Aisling was cursing herself, wondering where her damn spine had run off to.

“Fucking Alpha,” she grumbled under her breath while frosting a dozen cupcakes.

“Someone pissed you off?” Clarissa asked, entering the shop while counting dollar bills.

The orders were paid online or over the phone, and Aisling transferred Clary’s salary by direct deposit, but her employee received plenty of tips with each delivery.

“Multiple someones,” she replied, although it was perhaps a white lie.

While having a pride around pushed her buttons, it was Rygan and his damn tongue that she wanted to eviscerate for denying her a damn orgasm.

Okay, so she had been totally dumb to ask for it in the first place, but the man was downright cruel. She’d tried to get off at least five times after leaving him in the kitchen, without success. Her usually satisfying vibrator felt utterly inadequate compared to the smooth, thick, long cock he’d teased her with.

She bared her teeth, and squeezed her icing bag so hard the cupcake was drowned in three inches of blueberry frosting.

“I’ll have this one, thank you,” Clary said, snatching the cupcake, and licking it with obvious glee. “So,” she asked in between mouthfuls, “has your mood got anything to do with the bunch of hunks we’ve seen in town? People say they’re shifters.”

She grunted in response, but Clary wouldn’t let it go.

“Do you know them?”

“I know one of them,” she replied.

Aisling wasn’t used to sharing; but somehow, one second she was looking in the baby blue eyes of her pretty assistant, and the next, she was spilling her guts. “This stays between us?”

Clary beamed at her, and like they were twelve, rather than twenty-four and twenty-eight, she extended her hand and curved her little finger.

“Pinky swear.”

Ace stared at the finger like it might bite her.

“I do not pinky swear.”

“You will if you want me to keep my mouth shut.”

She could have just pointed out that she was happy to keep her affairs to herself, but Ace just shook her head, before briefly entangling her finger with Clary’s, taking it back as quickly as she could.

“This never happened,” she grumbled. Her reputation would take a hit if it ever got out. “Anyway, the Beta is my baby brother. The pride is getting targeted by wolves and he figured they could lie low here for a while.”

Although she’d been put out when he’d first turned up, Aisling wasn’t exactly pissed at Daunte, or surprised, for that matter. She and her cat felt that it was perfectly natural that, in a time of danger, he’d turned to her. She wouldn’t want it otherwise, anyway.

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

Ace shrugged. She never talked about Daunte - or the rest of her family.

It wasn’t like she had any reason to want to hide them, directly - the issue was that everyone knew about Daunte’s older sibling.

Tales about her were still a popular after dinner conversation in most prides. She felt no shame about any of the facts they knew about her; but being the subject of so much talk just pissed her off.

Still, Aisling was annoyed, and not only for the reasons she’d given her brother when he’d cornered her a couple of days back. Daunte had come with a complication that was unexpected and unappreciated. A delectable, six foot four complication that made her cat bat its lashes like the slutty pussy it was.

She growled, and the currently cranky animal inside her snapped at her.

She didn’t think they’d ever disagreed as much as they did now. Aisling wanted Daunte’s pride out of her house as soon as possible. Her cat wanted to crawl to her brother’s Alpha and jump on his cock. Repetitively.

Her cat wanted kitties - always had - but normally it agreed with Aisling that no male was worth their time. That Alpha…

---

The slutty cat liked Rye, and it all came down to dominance.

Dominance was partially a genetic thing, and partially some Freudian shit that wasn’t quite understood. No one was born dominant, just like no human was born overweight; some had a faster or a slower metabolism but, ultimately, it came down to the individual’s choices. Sometime around puberty, their dominance level was set for good and they learned to use it.

Submissives could use their vibes to diffuse situations - the most powerful ones - the Omegas - were able to stop pissed off dominants in the middle of a conflict, calming them down. The strongest dominants had the ability to force obedience. All in all, both extremes could be dangerous.

Aisling had met exactly two feline shifters whose level of dominance equaled hers - her father, and her little brother. They’d never quite established who amongst them was the most dominant, and no one needed that question answered.

She felt comfortable enough in her family’s company, knowing that she couldn’t bend their will without meaning to; other shifters, she tiptoed around, unwilling to become a domineering ass. That was one of the many reason why she was unmated; she’d never tie herself to a male she could mold and she could mold everyone she’d ever met. She’d feel like shit about controlling someone else’s actions - and besides, her cat wouldn’t let her get involved.

Her brother’s Alpha was another matter. He was as dominant as she - at least. She didn’t know whether he was stronger; it wasn’t impossible. She’d been pissed when Daunte had turned up at her doorstep with strangers; she could feel her cat infusing her every movement and there was no doubt that she’d also had her vibes working overtime. When she’d turned towards the intruders, all of them had taken a step back.

All of them except him. He’d looked at her with no fear, and his cat hadn’t seemed startled either; she could feel it, barely under the surface.

Hers had clawed at her mind, demanding naughty things. But then it’d seen the girl standing behind the Alpha, close to him, and snarled. The familiarity was enough to infuriate her cat.

---

Damn stupid pussy. Aisling had no interest in males; especially males who were part of a pride. She had a good life in Lakesides with her bakery, her home, the amazing forest surrounding her - and when she felt an itch, she could find a human to scratch it somewhere in a nearby city. It wasn’t like her to let some local male lick her out in her kitchen, even if he was only staying in the area temporarily.

But telling that to her cat right now was pointless. It wanted to be pinned under him again, and, this time, it wouldn’t let Aisling walk away.

Disagreeing with her cat felt weird; they normally felt the same way, as both of them liked simplicity. But the horny animal felt that jumping the Alpha was a pretty simple thing, while Aisling knew it was anything but.

She had no business lusting after a guy like him. He was the Alpha of a pride that was staying around her territory; worse yet, he also was her brother’s Alpha. That was too close to home and she preferred her flings to stay far, far away.

Basically the whole thing screamed stay away.

Her cat meowed in protest, focusing on what it found important - kitties. That hard cock that had been glistening against her could have given it kitties.

The animal didn’t understand the subtleties of the nature of shifters. Even if Ace had wanted to - and she definitely hadn’t - she couldn’t have just gotten herself pregnant by fucking another shifter. To procreate, they needed to be bound - by a blood oath, or a mating bond. She tried to explain it to her animal, who metaphorically stuck its little paws on its ears and chanted can’t hear ya, I want kitties.

She sighed, and ignored the cat.

“Daunte is two or three years younger than me,” Aisling replied to Clary.

“Two or three? You’re not sure?”

This. This was why she didn’t talk about her family.

“It’s a long story.”

She might have shared some of it, or might have left it alone; who knew? But she didn’t, because, just then, her ear vibrated, catching a faint change in the atmosphere around her.

There were wards around her town and her territory; she’d paid a witch friend of hers to place them and maintain them. They’d been activated when Daunte and his pride had driven their bikes through it, warning her of their arrival.

And they were ringing again now.

---

Ace knew that one of the members of the pride had gone away a couple of days before - the short-haired female Enforcer. There was a good chance that she was just coming back.

Possibly. Maybe.

Still, she needed to check. Ace had plenty of enemies and it wouldn’t do to let one of them walk in.

“Take care of the store,” she told Clary, not taking the time to explain herself.

She walked out back, removed her clothes, and shifted before leaving the bakery.

Finding the intruder took all of seven minutes; a sniff in his direction clarified that he was a wolf, which didn’t say much. Someone she’d pissed off might have sent a wolf loner to scout the area and confirm her whereabouts. But, as she found the man with a camera, taking pictures of the pride in her home, that told a different story.

It wasn’t her problem. It wasn’t her problem. She could just call Daunte and get him to track the wolf.

But then, just when she’d convinced herself to do that and go back to work like she should, she saw the wolf’s lens focusing on the kids playing in her backyard.

Her cat didn’t wait for her authorization. She launched forwards, her claws digging deep inside the shifter’s back.

The wolf screamed and attempted to shift, but, before he could, she’d turned back to her human form. Changing forms took a lot of shifters close to a minute; being in perfect sync with her animal meant she could do it in the blink of an eye. He never saw that coming; before he knew it, she had him in a headlock.

The wolf struggled, cursing and even spitting at her, but no one had ever managed to make her let go, and it wasn’t going to start now.

Shifters were considerably stronger than humans - even their weakest submissives, without any fighting skills, could defend themselves against a military trained officer - because of their animals. Like it or not, Aisling had an extra injection of feline gene, which made her twice the shifter in every way.

And, sure, that meant that catnip had embarrassing effects on her, even when she was in human form, but it also meant that she had no problem grabbing the wolf under one arm and carrying him, kicking and screaming, like he was just a toddler.

The commotion got some attention; a bunch of adult Wyvern cats were standing on her front porch, eyes focused on the two hundred pounds of muscle she carelessly dragged along.

Rygan was frowning - a habit of his, from what she could tell - while Daunte smiled; Ola, Coveney, Tracy, and Christine each bore an expression somewhere in between the Alpha’s and the Beta’s.

“What have we here?” Daunte asked, catching the wolf she tossed his way.

She shrugged.

“Your problem,” she growled, annoyed that she’d intervened at all. “He was looking at you, not me.”

So, yep. Maybe she was a little defensive.

She turned on her heels, cursing herself for the second time that day, because half of her wanted to stay and see what the scout would reveal when the Wyvern played with him until he talked. But whoever said curiosity killed the cat might have had a point - she didn’t want to find out. It wasn’t her problem.

And, anyway, she could always ask her brother later.

“Ace,” Daunte called behind her. “If you don’t stay now, I won’t tell you what I find out.”

Dammit.