Her Lion Guard 2 (Paranormal Shifter Romance) Read Online Free PDF

mate’s upper arm, trying to soothe the anger that threatened to overwhelm him. “Two days from now, where I first met Mary-Lou. You don’t show, I come to collect her.” Wiley then turned to his pack, growling out a short command.
    They were gone within seconds.
    Mary-Lou stared at the empty cement before her, at Jonas’s flushed face. Her mate was trembling against her, his body pained with the need to shift, to chase, to kill .
    In the end, it took both Mary-Lou and Sasha to ensure Jonas made it to their apartment and stayed there. Jonas did not speak a word for the rest of the evening; seemed incapable of it, human voice overtaken by its animal counterpart. Mary-Lou could do nothing but stay by his side, equally silent and sick with worry.
    No one slept alone that night: All four of them crammed in Mary-Lou and Jonas’ bed, needing the comfort only physical contact could provide. Mary-Lou pressed against Jonas, hugged Cara close, and tried to ignore the ball of anxiety growing, black and heavy, in the pit of her stomach.
    Tomorrow. Tomorrow, she will ask. Tomorrow, she will know.
    Mary-Lou wondered if she would want to, once she did.
     

C HAPTER THREE
     
     
        The bedroom was dark, silent. Shadows hung from the ceiling, draped over the room and all within it like a shapeless veil. There were only two figures in the spacious bed tonight, the night before it was all to end. They, too, were still and quiet – but not asleep. How could they be, when uncertainty threatened to drown their entire world?
    Mary-Lou blinked red-rimmed eyes, trying to keep the blinking digits of the alarm clock in focus. 2:59 AM. She felt her lashes burn where they pressed in the sleep-bruised skin of her eye-sockets, felt tired and too-awake.
    For the first night in many weeks, Mary-Lou’s insomnia was not called forth by phantom shadows and bloody dreams. The terror that squeezed her heart was very much warranted, for the danger that loomed over them – over Jonas, over her family – was intolerably real.
    Wiley . Mary-Lou gritted her teeth around a frustrated scream.
    What would she give, to have her fears remain locked within her consciousness! When Wiley had first walked toward her – face smug, eyes filled with hate – Mary-Lou had briefly thought him a nightmare: Had believed herself asleep against Jonas in Sasha’s car, safe on her way home. But Wiley had remained stubbornly real; a monster of flesh and blood. And when he had spoken—
    Mary-Lou felt Jonas shiver against her, violent and sudden. Anger thrummed across their mental bond, hate and passion and fear so potent it shook her to her bones. Hesitantly, Mary-Lou turned to face her lover, gasping to find glassy blue eyes staring hungrily into hers.
    Wiley and his disgusting advances had left Mary-Lou shaken, Sasha and Cara – distraught and angry in turns. But Jonas – Jonas had been enraged . That first night, it had taken the entire pack and hours of physical contact, of soft words and gentle gestures just to keep Jonas stable. Mary-Lou had felt her mate teeter, felt him pull back from the edge of pure, bloodthirsty insanity more than once. An awful experience for which Wiley, too, was to blame.
    “He is going feral,” Cara had whispered sometime in the early morning, face pale and drawn as she regarded her alpha. “Had we not stopped him, he would have chased after them. He would have fought.”
    “There were seven of them,” Mary-Lou had gasped out, quickly falling silent as Jonas let out a menacing growl against her neck. She shivered, letting Jonas nuzzle into her and calm himself with her scent.
    “That would be the problem,” Sasha offered in the resulting silence. He was pressed along Cara’s other side, legs curled so his toes brushed against Jonas’ taut calves. “No sense of self-preservation. No sense at all. He would have been torn apart .”
    In the present, Mary-Lou watched Jonas watch her and wondered who lay in this bed: Her mate, or