Free Juneau Heat by Tressie Lockwood

No, he meant . . .
what? “What you are?”
    Birk
sneered. “Let’s not play any more games. You know Kotori and I are shifters,
and we know what you are.”
    Human? Not a Keith. She pushed her way to the edge of the bed and stood to wrap the
sheet tighter around her figure. Shuffling through all of the training, all the
information crammed into her head over the weeks before she came here, she
searched for what occurred next in a situation like this. The answer should be
right there, engraved on her memory the way her dad lectured, but fear had
wiped the canvas clean. With a glance, she checked the nightstand for her cell
phone, but too late remembered she’d left it in the other room. Stupid move.
No, it had been stupid to sleep with them.
    Play dumb. “Just what do you think you know about me, Birk?”
    He crossed
the room in two or three strides. She backed up and hit the nightstand,
knocking the lamp over. Kotori stood by, out of nowhere, to catch it and set it
upright. Birk frowned down at her. “I thought we agreed no more games. If
you’re afraid of us, why did you have sex with us?”
    Shiya stood
straighter, hands on her hips. “Why are you so damn angry all of a sudden? Oh,
I get it, all the charm flew out the window after you got what you wanted last
night!”
    His
nostrils flared, and his hot gaze raked her from head to foot. “I can have any
woman I want. It doesn’t have to be you.”
    The crack
of her hand slapping his face punctuated the air. Birk didn’t move. A muscle
twitched in his jaw.
    “Feel
better?” he said in a low tone.
    She scowled
at him. “Okay, I know you’re shape-shifters.”
    “And you’re
a Keith,” Kotori added. “From a family of shifter hunters.”
    Oh hell, so
they did know. From the looks of it, they’d known from the beginning. Her
family had hatched a plan for her to seduce them, and at the same time, they’d
intended to draw her in.
    She rubbed
moist palms down her legs. “So what does this mean? You’re kidnapping me to
draw my dad to Juneau?”
    “Interesting,”
Kotori muttered. “If we didn’t have a plan like that, you would have given us
the idea.”
    Shiya
swore. “What then?”
    Birk
stepped closer. The heat from his body permeated her sheet, and even while she
feared him in this state, she remembered how tender he had become several times
during their time together. She recalled his funny jokes while they spoke
online, the ones he told well and the ones he screwed up. They’d laughed, but
that could be the charmer in him, a natural ability they all had to capture
their prey.
    “All of us
have heard of you,” Birk told her.
    She lit on
the word. “All?”
    “Shifters
in the United States.”
    Her
research showed there were whole families of shifters, and some who were rare,
producing one or two every so often. The time span might be a generation, or it
might be a century. She knew that there might be shifters to come who hadn’t
been born yet. Their fight spanned over generations of Keiths and would likely
go on into the future.
    Kotori’s
voice broke through her reverie. “I want to know why you slept with us. As
you’ve no doubt checked into who we are, we’ve done the same with your family.
Like shifters, you close ranks and squash information that might leak out about
your methods.”
    Birk picked
up the conversation. “You use beautiful women to lure the shifters into
trusting you. I thought it wouldn’t lead this far. After all, the most common
knowledge about the Keiths is that they think all shifters are killers. Yet,
your men send the women in to fuck them without qualms.”
    “You don’t
know what you’re talking about!” He leaned over her, but at that point, she
would not back down. He made it sound like she and her sisters were whores, and
he knew what he could do with his superior attitude. “You think you’re better
than us? You and Kotori were right there with me in bed, and you knew who I
was, just like you said.