Wild Cat Read online

  Praise for the novels of Jennifer Ashley

  WILD CAT

  “Danger, desire, and sizzling-hot action! Wild Cat is a wild ride. Jennifer Ashley walks the razor’s edge of primal passion as human and Shifter fight for their lives, their families, and a love that breaks all the rules. This is one for the keeper shelf!”

  —Alyssa Day, New York Times bestselling author

  “Wild Cat is a riveting read, with intriguing characters, page-turning action, and danger lurking around every turn. Ashley’s Shifter world is exciting, sexy, and magical.”

  —Yasmine Galenorn, New York Times bestselling author

  PRIMAL BONDS

  “[A] sexually charged and imaginative tale…[A] quick pace and smart, skilled writing.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Humor and passion abound in this excellent addition to this series.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  PRIDE MATES

  “With her usual gift for creating imaginative plots fueled by scorchingly sensual chemistry, RITA Award–winning Ashley begins a new sexy paranormal series that neatly combines high-adrenaline suspense with humor.”

  —Booklist

  “A whole new way to look at shapeshifters… Rousing action and sensually charged, MapQuest me the directions for Shiftertown.”

  —Publishers Weekly, “Beyond Her Book”

  continued…

  “Absolutely fabulous!… I was blown away by this latest release. The action and romance were evenly matched and the flow of the book kept me glued until the last page… Paranormal fans will be raving over this one!”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  “Ashley has created a riveting tale that… explores different interpretations of human and nonhuman interaction.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  THE MANY SINS OF LORD CAMERON

  “Big, arrogant, sexy highlanders—Jennifer Ashley writes the kinds of heroes I crave!”

  —Elizabeth Hoyt, New York Times bestselling author

  “A sexy, passion-filled romance that will keep you reading until dawn.”

  —Julianne MacLean, USA Today bestselling author

  LADY ISABELLA’S SCANDALOUS MARRIAGE

  “I adore this novel: It’s heartrending, funny, honest, and true. I want to know the hero—no, I want to marry the hero!”

  —Eloisa James, New York Times bestselling author

  “Readers rejoice! The Mackenzie brothers return as Ashley works her magic to create a unique love story brimming over with depth of emotion, unforgettable characters, sizzling passion, mystery, and a story that reaches out and grabs your heart. Brava!”

  —RT Book Reviews (Top Pick)

  “A heartfelt, emotional historical romance with danger and intrigue around every corner… A great read!”

  —Fresh Fiction

  THE MADNESS OF LORD IAN MACKENZIE

  “Ever-versatile Ashley begins her new Victorian Highland Pleasures series with a deliciously dark and delectably sexy story of love and romantic redemption that will captivate readers with its complex characters and suspenseful plot.”

  —Booklist

  “Mysterious, heartfelt, sensitive, and sensual… Two big thumbs up.”

  —Publishers Weekly, “Beyond Her Book”

  “A story full of mystery and intrigue with two wonderful, bright characters… I look forward to more from Jennifer Ashley, an extremely gifted author.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Brimming with mystery, suspense, an intriguing plot, villains, romance, a tormented hero, and a feisty heroine, this book is a winner. I recommend The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie to anyone looking for a great read.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “Wow! All I can say is The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie is one of the best books that I have ever read. [It] gets the highest recommendation that I can give. It is a truly wonderful book.”

  —Once Upon A Romance

  “When you’re reading a book that is a step or two—or six or seven—above the norm, you know it almost immediately. Such is the case with The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie. The characters here are so complex and so real that I was fascinated by their journey…[and] this story is as flat-out romantic as any I’ve read in a while… This is a series I am certainly looking forward to following.”

  —All About Romance

  Berkley Sensation Titles by Jennifer Ashley

  PRIDE MATES

  PRIMAL BONDS

  WILD CAT

  THE MADNESS OF LORD IAN MACKENZIE

  LADY ISABELLA’S SCANDALOUS MARRIAGE

  THE MANY SINS OF LORD CAMERON

  WILD CAT

  JENNIFER ASHLEY

  BERKLEY SENSATION, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  WILD CAT

  A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / January 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Jennifer Ashley.

  Excerpt from Mate Claimed by Jennifer Ashley copyright © by Jennifer Ashley.

  Cover art by Franco Accornero.

  Cover design by George Long.

  Hand lettering by Ron Zinn.

  Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-0-425-24578-1

  BERKLEY SENSATION®

  Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY SENSATION® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this
book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks go to my editor, Kate Seaver, and everyone at Berkley Publishing who puts so much hard work into editing and producing these books. I’d also like to thank the readers who love the Shifters and encourage me to write more about them. For more information about the Shifters and their world, visit the Shifter series site on the web page www.jennifersromances.com.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE

  Heights. Damn it, why does it have to be heights?

  Diego Escobar scanned the steel beams of the unfinished skyscraper against a gray morning sky, and acid seared his stomach.

  Heights had never bothered him until two years ago, when five meth-heads had hung him over the penthouse balcony of a thirty-story hotel and threatened to drop him. His partner, Jobe, a damn good cop, had put his weapon on the balcony floor and raised his hands to save Diego’s life. The men had pulled Diego to safety and then casually shot them both. Diego had survived; Jobe hadn’t.

  Diego’s rage and grief had manifested into an obsessive fear of heights. Now, going up even three floors in a glass elevator could give him cold sweats.

  “Way the hell up there?” he asked Rogers, the uniform cop.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Shit.

  “Hooper’s pretty sure it’s not human,” Rogers said. “He says it moves too fast, jumps too far. But he hasn’t got a visual yet.”

  Not human meant Shifter. This was getting better and better. “Hooper’s up there alone?”

  “Jemez is with him. They think they have the Shifter cornered on the fifty-first level.”

  The fifty-first level? “Tell me you’re fucking kidding me.”

  “No, sir. There’s an elevator. We got the electric company to turn on the power.”

  Diego looked at the rusty doors Rogers indicated, then up, up, and up through the grid of beams into empty space. He could see nothing but the gray dawn sky between the crisscross of girders. His mouth went dry.

  This cluster of buildings in the middle of nowhere—which was to have been an apartment complex, hotel, office tower, and shopping center—had been under construction for years. The project had started to great fanfare, designed to draw tourists and locals away from the heavily trafficked Strip. But construction slowed, and so many investors pulled out that building had ground to a halt. Now the unfinished skyscraper sat like a rusting blot on the empty desert.

  Tracking Shifters wasn’t Diego’s department. Diego was a detective in vice. He’d responded to the call for help with a trespasser because he’d been heading to work and his route took him right by the construction site. Diego figured he’d help Rogers chase down the miscreant and drive on in.

  Now Rogers wanted Diego to jaunt to the fifty-first level, where there weren’t any floors, for crying out loud, and chase a suspect who might be a Shifter. Shifters were dangerous—people who could become animals. Or, maybe animals who became people. The jury was still out. In any case, they’d been classified as too dangerous to live with humans, rounded up into Shiftertowns, and made to wear Collars that regulated their violent tendencies.

  Diego had heard that regular guns didn’t always bring them down, Shifters having amazing metabolisms. Shifter Division used tranquilizers when they needed to shoot a Shifter, but Diego was fresh out of those. Rogers, rotund and near retirement, watched Diego with a bland expression, making it clear he had no intention of going up after the Shifter himself.

  A high-pitched scream rang down from on high. It was a woman’s scream—Maria Jemez—followed by a man’s bellow of surprise and pain. Then, silence.

  “Damn it.” Diego ran for the elevator. “Stay down here, call Shifter Division, and get more backup. Tell them to bring tranqs.” He got into the lift and shut the doors, blocking out Rogers’ “Yes, sir.”

  The lift clanked its way up through the few completed finished floors, then onto floors that were nothing but beams and catwalks. The elevator was an open cage, so Diego got to watch the ground and Rogers recede, far too rapidly.

  Fifty-first level. Damn.

  Diego had been chasing criminals through towering hotels for years without thinking a thing about it. He and the sheriff’s department even had followed one idiot high up onto a cable tower two hundred feet above Hoover Dam five years ago, and Diego hadn’t flinched.

  A bunch of cop-hating meth dealers hang him over a balcony, and he goes to pieces.

  It stops now. This is where I get my own back.

  Diego rolled back the gate on the fifty-first level. The sun was rising, the mountains west of town bathed in pink and orange splendor. The Las Vegas valley was a beautiful place, its stark white desert contrasting with the mountains that rose in a knifelike wall on the horizon. Visitors down in the city kept their eyes on the gaming tables and slot machines, uncaring of what went on outside the casinos, but the beauty of the valley always tugged at Diego.

  Diego drew his Sig and stepped off the lift into eerie silence. Something flitted in his peripheral vision, something that moved too lightly to be Hooper, who was a big, muscular guy who liked big, muscular guns. Diego aimed, but the movement vanished.

  He stepped softly across the board catwalk, moving into the deeper shadow of a beam. The catwalk groaned under his feet. There were no lights up here, just the faint flush of morning and the glow from the work lights down on the ground that the power company had turned on.

  Diego saw the movement again to his left, and then, damned if he didn’t see a similar flit to his right.

  Son of a bitch—two of them?

  A sound like the cross between a pop and a kiss came from down the catwalk the instant before something pinged above Diego’s head. Diego hit the floor instinctively, trying not to panic as his feet slid over the catwalk’s edge.

  His heart pounded triple-time, his throat so dry it closed up tight.

  What the hell was he doing? He should have confessed his secret fear of heights, gone to psychiatric evaluation, stayed behind a desk. But no, he’d been too determined to keep his job, too determined to beat it himself, too embarrassed to admit the weakness. Now he was endangering others because of his stupid fear.

  Shut up and think.

  Whatever had pinged hadn’t been a bullet. Too soft. Diego got his feet back onto the catwalk and crawled to find what had fallen to the boards. A dart, he saw, the kind shot by a tranquilizer gun.

  Uniforms didn’t carry tranqs, and Shifter Division hadn’t showed up yet. That meant that one of the Shifters he was chasing up here had a tranquilizer gun. Perfect. Put the nice cop to sleep, and then do anything you want with him, including pushing his body over the edge.

  Diego moved in a crouch across the catwalk to the next set of shadows. The sun streaked across the valley to Mount Charleston in the west, light radiant on its snow-covered crown. More snow was predicted up there for the weekend. Diego had contemplat
ed driving up on Saturday night to sip hot toddies in a snowbound cabin, maybe with something warm and female by his side.

  On the other side of the next beam, Diego found Bud Hooper and Maria Jemez. Maria was fairly new, just out of the academy, too baby-faced to be up here chasing crazy Shifters. The two cops were slumped together in a heap, still warm, breathing slowly.

  Diego heard footsteps, running fast—too fast to be human. He swung around as a shadow detached itself from the catwalk in front of him and rose in a graceful leap to the next level.

  Diego stared, openmouthed. The thing wasn’t human—it had the long limbs of a cat, but its face was half human, like a cross between human and animal. Did Shifters look like that? He’d thought they were either animal or human, but as he watched, gun ready, he realized he was seeing one in midshift.

  The Shifter landed on open beams on the next floor up, then its shape flowed, as it ran, into the lithe form of a big cat. Morning sunlight caught on white fur and the flash of green eyes. Snow leopard? It sprinted along the beam, never losing its balance, and vanished back into the shadows.

  Diego heard a step behind him. He whipped around in time to see the flash of a rifle barrel in the sunlight, aiming directly at him. He heard the pop as his reflexes made him dive for the floor.

  He came up on his elbows to return fire, but there was nothing to aim at. Whoever had the tranq rifle had vanished back into the shadows.