I'm so excited to share this excerpt with you!
This is one of a handful of shifter series
I follow. If you like alphas with hearts of gold and a lot of action, you should check it out.
Just a whole lotta fun to read!
Here's the upcoming release in this series and
a link to read the first five chapters.
Title: In the Company of Wolves
Series: SWAT, #3
Author: Paige Tyler
Pubdate: December 1st, 2015
ISBN: 9781492608530
He opened his mouth to order her to drop the MP5 she had aimed at him, but nothing would come out. It was like she’d robbed him of the ability to speak. Shooting her wasn’t an option, though. And the idea of arresting her didn’t make him feel any better.
There's a new gang of criminals in town who are organized and ruthless in the extreme. When Eric Becker, along with the rest of the Dallas SWAT team, ends up in the middle of a shootout, he immediately senses werewolves-a lot of them. Turns out, the new bad guys are a pack of wolf shifters.
In a spray of gunfire, Becker comes face-to-face with the most gorgeous woman he's ever seen. Becker does the logical thing. He hides her and leaves the scene with the rest of his team.
Jayna Winston has no idea why that SWAT guy helped her, but she's glad he did. Ever since she and her pack mates got mixed up with those Eastern European mobsters, everything had pretty much fallen apart.
So what's a street-savvy thief like Jayna going to do with a hot alpha-male wolf who's a police officer?
This December, Paige Tyler releases the third
in her action-packed SWAT series,
IN THE COMPANY OF WOLVES.
To celebrate, we have the first 5 chapters of
Prologue
East Side Detroit, September, 2010
Jayna Winston flinched at the sound of the door slamming against the cheap plaster wall of the apartment’s tiny entryway.
Crap. Her stepdad was drunk again. No surprise there. These
days, Darren came home drunk almost every night. He was supposed to be
looking for work, but unless there was a job hiding under a bar stool
down at Hoolie’s, he wasn’t likely
to find one anytime soon.
She
glanced at her partially opened bedroom window that exited out onto the
fire escape. Maybe she should bail and see if she could crash at a
friend’s for the night.
She didn’t like the idea of walking the streets of Detroit’s East Side
this late, but she really wasn’t in the mood to listen to Darren and her
mom get in another fight over money and his drinking habits. Darren was
a mean drunk, and when her mom started screaming
at him about wasting what little money they had, things usually got
ugly fast.
Not
that her mom was any kind of saint when it came to saving money. The
reason she got so pissed about Darren blowing through all the cash was
because it hardly
left her any to spend on her own vices—lottery tickets with a little
crystal meth on the side.
Jayna
scrambled off the bed and started for the window but then hesitated.
Darren got pissed when she used the fire escape to leave their
third-floor apartment.
He said it made her look like a dirty hoodlum, sliding down the ladder
like that. Not that she cared what people around here thought, but the
last time he’d caught her slipping out the window, he’d thrashed her
with his belt right out on the street while the
neighbors watched.
She
was still weighing the odds when she heard Darren swear, immediately
followed by her mom’s voice, roughened by a lifetime of smoking
unfiltered cigarettes, cussing
right back at him.
“Don’t
turn your face away from me, you stupid bitch!” Darren’s deep voice was
so heavily slurred, it would have been impossible to understand if she
didn’t have
so much experience at interpreting his drunken rants. “You think you’re
too good for me or something? You’re nothing but a meth whore. Get over
here!”
“Double crap,” Jayna muttered as she headed for the window.
She
was getting the hell out of there. Darren wasn’t only violent when he
was drunk; sometimes he was horny too, and now seemed like one of those
times. Her stepdad
never had a problem smacking her around whenever he felt she deserved
it—which was frequently—but he’d never tried anything else. Since she’d
turned seventeen a couple weeks ago, he’d started looking at her in a
way that made her feel really queasy. Jayna
knew that sooner or later, he was going to come sniffing around her.
She wasn’t going to hang around and give him a chance to do it tonight.
She
was yanking on the window, which got stuck more often than not, when a
loud thud resonated from the living room, immediately followed by a
sharp cry of pain.
She hesitated, but not for long. She’d tried to come to her mom’s
defense a few months ago, putting herself in front of Darren and rocking
his head back with a slap across his face, only to end up getting hit
on the head with a heavy glass ashtray by her mom,
who then shouted at Jayna for touching “her man.”
Jayna
didn’t think of herself as all that smart—she was barely making it in
school—but there were some lessons she only had to learn once. That
night had been the
last time she ever tried to get between her mom and Darren. Her mom
wanted him; she could keep him.
Ignoring
the sobbing outside her bedroom door, Jayna tugged on the window again.
It broke loose without a sound, and she already had one leg halfway
over the sill
before she remembered her cell phone.
“Crap.”
She
pulled her leg back in and darted for her dresser, where her old,
battered Nokia was charging. She hated wasting time getting the thing.
It had crappy service
most of the time anyway. But if she was going to find a place to crash
tonight, she’d need her cell. It wasn’t like she’d find a working pay
phone around this part of town.
Jayna
was shoving the phone in her jeans back pocket when her bedroom door
flew open so violently the knob smashed a hole in the wall and sent a
cloud of white dust
flying. She took one look at Darren’s pissed-off expression and ran for
the window as fast as she could. Angry might have been his default
expression, but this was different. This time, he looked…hungry.
She
didn’t make it far before a heavy hand caught her shoulder. Darren spun
her around and gave her a shove, bouncing her off the cheap mirror
attached to the wall
beside the window. Her right elbow and forearm absorbed most of the
impact, hitting the mirror hard enough to shatter it. Something
shattered in her arm too, and the stab of pain that shot through it was
enough to make tears spring to her eyes.
But she didn’t cry. She’d found out a while ago that crying only made it worse. Darren liked to hear women cry.
Gritting her teeth against the pain, Jayna glared at the piece of crap her mom had brought into their lives. “What do you want?”
Darren eyed her from under heavy lids. “I want you to start pulling your weight around here, girl, that’s what I want.”
Her
heart pounded as he moved closer, and she knew this had nothing to do
with her cleaning the toilet or taking out the trash. Darren had wanted
something else
from her for a while, and tonight, he was apparently drunk enough to
try to take it. That was never going to happen. She’d die first.
She edged closer to the window. “Stay the hell away from me, you pig!”
If
she could get a lead on him, she could get out the window and onto the
fire escape. He’d never catch her once she got outside. She was too
fast, and he was too
clumsy.
But
he closed the distance between them faster than she’d ever seen him
move, making her wonder just how drunk he really was. Before she could
even take a breath
to scream, he had his big hand around her throat and was shoving her
against the wall. The back of her head bounced off the edge of the
mirror frame, and she felt shards of loose glass dig into her back at
the same time stars exploded in her vision.
Jayna
was still fighting off a creeping wave of blackness when his lips came
down on hers and he forced his tongue into her mouth. He tasted of cheap
beer and cigarettes,
and she bit down hard, jerking away. He bellowed like an angry bear and
backhanded her. She fell over the broken remains of her mirror in a
heap, pieces of the razor-sharp glass stabbing into her in a dozen
different places.
She
cried out, kicking at him with her tennis shoes as Darren roughly
flipped her over on her back. He ignored her feeble kicks the same way
he ignored her wild
punches. She screamed then, as loud as she could—not because she
thought someone might come to help, but simply because she wasn’t going
to let this happen without a fight.
Jayna
fought with everything she had, but he was so much stronger than she
was. On top of that, her right arm throbbed like hell. It was all she
could do to lift
it. Worse, the more weight Darren piled on top of her, the deeper the
shards of glass from the broken mirror dug into her back.
Crap. Why hadn’t she thought of it before?
Ignoring
the pain in her injured arm, she searched blindly on the floor for a
piece of mirror she could use as a weapon. Her fingers closed around
one, and she cried
out as the sharp glass sliced into her hand. But the feel of her belt
coming undone drove the sting away, and she swung her hand up, stabbing
at anything she could reach.
Darren
was so drunk and enraged, he didn’t realize what was happening until
she’d slashed his face so hard, the glass crunched under her hand. Blood
poured down
his face and he bellowed like a wounded animal. But instead of throwing
himself off her like she’d hoped, he brought back his fist to punch
her.
Knowing
a blow like that would end her fight, Jayna tightened her fingers
around the piece of mirror and swung at the most vulnerable area she
could reach—his neck.
The long, jagged piece of glass only stopped when the part she’d been
holding broke off in her grasp. The rest was buried in the right side of
Darren’s fat neck four inches deep.
He
let her go and reached for his neck. Jayna twisted sideways, kicking
him in the chest, then crawled out from under him and scrambled to her
feet. She staggered
toward the window, stumbling when she heard Darren behind her. Oh God,
he was still coming!
She
grabbed the porcelain Wonder Woman lamp that had been sitting on her
nightstand since her real dad had given it to her fifth birthday, spun
around, and smashed
Darren over the head. The lamp shattered, and Darren slumped to the
floor with the pieces.
Jayna looked around. There was a lot of blood on the floor, both hers and Darren’s. But she was still standing, and he wasn’t.
A sound from the doorway startled her out of her daze, and she lifted her head to see her mom standing staring at her in horror.
“What did you do?” her mother demanded, running to Darren’s side and kneeling down beside him.
Jayna
didn’t try to explain. Her mom wouldn’t listen or care. Darren was
still breathing, but Jayna had no idea if he was going to stay that way.
The cops might
believe she’d been defending herself, or they might not. She’d never
had much faith in cops. They weren’t interested in helping people like
her.
This wasn’t something she could get out of by spending the night at a friend’s house either. She had to get away from there.
Jayna
stepped around her mom, who was still blubbering and fussing over the
unconscious Darren, and grabbed the charger for her phone. Then she
scooped up the small
amount of money she had in her sock drawer and headed for the window.
Her mom didn’t even say anything to her as she climbed out.
Jayna
stood on the fire escape, afraid she’d take a header down the steps if
she didn’t. But she felt surprisingly steady considering what had just
happened. Her
hand was barely bleeding and her arm didn’t hurt nearly as bad as
before.
Maybe
it was shock, she mused as she climbed down the fire escape. Or maybe
she was simply a whole hell of lot tougher than she ever thought she
could be.
“Damn
right you’re tough,” she muttered, almost believing it as the pain in
her arm and hand receded a little more with each step. “You don’t need
anyone to make
it on your own.”
