Serengeti Storm

Chapter Three

The sight of blood dripping onto the pristine white snow blanketing the ground was oddly beautiful. Or it would have been.

If it hadn’t been his blood.

Caleb flexed his fingers, feeling the pull against the bloody gashes on his arm. Even healing as quickly as shifters did, Shana’s little love scratches were going to leave a mark.

His own fault. He’d learned long ago that she wasn’t afraid to use her claws, especially when she was trying her damnedest to prove she wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone.

She started to turn up the narrow path leading to Ava’s old cabin, but Caleb caught her eye and jutted his chin toward the main walkway. “This way.”

Shana stopped at the T in the path. “Dream on.” She planted one hand on her hip and flipped her long red hair, shaking off the snowflakes caught there. “I’d rather sleep with scorpions than in your sister’s bed, but I’d rather sleep there than in yours.”

Caleb told himself he didn’t give a damn where she slept, ignoring the feral urging of his lion to prove her words a lie. He’d scented lust on her earlier. Even if she had just clawed him, Shana’d always liked it a little rough. Drawing blood was probably a goddamn turn-on.

“Not Ava’s bed and not mine. This way.”

Shana gave a little sniff and fell into step beside him. Her eyes flicked down to his bleeding arm. He knew she was going to say something about it before she spoke.

Shay’d always hated to be proven wrong. She couldn’t tolerate any hint of weakness. Any time anyone bested her in any way, she had to remind everyone she was tough. Always.

“Gosh, Caleb, that looks like it smarts,” she purred, right on cue. “You really should put something on it.”

“It’s fine.” It was better than fine. It was a necessary reminder that Shana was walking, talking poison.

“Are you sure?” She shot him a rabid smile. “I haven’t had my shots.”

Caleb just kept walking, stalking silently through the snow.

Shana bounced on the balls of her feet at his side, the movement jostling loose a memory. His Shay sprawled across his bare chest. His fingers tangled knuckle-deep in her red curls. She twisted and bounced the bed, still energized after he’d done everything humanly—and inhumanly—possible to wear her out. Her happiness spilled around them, sunny and easy. “I love that you’re so silent, Cale,” she announced out of the blue, fingers then claws lightly flexing into his pectoral muscles to test his strength. “There shouldn’t be two talkers in a relationship. I can talk enough for the both of us.”

He hadn’t said anything then. At the time, the only thing he could have said was that he loved her. What a nightmare that would have been. Thank God he’d kept his mouth shut.

“Are we going to that bitch Zoe’s place?” she asked, jarring him out of the depths of his thoughts and back to the present. “I’ll just bet it’s empty if she’s in mine.”

“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.

“It’s good to have you back, Shana,” Loralee called, even her voice sounding pathetically subservient.

Did the girl have no self-respect? Shana appreciated Loralee’s respect for power and dominance, but even doormats like pathetic little Ava demonstrated some spine once in a while.

“Is it?” Shana asked. Her voice was harsh and she did nothing to moderate the icy thrust of the words.

Loralee’s wary smile faded a few degrees. “Yes. I missed you.”

“Sure you did.” Loralee’d missed having someone to fight her battles for her is what Loralee had missed. “Who’s in my bungalow?”

Loralee’s face froze. She was never much of a quick-thinker and now she was trying desperately to figure out whether Shana was allowed to know the answer to her question. Which meant she acknowledged an authority higher than Shana. Unacceptable.

“Who, Loralee?” she demanded.

“Tyler!” Loralee bleated.

“Shit.”

Tyler. Caleb’s older brother. Not quite as big, not quite as rough, but not someone Shana could tangle with and win.

"You could have just told me,” Shana snapped.

“Alpha said we couldn’t. He said it didn’t matter who it was. It was the principle of the thing.”

Of course. The principle. Trust the demented Alpha to make a big damned deal about principles when he could have just told her she didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning it back.

Shana turned and looked at the borrowed bungalow. It actually wasn’t that bad. As a starting point. A few challenges and she could trade up—principles be damned. Even if she couldn’t get her own place back, that didn’t mean she couldn’t get some nicer digs. And when she was the Alpha’s mate, even Tyler wouldn’t deny her. She’d have her place back. And her rightful place in the pride.

Goddesses and queens did not beg. Or fight. People gave them things.

“Your mother’s asking for you.”

Shana flinched at Loralee’s softly uttered words. Her mother. Living proof that queens did beg. Pathetic, deposed, drunkard queens who had lost all claims on self-respect. “What does she want?”

“She wants to see you,” Loralee said gently. “She’s missed you too.”

Shana knew what Loralee had missed. It was a little harder to pin down what her mother might have missed in her absence. A handy chauffeur to the nearest liquor store? Someone to look down on when she’d sunk so low it was hard to imagine anyone lower?

“She can go screw herself,” Shana whispered, barely mouthing the words.

“What was that?” Loralee asked, sweetness and innocence and weakness personified. Pathetic.

“I’ll go see her myself,” Shana said louder, brushing past the smaller female.

She sloshed through the melting snow, her mind closed to the pleasures of the winter sun and the playfulness of a snowy morning. She was going to see her mother. Firing squads were more congenial.