He swiveled around on his stool, turning his back on her.
“You son of a bitch!” she screamed, and dove at him, knocking him off the stool.
He was more shocked than anything else. What exactly did she think she was going to accomplish? There was no scenario where this ended well for her.
In human form, she was a cute, short, well-padded girl of maybe five foot two, weighing a buck sixty or so. He was six foot two, and two hundred twenty pounds of solid muscle.
In animal form, she was a cute little fox. Foxes, unlike some other species, were considerably bigger than their non-were cousins– she was double the size of a non-shifter red fox – but that was still only forty pounds. He was an enormous gray wolf, weighing about two hundred fifty pounds in wolf form. He could eat her for breakfast and be hungry for more by lunch.
She didn’t have a chance in frozen hell of besting him, either in human or animal form. Or even causing a dent.
And yet here she was, straddling him on the floor.
He’d certainly played this scenario in his head plenty of times, but it hadn’t been set in a bar full of whooping, hollering men who were eagerly rushing forward to get a better view of the action. They’d temporarily forgotten that he was a potentially feral rogue, and were pushing forward to get a better view of the show.
Savannah clenched her fists and rained blows down on him that barely even stung. Growing impatient, he grabbed her wrists and, with a heave of his hips, flipped to the side and flung her off him. She punched the side of his head; he swatted her arm aside. They writhed around on the sticky floor, which was littered with cigarette butts and smelled of beer and bodily fluids he didn’t want to think about.
Savannah’s breath came in panting gasps.
Austin was painfully hard now, his erection throbbing, his inner wolf howling with need. He would have to remember to come up with some particularly exquisite revenge. If he lived long enough.
She managed to get a few halfway decent blows in, and he was starting to get annoyed, because she had an unfair advantage; he wasn’t going to hit her. Well, he was extremely tempted to drag her over to the small stage at the back of the room, flip her over his knees, and spank her plump rear, but he had a feeling there would be bad consequences for doing that.
“Mangy scumbag thief!” she yelled at him. She wriggled free, leaped to her feet, brushed off the bottle caps and cigarette butts that were sticking to her arms, and stormed outside. A chorus of catcalls chased her out the door, stirring a sudden rage inside him. His fangs shot out, and claws curved from his fingertips.
With massive effort, he forced his wolf back down.
What the hell? There was no way he was jealous over Savannah.
He climbed to his feet and leaned against the bar, thinking hard. Something was off here. He had never managed to rile her up that much before.
So why the sudden blitz attack?
He could only think of one reason.
He patted his jacket and shook his head ruefully. Of course.
The sound of an engine starting outside confirmed what he suspected. It washisengine.
He hurried outside. The sun was high in the sky, and the warm air smelled fresh and clean after breathing in the fetid, smoky smog that brewed inside the Watering Hole.
Like most shifter buildings, the bar was set in the middle of a thickly wooded area, providing maximum privacy. The parking lot, hemmed in by tall, swaying pine trees, was full of Harleys and pickup trucks – minus his.
Savannah had snatched his car keys from his jacket pocket while they were rolling around on the barroom floor, and he’d been too distracted by his raging hard-on to notice.
Well, she was certainly upping her game these days.
He was seized by a sudden urge to push back against the darkness that was slowly creeping into his head, if only so he could stick around and annoy the living daylights out of her for that much longer.
He strolled outside, and a smile of amusement curled his lips as she drove off down the road in his pickup truck, spewing up dirt in her path.
She stuck her hand out the window and extended her middle finger.
His grin turned feral. Oh, that one was going to cost her.
He reached into the hidden inside pocket of his denim jacket, pulled out the extra set of keys that he always kept there, and pressed the kill switch on the key.
The pickup truck slowly glided to a stop. He would have given every single penny he had in his bank account to see the look on her face at that point.
