Wanted By The Cowboy Tiger (Heroes of Shifter Creek 3) by Clara Moore

Chapter One
     
    Krista
                 
                  It didn’t make sense.
                  Krista Beucourt looked down upon the grave she had just uncovered, wiping the sweat and dirt away from her forehead as the New Mexico heat scorched the land dry. The skeleton in the grave was man on top and beast on bottom, like the cousin of a centaur, but that was not what had Krista confused. What fur remained of the man-beast appeared to belong to that of a tiger. A cougar or a panther she could understand, but not a tiger. Tigers originated from Asia, not the Americas.
                  Krista studied the skeleton closer, hoping for answers. She should feel vindicated. The notoriety of her work as an anthropologist was about to sky rocket, but it was hard to embrace glory when the arms of the skeleton reached out so forlornly, as if he grasped for a lover who was not there.
                  Stepping away from the grave, Krista went to the cooler next to her tent, took out a bottle of water, and pressed it against her cheek. She wore only a pair of shorts and a sports bra, showing off her chocolate skin and curvy body, but it was not enough to ward off the blazing sun. She might as well strip naked. No one would be the wiser. She was out in the desert valley alone, her work a solitary venture. But she kept her designer shorts on. An anthropologist with a passion for fashion, she had paid a small fortune for them in the city, where she lived.
                  “Give me the city any day,” Krista mumbled out loud as she threw a tarp over the bones and went into her tent to hide from the sun and to process all she had learned so far from her discovery.
                  She had not traveled out into the dry wilderness to find a man-beast. She’d been in search of a lost group of settlers who had disappeared from the region in the 1800’s, when it was still the Wild West. A marking on a cave nearby of a cross had led her to this area. Her radar equipment had done the rest, picking up the skeleton as she scanned the land.
                  Technically, Krista was not authorized to be here. She had been unable to retrieve a permit from the local authorities, and so she could not call in a team to dig with her. She had assumed her permit had been rejected due to a bias that she was an anthropologist, meant to study human behavior, and not an archaeologist, who usually led digs for lost artifacts and people. She even suspected that the local authorities did not want a young, posh city girl uncovering the treasures of the frontier. But as she outlined a drawing of the man-beast in her sketch pad, she began to wonder if perhaps the local authorities had known the secrets within the sand, secrets they wanted to stay buried.
                  But why a tiger? Unless... her mind began to race, growing excited. Perhaps the man-beast was not some ancient creature legends were created around, like she originally assumed based on numerous mythologies she had encountered in her studies. Perhaps this man was someone who had travelled from Asia, or had ancestors who did. Perhaps he was connected to the lost settlers she was looking for...
                  “Hey sunshine,” a deep, sexy voice greeted, popping his head into the tent.
                  “Derek! What if I had been changing,” Krista protested, though truly she’d jump at the chance to be naked around Derek, to feel his piercing blue eyes on her curves and his sturdy lips trailing kisses down her skin. Hot cowboys were hard to find in the city, especially ones with the gentle but authoritative nature Derek encompassed.
                  “You’re practically naked as it is, so why would it matter?” he returned with good humor, smiling brightly under his oversized cowboy hat. “What you got there?”
                  “Nothing,”