Lion's Hunt: BBW Lion Shifter Paranormal Romance Read online

  Lion’s Hunt

  By

  Zoe Chant

  Copyright Zoe Chant 2016

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Lion's Hunt

  A note from Zoe Chant

  More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant

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  Alpha Lion | by Zoe Chant | Special Sneak Preview

  Cassie Shaw saw her boss coming out of his office and ducked her head. She was almost finished entering employee records, and she’d planned to take her break when she was done.

  But if Dave came over, she’d have another urgent task dropped into her lap, and he wouldn’t want to see her away from her desk until she was finished with that, too.

  Dave was the regional manager for Rowland Global Solutions’ Rocky Mountain office, which meant a heck of a lot of paperwork. But he really hated paperwork, so most of it ended up migrating to Cassie’s desk instead of his. Whether it was technically his own job versus his assistant’s didn’t really matter.

  Instead, Dave preferred to spend his time personally supervising the research sites, which meant a lot of time out of the office.

  So maybe he was just heading out to his car, and he wouldn’t notice her on his way past.

  But she was out of luck today. Dave was stalking right over to Cassie’s desk. “I cannot believe this,” he growled at her.

  Cassie looked around. Nothing unbelievable seemed to be happening. “Can’t believe what?”

  “There is a tax auditor coming to investigate us. Tomorrow.”

  Dave was clearly furious. Cassie could tell because his bald spot was starting to turn pink.

  “That's too bad,” she said cautiously. “Should we start getting all of our records together?”

  “I don’t have time for this!” Dave snapped. “I was going to be on-site tomorrow, and now I have to be here to meet this IRS guy. I definitely don’t have time to show him around the files. You’re going to have to do it.”

  Cassie suppressed a dry, What a surprise. She could’ve predicted that there was no way Dave would let his time be taken up by a tax audit. He never did anything he thought was a waste of time.

  “No problem,” she said, which was a total lie. But complaining about it wouldn’t get her anywhere. “Is there anything in particular I should have ready for him when he arrives?”

  “Just start with the records for us, for our building’s expenses,” Dave said. “Then go to the sites further out. Leave the local site for last. I’ll do that part.”

  ‘The local site’ meant the R&D lab nearest to their office, which ironically was actually Rowland Global Solutions’ most remote research location.

  It was way, way up in the mountains. It was labeled as an ‘Environmental Research’ lab, which wasn’t unusual. RGS had a whole project dedicated to Rocky Mountain environmental research, a government contract that spanned several labs.

  The local site, however, was different.

  Cassie had done all the paperwork for all of the labs. Employee records, requisition forms, tax reports, all of it. So she knew that there was something very strange about this particular lab. It took in way more money than any of the others, it didn’t seem to have the same tax documents attached to it, and the requisition forms were always abbreviated so that she couldn’t tell what equipment they were even using.

  And now Dave wanted her not to tell the IRS anything about it.

  Very interesting indeed. Cassie’s wild curiosity about what the R&D lab was really up to increased a few notches.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll have our own records ready for him when he gets here and I’ll let you know when we’ve gone through it all.”

  “Good,” Dave said shortly. “Try to keep him busy for a while, if you can.” He stalked away.

  “Thank you, Cassie,” Cassie muttered to herself. “It’s so helpful the way you do all of this extra work for me.” “You’re welcome, Dave. It’s just enough to know that I’m appreciated.”

  Yup, that conversation would never happen.

  Still, she got to meet an IRS auditor tomorrow, which she’d never done before. And she was incredibly curious to see whether he’d buy the claim that the lab was doing “Environmental Research” or not.

  Dave, meanwhile, was heading out to his car. Cassie pulled the employment records up again.

  Employee records were also technically Dave’s job, and more importantly, they should really be filled out in person to allow for questions. Emailing back and forth when someone didn’t understand what information they were supposed to put down was a pain.

  Cassie would’ve been happy to do them if she’d been able to go out to the research site and actually meet the people who were working at Rowland Global Solutions’ most remote R&D lab. Because although Dave was out there all the time, Cassie had never seen it.

  She knew where it was, but only because Dave had once CC’d her on an email that had included directions meant for someone else.

  Dave went to meetings at the site where he talked to the lab staff about the business side of their research, but Cassie never got to go along to those. Instead, she did all of the reports on expenditures and research progress that Dave signed his name to.

  It was a little frustrating, that she’d worked so hard, and borrowed a lot of money, to get her bachelor’s degree in business, but all of the credit for her work was stolen by a man who took off early almost every evening.

  And it was even more frustrating that she spent her workdays buried in information about a place she never went and people she never met. Even the reports she wrote didn’t tell her much. They were full of abbreviations and vague references to “Project A” and “Subject B,” and never let her know anything about what sort of research the lab was actually doing.

  But that was life sometimes. She made just enough money to meet her loan payments, and that was what was most important to her right now.

  Meanwhile, she kept herself amused by speculating about what they were developing in the secret lab.

  Cassie had seen enough of the requisition spreadsheets and expense reports to figure out that it was something big. They might use weird abbreviations, but nothing could hide the fact that what they were doing was way more expensive than “environmental research.” So what could they be making with it all? Laser guns? A time machine? Teleportation devices?

  She’d even considered going to look at the lab on one of her weekly hiking trips. Cassie loved hiking in the mountains, and some of her normal routes took her out in that direction. She’d have to drive for a while first, because it was way the heck and gone up there, but she could park somewhere and sneak up on foot.

  It was probably just a concrete building that the company had bought up because the location made it cheap, but it was fun to think about going on a secret mission to watch the scientists building their teleportation device.

  Cassie laughed to herself. That was one of the problems with this job: it left too much space for her imagination to run wild.

  But she didn’t have time for imaginary teleportation devices right now. She had employee records to fill out!

  Exciting, exciting employee records.

  She kept her brain occupied when she was typing social security numbers by making up dramatic backgrounds for all the employees. Maybe Daniel Harris, DOB 5/30/72, was really a secret agent assigned to investigate Rowland Global Solutions by the government. Maybe Mandy Lowell, DOB 11/24/91, was the genius behind the teleportation device, a prodigy who’d gotten her PhD in applied physics at nineteen and
would someday be known as the next Einstein.

  Maybe Cassie had been watching too much TV in her spare time.

  She finally finished typing up all the information and emailed it to Dave. She really needed to get started on compiling the tax information if the IRS guy was coming tomorrow—she could see overtime in her future—but she still wanted to take at least a little bit of a break.

  So she clicked over to Facebook just for a second. And immediately saw that her cousin had posted vacation pictures.

  The second stretched out to minutes while she clicked through the gorgeous photos.

  Anne and her husband Peter had gone to Morocco for two weeks, and the pictures of desert landscapes, open bazaars, and ancient cities called to Cassie as though they had audible voices.

  Get on a plane, they beckoned. Come see it all. Pack a backpack, grab your passport, and go!

  She yearned to do it. It didn’t have to be Morocco, either. She’d be just as happy with Norway, China, Antarctica, Peru...

  She’d been out of the country only once in her life, a trip to Mexico with friends from her Spanish class when she was in college. She’d been fascinated by the differences, by the people, and by the fabulous natural sights.

  Her classmates had mostly been excited about being able to drink legally and had wanted to find parties. Cassie had gone hiking every day, and had used her mediocre Spanish as much as she possibly could, talking to anyone and everyone she met. It had resulted in some embarrassing moments where her Spanish skills failed her, but she’d come back to the US almost fluent and with treasured memories of all the people she’d spoken with.

  That trip had woken a wanderlust in Cassie, and ever since then, she’d wanted to go overseas more than anything else.

  The problem was, she’d taken out loans for college, because her parents hadn’t had any money to pay for her. She’d thought she wouldn’t need to borrow too much, but in her sophomore year, her biggest scholarship had fallen through.

  She’d been absolutely determined to finish her degree. She’d worked and taken classes at the same time, trying to minimize the amount she’d had to borrow, but college was expensive.

  So now she was stuck paying off loans for the next...many years. Which meant that for now, she was stuck here with the tax records.

  She would travel around the world someday. But it was going to be years before she could.

  Still, she could dream. Mostly alone in her own mind, because when she talked about her plans, people always said, Who are you planning to go with? Wait, by yourself? Isn’t that dangerous?

  Her parents especially. They thought she was crazy to want to go off on her own. They were sure that the second she stepped off a plane in another country, she’d instantly be kidnapped.

  Cassie had tried to reassure them that travel wasn’t as dangerous as they thought, but it hadn’t worked. So it looked like when the time came, she’d be leaving behind a scared and unhappy mom and dad.

  The truth was, she wouldn’t mind having someone come with her. But none of her college friends had the time or the inclination to drop all of their lives for weeks or months, even if they’d had the money.

  And as for men...Cassie had never dated a man that she would’ve wanted to take on a world trip. Either they thought she was being silly just like her parents did, or they were the type of guy to one-up everything she was planning, just to show that they were more hardcore than she was. And she didn’t want to spend a vacation with a man like that.

  Truth was, Cassie had always had a hard time making connections with men. None of them had ever seemed right for her. And she wasn’t settling for anyone who wasn’t right...even if it left her with a lonely ache in her chest sometimes.

  Well, she didn’t need a man to travel. As soon as she could afford it, she was going.

  She took one more long minute to drink in the sunlit picture of Marrakech that Anne had posted. With that warming her, she went back to work.

  ***

  Seth Rowland had barely left the jungle behind him when his phone buzzed.

  He’d tucked it into the depths of his backpack when he left, burying it underneath his survival equipment. The heavy-duty battery kept it from dying while he was away, especially since he never used it while he was out. It was no use having it at hand, after all, because he knew there would be zero reception out in the Peruvian wilderness.

  And that was how he liked it. When Seth went backpacking away from civilization, he wanted to be just that: away from civilization.

  But now, even though he wasn’t anywhere near the city yet, he could feel the little electronic vibrations right against his spine, through the thick canvas of the pack. Apparently cell phone reception was improving no matter where you were in the world.

  How wonderful.

  He dug the phone out of his pack to check. It told him he had one (1) new voicemail...but the reception had cut out again, and he couldn’t dial his voicemail to hear it yet.

  Well, he could wait until he got back to town to listen to it. Even if there was an emergency of some kind, he had to get to somewhere with an airport before he could do anything about it.

  He hurried his pace, though.

  It was unusual for anyone to try and contact Seth while he was traveling. His brothers and sister knew that he’d be incommunicado for days or weeks at a time, and so limited their attempts to contact him to when they knew he’d be in the country.

  And hardly anyone else even knew the number to his international cell phone. If he needed a phone number for business purposes, he gave out his landline, and checked the voicemail remotely if he was expecting a call. And he almost never needed a phone number for personal reasons.

  For a long, long time, he’d wanted it that way. Growing up with a father who was a high-powered New York City businessman, in a world where socializing was part of everybody’s job, he’d started to hate all of the schmoozing and the calculated party invitations.

  Not to mention, crowds of people made him claustrophobic. He could only spend so much time in New York before he started to itch.

  When he turned eighteen, he’d dropped everything to head out into the wild, and he’d felt like he could breathe easily for the first time in his life. All alone, surrounded by trees, mountains, savannah, desert...it was what he was meant for.

  Now that he was twenty-four, though, he was starting to realize that he did miss seeing other people when he was away. He still hated the packed-together skyscrapers that his siblings ruled, but spending weeks at a time without any human contact was getting...old.

  He’d only ever had brief relationships with people other than his family. Friendships with people he met in the places he travelled, flings with women who knew that he would be leaving soon. His siblings were the only constant in his life, and they all knew he wanted to be left alone.

  The problem was, he was starting to get tired of being alone.

  He still loved to travel, but something was missing for him. On this most recent trip, he’d found himself fed up with his own company after only a few days. He’d wanted to go back to the city just to find some locals to talk to, to ask if they’d ever ventured out into the jungle and what they’d found there.

  He wished he could meet someone to travel with him, who could be a partner on the long journeys. But he’d never managed a long-term, serious relationship with anyone, because for the most part, women didn’t want to spend their lives on the move.

  Seth could understand that. It wasn’t the most comfortable life, and he was definitely learning about how lonely it could get. Anyone who wanted to live near their family, or who was at all interested in creature comforts, wouldn’t be happy with him.

  But it seemed like he was starting to just yo-yo back and forth. He couldn’t be content staying in one place, so he’d pack up and leave...but then he’d be all on his own in the middle of nowhere, and start feeling the need for company, so he’d come back to civilization. But then he’d get rest
less again...over and over and over.

  He didn’t know what to do.

  This time, he’d only spent four days out in the jungle. He’d shifted to his lion form for most of it, leaving the backpack tucked securely up a tree, and explored the unfamiliar territory with his lion senses. He’d hoped that staying in animal form would keep the desire for companionship at bay, but it hadn’t worked very well. His lion wanted a pride, and it was getting discontented with all of the solo exploration. So he was already on his way back.

  The short trip made him more concerned about what might be waiting for him on his phone. No one would have expected him to be checking it this quickly, so it might be urgent news.

  Or it might be the service provider calling him about his plan.

  Probably that’s what it was. Or a telemarketer.

  He sped up again anyway.

  It was a couple hours’ travel to the nearest town. When he arrived, he got himself a room to stay in and dug through his pack for his phone the first chance he had.

  I’m going to feel real stupid if it is a telemarketer, he thought. He dialed the voicemail.

  It wasn’t a telemarketer.

  “Seth, I know you’re out in the middle of nowhere, but when you get this, you need to come back to New York,” his brother Max’s voice told him. “There’s a situation I need your help with. Please get in touch as soon as possible.”

  Seth pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at it. It offered him no explanation as to why the words I need your help had actually come out of his older brother’s mouth.

  Max wasn’t the type to need anybody’s help. He tolerated people’s help. He didn’t need it.

  And he’d definitely never asked Seth for help with anything before.

  Seth pulled up the phone’s browser. Time to book himself a plane ticket.

  ***

  Lima to New York was an eight-hour overnight flight. Seth snatched a few hours of sleep on the plane and stepped out of JFK at 6:30 AM New York time, awake and alert. He was used to sleeping in short bursts when he was out in the wilderness.

  He hailed a cab and thought about the wilderness of New York, the concrete jungle. Wild animals on every corner, ready to take you for all you were worth.