Prologue
I screwed around for years, drifted for a few too many, and then I found a home with the Dark Leopards Motorcycle Club. No, we’re not all leopard shifters, but we do all have one thing in common. We don’t fit anywhere else, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
The pull to find a mate was never in my blood like it was for so many of my kind. Not until recently, anyway. Each woman who caught my eye also lost my interest just as quickly. That was until I saw her. Lying face down in the alley, her sweet coppery blood tinged the very air I breathed. I felt the pull and did what was necessary to ensure she survived.
Then the real battle began. I had to convince her that my club and I weren’t the bad guys in this situation before we could start exploring the undeniable pull we both felt for one another. Keeping her safe from the men who attempted to steal her pelt was an even bigger worry, and one that would require my club having her back too.
That meant she had to be claimed.
Mated.
Mine.
Chapter Three Hundred Seventy-Six
The woman shrieking my name from across the street could have been ignored if it weren’t for the way her tits were bouncing all over the place in the barely there shirt she had on. “Grayson Brewer? Is that you?” I hadn’t been called by my full given name in so many years, it seemed foreign to hear it from someone I couldn’t readily identify. Grayson had been my father’s last name. Not that I ever met the man, but having that knowledge made me cringe every time I heard it spoken.
“Conquest of yours?” Knox, my club’s president, smirked as he asked me.
“Fuck if I know.” The woman who yelled my name bounced her tits, along with the rest of her, all the way across the street to where we were just about to hop back on our bikes to head to the clubhouse. She poked her overly made up lip out in a pout as she neared and realized I had no clue who she was.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Listen, I don’t have time for games. I don’t know who you are or what you want, but I got places to be sweetheart, so…” I just left the last hanging, hoping she would get to the point or get out of the way. There was a hint of feminine cat, something other than leopard in the air. I licked at my lips, catching the taste of her in the air. Panther, maybe.
“Well, we met when you first moved here. I thought maybe, if you hadn’t found a mate yet, um…” Her eyes darted with a great deal of interest toward Knox before shifting back to me. It would take a complete moron to miss the fact that this little kitty cat was about to go into heat, and she was looking for someone to put little kittens in her belly. That was something I had no interest in. If, one day, I actually found my mate, there was no way I wanted her to be saddled with my cubs and a baby momma hanging around that she shouldn’t have to deal with.
“Sweetness, don’t you have a leap you belong to?”
“I’m not leopard,” she hissed at me for insinuating as much. “I’m panther.”
“Well, honey, I am leopard. You look down your nose at being called one, then maybe you shouldn’t be looking to get knocked up by one either. Go on, get out of here and let your claw take care of you then.”
“If I mate with one of them,” she started to say, but then stopped. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.” She turned on her heel and moved with far more grace and swiftness while crossing the road this time. Thankfully, she was also headed in the opposite direction I was.
Knox shook his head while laughing at me. “Jesus, Gray. What the fuck kind of pheromones you putting out over there?”
I grinned at my long-time friend. “Dead fuckin’ sexy, that’s what!” I was only half joking. I knew the effect I had on the opposite sex, especially other feline shifters. Some of it was just the sheer confidence I typically exuded. The rest of it was because I could usually read their wants or needs in an otherworldly way. I couldn’t quite read specific thoughts from people, but it was close enough that knowing exactly what they wanted was never a challenge. When I was younger, I used that knowledge for my benefit more often than not. Hell, I probably still used it too often, just because it was second nature at this point. I firmly believed that was why I had been made vice president of the Dark Leopards Motorcycle Club’s Western Michigan Chapter. I just knew shit that other people had to guess at. It made my presence indispensable during business deals.
“What do you think she was getting at about her claw?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Who the fuck knows. Maybe she didn’t want to feel owned?”
“You didn’t get anything off of her?”
“She’s about three days off from going into heat. I didn’t get shit, beyond her being nervous and horny,” I told him, only to have the bastard laugh at me.
“You have the control of a saint, Gray.”
“Nah,” I disagreed. “I swore I’d never leave a bunch of women with babies trailed across the country the way my father did before he found his mate. What that poor woman had to go through before he moved them to another fuckin’ country to get away from his brood. Hell, he moved them because it made his mate so sad to see all the children the bastard had before her, but him moving and abandoning them, has made it so his mate up
