Bailey Bradford - Southwestern Shifters 06 - Reverence (19 page)

Coming soon from Total-E-Bound Publishing:
Leopard’s Spots: Esau
Bailey Bradford
Excerpt
Chapter One

Esau Walraven normally loved the acuity of his shifter senses. Being a snow leopard shifter was a gift, a blessing in his opinion. He could turn into one of the most gorgeous of cats, and the power in his body when he did so was amazing. There was a freedom to being a leopard that no human would ever understand, and he had this huge extended family he was close to. Maybe not
real
close, because Esau tended to be more of a loner than not, but he loved every one of them, and they probably felt the same about him, too.

His loyalty to his family was why he was out in the middle of the night, traipsing through a recently fire-purged forest. Those senses that he had, yeah, they were pretty damned awesome—except his nose was burning like a mother and his eyes kept watering. The stench from the forest fire was wretched, sulphur and fear and death. Smoke lingered, soot was everywhere, and the enhanced senses might have been working against him at that point.

“Anything?” Oscar called back to him. Esau shook his head. They were out in the middle of this scorched land trying to find out if a lepe, or clan, of Amur leopard shifters had survived the fire. Esau only knew two Amur shifters, Bae, who was his cousin Isaiah’s mate, and Jihu, also a mate to a cousin, Gilbert. It was Bae and Jihu’s family who might have perished in the fire.
Or maybe they’ve survived
. Esau wasn’t holding out a lot of hope. In his experience, the good people ended up dead and the fuckwits got away.

No, sometimes the fuckwits get dead, too. If someone tracks them down and delivers justice to them.
Esau turned his thoughts away from that to what he was doing, which was trying to detect any scent or tracks that would offer them a clue to the Amur leopards. If they had escaped the fire.

If anyone had got away from the fire, it was probably the evil guy who wanted to keep Jihu and Bae and make them breed with females. Fucking Fate seems to like to let shits like that survive and claim good men for her own. No, I’m not going there.
He was having a hell of a time reining his thoughts in tonight. Esau wiped at his brow, sweat wetting it despite the chill in the air. He concentrated on catching any sign of the Amurs, whichever Amurs might have escaped.

Occasionally he’d think about the messed-up lepe Bae and Jihu had got tangled up in. What kind of sick leader enforced rape? That was what the Amur ‘breeding program’ had been, at least it sounded like it to him. Not that Esau knew all that much about it. He hadn’t really been around Bae much, and had only just met Jihu a few hours earlier. They seemed like nice guys, though.

Esau wished they’d had a better plan for the hunt they were all on now, but he supposed no one had had time to come up with one. Plans were something Esau felt was necessary in his life. If he didn’t have them, well, he didn’t like that at all. His job required plans, blueprints, and he figured that was a good way to go about life, too.
A nice mapped-out plan
.

Esau snorted and rubbed at his eyes. Yeah, sometimes life didn’t go along with that, or that bitch Fate shredded the detailed plans you wrote up, but Esau always just made new plans then.

Kind of like he’d just done, coming to help his family. He was bringing up the rear of the group he was with, all of them searching, hoping. He’d heard Bae and Jihu talking about one of their brothers, Ye-sun, and Esau hoped that maybe that guy, at least, had survived.

“Be nice if someone good made it out of this mess,” Esau murmured to himself. He stopped and took a drink of his water, arching his back and neck as he did so. The urge to shift and run was strong, his leopard really not happy with the smell of fire, or the remains of the fire, either way. It was a good thing he could reason with his inner beast, good that the man held the power most of the time. Otherwise, things could get…ugly.

Off to his right, Esau thought he saw something slightly off. Several feet away, there was a patch of ground that looked to be disturbed. Esau loped over to it, checking that the others were still off ahead of him. He knelt and sniffed, and along with the scent of scorched earth, another odour filtered into his nasal passages.

And it hit him like a sledgehammer to the gut. Esau grunted and tensed, his entire body tingling, his dick springing to life, thickening in a matter of heartbeats.
Holy crap, what the hell is that?
He sniffed again and moaned softly, his nipples aching, balls throbbing, heavy, full in their sac. Esau palmed his cock and rubbed, shivering as heat flooded his groin, need coiling before shooting out to his genitals and making his pucker clench.

If he kept groping himself just so, he was going to come, going to shoot in his jeans like he had done the first time he’d kissed another boy. Well, there’d been rubbing then, too, and neither him nor Kris had lasted more than a minute kissing and rutting. Still, that had been almost twenty years ago. Esau couldn’t believe his control was fraying all to hell now.

The reason for it could
not
be the one he suspected. No, he couldn’t believe it. Esau refused to even think about why his body was rushing with hormones, his cock so hard he could barely keep himself from spurting in his pants. Esau was not going to fucking think about it—but he was going to hunt down the cause of his distress, his intense arousal. If the alluring aroma belonged to an evil piece of shit, Esau would rather be the only one to ever know he’d got the boner of all boners from it.

“Hey, I’m gonna do a little reconnaissance,” he called out. Oscar and the others stopped and looked back at him. Esau desperately wanted them to not come any closer. He couldn’t hide his erection, and they would probably scent his arousal if they were within a few feet of him, even with the singed odour of the forest. “Just want to check something out. Go on, and I’ll probably meet up with everyone back at the rest area.”

Esau didn’t wait for their agreement. He shot to his feet and took off, moving briskly at roughly a forty-five degree angle away from the others. Now that he had the scent, he wouldn’t lose it. A quick check behind him assured Esau that the rest of his search party had gone on without him. That eased him some. His damned cock was still hard, and walking was going to rub his pecker raw if he couldn’t adjust himself. Esau stopped, unzipped and tried to find a more comfortable position for his dick.

There didn’t seem to be one. He was tempted to beat off and be done with it, except something told him he’d still be hard and unsatisfied with his own hand.
No sense in bothering then.
He tucked it away and hoped he’d have some skin left when he got to where he was going.

The trail he was following wasn’t visual. He rarely found any more disturbed areas on the ground. Slowly, after more than two hours hiking through the burnt-out woods, Esau realised that he wasn’t really even following a scent. No, it was a feeling, a tug like an invisible line was attached to his gut, a fish hook embedded in him, and he was being reeled in whether he wanted to be or not.

Esau stopped. The moon was low, and the sun would soon be rising. What was he doing? He was letting his feline nature lead, that was what. And his leopard was not happy that he’d stopped, the cat yowling inside him, and Esau would swear he felt the tearing of claws in his insides. Ridiculous, he knew, but his leopard had its own way of letting him know when it wasn’t happy with him. For all that being a shifter was a spiritual thing—one could lose their shifter spirit and be half a living being, he’d been told—the damned cat certainly could affect the physical, too.

He didn’t want to go on. Esau hated feeling like he had no control. The idea of predestination, whether it was for a mate or the saving of one’s soul, rubbed him the wrong way. And yet his heart pounded, and he wondered what he’d find if he kept moving forward, if he climbed the damned mountain he was on. What, exactly, or who, was waiting for him—or was anyone or thing waiting at all? Did whoever the scent belonged to, did he know Esau was coming? Esau didn’t doubt the owner was male. A female’s scent wouldn’t have done a thing for him. Well, nothing sexual, anyways.

Do I keep going, or turn back? Do I really want to know why I’m on this scent and why my dick hasn’t softened at all since that first whiff?
Esau didn’t ask himself if he
could
turn back. He was afraid the answer to that would just piss him off in nine different directions.

Setting his backpack down for a moment, Esau stretched and tipped his nose to the breeze. The aroma that floated to him on it, made him whimper as his need ramped up impossibly higher. He took his water bottle from his pack and uncapped it. The liquid wasn’t cold, but it was cool enough to soothe his throat. He didn’t drink much, not wanting to have to deal with a full bladder and a hard-on, never a fun combination. After recapping the bottle, he returned it to the bag. Esau zipped it up and hefted the pack to his shoulder. The wind kicked up and he fucking ached all the way to his core as more of that tantalising smell came to him.

Esau set off to find out who it belonged to.
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About the Author

A native Texan, Bailey spends her days spinning stories around in her head, which has contributed to more than one incident of tripping over her own feet. Evenings are resounds for pounding away at the keyboard, as are the early morning hours. Sleep? Doesn’t happen much. Writing is too much fun, and there are too many characters bouncing about, tapping on Bailey’s brain, demanding to be let out.
Caffeine and chocolate are permanent fixtures in Bailey’s office and are never far from hand at any given time. Removing either of those necessities from Bailey’s presence can result in what is known as A Very, Very Scary Bailey and is not advised under any circumstances.

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