Not Bad for an Amateur (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Read online

  Not Bad for an Amateur

  Lily Nelson went looking for answers. She found much more than she was looking for. Between trying to contact weres to show or tell her how to live life as a once a month furry and uncovering a secret research program involving the government and the were community, she is in trouble. She has done the best she can on her own to find the answers she needs to get by, from meeting intimidating biker chicks to saving a were from a hunter. Now it is time for her to run to the men that she can’t get out of her mind or senses.

  Jim and Joel Logan have found their mate, now all they have to do is gain her cooperation and trust. They know she is theirs, but now she has to admit it. She is perfect for them. Smart, beautiful, and she smells like home. They can and do protect her from the corruption that she has brought to light.

  Note: There is no sexual relationship or touching for titillation between or among siblings.

  Genre: Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Paranormal, Vampires/Werewolves

  Length: 32,641 words

  NOT BAD FOR AN AMATEUR

  Lynn Ray Lewis

  MENAGE AMOUR

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

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  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: Ménage Amour

  NOT BAD FOR AN AMATEUR

  Copyright © 2013 by Lynn Ray Lewis

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62740-052-7

  First E-book Publication: June 2013

  Cover design by Harris Channing

  All cover art and logo copyright © 2013 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  PUBLISHER

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  Letter to Readers

  Dear Readers,

  If you have purchased this copy of Not Bad for an Amateur by Lynn Ray Lewis from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.

  Regarding E-book Piracy

  This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.

  The author and the publisher work very hard to bring our paying readers high-quality reading entertainment.

  This is Lynn Ray Lewis’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Ms. Lewis’s right to earn a living from her work.

  Amanda Hilton, Publisher

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  www.BookStrand.com

  DEDICATION

  For Paula and Laura. Not a day goes by without thinking of you two. Keep the coffee fresh, girls, when I join you I will expect a decent cup and some good gossip.

  NOT BAD FOR AN AMATEUR

  LYNN RAY LEWIS

  Copyright © 2013

  Chapter 1

  He could smell her. Where she was by now was anyone’s guess. At least he now had her scent and would know her even when she was not in heat. The small shelter under the overhanging granite was very narrow, too narrow for his shoulders in either of his forms. He waited two days for her to emerge from the small, dark cavern in vain. His sensitive hearing could not catch any sounds coming from the opening either. He tracked her scent all day before finding this shelter. She would return sometime, and he would keep checking to see when she came back.

  Joel Logan walked into the training yard. His size alone would label him an Alpha in any society. At six feet five inches tall he towered over all but two of the males in the Silver Line Pack. His thickly muscled body and handsome face always garnered female attention, and this occasion was no different.

  June and Veronica were watching the males train. Wearing tiny shorts and belly-baring tank tops should have gotten more attention, but the males were focused today. It deflated their egos when Joel ignored the flirting gestures from the two women who were waiting for him to show up.

  Joel walked up to a small group of four men and addressed just one of them. “Harold? We need to talk.” Then he walked to the tree line waiting for the man to come to him for this conversation.

  When Harold stood next to him, he got right to business. “I have been patrolling our borders and found three different trespassers. Two I have taken care of and the third I will be waiting for to come back and then decide what to do with her.” Joel took a look around the two of them before talking and walking deeper into the trees. “Why didn’t you find these people last weekend when you were supposed to be patrolling?”

  Harold tried to form a lie to pacify his Alpha, but he saw Joel shaking his head in disappointment. Harold had forgotten for a brief minute that Joel could smell a lie. He tried the truth and hoped his neglect had not caused a major security leak. “Nancy was in need, Joel. It has been months since we had a security breach, and I really didn’t believe it would be a problem.” He hung his head then straightened his back and faced his Alpha. The dereliction of duty could not go unpunished. His negligence could have caused the entire pack to be placed in peril.

  Joel watched the big man fall to his knees and bare his neck to the Alpha. There would be no fight in this matter. “Get up, Harry, I have a suitable punishment that doesn’t involve tearing the throat from my Beta’s neck.”

  As Harold “Harry” Barker got to his feet, he made the mistake of thinking Joel would let him slide this one time. Everyone makes mistakes, right? The heavy fist knocking his jaw loose and then the second fist knocking the dislocated jaw back into place made him readjust his thinking. The next few minutes were a painful lesson as Joel turned his face and upper body into a mass of bruises and bloody splatters from his split lips and broken nose. The damage would not be permanent, but it would show the rest of the pack that Joel would hurt even his loved ones to protect his people.

  When Joel was finished Harry could not resist poking the wolf. “You hit like a girl. Next time leave your panties at home and wear your jock strap.” This was said with a bloody smile. The men had been lifelong friends, and as long as no other pack members were watching and listening, Harry could tease Joel.

  “I’m glad I didn’t h
urt you bad enough that you cannot finish your punishment, my friend. I trust Nancy has had her problem taken care of by now?” At Harry’s cautious nod, Joel grinned evilly. “Pack some provisions and say your good-byes. You are going on a stakeout.”

  When the men walked back into the training yard, all eyes swiveled in their direction. The women gasped at the sight of the huge man’s bloody face and rapidly bruising skin. The three males just stared. If the Alpha was pissed at his friend Harry and beat the shit out of him, they did not want to stir the pot and turn his ire on themselves. Where Joel was tall and thickly muscled, Harry was taller without the bulky muscles. The only blood on Joel was on his knuckles.

  Lily Fern Nelson was tired. It seemed her life was going to be a constant battle of hide and survive. Two years ago she had been a happy woman with a good career in computer science. Then one night during a full moon, her life had changed. Oh yeah, it changed and so did she, into a wolf. Waking up naked and with the nasty bit of fur in her mouth had been a shock. Especially when she woke up naked on the balcony of her apartment at dawn.

  At first she thought she had sleepwalked there. The vague memory of her body writhing on the floor as her bones stretched and elongated could possibly be a nightmare. That did not explain the scratches or the nasty taste in her mouth. When she spit the fur from her mouth into the bathroom sink, Lily began throwing up. Whatever she had eaten, it was red, a lot of red meat.

  Lily had scrubbed her teeth and gums with dish soap that day. She rinsed and rinsed until the soapy taste was mostly gone, and then she grabbed the rubbing alcohol and used it like mouthwash. Wood-grain alcohol was said to kill a person if they ingested it, but at that minute she really hadn’t cared. Her skin got the same treatment and was as pink and raw as if she was sunburned by the time she finished scrubbing herself. Then she sat and cried.

  After researching the myths of werewolves and shape-shifters, she came to the conclusion that she must have gotten the virus that was mentioned in a few of the articles when she was diagnosed with severe anemia. Her doctor had hospitalized her to give her blood and do further testing. After that day she never even got another cold and her blood work came back fine. The anemia must have been a onetime thing, and now that she was eating like a horse the problem was taken care of naturally.

  Lily wanted to talk to someone about this phenomenon, but who? She also was not really enthusiastic about going to a psychologist to talk about her new problem so that left her back to more research for answers. It seemed that any big forest was said to be infested with were animals. Foxes to bears and even a few birds were reportedly were animals. All she needed to do was to find a pack of wolves, and they would either be weres or not. If they were not, then she needed a backup plan because they were very territorial, and she was not about to piss off a pack of wild wolves if it could be helped.

  Her first attempt to contact one of her kind was at a biker bar two hundred miles west of her apartment. That had not gone quite like it should have gone. She parked her little Mustang in front of a wooden rail and stepped out of the vehicle, trying to gather the courage to walk inside. The good news was that she didn’t have to enter the building to find weres. Two women wearing small bits of leather for bras and leather pants came out of the door of the bar. They took one look and sniff of the air and advanced on her with cruel malice in their faces.

  Lily tried to introduce herself, but her greeting was ignored and she was ordered to get back in her car, get the hell out, and “do not come back if you know what’s good for you.” She opened her mouth to ask them to explain to her how she was supposed to live like this. The women ignored her question and advanced menacingly. She got back into her car and backed out of the parking space quickly. Those women were beautiful, and from their looks toward her, deadly.

  The second foray into her research was proof that she was going the wrong way in this quest for knowledge. This time she went north into that spot between North and South Dakota that some locals still referred to as the Dakota Territories. When she checked into the motel, the manager gave her an admiring look. “You up here by yourself?” When she nodded he introduced himself as Jim Logan with a big smile and a handshake that lasted a little too long. Then he began to ask personal questions, and she told him about researching local folklore. “Oh, we have a great deal of that, missy. We have werewolves around here, according to some people. The moon will be full in a few days, Maybe you will see a few running around here.

  “Then there is the spirit walkers that are said to roam the prairie at night. Those are the ghosts of people that died before their time, and now they walk the prairie at night lost, looking for the doorway to the spirit world.

  “There is the legend of Willy the drunken monkey that started a fire in the local saloon, back in the early 1800s. They say he burned down half the town running from building to building with his fur on fire.

  “We all kind of discount the Bigfoot sightings because of the fact that there is no real forests around here for miles. Everyone knows that Bigfoot only lives where there are forests, right?

  “Maybell Walker earned the title of being a legend by wearing men’s clothes, and chewing tobacco while her husband was at home tied to the bed. She found her man with a dance hall girl before old Willy burned the place down.

  “They say Maybell did some surgery on her man when he got home, and then passed out on the bed after he beat her up for embarrassing him at the saloon. She tied him to the bed and wrapped some twine around his balls just like they did the sheep. When they turned black she cut them off, and let him loose from the bed. They say from that time on she wore the pants in the family. The poor bastard shot himself in the head a few months after that.

  Lily listened to the man for two hours before she finally got the keys to her rented cabin and a stern warning to stay indoors at night here in the hills. She unloaded her suitcase and drove to the local store to get a few days’ worth of groceries. There was seventy-two hours before the next full moon, and she hoped to run into someone or something that could help her learn how to cope with this affliction.

  The grocery store was an old-fashioned building with a meat case and butcher behind it. She ordered three thick steaks and two whole chickens. The chickens came from the cooler, but the steaks were cut from the huge hunk of meat the butcher was already cutting up. She would not be able to get fresher meat at any time until the full moon. The fresh bratwurst looked too good to pass up, as did the small pork loin. Lily tossed in a loaf of bread and several small cans of vegetables to the cart. The two chocolate cupcakes were comfort food and absolutely necessary.

  At the small checkout counter the older lady was chatty, and again Lily gave her research excuse for being here. The woman looked at the meat and then at Lily. She explained that she was on a no-carb diet, trying to lose weight. It was lame, but the lady shrugged and told Lily that she looked perfectly healthy to her.

  Jim Logan was sitting on the small, covered stoop of the cabin when she pulled into her spot. He waved and waited for her until he saw her pulling grocery sacks out of the back seat then came to help her carry the heavy bags. He watched her walk in front of him while he followed with most of the bags and admired the view of her full-hipped walk. When she had the door unlocked and turned to take her bags from him, he crowded her until she let him into the cabin. Jim set the bags down on the little table and counter then decided to get to know her a bit better.

  “I stopped by to see if you had everything you needed to get by, and here you are being self-sufficient, already taking things into you own little hands.” He grinned and rubbed the back of his neck. The little shewolf watched him so he preened, stretching his upper body side to side as if he was just working the kinks out, then relaxed totally and gave her what he considered his most sexy look. “Would you be kind enough to have dinner with me around six? We have a small diner that has good food and hot coffee.”

  Lily wanted to go with him, but if they formed an ac
quaintance then he might want to spend time together while she was here, How would she explain that his joking reference to werewolves was actual fact? Providing that he didn’t run screaming, causing her to possibly consider him prey, chase him down, and rip out his throat. No, as badly as she might want to get to know him and his amazing body, there was no way she could do that to him, even if her senses and hormones hated her for it.

  Lily forced a polite smile and shook her head. “I am sorry, but I have a boyfriend back in the city, and we are pretty much exclusive. I hope you don’t mind, but I have to say no. But thank you for the invite.” The look of astonishment on his face almost made her laugh. His features went from confident, sexy male to narrow-eyed, irritated male in seconds. Then he turned and stomped out the door. She expected him to slam it behind him, but he left it wide open, not bothering to look back. Lily went to close the door, and she watched Jim stomp his way towards the office. She stood there watching him in regret wondering if she would ever be able to trust herself not to hurt someone.

  This solitary stuff was for the birds, no, not the damn birds, even they mated for life.

  Lily put away her groceries and munched on a large smoked bratwurst while she got out her notes. If there was any hope for her to contact a werewolf clan or pack, as they were called, then she would not meet them inside her cabin. And wolves were nocturnal most of the time. So she had to be out after dark no matter how scary it might be. Not tonight, tonight she would do a topographical map search to possibly identify probable shelters and areas where packs of wolves could hunt undisturbed.

  Two days later and three tankfulls of gas and still no were animals. Well, if they were any around, how would she even know? Tomorrow night she would morph into a furry creature, and she was in unknown territory. Luckily there were miles of prairie to roam. So if she did kill something, chances were it wouldn’t be a human or someone’s pet. There was not even a slim chance that she had hallucinated the first time she had changed. No, there was definitely fur in my teeth. There was no way for the event to have been dreamed up by her choice of reading or lifestyle.