Southern Shifters: Purred Promises (Kindle Worlds Novella) by R. E. Butler Page B

us.”
    Dillon rolled his eyes. “ If my dad bent over backward for me the way Veron has for Jair, I’d be falling on my knees in gratitude.” He snorted in disgust and turned on his heels, disappearing into the kitchen.
    “Give me ten minutes,” Veron said, striding into the living room as if he expected that Jair would follow.
    Jair’s grip tightened fractionally on Genesis, but she still managed to wiggle out of it. Coming to face him, she rose onto her tiptoes and wrapped her arms around his neck. Pulling him down to her, she rubbed her lips up his throat with a purr that was so soft he barely heard it.
    “I don’t know why Dillon did this,” she whispered in his ear, “and I don’t like it. Mona and Dillon are important to me, but you’re my mate. If you want to go, we can, but if we stay, I’m by your side the whole time.”
    He slid his arms around her waist and drew her closer , burying his face in her neck and inhaling her thunderstorm scent. “The tiger hates him,” he said into her ear, voicing things he hadn’t shared with anyone before. “When I see him, I think of all I missed out on because of his fucked -up genes.”
    She nipped his throat. “You wouldn’t be you without him. If you were a full-blooded tiger, I would have spent the night alone.”
    Well, wasn’t that the fucking truth?
    Easing away, he said, “I need you right with me, okay? You’re keeping the tiger calm.”
    She smiled. “I wouldn’t be anywhere but by your side right now.”
    Moving together, they walked into the living room and found his father standing in front of a large pic ture window. He turned slowly, arms folded across his chest. “I’ve been trying to talk to you for the last year, Jair. You’ve never given me an opportunity to tell you what happened between your mom and I. When she called to tell me that you’d been exiled, she also told me that she hadn’t ever explained anything about our history together.”
    Jair clenched his teeth together to stop the snarl that was building in his chest from escaping. He didn’t like hearing this male talk about his mother at all. He especially didn’t want to hear about the night that led to his conception. Genesis moved in front of Jair and pulled his arms around her like a coat, hugging herself close to him. The tiger settled down, knowing that talking to Veron made Genesis happy, and the tiger wanted her happiness above all else.
    “I’m listening,” Jair said.
    Veron sat on the couch and rested his elbows on his knees. Jair wasn’t interested in sitting down. He liked where he was just fine. When Jair made no move to join him, Veron cleared his throat and said, “I moved to the human city because my family was all gone. My pack was small , and when my parents died, they disbanded. I didn’t want anything to do with shifters or pack life, and living with humans wasn’t too hard once I got used to thinking and acting like them. I’d been on my own for a while when a beautiful tigress walked into the bar while I was working and, man, I couldn’t even form a coherent sentence.” He shook his head with a laugh.
    Jair grimaced. “Feel free to skip ahead.”
    “Right, sorry. She spent a week with me. The best damn week of my life. Then one morning, I w oke up and she’d vanished. I’m a pureblood, so it wasn’t hard to track her down and she didn’t go out of her way to hide her scent. I found her back in her house with her son – your brother – and I thought she was happy. I wasn’t happy to be without her, but I figured she saw me as a fling and that was it. Taking her away from her pride was one thing, but she had a pureblood son to worry about, and I was packless and living in the human world.”
    He paused for a moment, and Jair found himself simply staring at the male in front of him. His mother had never said that he came to the pride looking for her.
    “I left her my number and told her that I would love to see her again. We weren’t