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  Lyin’ Heart

  Erika Masten

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Ellie Lowe had a helluva lot better balance than most people would have expected of a big girl, even if they’d known she had a touch of wildcat shifter in her. She needed that feline ‘always land on your feet’ grace as she ducked her way through the construction zone that was the main hallway off the entrance of the Garden Gate Bed&Breakfast. The little bit of extra curve on the dishwater blonde’s hourglass frame wouldn’t have been much defense against a jab from the rough edges on the half-finished banister. Or from the broom handle sticking out at an odd angle from a hole in the ripped-up drywall. She picked her way with deft steps between scattered power tools and bright plastic buckets, a course requiring a hop, a half-turn, a weave in the style of a true Twister champion.

  Then she turned the corner toward the kitchen and nearabout tripped over the sawhorse barring the doorway.

  “That stinking, piss-drunk jerk,” she said through clenched teeth as she pictured ornery Nate Brennan. Always with spiky bedhead and stubble and not in a sexy way, not by her reckoning, anyway. He had probably made a point of leaving the sawhorse in the way if only because Ellie had reminded him to move it before finishing up the night before. When she’d hired Grayslake Home and Commercial Reconstruction to start the renovations, she had done so on the good feeling she got from meeting and talking to Jared Brennan—and had yet to suffer his loudmouth brother.

  “If he whispers ‘skin’ one more time behind my back, so help me…” Ellie vowed, but her tensed shoulders sank after a moment.

  She hefted the sawhorse out of the way without finishing the thought.

  So help her was right. Help was exactly what she needed. The only break she’d had since buying this dirt-cheap, falling-down Victorian money pit was finding a contractor with a bid as cheap as Jared Brennan’s. If the indirect costs of getting the B&B up and running again included putting up with werewolf Nate Brennan’s speciest hostility toward shifters “not pure enough” to actually take animal form—‘skins’ was the term around these parts of Georgia—Ellie was going to have to pay it.

  The alternative was unthinkable.

  All Ellie wanted to be thinking about just then was her morning coffee. At least there was that, the smell of cinnamon and nutmeg under the richness of a medium roast, wafting through the kitchen. For a few minutes, she could stop caring about the lack of kitchen furniture and the overabundance of boxes overflowing with gadgets and clutter and way more coffee mugs than even a B&B needed.

  Ellie poured herself a strong cup. The first was always black, then with cream and cinnamon as her day wore on her nerves and she had to cut the acid building in her stomach. She hadn’t had her first swallow yet, though, when Mason dashed into the room. Her six-year-old was doing his best vroom vroom. The towheaded boy drove his Hot Wheels racecars over the cheap faux-granite countertop before guiding the toys into a daring leap across the kitchen floor to complete two laps around his mother’s hips and butt over her t-shirt and jeans.

  “Hey, hey, stop. Knock it off. Hot cup, Mason,” she told him, though gently. Ellie put the coffee cup down with as much care as she could with her boy running circles around her and swatted at him lightly with a blue and white plaid dishtowel. “That’s near as I’ve got to a checkered flag, race fans. It’s time for school.” Ellie paused to glance over her shoulder at the clock on the stove front. “It’s time for school, and Ida was supposed to take you fifteen minutes ago. Ida Lowe!”

  Ellie stomped a hurried circuit through the ground floor, her temples and pulse pounding as hard as her steps. As much as Ellie understood she had only herself to rely on now and more than herself to take care of, the moments when she’d ask for favors only to be let down smarted more and more. With her parents gone. With Mason’s father gone. With everything familiar back home in South Carolina fading from memory.

  Ida was hunched leaning at the laundry room door that led out to the back portion of the wrap-around porch. The nineteen-year-old had the same fair coloring, flyaway curls, and plump figure as her older sister (by seven years) but none of the bossiness, bitterness, or bracing life experience that seemed to be the sum total of Ellie anymore. Life hadn’t had a chance to tear up the girl as much.

  As Ellie marched into the utility room and took a breath to scold Ida for forgetting to take Mason to his kindergarten class, the girl glanced over and held her hand up to hush her angry sister. The woman reared, offended but also intrigued by the impish and eager smile curving Ida’s delicate lips and rounding her pink cheeks. It took Ellie only a second to realize her baby sister was spying on someone. Cautiously joining Ida at the glass-paned, paint-peeling French door, Ellie peered out toward the porch and past that at the gathering of men.

  A wave of nausea washed through Ellie’s stomach like a belly full of sour milk. At the foot of the porch steps stood the only current B&B guest, talking to two strangers.

  Aubrey Drummond; that was his name. He’d shown up at the front door six weeks before, when the old Garden Gate B&B sign was still cracked and swinging from only one of its two metal hooks on the post by the sidewalk. In fact, he was the reason it was hanging straight now and hadn’t finished snapping in two in the last winter storm to blow through, though it still needed fresh paint. What around here didn’t?

  How had he known to ask about a room back in the old carriage house? There were three out there and seven upstairs, and only the one he’d rented was fit for use. Ellie was suspicious of him, sure. That was her nature now. Just not suspicious enough to ask questions that might drive her only paying guest away—until now.

  “What kind of trouble has that man brought to my doorstep?” she whispered to herself, hairs on her nape prickling and werecat instincts bristling.

  It was bad enough that Drummond was gorgeous. Too gorgeous to be single, as he claimed, though he didn’t have the telltale faded stripe on his ring finger where a wedding band had gone missing. And Ellie had looked, good and hard, admittedly. He claimed to be a ranger working on some of the federal reserve lands out past the lake, and he had the uniform for it. But, still, for Ellie that dog wouldn’t hunt. Aubrey Drummond didn’t move like any run of the mill park ranger or environmental scientist she’d ever seen.

  He moved like a soldier, broad shoulders pulled back and down, spine straight, fingers curled loosely into fists. Polite and quiet and stoic the way she imagined a disciplined military officer would have been. And he had the haircut. What did they call it? High and tight? At 6’4”, he was a brown-haired, blue-eyed, square-jawed All-American heartthrob, the kind of guy any man would want his daughter to marry. That was, provided no one minded him being a shifter. A werecat, specifically.

  That was less of a problem here in Grayslake, Georgia. The whole town was run by a werebear clan, though the human population would never have known it. When things
had gotten a little iffy in other parts of the southern states these last few years, with government men ferreting out too many of the wolf and cat clans, Ellie had thought it would be safer someplace like Grayslake. It was, in a matter speaking.

  Ellie was only a skin herself, unable to shift like her daddy could. She had enough of the blood in her, though, and enough teaching from her parents to catch the signs. The slight golden shimmer in Aubrey’s skin when he got annoyed or overheated and his shift was pushing up on him. The peculiar grace and lean power in his body and his movements. The natural magnetism male werecats in particular possessed without even trying—though try they did, compulsively.

  And the smell. Under his cologne of sage and cedar, his skin was warm amber and musk. Even now, Ellie felt heat simmering up along the skin of her cheeks and her stomach trembling lightly at just the thought of that man’s scent. She’d have bet money he was a werelion, and not mountain lion like the few she’d known here in the south. Lion lion, with Greek or Mediterranean bloodlines that bestowed upon them a noticeable calm and near enough royal authority when cat clans gathered or allied. Or so she’d heard tell.

  She hadn’t asked Drummond about being a shifter, hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t needed to know. Ellie just minded her own business these days, especially when it came to attractive men, like the ones out there with him now. She glared, irritated at the primal reaction her body had to them.

  If Aubrey Drummond smelled faintly of royal werelion, the blond man peering down a patriarch nose at him right now in her back garden reeked of it. Sex in tight pants, that was who the stranger was, with golden blond hair and both the manner and the clothing of a man of taste and money.

  “Doesn’t the blond one look like an angel?’ Ida said in an excited whisper, gushing over the well-heeled stranger.

  “Mm-hm,” Ellie agreed. “The wrong kind of angel.” The kind that tempted and seduced. Even the look in his eye was wicked and irritatingly bemused as he regarded Aubrey Drummond over words that obviously had her guest riled. Those loose fists weren’t so loose as Aubrey glowered at his visitor.

  Worse, though, was the third man, the other one that Ellie didn’t know. He smacked of werecat, too, but not like either of the other men. This stranger was darker, and she didn’t just mean the tanned skin or the long black hair. He had the sort of black eyes she’d have expected to see in a beast of the wild, no human to the look of them at all. His body was still, taut with power at the ready, and he stood with discipline, with his hands folded the way she would have expected of a bodyguard. Waiting. Listening. Ready.

  The fact that the dark one was the only figure there who didn’t jump—and that included Ida and Ellie herself—when Mason ran out the kitchen door in a sudden interruption of six-year-old laughter and chaos told the woman all she needed to know about that stranger. He’d known Mason was in the kitchen. He’d seen the child ready to charge out onto the porch, though his black, fathomless gaze had never strayed toward the door. And it was likely, if not certain, that he knew the women were watching him from the utility room.

  Ellie’s only relief was seeing Aubrey Drummond move swiftly to scoop up her son into his arms and hold him at a protective angle on one hip.

  “Whoa there, speed racer,” Aubrey said. Ellie heard the forced pleasance in his voice even with it muted by distance and the glass between them.

  Sure, Drummond was smiling as wide as the child was as Mason showed off toy cars clenched in tiny fists, but there was that shimmer to Aubrey’s skin. Equal parts lustful awe, sheer terror, and building wildcat wrath put Ellie’s heartbeat in her mouth.

  Chapter 2

  Aubrey had hardly had the chance to put himself between Pietr Achieli and Mason Lowe when that glass-paned door off to one side of the porch flew open, and out she charged. Plump curves for days. Silky, flyaway, honey-blond hair. And all the fire of a she-cat in a temper. In a town full of werebears, you could be sure everybody thought there was nothing more formidable than a she-bear protecting her cubs. But the biggest, baddest werebear had nothing on Ellie Lowe.

  Panthera agent Aubrey Dreyer—make that Drummond now—shot Achieli a quick sidelong glance and subvocalized as low as he could, “She doesn’t know yet.”

  Which was Aubrey’s warning to the leader of the Panthera, the most powerful alliance of werecat species, not to turn on that golden boy charm and persuasion too soon. With a werecat as beautiful and voluptuous and wild as Ellie, though, would the privileged Greek aristocrat listen or even care? Six weeks of potentially wasted groundwork was at stake, not to mention the deal with Ty Abrams and his local bear clan if Pietr moved too fast and made Ellie—how did they say it here in Georgia?—bow up on him.

  The abrupt tightness in the front of Aubrey’s tan uniform pants revealed graphically what a bad choice of phrase that had been even just in his head. There was no hiding his arousal at Ellie’s nearness from the other male werecats or from himself. The only stroke of luck, and wasn’t that just another unfortunate thought when Aubrey didn’t need to be imagining the female werecat stroking anything on his body, let alone his painfully mounting erection, was that Ellie was so concerned about Mason that she didn’t notice her effect on the men. On any of them, and all of them.

  Beginning to exude that animal magnetism that all werelions had, and Pietr in spades, the Panthera leader pivoted smoothly to face Ellie Lowe. No attempt to hide the gleam of visceral appreciation in his light eyes. No gentlemanly self-consciousness at the rise of his cock in those expensive and unnecessarily slug Italian designer slacks he always wore.

  “You must be Elizabeth Lowe,” Achieli said with the smooth Mediterranean accent that generally rendered human women defenseless. And made Aubrey grate his teeth. The Panthera agent was going to need to get a mouth guard if his illustrious leader graced their presence for more than a day or two. “Aubrey has told me all about you.”

  Was it the voice, the leonine glow, the Greek god smile that pulled Ellie up short and made her step falter just as she reached the top of the porch steps?

  “He what? He… has?” Her words tripped as haltingly as her step.

  Fuck if that shit didn’t work on her, too.

  “Why does he talk like that?” Mason asked in a small voice just at Aubrey’s ear.

  Aubrey perked one brow. “Like what?”

  “Like it’s the vampire movies Ida watches with no color.”

  Fighting back his own snort and a glare from Pietr’s ever-watchful right hand, Dhakal, Aubrey shrugged. “I dunno, but I get what you’re saying,” he muttered back.

  Aubrey knew he liked Mason for more than being a cute kid. The boy might not have known Transylvania from Athens, but a six-year-old who knew smarm when he saw it would go far in life.

  In Aubrey’s moment of distraction with Mason, Pietr Achieli had taking the opportunity to sidle up to the boy’s mother. It had become Aubrey’s mantra, these last few weeks getting the lay of Grayslake and the B&B and watching her, to remind himself it wasn’t his business how many males came sniffing around the fiercely independent she-cat. Grayslake was a recon assignment, a temporary stop. So why was his lion rearing up under his skin when Pietr stood looming over Ellie?

  “Pietr,” he said cautioning, “I didn’t say—.” The Panthera leader’s smug, knowing glance over his shoulder told Aubrey that Pietr was pressing up on Ellie on purpose, to yank his subordinate’s chain as much as anything else. Manipulative bastard.

  Ellie seized on the pause between the men. “Didn’t say what? Why am I a point of conversation with strangers who don’t even know me?” she asked with the fiery southern accent that always hit Aubrey low in the gut, groin deep.

  The Panthera agent had to say that for the women he’d met in the south; they kept their tones clipped and polite while scolding bad manners right to the bone. The contrast riled both man and beast in him, both male pride and the urge to possess that fire.

  Achieli smiled down at Ellie with a serenity that Aubrey
wanted to tear off the other werelion’s face with his bared claws. “Aubrey is trying to say he hadn’t had a chance to tell you he’d mentioned finding this quaint old Victorian B&B to a friend who’d be very interested in buying it from you.” Pietr laid a manicured hand on his own chest in a gesture to indicate he was himself that ‘interested friend.’

  “You’re selling Garden Gate?”

  All gazes turned to meet the sound of a stern woman’s voice behind Ellie, at the top of the porch. Talk about bad fucking timing.

  Ellie tensed and whirled at the sound. “Caroline? No, I did not say I was selling the B&B.”

  He’d only been in Grayslake six weeks, but Aubrey would have been a piss poor intelligence agent if he hadn’t made a point already of acquainting himself with the primary players in the werebear clan that claimed this as their territory. She-bear Caroline Heath qualified as a player—as well as a raging bitch.

  Mid-calf pencil skirt, tiny pearl earrings, and sleek chestnut ponytail aside, the woman’s southern refinement only went so far in glossing over the grizzly, gristly part of the bear. Glaring and stiff-jawed, she looked like she’d just as soon have snapped at Ellie’s jugular as speak to the curvy blonde.

  “But you’re obviously entertaining an offer,” she told Ellie. Caroline’s gray eyes swept the group with a cold, surveying stare. “And entertaining quite the group of gentlemen.” She paused a split second longer than necessary, letting the implication sink in that Ellie was up to something indecent, before she added, “While my nephew is missing school.”

  The woman held her arms out toward Mason while she remained at the head of the steps above everyone else.

  “Yay, Auntie Caroline.” The boy squealed and squirmed his way out of Aubrey’s arms. “Do I get to ride in the ‘vertible? With the top down?”

  Cheeks flushed, Ellie turned to kneel before her son and take him by his narrow shoulders to intercept him. “No, Mason, I told you Ida is taking you to school.”