Etienne (The Shifters of Shotgun Row Book 1)(10)

Everything would be clearer in the darkness.

My truck’s tires skidded up to my house. It needed a paint job. I could see the chips and missing chunks even in the moonlight.

“This will all be fixed in a few minutes. Just need to get into the fucking water.”

I shook free of my pants and shirt in seconds flat. The smell of the tangy water already penetrated my nostrils and filled my senses. I could almost feel the waves gently rocking me to sleep as they patted the shore tenderly.

Shifting into a gator was tough. It hurt. My skin rose into peaks and stiffened into a leathery hide. My body doubled in size, my torso stretched and pulled me into a form much like my prehistoric ancestors. My jaw elongated into a gator’s muzzle. Then my human side took a back seat. I was always there, like looking through a mask, but I was someone else on the outside. He took over, his senses sharp and lethal.

My gator was a monster, and while I was in his skin, I was the king of this swamp.

Finally.

I relaxed into my animal form, reveling in his simple thoughts. Hearing was piqued, smell acute, all of my senses on point.

He let me be for only a few minutes until he made his opinion of that night’s events show.

Mine.

His growly voice rumbled through me.

I refuted him, blocking the images he was sending me out of my mind, and focusing on what he could feel through the gator.

He was wrong.

He must be hangry or something.

He’s confused.

Something.

Mine. Mate.

His booming voice rumbled through my body, causing splashes and ripples of brown water to give away our location at the surface.

Smell. Taste. Mate. Mine.

My argument with his caveman logic didn’t even reach him. He’d made up his mind, and I was afraid I’d been overruled by the three-hundred-pound version of myself.

A smell, pungent and almost rancid, caught my nose, and with tail wagging back and forth, I went toward it. Maybe a belly full of meat would change his mind.

***

My stomach growled as I typed in a report I should’ve done the day before. I’d been too busy following Tansy around town to do what I was supposed to be doing.

Idiot.

I’d avoided the donut shop this morning. I was actually avoiding Tansy. The conflict inside me felt as real as a hurricane down deep in my chest. The churning and chaos grew stronger as my human side and my gator were locked in a battle—neither giving the other an inch.

I looked up from the computer as a smell touched my nose. Someone was brilliant enough to bring donuts into the police station—so original. I stood, bound to either steal or swindle one from the owner.

“Is Etienne here?” I heard her voice at the same time I recognized my nose had lied to me. It wasn’t my favorite breakfast waiting in the wings somewhere, but that Yankee woman and her sugar smell.

Ducking back into my office, I could almost hear the walls calling me on my cowardice. I kept the door open a crack, desperate to hear what my co-workers told her.

Bruno answered her sweet voice, and my gator gnashed at me, demanding to get out.

“He’s around here somewhere. Maybe I can help you.”

The tone and slithery quality of his voice made my skin crawl. When she answered, her voice changed.

“No, I appreciate it. I would really like to talk to him. I’ve tried his cell a couple of times, but there was no answer.”

At the mention of it, I almost tore my pockets open searching for my phone. She was right. I’d missed calls from her and from Loic.

“Let me check his office.”

I fully expected Bruno to blast into my office and berate me for ignoring such a beautiful female.

Except, he didn’t. I pushed my head out of my office to check, and Bruno was a big lying bastard. He stood in the hallway, looking at his watch. Whatever amount of seconds he was waiting for passed, and he went back out and claimed I wasn’t in the office.

“Oh, okay. I will check back later.”

He chuckled. I knew that sound from the bars and late-night sheriff’s dinners. It was his “oh, there’s a female near who I want to bang” sleazy laugh. The one he continued to use no matter how many women were instantly turned off by it. “Well, I could always drive you around to look for him if you really need him.”

The ooze dripped from his tone.

He wasn’t going to drive her anywhere except somewhere he could make a move on her.

I knew the bear too well.

No way he was taking my female anywhere. The female. Tansy. Her. I shook my head and walked down the hall. Discomfort was written all over her face. She was stuck.

“Hey, Tansy. I thought I heard you when I came in. Thanks, Bruno. I’ll take it from here.”

I ignored his chuff when I slid between him and Tansy.

“Now, wait a minute, Etienne. Maybe this is business we both need to handle.” When he smiled, he revealed something brown between his bottom teeth.

“Tansy, is this business or personal?” I winked at her. My best attempt at giving her a hint. Even if she was here for business—which I could tell by her smell she wasn’t—it would be with me and not the slimy bear.

“Oh, it’s personal. I wanted to talk about last night.”

That’s my girl.

“Was there a disturbance?”

He flopped back into the conversation.