Tail 'Em: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (Jailbreak Book 1) Read online

  So I worked on that. While for all intents and purposes I was ‘laying on hands,’ really, I was gently, persistently removing the many things that got in her way and strengthened that need and sense of purpose. I smoothed and I shored up, I redirected and I encouraged, I stroked and I soothed, until finally, I felt like the dog was going to make it through the month.

  I had to grab the table when I was finished, feeling the sudden wave of dizziness that came from deep workings like this. Normally, I would have rescheduled, as the trauma of dealing with a hurt dog, like Rex, took its toll.

  “Are you all right, love?” Carla asked, placing a soft hand on my shoulder.

  For a second, I couldn’t answer, the room spinning as my head felt as light as a balloon, floating higher and higher, while my fingers dug hard into the metal consulting table, as if that would be enough to keep me down. But then just as quickly as it came on, the feeling faded away, and there was just me, a very concerned looking Carla, and a bright-eyed Izzy, waving her big plume of a tail at me.

  “I’m fine,” I said finally. “Sorry to give you a scare. The energy transfer was a bit intense today, and we had Rex in before…”

  “The Gordons’ dog?” Carla’s brows creased. “Is he OK?”

  “I think so.” I produced another treat, something that had Izzy now quivering with excitement as she sat and waited for me to give it to her. “Good girl!” She quickly munched it down and then sat very still as I wrapped an arm around her, burying my face in her soft fur. “Now stop fighting me each time you come, girl, and this will be a lot easier for both of us!”

  I was waving Izzy and Carla goodbye in the reception room when the next client turned up. Harvest Grove was a small town, so to see anyone we hadn’t met before was odd, but a bunch of guys in paramilitary gear? Janey and I just looked at each other as the clinic door was filled with blokes wearing black uniforms. The shoulder mics, the holstered guns, and the big black combat boots along with mirrored wrap-around sunglasses were enough to convey a serious air of ‘do not fuck with us.’ Two went to open the doors wide as the other two brought their dog in. The guy holding the leash passed a very dejected looking Doberman Pincher to one of the others and approached the front desk.

  Uniforms…guns…military… I masked the stiffening of my body, the rapid gallop of my heart as they piled in, just staying still and quiet.

  “Welcome to Harvest Grove Veterinary—” Janey started to say, but the guy just shook his head.

  “Christian Hollingsworth. I have a four o’clock meeting with your veterinarian,” replied the man.

  “OK, Mr Hollingsworth, Stuart is just seeing to an emergency patient at the moment. If you’d like to take a seat?”

  The man looked around at the plastic seats in the waiting room with a derisive sniff. My eyebrow jerked up, my hand going to my hip. If I had to guess, I’d assume they weren’t up to his usual standard, but this was a vet waiting room and they were easy to hose off if our clients had ‘accidents.’

  “Is there somewhere else we might wait?”

  No, no, don’t do that… I told her in my head, but Janey turned to me. So of course, everyone else did the same. I bore the brunt of their collective gaze, wanting to step away, anything but be here, but instead, I squared my shoulders and slapped on a professional façade.

  “You could wait in the break room…” I said. You can do this. Stay chill. The man nodded slowly, seeming to take way too much interest in inspecting me. “Mr Hollingsworth, if you’d like to come this way?”

  But it appeared all of them were coming as I opened the empty examination room, then the door at the back that led to the rest of the clinic. I walked down the hallway, which seemed somewhat claustrophobic with the wall of men behind me, then felt a wave of relief when we reached the doorway and I ushered them in. Who the freaking hell were these guys? And why did they want to talk to Stuart? They didn’t look like coppers or soldiers, so…? The Doberman whined when he saw me, leaning over and wanting to take a sniff. Hollingsworth looked at me and then gave the dog a jerk on his lead to keep him moving. OK, weird. Once they were all ensconced, I asked, “Can I get anyone a drink while you wait?”

  Say no, I pleaded. Let me get the hell out of here.

  “White with one please,” the man said.

  “Oh, good, Shannon,” Stuart said as I busied myself in the kitchenette, getting the drink orders made. “I’d like you in this meeting.”

  “What?”

  Um…how about no? No, no, no, no, no.

  “It looks quite promising. The old prison up on the hill has been completely renovated and turned into a new research institute, and they need the services of a veterinarian on a regular basis. It’d… It’s very important we win this contract, Shan, and you’re a big part of what brings people to Harvest Grove.”

  Stuart’s smile was bright and sunny, as it always was. The same smile that placated anxious pets and their owners by turns. It said, ‘leave everything to me, I’ve got this.’ But of course, he couldn’t, could he?

  Keep away…keep away…keep away…

  Nan’s admonitions beat frantically inside me, but with them came the sure knowledge that she had not followed her own advice. She’d settled here many years before I came along, raising Mum in our house, then me when Mum died. I swallowed hard.

  “It’s just…”

  Stuart was going to explain, lay out for me what I already knew—that the town of Harvest Grove had gotten too small to support its own veterinarian now. If the weirdos in the black uniforms were offering him more money… I passed him two of the mugs to be taken into the room, grabbing the other three myself.

  Don’t do this. Do not do this.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’d be happy to help.

  Chapter 4

  “So, tell me about what your practice has to offer,” Hollingsworth said, leaning back in his chair, fingers steepled.

  “Uh, well…perhaps you might tell us a little more about the day to day business of the Capricorn Institute, and then we’d be able to discuss better how Harvest Grove could meet your needs,” Stuart replied. “We knew there was a bunch of work being done on the old prison, but not what for.”

  The man sniffed at this, but he straightened and said, “The institute is focussed on ensuring that certain threatened species of animals will survive into the future. We’re creating gene banks and exploring ways to ensure captive animals keep perpetuating their number, possibly using some cloning techniques.”

  “Cloning? That must be some set up you’ve got up there. So what do you want from a country vet?”

  “Dr Wilson…” The black clad man looked at Stuart with an indulgent smile. “Let’s not be coy. Your reputation precedes you. We have our own science team, of course, but when I was headhunting someone to run the veterinary science side of things, imagine my surprise when I found a world-wide expert on big cats right down the road.”

  Wait, what?

  This whole scene was waaay too Bond villain for me. I was half tempted to dump Fluffy, Mrs Dixon’s incontinent and very crabby Persian cat, in Hollingsworth’s arms so he could stroke it absently. But as the two men did that manly, stare down thing only people with penises seem to be able to do, I got to my feet. Stuart had a past, we all knew that, but he refused to talk about it and I was respecting that by GTFO’ing of the room.

  “Stay, Ms Bruce,” Hollingsworth said, without even looking my way.

  Excuse me? I looked the man over, eyes narrowing. Does being an overbearing dickwad come automatically with power and authority? Stay cool, Shan. Just be professional and tell him you have a client.

  “I apologise, but I have a four-thirty appointment to get to,” I said, realising I hadn’t given him my last name.

  Get out, get away, hissed Nan’s voice.

  “Yes, with Diablo,” he replied, letting go of the Doberman’s lead.

  The dog had been fixated on me since we got in the room, his dark brown eyes taking in every move I made, but I wasn’t getting much from him from this far away. I wasn’t sure if that vigilance was because he wanted a pat or to eat me up. I took a deep breath, my muscles locking up as I sat back down in the chair, Stuart’s protests dying away as the animal came closer. Diablo walked up, sitting down neatly at my feet, and then continued to stare.

  “What seems to be the problem?” I asked. “He presents like a well-trained dog. I usually deal with the more neurotic of our clients.”

  “Diablo…suffered a setback recently. As you have noted, he shows no outside signs of being affected, yet we are having difficulties using him in his usual capacity.”

  “Which is? What was the setback?”

  The men behind him shuffled in their seats. Interesting. I looked down at the dog.

  “Diablo is one of our guard dogs. While the Capricorn Institute has altruistic aims, there are those who do not agree with our methods. We had a recent incursion from a radical animal rights group, and ironically, it was Diablo who was the victim of their ham-fisted attempts to free non-native apex predators into the community. He has become skittish when out on patrol, and an unstable guard dog is a dead guard dog.”

  Hollingsworth’s dark eyes seemed to spear straight through me. “But this is also a job interview of sorts. People in town talk about your miraculous ability with traumatised animals. Some of our specimens have been recovered from impoverished zoos, where the animals go mad from lack of enrichment or worse, starve. Others have been retrieved from ‘personal collections’ or circuses. Having someone on staff that can work with traumatised animals? Well, that would be priceless.”

  Go, go, go, the voice in my head said. Grab your go bag, leave here, and never come back.

  Yeah, I said, ready to argue with a dead woman. You gave up on your go bag years ago. You got a house, had a family, tied yourself and us to this place.

  “Am I all right to touch him? What’s his tolerance of stranger contact?”

  “I would not let a dangerous dog roam freely around the room.”

  I shot a look at Stuart. Is this what he wanted me to do? But it was obvious he did. All we knew about him was that he’d been Fergal Wilson’s son, that he was much older than me. That he’d gone away to some fancy school and was headhunted for some animal preservation project. Then his dad had died, and back came Stuart, inheriting a practice, Janey, Nick, and me.

  He was trying to keep it under wraps, the hope he felt. I wasn’t as good at reading humans, but his eyes were slightly too wide, his attention solely on me. Things weren’t great at HG Vets, I knew that. Stuart tried to hide it, the hours he spent bent over the books, trying to clear the mess his dad had left, but this… I scanned the men and their uniforms, seeing signs of a big budget in the hardware they’d been outfitted with.

  My jaw flexed as I felt it—the age-old admonition to get out and away warring with loyalties. Our kind never stayed in one place for too long in the past, preferring to follow routes handed down from mother to daughter for generations, but then my ancestress had been sent over here on a convict ship, away from all of that history, and we’d settled here in the Grove.

  “I’ll just tap into Diablo’s energy and see what I can do,” I said, bending over the dog.

  I heard the snorts from the peanut gallery at the back of the room, but I held out my hand nonetheless, back out, an offering to the dog.

  Friend, I sent out. Smell, reassure.

  Something came rushing at me, the dog’s consciousness slamming into mine like an overexcited puppy, and with it came memories, impressions, feelings.

  The room fell away to be replaced by one of those darkly sleek spaces, full of minimalist stainless steel, glass, and concrete, but it was merely the backdrop. My view was jerked forward when Diablo fought against his handler’s lead. Enemy! Intruder! his mind shouted, riding the adrenalin high of leaping into action. He barked furiously, no doubt appearing demonic with his teeth bared, jaws snapping.

  I’d expected to see a bunch of soft-eyed PETA clones holding placards, but they weren’t the people beating down the reinforced steel door. The sound the lift door made as it was forced open was cacophonous in the dog’s ears, striking a moment of fear in his heart, but he was strong, he was fierce. He was Diablo, and he would protect his pack to the end. He squared his feet, tensing his powerful muscles as they came through.

  My view of the intruders was blurry and imprecise, but what I did catch looked a lot more like trained soldiers than hippies. I frowned, being dragged deeper, despite myself. Not soldiers, I revised my opinion as Diablo pulled harder and harder. He had smelled these before. These were the ones he’d been told to hunt, to bring down. All those millions of circuits of the institute, being led around on a short lead only to find nothing, were for this. His brain jumped instantly to the samples his trainer had given him, rewarding him each time he picked the right one, then showing him how to hunt them, bring them down.

  And bring them down he would.

  He jerked free of his handler’s grip, his lead whipping behind him as he went barrelling towards the interlopers.

  “Stun only!” came Hollingsworth’s command. “Do not shoot any of them!”

  But Diablo’s haunches coiled, and he launched himself at the nearest of them.

  All I got was a blurry view of a muscular chest, a snarling face before hands snapped out way too quickly to grab us—Diablo around the throat.

  “Not this time, little brother,” a voice said, more growl than speech, and for a second, all I saw was a deep golden eye before we were shaken brutally, then sent sailing through the air to smash down on the marble floor.

  The air was driven from our lungs, the dog struggling with all he had to get back up and failing miserably.

  “Stay down, mutt!” another voice said, and then a god-awful kick to the head stopped the memory in its tracks.

  When the room reasserted itself, I felt everyone’s eyes on me, but I kept mine on the dog. Those brown eyes held so much—an endless desire to serve and protect, and a fragile pride in his ability to do so, one that had taken a battering. He shifted restlessly, looking down and whining before meeting my eyes again. This was a dog at war with himself, his need for that occasional pat and praise burning so brightly inside him but… With an animal’s instincts, he saw the threat now to his existence and shied away from possible enemies, feeling a deep need to avoid that boot, that white hot burst of pain as it exploded in his head.

  “They’ll make you do things you don’t like, force animals to do things they shouldn't,” Nan had said, reordering her work bench, putting bunches of carefully dried herbs into baskets with a little more oomph than needed. “You’ll have to do it. There’s not many of us, while there’s so many of them, and nothing pricks their pride like being told no. Especially for the sake of a ‘dumb’ animal.”

  She collected crystals and tarot cards, her stock in trade when the hippies decided Harvest Grove was the place to be back when I was a kid.

  “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’” She snorted. “And who has dominion more than us? But we have the wit to understand, to know what a bloody privilege it is, to know how dependent we are on them. To know we must live beside them, not as overlords.”

  She looked down to her ageing beagle, Princess, who thumped her tail in response to the attention.

  “Isn’t that right, my love?” she said, patting the dog’s silky head. “But they don’t see it that way, and there’s not enough of us to make a difference. So we keep them happy, as it’s their teeth that’ll be on our necks, not the animals. You’ll be faced with a situation, many times I’m afraid, where you must use your powers for the humans and against the animals.”

  The memory faded away, and instead, I found Diablo’s warm gaze staring back at me. Animals are not furry people, their minds an alien, hard-wired maze of instinct, but I could almost imagine him asking me for advice. What should I do, Shan? Do I protect the men? Or do I do what I need to survive?

  Which will result in you being destroyed anyway, I thought.

  I looked up at Hollingsworth, who watched my every move with the laziness of a cat.

  Look after the men, I thought, shoring up his sense of purpose, inflating his innate bravery and self-sacrifice. Protect them. I showed a fearless, untouchable Diablo, forcing the men who’d attacked him back. Love the men. I choked on that one, the suggestion coming out more as a whimper than a command.

  But he took the bit between his teeth as dogs do, his head swivelling around as he scanned the four men, and then I felt it. I sighed, not caring how that came across with our new client. It still broke me every time. Not every owner was like Carla, desperate to do the best by her pet. Plenty basically wanted me to brainwash their beasts, make a dog bored out of his mind OK with sitting in his tiny yard all day, or working to get a cat to accept his owner had decided to cut his claws off.

  “Keep them happy.”

  Nan’s words—part wisdom, part rod for my back—rang through me as I sat up.

  But what about them? What about me?

  “See how you go, but I think you’ll find he’s less reactive,” I said.

  Hollingsworth nodded slowly, then turned to Stuart.

  “Look, Wilson, enough of the pussyfooting. This place has another couple of months of liquidity, and then you’ll either be borrowing hand over fist or going under. Here’s my offer.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and slid it across the table. “You, Ms Bruce here, and all of your employees will be earning double what they’re currently paid. I’ll be paying you a lump sum on top of that, which will free you up to either sell this place or find another vet to look after your father’s legacy. I’m being more than generous.”