Shifter's Claim (The Shadow Shifters) Read Online Free PDF

opened her eyes again it was to more than a couple of hits on his name. Words like playboy, eccentric millionaire, and recluse were all mentioned in the descriptions of him. His bio explained why he was so arrogant—heir to a communications fortune and yet he’d earned his own fortune. The rich simply got richer. And good-looking rich guys showed up on the cover of GQ, multiple times. She groaned as she remembered assuming he was Reynolds’s bodyguard last night. As arrogant as Perry was, he was probably thinking she had to be a colossal idiot not to know who he was.
    Pictures of him with various women appeared on gossip pages, all with titles insinuating they were a “hot” item. Yet she never saw the same female twice. Perry’s background seemed to personify some of the things Priya hated about men—entitled, conceited, and distracted. In the midst of all these things that she shouldn’t give a damn about, she came across something important. While Perry owned his own string of resorts across the world, he seemed to be extremely close to Reynolds, Delgado, and Markland, all of whom lived right here in D.C. It was a picture of Perry and Markland at Perry’s Sedona resort taken only a week before that night she’d seen Markland and the other men in the alley behind Athena’s. To Perry she’d made it seem as if someone had given her that information, when in fact, she’d been there and had seen it for herself. She shivered at the memory of those eerie eyes. She and her photographer had been rushed out of the alley by a forceful and attitudinal female and warned not to come back. And the next morning Priya had received the first e-mail with instructions on how she would be the one to reveal the creatures living among them, she would be the one to take Reynolds and his crew down.
    She’d been about to ask who was sending the e-mail and what gave them the right to order her around. The picture of her brother gagged and bound and bleeding from a gash in his head had been the only answer she’d needed.
    Before Priya could think more about the man she’d met last night in connection with the man she was determined to get to, her phone rang. Instantly, she knew who it was and wondered if she should answer it. Nobody used her house phone besides her family, all her business contacts and Lolo used her cell. Prior to receiving that first e-mail, Priya may have ignored the ringing phone, at least for an hour or two until she was able to get some work done. Starting her day with the drama that inevitably came with the Drake family was not something she enjoyed doing. But now that had changed, the e-mails she’d begun receiving had changed how she dealt with her family. They had inextricably connected her family and her work so that this next story was literally do or die.
    If the truth be told, her entire life had been do or die. Born the fourth in a succession of unplanned children to Karen Drake, one of Prince George’s County’s poster children for what not to do when you grew up, Priya had been working toward a better life for what seemed like forever. While her two sisters had followed in their mother’s footsteps, dropping out of school and having babies faster than they could figure out names for them, her brother, Malik, the oldest of the Drake siblings, had been suffering from drug addiction for as long as Priya could remember. It seemed odd and slightly pitiful that as the youngest child who had worked drive-thru at Burger King to pay her way through college, she was the most responsible of the Drakes, the one everyone turned to when they were in trouble.
    Reaching for the cordless phone that sat on the corner of her desk, she answered, “Hello?”
    “Hey, baby,” her mother replied.
    “Good morning, Mama,” she answered, closing her eyes and dreading what might come next. “What’s going on?”
    That was the first question because Karen never called just to say hello.
    “I was just calling because I