Summer Cursed

“Don’t get shy on me now, Mr. Fraser,” I whispered. When he still didn’t respond I moved my hand again with his still covering it.

“There’s not a shy bone in my body.” In a blur of movement, he tore off my clothes, and he looked at what he’d revealed. I froze when I looked into his eyes. The hunger in them had a surge of lust rushing through me.

“Good.” I watched him as I kissed my way down his body until I was kneeling in front of him.

As I wrapped my lips around him, his hand gripped my hair again. His hold tightened as I worked my mouth and tongue over him, building the need in us both. I could tell he was close to coming, and I was ready for it. But he grabbed me under the arms and dropped me onto the desk. He pushed me to lie back and slid into me. I let my head hang over the edge of the desk as he thrust his hips hard and fast, until we both reached the release we needed.

“Dammit, Red, you bring out the animal in me.”

“I know, Mr. Fraser, and I like it,” I said with a smirk as I rose to stand.

He grinned as he reached behind me to squeeze my ass. “It’s a shame we have to go to that damned summit.”

“Yeah, but we get to come back here and do whatever we want all night long.”

“It’s nice to have something to look forward to.”

For the first time in Liam’s life, he was late. It was my fault, and I gladly took full blame. We really had meant to get dressed and leave for the summit, but I just happened to bend over to pick something up and… well, twenty minutes later we finally started getting dressed.

We’d made it, that’s all that mattered. These summits were boring as hell. Normally, once the important stuff was taken care of, it turned into a bitch session. Usually about how many asses I’d kicked and how I was a menace to shifter society.

Liam usually sat with a blank look on his face while the others bitched and moaned about me. Even Wallace and Porter would get in on it. Isaac was usually my only backer, but this time I had Liam too. Things were looking up.

I heard the gasps and murmurs as Liam and I walked through the sea of shifters. Since the Cabin is not big enough to hold everyone and because the females couldn’t go inside, they held the quarterly pack summits in the yard. They had placed chairs in front of the long table reserved for the Alphas. Liam grabbed a chair from the front row and plopped it down behind the table so there were five seats.

He placed the chair between his and the one Isaac always sat in. That was the straw that broke the shifter’s back. All hell broke loose in the crowd. They threw protests of all kinds at us.

“Enough,” Liam said. Not yelled, not bellowed, he simply said the one word in his normal voice and somehow it worked. Everyone shut up and sat down.

I looked at him wondering what it was about him that made people listen without question. What did everyone else, including Isaac, know about him I didn’t.

“Miss Steele belongs up here. Always has. If anyone has an issue with that you can take it up with her.”

I was proud of myself for not letting my jaw drop. I’d totally expected him to say they could take it up with him. Over the short time I’d gotten to know him, he’d let me fight my own battles. I loved Isaac, but he always defaulted to the ‘man takes care of woman’ thinking. Not Liam. He would wait for me to ask for help, and until I did, he assumed I could handle shit myself. He was so getting a blow job when we got home.

He glanced over at me with a wink and that smirk, and I almost dropped to my knees right there. Damn, he’s sexy, I thought deciding he’d get it in the car on the way home instead.

“Are we ready to get this started or does anyone else have something to say?” he asked as we took our seats.

The crowd remained silent, and he tapped the table signaling the summit had begun. As always, babies came first. Breeding is a huge deal for us. Our numbers have grown significantly, but we aren’t as bountiful as we were prior to going into hiding.

We female shifters may ovulate every month but getting pregnant with someone other than your mate is impossible, and even with our mate it’s not a simple task.

And when we do finally get pregnant, we have to be careful not to shift. If we get too stressed out, the shift can come on involuntarily and it’s rare for a fetus to survive after that.

So, discussing babies was top priority. This time around, six had been born during the summer, and five more were due in the autumn. Eight more females were in the early stages of pregnancy, but no one put too much hope into pregnancies until the final trimester when the fetus had a better chance of surviving an accidental shift.

The numbers were good and were better than the prior year, so it was something to be happy about. There wasn’t much to bitch about since I’d been busy fighting rogues, not their pack members. Then the missing shifters came up. That got the crowd rowdy again, yelling questions to the Alphas, and looking for reassurance they were safe.

“Should we be worried?”

“What about our children?”

“Do you even know anything?”

The missing shifters had returned home and were getting back into their regular lives. But at least one of them had told people about Stella and her zoo, and that news had spread quickly. Even though Stella’s minions hadn’t taken anyone in a while, without her head on a platter the community was still frightened.

“Pardon this interruption,” a booming voice said over a PA system.