Esau

By Bailey Bradford

Sometimes what you don't want is exactly what you need.

Esau Walraven is a loner in a family filled with togetherness happy people. A shifter, it has taken him years to come to terms with that aspect of himself. He used to resent being different, but now he has come to appreciate it, and even embrace it. He's still not thrilled about being around people, but when his family asks for help, Esau is there to give it.

Ye-sun Warren helped his brother escape from their cruel grandfather. It didn't matter that Ye-sun had never met that particular brother, it was the right thing to do. Added to that, he has a nephew, a sweet baby boy who shouldn't be used as a pawn. Ye-sun's decision to help them costs him, with his grandfather punishing him in cruel ways he thought would kill him. Abandoned and left to die, Ye-sun is an angry, hurting Amur shifter.

When Esau and Ye-sun meet, the sparks fly. Esau tries to reject the mate-bond, but when he gives in, taking the innocent man first as they are leopards, then as men, he swears to himself he will not feel anything but lust for Ye-sun.

But Fate has a funny way of making sure her plans are followed...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pride Publishing
• Release date: Oct 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781781841112

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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Esau

ISBN # 978-1-78184-111-2

©Copyright Bailey Bradford 2017

Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright September 2017

Edited by Eleanor Boyall and Nicki Richards

Pride Publishing

This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Pride Publishing.

Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Pride Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

Published in 2017 by Pride Publishing, Think Tank, Ruston Way, Lincoln, LN6 7FL, UK

Pride Publishing is a subsidiary of Totally Entwined Group Limited.

Leopard’s Spots

ESAU

Bailey Bradford

Book six in the Leopard’s Spots series.

Sometimes what you don’t want is exactly what you need.

Esau Walraven is a loner in a family filled with togetherness and happy people. A shifter, it has taken him years to come to terms with that aspect of himself. He used to resent being different, but now he has come to appreciate it, and even embrace it. He’s still not thrilled about being around people, but when his family asks for help, Esau is there to give it.

Ye-sun Warren helped his brother Jihu escape from their cruel grandfather because it was the right thing to do. Added to that, he has a nephew, a sweet baby boy who shouldn’t be used as a pawn. Ye-sun’s decision to help them costs him, with his grandfather punishing him in cruel ways he thought would kill him. Abandoned and left to die, Ye-sun is an angry, hurting Amur shifter.

When Esau and Ye-sun meet, the sparks fly. Esau tries to reject the mate bond, but when he gives in, taking the innocent man first as they are leopards, then as men, he swears to himself he will not feel anything but lust for Ye-sun.

But Fate has a funny way of making sure her plans are followed…

Dedication

To all the good folks who made this story possible.

Chapter One

Esau Walraven normally loved the acuity of his shifter senses. Being a snow leopard shifter was a gift, a blessing in his opinion. He could turn into one of the most gorgeous species in the world, and the power in his body when he did so was amazing. There was a freedom to being a leopard that no human would ever understand, and he had this huge extended family he was close to. Maybe not real close, because Esau tended to be more of a loner than not, but he loved every one of them, and they probably felt the same about him, too.

His loyalty to his family was why he was out in the middle of the night, traipsing through a recently fire-purged forest. Those senses that he had, yeah, they were pretty damned awesome—except his nose was burning like a mother and his eyes kept watering. The stench from the forest fire was wretched, sulphur and fear and death. Smoke lingered, soot was everywhere, and the enhanced senses might have been working against him at that point.

Anything? Oscar called back to him.

Esau shook his head. They were out in the middle of this scorched land trying to find out if a lepe, or clan, of Amur leopard shifters had survived the fire. Esau only knew two Amur shifters, Bae, who was his cousin Isaiah’s mate, and Jihu, also a mate to a cousin, Gilbert. It was Bae and Jihu’s family who might have perished in the fire. Or maybe they survived. Esau wasn’t holding out a lot of hope. In his experience, the good people ended up dead and the fuckwits got away.

No, sometimes the fuckwits get dead, too. If someone tracks them down and delivers justice to them. Esau turned his thoughts away from that to what he was doing, which was trying to detect any scent or tracks that would offer them a clue to where the Amur leopards were. If they had escaped the fire.

If anyone did get away from the fire, it was probably the evil guy who wanted to keep Jihu and Bae and make them breed with females. Fucking Fate seems to like to let shits like that survive and claim good men for her own. No, I’m not going there. He was having a hell of a time reining his thoughts in tonight. Esau wiped his brow, sweating despite the chill in the air. He concentrated on catching any sign of the Amurs.

Occasionally he’d think about the messed-up lepe Bae and Jihu had got tangled up in. What kind of sick leader enforced rape? That was what the Amur ‘breeding program’ had been, at least it sounded like it to him. Not that Esau knew all that much about it. He hadn’t really been around Bae much, and had only just met Jihu a few hours earlier. They seemed like nice guys, though.

Esau wished they’d had a better plan for the hunt they were all on now, but he supposed no one had had time to come up with one. He felt plans were necessary in his life. If he didn’t have them, well, he didn’t like that at all. His job required plans, blueprints, and he figured that was a good way to go about life, too. A nice mapped-out plan.

Esau snorted and rubbed at his eyes. Yeah, sometimes life didn’t go along with that, or that bitch Fate shredded the detailed plans you had written up, but Esau always just made new plans then.

Kind of like he’d just done, coming to help his family. He was bringing up the rear of the group he was with, all of them searching, hoping. He’d heard Bae and Jihu talking about one of their brothers, Ye-sun, and Esau hoped that maybe that guy, at least, had survived.

Be nice if someone good made it out of this mess, Esau murmured to himself. He stopped and took a drink of his water, arching his back and neck as he did so. The urge to shift and run was strong, his leopard really not happy with the smell of fire, or the remains of the fire, either way. It was a good thing he could reason with his inner beast, good that the man held the power most of the time. Otherwise, things could get…ugly.

Over to his right, Esau thought he saw something slightly off. Several feet away, there was a patch of ground that looked to be disturbed in a way that was different from the rest of the burned-out land. Rather than being a scorched mess, the spot was cleared out of debris. Brown dirt stood out against the darker remnants of plant life around it. That dirt was somewhat compacted, like something had pressed it down, not loose and blowing in the wind. There was a chance some kind of animal had dug away the ash and debris to make a place to rest for a few hours, but in Esau’s experience, animals fleeing a fire didn’t take a break to rest. That seemed more like something a person would do, with such a person reasoning the fire danger from the fire was passed despite the reek of destruction in the area.

Esau loped over to it, checking that the others were still off ahead of him. He kneeled and sniffed, and along with the scent of scorched earth, another odor filtered into his nasal passages.

And it hit him like a sledgehammer to the gut. Esau grunted and tensed, his entire body tingling, his dick springing to life, thickening in a matter of heartbeats. Holy crap, what the hell is that? He sniffed again and moaned softly, his nipples aching, balls throbbing, heavy, full in their sac. Esau palmed his cock and rubbed, shivering as heat flooded his groin, need coiling before shooting out to his genitals, making his pucker clench.

If he kept groping himself just so, he was going to come, going to shoot in his jeans like he had done the first time he’d kissed a boy. Well, there’d been rubbing then, too, and neither him nor Kris had lasted more than a minute kissing and rutting. Still, that was almost twenty years ago. Esau couldn’t believe his control was fraying all to hell now.

The reason for it could not be the one he suspected. No, he couldn’t believe it. Esau refused to even think about why his body was rushing with hormones, his cock so hard he could barely keep himself from spurting in his pants. Esau was not going to fucking think about it—but he was going to hunt down the cause of his distress, his intense arousal. If the alluring aroma belonged to an evil piece of shit, Esau would rather be the only one to ever know he’d got the boner of all boners from it.

Hey, I’m gonna do a little reconnaissance, he called out. Oscar and the others stopped and looked back at him. Esau desperately wanted them to not come any closer. He couldn’t hide his erection, and they would probably scent his arousal if they were within a few feet of him, even with the singed odor of the forest. Just want to check something out. Go on, and I’ll probably meet up with everyone back at the rest area.

Esau didn’t wait for their agreement. He shot to his feet and took off, moving briskly at roughly a forty-five degree angle away from the others. Now that he had the scent, he wouldn’t lose it. A quick check behind him assured Esau that the rest of the search party had gone on without him. That eased him some. His damned cock was still hard, and walking was going to rub his pecker raw if he couldn’t adjust himself. Esau stopped, unzipped and tried to find a more comfortable position for his dick.

There didn’t seem to be one. He was tempted to beat off and be done with it, except something told him he’d still be hard afterwards and unsatisfied with his own hand. No sense in bothering then. He tucked it away and hoped he’d have some skin left when he got to where he was going.

The trail he was following wasn’t visual. He rarely found any more disturbed areas on the ground. Slowly, after more than two hours hiking through the burnt-out woods, Esau realized that he wasn’t really even following a scent. No, it was a feeling—a tug like an invisible line was attached to his gut, a fish hook embedded in him, and he was being reeled in whether he wanted to be or not.

Esau stopped. The moon was low, and the sun would soon be rising. What was he doing? He was letting his feline nature lead that was what. And his leopard was not happy that he’d stopped, the cat yowling inside him, and Esau would swear he felt the tearing of claws in his insides. Ridiculous, he knew, but his leopard had its own way of letting him know when it wasn’t happy with him. For all that being a shifter was a spiritual thing—one could lose their shifter spirit and become half a living being, he’d been told—the damned cat certainly could affect the physical, too.

He didn’t want to go on. Esau hated feeling like he had no control. The idea of predestination, whether it was for a mate or the saving of one’s soul, rubbed him the wrong way. And yet his heart pounded, and he wondered what he’d find if he kept moving forward, if he climbed the damned mountain he was on. What, exactly, or who, was waiting for him—or was anyone or thing waiting at all? Did whoever the scent belonged to know Esau was coming? Esau didn’t doubt the owner was male. A female’s scent wouldn’t have done a thing for him. Well, nothing sexual, anyway.

Do I keep going, or turn back? Do I really want to know why I’m on this scent and why my dick hasn’t softened at all since that first whiff? Esau didn’t ask himself if he could turn back. He was afraid the answer to that would just piss him off in nine different directions.

Setting his backpack down for a moment, Esau stretched and tipped his nose to the breeze. The aroma that floated to him on it made him whimper as his need ramped up impossibly higher. He took his water bottle from his pack and uncapped it. The liquid wasn’t cold, but it was cool enough to soothe his throat. He didn’t drink much, not wanting to have to deal with a full bladder and a hard-on, never a fun combination. After recapping the bottle, he returned it to the bag. Esau zipped it up and hefted the pack to his shoulder. The wind kicked up and he fucking ached all the way to his core as more of that tantalizing smell came to him.

Esau set off to find out who it belonged to.

Chapter Two

The trail, whether visceral or the occasional hit of it on the wind, led Esau out of the burnt area eventually. He was in damned good shape and not even breathing hard after the steep climbing he’d been doing. Sometimes the way the body worked fascinated him. He liked the play of muscle rippling beneath the skin, the bulge of it and hardness. Even the veins when they protruded upon exertion were eye-catching periodically.

Esau was bulked with more muscle than most of his cousins, even if they did all tend to look the same. There were a couple who varied, but mostly Esau looked like all the rest of his blood kin—tall, ripped, auburn hair and gold-flecked green eyes. While he wouldn’t call himself classically handsome, he knew there was a certain rough-hewn attractiveness about him that drew enough men to him. Esau rarely went without sex unless he wanted to.

Pausing after a particularly steep climb that had him clinging with his fingers more often than not, Esau leaned against the rock wall behind him. The sun was rising now, casting a golden glow across the land that was almost magical. Even the blackened ground and misshapen stumps left from the fire looked surreal under the sun’s yellow-fingered caress.

It’d been a long time since Esau had appreciated such beauty. He basked in it for a while, relaxing as much as he could while still trying to remain alert. His tightly coiled muscles loosened up a bit, and even his burdensome erection eased off. Esau sighed, a bare breath of a sound as he let nature put on her show for him.

Eventually, he squatted and dug a protein bar out of his pack. He ate it in two bites, wanting the taste of it gone as quickly as possible. Eating a few more of them might have been a good idea, but Esau figured he’d need to be hungrier than he