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

sweet and extremely pregnant at the moment. Because Estrella was pregnant, she was told that Vic tended to have a rather bad temper because his protective streak was getting the better of him.
    Considering Mandy had only known Vic for about a month? She’d never seen him in a good temper.
    “You need to shift, Mandy.”
    “No.” She crossed her arms over her chest.
    “Yes.”
    “I don’t have to.”
    “You haven’t shifted in weeks. You’re overdue.”
    “Nope. I’m fine. I don’t feel the need to shift at all.” If she did, she quickly squashed the sensation. Fuck them for thinking they could tell her what to do.
    Vic’s jaw clenched. “You need to shift regularly so you can learn to control it.”
    “I don’t need to shift at all,” she told him stubbornly. And that was the end of that. She was not going to shift for him like a good little puppet.
    “It’s time for all of us to be adults about this,” Vic said, in what she assumed was his ‘reasonable’ voice. “As much as you would like to put this past month behind you, Mandy, I’m afraid it’s just not going to happen. Like it or not, you chose this lifestyle, and you can’t go back on it now. Becoming a shifter is a one-way street.”
    Chose? She chose ? What a joke. She hadn’t chose anything. She hadn’t even chosen Johnny, not really. He’d just made all the decisions and Mandy was left trying to pick up the pieces of her life. “Excuse me?”
    “You heard me–”
    “If Johnny told you I chose to be changed, he’s delusional.”
    Vic gave Johnny a hard look.
    Johnny just shrank lower in his seat.
    Mandy shook her head. This wasn’t getting anyone anywhere. “Look. Just forget it. Just let me go, all right? I don’t want anything to do with any of you,” Mandy said. “I want to go back to college. I would be perfectly happy if I never saw any of you ever again!” She uncrossed her arms and clasped her hands in front of her breasts. “Please, please, please let me go back home. I just want to be normal again.”
    Vic’s jaw tightened, and she saw Estrella place a hand on his arm, soothing him. Okay, so maybe that had been the wrong thing to say. She looked around the table at the rest of the Merino faces, all unsmiling. As a one, they were good looking men, but Johnny’s face now filled her with loathing and rage. Why was she the one being punished when he was just going around doing whatever he wanted? It didn’t seem fair.
    “You absolutely cannot go back,” Vic said.
    “I don’t see why not,” Mandy replied.
    The vibe around the table became extremely tense. Estrella petted Vic’s arm again, and as Mandy watched, Vic’s nostrils flared. Okay, she was starting to get that awful crawling feeling on the back of her neck when she knew she was being a bad tiger. The urge to crawl under the table and hide intensified, and she averted her gaze from him. Unfortunately, it landed on his second, Adrian.
    Adrian was an entirely different awkward sort of problem for her. Ever since she and Johnny had parted, he watched her. All the time. She suspected it was because he was expecting her to spontaneously stripe-up (as she liked to call shifting) but sometimes, she wondered. Like right now. Adrian watched her with a pair of darkly lashed, intense blue eyes. His eyebrows were thick, heavy slashes that made him seem as if he was frowning at her at all times…and maybe he was. He wasn’t the kind to smile much. A few inches taller than his alpha, Vic, he was the quiet one you had to watch out for compared to Vic’s assertive alphaness.
    “You don’t see why not?” Vic’s voice was dangerous, and Mandy’s attention snapped back to him. “What do you mean, you don’t see why not?”
    Mandy quailed in the face of Vic’s fury, shrinking down lower in her seat. Could an alpha kill one of his tigers, she wondered, even if she wasn’t really officially a tiger? Just sort of acquired by them?
    “Vic, baby,” Estrella said in