Wolf Rock Shifters Books 1-5: Five BBW Paranormal Romance Standalone Novels (52 page)

But even Estée knew that she would probably lose this fight.

S
he stopped in her tracks
, one hand easing its way into her messenger bag to feel for the precious cargo within, exhaling as her fingers enveloped it, pressing the package to her palm. It was her relief, her talisman, employed to keep fear at bay.

Though the money belt was still around her waist, the package was all she cared about. And it was precisely what the men wanted.

Each of her two stalkers was now moving slowly towards her, cars tearing around on the street to her left as she measured her options, feet firmly planted.

Her choices:

Shift into a white tiger on a busy Paris street, drawing attention and cell phone cameras from hundreds of tourists and locals to her, no doubt alerting everyone on the planet of her whereabouts and rendering her new passport and identity useless,

Or

Run like a maniac into the narrow laneway to her right and hope for the best.

The worst case would be a dead end and a forced battle with her pursuers. But hell, at least she would be hidden from all the watchful eyes. Besides, she was a tiger. Since when was she helpless?

“I’ve never done the sensible thing. Why start now?” she mumbled as she took off at full sprint into the alley, a deep canyon of stucco, graffiti and sullied windows coated in iron grates, puddles of who-knows-what splashing up around her as she went, clothing dangling overhead from drying lines.

So far, this plan seemed to be proving the best choice. The lane was long and provided many opportunities to toss stray chairs, garbage cans and other objects into the path of her followers, slowing them down as she charged ahead.

In the distance she spotted figures moving from the left and right: a sidewalk, which meant more crowds; she might be able to get there fast enough to use them to her advantage.

Though her scent would never mingle with that of a herd of humans; she would stick out like a cactus in a vase of tulips. What other choice did she have, though?

Estée was a fast runner; she’d always had good legs and feet on her—she supposed that she could thank her cat genes for that. And her two pursuers had looked like big, galumphing grizzlies. Maybe if she played dead they’d even leave her be after poking her gently with a stick—wasn’t that what grizzlies did?

But no; that would be too much to hope for. They weren’t that stupid, surely. And they had their orders; there was little doubt in her mind that they worked for
him
: the man she’d met briefly a few weeks back, who had shown far too keen an interest in her. Who had creeped her out and annoyed her simultaneously, his arrogance unrivalled. He was rich and powerful, and now convinced that he could hunt her down like a dog in the street.

The problem with pissing off rich and powerful men was that they could in fact do just that.

And these goons were his hired guns, or hired
fangs,
rather. Going after the helpless little cat, to do God knows what when they caught her. Well, screw him, his bears and the horse they rode in on; she wasn’t about to find out.

Estée tore along the alley until she could clearly see the next street over, its wide walkways flanked with cafés, gift shops and street vendors: freedom, or at least temporary respite from the pursuit. If she could get there fast enough she might be able to dash into a shop before they saw her, concealing her trail temporarily amid a flood of other scents.

She could smell the men still, like cigar smoke drifting about her head, unrelenting: they’d been frightened, but not so much of her as of their boss
. That
was it. They were worried that the man would kill them if they didn’t bring her in. Somehow, he’d convinced them to be terrified of him. The mark of a true tyrant.

Well, whether he killed them or not wasn’t her problem; she had bigger fish to fry.

She reached the end of the slick tunnel of bricks and mortar and prepared to take a few final, victorious steps onto the street ahead, one leg of her race finished.

But the moment of triumph was cut short by a tall, broad figure who stepped into the narrow chasm between buildings and stood silhouetted before her. He towered over her, his wide shoulders casting a daunting road block that nothing could get through, let alone a woman who was beginning to tire.

She pulled up at the last second, hoping to avoid physical contact. But inertia was a powerful thing, forcing her to collide with his chest even as his arms reached for hers, grabbing her tightly.

“Found you,” he said. “You’re coming with me. Now.”

A
ll right
. So this trip had been a pain, and more than once Dascha had craved a warm bed, a cold drink and a hot pizza.

But as his hands gripped the woman in front of him and he took in her scent, all desire for material things left him. A new sensation was taking over, though he couldn’t have explained it in words if someone had held a gun to his head; it would have come out in caveman grunts and single syllables.

“Man. Girl. Hot. Must. Take. Now.”

There was a sort of relentless horniness that sometimes invaded men’s bodies when they saw a gorgeous woman on a billboard or on television: evolution, he’d always called it. Simple evolution. The desire to procreate with something pretty, a woman with even features, round breasts and a good head of hair.

Dascha’s theory had always been that men looked for women who were beautiful so that the men themselves didn’t have to be. So that they could just go on being selfish pricks, looking out for their own interests while the woman did the dirty work of having sex with their unsavoury bodies and then going through the agonizing pain of childbirth, passing her perfection on to the next generation while the man went about his business, scratching his junk and drinking beer on the couch while watching football.

Selfish bastards, they were, and he lived among their ranks.

But as he held fast to Estée, he knew that all of it had been bullshit; every theory he’d ever had about attraction had been wrong. His body’s brief infatuation with that other female shifter—the one whose name he couldn’t even recall now—had been small potatoes compared to this.

This
was something new.

He was a wolf. She was a tiger. And inside him something else was rearing its head, as though some unwritten law of nature had attacked him like a virus, feeding into his mind. Controlling him.

For a moment he wanted to shake his head violently, to regain control over his faculties. A minute ago this woman had been a figment of something not quite real in his mind, a pretty pain in his ass. Now his every sense was occupied with some aspect of her, and no aspect was bad; her scent, her face, the feel of her under the touch of his hands.

“Who…who the hell are you?” she was asking him. He realized then that his eyes had locked on her, and that he hadn’t moved in what seemed like hours.

“I’m Dascha. I’m from Wolf Rock,” he managed, his voice strained from the effort. “I came here to find you.”

“Well, Dascha, you’re not the only one hunting me,” she growled, looking over her shoulder. Her followers were near now; perhaps twenty feet back and jogging towards them. “Two bears at six o’clock, ready to take us both on. And unless you want to create an international incident, we need to get the hell out of here.”

“Shit,” he blurted out as he saw them; the two men moved faster than their large frames should have allowed. “Come on.”

He took her hand and pulled, taking Estée along for the ride as he began to sprint.

A block later, though, she stopped, attempting to pull herself free of his grip. Dascha could see the two pursuers still on their trail.

“What are you doing? Why would you stop?” he asked, whatever biological need had hit him subsiding momentarily in favour of aggravation.

“What makes you think I’d go with you?” she asked. “I don’t know you, and there’s no reason in the world that I should trust you.”

“I’m in the wolf pack. Tristan’s pack. Surely to God you know what I’m talking about.”

“Well, I came to Europe get away from that place and all of you.”

“Fine, Sweetpants. You can do exactly that,
after
I bring you back there and let your daddy spank you for being naughty.”

“Charming.”

“Come on, woman. We can have our first lovers’ quarrel later. Until then, we need to get away from the Bad News Bears.”

Finally, as the first of the two lumbering idiots came upon them, Dascha felt her give in to his insistent yanking and they sprinted down the street, making their way towards the Seine and more crowds.

They dashed in and out between slowly-moving bodies expertly, Dascha’s hand never letting hers go. On occasion he could feel her grasp tighten as though afraid of losing him. So she wasn’t as brave as she pretended.

“Where are we going?” she asked as they went.

“Anywhere away from these assholes and towards beer,” he replied, his voice a hoarse growl.

On the sidewalk above the Seine’s embankment was a row of seated painters, some working on landscapes of the cityscape and Notre Dame Cathedral, others working on caricatures for tourists, portraying them with enormous teeth, eyes or lips, depending on the case.

Dascha thought fast, pulling up and grabbing one of the less than busy caricature artists by the shoulder.

“Do you speak English?” he asked.

“A leetle.”

“Good. See those two men, running this way? They
really
want drawings of themselves. I suggest that you and your friends grab them. Here,” he said, handing the man a few hundred euros. “Make sure they’re very, very detailed portraits. If you do a good job I’ll come back later with more clients for you.”

The man smiled, gesturing to two other artists to join him as Dascha and Estée took off running again.

“Do you really think that’ll work?” asked Estée.

“I dunno. I hear that French men can be very persuasive.”

Estée turned her head to see that a series of artists had formed a barrier with their bodies, each wanting a cut of the pie that was Dascha’s cash. Within a few seconds, two enormous grizzly bears stood before them, and as the men cowered, throngs of tourists began to gather, blocking their path to take photos of the wildlife.

“Beautiful,” Estée laughed, admiring Dascha’s handiwork.

After sprinting down several narrow streets they finally slowed their pace, Dascha’s eyes scouting the buildings’ signs. He settled on one that read “Hotel de la Seine.”

“There are a billion dogs in this area, and all of them mark their territory,” he said at last, pulling her through a tinted glass door. “That’ll cover our trail. Meanwhile we’ll check into this joint.”

“Really? But I stayed in a roach-infested hotel last night,” said Estée. “You sure you didn’t mean to bring me to the Hilton instead?”

“Honey, what I’d like to do is tie you to a boat and push it off towards New York City, but I’ve promised my pack that I’d bring you back myself. So let’s check in, get cleaned up and I’ll think about ordering us some tickets home.”

“Fine.”

It didn’t matter that she was now the prisoner of a wolf, thought the white tiger. No one ever managed to keep her captive long.

A
t the front desk
, Dascha booked a single room for the night.

“Listen,” he told Estée as he pulled her by the hand into the elevator, hitting the button to the third floor. “You’ll be staying with me tonight. You’re not to leave my sight, except to hit the washroom. Is that understood?”

Estée responded with a sarcastic salute. Great. This was going to go well.

“Cute,” he growled as he stepped out. Without another word he led her down the hall and unlocked the door to their temporary home.

“Well, you’re so…what’s the word…commanding. And oh so strong,” she said, her voice deliberately and mockingly sultry.

“Listen, lady. I don’t want to share space with you any more than you want me to. So I’d suggest that you just settle in and suck it up. I’ll be damned if I’m going to fail at this task because you’re being a smartass.” He was convinced that all of his initial biological attraction had now been eradicated by irritation, which was probably for the best.

“Why exactly were
you
assigned the job of retrieving the tiger?” Estée asked. “You’re a little too big to be an errand boy. You look more like…”

“What? An Alpha?” said Dascha, suppressing a laugh.

“Well, yeah.” Estée threw herself onto the bed, claiming it with her scent. The dude could sleep on the floor.

Dascha stood over her, his shoulders seeming extra-broad from her new vantage point. All right, so he was a manly man. So what?

“I’d like nothing more than to be exactly that, but the pack already has one. Let’s just say that I had a debt to pay, so I volunteered to come fetch you.”

“Fetch. Appropriate word for a dog.”

“A dog, is it?” Dascha allowed himself the laugh this time. “Honey, this ‘dog’ has bigger fangs and longer claws than most. And you certainly don’t want him calling you a pussy, so maybe you should consider keeping those sweet lips of yours sealed.”

“Why not call me a pussy? It’s what I am.” Estée was doing it again; using her voice to be overtly sexy. And though Dascha fought against the temptation to find her interesting, the bits of him that resided in his pants were telling a different story, succumbing to her voice, her scent and her curves.

“Let’s leave the word ‘pussy’ out of the equation, shall we?” he asked. “And dog as well. I’m a fucking wolf, and you’d best get that through that mane of yours. Or is that a lion?”

“I know you’re a wolf. I see it in your eyes. You guys do have some fine blue eyes,” she said, rolling over onto her stomach and thrusting her chin onto her fists. “When I was little I used to look at the wolves with envy. You all seemed to know your place, like it was sorted from birth.”

“Yeah?” said Dascha, pulling the chair out from under a wooden desk that housed the room’s coffee maker. “And what’s
your
place, little Miss Runaway Kitty?”

“I don’t have one,” she said. For the first time her voice was sincere, and Dascha felt a pang of empathy, which he quickly knocked out of the way. This woman was trouble, and he couldn’t allow himself to feel for her, damn it.

“Well, your family says you have a place,” he replied. “With them. I’ll get you back there and then you can do what you like. You can even run away again, if you want to. I have no interest in whatever shenanigans you get up to.”

“Gee, thanks for looking after all this. Every woman’s dream is to be imprisoned and carted before her father in handcuffs.”

“No one said anything about cuffs,” Dascha leaned forwards. “But I’m sure I could find some if that’s what you’re into.”

Estée sneered at him. “Thanks for putting that thought in my head. But no thanks.”

She rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling, as Dascha pulled out the room’s phone directory.

“I’m going to book us a flight back,” he said. “For first thing in the morning. Is this all the luggage you have?”

“Yep,” she replied. Her messenger bag sat on the floor by her dangling feet. She’d left England with a suitcase, which she’d since abandoned. All she’d kept was a change of clothes and her overnight necessities. And of course the package, which sat tightly wrapped under all of it. The reason for the pursuit and the reason she wanted to get away from this damned wolf.

“Okay, well that makes things easy. There’s a flight into Colorado that leaves at eight a.m. We’ll order dinner later and you can hit the hay early. But for the next few hours, you’re going to have to find a way to entertain yourself that doesn’t involve being chased by bears or some kind of Houdini escape bullshit.”

“I’ll manage,” she said, pulling herself upright. “First thing I need is to use the washroom.”

“Suit yourself,” said Dascha, but he stood and walked into the small room before she had a chance, scoping it for possible exit points. This woman was a runner, and if there was a window for her to climb out she’d probably try.

Satisfied that she wouldn’t be able to escape he slipped out again, his chest only inches from hers as she stood in the doorway, glaring at him. As he moved, he took in her scent one more time, the same chemical reaction as before occurring inside of him. It was like he’d just inhaled the smell of a steak after going without food for three years; he wanted more and more of it, and yet he knew that it was bad for his heart.

Hell, he wanted to
eat
her. Great. He wanted to eat the pussy.

That was a dangerous thought.