wait
out the night. She had enough food and a full water bottle. No tent or sleeping
bag, but she’d survived worse conditions. A fire would’ve been welcome, but she
couldn’t risk—
“Hey there. You.
Show yourself, man,” a deep voice called from behind her. Light flared,
illuminating the forest. Footsteps crunched over rocks and twigs as the person
approached.
Alice stiffened.
People looked at her build and assumed she was male. It had happened to her
before—and more than once. She considered running, but burdened with her heavy
boots, climbing hardware, and the moonless night, she didn’t want to chance a
headlong flight. Besides, the man might have a gun.
“Why should I?”
She spun to face him, ready for almost anything.
“What? You’re a
woman?”
Alice grasped her
ice axe in both hands. “Leave me alone,” she grunted through clenched teeth.
“I’m tired and my friend is...lost.”
“Whoa.” The man
held up both hands, one of which gripped a flashlight. “Put your axe down,
sweetheart. I’m not going to hurt you.” He was tall, maybe six-feet-four, with
straight, red-blonde hair. Despite his height, he had a slender build. A
well-defined jaw and sharp cheekbones suggested Nordic blood. It was tough to
tell in the reflected light, but his eyes looked blue.
“Go back inside.
You can see I’m not any kind of threat. I’d head down, but I need to be moving
at first light to hunt for my friend.”
The man cocked his
head to one side. “Big guy with red hair?”
Terror gripped
her. Her throat narrowed. Breathing became a struggle. Since she couldn’t
manage words, she nodded and steeled herself to hear the words, he’s dead.
Alice bit her lower lip and gazed mutely at the stranger.
“Look, I think
he’ll be okay. We were out hunting and heard something big falling. Thought it
was the deer we’d shot at. Turned out to be your friend—”
“Awk! You shot
Brent!”
The man waved his
hands in front of him. “Calm down, woman. Christ, you’re strung tighter than a
fiddle. Take a couple of deep breaths. No, we didn’t shoot him. Your friend was
unconscious because he hit his head on a rock, so we carried him back here. My
two buddies took the horses and hauled him down to the lodge. We only had three
horses which is why I’m still here. Anyway, they were planning to drive him to
the hospital in Bishop. I don’t expect they’ll be back much before the middle
of tomorrow.”
At least that
explains why there’re no horses here.
Alice shook her
head, digesting the information. “I need to get moving, then. I can drive to
the hospital and meet them.”
The man held out a
hand. “I’m Jed. Jed Starnes. You look beat. There’re mountain cats on the
prowl. Shot one a few hours ago. They get worse at night. More aggressive. You
got a gun?”
She shook her head
and ignored his outstretched hand. He looked chagrined and dropped it to his
side. “Well, then, handshake or no, you need to come with me. Got a nice warm
fire going inside. You look wet clear through. Nothing you can do tonight,
anyway. Get a few shots of Irish whiskey in you, a little soup, and some sleep.
Come morning, you can go after your friend.”
It sounded good.
Too good. She kept her ice axe poised. “How’d you get access to Lon Chaney’s
cabin?”
Jed threw back his
head and laughed. “That’s easy. Ever since Chaney senior died in
nineteen-thirty, his son’s been letting some of us who work with him have the
keys. All we have to do is ask. Damn shame the old man died right after he got
this place built. It’s a beauty. You really should take a look inside.”
She blew out a
breath. “What is it you do?”
“I’m a production
manager for Paramount.”
“I thought they
were in receivership.”
He laughed again.
“We are. But we’re still making movies.”
Something about
Jed put her at ease. Or maybe she was just too weary to think straight. She
slowly dropped her hands. Tethered to her wrist, the ice axe dangled, not quite
hitting the ground.
“That’s better,
sweetheart,” he crooned. “Follow me. I promise I don’t bite.”
She trailed after
him and climbed the broad steps leading to the cabin’s heavy wooden door. He
unlatched it, took the lantern from its hook, and motioned her through ahead of
him. Alice scanned the large room. One end was an enormous stone fireplace. The
other held a kitchen of sorts with a pump mounted next to a sink. A curtained
alcove probably contained a bedroom. The lower walls were the same large, flat
fieldstones mortared together she’d seen on the outside. The upper walls were
wooden planks. Alice sighed. It was warm. Truly warm. She didn’t realize how
chilled she was. Her face stung from the sudden temperature shift.
She took off her
headlamp and set it on a table. Next she unbuckled her waist belt and dropped
her pack in a corner, followed by her axe. The click of a deadbolt falling into
its metal hole snapped her to attention. She made a grab for her axe, but Jed
beat her to it. “Don’t know about you,” he said, hefting the axe over a
shoulder, “but I’m not fond of weapons inside.”
She’d been right
about his eyes. They were a rich midnight blue. Something about them made her
tingle deep inside. Alice pushed the thought away. She was still a virgin at
nearly thirty, and likely to stay that way at the rate things were going in her
life. Almost as if they’d been listening in on her thoughts, her nipples
pebbled into points of awareness.
What am I doing?
She shook herself
back to reality. A stranger she’d just met had locked her into this cabin and
taken her only means of defense. Trepidation trumped lust. “Why’d you lock us
in?” Because she tried hard, her voice only shook a little.
He flashed the key
in front of her and dropped it into his pants pocket. “Never know who might
wander by. I wanted to make certain we’re safe is all.” He made a huffing sound.
“Most women appreciate that sort of thing.”
“No one would come
up this trail in the middle of the night.”
“Hey, I’m sort of
a city boy. We believe in locking the bad guys out.” He shrugged. “If you want
to hang your jacket, there’re hooks by the fire. It looks pretty wet to me.”
Alice crossed her
arms over her chest and stared at Jed. He stared back. Tension sizzled in the
air between them. She held out a hand. “My axe.” She gestured to guns on racks
along the walls. “Looks as if there are plenty of weapons in here. Besides, my
ice axe isn’t a weapon, it’s a climbing aid.”
“Let’s just say
I’m not enamored of watching my back. Look—” he balanced her ice axe against a
wall, stepped away from it, and spread his hands in front of him “—you’re
apprehensive because you don’t know me. How about if I’m feeling the same way?”
She sidled past
him and tucked her axe behind her pack where it had been before. “I have no
idea how I’m feeling,” she muttered, “other than tired.”
Jed moved past her
to the sink and pumped water into a glass. Crossing the cabin, he handed it to
her. “Drink this,” he suggested. “Once you’re done, let me hang your jacket
near the fire where it can dry a little. It’s so wet, steam’s rising from it.”…
Megan’s
Mates
Wolf
Clan Shifters
Book Two
Ann
Gimpel
Dream Shadow Press
55K words
Release
Date:
4/18/16
Genre: Shifter
Ménage Romance
One
virgin + two wolf shifters = e-reader ecstasy.
Book
Description:
Calgary, Alberta 1936
After witnessing what might’ve been
a murder, Megan is frantic to escape the Garden of Eden cult, so she catches
the night train north out of town. Her lifetime commitment to the cult may well
be her death sentence, but she’s not sticking around to let them frame her.
Wolf shifters, Les and Karl, eke
out a primitive existence on the flanks of the Canadian Rockies. Between
Hunters who want to kill them and a wildfire raging out of control, they’re
glad when Jed, their clan leader, shows up. And even more delighted when they
see who’s in his car.
Jed’s mate, Alice, spied Megan by
the side of the road looking lost and desperate and offered her a ride. Before
Jed’s car even stops rolling, Les and Karl know she’s their mate. So skittish
she’s barely willing to exit the car, Megan busies herself helping Jed and his
pack mates unload supplies. Can Les and Karl convince her to join her life to
theirs? If she does, will the risks she faced as a cult member pale in
comparison to being mated to shifters?
Excerpt
from Megan’s Mates:
The phone jangled
again. Loud and strident, it made Les’ sensitive lupine hearing ache. It took
him a moment to realize he needed his human form to make the noise go away. He’d
tried to ignore the damned thing, but whoever was calling wouldn’t give up.
Every time he ventured near the house, it was ringing. With an aggravated
growl, he commanded his body to shift.
As soon as he had
feet rather than paws, he strode through the door of his cabin deep in the
woods, jaw tight with annoyance. The remote location a few miles outside Rocky
Mountain House often lost phone service for long periods of time.
“Yes and too bad
this isn’t one of them,” he muttered, snatched up the receiver, and barked,
“Yes, I’m here.”
“It’s about damned
time. I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days.”
Les’ eyes widened.
“Jed?”
“Who the hell
else?”
Les brayed
laughter. “Good point. It’s not as if very many people have this number. What’s
up, boss? I thought you were coming my way months ago. The boys and I wondered
what happened.”
“Now that I have
your attention, hang up.” Jed’s voice held a sharp edge that Les remembered all
too well. “We’ll do this a more private way.”
“You got it.” Les
dropped the black receiver back into place. He kicked the door shut to keep the
cold breeze out. It didn’t bother him as a wolf, but he was naked, and the air
had a chill edge to it. He trotted into the bedroom and had begun to dress when
Jed’s voice sounded in his mind.
“Where the hell
have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for a week.”
Les sank onto the
bed and pulled a quilt over his still-bare legs as he considered where to
start. Jed was clan leader for wolf shifters. He needed all the information Les
could provide. “First off, we’re all still okay.”
“That’s a relief.
When I couldn’t raise you, I was afraid Hunters had killed everyone. Made me
half-crazy not to know anything. Anyway, we pulled into Calgary last night, so
I’m finally close enough to use telepathy.”
“Is your new mate
with you?”
“Affirmative.
Bron, Terin, and Alice are with me.” Jed blew out a breath. “You may have heard
through the grapevine, we’d originally decided to come north as part of our
wedding trip, but Hunters nabbed half a dozen of us in northern California. It
took a major offensive to free our people. Even so, we lost a couple.”
Les nodded, and
then realized Jed couldn’t see him. “Yes, I know. We’ve had problems of our
own. Hunters almost got your cousins, Ron and Chris. We killed them, and I’m
still waiting for the fallout on that one since we also killed the whole posse
that came afterward, hunting for their fallen companions. All five of them.”
“How many total?
Was there any choice?” Jed’s voice was stern as he peppered Les with questions.
“Seven. No, no
choice.” Anger tightened Les’ muscles. He’d like to kill every goddamned Hunter
in the universe, but he wasn’t about to tell Jed that. And there hadn’t been
any choice, not really. They’d been surrounded. The only thing that saved them
was taking a firm offensive position.
Jed broke into
Les’ thoughts. “What’d you do with the bodies?”
“Don’t worry,
boss. No one will ever find them. We dragged them to the very bottom of a cave
system where there’s a vent to an upper cave and burned them.”
“How long ago?”
Les thought about
it. He’d spent much of the last month as a wolf, which skewed his time sense.
“Maybe a week.”
“You still haven’t
told me why you weren’t answering your phone.”
“We’ve all been in
our wolf forms. There’s a fire burning out of control between our pack and the
crest of the Rockies. A couple of the cabins farther west incinerated—”
“Humph,” Jed
interrupted, obviously not concerned about an out-of-control wildfire. “Any of
you find mates yet?”
“What do you
think? It’s not as if the odds are in our favor.”
“Maybe Alice can
change that. Women trust her. She’s actually scared up three mates since she
joined Bron, Terin, and me.” A hesitation. “How close did you say that fire
was?”
“My cabin’s not in
any immediate danger. It’s fall and I’m expecting it to rain soon.” Les
scratched at month-old beard growth on his chin. “It’s pretty primitive here,
boss. Nothing like your digs in Hollywood.”
A different voice
sounded in his head, rich, vibrant, and definitely female. “I’ve been listening
in. Shameless of me not to have said something earlier. Don’t worry about me.
My life was a whole lot simpler before I met up with Jed and my other two
mates. Besides, I’m looking forward to meeting the clan members here in
Alberta.”
Les’ mouth
twitched into half a smile. “You must be Alice. We’ve heard a lot about you.
Are you really six feet tall?”
Alice snorted,
making Les wish he’d kept his mouth shut. After all, Alice was mated to his
clan leader. “How about if we leave the details open, and you can see for
yourself when we get there? Jed says it’s a four or five hour drive, and we
should arrive sometime tomorrow. Is there anything we need to bring from the
big city?”
Les gazed around
his one-bedroom cabin as if he expected a grocery list to materialize. He
cleared his throat before remembering he didn’t need his actual voice. “Um,
we’ve been pretty much living off the land this past month, so anything you
bring would be welcome.”
“I get the
picture.” Jed broke in with a laugh. “We’ll fill up the trunk and the rest of
the back seat.”
Les couldn’t help
himself. “Who gets to sit next to Alice?”
Female chuckling
made his heart lighter than it had been in a long time.
“Oh, they fuss and
snarl a bit, but they sort of take turns. It’s nice actually, to have three
doting mates.”
“I’m sure it is.”
Les brushed a wave of sadness aside. He’d love to have a woman to fuss over,
alongside Karl, his pack mate. They’d hunted for years for a female to grace
their lives without success after their first mate died in childbirth in the
1600s. A few promising candidates crossed their path when they’d lived in
Edmonton, but Hunters had driven them out of the city fifty years before.
“We’ll be there by
tomorrow afternoon.” Jed’s voice was gruff, and Les figured his clan leader
could read his mind.
“I’ll alert the
troops, boss. Everyone will be really glad to see all of you. And to meet your
mate.”
Les waited, but a
certain emptiness told him Jed had signed off. He shoved the quilt aside,
finished dressing, and called Karl through their telepathic link. It didn’t
take long before paws scrabbled against the door, and Les remembered he’d shut
it. By the time he crossed the small space and pulled the door open, Karl had
found his human form and stood shivering, arms wrapped around his tall, spare
frame. Black hair hung to his waist in tangles.
“Thanks. Damned
cold out here.” The wolf shifter bounded into the room, giving the door a shove
as he passed through it. “What’s up?”
“Jed’s here.” Les
spread his arms wide and rolled his eyes. “Along with his lieutenants and their
new mate. We’ve got to clean this place up.”
“Why? It’s always
been good enough for us.”
Les slugged him in
the arm. “You weren’t listening. Jed’s mate will be here.”
“Oh, I get it.”
Karl chortled, his dark eyes gleaming with glee. “Maybe if we didn’t do
anything, she’d take pity on us and—”
“Right. Find some
clothes, and we’ll get to work. I don’t think Jed, Terin, or Bron will want
their new mate waiting on the likes of us.”
Karl sprinted for
his sleeping alcove toward the rear of the log cabin’s main room. Drawers
banged open. “Fire’s getting closer,” he called over one shoulder. “Maybe it
would be better for all of us to get together in Red Deer.”
Les considered it.
“Nope. Too soon since we axed those Hunters. That’s where they were from—there
and Edmonton. I don’t want any friendly sheriff asking questions if they
discover we live out here. Are you sure the fire’s closer? Maybe the wind just
shifted direction.”
“It’s definitely
closer. The smoke’s thicker, and I can actually hear it burning from the rise a
couple miles west of here. At least my wolf can.” Karl slid his legs into
trousers and pulled a sweater over his head before shoving his feet into an
ancient pair of sheepskin slippers. He turned to Les. “Where do you think we
should start? Come to think of it, when do you want to alert the rest of the
clan, or should I do that?”
“We can take care
of that later tonight. How about if you work on the dishes? I’ll sweep and get
the kettle going for laundry.”
Karl strode to the
sink and pumped the handle for water. “Eww.” He wrinkled his nose. “How long
have these plates been here?”
“Does it matter?”
Les lugged a large, cast iron kettle in through the back door and hefted it
onto a wood-burning stove. He opened the firebox door, levered a pocket knife
out of his pants, and started shaving tinder. “Let’s warm some water. That
should help.” As he worked, Les dialed in his lupine senses and scented fresh
air coming through the back door. It was indeed tinged with smoke. What bad
timing for a major fire. If it drove them into one of the nearby towns, they’d
risk discovery because Hunters could scent them.
“Les?”
He looked up from
his half-built fire. “Um-hum.”
“Maybe it’s time
to move on.”
“No!” Les banged a
fist down on his thigh. “I’m sick of running. If the fire gets this far, we’ll
come back when it’s over and rebuild.”
“But we’ll never
find a mate out here.”
“Just do the
damned dishes. We’ve got enough problems without adding to them.”…
Sophie’s
Shifters
Wolf
Clan Shifters
Book
Three
Ann
Gimpel
Dream Shadow Press
66K words
Release
Date:
5/2/16
Genre: Shifter Ménage
Romance
One
spirited woman + three coyote shifters = e-reader ecstasy.
Book
Description:
Late 1930s, California.
The winds of change are blowing
hard as shifters gather deep in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for a war powwow.
Tempers run high as they argue their next move.
An unexpected attack from more
Hunters than they’ve ever seen forces their hand, and Blake, alpha for the
coyote clan, fights alongside his brothers. He’s grimly pleased when every
single one of their enemies is finally dead, the bodies chucked into glacial
crevasses.
Sophie Laughing Wolf tracked her
hated brother into the mountains. Gifted with foreseeing, she wants to make
certain he ends up just as dead as he was in her vision. When the large group
of men he’s with are set upon by shifters, mythical dual-natured beings who can
take animal forms, she hides, calling on earth power to shield her.
It doesn’t work. Two shifters, back
in their men’s bodies, haul her from her hiding place once the battle ends and
drag her before their chief. He spares her life—for now—but she senses the
animosity the others have for her. They see her as a threat, a witness to
multiple murders.
When the mate bond strikes, she
fights its pull. So does Blake. He can’t believe the gods would be so cruel as
to bind him and his lieutenants to a woman with blood ties to Hunters—their
ancient enemy. She runs from her fate. So does he, but the bond burns bright, transcending
everything.
Excerpt
from Sophie’s Shifters:
Jed slipped and
slid down the glacier, grateful his mate Alice wasn’t there to read him the
riot act. An accomplished mountaineer, she’d have laughed herself sick after
the second time he fell on his ass and slid twenty feet.
“Goddammit!” Terin
screeched from behind him and went flying past on his stomach. He shifted
mid-slide and dug his claws into the icy surface to stop his suicidal descent.
Once he’d stopped on the uphill side of a boulder, he shifted back.
Jed drew to a halt
next to him. “Good thing you didn’t bother getting dressed. Your clothes would
be strewn over the last fifty feet of ice in shreds.”
“Yes and no,”
Terin muttered, glancing pointedly at Jed’s shoes. “My boot soles would have
helped—a lot. Jesus but I’m glad Alice isn’t here to see this.”
“Keir’s doing okay
in bare feet,” Bron noted, catching them up. “And I’m not doing that bad, but
the soles of my feet hurt like hell—and I miss my claws.”
Jed eyed the edge
of the glacier. Patches of rocks and dirt, interspersed with ice, began a
couple hundred feet below them. Walking would get much easier then. He grabbed
one of Terin’s arms. Bron seized the other one, and together they lurched over
the remaining rock-studded ice.
“We have a
problem,” he said without preamble.
“Tell me something
I don’t know,” Bron muttered.
“We have to get
home and make sure Alice is okay,” Terin added.
Jed winced. He’d
wanted to leave someone home with the women, but neither Alice, nor Megan—Les
and Karl’s mate—would have any part of that. He reached for Alice through the
mate bond, but she was too far away for him to sense anything.
“Which particular
problem were you alluding to?” Bron asked. “Somehow it seems like more than
getting out of these mountains with our hides intact.”
“It is,” Jed said
tersely. “Les and Karl found a woman. They’re holding her back in the cave.”
Terin stopped
dead. “What? Is she a climber like Alice, who got stranded up here?”
“Somehow, I don’t
think that’s it,” Jed muttered.
“We’ll find out
soon enough,” Bron broke in. “Shit! If she came with the Hunters, we’ll have to
kill her.”
“That already
occurred to me.” Jed shot a pointed look at his lieutenant. “Keir said the
same. He was standing close enough to hear when Les gave me the bad news.”
“Damned shame.”
Terin shook loose from them. “I’m good. I don’t need you two to nursemaid me
anymore.”
They covered the
remaining half mile to the cave in silence. Terin and Bron went to collect
their clothes, and Jed strode briskly to a back corner where he sensed Les and
Karl. Crouched behind them in a quivering mass was a woman with her head buried
in her crossed arms. Long black hair shot with thick silver streaks spilled
around her onto the dirt floor. She was swathed in dark colored wool and
flinched away when Jed hunkered next to her.
He probed her mind
and found terror so gripping, it obliterated everything else. He started to
tell her not to be afraid, but the words died on his tongue. He couldn’t give
her any guarantees, and he wouldn’t lie to her.
“Who are you?” he
asked, keeping his voice gentle.
“We tried that,
boss,” Les said.
“At first, all she
did was moan,” Karl added. “She got quieter after a while, but she hasn’t
answered any of our questions.”
“Where’d you find
her?” Jed asked.
“After we lifted
the last of the bodies in our sector out of the moraine, so others could move
them up the mountain, Les and I sensed something living. It wasn’t a Hunter,
but it was human, so we dug a little.”
“Didn’t have to go
far,” Les cut in, “before we found her hiding between a huge piece of deadfall
and a big rock.” He shrugged. “Without our wolf senses, we’d never have
discovered her.”
A low whimper
escaped from the woman, and Jed laid a hand on her arm. “What’s your name?” he
repeated.
“Just get it over
with.” Her low, musical voice was strained. Hysteria trod near the surface.
“Get what over
with?” Jed probed. Maybe if he could get her talking, he could learn something.
The woman lifted
her head from her crossed arms and Jed’s eyes widened. She was absolutely
stunning with huge midnight blue eyes. Pronounced bone structure and copper
skin suggested Native American blood flowed through her veins. Sharp
cheekbones, a hawk-bridged nose, and a squared-off chin lent her an exotic
cast.
She tilted her
chin at a defiant angle. “You have to kill me. I know too much. Get it over
with. The others—” she cast a spurious glance Les and Karl’s way “—they were
waiting for you to make the decision.” Her mouth worked as if she’d tasted
something bitter. “Anyway, get it over with. I took my chances when I tracked my
brother today. If he’d known, he’d have forbidden me to come.”
Jed frowned. “One
of the Hunters was your brother?”
The woman nodded
mutely. “Yeah, that’s what I just said, isn’t it? Get it over with, white man.
If you’re going to kill me, do it. If not, let me go.”
Bron and Terin had
joined them once they’d dressed. Bron passed a hand over the woman’s head, and
Jed felt him probing with shifter magic. “You have white man’s blood too,” Bron
murmured.
The woman shot him
a scathing look. “Not much. What of it?”
“Where we come
from in Canada,” Les said, “Indians are friends to those like us.”
She curled her
upper lip in withering scorn. “We have enough problems without associating with
shifters. You’re nothing but trouble. Bad enough we got stuffed onto reservations,
land no one else wanted.”
Jed tried a
different tack. “Why’d you track your brother today?”
She buried her
head in her arms again, refusing to look at him.
“Please.” He
gentled his voice. “Give us something to work with. Les and Karl, my brothers
who found you, didn’t harm you.”
“Only because they
were waiting for you, their chief.” Her voice was muffled.
“Goddammit!” Les
squatted in front of her and yanked her head upward. “Karl and I could’ve
killed you. We didn’t. We were not waiting for Jed to make that call. Tell us
why you were tracking your brother.”
Jed heard
compulsion flow beneath the other shifter’s words.
The woman drew
back. She tried to combat Les’ spell, but the contest was laughable. “To stop
him,” she said. The words were clearly dredged from her, but they held the ring
of truth.
“Good. He needed
to be stopped,” Les said. “Why’d you think he’d listen to you?”
The woman’s face
crumpled and she started to cry, big noisy gulping sobs that ripped through
her. “It’s not what you think. I didn’t try to make him listen to me,” she
managed between ragged breaths. “I have the gift of prophecy—farseeing—and I
knew things would go to hell for all of them today.”
“Do your visions
always come true?” Jed probed. Despite the problems the woman presented, her
story fascinated him.
She nodded, but
didn’t say anything further.
“Did your brother
know you followed the Hunter group?” Jed asked.
She shook her
head. “No. He doesn’t share my gift. His magic came mostly from the goddamned
white man’s Church.”
“Odd none of the
rest of them sensed you behind them,” Karl muttered.
“Not odd at all,”
she shot back, choking a little on snot running down her face. “I can blend my
energy into the rocks, the dirt.”
“We found you,”
Karl pointed out.
“Because you were
in your natural form, and wolves sense such things far more acutely than men.”
Jed waved Karl to
silence. This was going nowhere fast. Returning his attention to the woman, he
said, “So you came along, but didn’t talk with him. Didn’t try to warn him.
Help me understand why.” Jed hoped things might get clearer, but so far they
were just becoming more confusing.
“Let me get this
straight.” Bron hunkered next to Les and caught the woman’s gaze with his dark
one. “You saw in a vision that your brother would die, and you came along
anyway but didn’t try to warn him. Did you want to make certain he was dead?”
Jed silently
offered his lieutenant credit for shrewdness. If the woman knew today would end
in a bloodbath because she’d seen it—and she made no attempt to warn her
brother—what other reason would she have had for trailing after him.
The woman’s
sobbing escalated. She tried to jerk her chin out of Les’ grip, but he held
fast. “Yes,” she gasped out. “Yes. I hated that bastard. He…used me, hurt me
the way men hurt women, when I was only ten years old and never stopped until I
ran away when I was sixteen. No one believed me. No one c-cared.” Her last
words were almost obliterated by sobs.
Suddenly her
phrase to stop him took on a whole new meaning. Jed just stared at her. “So
it’s not that you didn’t say anything today. You never told him anything.”
She did yank her
chin away then and spat on the dirt floor. “Hell no. I haven’t spoken to him in
ten years, but he’s blood and he shows up in my visions.”
Running on instincts
that had rarely failed him, Jed glanced at the four wolf shifters ranged around
him. They didn’t need to talk. After hundreds of years of working together,
they understood one another.
“Stand up.” Jed
told the woman.
“Why?”
“Did you see your
own death in your vision?”
An odd look washed
over her face before she shook her head and pushed herself upright. Standing
she was of a height with Jed, and her hair reached past her ass. She squared
slender shoulders. “Is that a backhanded way of saying I can leave?”
Jed shook his head
and hurried to add words before she sank into a puddle of terror again. “You’re
right that we can’t allow you to return to your life. We have no idea who you
are, who you’d tell. We could wipe your memory of us, but you’d still recall
the death that happened in this canyon.”
“What are you
going to do with me?” Her voice shrilled and she jerked her chin upward. “If
you think you’re going to abuse me like my brother, think again, white man. I’d
rather be dead.”
“We don’t do that
to women.” Terin pushed into her line of vision so she had to look at him.
“Not what I’ve
heard,” she retorted. “My brother said he learned it from you.”
“Bull crap!” Jed
said succinctly. “I’ve never known a shifter to take a woman against her will.
Not on my watch, and not in my clan.”
“You planning to
bring her home with us?” Bron quirked a dark brow.
Jed nodded. “The
only question—” he focused on the woman “—is whether you come willingly, or we
knock you out and carry you down the mountain.”
“Home as in
staying under the same roof with five men?” Her face twisted into a grimace.
“No. Not happening. Just kill me here and get it over with.”
“We’re mated,”
Karl informed her. “Les and I have a mate. Her name is Megan. And Jed, Bron,
and Terin are mated to Alice.”
The woman tossed
her head. “Fine. Just because you located some sluts who—”
Jed snaked out a
hand and slapped her hard across the face. He grabbed her head between his
hands and forced her to look at him. “Never say one bad word about my mate. I
love her. So do Bron and Terin. Don’t disparage what you don’t understand.”
A shocked look
blossomed on her face and she muttered, “Sorry,” before looking at her feet.
“Let go of her,
boss.” Bron pulled Jed’s hands away. “She only understands what she’s lived.
And it hasn’t been pretty.”…
I'm basically a mountaineer at
heart. I remember many hours at my desk where my body may have been stuck
inside four walls, but my soul was planning yet one more trip to the
backcountry.
Around the turn of the last century
(that would be 2000, not 1900!), I finagled a move to the Eastern Sierra, a
mecca for those in love with the mountains. Stories always ran around in my
head on backcountry trips, sometimes as a hedge against abject terror when
challenging conditions made me fear for my life, sometimes for company.
Eventually, the inevitable
happened. I returned from a trip and sat down at the computer. Three months
later, a five hundred page novel emerged. It wasn’t very good, but it was a
beginning. I learned a lot between writing that novel and its sequel, and I've
been writing ever since.
In addition to turning out books, I
enjoy wilderness photography. A standing joke is that over ten percent of my
pack weight is camera gear, which means my very tolerant husband has to carry
the food -- and everything else too.
Find Ann At:
