Hunting Season: Werewolf Bodyguard Romance (Guarded by the Shifter Book 1)

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.


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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,