Chasing His Bunny Read online

  The inside of the hummer was dead silent other than Jordan's occasional chuckles, which happened every time the big bastard looked over at Steele. Steele's fingers tightened around the steering wheel. He glanced in the rearview mirror, ostensibly to check on the convoy following behind him, but really because he couldn't stop looking at his mate.

  His mate.

  He’d never been a superstitious person, but considering that today was April Fools’ Day, he felt like he’d just had the biggest fucking joke Fate could have ever played on him.

  Inside of him, his wolf was jumping up and down, running around in excited circles, and lolling about on his back with his tongue hanging out. The stupid animal didn't even care that they'd never smelled anything like her and her siblings before, and had no idea what kind of shifter she was. That all of them smelled like an unnatural and confusing mix of predator and prey. It didn’t care that their mate had just punched him on the nose. It just cared that they’d found her, she was obviously another alpha, and she was here. It was fucking delighted. Steele was thankful that his own ass wasn't wagging, the wolf was so damned happy. At least one of them was. Steele didn't want a mate. He never had and he still wasn’t too sure how he felt about it now that he’d found her.

  The only male in a family of six siblings, he'd had plenty of protecting and looking after females his whole life. Hell, he'd left his pack and gone out on his own after the third one had finally mated and he hadn't felt guilty about leaving his parents to watch after the other two... A one-on-one ratio at least gave his parents a fighting chance.

  Steele loved his sisters, but he had to admit, he didn't truly get them. Every single one of them was demanding, needy, and expected to be treated like the queens they felt they were. They were pampered princesses, made more so by the fact that their father was the Alpha of their pack and everyone deferred to them. Their friends were suck-ups and their mates were overly impressed by them, in Steele's opinion. He loved them... but he'd also had his fill of females always needing him to do everything for them. Going out on his own, he'd found that he attracted the same kind of women, no matter how hard he tried to avoid them. He wanted a different kind of woman.

  Unfortunately, thanks to his sisters, he was used to being a little bossy and perhaps a tad overprotective and just a bit too much of a caretaker for more independent women. They found him overbearing, high-handed and arrogant. So, for the last couple of years, he'd found it easier to just swear off personal relationships with women. Hell, he hadn't even gotten laid in the past year, since the independent women he liked weren’t a fan of him and the women who did like his overbearing, high-handed, and arrogant ways were way too needy, dependent, and weak for his wolf. He attracted Stage 5 Clingers like nobody’s business.

  Which his mate most certainly was not, which was probably partly why his unfavorable view on mating had turned to something a little less decisive.

  No clinging at all for the curvy, little blonde, which was too bad because he’d really like her clinging to his dick, which had been hard as his nickname since the moment he’d scented her. She was seated in the far back, next to her sister. In the middle row of seats, her older brother was glaring at Steele in the rearview mirror, apparently unimpressed by the fact that he was seated next to Steele's biggest and most deadly soldier - Kasim, one of the few lions living in the States. Practically radiating calm, the lion glanced over his shoulder to give the females an encouraging smile, his white teeth flashing in his dark face.

  Getting the Bunson family into a vehicle had been an exercise in diplomacy, and thankfully Steele's Omega, Jacqueline Morn, had stepped in. It was her job to keep the peace in his pack after all. She was damned good at it too, despite her badger temper. Or maybe because of it. When Steele had insisted that his mate accompany him and then her entire family had insisted on accompanying her, it had been Jacqueline who put together the seating arrangements in the hummer. Surprisingly, the two younger males hadn't argued once they knew that Bethany would be separated by a row of seats from Steele, and that Brady would be sitting in that row.

  Of course, their quick capitulation might also have had something to do with Jacqueline pointing them to her hummer, which had been surrounded by females, waiting for her. All of them grinning invitingly at the Bunson brothers. His Omega wasn't exactly known for being subtle. But if putting the two males into a hummer full of females was what he'd needed to get them out of there, that had been fine with him.

  They'd already overstayed their welcome, and he couldn't help but worry that they would somehow be followed from the compound. They knew at least four of the employees had managed to escape. Their scents had been found, heading away from the compound, but Steele had had to make the executive decision not to follow them. They just didn't have the personnel possible to do that, gather up all the files and equipment from the compound, guard the prisoners that they'd taken, and see to the captives that they'd rescued. After all, going in to this mission, they hadn't known that there'd be captives or the extra staff that had been needed to take care of them.

  Intelligence had been fucking shoddy, and he was going to have a few choice words with his boss when they got back.

  "Where are we going?"

  Ah, the dulcet tones of his mate. She wasn't asking a question so much as demanding an answer. Steele had already noticed she had a tendency to do that. From what he'd heard over the radio, she hadn't been like that when his team had first broken into her cell. Apparently, freedom had gone to her head pretty quickly.

  Then again, he preferred demanding over frightened and needy. Just seeing her, knowing that she'd been a captive, knowing that they'd done something to her, because she sure as hell should have known he was her mate as soon as she'd smelled him, had all his protective instincts riled. Even though she'd punched him in the nose. He much preferred a happy, gamboling wolf in his head to a furious, protective one without an enemy to rip into shreds.

  Looking into the rearview mirror, he met her big, baby blue eyes and felt his chest clench at the same time as his wolf yipped happily, tongue hanging loose. Just looking at her had his inner animal - and his cock - jumping to attention.

  "Somewhere safe."

  "That's not an answer," her brother said grumpily. Brady, that was his name. Steele could already tell that Brady was going to be a problem. The big, dark-haired bastard turned halfway in his seat to look at Bethany. "You shouldn't talk to him. You don't want to encourage him with this 'mate' bullshit."

  The steering wheel creaked.

  "Chill, Steele," Jordan said, his voice a deep rumble. He sighed, looking over his shoulder at Brady to explain. "It's not nonsense. If he says she's his mate, she's his mate. It's not like he wants one, so he has no reason to lie."

  Bethany hissed, looking affronted at the news that Steele didn't want a mate - even if she hadn't seemed particularly welcoming of the idea. He found that encouraging. On the other hand, his wolf was less than amused by Brady's comments, which wasn't good. He was already having trouble controlling his animal side after all the fighting and meeting his mate, then being rejected by his mate, and now being in close confines with his mate but unable to touch her. The last thing they all needed was his wolf taking over while he was in the driver's seat and they were on the run.

  "What the fuck does that mean though?" His mate said plaintively. Next to her, her sister was sitting in silence, her eyes and ears taking in everything. It was actually kind of creepy how quiet she was compared to her siblings. Then again, as the youngest, maybe she just never got a chance to get a word in edgewise. She was very pretty, with big blue eyes just like his mate’s, but brown hair, and she didn’t have the same kind of presence that Bethany did.

  "If he doesn't want a mate, then what's the problem?" Brady asked irritably. Steele gritted his teeth.

  "The problem is he doesn't get a choice now that he's found her," Kasim said, his brow furrowing as he looked at the man sitting next to him and then the two wom
en behind him in confusion. "Didn't your parents explain how mating works? How long have you been in that compound?"

  "No," said Bethany at the same time Brady said, "Seven years."

  A chill went through Steele, followed swiftly by fury again as his wolf howled. Seven years? They weren't that old... they must have been taken when they were just fucking children! Holy shit!

  "Our parents are human," Bethany said, resting her cheek against the top of Bailey's head. Steele's wolf calmed slightly at the sight. He liked seeing how protective and mothering she was over her sister.

  Until he realized where his thoughts had gone, and then he just wanted to kick himself all over again. Mothering? Since when had he ever been interested in how good a mother a female would be? He didn't want a mate! Or pups! He’d just reacted without thinking when he’d scented her!

  Although, like Kasim said, he didn't really have a choice now, and as long as he was going to have a mate, at least she was a sexy, little, blonde bombshell package with some serious curves and a mean right hook... Things could definitely be worse. Steele already knew he was going to end up bowing to his wolf on this, it was just going to be a little bit of mental adjustment on his part. Although, since she was so independent and feisty, maybe it meant that this was finally his chance to get the kind of mate he wanted. That perked him up quite a bit. All he had to do was wait for the mating bond to bring her to him, and it wouldn’t matter how autocratic, dictatorial, and pushy he was. Unlike other women he’d been attracted to, who hadn’t been interested in a man like him, she would be just as attracted to him as he was to her. There would be no getting around it.

  Then he realized what she had said. Human? How was that possible? He could smell the disbelief and shock rising off of his packmates. Emotions had to be very strong to be discernible, but then again, what Bethany had just said was impossible. Although shifter genes could be recessive and passed down along family lines, one of the parents must be a shifter for any of those genes to actually show up in the children.

  "Ah. Hmm. Well, okay then." Kasim cleared his throat, and Jordan turned back around, apparently satisfied that Kasim now had things under control. The big grizzly looked poleaxed as he shook his head, happy to hand things over to the lion.

  Kasim decided to ignore the impossible and to focus on the important matter that he did understand. "Fated mates are... well they're special. Any two shifters can mate, if they're willing to commit to each other, and they share a claiming bite. Doing that means that you've given up on finding your fated mate and, honestly, it's how most of us mate. But if you do find your fated mate, well... your animal will know immediately, and they won't accept anyone else after that. Not unless you're already in love with someone else and your animal had accepted them, and then you'd better share the claiming bite with your chosen mate real fast before your animal can change its mind. The ah..." Kasim glanced warily at Brady sitting next to him, whose expression was becoming harder by the second. "The ah... biological imperative to claim your fated mate becomes harder and harder to resist until it's said to be impossible."

  "Biological imperative?" Brady asked, looking furious. Obviously he’d picked up on the fact that it meant the drive to consummate the mating. Unfortunately, Steele’s erection wasn’t going to be going anywhere anytime soon until he could sink it into his mate. Even then, it was going to keep coming back, just as hard and just as demanding, until they shared the claiming bite. Those commercials for calling a hotline after an erection of four hours or more? Yeah, totally useless for shifters.

  "Well, it doesn't matter," Bethany said from the back seat, her voice matter-of-fact. "He smells… delightful,” (understatement of the century) “but other than that, it wasn't anything special, so obviously he's wrong about the mate thing anyway."

  "I'm not letting some asshole talk my sister into bed just because he likes the way she smells!" Brady practically roared, over his sister's words.

  Steele's wolf howled, and his claws popped out of the ends of his fingers.

  "Everyone shut up," he roared. He was seconds away from losing it, and he hadn't lost control since the first week he started shifting. Dammit. His mate was already making him lose it. If she kept rejecting him, she was going to find herself hauled off over his shoulder caveman-style. Just thinking about it sent a wave of satisfaction through him. "We're going to the airfield where a plane will pick us up and take us to my pack's lands. We can give you a crash course in shifter society there."

  And he would talk to his boss and find out just what the hell was up. If the lab had somehow managed to create shifter genes in humans, the world was about to change, and in a really bad way.

  Chapter 2

  "They didn't create shifter genes, they just... woke them up." Eli Mansfield, Steele's boss, told him. Fortunately Steele's tech team had been working on getting documents and notes scanned and sent to Eli ever since they'd taken the compound. Once he'd heard Bethany's assertion that her parents were human, Steele had ordered them to concentrate on the notes about the siblings.

  He knew a lot more about his mate now. The Bunson family - taken when Bethany was barely eighteen years old. The youngest, her sister, had only been thirteen. Unfortunately, he also now knew that her parents were no longer alive. They'd had a suspicious accident the night the siblings had been taken. Jordan had gone to break the news, and it physically hurt Steele that he couldn't be there... but this was too important. They had to understand what this Dr. Montgomery had done and why, and, most importantly, who he was working for. Because someone had funded his work, and it wasn't the government.

  About a year ago, Eli had been contacted by the U.S. government, when scientists had started reporting that their work was being stolen. All of them had been working on some kind of research involving shifters. What had started out as simple recovery had taken a major turn today when they'd found the Bunson siblings. The other compounds hadn't had experiments; they'd just been guarding and continuing the research. Some of it was focused on military uses, but a lot of it also seemed to be geared towards the diseases which had devastated much of the smaller shifter population in the past few years. The smaller shifters, who turned into prey animals, tended to be pretty insular and scientists had theorized that inbreeding may have contributed to the spread of disease and the general weakness of those shifter lines.

  The larger predator shifters could be somewhat insular as well, but they didn't mind mixing with humans as much, or with each other. Most of them didn't take it to the extreme like Steele did with his pack, but he liked having a mixed grab bag of shifters around him, rather than just wolves. Especially since his pack was made up of both fighters and other shifters who wanted to support the fight; no one like his sisters would make it very far in his pack. Everyone was expected to pitch in and lend some kind of hand whenever shit went down. Either you were a soldier, or you contributed in some way by healing, cooking, logistics, tech support... everyone had a job. Everyone was useful. Or they left to find another pack where they could sit on their laurels and have everything handed to them. It didn’t matter their place in the pack – unlike his parents’ pack where the alpha and his family definitely received preferential treatment and rarely had to lift a finger unless they wanted to. Which was probably why his sisters never visited Steele; they waited till he came to visit their parents’ pack to see him.

  "What do you mean, woke them up?" Steele asked, confused. His hands were balled into fists as he tried to control his frustration. Fortunately, his wolf seemed to understand the need to stay in human form right now.

  They needed as much information as possible to protect their mate.

  "The Bunsons have shifter genes, way back in their ancestry," Eli explained, looking down at the notes he had in front of him. "No one in their family has shifted for generations, it looks like, but the genes are still passed down. If any of them had mated with a shifter, there's a good chance their children would have been shifters, because of that."<
br />
  Shifter-human pairings had a fifty-fifty chance of producing humans or shifters. Shifter-shifter pairings had a one hundred percent chance, but the children always came out as one or the other animal when the shifter parents were different animals.

  "But they didn't," Steele said.

  "No." Eli said, his face grim. Blond hair and bright, green eyes didn't usually do brooding well, but right now Eli pulled it off. "But it doesn't seem to have mattered. It appears this Dr. Montgomery figured out how to unlock the shifter potential in their genes. The process sounds... painful." Steele's wolf howled internally. He was going to need to go for a long run tonight to let his poor wolf work off some of its frustrated fury.

  "So, what are they?"

  "We're not sure."

  "What do you mean you're not sure?" Steele's jaw creaked as he gritted his teeth.

  Eli sighed, rubbing his hand over his face, looking more tired than Steele had ever seen him before. Even though he was dressed in a suit, as always, he looked... rumpled. Which was highly unusual.

  "From his notes, Montgomery says that he successfully unlocked their potentials. Plural. On their mother's side, they have bear ancestors. On their father's, rabbit and... turtle." Eli's mouth twitched. There hadn't been turtle shifters in generations. They'd been among the first of the smaller shifters to die out, in fact.

  Holy shit... if Montgomery had been able to unlock long dormant genomes... it was a medical breakthrough of the miraculous variety. Although his methods sure as hell left a lot to be desired.

  "So... which one do they change into?" His mind boggled. How special were his mate and her siblings? “Do you think they could change into all three?” Normally, an impossibility, but the Bunsons were already impossible.

  "We're not sure. The notes aren't conclusive, but they can shift. It's possible that their animals aren't fully developed because of the way they were created or they might be stunted because of the variety factor, which could explain why Bethany doesn't know – or is able to deny - she's your mate."