Page 1 of Kidnapped By the Beast (Beasts of the Kindred #11)
ALEXANDRA
“Show me your breasts.”
“Excuse me?” Alexandra Tatum—Lexi to her friends—stared up uncertainly at the huge Beast Kindred looming over her.
To be fair to Dr. Brandt, she was sure he didn’t actually mean to loom. It was just hard to avoid since he was seven feet tall and extremely muscular. His air of austere dominance wasn’t helped by the fact that he was wearing a white lab coat which made him look stern and aloof.
Her prospective boss also had thick black hair which was pulled back and gathered at the nape of his powerful neck, making her wonder how long it actually was. He was a Beast Kindred and his eyes, gleaming like pure, melted gold proved it.
Lexi had never seen a Kindred wearing a lab coat before but then, she hadn’t seen many Kindred warriors at all until she had come up to the Mother Ship for this job interview.
But now she was beginning to wonder what kind of job she was interviewing for!
Her best friend, Natalie—who had married a Blood Kindred and moved to the Kindred Mother Ship not that long ago—had told her the job had to do with some kind of hazardous duty on a distant and dangerous planet.
“That’s why it pays so much,” she’d explained, when Lexi had called her up crying, asking if she knew of anywhere she could make a lot of money quickly. “It’s like combat pay or something. But why do you need money all of a sudden, Lexi? Are you having trouble paying off your student loans?”
As a matter of fact, Lexi’s student loans were a crushing financial burden.
She should have known better than to get a Masters degree in 18th Century English Literature.
But she had chosen to follow her dream of becoming a professor at an Ivy League school and spending her life sharing her love of literature with like-minded students.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t get a job at a reputable college without first earning a Ph.D. And that was going to cost so much more than the Masters she had earned, Lexi was afraid she would be buried in debt for life!
So she had put her dreams on pause for a little while to get a job and try to pay down the debt—which was how she found herself teaching high school kids, most of whom didn’t know Jane Austen from Alexander Pope and cared even less.
It was a soul destroying job, mainly because the school district Lexi was in kept putting more and more restrictions on teachers and paying them less and less, but she kept at it, chipping away at her student debt a little at a time.
She was paying twice the regular payment every month and hoping to be debt free and able to start her Ph.D in a few more years.
The only reason she was able to keep paying so much, though, was that she had moved back in with her Aunt Helen and Uncle Herbert. The kindly old couple had raised her after her parents died and when Lexi had admitted the predicament she was in, they had welcomed her back with open arms.
But none of that was why she needed money so badly—it was her Uncle Herbert’s debt she was worried about paying now, not her own.
Lexi still shivered when she remembered the scene she’d witnessed when she had followed her elderly uncle through the rain last Wednesday night.
Uncle Herbert had been acting cagey and looking extremely anxious for months.
So when he snuck out to his old pickup truck without telling either Aunt Helen or Lexi where he was going, Lexi had felt compelled to follow.
She didn’t know what she expected to see.
Uncle Herbert was too old to be having an affair and he wasn’t one to gamble or drink more than a beer or two at a time.
So she’d been surprised when she followed him in her beat-up Honda Civic and found herself on the wrong side of town at a rundown dive bar called Bad Intentions which was known for having some pretty rough customers.
Lexi had kept her raincoat zipped and the hood up as she trailed her elderly uncle through the bar. Neon signs flashed on the walls and the atmosphere was thick was cigarette smoke and the smell of cheap whiskey and stale beer.
Uncle Herbert had gone straight to the back of the bar and walked around a corner, presumably leading to the back room. Confused about what he was doing, Lexi had followed him, keeping to the shadows and stepping lightly on the balls of her feet to keep from making a sound.
Down a dark hallway she saw a dim light shining. Uncle Herbert went down the hall and turned the corner again and Lexi crept after him, staying in the shadows until she could peek around the second corner.
There stood Uncle Herbert, twisting his John Deer cap in his hands with a worried look on his kindly, wrinkled face. He was standing in front of a green, felt covered poker table where a number of men seemed to be in the middle of a card game.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Butcher,” Uncle Herbert was saying to a burly, middle-aged man who had a heavy five o’clock shadow and a cigar stub clenched in his teeth.
“But I can’t make the whole payment if you keep raising the interest rate!
When I took that loan from you, you said it would be twenty-five percent.
Now you say fifty—where am I supposed to get the extra money from? ”
“I don’t give a fuck where you get it from,” the man called Butcher snarled. “But you’d better have it soon, old man. I’d hate to have to send some of my boys to teach you a lesson!”
“But that interest rate isn’t what we agreed on!” Uncle Herbert exclaimed.
Butcher had looked up, his squinty eyes gleaming through the haze of cigar smoke.
“The interest rate just went up to seventy-five percent. See that? It is what I say it is. And if you mouth off one more time, I’ll send some of my boys to your house to see about giving you some free knee surgery. How would you like that?”
“But—” Uncle Herbert began.
“Get rid of him!” Butcher made a curt gesture to several of the burly men standing around the room. “He’s interrupting my streak!”
Two of the big bouncer-looking guys had grabbed Uncle Herbert by his arms and physically tossed him down the hallway. He stumbled and might have fallen and really hurt himself if Lexi hadn’t stepped forward and caught him.
“Oh, Lexi-girl!” he exclaimed, when he recognized her. “What are you doing here?”
“I think I’d better ask you the same question, Uncle Herbert,” Lexi told him. “Come on—we need to talk.”
She had gotten her elderly Uncle out of the bar and back to his truck where he confessed something awful—he owed the man named Butcher a huge amount of money.
“Everything’s gotten so high this year and they raised the taxes on the house, you know,” he said to Lexi as they sat in the front seat of his pick-up and stared at the flashing neon signs of the bar they’d just left.
“The bank wouldn’t loan me any money—of course they wouldn’t,” he added bitterly.
“If we can’t pay the taxes, they’re the ones who get to swoop in and take our house and sell it out from under us!
So I went to Butcher, because I heard he made personal loans.
Only I never dreamed he’d keep raising the rates on me!
” He shook his head, looking defeated. “I only borrowed two thousand dollars, but now I owe him so much more!”
“How much more?” Lexi had asked, determined to know the worst.
Uncle Herbert took a deep breath.
“Twenty thousand,” he admitted in a hoarse whisper. “And he wants it by the end of the month! Lexi-girl—what am I going to do?”
“Oh, Uncle Herbert!” Lexi felt sick with worry for him. He had always been a strong man with an easy, open smile. Now he looked so broken and bent and old. She hated to see the man who was the closest thing she had to a father looking so defeated.
“I don’t know how I’m going to pay.” He shook his head.
“But you shouldn’t have to!” Lexi exclaimed. “Butcher can’t keep raising his rates without telling you! That’s what they call ‘predatory lending practices’. Don’t you have some kind of contract you signed with him telling the original interest rate he quoted you?”
Uncle Herbert shook his head glumly.
“It was a handshake deal,” he said. “Shoulda known better than to trust a fella who looks like him.”
Privately, Lexi thought the same thing, but she didn’t want to make her uncle feel worse.
“Well I’m sure what he’s doing is against the law—especially threatening to send people to come break your legs!” she exclaimed. “We’ll go to the police.”
Uncle Herbert shook his head.
“Did you get a good look at those two who threw me out? They’re both on the Police Force—I don’t dare say a thing or it will get back to him for sure!”
At that, Lexi didn’t know what to say. It seemed like they were stuck—but she had never been a quitter.
“Don’t you worry about this, Uncle Herbert,” she told him, lifting her chin. “I’ll find a way to get that money for you—I promise I will.”
“But how, Lexi-girl?” He shook his graying head. “I don’t see how you could do that.”
“I’ll find a way,” Lexi repeated stubbornly. “Don’t you worry.”
But finding twenty thousand dollars was much easier said than done. Even if she sold her ancient car, she couldn’t get more than five thousand for it and she really didn’t have anything else that was worth selling.
Lexi thought about stripping or trying to be a cam girl, but she didn’t see how she could make that work.
She had a pretty face with long brown hair and green eyes, but she was definitely plus sized.
She had extremely large, sloping breasts, full hips, and a behind that was much too big to fit the normal standards of beauty.
In fact, all of her was too big—even her fingers and toes were chubby.
Plus, she was shy about showing her bare body to men she didn’t know—she felt self-conscious, like they would be constantly judging her and thinking that she needed to lose weight.
Also, her career as a teacher would be over if anyone found out she was camming or stripping—and it seemed like someone always found out.