Their kiss broke again when he turned her around and bent her over the back of the couch, where he shoved her leggings down and helped her get them off her feet, biting at her ass while he was down there and kissing his way back up while his hand lingered at her entrance, circling her clitoris and fingers sliding into her. He draped himself across her back, erection between her thighs. She briefly thought they needed condom, but forgot it again when he nipped the back of her neck.

  “Angel.”

  His deep purr of a voice slid around her bare flesh. She turned her head slowly, aware of the predator behind her, torso draped across hers. Equal parts thrill of sex and thrill of fear. She cleared her throat, but her voice was raspy anyway. “Tremaine. You’ve never called me that before.”

  He eased away from her, cold air blowing between them. She turned to face him, her arousal fading. He’d been so close to taking her.

  Why had he stopped?

  “Angel,” he rubbed his face.

  She shook her head, “What is it?”

  “I have to know you’re with me.”

  “I am. Why did you stop?”

  “You’re letting me do things to you. It feels good, so I do it and you feel good.”

  She shivered. “Yes. We feel good together.”

  “Yes.” But he sighed. “You’re going along with it.”

  “You’re dominant and I trust you to make me feel good.”

  He stepped forward, crowding her butt against the hard back of the couch so their damp, hot skin pressed against each other, his erection pushed against her thigh, the latex sticking to her skin slightly. At least he had thought of a condom and done something about it. “But what if I want more?”

  “More what? More sex?”

  He scowled and eased away. “I want it all.”

  A lifetime of fear, her mother’s death, her depression, her anger, her mistrust, weren’t going to disappear in an instant. She eased away from him. Another cool breeze brushed across her sweaty chest and she shivered again. “You can’t just order me to be yours, like handing me a valentine with ‘Be Mine’ on it is a binding contract.”

  He tugged her around the couch and pulled her down so he was half under her, her right breast pressing against his hard chest, his heart pumping steadily. “I want to hand you a valentine that says ‘I’m Yours’.”

  His hand traced down her back, skimming lightly over her spine. He stared into her eyes and she couldn’t have looked away if she wanted to. “If I do this. When. When I take the pride, you will be the alpha’s mate.”

  Everything inside her stilled. “Mate?”

  His little smirk reappeared. “Mate.”

  “That’s your end game?”

  He sighed, lifting her up with his deep inhalation. “That’s it. I want you to be my mate. I want to stay here and rebuild this pride. I want people to come back and live here in the house that I’m putting a new roof on.”

  “Straining the metaphor?” she asked softly just before she kissed his cheek.

  “I need you to help me,” he murmured. “I’d just put the roof on and move on without you. I need you to protect the members of the pride. From each other, from outsiders, even from me.”

  “To make you compromise?” Her heart was beating faster.

  “Pretty much, yeah. To remind me that it’s their pride, not just mine. That’s what Ella has forgotten. Everything is hers and she’s forgotten that she serves us. I’ll be the alpha unless someone stronger comes in and we can trust them.”

  Her mind went to her strong best friend. “Macey.”

  “Macey. If she’s as wonderful as you say. Or someone like her.”

  She lifted herself up on one elbow, balanced precariously on the edge of the seat of the couch. His arm tensed around her, keeping her from falling, but she still frowned at him. “She is that wonderful. She’s done work with community organizing and health care. She’s smart and quick and has a huge heart. More wonderful than even I know, because I know her from before she figured out her life. I know her from when we were angry, cranky children. ”

  “So you know her true character. If she is strong enough – I trust your judgment that she really is good enough – I can be her right-hand man. I don’t want the whole pride, but I want a good pride.”

  She kissed him fiercely and completely, then rose above him and took him inside her, driving herself onto him with powerful thrusts as his hips bucked up to meet her. Her thighs burned with the effort, threatening to cramp, but before they could, he lifted one knee behind, changing the angle of their thrusting and she came in a rush, him clutching her against his sweaty torso, growling as he came, too.

  Chapter eleven

  “Here’s something a bit different about the big prides, packs, herds, and colonies that live semi-communally and have a shared history: they also have a historian or a librarian or a genealogist of some sort who holds onto the books and papers and family trees and passes those on. In the past, with shifters still secret from the rest of the world, this information even more closely guarded than it is now, with some shifters living in the open. But woe betide anyone who wants to check out a book.” Ogden in Renard et al, 2025, pp 99-131.

  Angelica was barely inside Carol’s apartment when she heard footsteps in the hall – two or three people – and a knock at the door. She could smell Ella and her daughter and someone else. It took her a moment and a harsh sneeze to figure out it was Lipstick Lyssa with a new perfume.

  She briefly considered calling the cops, but instead peeked out, her foot blocking the door from opening further. “May I help you?” Did they know about Tremaine’s plan? The missing boys? Her own insubordination?

  Lyssa shoved her chest forward, as if Angelica wanted a better view of her boobs or would be swayed by it. “We need the pride archives.”

  Angelica kept herself in the doorway, her leg blocking the door from opening further. “Pretty sure Carol would disagree with you there. She’s the pride historian.”

  “But those things go in the library and I am the librarian.”

  Oh, Lipstick. So much entitlement.

  “They are the responsibility of the historian. She has them protected as a duty and an honor.”

  “She stole them from the library when she retired,” said Ella, her voice quiet but steely.

  “She did not. She did not retire from the historian position when she retired as librarian, and she is still fulfilling her role. The records were in the library because that was where she worked and she knew they were locked away and kept in a climate-controlled environment.”

  “So they’re not locked away now? Not kept from degrading? I’m a real librarian and I know about preservation.” Lyssa ran a finger across the corner of her mouth, dabbing at her purplish lipstick.

  “I do, too. In spite of the pride’s unwillingness to fund my education, I have made a study of current preservation techniques in consultation with Carol who is also, as you say, a real librarian. And yes, they are locked away and kept from degrading. We also have electronic records of all of our archive material. It is not on a computer that is linked to the internet, nor is it kept in the cloud, for fear it could be hacked and all the pride’s secrets and all its members would become public.”

  Ella looked more dangerous and her daughter frowned deeply.

  “If you wish to consult the materials, I can let you look at the recent physical or electronic copies that are kept for that purpose. The electronic copies can only be looked at under strict supervision so we don’t have any unauthorized copies made.”

  She realized she could buy Tremaine a little time and give them the incomplete genealogy book. They knew she was stubborn and grumpy and even that she would usually give in eventually, so the more she protested, the more likely they were to take the one she wanted them to take instead of the one with the more complete Singh family tree that included Tremaine.

  Even if they did know about Russell being Tremaine’s blood father, they wouldn’t get the Singh link from the charts in that book, just as she hadn’t until Carol pushed her to it. Ella would know the importance of it if she did find the link, since she’d clearly kept tabs on and forced out a lot of Singh descendants herself.

  “You think we would be careless with the originals?” Ella’s daughter growled slightly, showing some spine for the first time that Angelica could remember.

  Angel met Charity’s eyes and waited a few seconds for her lack of fear to sink in. On the other hand, Charity had always seemed bookish, so maybe she liked physical books. She never came into the library, though, so she probably bought all her books instead. Even if the coup didn’t work, maybe she could talk Charity into donating all her old books to the library collection.

  Then she realized if the coup didn’t work, she and Tremaine would have to leave town and she would never work in the library again. And she was still waiting for the call for a second interview for the Middleton library job.

  Charity’s eyes darted away and Ella was too occupied with craning her neck to see Carol’s shelves to notice that her daughter was backing down. Lyssa was busy posing and looking like she smelled something bad, so was oblivious as usual.

  Perhaps Angel was meeting dominants’s eyes not because she was half human, but because she really was more dominant than most of them. She switched her gaze to Ella and knew that was the truth when she couldn’t hold her alpha’s gaze. “I think you will borrow a couple of books and figure out what you want to know, then return them to this apartment where either I or Carol will take care of them.”

  “But I’m the librarian,” Lyssa huffed.

  Angelica straightened. She was definitely dominant to Lyssa, so stared her down until the younger, cuter, breastier woman stepped back and looked to the others for help.

  “The pride historian chooses his or her successor. If the post is left empty, nominations come from the members of the pride as to whom they trust to protect the history. The alpha has a vote, but the choice of the maternals, the elders, and other rank and file members is nearly always the winner. When it isn’t, the pride comes to regret it very quickly.”

  “Obviously they’ll choose me, then.” Lyssa smirked, smoothing her flawless hair.

  Angel felt a new sense of pride and power unfurling in her as she thought of all the training and counseling Carol had given her, of how Carol had left her in charge of the precious papers, of how Angel had already tacitly accepted the position and the pride currently had two historians.

  “How is that obvious?” she asked politely. Semi-politely.

  “Because I’m popular. I can round up the votes.”

  “Can you?” Angelica asked, still polite, but feeling vindictiveness building in her gut, ready to slash. “Popular with the maternals?” She waited a few seconds as Lyssa’s gaze dropped away and flickered back. “How is story time going?”

  Lyssa waved one hand and giggled. “They’ll be back. And that’s only a tiny subset of maternals, just the ones with little cubs. Wanda and her friends like me.”

  Wanda and her friends were rich, entitled snobs who didn't even live in town, but whatever.

  Ella’s head turned slowly in that menacing way that always made Angelica want to puke. But she was turning toward Lyssa. “You didn’t mention there was a problem with story time.”

  “There’s not.” Lyssa stuck her chest out again, but her eyes were on the wall behind Ella. “I just haven’t had time to organize it, since I have to do everything myself and my shelvers keep quitting.”

  “Hard to get good help.” Angelica smirked at Ella’s daughter, Charity, who smirked back before flicking her eyes to the floor, then back to her mother. Angel could appreciate loyalty, so wasn’t about to call her on it. She wondered what Ella’s daughter would choose when the time came.

  “What exactly are you looking for? Is this a request for information or a usurpation of Carol’s role?” Of Angel’s role.

  Ella looked uncomfortable, which made Angel’s heart swell.

  “Information,” she snapped out.

  “How recent and what sort?”

  “Genealogy and in the last hundred years.”

  Had she called it or what? “Paper or electronic?”

  A pause. “Paper.” Obviously, she didn’t want to do whatever it was with Angel watching over her shoulder.

  “Excellent. Let me get the book with the family trees. It’s an old volume, so I will need you to be careful with it.” She closed the door in her alpha’s face and shot the deadbolt before going to the bookshelf and pulling down the document box holding the tall scrapbook with photocopies of handwritten charts and printouts and incomplete family trees.

  She reopened the door to Ella’s glare, still blocking the entrance with her body and holding the door with her left knee. “I really should keep it here. Or I could bring it to the library and wait while you go through it, if you’d like.”

  “We will not stay here to read it. We will take it with us to the Alpha house.”

  Angel turned on even more reluctance than she felt. “It’s old and needs to be treated with utmost care. I would feel better if –”

  “I will check it out,” Ella declared, her eyes darting greedily to the book.

  So easy to manipulate greedy people.

  Angel closed the door in their faces again and pulled down the checkout book and only then opened the door all the way. She handed over the checkout book, which Ella handed to her daughter to fill out, and then handed over the book in its acid-free box. She looked down at what Ella’s daughter had written and asked, “When will you bring it back?”

  “A week,” Ella said through clenched teeth.

  Angel wrote the date in. “Initial here, please.” She didn’t always make people initial, but she and Carol did ask for the return date. It didn’t do anyone any good to have a complete list of lion shifters floating around in a world that had found out shifters existed and wanted to punish them.

  “Enjoy,” said Angel, faking perkiness that almost matched her happiest moments of finding books for library patrons. Good lord, she missed the library.

  Instead of asking if there was anything else she could do to help, she closed the door and locked it before calling Carol to confirm that she really was the historian in training.

  Which of course she was.

  Her phone rang that afternoon. Freight Train Tremaine. Her heart beat a little faster.

  “Hello,” she answered simply, but her voice was huskier and more come-hither than she intended, at least while she was sitting in Sugar, the café in Middleton, with Mellie and two other young mothers, kids of four and under climbing on them and squalling and two of them just starting a shoving match that was going to send them all outside to the park to play.

  Mellie grinned her wholly feline grin and whispered loudly, “I wonder who that is.”

  Angelica could feel her face heating, especially when Tremaine muttered, “Who did she expect?”

  Jessica giggled next to her. They were all lionesses and had sharp hearing. Angelica thought about fishing her earbuds out of her pocket and going outside, but she had one arm firmly around two babies on her lap, one baby was asleep and the other she had already kept from falling five times as she tried to fling herself down to crawl.

  Tremaine sighed. “I’ll tell you other things later, but did you hear that Ella’s called a council meeting this Thursday?”

  “What? This Thursday?” Angelica replied, sitting up straight and snatching at the cub who startled and, for the sixth time, almost pitched off her lap while the other one woke up. She dropped her phone. “Sh… shoot!” she said. Jessica took her just-waking babe and Mellie scooped Britt’s fidgeter up and set her on her bottom on the floor. Angel called out, “Just a second!” and scooped up her phone, checking her screen was undamaged.

  Tremaine chuckled in her ear when she said, “Hello?”

  “So yes: this Thursday. I’m the accountant and will have to give a report, so probably the fifth or so to know. I wanted you to know before I started to call my list for the phone tree.”

  “I can’t believe we still have a phone tree instead of robocalls and robotexts,” said Mellie.

  “That’s a good question,” said Tremaine. “It’s because when we have a phone tree, everyone pays their own phone bill. Setting up a robocall means paying for a system or service that does them. In the case of an outside service, they could potentially listen to the message.”

  “It’s also more personal if we get a call from a member of the pride. It keeps us in touch,” said Jessica.

  Angelica gave up and held the phone away from her ear so as not to block Tremaine and her friends from talking to each other.

  “Good point,” said Tremaine.

  “So are we calling in everyone who lives outside the territory?” asked Angelica.

  “I am,” he replied.

  The three lionesses froze, even the kids noticed something was up and their corner of the café went still and silent.

  Angelica looked around and saw there were only two men, one a lynx shifter whom she’d greeted on her way in. The other she didn’t know, but he looked like he might be related to the lynx. They were watching now, poised for fight or flight with the sudden tension among the much bigger lionesses. She nodded to them and said, “Big news. And now the lynxes will be among the first to know, too, that you’re calling up pride mates who are out of the territory to come to the meeting.” She looked over at the counter at the café owner, a strict fifty-year-old woman lynx, who winked at her.

  The guy she knew raised his eyebrows. The lynxes were less centralized than the lions, but they knew from years living in proximity to a pride of lions that calling in the outliers was bigger news than a mere council meeting.

  Mellie cleared her throat. “I’m assuming we’re not keeping this a secret? I don’t think we could once more people than usually come to these things start flowing in.”

  “Yeah, the cat will be out of the bag that something big is happening by tomorrow. Ella has allies who don’t live here and they’ll ask her what’s going on.”

 

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