Destined Prize by Bailey Bradford
Book 3 in the Wild Ones series
General Release Date: 4th October 2022
Word Count: 45,576
Book Length: SHORT NOVEL
Pages: 183
Genres:
BONDAGE AND BDSM,CONTEMPORARY,COWBOYS AND WESTERN,EROTIC ROMANCE,GAY,GLBTQI,PARANORMAL,WERESHIFTERS
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Book Description
Sam’s imagination was never this wild.
Coywolf shifter Emil Akers is still trying to find his own place in their world, with his dominant tendencies making him butt heads with his big brother and alpha, Casey. After trying to strike out on his own, Emil’s back, farming his own ranch, the Lone Pine, and taking care of his sexual needs with one-nighters, usually far from the small town his pack lives in.
Sensing a story in the accounts of unearthly wild creatures in a small Wyoming town, aspiring reporter Sam Brannigan comes to Britton to research, not have a one-night stand. But after a few drinks and a dark promise from tall, dark and buff in cowboy boots, he happily submits. Submits totally, in fact.
The problem is that the one-nighter proves the two of them are destined mates. Another snag is that both Emil and Sam, two men from two very different backgrounds, are keeping secrets—and Emil’s could shatter Sam’s world.
And when someone seems determined to make the existence of shifters known, Emil and Sam are caught in the crossfire. All hell’s breaking loose, and what they both have to do to ensure the other survives could make their relationship one of the casualties.
All his life, people told Sam he was too imaginative. But he could never have imagined anything this wild…
General Release Date: 4th October 2022
“No, don’t lift me—I can hit it!” Rainey struggled to get down from her fathers’ arms.
Not Rainey but Billy, Emil Akers silently corrected himself. His cowboy-obsessed niece, five today, hadn’t answered to her actual name in a good while now. She pointed at the floor with one hand, kicking her legs for her fathers, Casey and Rhett, to lower her again, and took wild swings at the dangling piñata with the plastic bat in her other hand, convinced she could hit it all by herself despite it being out of reach.
“Told you she’d like that one,” Emil and Casey’s sister Lacey informed the room at large, patting the cactus-shaped piñata she’d chosen. She’d been in charge of setting up the party.
“It’s for meee!” Rainey howled, looking likely to take her bat to her Aunt Lacey.
She wouldn’t. The kid adored all her Akers aunts and uncles, just as she adored her Tucker uncle, Jack, Rhett’s brother, and every minute of her life on the Double T ranch. Her love of cowboys made perfect sense, even if today Emil—and probably his brothers and sisters and the ranch hands attending the birthday tea—felt more than a little foolish dressed in chaps and boots with spurs.
Wyoming was hardly Texas, and Emil doubted a Stetson looked good on his buzzed-short head. Tired of jokes that his beard was longer than his hair, he’d cropped that and his mustache shorter, but left it bushier than his hair, just to piss people off. He could have done without the jaunty singalong kids’ music playing, but each and every one of the party guests would do anything for the tiny girl, and her squeals of delight made it all bearable.
“No.” Casey’s simple command had most of the Akers stopping what they were doing. Well, an alpha saying “Jump” would normally have his pack asking “How high?” and Casey’s pack, also his family, all paused. Even Emil, though he bristled at it. The habit of deference was long ingrained in him—Casey had brought them up since their parents’ death.
“Casey?” Rhett asked.
“Don’t put the blindfold on her,” Casey continued, easing his lean, long-legged body between his daughter and the younger Akers brother, Robin, who was bending down to cover his niece’s eyes with a strip of cloth before she went swinging for her prize. “I’m worried she’ll trip over the mutt if ya do.”
“She will anyway. We all will,” Rainey’s Aunt Anne said. “We all have.”
“More so than usual,” Emil commented, trying to catch the dog who wagged her whole body, not just her rear end, on an average day and had upped the speed today, excited at the number of people, the music and no doubt the snack food. “I still can’t believe you got Rainey a pup last year. And that one…”
That one, Duchess, who was currently yipping and woofing and weaving her black and brown body in crazy figures-of-eight around the party guests’ legs and around table and chair legs too.
“Hey! Watch what you say about Duchess—Jerry’s right here,” Rhett’s brother Jack cautioned.
Jerry, Rhett and Jack’s employee, was a long-serving Double T ranch hand whose German shepherd, Duke, was the best tracker in Fallon County, highly intelligent and trained to every command a rancher could want. The pup Duke had fathered on old lady Elgiers’ beloved Corgi…wasn’t. Emil had never even heard of a corman shepherd until the small, elongated brown-and-black mutt had been born. He sure had now though.
Jerry gave the easy smile of a dog owner whose hound’s lineage and performance meant he could blame any shortcomings in its offspring on the other side of the gene pool.
“And to think we could never have a pet growing up,” Lacey sighed.
“Duke’s too well-trained and smart to go crazy around…us,” Robin said, catching himself in front of Jerry and Javon, the other hand.
“And Duchess is too daft,” added Rhys Tucker. No, that was Lewis. Rhett and Jack’s second cousins, there on a working vacation from Great Britain, were twins, and hard to tell apart today in matching western gear.
“Dumb,” the actual Rhys corrected, in case people didn’t understand the Tuckers’ way of speaking. “Daft as a brush, dumb as an ox. Fitting, for a cattle ranch!”
They were from a sheep farming background, and fascinated by the differences they’d found on this spread compared to their hill farm. Those differences ranged from the crops and cattle to their eldest cousin having fathered a child with his ex-girlfriend, a child he was bringing up with the man he was married and mated to. Oh, and the man in question being a shifter. Emil didn’t know if he’d be so calm about stuff like that, in their shoes.
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Bailey Bradford
A native Texan, Bailey spends her days spinning stories around in her head, which has contributed to more than one incident of tripping over her own feet. Evenings are reserved for pounding away at the keyboard, as are early morning hours. Sleep? Doesn’t happen much. Writing is too much fun, and there are too many characters bouncing about, tapping on Bailey’s brain demanding to be let out.
Caffeine and chocolate are permanent fixtures in Bailey’s office and are never far from hand at any given time. Removing either of those necessities from Bailey’s presence can result in what is known as A Very, Very Scary Bailey and is not advised under any circumstances.
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