|
Red-hot animal attraction.
A Feral Attraction story.
Jules Kingston is a WereLion destined to be the next Lioness of the White Sands Pride. Her fathers, having decided to step down as Leos, have put out a call for a pair of lions to mate with their daughter. Before settling down with mates and a litter of cubs, though, Jules wants to spread her wings.
Of all the Lions in the Pride, Gabriel and Lucas Beckett are the only two who make her panties wet-and the last two she would ever take on as mates. When the brothers stake their claim, she runs, cursing her hormones for reacting to such prime specimens of her species.
Gabe and Luke have known for years that Jules is meant to be their mate. The trick will be to convince their woman she belongs to them. As expected, Jules leads them on a merry chase.
Then a mate fight and hunt is called by a rival pair. To win Jules as their own, Gabe and Luke must prove their dominance over the Pride-and their woman.
Warning: Contains explicit sex, graphic language, stubborn men, an independent woman and red hot romance.
Excerpt:
Usually a pint of Cherry Garcia ice cream made all seem right and put her back in focus, back on track, giving her comfort the way saturated fat and refined sugar was supposed to. As she sat sulking in her bed amid more pillows than there was almost room for, Jules scraped the last remaining bite from the bottom of a second pint of Cherry Garcia and realized no amount of ice cream in the world was going to make things better. Disgusted, she tossed the empty container on her nightstand, adding it to the pile of candy wrappers, crumpled chip bags and an empty jar of olives.
Thank God she had a good metabolism.
Jules knew who was to blame for the late night binge that had her stomach pitching and rolling. She’d like to blame Martin and David Marshall. And Will and John Reynolds. Or Harlan and Mitch Payton. She’d really like to blame them. In fact she would love to place the blame on the entire male population of the White Sands Pride but she couldn’t. All the men who had been pursuing her the past three months, and driving her crazy in the process, were doing what came naturally as a matter of tradition and their DNA. No, the men at fault were her fathers and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
In three short months her life had gone from normal and pleasant to whacked out and shitty. When her fathers, Dane and Marcus Kingston, announced they were stepping down as Leos of the White Sands Pride, a call had gone out to all the unattached male Lions under their domain and Jules found her life turned upside down. The hounds of hell, or rather the Lions of her hell, had been hard on her paws, trying to persuade her to accept a mating she wasn’t ready for and didn’t want. However, what she wanted didn’t matter.
She belonged to a clan of WereLions, a fierce breed of shape shifters, and she was bound by the laws and customs her society had embraced since recorded time. Having no brothers and as the eldest of three daughters, it was her duty to mate with a pair of WereLions and continue the Kingston line by bearing sons who would lead the Pride into the future. A member of the Kingston family had led the Pride for over two hundred years, a right of succession her fathers refused to abandon.
She was twenty-three and had her life ahead of her. Every time she thought about the future and the responsibility of carrying on the family lineage, she had thought in terms of years, very many, very long years, before she had to step up, accept a mating pair and birth the cubs of the next generation of Leos. Her fathers’ announcement and resulting mate call had put a stop to her plans of leaving the Pride for a while and seeing the world.
For the hundredth time in the past three months she cursed herself for returning home right after college instead of taking time to explore the world and be on her own. She had come back after school for two reasons. The first was because she’d missed her family. Setting aside the fact she wasn’t speaking to any of them right now, they were a close family and their separation during her years in school had been difficult. She’d wanted to spend time in the comfort of her home surrounded by her parents and sisters.
Not so much anymore.
Jules wanted to be as far away from Logan, New Mexico as she could be, communicating only by postcard, and even that would be done begrudgingly.
The second reason she had come back was because of the Pride, and because the freedoms she had in Logan she wouldn’t have elsewhere. She was a WereLion who needed to shift and roam and prowl like her body demanded, giving over to the more elemental side of her being. There were some Non-Weres living in Logan and the surrounding area but not many. Of the full humans living alongside the Pride, only some knew their secret—those whose families had lived here for generations—the rest remained oblivious as most humans do to things they don’t believe are real or possible. Here she could shift and roam the ranch or other sanctioned ranges safely, something she had missed while away at school. Now, being home and around others of her kind was a pain-in-the-ass problem and not the blessing it was supposed to be.
Jules didn’t want one husband, much less two. Not now at least. Years ago she’d accepted her fate as the next Lioness of the Pride. Jules knew she would be mated to the next Leos. She had planned to leave the Pride for a while then return, maybe in ten years or so, and accept her role as future Lioness and select her mates. On her terms and in her own time. Not her fathers’. The Pride operated much in the same way those in the wild did; two male leaders mated to one female. Two Leos rather than one helped ensure the safety and continuity of the Pride and their lineage. The mating pair would be brothers or men of the same bloodline. Her friends from outside the Pride would be shocked to learn she would have two husbands. Knowing she would share her bed with more than one man should scare her.
Actually it was quite the opposite.
Thinking about taking two men to mate and to her bed made her hot and wet. Not that she wanted to deal with the attitudes of two Leos who would most likely try to keep her under their control; the amount of testosterone one male WereLion in his prime had was staggering. Having to put up with two Lions would drive her crazy. Jules envisioned many arguments in her future as she had no intention of letting any one man control her, much less two. But the tantalizing thought of having two strong men to pleasure her was another matter, something she knew she wouldn’t resist. Ever since her fathers had made their announcement, she’d been consumed with thoughts of lying in the dark, in her bed, between two men intent on staking a claim. The images running through her mind had her squirming under the covers until her panties were damp.
And it wasn’t just two nameless faces she saw on the men who would hold her and stroke her and claim her as their own for all time. When she closed her eyes and imagined being held between her future mates, she always saw the same two faces.
Gabriel and Lucas Beckett.
Two men she would never, ever, ever consider as mates.
No matter how much they got her juices flowing and made her want to purr.
|
