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  Zach crouched next to his former prey, no longer interested in sating his anger and hunger on it. It wasn’t any fun now that it was dead. No, he would save his aggression for the moron who went hunting in shifter territory. Everyone in the fucking country knew certain areas in each county and parish were reserved for shifters, yet this fucktard had brought a high-powered rifle, complete with sound repressor, into that territory. And shot his fucking kill. He should have been outraged that a human had fired a weapon in an area where young shifters could be practicing their hunting skills, but all he could think of was his thwarted fight.

  He bit back a roar, not wanting to give away his position. Sure, he’d probably get a visit from Sheriff Picou for scaring one of the parish’s fragile humans, but that was a small price to pay for losing his kill. It wasn’t as if he’d kill the motherfucker as much as he’d like to. God knew neither he nor his tiger wanted anything to do with non-shifters. Their males were too weak to fight, their females were too weak and small to fuck, and it was illegal to eat them even in his animal form, so what the fuck good were they? He didn’t hate them. He simply had no use for them. And for one of them to steal his hog— He almost shook his head at their stupidity and arrogance.

  A twig snapped nearby and he turned his head slowly to watch the shadows. It wasn’t nighttime yet, but the dwindling sunlight was a plus for him, not the human. His vision made a mockery out of the goggles humans had to wear and he was able to see everything. He waited, but still nothing approached. He also didn’t feel the ground vibrating from a clumsy human’s footsteps.

  If he could have frowned in his tiger form, he would have. Where were they? Usually when humans went hunting feral hog, they had four-wheelers and a crew of three or four to help pull the hog out. Yet he hadn’t heard a single thing since that twig snapped, nor did he scent anything that didn’t fit the surroundings. It was a puzzle, something he absolutely hated.

  “You can come on out. I know you’re there.”

  The voice caused him to jump. Not only because it came from the opposite direction he’d expected to see the hunter, but also because it was accompanied by the deadly sound of a gun being pumped. No more than five feet away from him. Even better, the voice, while low and husky, was undeniably female.

  He searched the shadows, impressed despite his contempt of humans. Whoever she was had somehow moved around him, remaining downwind the entire time and slipped into cover so thick he couldn’t make her out. Then he caught the gleam of a rifle barrel. Slowly, details about the figure behind the gun emerged, but only because she stepped out of the protection of a bush.

  She wasn’t wearing fancy camouflage the way he’d seen some hunters employ in the hopes their prey wouldn’t see them coming. Her plain, faded jeans were frayed at the hems and had rips that came from long, hard use, not a designer’s mind. From his position on the ground, her legs looked to be a mile long, the jeans lovingly following her thighs to round hips, yet she couldn’t have been more than five foot two. The plain green t-shirt tucked into the waistband displayed a neat waist and smaller breasts than he usually liked on his women. Her shoulders were narrow, but there was no denying the strength in her upper body, the feminine muscles evident through the thin cotton.

  His tiger was intrigued despite its frustration over losing a kill. He appreciated a predator and hadn’t really considered human females as the kind to hunt. The ones he’d seen and rolled his eyes at had been all fluffy and frivolous and about as dangerous as a gnat with one wing. This one was different though. Eager now, the tiger forced Zach’s eyes away from those interesting little teacup tits to her face. And he promptly forgot about her body.

  Every shifter in Pointe-Aux-Chat Parish knew about the very small community nestled in the deepest part of the swamp called Bayou Ange, or Angel Bayou. Shifters didn’t really go there unless they were authority figures and even then, they went in groups. Zach had never given the small community much thought since the people there went to nearby Germantown instead of Maison Rouge for anything they needed. All he really knew about them was a combination of historic fact found in the parish’s archives and gossip he heard in his shop. But he was aware that if you ended up in Angel Bayou without an invitation, shifter or not, you were bound to earn a hurting when you were discovered. And you would be discovered. The Robicheauxs, the largest family in Angel Bayou, were some of the most legendary hunters in the state. Something that didn’t endear them to Zach. In his mind, hunters had no business living near shifters in case they were ever tempted to snag a prize of the two-legged variety.

  And the pale-violet eyes staring down at him so impersonally belonged to none other than a Robicheaux. That was another thing he knew about the family. It didn’t matter what ethnicity they married into, the strange purple eyes were dominant in the line. Those eyes gave her away as belonging to the close-knit clan of rough, tough hunters who were said to fight a fence post if it got in their way. That was why the Pointe-Aux-Chat Sheriff’s Office went in the community with backup when they were called out, which was frequently. The men liked to fight. A lot.

  He wasn’t so sure how the family managed to avoid being banned from Germantown, but he’d had several shifters from that area come to his bakery and talk about how the Robicheauxs had torn up the town again. Strangely enough it was always said with affection and a touch of amusement, as though they were proud of the heathens. But in all the time he’d heard stories about the Robicheaux clan, Zach had never once heard mention of a female unless it was someone’s wife. Yet there was no mistaking he was looking at one now. Those tits had given her away. Well, and the hips and the voice that made the fur on the back of his neck stand straight up.

  Once he was able to drag his gaze away from her mesmerizing eyes, he catalogued the rest of her features. Long, bold nose with a bump on the bridge. High cheekbones, square, almost masculine jaw, stubborn chin with a cleft and a cute, rosebud mouth. His gaze snagged on those lips, which seemed completely out of place on the rest of a face that screamed hard woman. Light-pink, like sugar-crusted rose petals. He remembered that interesting concoction from culinary school and her lips looked just as delicate and delicious. Which was insane, really. He didn’t kiss humans.

  But her pale lips and light eyes stood out to him. Set against her sun-bronzed skin with the slightest tint of red beneath, she was strangely exotic and sexy to him. Even his tiger was intrigued by her, eager to catch her scent, but with her downwind, that wasn’t happening.

  The loaded rifle cradled in her capable hands didn’t waver once while he stared at her. The muscles of her arms stood out as she took the weight of the weapon, but she didn’t seem strained. This was a strong, dangerous woman. She didn’t seem afraid to be faced with a tiger that outweighed her by several hundred pounds. If anything, she seemed almost bored.

  “You’re trespassing,” she said suddenly, her voice calm and collected. “And don’t try to act like you don’t understand me. Tigers aren’t indigenous to south Louisiana.” She lifted the rifle up to align the sight with her eye. “So why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here trying to steal my kill, furboy.”

  Zach was in love. Well, no, not in love. He didn’t do love. He did lust. His tiger, on the other hand, wanted to knock her to the ground and lick her from head to toe. Idiot fucking cat. It liked the fact that she was threatening him. Shifter females didn’t do that. They all rolled over way too easily, giving in to him before he’d even decided what he wanted from them. This human, who should have been pissing herself in fear, wasn’t scared of him, wasn’t intimidated by his size and looked as though she couldn’t care less if he walked out of the swamp or was carried out in a body bag. Strike that, she was a Robicheaux. She probably knew exactly how to skin and dispose of his body in such a way that no one would ever find his bones.

  And his tiger liked it. Zach told the animal to shut up, even as he fought his body’s urge to shift and show her exactly how happy he was to see her. His tiger wan
ted to share the hog with her, feed her the best bits of meat and then lick off the juices. It didn’t even care he’d have to cook the meat first. It wanted her to be happy with him. It wanted to please her. In more ways than one. Oh fuck, this is so not good.

  “I’m going to count to three. If you don’t shift and tell me why you’re on my land, I’m gonna start shooting body parts starting with the tip of your pretty ear.” The barrel moved inches to the right.

  She was a human living in a parish populated by shifters. If she wanted him to shift and see him naked, who was he to deny her? Besides, he couldn’t try to charm her into a friendly wrestling-slash-fuck match if he was in animal form. With that thought in mind and his blood boiling hot for sex, he shifted.

  Colette, only daughter of Willis and Laurette-Marie Robicheaux, knew it was a bad idea to tell a shifter to change to human. Not because they would attack. She’d shoot the big bastard between the eyes before he could say “rar”. No, it was a bad idea because he’d be naked when he lost his fur. She knew it. She might have been a human in a world of shifters, but everyone knew the basic facts. They were stronger and faster than “normal” people. They had senses Homo sapiens had long abandoned in the quest for technology and science. But there was one thing shifters couldn’t do and that was keep their clothes when they went from one form to the other. Depending on the size of their animal, their clothing would either rip or fall off. When they shifted back, they were naked as the day they came into this world. Some of her cousins turned furry when they wanted to, so it wasn’t as though she didn’t know exactly what she was doing. Knew it and also knew it was oh so wrong.

  And she couldn’t wait.

  When she’d seen the striped body fly through the clearing when she shot at the feral hog, her heart nearly stopped beating. She knew who this tiger was. She didn’t need him to shift into his sexy, muscled, panty-wetting human form. But she wasn’t about to stop him.

  It was a universally known truth in the entire tri-parish area that Zachary Trahan was the sexiest tiger-shifting chef in the world. A lot of women weren’t sure which was more important, the way he looked or how he handled desserts. Colette would’ve scoffed over the claims she heard while she was in Germantown, except she’d been to his shop once. Just once and she’d fallen into instant lust with the baker.

  So knowing how close he’d come to being shot by her while she hunted on her family’s land nearly had her dropping her rifle. Only years and years of gun safety had kept her from doing something stupid. She’d had to take a minute, or more like ten, to calm her nerves. She knew she hadn’t shot him. She was one of the best marksmen in her family. But a rogue wind, a shift of his body, the slightest jerk of her arms could’ve left him either dead or critically injured. He could’ve been killed. No more Zach the sexy tiger, no more sweets from his bakery. Gone in a split second.

  But he was there in his tiger form, his eyes trained in the direction she’d just abandoned. And she’d just had to soak in his beauty. Yes, beauty. For the most part, appreciating the beauty and the strength of the animals she hunted extended to a kind of awe over the shifters who populated the parish. How many times had she wished she could change into an animal, to experience life in a completely different way? Too many to count. But there was no way to turn a full human into a shifter, no magic pill, no exchange of bites or saliva that would make it happen. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t admire them anyway.

  The way she was admiring Zach right now, her pussy heating up as the man was revealed. Gold, black and white fur receded so quickly and smoothly, she barely had time to blink before her gaze was caught by golden skin and muscles. Cher bon Dieu, the man had some muscles. She practically ate him up with her eyes, devouring every square inch revealed to her like some kind of weird striptease. Not that she’d ever been to a strip joint. There was a place her cousins’ wives had told her about in Texas where muscled men took their clothes off, but she’d never been. Not for a lack of trying though. She just hadn’t been able to convince her male relatives there was a women-only hunting ground and she simply had to go.

  But now, after seeing Zach Trahan in the nude, she wasn’t sure any other man could measure up. Like, really measure up. Her gaze was drawn down his rippled stomach—she’d never seen that before in real life, only on television—to the long, hard length of his shaft. Heat raced through her body, arrowing straight between her legs to warm her pussy and shoot up to her face in a blush she was positive would set her hair on fire.

  Which was ridiculous. It wasn’t as though she were some virgin. Despite the sheltered life she’d led in Bayou Ange, Colette had gone to college just like her male cousins and she’d done her fair share of crazy things, had unfurled her wings as a young woman and taken a couple of lovers. But none of them had been built like this. She suddenly felt cheated, even as she acknowledged if her first lover had been as big as Zach Trahan, she would’ve been walking bow-legged for months. The tiger-shifter had a bibette that would make a horse look twice. Realizing she was staring at it as though he were a snake charmer, her gaze shot up his gorgeous, muscled torso to tangle with sultry yellow eyes.

  Thanking God she was downwind and he couldn’t smell the hungry musk between her legs, she pretended she was facing a game warden and let her “I don’t know anything” mask fall in place. The sexy twist to his lips was almost a smirk and it told her that he knew better. Damn.

  She tightened her hold on the rifle. “What are you doing on my family’s land?” she demanded.

  Instead of answering, he stretched, lifting his arms over his head and elongating his body. She told herself it was a natural reaction to let her gaze skim over him again. And it was perfectly normal for her stare to linger on his impressive groin. What would something that size feel like moving inside her? What kind of lover was he? Did he like to take his time, or did he like it fast and hard? Her nipples tightened. A quick glance up at his face showed he’d definitely noticed her body’s reaction since his eyes had dropped to her chest.

  Good Lord. “What are you doing here?”

  He dropped his arms to his sides, adopting a relaxed pose that should have looked ridiculous since he was buck naked, but Zach Trahan seemed as composed as he would if he were fully clothed. Colette bit back a snarl of envy. She avoided looking in mirrors unless she absolutely had to, and never when she was naked. Yet in her twenty-eight years, one thing she’d learned about men from watching her cousins was that they had absolutely no shame.

  How many times had they whipped it out to pee when she was on the hunt with them? As far as they were concerned, she was one of the guys even if she had to squat to pee. But that wasn’t all. Getting drunk and streaking around the swamps on their all-weekend hunts was nothing to them. She knew from growing up with all boys that most men were oblivious to the little thing called modesty. However, she’d think being buck naked in front of a stranger would affect them somehow.

  But there was no self-consciousness in Zach’s gaze and his impressive dick didn’t wilt beneath her study. If anything, it seemed to grow another inch. And she was staring at it again. Have to stop staring at his junk. Her mama would beat her ass if she knew she was gawking at a naked man’s groin, no matter how sexy he was. Her mama would cluck and find something for him to wear. But the last thing Colette wanted to do was cover up a single inch of naked Zach.

  “I was hunting,” he said after a few more seconds, his voice dragging her gaze from his cock. She hadn’t realized she’d been looking. Again. “And you stole my kill.”

  Colette was as hot-tempered as any Robicheaux over certain things. She hated cruelty in any form, having been known to take down men twice her size if she caught them abusing an animal. She hated bullies. She also took her sense of honor very seriously. No one called her a liar or a cheat, or a thief in this case. Ever. Having the man she’d been openly infatuated with for nearly a year say she stole anything from him was like having a bucket of ice water thrown over her during
a heat wave.

  The rifle went back up, her ire lending her tiring arms renewed strength. She wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long though. She either had to shoot him or send him on his way. And after that accusation she was leaning more toward the former. “A kill you tried to make on private property,” she told him in a cold voice that would have warned any one of her relatives she was about to lose her control.

  The tiger had no sense of self-preservation because his smirk became a full-blown grin that would’ve made her weak at the knees if she hadn’t been on the verge of a volcanic explosion. “About that… You’re not quite what I expected from what I’ve heard about the Robicheauxs.”

  It was as though he wanted to die a very slow death. Another quirk of hers, one not many people ever tweaked, was her defensiveness about her family. Oh, she knew exactly what everyone in the parish thought of the residents of Bayou Ange. Most of the time she could ignore the comments, the mockery and condensation when they spoke to or of the Robicheaux, Brule, Boudlache and Gautreaux families who inhabited their small community. They were called backwards. Kayaks, a derogatory term for people who lived so far down the bayou they may as well be another species of Cajun. She and her cousins and brothers had heard it all applied to them, but especially to their fathers.

  If the people in Pointe-Aux-Chat Parish only knew over fifty percent of the “backwoods coonasses” from Bayou Ange had college degrees, maybe they’d realize the err of their assumptions. But her parents always told Colette not to worry what other people thought. It wasn’t their fault their mamas didn’t raise them right. For the most part, she was able to ignore the snide remarks. Not right now though, not with him.