Page 11 of Chased

Don’t give them up, Vixen said. We need those very much.

“Lying on the shelf where I put them down, before I started to look at magazines.” The guy was growling now, a low animalistic growl deep in his chest. He was a shifter, she realized. An angry shifter. Maybe he was going to attack her right here in the store.

“Hey,” she tried to say, but her voice was too soft—the instinct of a prey animal to stay quiet in the face of a predator.

Fuck that shit. “Get away from me!” she yelled.

He stepped toward her, and Madison backed away around the corner of the aisle, getting ready to break and run.

Crash!

She’d backed straight into the lavender oil display.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Bottles tumbled down, cracking the glass top of the display case and smashing to the floor behind it. One of them hit the sharp corner of the case and shattered, splashing a wave of lavender over Madison’s forearms and soaking the front of her blouse.

Almost instantly, her skin started to sting. Her eyes teared up.

“Ack! Get it off!” she yelled, holding her arms out to her sides so they wouldn’t drip on her. “Help! Towels! Rags! Anything!” She looked around for something to wipe the stuff off, but there was nothing.

The angry shifter appeared around the end of the aisle, his eyes wide. “Fuck,” he muttered, staring at the carnage. “Oh, fuck.”

The big tattooed guy raced around the corner at the other end of the aisle, with the third man right behind him. She was boxed in by hot predators.

“Cisco?” the big guy said. “What the fuck? Is she hurt?” He looked at Madison. “Are you cut?”

“No, I’m not cut,” she snarled, dripping and watching her skin turn red. “I’m lost, my car broke down, I have blisters, and I’m ALLERGIC TO FUCKING LAVENDER!”

The big guy bellowed, “Samantha!”

“She’s out back in the storage shed,” Cisco said. “There was a note by the register.”

“Fuck.” In two strides, the big guy was in front of her, rapping out orders to the others. “Matéo, go get a pack of dish towels and some of that hippie orange spray cleaner. And a bottle of water!” he yelled, as his friend disappeared.

“Cisco, get some cortisone cream from the drugstore aisle. Lots of it.”

He looked down at Madison. “Do you get anaphylactic shock? Do you need an epi pen?”

She shook her head. “Just hives.” She held her arms out to him, where itchy red welts were already rising. “Lots and lots of hives.”

“Good,” he said. Taking the collar of her t-shirt in both hands, he tore it straight down the middle.

Bunny freeze.

Chapter 6

Just as Sanchez got the girl’s shirt off, Matéo came back with the orange cleaner and towels. Sanchez knelt down and sprayed the cleaner on her arms and stomach.

“This should cut through the oil and let us wash this shit off,” he told her. He stopped. “Unless you’re allergic to citrus too?” Shit. He should have thought of that.

She shook her head. From being pissed off and yelling, she seemed to have practically gone catatonic. He guessed that was better than her screaming in his ear.

Sanchez finished spraying and started wiping off the lavender oil. The splash had miraculously missed her pants, which was probably good because he wasn’t sure this was enough of an emergency warrant ripping someone’s pants off. Hell, it might even get him arrested. At best, she’d probably start yelling again.

Although, from what he could see of her full, perfectly rounded hips, it was too bad. Call him a perv, but they looked like they might even be worth getting arrested for.

He felt his dick stir in the beginnings of a boner.

Focus on the mission, he told himself. Not on her ass.