Page 39 of Chased

Her face lit up. “Would you?”

“Sure.”

She stepped in then and put her arms around him, resting her head on his chest. “Thank you.”

She didn’t step away again, so after a second he put his arms around her too. She felt good against him, like her warmth was seeping through his skin and making his insides warm.

Her head still on his chest, she said, “So is that why you were watching me? To make sure I was okay?”

“No.” Yes? He didn’t know anymore.

“Then why were you?” She was looking up at him now.

Yeah, fuck, he did know. He tilted his head down and kissed her. Slow, because he wanted to know what she tasted like. If she maybe wanted him.

He felt her draw in her breath, and then relax with a little sigh, kissing him back. He didn’t know how long they stood there making out all sweet and slow, until he heard a wolf howl from the nearby woods. Fucking Cisco.

But it was just as well, because where the hell did they go from here? He could already feel his wolf rising up, and he didn’t think he could fuck anybody right now without his wolf coming half out.

If she was looking for romance, that sure as hell wasn’t it.

So he stepped back and said, “I better go. Sleep good.”

She gazed up at him for a moment, and then said, “You too. See you.”

He watched until she was safe inside, and waved to him from the window. He waved back, and then walked off into the shadows, wondering what the fuck he was going to do now.

Chapter 17

As the days went on, Madison began to feel comfortable at the Ridge. The biggest problem she had was not being able to Change into her lapin form, and she knew she’d have to figure out a way to do that soon.

Shifter animals couldn’t be kept inside for too long. It hurt them.

The work was overwhelming but fun, and no one expected more of her than she could handle. She was also making friends with Breanna, Mikey and Jaeda, who apparently was an old friend of Mikey’s from her home pack.

Jaeda’s mate Remy and his twin brother Colt were also old friends of Mikey’s, which explained why Colt—a contractor and construction engineer—had agreed to come here from Kentucky and oversee their construction projects. Mikey claimed it was because she knew too much about the twins’ misspent youth and the work was payment for her silence.

The twins claimed they had just as much on her as she had on them. They were hybrid shifters like Madison, combination snow leopard/snowy owl shifters, who’d grown up in the legendary Bad Blood Crew. But to her fascination, they could both manifest both animals. Maybe it was a twin thing, but it made her wonder if she could ever be a fox.

That would be cool.

The twins’ mom, Caitlyn, was the snowy owl part of the equation. She was the woman Madison had first seen on the barn roof, running the crew there, and she was as much fun as the other girls, especially because she absolutely could not hold her liquor. When she was drunk she was hilarious.

Madison’s second-biggest problem was Sanchez. He still lurked in the woods at night, and she still seemed to find him wherever she turned, but he hadn’t kissed her again since that Saturday night. So she didn’t really know what was going on there. Only that she couldn’t stop thinking about him.

Not that she didn’t have other things to think about. By this time, Breanna, Mikey, Jaeda and Caitlyn had decided that Madison needed to have all the experiences she’d missed growing up in a wealthy Renard household.

They didn’t know everything about her yet—and she felt bad about that—but she’d told them a lot. How messed up and repressive it was being a Renard, and how much more fun it was here.

She’d made a joke one night about having a bad girl bucket list, and they’d made it their mission to help her check things off it, with the guys helping.

Mikey had already started to teach her to pick locks, although there weren’t a lot of them at the Ridge to choose from. Jaeda was teaching her to shoot. Boomer had promised to teach her to make a bomb, and Sanchez had started teaching her how to throw knives and axes. She was still really bad at it, but it made her feel badass as fuck.

Madison even let Mikey give her a tattoo one Saturday afternoon. A lot of the soldiers—including Gunn, Switch and the Sanchezes, were away on a mission, and the girls were hanging out.

Madison had agreed to the tattoo only if it was of Snowball, the evil rabbit from The Secret Life of Pets. She didn’t tell the girls why, of course, but aside from the Monty Python killer rabbit, Snowball was the only badass rabbit she’d ever seen. On the rare occasions when Vixen admitted to being a lapin, she wanted to be Snowball.

All the girls came to Mikey’s to drink margaritas and be moral support while she got inked. They gave her the courage to ask Mikey to add a Snowball quote to the tattoo: Liberated forever. Domesticated never.