Free Tiger by the Tail: A Midnight Liaisons Novella by Jessica Sims

Tiger By The Tail 
     
     
    “All right,” Vic Merino said as the entire Merino tiger clan sat around his kitchen table. “We have a problem.”
    All eyes turned to Mandy Petersen, who then rolled her own eyes and crossed her arms. It took a lot of bravery to stand up to the tiger clan, but Mandy was sick of them, every last stripy bastard of the lot.
    Really, Mandy shouldn’t have even been at the meeting. She should have been back at college, safely tucked in her dorm, helping her old sorority handle rush week, or meeting a roommate. Something normal. She shouldn’t be at a meeting in a stranger’s kitchen about whether or not she could grow her own tail. She shouldn’t have had the slightest clue about tails or shifters or the mysterious Alliance network of shifters that populated North Texas. Nope. Nor should she have known that every one of the tall, good-looking Merino men was a were-shifter, and that they all turned into tigers when they felt like it.
    She shouldn’t have even known that shifters existed.
    Of course, if she had known all that, she would have never started dating Johnny, a twenty year old reckless guy with a devilish look in his blue eyes. She would have continued to hold Johnny at arms length for forever. Better yet, if she had known he was a shifter, she would never have gone out with him at all.
    Because if they hadn’t dated, he would have never bitten her on the neck and transferred his shifting ability to her. He hadn’t even warned her that there was a possibility. She’d just thought he was a little too forward.
    But he was a shifter, and he’d bitten her hard enough to break skin, and that was apparently all it took. When she’d immediately started to sprout fur, brought her home to his alpha – an alpha!!! – all proud and telling everyone that he was now her mate and she was his mate and that they should accept it.
    There were two problems with this scenario – one: humans weren’t supposed to know about shifters and were definitely not supposed to be changed into shifters.
    And two – nobody had ever bothered to ask Mandy if she wanted to be a tiger.
    Scared out of her mind, Mandy hadn’t protested when they’d shipped her and Johnny to Alaska. She was too busy growing fangs and claws and other terrifying things to stress about her living situation. When things finally did stop growing spontaneously quite so often, Johnny (who was still unsuccessfully trying to get into her pants) casually mentioned that oh, she was now part of the tiger clan, and since ‘they’ had broken the rules, they were now exiled to Alaska. Forever.
    Again, no one had asked Mandy how she felt about snow.
    Needless to say, she wasn’t happy.
    It turned out that ‘forever’ was only a few weeks, and the long-standing rules against humans were tweaked a bit, and Mandy and Johnny were allowed back to Texas. And then Johnny – who, two weeks ago, had been swearing he was her forever mate and had changed her because he wanted to be with her always – started seeing a brunette because Mandy ‘just wasn’t working out’.
    So now she was a tiger. An unwanted tiger. And dumped. Back in Texas, but still a tiger.
    And still, no one had bothered to ask Mandy how she felt about any of this.
    So the fact that they were now having a meeting about her and the fact that she didn’t feel like shifting? Well, they could all go suck a bag of dicks, as far as she was concerned.
    But she didn’t say that. She sat and crossed her arms and looked pissy. Because now that she was a shifter, she also had this weird, awful new problem: she couldn’t oppose her alpha. It was something in shifter blood, Johnny told her. You bowed to the man in charge. And lucky her, she was now a shifter.
    Her alpha was Vic Merino, the man currently trying to decide what to do with her. Vic was not her favorite person. He was tall, muscular as hell, and covered in tattoos. His mate was the equally tall Estrella, who was blonde and