Hunting Season Read online

  Hunting Season

  Kate Rudolph

  Celestial Heart Press

  Contents

  About Hunting Season

  More by Kate Rudolph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  What to read next

  Also by Kate Rudolph

  About Kate Rudolph

  About Hunting Season

  Werewolf. Bodyguard. Mate.

  Owen has one job: keep Stasia from being abducted. Easier said than done when his fiercly independent client tries to fire him the moment they meet. His werewolf senses howl to life and he's certain of one thing: Stasia is his.

  She's sick of overbearing men.

  When her wealthy father hires a bodyguard, Stasia says no. Not exactly a smart move after someone tried to nab her off the street. But she doesn't need a babysitter. Especially not someone who makes her heart pound and her fantasies run wild.

  When Stasia is yanked out of her glittering world and into Owen's she'll need to grapple with an impossible new reality: werewolves exist. And her bodyguard says he's her mate.

  More by Kate Rudolph

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  Hunting Season © Kate Rudolph 2021.

  Cover design by Kate Rudolph.

  All rights reserved. No part of this story may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied within critical reviews and articles.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Kate Rudolph.

  www.katerudolph.net

  Created with Vellum

  Chapter One

  Stasia wanted to curse the strength of her cell signal. She hadn't spoken to her father in nearly a year and now he wouldn't stop talking. Where was a dropped call when she needed it?

  "Are you there?" he asked for the second time.

  She glanced at the nearby entrance to the subway and contemplated running down the stairs. She doubted even that would save her. "I'm here," she confirmed.

  "Then speak when you're spoken to."

  He couldn't be serious. "You asked me to come to Riley's birthday party." She had to repeat it to make sure she understood. "That would be your wife. Who's ten years younger than me." It didn't exactly grate at this point. His last wife had only been six years older than her. And then there were four others. She’d forgotten most of their names at this point.

  "It's not Riley's birthday, it's Emmy's. She's turning three." She heard a sound in the background and wondered what work her father was ignoring for this inane invitation.

  "I'm pretty sure Riley's kid is turning four." And she wasn't getting into the name issue. She wanted off this call, not to start a fight.

  If only she was still working at the hospital. This would be the perfect moment for an emergency page.

  "Emmy is your sister." Armand Selby was a stickler for the facts… when they suited him. And Emmy was Stasia's half-sister. One of her nine half-siblings.

  But that didn't mean she wanted to drop everything for a toddler's birthday. "I'll have to look at my schedule. I don't know if I'll be in town." She'd known it was a mistake to move back to New York. She was way too close to family obligations that she'd rather ignore.

  "You know you can arrange to use the jet if transportation is an issue." He mumbled something, and Stasia was pretty sure she was about to be handed off to an assistant to make plans. The assistants weren't nearly as easy to distract as her father. But at least she didn't feel conflicted about lying to them.

  "Transportation isn't the issue." She wasn't going to use the family jet. Or one of the fleet of family cars. Or anything that came from her family's grotesque wealth if she could ignore it. She had an inheritance she already hated to touch, but at least that didn't come with strings.

  Horns blared down the street and Stasia barely noticed them. Honking horns were just a part of everyday life. But the sound came towards her in a wave, as if warning of some impending doom. She looked down the road, wondering if it was an ambulance or an erratic driver. Another pedestrian bumped into her shoulder and cursed.

  Stasia didn't apologize. This was New York.

  But she should have kept walking.

  She didn't see a car stop, but a hand clamped on her arm and started to pull her towards the road. She dropped her phone as she yelled out and spun around, ready to hit whoever was manhandling her. Her heart jumped into her throat when she saw a scarf around the man's face and dark sunglasses obscuring his eyes. A bit of dark hair peeked out from his navy blue baseball cap, but she could not have described him to save her life.

  Neither could any of the thousands of witnesses around them.

  They were about to see a woman abducted in broad daylight.

  Like hell.

  This wasn't Stasia's first rodeo. She reared back, aiming for his throat with the bony point of her elbow. She moved fast enough to jerk out of his grasp, but he flinched back and her strike didn't connect.

  "Help! Call the cops!" Stasia called out as the man got a hold of her again. She used her best ER voice, the one she'd learned from the veteran nurses who could make anyone follow an order. And she didn't panic. Panic got a person killed.

  The man got a good grip and started pulling her towards a dark car with tinted windows that had appeared at the side of the road. Distantly she wondered if that was who had caused all the cars to honk, but she wasn't about to dwell.

  She went limp, dead weight against the man, refusing to be a participant in her abduction. That wasn't something she'd learned in an ER, but rather something one of her bodyguards had instructed her to do as a child.

  Stasia looked around, trying to get a better idea of what was happening, who was witnessing it, and who was trying to abduct her. A blonde woman stood wide-eyed with her phone out, getting video of the whole thing.

  Video wouldn't do Stasia much good if she got stuffed into the trunk of a car.

  "You," she couldn't point, but she made eye contact with the woman, "Call the police! Now!" That was the last thing she could say before her abductor clamped a hand over her mouth.

  Stasia tried to bite down on his palm but she didn't have the leverage. She went limp again and winced as her ankle twisted against the hard concrete, but it forced her captor to stumble.

  "Let go of her!" a man in a Knicks jersey yelled, shoving his way forward. Stasia managed another glance around and saw they'd drawn another crowd, something not too hard to do on a busy New York street.
<
br />   So why was someone snatching her here?

  She'd worry about that later.

  "Let her go!" A young woman with bright purple hair who was wearing a torn jean jacket joined the fray. It only took a minute for the scene to descend into a mob, and Stasia was yanked away from the man. Three or four people surrounded her would-be captor, but he drove his shoulder into the guy wearing the jersey and scuttled back until he was close to the car. A door opened and he dove in as the car drove away.

  "Are you okay?" the woman with purple hair asked. She stooped down and held out Stasia's phone. "This yours?"

  Stasia's arms were starting to shake and her teeth chattered. Shock. She knew it, but that did nothing to make it go away when she was right in the thick of it. "I'm fine," she managed to say around trembling lips.

  "You don't look fine. What did that guy want with you? I've never seen something like that before." The girl shuddered.

  Stasia laughed. She knew it wasn't the right response, just another case of neurons misfiring due to trauma. But laughing was better than crying. "I have." And she knew exactly what that guy wanted with her.

  Ransom.

  Her father's money.

  It always came down to that.

  For all the privilege that came with wealth, it wasn't always safe to be the daughter of a billionaire.

  She looked down at her phone and was surprised to see the screen wasn't cracked. That was truly a miracle. There were a dozen notifications from her father, demanding to know what was going on. Stasia was tempted to leave him hanging. But someone in the crowd around her was bound to post video of the event to social media and the news would be better coming from her. She pulled up her texting app. She didn't think she could manage a conversation with Armand Selby right now.

  Attempted kidnapping. Crowd fought attacker off. Bound to be video on social media. Must speak to police shortly. Will contact you for damage control.

  There. That covered it. And her fingers were barely shaking anymore. A moment later her phone pinged with the response.

  Sending lawyer to you. Remain quiet until you have counsel.

  She didn't send anything back. She didn't need to. Another daughter might have chafed at the fact that her father hadn't checked to see if she was alright. Another woman might have been upset that her father instructed her to wait for a lawyer like she was a child. But she'd learned a long time ago that there was no use in getting angry.

  The purple haired woman put a hand on Stasia's shoulder and she flinched away.

  "Sorry," said the woman. "I'm Vi. I see a couple of cops coming our way. Do you want me to distract them?"

  Stasia took a closer look at Vi. She was young, probably under twenty-five, but there was a hardness to her eyes that only came from being hurt by people you trusted. And here she was trying to help a stranger. She gave off a forbidding enough aura that most of the crowd was keeping back from the two of them. If Stasia was just a bit more jaded, she would think Vi was in on the attack. But her instincts were telling her to trust the girl. "No need. I've got backup incoming." She held up her phone and gave it a little shake.

  Two uniformed officers were breaking up the crowd and Stasia braced herself.

  "Ma'am," said the first cop. He and his partner looked basically the same and there was no way she was going to remember them. She glanced at the nametags and saw one was named Smith and the other Jones. Lovely. "We had a call come in."

  "Someone attempted to kidnap me," she confirmed. Her voice was steadier now and her hands weren't shaking. Good. Cops didn't like crying women. "You're going to want to call your sergeant before the media circus starts."

  "Media circus?" Officer Jones was skeptical. "This is New York, ma'am. Now we need to take your statement."

  "My name is Stasia Nichols. My father is Armand Selby, the third richest man in New York. And I won't be saying anything else until my lawyer joins us. Now, shall we speak at the station? Or would you like to wait for the news vans to show up?"

  Chapter Two

  The air felt green. Owen tipped his head back and howled in joy and abandon into the moon-bright night. The ground was soft under his paws, some of the mud squishing up between his toe pads. He loved it, loved the connection to the earth and to his primal self. Running like this was a freedom he'd never imagined before the change.

  Now he couldn't imagine a life without it.

  A chorus of howls answered his cry and wind whooshed behind him as one of his team chased after him. Owen glimpsed brown fur, but it was the scent that gave the wolf away. Andre bumped him and nipped at his fur before taking off running. Owen chased. They were safe in these woods. Gibson owned the property and they had miles to run and run and run through dense forest and forgotten paths.

  Forgotten to humans, at least.

  But in the beautiful chorus of howls, they were missing two. Rowe and Vega were out on a job and were probably running by themselves somewhere that could never live up to these grounds.

  Owen let out a little whine at the thought. He wanted his family together. They may not have shared blood, but a dark night had bound them together years ago, and he was determined to build something with the men and women who shifted and ran with him.

  Who else could understand how weird it was to be a werewolf?

  He'd only been one for two years and he still didn't understand most of it. None of them did. But sometimes the urge to shift overcame them all and they ended up running through the night like the wild beasts that lived inside of them. It wasn't connected to the full moon, that much they had tested. But there weren't exactly guidebooks they could follow.

  Andre let out a frustrated bark and Owen shook himself. Those were human thoughts for human time. He let them fall away and surrendered to his wolf. The scents grew more intense and he knew a hare was just out of reach, full of juicy blood and the spirit of the run.

  He and Andre ran together and it wasn't too long before Hunter, Jackson, and Gibson joined them. One hare would never satisfy five wolves. But hare wasn't the only prey in these woods.

  Gibson took the lead. The major had a way of doing that, and they all unconsciously followed. In this form they didn't talk, their communication relegated to looks and chuffs and barks. It didn't take much to get them into formation. They'd done this before.

  Hare forgotten, they latched onto the scent of a stag and chased.

  Owen's muscles ached but he forgot about it in the euphoria of the hunt. This was what his body was meant to do and he never wanted to stop.

  And then it happened. The stag appeared.

  The hunt was on.

  He no longer paid attention to the feel of the ground beneath his paws or the scent of the trees in the air. His entire being was focused on the stag and the hearty meal they were bound to have. When Owen woke up with two legs he knew he might have a weird taste in his mouth, but he didn't care. He didn't worry about the future in this form.

  It was going perfectly. They were a unit born to hunt together.

  Andre ran ahead to flush the stag along the right path while the rest of them bounded after it, ready to pounce once it stumbled.

  Only something went wrong. The deer was supposed to keep heading along the path. The trees would close in and become too dense for it to go any further. Then it would be theirs.

  It didn't.

  The stag took a turn toward the east and in a matter of seconds made it to the county road that abutted the property. The wolves had to skid to a stop before they left the tree line. They couldn't risk getting spotted by a regular human. If they were lucky, they might be mistaken for coyotes. But they weren't going to rely on luck.

  Owen and the others were disappointed. It was hard not to be when a juicy stag had bounded from their grasp. But the night wasn't ruined. Not by a long shot. They ran and chased and played until exhaustion got the better of them. Some nights, they ended up in a pile of sleeping fur and slept under the stars. Not tonight.

  Gibson gave t
he call and they all headed back towards the cabin.

  Before he went in through the basement door, Owen shifted back to human. The others followed shortly behind him. His shift was faster than theirs, but not by much, and thankfully it wasn't too painful for any of them. It felt like stretching his muscles just past the point of comfort and holding it there for several seconds. Not exactly pleasant, but worth the cost.

  And once he stood up, naked in the pale moonlight, his senses felt muffled by cotton. He could barely smell anything and the sounds all meshed together. But colors quickly became clearer as his senses adjusted back to human. That was the most jarring part of the whole change.

  He opened the door and headed inside, picking up his bathrobe that was lying on the floor where he'd left it before the run. Everyone else did the same. They were quiet. They always were when they became human again, as if it took a while to remember how their vocal cords worked and what words went in which order.

  Then Owen's stomach grumbled.

  "Fuckin' Chip," Erin Jackson groused. She tied her own robe tight and slicked her blonde hair back into a ponytail with a tie that seemed to materialize from nowhere. He didn't know how she got her hair slicked so perfectly and he wasn't about to ask. Jackson had a way of frowning that made him sure he was about to get hit.