“She isn’t in yours.”
“No? Mara, then.”
Caleb said nothing, but she’d always been able to read his silences better than anyone else.
“Not Mara, either? Not Loralee. Pathetic little bitch. I’ve been kicking her ass since the fourth grade.”
Caleb didn’t call her on the lie. Loralee was the closest thing Shana had to a friend in the pride. For years, she’d followed Shana around like a duckling and Shana’d made sure no one laid a finger on her. Their friendship hadn’t soured until Landon had called a moratorium on challenges and Loralee hadn’t needed Shana’s strength anymore. Loralee stealing her bungalow would be another painful betrayal.
Though, knowing Shana, she would never admit to feeling pain.
“Not Loralee.”
“Good.” Shana frowned and worked at her lower lip with her teeth. “Then who? One of the males? Doesn’t matter. I can still take him. Whoever it is.”
“Drop it, Shana.”
“You sure it wasn’t you?” she persisted, ignoring his demand. “I can just see you, moving into my old place because it smells like me. Mooning over what might have been. Jacking off into my underwear drawer. That’s what happened, isn’t it? And you’re too much of a pussy to admit it. Don’t worry, baby. I won’t hold it against you.” She gave a little snickering laugh. “Much.”
“Not me. Shut it, Shay.” She was trying to hurt him, but he told himself not to take it personally. Hurt them first before they hurt you. That was Shana’s motto, pounded into her by a lifetime with her toxic mother.
“I’ll figure it out eventually. It’s not like you can keep me from wandering by the old stomping grounds to see who’s taken up residence.” Her face twisted like she’d tasted something sour. “It’s not some little girl you’ve been fucking, is it? In my bed. Probably calling my name when you come. Ugh. That’s disturbed, Caleb. There are counselors you can see about shit like that.”
“Shay.” Her name was a warning.
She ignored it. “I always felt bad about that,” she chirped, her cheeriness making the words a lie. “Ruining you for all other women. And at such a young age. It’s sad, really. Poor Caleb.”
His tongue itched with the urge to say something about the way she’d ruined herself. There wasn’t a bed Shana hadn’t slept in, a lion she hadn’t spread her legs for, and the nastiest part of his nature urged him to call her every kind of whore.
But they’d arrived at the empty bungalow, and part of him still believed there was a breakable little girl beneath her tough-as-nails front, so he said instead, “Here it is.”
Shana looked at the medium-sized, decently appointed bungalow and tipped her head to the side. “Not bad. From the outside. What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing. Go on.” He would have shoved her up the path, under the porch overhang and out of the snow, but knowing Shana, she probably would have bitten him for his efforts.
“Is it booby-trapped or something? Trip wire?”
“Shana, for God’s sake, just go in the damn house. It’s a fucking blizzard out here.”
She glanced up, seeming startled anew by the falling snow. “It’s barely snowing. Some Storm of the Century. Pathetic.”
The devil of it was he couldn’t even disagree with her. The blizzard the weathermen had been talking about for days was turning out to be nothing more than an inch or two of lightly falling snow. No wind, no whiteout conditions, nothing. But even extreme torture couldn’t have made him agree with her at that moment.
“Go, Shana.”
She turned the same look on him that she’d given the questionable bungalow only seconds before. Then, slowly, her eyes grew calculating. Her tongue snaked out to wet her lips. “And what if I don’t?”
He’d forgotten how exhausting it could be to deal with her. How nothing was ever easy. Even when he was balls-deep inside her, she was always testing his limits. Always pushing harder. His cock stiffened at the memory.
The answer Caleb suddenly wanted to give her was rough and sexual and would take their relationship right back to a place he had sworn he would never go with her again.
Shana must have sensed some shift in his mood, because suddenly she was three steps up the path to the abandoned bungalow, tossing him a disdainful glance over her shoulder. “Relax, tough guy. I’m going like a good girl.”
She waggled her ass at him in a way no good girl had ever dreamed and he growled. Then she disappeared into the house.
Caleb held himself still, fighting down the lingering urge to follow her into that house and show her what happened to little girls who teased men like him. The itch at the base of his spine simultaneously urged him to fuck and to shift. He fought both urges.
Until he felt the slight air pressure pop from the house, indicating Shana had taken her lioness form inside.
Caleb shifted involuntarily, the animal rising up fast and hard to claim his body.
In this form, the urge to break down the door and fuck her into submission was a hundred times more intense, the animal in him pressing humanity to the periphery of his consciousness. His lion told him the female he’d once thought would be his mate needed to be mastered, that she would welcome his dominance, but the man was still present enough to keep his paws firmly planted on the snowy ground.
When his animal snarled and snapped at his self-imposed tether, Caleb began a slow, prowling circuit around the house. Every fourth paw print was bloody from the bite of sweet Shana’s tender claws. He paced around the house until the track was a circle of red. Guarding. Whether he was keeping her in or keeping others out, he didn’t know. The animal in him didn’t see a difference. It just insisted that he keep prowling.
So he prowled.
Shana woke and stretched, reveling in the pleasure of being in her feline form.
During her months away from the pride, she’d never had the luxury of sleeping as a lion—or really of living as a cat for more than a few moments of each day, safely behind locked doors and careful not to make any non-human sounds.
Shana arched her back and rolled to all four paws, pushing up to stand. Just for the joy of it, she filled her lungs and roared, long and loud. She flicked her tail just to feel the air brush through the tuft.
Tempted though she was to remain feline all day, Shana reluctantly shifted back to human form.
She quickly pulled a fresh pair of panties out of her pack and pulled them on, along with yesterday’s jeans, bra and tank top. She’d get someone to bring in the rest of her clothes from the jeep today.
Shana opened the door to her borrowed bungalow—it was only hers temporarily, until she got her own back—and stood looking out over the snowy morning.
The big storm had only dropped a couple inches of snow on the ranch. Pale morning sunlight was already at work melting it. All signs of the so-called Storm of the Century would be gone by noon. Not far from her—borrowed—front porch, a pair of cubs rolled around in the slushy snow.
Shana frowned at a rusty brown stain on the porch—matching a similar stain circling her bungalow. She sniffed. Blood.
Trust Caleb to bleed out on her damn front porch instead of taking five seconds to have someone put a damn bandage on his arm. Goddess forbid he should disobey the Alpha’s command to keep her out of trouble even as long as it took to patch himself up.
Of course, he wasn’t around now to keep her out of trouble. Shana craned her neck and scented the air just to be safe. But no. No Caleb. Either he was hiding downwind, or he’d run off after making himself sick lying there bleeding on her porch all night long in the cold.
She had no sympathy for him.
A sleek young woman appeared around the corner of a nearby bungalow, giving Shana a tentative smile and a sheepish little shrug of her shoulders as she headed in her direction. Shana gritted her teeth. Loralee. She had no sympathy for her either.