Page 7 of Hunting Isla

Then I looked at their faces. Wyatt couldn’t even look me in the eye.

“I don’t think that’s an option, Isla. Maybe if Bohdie had been a lioness… but he’s a direct male descendant of our former Regent, and Bob isn’t going to like that.”

I couldn’t help the unladylike snort. “Your new Lion King is called Bob?” I let out a tiny laugh, which got more and more hysterical. “I would have been less surprised if his name was Muf⁠—”

Archer held up a hand. “Don’t say it.”

“Mufasa,” I burst out, doubling over as laughter made my gut muscles hurt.

Wyatt was smiling, while Archer was looking at me like I was deranged. But Axel just drummed his fingers on the armrest, waiting for me to finish my outburst so he could continue.

“Sorry, sorry. Keep going,” I told him, sucking in breaths.

“As I was saying, there’s a good chance that Bob felt Bohdie’s shift within the extended Pride links. He’ll know Bohdie is alive.”

All mirth left me when I saw the look on Axel’s face. “What are you trying to say?”

He dropped his voice, almost too low for me to hear. “It means that if he finds Bohdie, then your son will be as good as dead.”

CHAPTER 3

AXEL

This was weird, and I felt like a fucking creep, but I couldn’t help it. I watched Isla sleep, her body curled into a tight ball, and I wanted to crawl in there beside her. Wrap my body around hers. Sink myself into her warm flesh.

I’d missed her. When she left, something in me had broken. I knew what it was. We all knew. She was my mate. But when I’d first met her, she’d been a crazy seventeen-year-old kid with a jagged past and a chip on her shoulder. Now she was a beautiful woman, fierce. Seeing her standing there, protecting the cub even though she could hardly stand, it had hit me right in the gut.

I sucked in a deep breath, taking in her scent and letting it wrap around me like a blanket. Being turned was changing her already. Her scent was changing. I hadn’t thought there was anything more alluring than her scent as a human, but I was wrong. The lioness in her scent made me hard as a rock.

Deciding to move out of the room before she woke up and saw me standing over her with a hard-on, I crept on silent feet out into the living room, where my Pride and I were sleeping.

It hadn’t been a hard sell to get her to let us stay. I think she’d missed us as much as we missed her. Even Archer, the asshole.

The asshole in question popped open an eye. “You done watching her sleep, you psycho?” he joked from the ground, and I toed him in the ribs with my foot.

“Watch it,” I growled.

“Leave him alone, Archer. You’re only mad because you wanted to do it too, and he beat you to it.”

“He wants to beat something,” Archer grumbled, raising an eyebrow at the tent in my jeans.

“Only thing I’ll be beating in a minute is your face if you don’t shut your mouth,” I told him, lying down on the couch. I wanted to shift into my lion to sleep, but didn’t want to scare Isla or Bohdie if they got up.

“What are we going to do, Axel?”

Wyatt asked the question I’d been trying to solve all damn afternoon. So far, I had nothing. If the cub had been Isla’s—just some half-breed offspring of a low-ranking lion—that would have been one thing. We could have taken them both home today, made Isla happy enough that she’d agree to be our mate, and raised Bohdie as our own cub.

But Bohdie was practically a prince amongst lions. The old Regent had only had lionesses, Kara being the oldest. Bohdie would have been the next in line to the throne, if the Regent hadn’t been killed.

“We could take them and run, maybe find a place to make our own Pride. Just us, Isla and the kid. It’d be nice to have our own progeny, you know?” Archer suggested, rolling over so I couldn’t see his face.

I knew what he wanted. I was their leader, even though in the human world, we were cousins. We weren’t—we were rejects from our own Prides, ran out at fifteen and forced to find our own way. Well, I was, at least. I’d lived on the streets until I’d found Archer in the same position, and we managed to scrape together enough cash to get our crappy little apartment. By the time Wyatt came along, we were making enough that we could support him while he finished school. We’d made him go to college, even as we searched right across North America for Isla. Now he was a qualified accountant, with quite a little cache of private clients.

But all that would be wasted if we ran.

I didn’t have the answers, so I stayed quiet and let myself doze a little, one ear open for intruders. I would protect my Pride. Of this much, I was certain.

I was awoken by someone watching me sleep. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a sexy-as-sin brunette who’d haunted my dreams for the last six years. It was a five-year-old boy with his finger dangerously close to my nostril.