Company of Wolves Tour
@SourcebooksCasa Company of Wolves Tour
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?
Amazon: http://amzn.to/1N9s7aS
Apple: http://apple.co/1jDW2eF
Barnes and Noble: http://bit.ly/1L25iPs
Chapters: http://bit.ly/1jPkNEZ
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 IN THE COMPANY OF WOLVES to share with you! Just
click hereto download the first 5 chapters for FREE!
(When you click on the link, DropBox will prompt you to
create an account with them in order to download the PDF. However, you DO
NOT need to create an account. Instead, there is an option at the bottom of
the window that allows you to download the PDF without creating an account.)
To get you started, we’ve included the first few pages
below. Can’t get enough of SWAT? Sign up for Paige
Tyler’s newsletter to receive an exclusive bonus scene on November
23rd.
Happy Reading!
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.”
Comments