Dark and Forbidden Luca's Secret Baby: Hockey Playing Lion Shifter Dads

By Abigail Raines

As a girl from the wrong side of the tracks and the wrong lion pride, I'm used to scraping by.

It's hard enough looking after my brother who's going nowhere and my dad who started drinking when my mom died and hasn't stopped.

But being under the thumb of Blake, a brutal alpha who won't leave me alone, doesn't make it any easier.

When I share one night with Luca, the captain of St. Dominic's hockey team, The Cougars, and an alpha of a pride that has feuded with mine for generations, I think that's all it is: One night.

Luca is kind, strong, and beautiful. He's also way too good for me.

One night.

That's it.

But then I get pregnant.

If I seek asylum with Luca's pride, I can leave my sad, hard life behind and Blake won't be able to say a thing about it.

It's the perfect solution to all my problems.

Except that Luca isn't the father...Blake is.

One lie and my life is fixed.

No one will ever know...right?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abigail Raines
• Release date: Sep 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215070307

Book preview

Dark and Forbidden Luca’s Secret Baby

Hockey Playing Lion Shifter Dads

A sports paranormal romance series

Abigail Raines

© Copyright 2019 - All rights reserved.

It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Chapter One:  Chloe

Chapter Two:  Luca

Chapter Three:  Chloe

Chapter Four:  Luca

Chapter Five:  Chloe

Chapter Six:  Luca

Chapter Seven:  Blake

Chapter Eight:  Chloe

Chapter Nine:  Luca

Chapter Ten:  Chloe

Chapter Eleven: Luca

Chapter Twelve:  Chloe

Chapter Thirteen:  Luca

Chapter Fourteen:  Chloe

Epilogue

Chapter One:  Chloe

Igroaned with relief as I slumped down on a bench in the break room at the back of Tom’s. A twelve-hour shift never seemed that bad in the morning, but those last couple of hours were brutal. I slipped off one shoe, rubbing my foot. I needed new sneakers. The pair I was wearing had paper thin soles by now. I knew I should have replaced them a year ago. My shifter’s strength and stamina gave me some room there, but I relied on it too heavily sometimes to carry me through rough days on too little money. Now I slipped my shoe back on and forced myself to stand. If I let myself sit too long, I wouldn’t want to get up again. That’s how I sometimes ended up sitting there in Tom’s break room for an hour after work, staring into space, unwilling to get myself back on my aching feet and out the door.

Okay, I muttered. I made my way out, nodding goodbye to Mindy, a wolf shifter, and Jeff, a regular ol’ human who had no idea he worked with magical folk. I grabbed my parka from the coat rack by the door and slipped it on, yawning as I made my way down the hall and outside into the biting chill of Stone River, Minnesota. It was winter and, as always, I pitied the fragile humans. If it was just a little uncomfortably cold for me, I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to have to live in this weather without a shifter’s constitution. Tom’s was just a few blocks from the woods and I knew the route through the woods to the shabby little house I rented with my father and my brother like I knew the back of my hand. I shoved my hands in my pockets, and hurried along, eager to shift and stretch my legs for the run back to the house. I had a car I shared with my father; an old beater that barely ran. But on a day-to-day basis, I didn’t bother. It was just as easy to shift and run to work and it always woke me up in the morning and was somehow relaxing too on the way home.

I glanced around as I trotted into the woods, carrying my purse, just to make sure no troublesome humans were anywhere near me. I could already smell a few shifters up ahead in the forest, acquaintances from the big pride I was born into and raised in, but nobody who would give me any trouble. Once safe under the canopy of the trees, I shifted into my cougar form, my clothes and things all shifting with me; a convenient feature of being a shifter. I stretched for a minute, crouching on my front paws with my butt in the air, just enjoying the feel of the chill air on my thick winter coat.

I often get playful in my lion form. I find it harder to translate that feeling when I’m human. So it’s especially nice to get to shift every day. I know that some shifters are much more assimilated into the human world and not too involved in the daily life of a pride or pack. I don’t know how they get by, just mentally and emotionally. I consider myself a lion as much as a human, or maybe more so. I’m both and neither. It’s a feeling only shifters can understand.

Now I bounded through the forest, glancing at fellow members of my pride as I ran by, but not stopping. My paws were still as sore as my human feet were and I was still exhausted from a long day at a crappy job I didn’t love, but none of it mattered now as I ran like the wind through the trees, leaping over familiar obstacles like the frozen over creek and the fallen pine that still hadn’t been cleared. As tired as I was, I felt like I reached home all too soon. I couldn’t see our little house from the woods, but I knew this whole town well enough. Even without little landmarks like the knot in a certain tree or a circular formation of stones, the smells changed. I could smell every little scent in my vicinity of the forest and some scents wafting around outside of them; the ice rink, the barbecue stand, the Dairy Queen, the lumber yard... I could smell my own house from half a mile away so I knew when I was near. My father was home and my brother wasn’t. I slowed my run and didn’t bother to shift till I was well out of the woods. Our little shack is in a pretty deserted spot and the nearest homes and businesses to it are all shifters anyhow as is most of this town.

Once I was trotting up to our door, I shifted back and shivered again as the cold hit my still too human skin. I stomped on our welcome mat, knocking the snow from my boots, and let myself in. Like usual, my dad was in his big chair in front of the TV. Dad was retired. Or rather, dad’s bad days after my mom died had turned into retirement and now he just collected social security and drank his feelings in whiskey, and once in a blue moon he’d go running in the woods.

He used to be an alpha. Our pride, like most lion prides, has multiple alphas. My dad unseated a bad one back in the day. He was a real leader back then. Maybe not a great leader but a reasonably competent one. Now he was just a sad old alcoholic and I’d never been able to help him beyond keeping him fed and borderline healthy. Just walking in to see him like this made me sad. It made me sad every day.

Hey, Chloe, my dad said, not looking away from the TV.

Our place was shabby and dimly lit, but I kept it clean and uncluttered. I think I had an insecurity about being considered trash. We were definitely considered trash by some prides in other towns, just by virtue of being poor. Lions can be a little bit classist like that (although we’re not nearly as bad as dragons). I knew I shouldn’t care and that there were plenty of other prides like mine near Stone River. There was St. Dominic, for example. Not that I could ever point to St. Dom as an example. Their pride had rivaled mine for generations. I was fuzzy on why exactly. But that was the thing about feuds. They went on forever until eventually nobody could remember why the fight had even started.

I checked my phone, yawning again before I took off my parka and hung it by the door.

Gabe’s not home yet? I said softly.

Gabe was my little brother. He’d just turned nineteen, and it wasn’t as if a nineteen-year-old had to know exactly where they were going in life but I worried about him. High school had been great for him. He’d been a varsity high school star and the both of us had been sure he would get recruited to The Stone River Fangs.

But I hadn’t counted on the bad blood between my father and Blake, the Captain of the Fangs, as well as one of our pride’s four alphas. It was Blake’s father who my dad had unseated all those years ago. He’s never directly said so, but I was sure that was the reason Blake wouldn’t put Gabe on the team and it had been a hit to Gabe’s confidence. Meanwhile, I know he wasn’t going to leave the pride and try to find a spot on a different team. He felt too loyal to my dad. I didn’t know why. My dad had never done anything for him. But I knew they shared a bond over missing my mom. My mom’s death hit me hard too, but Gabe had been a kid. It hit him harder.

I went to the kitchen and started making a simple dinner. Hamburger Helper might have been cheap, but it got the job done well enough for us when we didn’t feel like hunting. I just hoped Gabe would get home soon. I also hoped he hadn’t gotten into any fights. He just didn’t have much going for him right now, taking odd jobs around town and unable to find regular work after high school. That was a perfect recipe for trouble. He’d started hanging around with young, troublemaking lions who I didn’t much care for and he let himself get tangled up in their bullshit. But I tried not to worry about that too much as I made dinner, while listening to music on my phone.

Not that I succeeded in not worrying. My entire life, I’d always felt like we were scraping by. But since my mom’s death, everything had just felt so much harder. I was always worried about either my dad or my brother and too often it felt like nobody bothered to worry about me.

Hey. I heard the muted voice of Gabe in the living room just as I was leaving the Hamburger Helper to simmer. Gabe swept in and I grabbed a root beer from the fridge for him, knowing it was his favorite. But when I turned to look at him, I gasped reflexively.

"Gabe! Gabe was all beat up. My dad wouldn’t know because he probably hadn’t looked him in the face. But Gabe had a shiner and a split lip, plus a bruised cheek, and he was limping a little. Goddammit."

Don’t look at me like that, Gabe grumbled, sitting down gingerly at the kitchen table. "It was a couple St. Dom’s guys. Showed up on our turf. But I