Chasing The Night: Big Easy Shifters: Book Three, Knox, Abby [book series to read .TXT] 📗

killing her; that old lady would have to get in line behind the bride, Rosemary, and Aunt Betsy.

Focus, Chas. Focus. Where are you? And who were you kissing last night? Chas closed her eyes, and then she sniffed. A man’s scent. All over her. Like, really all over her.

She did not hate this scent, whoever it was. Too bad he wasn’t here so she could interrogate him about this giant hickey.

She stumbled back to the bed to look for her phone. The maps apps and GPS could tell her where she was and how to get back to the mansion. She could probably enlist some of the other bridesmaids to help her sort her evening out. She didn’t want to bother Rosemary with any of this.

As she dug through the mess of sheets and blankets, Chastity got her biggest clue about the night’s events. There, in the middle of the bed, was a small spot of blood. Her mind raced.

On one hand…dammit, I missed the whole thing. And then, there was the issue of an oath. A magical pact with her overbearing father. If the thing happened that she thought happened last night, her father would already know, and he’d be hunting down the man who had deflowered his Chastity.

Now she was desperate to find her partner in last night’s crimes. She looked around the room for clues, but all she found were her pashmina and her shoes. There was something else, too: a soreness on her butt.

What in the world?

She lifted her dress and twisted her torso enough to see what it was. A bandage. She lifted the tape around the bandage to reveal a tattoo of a Valentine heart that looked like it had been clawed by a wild animal. On the heart was a letter “G” written in elaborate calligraphy.

G? What—or who—is G?

She needed to find her phone immediately.

Oh man, she also needed water. And coffee. And a large JB Chicken crispy breakfast biscuit slathered in butter and ghost pepper jelly. And ibuprofen, stat. But first, her phone.

Ignoring the little blood stain on the bed that most likely represented the end of her innocence, she kept rifling through the sheets, pillows, and blankets. Finally, she found her clutch purse under the bed.

She opened it and breathed a sigh of relief as she plopped onto the floor. A few undamaged brain cells must have started working again, because she suddenly had the brilliant idea of looking at her photos. Yes! Of course! Surely there would be photo evidence of what had happened last night.

She ignored the little red dot that indicated she had several unopened text messages — she had resolved not to keep her parents’ up to speed on her first night of true freedom, so no doubt they’d been texting her for updates — and tapped the photo icon on her phone screen. Up popped an album marked “G.”

Because, of course. Drunk Chastity had gone to the trouble of creating a whole separate photo album. But Drunk Chastity could not be bothered to do any favors for future Sober Chastity by fully naming the dude who presumably had “taken her flower.” That would be her mother’s phrase for it. Her mother, the sweetest and most clueless of all the panther shifters, liked to assign cute names to everything. Virginity was a Flower. Vagina was a Whoo-hoo. Pussy in general was the Lady Garden. Testicles were dingleberries, and the penis was, unfortunately, spoken in a whisper as the “wiener.” All of this would have been funny if used ironically. But her mother was not in any way, shape, or form ironic.

Chastity held her breath and clicked on the album marked “G.”

What opened before her was a series of images that would make any brothel madam blush. Good lord! Who was this acrobatic, tanned, muscular specimen with six-pack abs hard enough to bounce a quarter off of? She swiped through and felt the heat rising to her face. She got a glimpse of long, wavy brown hair. Nice. A shoulder with a Jolly Roger tattoo.

Really, dude?

There was a hip tattoo on him that matched hers, only with the letter C. “Oh, God,” she groaned. What tattoo artist in his or her right mind would allow a pair of drunks to get inked?

She saw a face in the thumbnails. Her heart skipped a beat, and she was about to click it when another one distracted her. A pretty shocking one.

Oh my. Was that his…it was. Oh, god. Yeah, she clicked. Who could resist?

Wow.

Well.

Was she grinning at a dick pic right now?

Well, it wasn’t exactly an unsolicited dick pic. I mean, I probably was the one who took the photo. And no wonder.

The size of it, in relation to the size of what she could see of the rest of his body in the photo, might explain why she was finding it hard to walk this morning.

True, size isn’t everything. But the size of that might also explain why she’d agreed to matching tattoos, because damn. Who wouldn’t want to commemorate a night of thorough rutting with—whoever that is?

Enough, Chas. Get to the face. We need to identify this bad boy.

She swiped through and finally came to a face. It wasn’t a full face, so she kept swiping, but there was even less of him visible in the rest of the photos. More than anything, his identity was blocked out by her own smiling, drunk-ass face.

The only parts of his face she could make out were one brown eye, sun-kissed skin, long, wavy hair. Did he have a beard? She could not tell.

Nothing to indicate a name, though.

Shit.

And who was she, exactly? Five years ago, at the age of 17, she was Miss Junior Baton Rouge 2012, cutting the ribbon on the new YMCA splash park, smiling wide for the newspaper photographer. Now she was on the floor of a weird apartment, in the dress she’d worn the night before, desperately searching for clues about the man who had most