“You know what I want to do with you? What I really, really want?” He leaned in and brushed his lips against her ear. She gasped. “I want to take you into the woods, tie you hand and foot…” Her lips parted eagerly, and she nodded.
“Yes?” she breathed huskily.
He straightened up and took a step back. “And leave you there, so I can get back to eating without you annoying the shit out of me. Run along now, flea circus.”
Instead of looking offended, she turned and yelled out to her mother, who was at the burger grill, frying up meat patties, “Hey, Mom, he passed the first test!”
And her mother looked across the yard at them and gave a big thumbs-up.
Great.
Savannah came barreling across the yard towards them. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans now, and her hair was wet from her quick shower. Her eye makeup was smeary. She couldn’t be any more obvious about what they’d just done if her T-shirt had said, “I just got sexed by Austin Bronson!”
Come to think of it, he’d love it if she wore a T-shirt like that.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Savannah demanded of her sister, panting for breath as she skidded to a stop.
“Relax,” Jessamine told her. “Mom sent me to do the fidelity check. He turned me down. Honestly, if he’d said yes, I wouldn’t have done it anyway. He’s not my type. I don’t think he’s piercedanywhere.” She started to walk away, then she stopped, flicked a glance at Austin’s crotch area, and looked questioningly at her sister. “Is he?”
Savannah’s face was so red it almost matched her hair. “I know where you sleep. I will get revenge on you, in horrible and humiliating ways.” She ground out the words as if spitting out glass shards.
Jessamine tossed her head coquettishly. “Yeah, the problem with that is, I can’t be humiliated, because I have no sense of shame.”
She turned and walked off.
“That’s not something to brag about!” Savannah yelled after her.
Then she shoved her hands in her pockets and stared at the ground, biting her lip. She looked like she was almost about to cry from embarrassment, so Austin threw his arm around her shoulders.
“Your family seems…what’s the word that I’m looking for? Weird as fuck. But, you know, a good kind of weird. Unlike my family’s kind of weird; they’re a bunch of platinum-plated assholes. So, it’s like a full moon here twenty-four seven, I gather?”
“You have no idea what I go through on a daily basis,” Savannah groaned, leaning her head against his shoulder.
Then she quickly stepped away from him, shrugging his arm off and glancing around nervously.
He smirked down at her. “Embarrassed to be seen with me?”
“Hell, yes.” But a grin tugged at her lips. “Wolf cooties. Gross.”
“Fox cooties.” He ran his tongue over his lips in response. “Tasty. I’d like a second helping.”
She bit back a laugh, hiding it behind her hand. “Can you please stop being so— damn it tohell!” She finished that last bit on an angry snarl.
“Can I please stop being so damn it to hell?” Austin repeated, confused.
His little fox shifter was so wonderfully weird.
But she wasn’t his. Not after tonight.
That thought made him incredibly sad.
Then he followed her gaze. She was glaring across the parking lot. A fox shifter who looked like an aging gigolo, wearing a pin-striped suit and with his hair slicked back like a wannabe gangster, was marching across the lawn, with a gang of men behind him. At least twenty of them. They were shoving foxes out of their way left and right, and they headed straight for the cash box, which was being manned by Niall.
The gigolo fox violently elbowed a woman in the head, wrenching a cry of pain from her, and knocked her out of the way.
Her mate started forward, and a big bruiser of a fox shifter snarled at him.
The crowd was murmuring in fear and dismay. Austin glanced at the police chief, who was huddled in on himself, shoulders drooping, head down.
