It’s not every day that a beautiful naked woman falls out of the sky and lands face-first on grizzly shifter Berg Dunn’s hotel balcony. Definitely they don’t usually hop up and demand his best gun. Berg gives the lady a grizzly-sized T-shirt and his cell phone, too, just on style points. And then she’s gone, taking his XXXL heart with her. By the time he figures out she’s a honey badger shifter, it’s too late.

Honey badgers are survivors. Brutal, vicious, ill-tempered survivors. Or maybe Charlie Taylor-MacKilligan is just pissed that her useless father is trying to get them all killed again, and won’t even tell her how. Protecting her little sisters has always been her job, and she’s not about to let some pesky giant grizzly protection specialist with a network of every shifter in Manhattan get in her way. Wait. He’s trying to help? Why would he want to do that? He’s cute enough that she just might let him tag along—that is, if he can keep up . . .

What had she been thinking? Using the “Ride of the Valkyries” as a ringtone? Because that shit waking a person up at six in the morning was just cruel. Really cruel.

And, as always, she’d done it to herself.

Charlie Taylor-MacKilligan slapped her hand against the end table next to the bed, blindly searching for her damn phone. When she touched it, she was relieved. She had no plan to actually get out of bed anytime soon. Not as hung-over as she currently was. But she really wanted that damn ringtone to stop.

Somehow, without even lifting her head from the pillow she had her face buried in, or opening her eyes, Charlie managed to touch the right thing on her phone screen so that she actually answered it.

“What?” she growled.

“Get out,” was the reply. “Get out now.”

Hangover forgotten, Charlie was halfway across the room when they kicked the door open. She turned and ran toward the open sliding glass doors that led to the balcony. She’d just made it outside when something hot rammed into her shoulder, tearing past flesh and muscle and burrowing into bone. The power of it sent her flipping headfirst over the railing.

* * *

“What do you think?” the jackal shifter asked.

Sitting in a club chair in his Milan, Italy, hotel suite, Berg Dunn gazed at the man holding up a black jacket.

“What do I think about what?” Berg asked.

“The jacket. For my show tonight.”

Berg shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You must have an opinion.”

“I don’t. I happily have no opinion on what a grown man who is not me should wear.”

The jackal sighed. “You’re useless.”