Page 2 of Hers to Love
Chapter Two
“Don’t move.”
Taika Morgan froze at the same instant his gorilla growled a warning within him.
Too fucking late, you dumb hairy bastard. Where the hell were you when awomanmanaged to sneak up on us on our own damn lands!
His gorilla’s response to that was a grunt, and Taika had no doubt the sound came with a lip curl that showed equal amounts of disdain and contempt for his human side. Gritting his teeth at the surge of power that flowed through him as his beast pushed forward, Taika lifted his hands in the air.
“You’ve got some skill to be able to sneak up on me on my lands, and without the rest of my group tearing you apart,” Taika said in a low voice. “That’s grounds for punishment, and by that I mean a fucking beatdown, so you might wanna tell me what the hell you’re doing on my lands before I turn and show you why sneaking up on a man like me was your worst mistake ever.”
“We’ll get to that,” the woman responded with no fear in her voice at all. “First you have a decision to make, and because I have about as much desire to be here as I do the possibility of a full body cavity search the next time I fly through LAX, you had better make it quick.”
Despite his anger at being caught unawares, Taika felt his lip quirk at the woman’s words. “Well, I have never been accused of keeping a woman against her will, sweetness, so let’s hear it.”
The woman moved slightly, just enough that the air around her shifted, and he inhaled her scent for the first time. Everything within him stilled, his gorilla huffing low as everything became confusing and clear at the exact same moment. As a silverback, he was the leader of his group, and had fought for that right on more than one occasion. He was an alpha, a shifter no body ever fucked with. He was feared and revered. He never knew he’d felt so untethered to the world until a bond snapped into place within him, holding him steady. The emotion that came with it was so fierce it almost dropped him to his knees, the realization that the woman standing behind him was his. His mate.His.
The confusion that came with that powerful recognition was the fact that the scent was difficult to catch, so weak he might have thought he’d simply crossed paths with his mate, and not that she was currently standing directly behind him.Click. With a weapon apparently, and Taika had a feeling she wasn’t just pointing it at the sky. A suspicion that was confirmed moments later when he felt the hard metal of the barrel press against the back of his head.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” his mate said in a voice that said she was anything but. “Did I interrupt you ignoring me? That is so rude of me. I mean, here I am talking like you might actually be listening to me, and in the middle of my badass rhetoric, you ignore the shit out of me, and I have to press the barrel of my truly beautiful Glock 9mm to the back of your head to make myself heard.”
Taika loved that his mate was a badass. Oh, he was pissed as hell that she was standing there with a weapon in her hand, but not because it was pointed at him. As long as she stayed close to him, he didn’t give a shit if she pointed a goddamn grenade launcher in his direction. No, he was angry because beneath the bravado and the sexy as hell sass flying from his woman’s lips, there was a thread of uncertainty and, if he wasn’t mistaken, fear, in her tone. He was fairly confident it had nothing to do with him though, as surprising as that was. What that did to his gorilla wasn’t surprising at all. He wanted to shift, take control, find whoever or whatever it was that made her scared and rip. Them. To pieces.
“You have my complete attention, sweetness.” Taika heard the anger in his voice, and from the way his woman stilled behind him, she did, too. “You’re scared. Stop it. It’s fucking with my animal, and he’s a monster. You ain’t ever seen anything like him. Just tell me who it is you fear. Give me a name, and I promise you, they will never fucking frighten you again.”Or breathe.
“And what makes you think that it’s not you that I fear?” His mate’s tone was more quizzical than anything else.
Taika held his breath as he raised his hands, desperately trying to appear as non-threatening as possible. Not an easy task for a guy who weighed over two-fifty, stood close to six foot six, and had the ability to shift into an eight-hundred-pound silverback. “I’m gonna turn around so we can have this conversation face to face. I’ll try not to scare you, and you try not to blow the back of my head off by mistake.”
Her laughter was something someone could write sonnets about, and had him closing his eyes briefly as pleasure rolled through him. “Trust me. If I blow the back of your head off, it won’t be by mistake.”
Taika began to slowly turn. He held his breath, his heart pounding a mile a minute, then slammed to a halt when he set eyes on his mate for the first time. She was stunning. Her olive skin and bright green eyes spoke of a mixed heritage that also left her with dark hair that appeared almost black. It was twisted on top of her head in a way that made his palms itch to unravel it just to feel the silky strands slide through his fingers before he claimed his woman’s mouth for his own. Speaking of her mouth, it was full, with a bottom lip that begged to be nibbled, and she had a curvy figure that had the man and the beast within him promising to move heaven and earth if she would only consent to be his.
She tilted her head to the side quizzically, and he watched as her gaze swept over him in return. “You don’t look like what I thought you would.”
Taika matched her head tilt with one of his own. “And that would be?”
She shrugged. “A little more … apelike?”
Taika was taken aback. She knew what he was, but didn’t smell like fur, so she wasn’t a shifter. He gave over to his animal a little more and allowed his gorilla to scent her once more. Again, he was frustrated at how weak it appeared to be, but it was enough for him to learn that although his mate was not a shifter, she was not entirely human either.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Taika answered carefully.
His mate shrugged a second time, still not lowering the weapon she held pointed in his direction. “Don’t let it bother you. I’ve been looking for you for a long time now, and the people back in town have a few, shall we say, wild stories to tell of the man they call Kong.”
“Fuck, I hate that name.” Taika groaned. “It’s so unoriginal.”
“You’re the leader of a group of nine people, who can change into gorillas at will, who call this farm and the eighty hectares around it home,” she said, illustrating that she had indeed done her homework on him. The question was why. “They do fear you, as they would anything unknown. They mistakenly believe that despite the fact you can literally turn ape-shit crazy, that they’re safe.”
He shook his head. “We don’t change into our animals. It’s not like we pull on a damn costume. Weshiftinto our animals. Mine happens to be a silverback gorilla, not an ape.”
“You say potato, I say big ass ape.”
Taika did not like the anger and distaste he heard in her voice, and felt his own ire rise within him. “Now wait a minute, people in glass houses who aren’t exactly completely fucking human themselves, shouldn’t cast stones. Me and mine keep to ourselves. We don’t look for trouble, but if it comes our way, I can assure you it’ll be the last t—hey, what is it?” His mate had gone pale, and he felt a wave of fear sweep down that fledgling bond within him.
His mate had spun around to look back into the forest behind her, and when she turned back to him, there was fear in her eyes.
“You’re scared. What is it?” Taika sent out his senses, searching for whatever it was that had frightened his mate. He could sense nothing but members of his group, and that light, tantalizing scent of his mate. He spun to the left and right, looking for anything that dared to threaten what was his.
