Sassy Ever After: Bonnie Sass (Kindle Worlds Novella) (4 page)

“Scream at me, Angharod, or scream for me,” he growled into her ear. “Your choice.”

“You
are
insane. Everyone in the kitchen will hear us.”

His low rumble of a chuckle, deep in his chest, wolfish, was not a good thing. “Then that’s going to make this quite the challenge for you, lass.”

This? Angie didn’t have the chance to ask before Calum had her pushed up against the wall with her suit jacket pulled halfway down her arms, tangling her, and her skirt pulled up to her waist. The alpha kissed and nipped and growled his way down Angie’s body, leaving a trailing of tingling warmth.

“You still wear stockings and garters for me,” he groaned as he crouched before her and laid a hot kiss on her inner thigh just above one stocking. His cheek, rough with the stubble of a long day, brushed her pussy through her panties. Angie bit her lip and held her breath to keep from moaning.

Finally, her breath burst out of her. “It’s not for you, Calum. You can’t keep acting like everything is for you.”

“
You
are for me,” the shifter told her in a voice that was deep and gruff and insistent. “You’re my mate.”

Angie shook her head no, mostly at Calum’s words but also at the swell of temptation she was feeling to give in to how much she wanted him. How much she’d always wanted him.

“Would it really be so bad to admit you belong with me, lass?” Calum asked, more softly but more ominously this time. His breath steamed hot against her mons through her thin underwear.

The woman shook her head again, more violently. “I don’t believe in fairy tales. The common American girl doesn’t marry the handsome lord and live happily ever after. As soon as the press and your friends start asking about the chubby girl in the tabloid photos, you deny I even exist.”

Angie was squirming as Calum breathed hot and heavy against the juncture of her thighs. Now he pushed her legs wide apart to slide between them and wrapped an arm tight around her waist. He jerked her in close and made her be still. She kept her eyes clamped shut as she felt his breath against her skin while he spoke.

“That was never what happened, Angharod,” he scolded her, clearly enflamed by the suggestion. “I was a fool for not telling you my father had been killed, and they were calling me home to settle a restless pack bent on vengeance. I was a fool for thinking I was protecting you from the prying eyes of the press by refusing to talk about you. But I never denied you. I was never hiding the plain truth that you were my mate.”

Pretty words and late apologies
now
, she thought. But there wasn’t much time for thinking or arguing his points.

Calum used his teeth to shred the material shielding Angie’s pussy, and his thick, hot tongue plunged into her softness. She squealed, his name maybe, or a curse. She couldn’t be certain as his tongue swirled and dove and drove up into her. Angie clawed at the wall behind her and at Calum’s hair as he licked deeper and deeper into her aching core. He was growling and huffing all the while, rubbing his rough skin against the sensitive lips of her sex.

It was like he couldn’t taste enough of her, couldn’t lick deep enough inside of her. Pushing his face and thrusting his tongue and grinding. Angie’s feet came up off the floor. Calum was holding her around the waist, balancing her weight on his shoulders and the wall, making her rest down on his face as he pumping his tongue and sucked and nipped and licked and licked and licked until….

Until Angie slumped forward, biting down hard on her lip and a climax that rippled and prickled through the walls of her pussy like electricity. Pulsing. Stinging. Hot, so hot. He kept licking her through her orgasm, through her shuddering little fit of bliss.

The pleasure grew too intense, finally, and Angie wriggled fiercely against Calum, away from him. “Enough, enough, enough,” she said in a low mew, sounding far too vulnerable to her own ears.

The alpha stood, gathering Angie to her feet, steading her, holding her until she stopped shaking. She was acutely aware the whole time of the demanding ridge of his erect cock straining the front of his suit pants and pressing into her flesh.

At length, Calum took Angie’s hands in his face and kissed her deep and hard and breathless. “It’s never enough, Angharod, not until you’re truly my mate. Marked as mine.”

He smoothed her clothes and her hair and left her in a daze in the kitchen with those impossible words. Marked as mine. Mated. It was impossible, she thought. It was a fairy tale she had forced herself to stop believing seven years ago.

Angie was practically at the point of tears when her damn cell phone rang.
Suck it up, princess
, she told herself, took a deep breath, and answered.

“Ms. Maddox, this is Orla. I need your help. You know Las Vegas far better than a visitor would.” The woman’s tone was urgent, her words clipped.

“What’s the matter?”

“Kenzie slipped away from me—intentionally. I wouldn’t agree to take her to a club somewhere here in the city. I don’t know the name.”

“What kind of club? I probably know it.”

“One with men stripping. Shifters.”

“Fuck,” Angie blurted into the phone. “I know the one. The Naked Wolfe. Let’s go find her.”

I
t wasn’t just
the taste of Angharod’s sex in Calum’s mouth. Not just the sound of her mews and moans, denied him since she’d disappeared from his life. Not just a flaw in his instincts. Angharod was Calum’s mate. He felt it. As he stood on the balcony of his suite in the warm desert wind with another glass of whiskey, Calum was certain of this in a way that he could be certain of nothing else.

The knowledge weighed in his chest in her absence, in his gut, in his groin, and made the wolf inside him yearn to shift and howl.

Calum finished off the whiskey, letting it burn his throat and his chest the way the encounter in the kitchen of Apex with Angie left his cock burning for her. She was the only remedy for the pain. Just like she was the only hope he had that his instincts were not fatally flawed.

Fatally flawed
. Calum winced at the thought. His instincts seven years ago, when his father had fallen with suspicion on one of the vampire covens in northern England but no proof, has been to press for evidence before blood. Then two years ago, his instinct was to let Hew’s and Orla’s older brother work alone with a skittish vampire spy inside the largest of the London covens. Now here he was with his father’s death still unsolved and a pack brother’s on top of that. Because of decisions he’d made. The wrong decisions.

Was this summit a strategic alliance, Calum had to wonder, or the desperate act of a flawed alpha looking for redemption?

Aye, and just how foolish was it to place so much faith in a woman who had already drug his ego through the mud? It seemed, from what she’d said in the kitchen, her experience of how things had fallen apart in London had been very different from Calum’s. Each felt the other had abandoned them, and maybe it really couldn’t have turned out any other way, with both of them so young, but now….

“Sir?” Ewan said from behind Calum, from behind the sheer white veil of drapery across the open door to the balcony. When Calum joined him inside, the beta informed him, “We have an update from our scouts.”

“Which is?”

“They’ve spotted surveillance on our movement, at least three males. Smells like shifters, like wolves.”

Calum considered this as he studied the last few drops of whiskey swirling around in the bottom of his glass. “The Las Vegas pack, perhaps? Standard surveillance procedures when other packs are in their territory in numbers rather than one or two at a time?”

Ewan nodded. “Aye, it’s possible. We do it, so why wouldn’t they?”

“A lot easier in a place like Inverness than Las Vegas,” Calum said, and again Ewan nodded his agreement. “But if it’s not our hosts keep a watchful eye that we all follow the rules of the summit, then what?”

Ewan paused to look at Calum from below his brow, his ginger head bowed slightly.

“Out with it,” Calum insisted.

“There’s a rumor that the London vampire coven has had another incident. Someone’s gone rogue, and they canna tell where or why.”

Calum tapped his glass with the tip of one finger, trying to think strategically while his wolf bristled and pushed up on him to shift. To get out there into the night and find out what was really going on.

“Put another two guards on Kenzie,” the alpha ordered, and Ewan nodded as though he had expected as much. “And put one, two if we can spare them, on Angie Maddox, but keep them at a distance so she doesn’t know they’re with her.”

“Fuck, Calum, can you not stop thinking about that girl for two minutes?”

“Ewan, don’t—.”

“Swear to God, you’ve really got your bum out on this one.”

“And I swear I’ll have your wolf on its back in front of the whole pack if you can’t be bothered to obey your alpha.”

“Calum, had it even occurred to you that this is about your fucking ego?”

And oh indeed it had.

“That if you get the girl, your wounded ego will be satisfied and you won’t want her so much after all?”

Hew rushed in from the foyer without concern for what was becoming a dangerous confrontation for the pack’s top two wolves. Both men were flustered, the color of their eyes changing, the appearance of five o’clock shadow growing heavier on their cheeks.

“They’re gone. Calum, they’re gone.”

Calum hadn’t seen Hew so shaken since they’d found his brother gutted in a London alley. Having that memory occur to Calum now set his teeth on edge. His wolf rose closer to the surface. “Who is gone, Hew? Who’s gone missing?”

“Not missing, kidnapped. Orla tried to stop it, but there were four of them, wolf shifters, and now she’s hurt. Torn up pretty bad, up and down one side, from her shoulder to her hip. We’ve got help seeing to her now. She said Kenzie was too wrecked from being out drinking at some nightclub here to defend herself, and Angie’s just human, so—.”

“Angie?” Calum felt the residual heat of his amorous moment with Angharod dissipate at the touch of a searing cold chill.

“Aye, Orla and Kenzie and Angie were in the drive beside the club. Kenzie was sick from too much to drink. Angie was trying to get her back to the hotel when four men came up on them and tried to convince the girls to take a ride back with them. It wasn’t smooth, she said. They didn’t seem to know what to do when the girls all said no. The stupid bastards even shifted and went half-form to wolf to try to force the girls into a van. Then shifters from the club heard the fight and came running, and it got messy. Orla had gone to her wolf and was all fangs with them. She was too wild and too bloody to get her into the vehicle, so the men just took Kenzie and Angie and let out like their tails were on fire.”

“Who the fuck would….?” Ewan asked, his face burning red with far more rage than a few moments before over his petty argument with Calum.

“It could be one of the other packs, I suppose,” the alpha said, trying to reason through the anger of his wolf and the fear gripping his gut for his sister and his mate. “But to what end? To come all the way to Las Vegas on the pretense of negotiating coordinated action against the vampire covens while all along just looking for some kind of… leverage, but for what?”

“I don’t think…,” Hew started to say, shaking his head no. “Calum, I was out there where it happened looking around with the scouts. We scented a vampire.”

S
tay calm
. Stay calm. Stay calm.

Angie’s breathing exercises, originally intended to help her deal with her boss without sassing him, kept her occupied as she sat in total darkness in the back of her kidnappers’ van. After all, how was panicking going to help? She was with Kenzie, who was a shifter herself, though Angie didn’t know how mature or powerful the girl was as werewolves went. Something she now realized she should have asked Calum.

Once, back in London, he had shifted for Angie, so she’d see it and know his wolf was as loyal and protective toward her as he was. And probably so he would know she wasn’t going to freak out about it later if a situation came up and he
had
to shift in front of her to face some threat.

Calum was a beautiful dark wolf, almost black when his coat lay flat. When a hard British wind came up or when he let her run her hands through the fur, it was more of a warm dark brown underneath. Just thinking about that, about the feel of Calum’s wolf relishing her touch, the fur, the wind in her own hair that day, calmed Angie more than her breathing exercises.

And it was the thought, too, that surely Calum and his pack would come for them any moment. Strange how she couldn’t make herself trust anything he said after how rejected she’d felt in London, but she had complete faith that the alpha would bring all the force of his wolf and his pack to bear to rescue….

Well, his sister, obviously. Angie frowned beneath the hood her captors had unceremoniously yanked down over her head. Yeah, Calum and the pack would definitely come for Kenzie, and whether or not Angie was included as a priority or not, at least they’d help her while they were there. Right?

Fuck that. Whether rescuers were on their way now, whether they were coming just for Kenzie or for Angie, too, didn’t matter. The upside to everyone abandoning her—from her workaholic father to her emotionally unavailable mother, from her closest friends and co-workers to Lord Calum Ferguson—was that it taught Angie to believe in and rely on only herself.

When all this was over, Calum was just going back to Scotland anyway. If Angie was lucky, she’d get away with just losing her job.
Great.

The woman’s sense of calm had given way to cold anger by the time the kidnappers dragged Angie and a snarling, kicking Kenzie out of the van. Calum’s sister tried to shift on them twice, but a hard kick from one of the men had stopped her both times. Angie heard one of them comment about the young ones having trouble shifting to their wolf if you put their human form in pain, but not too much. Hurt them too badly, and their wolf would spontaneously rise to form out of survival instinct.

Angie tried to take in what she could from her other senses—possibly asphalt under her feet, the echoing quality of a small stairwell, and then the sharp strike of shoes on a hardwood floor. Then the hoods came off to reveal what looked like a renovated industrial loft with huge banks of windows, lit only dimly by bright moonlight and the residual glow of the Strip lights in the distance.

The sight of the kidnappers, scruffy thugs with neck tattoos and low-grade wannabe paramilitary jackets from some surplus store, hit all of Angie’s buttons. Her filters disengaged.

“Fucking mongrels,” she swore before she could stop herself, if she had wanted to stop herself. Even having seen the men transform into six-and-a-half or seven-feet-tall half-form werewolves didn’t generate enough fear in Angie to keep that mouth of hers shut.

She bit her tongue, a little too late.

The one beside her stepped around in front of her of her and raised his hand to strike, talons extended. “I’ll shut that mouth if you won’t, bitch.”

Angie caught her breath. This was going to hurt. This was going to cut.

Kenzie, somewhere behind Angie, snarled furiously. “Don’t you dare touch her.”

“Stop.”

It was a male voice that issued the command. Angie hadn’t heard anything quite like it. Oh, the voice sounded just like a deep, sexy, smooth male voice, sure. And, yes, she had heard an English accent before. But the quality of authority it wielded was strange. No growl. No menace to the tone. No anger or insistence or urgency. If anything, he sounded mildly frustrated, maybe fatigued even. And yet all four of the shifters instantly took notice and turned to face the figure standing by the windows.

Angie hadn’t noticed the man there, standing in partial shadow, his back to them as he looked out over the city. Now she had a chance to see a young, well-dressed figure with neatly trimmed, short brown hair. The gleaming moonlight accentuated the lean but muscular curves and angles of his tall frame, from broad shoulders to narrower waist and solid, powerful hips. The woman had been working in Las Vegas too long when she could be in a situation like this and admire the fine Italian designer shoes the man wore.

“Look,” said one of the werewolf thugs, his hair buzz-cut on the side but longer and scraggly on top. Wannabe neo-punk, Angie thought dismissively. “We brought you the girl.”

“Bound,” the Englishman at the window said. “You bring her bound and scuffed when you had careful, clear instructions to bring Mackenzie Ferguson to me gently and unharmed. Did your alpha not understand that?”

“Rogues don’t have a fucking alpha.”

The well-dressed stranger, obviously an educated man from his speech and his posh accent, raised his hand to the face Angie could not see and rubbed his brow. “Fine, whatever Joel is to you. I told him I wanted to talk to Ms. Ferguson. His associates—that’s you—were to persuade her of my need of her assistance, to become physical only if necessary, and to hurt her under no circumstances whatsoever.”

“The bitch is a she-wolf. How gently do you think she’s going to come when four shifters who aren’t even in her pack come up and ask her to evening fricking tea?”

“That was Joel’s problem—and yours—not mine. We had a bargain.”

“Yeah, I heard, if you can even hold up your end. Not sure why Joel trusts a vampire, and one that won’t even show us his face.”

Vampire. The word pierced Angie and got bigger and bigger in her mind, heartbeat by heartbeat. The vampire menace, Kenzie had said, was the whole reason Calum had called the summit of the dozen most powerful packs in the world. Kenzie was snarling lower and louder now, with an animal nature to the sound that Angie had never heard from the girl before. It was making their wolfish kidnappers anxious, making them fidget and tense and balance their weight back and forth from foot to foot.

Another British-tinged voice, significantly more crass, amused,
and menacing
, called low from the shadows on the other side of the room. “He’s not showing you his face because he’s trying not to kill you.”

When one of the thugs snorted derisively at the thought, a pale but burly man with a nearly shaven head came forward from the darkness.

He chuckled and said, “Everything about you wolves—your smell, your growling and pissing, your bloody stupidity—makes him angry. Vampire instincts that are a hell of a lot fucking older than you lot all put together are telling him to rip your throats out and drink. So he’s keeping his back turned until it passes. Just in case you turn out to be useful after all.”

This new vampire made Angie’s radar go off—that instinct women have about the creeper on the dating site or some guy watching them walk to their car. He was straight out of some movie about crime gangs in England in the 1950’s.

“Me personally?” he said. “I never thought dealing with a bunch of rogue werewolves who can’t even be loyal to their own kind was a great idea. It’s odd how you get all sentimental about your prey and mate with them. But at least you did bring an extra guest.” He was clearly staring at Angie. “I could feed about now.”

“Simon,” the man at the window said cautioning.

“What? Are you serious? Ferguson’s sister isn’t going to cooperate now. Having her here is all the fucking leverage we’re going to get with him.”

Leverage, Angie thought. Leverage for what?

The vampire with the shaved head motioned at Angie, whose skin had turned cold with goosebumps. “And this bird they just scooped up along the way, she’s no one.” He was stalking toward Angie as he spoke, and the werewolves parted to let him have a clear path to her.

Oh, fuck
.

Kenzie piped up then. “She’s my brother’s mate. Touch her, and it will be all out war between wolves and vampires.”

The vampire at the window stiffened, his shoulders straightening and expanding. What was possibly the most handsome man Angie had ever seen finally turned to face them.