Her Tiger To Take

Resisting her is impossible.

After a lifetime of fighting his own kind,
Nikolai Chernikov has been in self-imposed isolation for years. The
taint of his father’s crimes hangs over him, and of all the
infamous Chernikov brothers, Nick is most like their father. The
fear that madness is only one bad decision away has kept Nick from
seeking a mate for more than ten years. Then
she
comes into
his life—the sexiest, most stunning tiger shifter Nick has ever
known. Tatiana is everything he wants. And everything he can’t
have.

He’s the only man she’ll accept.

Tatiana Loban-Gupta has tried to find a mate
for more than three years. She was starting to lose hope when she
caught Nick’s scent and her entire body lit up with need and
longing. She’ll defy the rules of their people to answer the
combustible chemistry between them, even though getting caught
could ruin everything. But Nick’s family history is a wall between
them she’s not sure she can breach. A fight with a werewolf pack
and facing off against the other tiger males seems easy compared to
fighting Nick’s demons. Convincing him to return to the Mate Run
will be the hardest thing she’s ever had to do, but for Tatiana,
failure is not an option.

HER TIGER TO
TAKE

Copyright © 2015 by Katrina Tipton

Edited by Practical Proofing

Edited by Hot Tree Editing

Cover by The Killion Group

Published by T&D Publishing

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be
used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. The names,
characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s
imagination or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be
construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead,
actual events, locale or organizations is entirely
coincidental.

eBooks are
not
transferable.

They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an
infringement on the copyright of this work.

Introduction

Copyright

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Thank You

Tiger Shifters, Book 5: Excerpt

Books by Kat Simons

Author Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

For my boys

Nikolai Chernikov knew the woman was a tiger
shifter the instant she stepped into his diner. He’d felt her the
moment she came into town. No tigers lived anywhere near Eirene,
which was why he’d settled here five years ago.

Worse still, the tiger invading his territory
was
her
. Tatiana Loban-Gupta. She was more dangerous to him
than all the rest of his people combined.

She sat at the counter and glanced around the
cozy space, taking in the bustling breakfast crowd. For several
moments, Nick couldn’t think past his raging heartbeat. She was
stunning. Golden blonde hair, dark brown eyes, perfect heart-shaped
lips, and a figure so lush it made his mouth water.

She was even more beautiful than she’d been
six years ago, the first time he’d seen her. They hadn’t met then.
She hadn’t even noticed him, much to his relief. But that moment
was fixed in his memory.

He’d been at the elders’ compound in West
Virginia, stalking through the corridors deep in thought after a
meeting with his grandmother, where she’d once again tried to talk
him into returning to the Mate Run. He’d walked into a large, open
atrium and looked up.

There Tatiana stood with two males and a
female, smiling, laughing, and talking as if the world hadn’t just
turned upside down. Her scent washed over him, a mix of
honeysuckle, female, and her basic essence, robbing him of breath.
His pulse hammered hard. Something about her scent called to him on
a basic level, beyond anything he’d experienced before; primal and
insistent. His tiger lifted its head and growled.

She wasn’t just beautiful and sexy. She
wasn’t just a rare and delectable female tiger shifter. His tiger
insisted she was
his
.

Only a moment passed, a few heartbeats, then
he’d turned and escaped to his room at the complex, running from
the spark of electricity he’d felt for her. He’d tried to tell
himself it was for her own good. He was one of the infamous
Chernikov brothers. No tigress in her right mind wanted to be
saddled with him. No tigress gave the Chernikov boys a second
glance.

She’d grown even curvier over the years,
curves that had nearly brought him to his knees four months ago
when she’d come out of nowhere and introduced herself. His damned
bad luck to have been at the elders’ compound again at the exact
same time she’d been there. He’d managed to avoid her for six
years. And all that careful avoidance had gone to hell.

Damn her, what was she doing here? Didn’t she
know better?

His tiger raised its head, scenting the air
and absorbing her deliciously unique fragrance. That scent had
haunted him since he’d first picked it up. The tiger in him saw a
mate.

The man in him saw trouble.

He waited for her to order coffee from Jane
before he came out of the kitchen to greet her. He had to settle
himself, control his reaction, or he was likely to scare off all
his customers and ruin the comfortable life he’d built for himself
here.

As soon as he stepped into the main room, her
gaze locked on to his. She smiled, just a little, and raised her
coffee mug to her lips as she watched him approach.

Fuck. He was in serious trouble.

“Tatiana,” he greeted her from the opposite
side of the counter. Safer to have at least some obstacle between
them, even if it was only the flimsy barrier of wood and Formica.
“What brings you here?”

“You.”

Well, she didn’t mince words. He liked that
about her. “You shouldn’t have come.”

“What else could I do? You’ve been avoiding
me for months now. You ignore my letters and emails. You didn’t
leave me much choice.”

“You could have stayed away.”

“You know better than that.”

No, he didn’t. But that wasn’t a conversation
they could have in public. “You want something to eat?”

“What’s good?”

“Everything. My omelets are really
popular.”

She wrinkled her nose and shivered. “No,
thanks. Maybe just a side of bacon?”

He hid a smile and nodded. For some reason,
most tigers hated eggs. He wasn’t one of them, but obviously,
Tatiana didn’t share his taste.

“Be right back.” He felt her gaze along his
spine all the way back to the kitchen.

Every muscle was stiff and tight as he worked
to contain instincts better kept in check. His tiger didn’t want to
listen to civilized logic, but giving in to those thoughts would be
disastrous.

He’d moved to this isolated little town in
Colorado and stayed as far away from his own people as was possible
for five years. Occasionally, he saw his brothers when they stopped
in to visit. But they had their own lives, so emails and phone
calls had become the default. Outside of that situation four months
back with Mitch and his new fiancée and the subsequent trip Nick
had had to take to the elders’ compound, he hadn’t been around his
own kind in a long time.

Which suited him and the other tigers.

Tatiana being here was going to bring down a
world of trouble onto his head. The kind of trouble he’d gone out
of his way to avoid. The older he got, the more he just wanted
peace. Tatiana was the exact opposite of peace. She was excitement,
chaos, passion, reckless abandon. And despite what his tiger kept
telling him about her, he did not want to go back to fighting every
single day of his damned life.

He finished the bacon but sent the plate out
to her via his waitress Jane.

He was a coward.

Scrubbing his hands over his face, he let out
a quiet groan. “Fuck.”

He stared at the wall for a long moment, and
then gave in to necessity. He couldn’t ignore her anymore. He
couldn’t pretend she meant nothing to him. But he couldn’t have her
either, and she needed to get that through her thick skull.

Which meant they had to talk.

But damn, if that wasn’t going to be the
hardest conversation of his life.

Tatiana worked hard to keep her knee from
bouncing as she ate her way through the plate of bacon. She was
putting everything on the line being here, but she didn’t have a
choice. She couldn’t continue on as she’d been indefinitely. She
had to talk Nick into returning to the Mate Run,
her
Run.

She assumed a relaxed pose and tried not to
let her nerves show, but her stomach danced with both giddy
excitement and dread. In an attempt to distract herself, she
studied the little diner Nick owned. It was a charming place with
bright walls, polished wooden floors, and tables decked out with
the kind of paper coverings kids could draw on. She smiled as one
little boy, probably no older than two, scribbled furiously on the
paper with two different colored crayons, then raised his hands in
triumph to present his masterpiece.

The sight tightened a band around her chest
and she had to look away.

Despite what the others said, she
did
want children. She’d always wanted them. Lots of them.

But she refused to mate with just any tiger,
and until she’d caught Nick’s scent four months ago, she’d
despaired of ever finding a suitable mate. Every male who’d come
forward to participate in her Mate Run fell short. She tried to
keep an open mind, but when the time came to choose, she just…kept
running. The idea of any of them catching her filled her with
dread.

You weren’t supposed to dread being with the
man who might possibly be the father of your children.

The elders had tried to help, and Tiana had
honestly tried to select a potential mate. Her Run had been opened
to males from around the US, a much larger pool than normally
participated. Usually only the males located near a female’s
territory took part in her Run. But then, usually the females knew
who they wanted before they even started to run.

For reasons she’d never been able to
understand,
none
of the tigers she’d met did anything for
her. She wasn’t trying to be obstinate or difficult. She just
wanted to
want
the man she’d spend three days having sex
with, and so far, not one of them had sparked that chemical, basic
lust in her.