Out Now
Tabitha Conall
The White Fir Bend Cult Series #2
Army Ranger and bear shifter Tiger Kane got kicked out of the cult he grew up in when he was fifteen. Now he's back to rescue his estranged mom from the clutches of the cult leader.
BBW Dr. Piper Holmes thought she was going to be studying dropping fertility rates in a rural shifter town. If she'd known she'd be trapped in a cult compound where grown men married twelve-year-olds and grown women wore bruises, she never would have agreed.
Thrown together, Kane and Piper work to stop the cult. But other forces are at work, and Kane and Piper don't know who they can trust. They're not even sure they can trust each other.
Excerpt
The third floor was as dark as the fourth had been, but this time Kane had a secret weapon—he could track the mystery woman’s scent right down the hall to the door she must have passed through. It stood cracked open, no light inside.
He’d kept his footsteps as quiet as he could, but he still didn’t hear a sound from inside the room and had to assume she was hiding, waiting for him to leave. Right.
Well, since he wasn’t going to be able to spy on her, he’d have to confront her instead. Kane pushed the door open, listening to its lingering creak and trying to hear any other sounds from inside the room. If it was quiet enough, he might even hear her breathing, but the squeaky door took care of that possibility.
“What’s your name?” he said.
He waited, but didn’t hear a sound. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He fumbled for a lock but there wasn’t one.
“Easy way, hard way,” he said. “I can do either one.”
The situation told him so much already. She didn’t belong here, that was for sure. If she’d been an office worker putting in a few extra hours, she wouldn’t have been hiding in the dark.
Speaking of which, with the door closed, it was pitch black. Bears had eyesight about as good as humans, but it certainly didn’t match their feline cousins. He couldn’t see a thing and it would take far too long for his night vision to kick in. He flicked on the lights.
A shuffle sounded from the far corner. Someone hadn’t been expecting full illumination.
He grinned. “I can drag you out, but you might enjoy it more if you came out on your own.”
Now he heard a breath, a deep one, then a motion as the woman unfolded herself from the floor where she’d been hidden behind a box. “You.”
“Me,” he said. He realized he was still smiling. What was it about this woman that got to him?
“I suppose you’re the guard,” she said.
Interesting. “What makes you say that?”
“You’ve caught me. Isn’t that what guards do? Besides, you’re all—” She waved her hand up and down, indicating his body.
“Taut?” he said. “Hard? Formidable? Sexy?”
“Ha ha.”
If she thought he was the guard, he might as well milk it. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here?”
She gazed at him, blinked once, then twice. “If you’re going to arrest me, then arrest me. Otherwise, let me go.”
She was so definitely not like the other women in town. Any one of them would have folded easily and told him everything he wanted to know. “What’s your name?”
Folding her arms over her chest, she leaned against the metal filing case next to her. “Don’t you know? I thought everyone in town knew about me.”
“Pretend I don’t.” Apparently she didn’t know about him either. So she wasn’t in on local gossip. Yet another reason to suspect she was an outsider of some sort. But who on earth would allow an outsider here?
Unless…he took an experimental sniff. Nope, not human. She was a cat of some sort, if he wasn’t mistaken.
She took her time before speaking. “I don’t see why I need to tell you anything.”
“Well, sweetheart, I’m not a guard. But I could hand you over to one if I wanted to.” He decided to be a little easier on her. “I just want to know what you’re up to. I don’t mean you any harm.” Truth was, his curiosity was killing him. Who was she? What the hell was she doing here?
After gazing at him for what felt like ages, she said, “I’m the new doctor, brought in to investigate the low fertility rates. I’m here to look at some additional background information on my patients.”
“A doctor? I can’t imagine Gerald bringing in a female doctor.”
Her eyes widened. “Gerald?”
That’s right—Kane had forgotten that everyone in this God-forsaken town referred to that kook as “the Master.”
He was about to respond when he heard the scrape of a door outside in the hall. The missing guard? Or an office worker come to do some late night work? He hit the light switch, grateful the door didn’t have a window, and felt his way across the room toward the woman—whose name he still didn’t know.
She must’ve realized what was going on because he heard a very faint shuffling and when he reached the spot where she’d been standing, she was no longer there. He crouched down behind the file cabinet and hoped he wouldn’t be visible if the guard—or whomever—turned on the light.
Not that it would matter if the guard were using his nose. Both he and the woman had left their scent all over everything. But there wasn’t anything he could do about that now.
The footsteps in the hall paused outside their door then continued on. When he could no longer hear them, Kane let out a deep breath. Either the guard was an idiot or it hadn’t been the guard at all.
“You really aren’t the guard,” she said softly.
He wished he could see her. “Nope. What’s your name?”
“Piper Holmes.”
Maybe it was the dark, but the sound of her voice was doing something to him, stroking him with invisible hands. “Dr. Piper Holmes.”
“Yes.”
“What the hell’s a female doctor doing in Crazy Town?”
She choked, the sound muffled. After a second, she said, “Crazy Town? And you called Gerald Gerald. You’re not from here either, are you?”
He moved toward her voice, though he wasn’t sure why. “No, I’m not. I mean, originally, yeah. But I’ve been gone a long time.”
“So why come back?”
He could feel the heat of her body and knew she was close. “Nuh-uh. You answer my question. Women in this town usually don’t even hold jobs, much less ones requiring any level of intelligence, education or authority. What’s a female doctor doing here?”
“Must you sit so close?”
“Yeah, I really must.” He said the words with a twist. She was so sweetly proper. He wanted to mess her up. “The guard might come back. Now answer.”