Her Lonely Mastiff
by Summer Donnelly
Quinn tossed the bag of burgers onto the passenger seat and glared at the neon lights of the Leopard. Stupid bar. Stupid shifters. Stupid desire to claim.
Unwanted emotions pummeled Quinn as he pulled away from the Lusty Leopard. He ground his teeth against a growl tearing at his throat. The desire to fight. To attack. To defend what he saw as home ate at him and his whole body ached from the resistance.
Not many of them realized Quinn had been the first shifter. After he’d retired, all he’d craved was the quiet of the mountains. The solace of running in the woods. Time to consider the deal he’d made with the Army right after boot camp, the guy from the Pentagon had shown up and made him an offer.
The Shifter Special Forces were looking for more men. There was a lot to gain by allowing the government to splice animal DNA with a human. The ability to shift. Heightened senses.
Of course, this was also Quinn’s first lesson that the military tended to downplay the negatives of an operation when looking for volunteers. What the man from the Pentagon hadn’t told him was that Quinn would be unable to have children of his own. First, the Pentagon wanted to keep track of the number of shifters in the country. Letting them have babies willy-nilly if they survived their service contract would have been counterproductive. Secondly, they weren’t quite sure spliced DNA would work with human DNA.
Quinn had signed on the bottom line and received his animal the next day. Quinn loved the stubborn beast that lived within him. They’d run herd together as a gunnery sergeant. They’d protected his men. Protected his country for twenty years.
And then, when his time was done, he’d received his discharge papers without as much as a “fuck you” from the government.
Quinn had returned home to Maxwell Mountains, the land his great-grandfather had claimed deep within the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Despite the loneliness, Quinn had needed the solitude.
First on the scene had been Cree James. Cree was the unexpected offspring of a mountain lion shifter and a human. He’d remained off the grid of the government for years, but a stint in juvie had exposed him as a partial shifter.
That told Quinn all he needed to know about the Army and their deal. It was fucking bullshit.
And as his men came home. Didn’t fit in. Couldn’t find jobs, one by one they’d found him. Came to the mountains. Settled the Silver Fells land. Built businesses and homes.
But the biological fact was, you couldn’t have a few hundred men settle a town without women. They became edgy. Restless. Territorial.
And Lacey St. Claire had wandered her delectable body right into the middle of a mangy pack of horny shifters. With Quinn Maxwell being the horniest, mangiest, and most territorial of the lot because she had sauntered right up to him and settled on his property.
His.
Quinn breathed a sigh of relief when he returned home and saw the light in Lacey’s cabin. He stared for a moment as her shadows moved around the cabin. Somehow, in the space of only an hour, she had given the dilapidated shack a quality of hominess.
One he would miss when she was gone. Because she was going.
He was going to contact the realtor he used and ream them out. This kind of fuck up was unacceptable. The last thing he needed was to babysit a human unable to protect herself.
The problem was he liked her. Her southern sass. That mouth that didn’t know when to stop. The way she leered at him like he was a stripper on a pole.
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