Page 1 of Chased

Chapter 1

Madison Fontaine’s life started going to hell the minute she stabbed her brand-new fiancé with a cake fork.

It all started with a summons to formal afternoon coffee in the salon with her Aunt Solange. She should have known right then.

No good had ever come of coffee with Aunt Solange.

First of all, no normal person had called a living room a salon since somewhere around 1890. Which was probably when their salon’s decorating scheme had been concocted—brocade drapes and velvet-upholstered sofas and chairs with little lace doilies draped over the backs of them, overstuffed and yet still somehow uncomfortable as hell.

The silver coffee service, dainty cups and saucers, tasteless cream cakes and utterly repressive atmosphere also dated from circa 1890—the same time her shifter ancestors had left France and set up their own little enclave in the US. Renards and lapins—foxes and rabbits—locked in what her family called a ‘symbiotic relationship.’

Madison called it an unholy alliance.

Female Renards—fox shifters—were incredibly rare. For some reason, in the last hundred and fifty years, fox shifter matings had produced fewer and fewer females. At first that had made the patriarchal idiots who headed the aristocratic Renard Houses supremely happy.

Then, after a couple of generations, they clued in that they were running out of mates. Naturally, being entitled douchebags, they’d turned to their lapin servants and started grabbing up their rabbity females.

Most of those matings produced rabbit shifters; a few came up foxes. The majority of both kinds were still males, making more lapin mates a necessity.

Madison’s mother had been a full-blood lapin, mated to the younger son of a prominent Renard family. And Madison was that rare thing—a hybrid female. She wasn’t as valuable as a fox shifter female, but even half-fox lapin females were worth a fortune on the mating market. Every Renard family with marriageable sons would be competing for her, upping the price of her mating contract in the hopes that she could produce lots of little fox babies so they wouldn’t have to keep diluting their bloodlines with bunnies.

Aunt Solange, queen of the Fontaine household by way of being mated to the oldest son, considered Madison to be a necessary trial, on account of her bad attitude, smart mouth, and troublemaking ways. Her Uncle François considered her to be an unwelcome but potentially lucrative responsibility. And her father—who she luckily almost never saw, since he ran the Fontaines’ European business interests—didn’t consider her at all, unless she displeased him and required punishment.

Like her mother, who’d faded out of life when Madison was twelve—ground into nothing by repeated failed pregnancies and fear of her father’s abuse.

Madison had decided then and there, that would never happen to her.

No one knew that she had no intention of being auctioned off like a pampered house slave. No one could know. Lapin women didn’t resist their fates—bad things happened to them if they tried.

But when her uncle had called her into his study and informed her that he and her aunt would soon be entering into a mating contract for her, she’d known she had to stop dreaming of getting out, and really do it.

And when Aunt Solange told her they had an important guest coming for coffee—and to look her best and behave, or she’d be sorry—Madison knew her escape window was probably closing.

The problem was, she didn’t yet have all the pieces of her plan in place.

So she dressed herself up like a good little lapin, and showed up in the salon to see who her family had potentially picked out to sell her to.

Then she found out it was Henri Levesque.

Henri was the middle son of the richest, most influential Renard family in their small insular community. By her aunt and uncle’s standards, he was eligible in every way: rich, intelligent, handsome, and probably destined to be head of his family’s business holdings one day, assuming he could continue to out-backstab his older brother.

He was also mean as a snake, which they would no doubt see as an advantage. As far as her aunt and uncle were concerned, Madison was ungrateful and rebellious and needed ‘a firm hand.’

Henri and Madison had hated each other ever since a certain incident her senior year in high school, where she’d introduced him to an unfamiliar word: No.

But mindful of Aunt Solange’s watchful eye and smug expression at landing such a prize, Madison served Henri coffee and smiled like a dimwit and kept her eyes demurely on the floor. She hoped that Henri was just here for an exploratory discussion with her uncle, and wondered if it was worth the punishment to try to discourage the whole idea. By, say, dropping a hot cup of coffee on his crotch.

That hope was dashed during the first cup of coffee, when the maid entered the room with a small frosted cake and deposited it on the coffee cart.

Aunt Solange put her cup and saucer in the precise center of the polished end table at her side and said, “Thank you, Amélie.” The mating scar that ran across her aunt’s left cheek shone silver-pink in the afternoon sun coming in through the French doors. As the maid left, she went in her dry, stern voice, “Well. This is a happy occasion. Madison, you’re a very lucky girl.” Her tone said, luckier than you deserve. “Your Uncle François has concluded his mating negotiations with the Levesque family. You and Henri will be mated next month.”

Madison’s stomach suddenly felt like she’d been drinking molten lead instead of coffee. She put down her cup. Henri, perched on his uncomfortable poufy chair across the room, smirked at her.

Aunt Solange went on, “I had the cook prepare a betrothal cake. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to offer your promised mate the first slice, as is traditional.”

Madison gritted her teeth. Her inner lapin—who called herself Vixen and was convinced she was really a fox—was muttering, Bad Renard man. Bite him. Run away. Madison barely kept her from hissing.

We can’t run, she said. Bunnies run. We have to act like a sly fox. Play along. And no biting! she added. Now that she knew the mating was already set, she didn’t dare risk what Uncle François or her father would do to her if she bit the top bidder for her mating contract and screwed up their business deal.