Read Dark Curves (Dangerous Curves Book 6) for Free Online

ice, holding on to overhanging tree branches to haul herself up. Her arms were sore, her thighs were burning, her fingers were screaming and she was sweating like mad, despite the chill in the air.
    She stopped, drank some water, checked the phone. Still no reception, so she pocketed it again and turned her face to the clear blue sky. She closed her eyes, just for a second, gathering up her energy to carry on.
    When she opened her eyes, the mountain lion was standing less than ten feet in front of her.
    She froze, completely. Stopped breathing. Stopped thinking. Stopped everything.
    When her brain did actually start to function again, the only thing that she could think was how she just couldn’t believe that she’d managed to extricate herself from the clutches of one wild animal… only to wander smack in to the path of another one.
    Slowly, she took a breath, then another. The panic receded, just a bit, and she scrambled to recall anything that she may have gleaned from casually flipping past the National Geographic Channel whilst drinking coffee. Maybe she’d accidentally retained something useful?
    OK… weren’t you supposed to not make eye contact with wild animals? It made them feel challenged if you stared at them head-on, right? She’d certainly employed that eyes-lowered, submissive bullshit with the violent idiot that she’d laid out on the kitchen floor, so it had to work on other beasts too. Right ?
    Shay dropped her eyes to the lion’s paws, which was a huge mistake, because now she saw that its claws were out. She swallowed, tried to make herself smaller than she was, since she was sure that animals backed down when they didn’t feel threatened by an opponent.
    This mountain lion didn’t seem to have received the memo, though. If anything, her eye-lowering and shrinking seemed to just piss the thing off more. Shay heard a low, rumbling sound coming from its chest. And it definitely was not purring.
    It was growling at her.
    It was also getting all tense and arched, its tail twitching wildly. Then, the surest sign that she was in big trouble: it bared its teeth at her.
    Oh, shit.
    Trying to keep her movements small, Shay slowly, so slowly, reached for the gun in her pocket. Still keeping her eyes down, she slid off her glove and then flicked the safety off with her thumb.
    The tiny click sounded like thunder in the deathly stillness and silence of the mountains.
    The mountain lion exploded in to action, launching itself at her, closing the distance between them in mere seconds. In one smooth, practiced move, she had the gun out of her pocket, aimed and ready to fire. She almost made it, too… she was less than a millisecond too late in pulling the trigger.
    The shot echoed and rolled down the mountains, so loud that it stunned her a bit, and completely distracted her from the fact that the lion had its teeth in the front of her right leg. It ripped her flesh as it fell backwards, making sure to twist and shake its head as it went, ensuring maximum pain and damage.
    Shay screamed, fell to the ground herself. She managed to keep a hold of the gun, though she saw that she no longer needed it. Her shot had been true and the lion was dead, its mouth bright red with her blood. Quite a lot of her blood.
    No. Oh, no.
    She stuck her injured leg straight out in front of her, gritting her teeth against the agony of even that small movement. What she saw damn near threw her straight in to the land of Holy-Fuck-It’s-Time-To-Panic-Now.
    The white ground was stained red, her jeans were shredded, she saw teeth marks in her lower leg. She was hurt, and for a minute, she just sat on her ass, more frightened than she’d ever been in the whole of her life.
    Then her survival instincts kicked in and she got her shit together. Kind of.
    OK, first things first. She checked the phone again, praying hard now for reception. But the god of cell phone towers was still out for lunch or something, because he was not listening.