Risking everything for the one woman bold enough to betray him.
Julia Rierdon attacks life with everything she’s got, taking the missions no one else will touch. Refusing to slow down long enough to embrace anything or anyone else. When her plane goes down in the Smoky Mountains, being injured and alone with a dangerous shifter chained at her side is bad enough. Fighting her bone-deep desire is a challenge she could fail.
Ross Walker knew Julie was dangerous the minute she walked into his casino. She exactly matches the image of his destined mate imprinted on his dreams. One moment of distraction and he’s on his way to prison—putting at risk the future of the Cherokee Ani’Kutani, an ancient clan of shape shifters.
He ought to make a break for freedom. Instead he stays to heal her wounds. Giving in to their wild, undeniable passion, Ross prays their mystical connection will help Julia see beyond what she’s always believed about shifters and see the
forever in his dreams.
Product Warnings
This book contains a kick-ass heroine who has faced death and come out on the other side ready for anything and everything. It also contains a sexy cougar shape shifter who’s man enough to give her more than she’s bargained for…again and again.
Copyright © 2010 Barbara J. Hancock
All rights reserved — a Samhain Publishing, Ltd. publication
She was being hunted.
Knowing it and doing something about it were two very different things.
She had a banged-up knee that made standing painful and walking any faster than a hobble impossible. She had an empty stomach and the lightheadedness to prove it. So empty in fact, that if she had claws and fangs she might be stalking him.
As it was, clawless, fangless and getting-the-hell-out-of-here challenged, she was forced to put her back up against a tree and wait.
He was out there.
And he was angry.
The wreckage of their plane smoldered peripherally to the south. Smoldered even though her stomach told her it had been many hours since the crash. She’d only regained consciousness in the last half an hour.
And now this.
It was what she deserved for taking a non-military flight with a captured shapeshifter in tow, a wealthy powerful shifter in control of half the state. She should have waited for a military cargo plane and a fighter-plane escort.
Then again, she wasn’t sure that anyone deserved to be chewed.
It was four days before the most ambitious raid ever planned against shifters. Now, because of her impatience, she was in the remote mountains of North Carolina with no help in sight and she was about to be savaged by a man she’d thought about sleeping with twenty-four hours ago.
*
Ross Walker.
He would have been incredibly handsome if he’d been a down-on-his-luck used-car salesman. As the head of a powerful shapeshifter clan, he was incredibly handsome and untouchable. Untouchable always seemed to push Julia Rierdon’s buttons.
When he had stalked onto the plane, even though no man should be able to move with predatory grace in shackles and chains, she’d gone white-hot for long, long seconds. She didn’t know if it was the challenge in his eyes or the muscles in his thighs, but she’d let herself look and look some more. The answering heat in his brown-eyed gaze should have made her blink and look away.
She didn’t.
The end of the world as they had known it had made most of the remaining human population cautious. It had made Julia determined to prove she was alive.
One thing she should have known—never shoot come-hither glances at a shapeshifter—unless you want to be up against a wall very soon thereafter.
She didn’t hit the galley wall too hard. Only hard enough to send tumblers tumbling and bags of peanuts flying. That quickly, she’d found herself with cool refrigerated metal drawers at her back and the hot hard body of an aroused shapeshifter all along her front.
Guess which had gotten the majority of her attention?
“Backup. Call for backup. The shifter’s gone postal,” a uniformed agent had shouted as he grabbed for Walker.
“We need a tazer up here, now!” another agent had shouted into the transmitter clipped to his ear as he too went for the man pinning her to the wall.
Walker ignored them.
His dark eyes had locked onto hers and he’d pressed even closer. It’s not like she could cry jerk when she’d been checking out his thighs moments before, and she wouldn’t cry mercy. No way, no how. Instead of crying anything at all, she’d tilted her chin and given him the dewy-eyed look that had gotten him into this trouble in the first place. She’d even thrown in the pouty lips for good measure. She was no longer wearing the low-cut sequined dress and the four-inch stilettos she’d worn into his Cherokee casino, but “the look” she could do in jeans and sneakers.
He’d gotten it.
He’d gotten that it was a challenge and not a come on. He’d understood she was tweaking him for falling for the oldest trick in the book. His full sexy mouth softened and tilted in an appreciative smirk.
But then, then he’d spoiled it all—her cheekiness and his humor—by pressing his lips to hers.
The first shock? It wasn’t hard, bruising domination. The second? That it was seductive, soft and teasing. She was so taken off-guard she’d actually liked when a hint of moisture, just a hint of tongue, had brushed against her slightly open lips.
She might have kissed him back given one more second. She might have even sighed or whimpered because that slight hint of heated moisture was so not enough.
Thank God, she’d been saved from that humiliation by two more uniformed agents. All four big men were able to pull Walker back…but only because he’d been ready to step away.
“We’re not finished,” Walker had said to her calmly, even though four burly agents were handling him way less than calmly.
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