Seduced by the Moon
Seduced by the Moon
Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
Into the woods… Skylar Donovan comes to her late father’s Colorado cabin to find answers that explain his death. Instead, she meets a handsome Forest Ranger with a dark side, a stranger who appears in her dreams as something other than a man…Werewolf Gavin was bitten by a monster in the hills he has sworn to protect and has committed his life to searching for the beast. Now Gavin must protect Skylar from the evil he is stalking – but the forbidden lust that burns between them might be the greatest danger of all.
“Does the approach of a full moon make animals restless? I think I hear them at night,” Skylar said.
Now she was pushing things. She was an idiot.
Gavin came closer than she should have allowed and faced her squarely. He smiled, but with an expression of sadness. Heartbreaking sadness.
Why?
Whatever she had expected, it hadn’t been that.
As he slowly moved toward her, she felt every inch he traveled as if the air between them had been compressed. When he stopped, they were nearly chest to chest, and she had to look up to see his face.
Liquid lava coursed through her veins. She was hot enough to be combustible and was breathing hard … all these reactions serving to confirm that she hadn’t been wrong about one thing. Something was going on between them on a crazy personal level. Their chemistry had been instantaneous and impossible to ignore.
Animal magnetism taken to extremes.
Lust at first sight.
Dreams trespassing into the realm of reality.
LINDA THOMAS-SUNDSTROM writes contemporary and paranormal romance novels for Mills & Boon
Desire™ and Mills & Boon
Nocturne™. A teacher by day and a writer by night, Linda lives in the West, juggling teaching, writing, family and caring for a big stretch of land. She swears she has a resident Muse who sings so loudly, she often wears earplugs in order to get anything else done. But she has big plans to eventually get to all those ideas. Visit Linda at lindathomas-sundstrom.com (http://lindathomas-sundstrom.com) or on Facebook.
Seduced
by the Moon
Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To my family, those here and those gone, who always believed I had a story to tell.
Contents
Cover (#u70474a0b-d1dd-586b-a16a-7d2949fb0016)
Introduction (#ue2330bc8-77a0-533c-a99c-2328fb2169ad)
About the Author (#ud8f9329c-c0c2-55ab-bb8c-c7a0d7a78b53)
Title Page (#u22fcf517-1472-5edf-a7c6-03530270ef66)
Dedication (#u683296e6-0f70-58eb-be7b-d475caebcc79)
Chapter 1 (#u7d7b4f63-9c07-507f-af72-ce58cb0a7302)
Chapter 2 (#u4447796d-9eb9-5c64-a3b3-d48af140cf5b)
Chapter 3 (#uc2348519-93ae-510c-b9c2-a95fe2af51c2)
Chapter 4 (#u829470d7-82aa-5a29-95bf-a87ebd5eff0d)
Chapter 5 (#u91544c47-056f-55a5-a195-463cf74eacf0)
Chapter 6 (#uecb034f8-924a-5c92-b410-5f5b2f463ddf)
Chapter 7 (#u2b3abd92-731e-52d0-ad82-46e81daf261b)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_9996bda7-af32-583f-b4b4-22620c99668e)
Skylar Donovan was being haunted by the same dream.
Four nights in a row.
An erotic, half awake, half asleep nightmare from which she awoke in tangled sheets, body slick with sweat, with her hand between her thighs.
Looked like nothing had changed tonight, either.
The minute Skylar closed her eyes, the dream returned. Moonlight lit the mountains. Shadows edged that light. And through the dark came the echo of a man’s voice: a mesmerizing wordless whisper that was the equivalent of a highly charged sexual invitation.
Her dream guy was there again. Hell, it was impossible to tune him out. The remote Colorado cabin she bunked in had no TV for white noise, and she’d left her headphones behind.
He called to her, and she responded to the raw sensuality in his voice. Though his words weren’t clear, his provocative tone left her ready to do something about the effect he had on her, whether he was real or not.
These damn dreams would have topped the charts as the best wet dreams ever...if it were an actual man she lusted for instead of a hallucination. Something her mind had created as a distraction from recent painful events. Everyone knew that fantasy was a notoriously viable way of coping with loss.
Problem was, this nighttime lustfest wouldn’t stop. Neither would the questions she didn’t dare acknowledge out loud.
Who was he?
What was he?
What would this creature’s skin feel like against her? How about his mouth? With a voice so totally seductive, surely the rest of him would be sublime.
Although Skylar knew the difference between dreams and reality, there were no clear-cut definitions here. With her eyes closed, she fell under his spell. His image stuck to her with supernatural glue.
Wide shoulders above a broad muscular chest. Thick torso. Narrow waist and hips. Dark hair worn long. His stance was determined, his face sometimes raised to the star-filled sky. And over everything was an aura of wildness that catapulted things into nightmare territory. Because there wasn’t the slightest chance of mistaking her nocturnal seducer for a normal human being. He was, in fact, anything but normal.
He was a magnetic combination of man and beast with a ridiculous twist on the DNA sequencing of two species that couldn’t share the same physical space in reality. A unique being with its own name.
Werewolf.
Hell. Yes. Werewolf.
With a presence powerful enough to sift through REM.
Of course these were just dreams. She got that. She wasn’t an idiot.
Well, maybe she was. Because...
She was so very hot for the creature that stood on that hilltop and looked like a man at times, though that outline was deceptive. She felt vulnerable when he was around, and slightly out of control. But maybe she was only an eavesdropper, and he waited for someone else. Something else.
Was the moon his mistress? Wasn’t that how things worked for werewolves?
Why, then, was he yanking her chain?
A sudden spike in her heart rate, far beyond the usual range, jolted Skylar’s eyes open. Anxious, she rolled over on the mattress and sat up, sweat trickling between her breasts, heart pounding too damn fast.
Tonight was different somehow. This time the voice had seemed closer and very, very real. It left an echo in the room.
Not dreaming now?
To prove that, Skylar slipped from the bed and padded to the window. She moved the curtain, expecting to catch sight of her velvety tormentor, wondering again why she allowed a figment of her imagination to continue to interrupt what should have been a good night’s sleep.
She saw nothing out there, but God, had she actually expected to?
Resisting the urge to laugh at herself, Skylar rested her forehead on the cool window glass. Probably she had allowed her mind to supercharge some poor nocturnal creature’s cry into something it wasn’t. That’s all those sounds were.
Not a voice.
She wasn’t nuts, just tired, worn out and sleep deprived. She also supposed that these nighttime escapades could be tied to the power of suggestion, caused by the discovery of her dad’s cache of items in the attic. That old trunk and the things she found inside it.
Her dad, it seemed, kept dirty little secrets to himself here in Colorado, so far away from his family. And it had taken coming to this remote cabin to go through his things for Skylar to realize she hadn’t really known David Donovan at all.
One more glance outside, at the night, and she turned back to the bed. Curling up on the mattress with her knees to her chest, she used her usual abundance of common sense to reason things out.
Maybe dreaming about a supernatural lover merely showcased a healthy need to get past the termination of her relationship with Danny, her ex-fiancé. She had left him a couple of months ago, before actually getting to the altar, and everybody needed time to adapt.
It wouldn’t take a professional opinion to point out that the sexy dreams she seemed committed to having could be her mind’s way of filling the void made by that kind of change, especially since it was followed fairly closely by her father’s untimely death...
The father who, as a famous psychiatrist dealing in other peoples’ problems, had, it turned out, sometimes dabbled in his own world of make-believe.
Werewolves were his idea, after all.
Not only had her dad believed those creatures existed, he must have thought they roamed the mountains of Colorado, right outside this cabin’s door—which was likely the reason he often retreated here under the premise of needing alone time.
Beasts, for God’s sake.
Like the one in my dreams.
So maybe fantasies were contagious and could be inherited, and stumbling on her father’s secrets had spawned her own nocturnal reveries.
Skylar pulled the blanket up to her neck. Seconds later, she flipped onto her back, staring at the ceiling of the small rustic bedroom.
“Screw the pity party,” she murmured. Because truthfully one thing, at least, was clear. She felt liberated by the empty spot on her ring finger.
Seeking comfort in the lavender-scented feather pillow, Skylar vowed to stick to her plan: finish going through and packing up her father’s things and then return to her apartment in Miami, where her wedding dress still hung on a hanger. The dress would have to be returned eventually. If she ran into Danny, she’d just have to deal.
She could do that.
In truth, her life sucked sometimes. No mother, no father and no fiancé...but what the heck? She had three loving sisters and the deed to this cabin.
“Bring it on, sexy nightmare!”
Plumping up the pillow, Skylar blew out a breath and dared to close her eyes. Refusing to behave, her heart spiked again.
Swear to God, she was sure the man in her dreams was out there now, waiting for her. Whispering to her. Compelling her to listen.
And why the hell shouldn’t she?
* * *
Gavin Harris turned his face to the night wind, catching a whiff of a fragrance completely foreign to the rest of the forest smells surrounding him. It was a sudden sensory bombardment that didn’t belong here and was, even as he breathed it in, a detour from his agenda.
Eyes shut, he wrapped his senses around the uniqueness of the rich, sweet scent, separating each component with his fine-tuned wolf senses.
Female, he concluded. Young, supple flesh. Musky pheromones. Traces of soap and denim. Tantalizing feminine scents that weren’t in any way related to the more monstrous odors he sought tonight, but were oh so compelling.
He shook his head hard to ward off the distraction, and muttered, “Forget it.” Investigating the source of these new smells would mean detouring from his objective, which had to remain his greatest priority. He was on watch, hunting his own version of big game.
That objective was an important one. Vital.
But damn...
The rosy feminine perfume floating to him from the cabin in the clearing below him caused a visceral physical reaction similar to being shocked by a cattle prod. All the little hairs on his arms stood up. Tingling nerves made his muscles twitch.
He smelled the woman in that cabin as easily as if she stood in front of him, in person.
And she was alone.
Stepping forward brought the cabin into view through a gap in the trees. Gavin leveled his gaze on the dark windows and inhaled deeply, concluding that the woman down there was the only human in the area at the moment. She occupied a cabin that had been originally been built by old Tom Jeevers, making it smell a whole hell of a lot better than its line of former occupants had.
Something else?
The agitated, tinnier scent of anxiousness wafted to him, adding a second, spicier layer to the woman’s floral bouquet. Either she was anticipating something, or was in some kind of trouble. A fight with a companion, lover or husband, maybe, that caused a ruffle in the atmosphere? The long-anticipated arrival of a lover who was late?
“Lucky bastard,” Gavin muttered. If she had a husband, that guy would get to smell her every damn day.
With a quick glance up at the sky, Gavin widened his stance, knowing he shouldn’t linger too long in the moonlight. Though the moon wasn’t completely full tonight, that bugger was close enough to that phase to affect him in adverse ways. All the enhanced senses were just a start.
A quick glance down the length of his body found it not actually foreign, but increasingly unfamiliar as each lunar phase progressed. The extra muscle that he hadn’t worked out in a gym to maintain helped to add bulk. His height had stretched a good inch or two above his normal six-one.
His jeans were tighter. Shirts now strained at the seams. The only measurements remaining the same were his feet, slammed into his boots.
Then there was his hair. The tangle of chin-length waves were darker and much longer than he was used to, tickling his ears, making him wonder how long he’d been patrolling this section of the mountain ignoring most of the perks of civilization.
Could it have been two years?
Damn if everything hadn’t changed in the span of those years. Out of necessity, he’d pretty much become a loner. And though he patrolled this area of the Rockies regularly, during those past two years four people had died. One of them was the last man to occupy the cabin now emitting a woman’s enticing pheromones.
Oh, yes. And within those two years he, Gavin Harris, Colorado Forest Ranger, had regrettably, unforgettably, become a beast tethered by a silver chain to the devilish disk in the sky. Moon. As absurd as that seemed.
He closed his eyes again, shook his head. Having a woman down there, so very close, and smelling like heaven, served to highlight his shitload of personal issues.
People who abused the clichéd phrase no crying over spilt milk had never experienced their skin turning inside out or their muscles expanding to nearly twice their size in the span of sixty seconds. They’d never felt the pain of fingers splitting open to spring a full set of razor-sharp claws, and a jaw disconnecting bone by bone.
After taking another deep breath, Gavin dropped to a crouch. The sultry smells floating upward from the cabin were disturbing to him for so many reasons. One major problem was that they could easily mask the other, more feral odor he’d been out here searching for.
The woman’s presence was trouble, any way he looked at it, and also a reminder he didn’t need about the better times in his past. And the woman in that cabin might be in danger out here from bigger, badder things than him.
Who are you? he wondered. Hasn’t anyone warned you about this place? Told you that four deaths in and around the area are four too many, and that a woman by herself might be asking for trouble?
Determined to let this go, Gavin straightened and half turned. That woman wasn’t his problem. He had more serious things to worry about. There was a damn good possibility he wasn’t the only monster nearby, and if that theory proved true, odds were less than good that he’d ever see another sunrise.
“Leave her alone. Get out of here. Let her be,” Gavin warned himself.
Not so fast...
An additional beam of light drew his gaze.
He turned back.
The cabin’s door opened, throwing a narrow strip of yellow across the boards of the covered porch. A figure emerged to stand in that beam, and although the features were shadowy from this distance, Gavin’s heart exploded in a flurry of racing beats.
The woman stood in the open doorway as if his thoughts had drawn her out. As if she knew he was there, watching her, and felt his presence.
Seeing her jolted the beast inside him.
He’d been right about this woman. Anxiousness rode the breeze. She was tense, uptight and high-strung, like an animal about to spring.
But she was also small, blonde, and only half-dressed.
Gavin stared at the half-dressed part, and the long, lean, very bare legs that melted into delicate ankles and shoeless feet.
His inner wolf gave a soft, muted whine that scattered when he cleared his throat.
Christ, temptation was a bitch.
So was being a goddamn werewolf.
As for you, woman...
His attention snapped to identify another smell.
Metal.
The woman on the porch had a gun?
Gavin realized with a sudden flash of intuition that the icy chill now ripping through him wasn’t due only to the alluring sight of the woman, or the scent of her weapon, but to the thing closing in on them from the mountain.
He must have gauged the strange lure of this area correctly if the prodigal beast he sought returned two days early. Forty-eight hours shy of that next full moon.
“Ah, hell...”
With renewed wariness, he glanced again at the cabin and the beauty on the porch whose white T-shirt highlighted her slender torso, and whose face was hidden by a cloud of fair hair. He already felt protective of her. Felt as though he knew her somehow.
She might have courage enough to try to protect herself, but no gun he knew of would save her if the thing he chased turned its attention her way. He whirled, his boots digging up clumps of dirt. No time to waste. If the visitor heading this way was what he hoped it might be, he needed to lead that abomination away from the cabin.
With a final look over his shoulder, Gavin took off at a jog because his gut told him he needed to stop this killer before it claimed another poor soul.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_41d2a9f4-8e43-54ea-87fa-0ed8f96a310c)
Although no one showed up to confront her as she stood on the porch, Skylar knew she was no longer alone, and that she wasn’t dreaming this time. Not a chance in hell.
Her father’s gun felt heavy and cold in her hands. It was loaded, and she knew how to fire, just as all the Donovan girls did. Their father had been diligent about his daughters’ self-defense.
That didn’t stop the shaking, though. She had to hold the gun with both hands as she faced the unknown. Someone was out there. This was real. And at this time of night, that felt like bad news.
Of course, it could be a lost hiker. Maybe it was her father’s crusty caretaker coming by to check on the property, or out for a late-night stroll. But the persistent flush of internal heat told her that those possibilities were false and that someone else was here.
Instead of retreating inside and locking the door behind her, Skylar stood her ground, scanning the night beyond the meager pool of porch light where evidence of a visitor lay in the sudden silence of insects.
Biting her lip hard enough to taste blood, she ventured a call. “Where are you? Who are you?”
The silence was unnerving. She worked at drawing a breath.
“Not going to show yourself? I’m here, waiting.” She pointed the revolver at the trees on the hillside, upped her volume. “And I’m not happy about it.”
The taunt produced no results, but she couldn’t give up. Someone was there, somewhere. What if it wasn’t some innocent hiker? Suppose her father’s killer had returned?
She had to consider that possibility. She refused to believe that her diligent, first-rate climber dad might have fallen to his death. The conclusion she’d come to, independent of her sisters’ opinions, was that if David Donovan had fallen, someone must have pushed him.
“So who are you? Have you come for me?” she said to the quiet night, getting nothing back. No response at all.
“No time for hide and seek,” she called out in a last-ditch effort to make contact as she backed up slowly, crossing the threshold in a shuffle of bare feet.
A change in the air made her pause. Moving the gun, she refocused her aim on a point just south of the path up the hillside.
“Best to stay inside,” a man’s voice advised from somewhere near the closest trees. “And lock the door. It might also be a good idea to leave here tomorrow.”
Skylar’s heart skidded over one too many beats, leaving her breathless. “Who are you?” she called out.
“Ranger, patrolling the area. There’s been some trouble around here.”
She waved the gun. “I know that, and I know how to use this.”
“Better to move on before you have to use it,” he said. “A woman alone is far too tempting as a target.”
“How do you know I’m alone?”
“It’s my business to know who’s in the area.”
“You’ve been watching the cabin?”
“As much as I can, but right now I’m needed elsewhere.”
“Where’s your car, or whatever rangers use to get around in?”
“Over the hill behind me.”
“You run around on foot in the dark?”
“There aren’t too many paths worthy of a vehicle around here, beyond the main road.”
“I don’t need you to stand guard,” Skylar said. “Thanks, but you can get on with your business.”
“Fine. Just offering a friendly warning. Can’t be too careful this far out of town.”
Skylar waved the gun again. “I’m well aware of that.”
“Well, good night, then,” the invisible ranger, if that’s what he really was, said.
“Good night,” Skylar echoed.
The night air changed again, rearranging itself as though something heavy had been removed and the darkness filled in the vacuum left behind. The result was a powerful charge that left Skylar swaying on her feet.
This could have been her imagination, she supposed as she shrugged off a new round of chills. But one thing was clear. She had no doubt whatsoever that this ranger’s voice was the voice from her dreams.
The same damn one.
She’d bet her life on that.
* * *
“You’re too far out there,” Trish said over the phone the next day in the authoritative tone reserved for bossy older sisters.
“It’s temporary, so I don’t mind.” Skylar rubbed her bloodshot eyes. Ten minutes of sleep while sitting by the window all night, gun in hand, wasn’t nearly enough for a clear head.
“I need to get this cabin boxed,” she added, like she did every time she spoke with Trish, which was every day. Sometimes twice.
“I’ll come and help,” Trish said.
“No, you won’t.”
“Then Lark can visit. She can ask for time off.”
“I’d rather choke.”
Trish’s voice deepened. “Do you know any of the neighbors?”
Like most lawyers, Trish didn’t like being crossed or argued with for any reason. As the oldest Donovan sister, Trish would lay out her argument logically and plan on wearing her down with repetition.
Skylar didn’t want to go home and didn’t want company while she explored the circumstances surrounding her father’s death. Unless hell froze over, she wasn’t going to share that objective with her sisters and get them all riled up.
Besides, the good Lord only knew what would happen if she were to utter the word werewolf, or mention being harassed by someone who hadn’t really shown themselves last night. If Trish knew any of that, half of Colorado would be on their way over before the phone disconnected.
Which might not have been such a bad idea, actually, if Skylar’s stubborn streak would have allowed it.
“The caretaker for this place lives a couple of miles down the road, Trish. I have his phone number right here.”
Trish snorted her disapproval. “Miles? Like that’s comforting?”
“I have a gun.”
Skylar’s announcement preceded a beat of silence over the line.
“You what?” Trish eventually said.
“It was Dad’s. I took it from the trunk.”
“What trunk would that be?” Trish asked. Demanded, really, in her best cross-examination style.
“The one I found in the attic here. It’s loaded and I know how to use it. We all do.”
Trish sighed unhappily. Trisha Lilith Donovan saw far too many weapons in her job as a prosecuting attorney to be comfortable with any of them. And Trish, as the eldest sibling and the only Donovan kid not named after a bird, felt responsible for the rest of the motherless girls.
“I suppose being engaged to the cop for twelve months also had its perks in the weapons department?” Trish suggested.
Skylar lowered the phone to take a deep breath so that Trish wouldn’t hear it. Trish had said “the cop,” avoiding the use of Danny’s name.
Skylar raised the receiver when she heard Trish calling her name.
“Skye? Skylar?”
“Sorry. I have something cooking on the stove. Can we talk later?”
“You’re putting me off. We haven’t discussed—”
“Good. Thanks,” Skylar interrupted. “I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”
“Skye, wait. I’m sorry I brought up the cop. Really sorry.”
“No sweat. I’ve moved on, that’s all.”
“I know, but...”
“It’s all right. I haven’t been a baby for twenty-three years now. Nor have I ever needed help in making up my mind about something.”
“I know that, too. But you will always be my baby sister. You can confide in me.”
“I’m all right, I swear. My fiancé was a bastard, and it took me too long to figure that out. I’m off the hook now. That’s how I look at the breakup. Possibly it was an act of divine intervention in my favor. I feel relief, if you want the truth. We’ll talk again tomorrow. Okay?”
“Oh, all right.”
“Bye, Trish.”
Skylar signed off before the arguments could start up again, and with them the apologies about things not working out with Detective Danny Parker, who had gotten her close enough to matrimony to actually buy the dress.
But it had never been a match made in heaven, and she’d known that, deep down inside. She’d merely been going through the motions.
Worse, in terms of regrets, was realizing she’d gone along with Danny’s little mental abuses, and had been swept up in them, rather than openly exerting her true rebellious personality. That hadn’t been like her at all, really. And she hadn’t been lying to Trish about the relief.
Palming her cell phone, Skylar checked the screen for calls, half expecting Trish to call back. Then she set the phone on the table. Service was spotty in the mountains, and only seemed to like this small area in the front room of the cabin—a fact that wasn’t exactly comforting, she supposed, though Trish didn’t need to know that, either.
“And if you knew what else I found in that trunk of Dad’s, Trish, you’d send in the tanks,” she muttered.
Not only had she found the gun in that trunk, well-oiled and ready to go, it was loaded with unusual ammunition that had to have helped shape her dreams. She was sure that silver bullets weren’t the norm for anyone, outside of people chasing their own form of madness.
Glancing up at the ceiling as if she could see through the rough wooden beams, she said, “Neither are they standard in a psychiatrist’s medicine bag.”
In the past, she would have called Danny to talk about this, but she was on her own now—which left her imagination wide-open. Because shiny silver ammunition, unless merely something a collector might covet, was de rigueur for hunting...
“Werewolves.”
Skylar turned toward the window, attuned to the drop in temperature that signaled another day’s end. Nightfall wasn’t far off.
“Damn it, Trish. I need to find out what our father was up to, and why it might have killed him.”
Solving the mystery of her father’s frequent disappearances was paramount, as was finding out why he needed so much time away from everyone he supposedly loved.
But hell, Dad. Silver bullets?
In all truth, she had to admit, being in this cabin for a few days by herself, with her dad’s things, had caused her more discomfort than seeing Danny’s face when she told him the engagement was off.
The men in her life were gone, and she was far too intelligent to imagine that velvet-voiced rangers could have stepped out of her dreams.
As for monsters...
The moon would be completely full in another twenty-four hours, a big deal in werewolf lore, at least in the movies. If the approaching moon was some kind of supernatural stimulant, all werewolves would be affected. If there were such things as man-wolf creatures, her dream lover would be affected, too. And with her dad’s gun under her pillow, she’d be ready for anything that dream had to offer.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_4cd7c6e1-3540-5a03-a6e0-1c418237c2cc)
Gavin hadn’t found the trail of the creature he sought. Although he’d gotten close enough to taste its feral presence, one too many detours had brought him back, time and time again, to stare at the cabin, wishing to see her.
He hadn’t meant to circle back. He had, in fact, been heading in the opposite direction. Yet here he was again, staring down at the blasted cabin, telling himself, “Don’t be an idiot. No one needs a woman that bad.”
Obviously, he didn’t believe that on some level.
The beast he hunted, which had a fondness for blood and sacrifices, disappeared just after midnight. After following its malevolent stench south, the damn thing vanished into thin air. He’d spent a fruitless night backtracking all over the mountain, and more time searching throughout the day to make sure he hadn’t missed anything crucial. Now, once again, darkness wasn’t far off, putting him a hell of a lot closer to the phase of the moon that counted.
He eyed the cabin warily, figuring that if his interest in the woman down there kept up, he’d have to chain himself to the Jeep to avoid showing up on her doorstep, in person. The next time he confronted that woman, she might do more than point the weapon in his direction. She might actually pull the trigger.
He thought about that gun, and what it might do to him.
It was possible that he could he survive a bullet at close range, but it would certainly slow him down. When the beast inside him took over, several bullets might be required to make a permanent dent.
In theory, anyway.
He’d only tested his survival skills once, when he was accidentally hit by an arrow fired at him by mistake. That hunter now spent time in a cell.
And by the way...that arrow had been a bitch.
Gavin searched the clearing.
The cabin looked quiet in the evening light, though he knew the woman hadn’t taken his advice and hit the road. A ribbon of gray smoke rose from the chimney.
Stubborn streak?
Who in their right mind remained resistant to a ranger’s warning, or stepped outside in the middle of the night to face anyone or anything that might be out there?
Not courageous, necessarily. More like impulsive.
Maybe she gets off on danger.
And just maybe he’d make it his business to find out.
Besides, he was ravenous for company, and the smoke coming from the cabin carried the smell of food. If he knocked on the door, was there was a remote possibly she’d invite him in for a bite?
Gavin shook his head, rubbed his eyes.
She shouldn’t be alone. The last death out here had been gruesome. Some poor doctor found in a gulley, sliced to shreds. Gavin had an idea about how that might have happened, and that idea didn’t include a slippery trail. But he couldn’t speak of it to anyone. Who’d believe him?
The doctor who had occupied the cabin died just ten days ago, which made the new occupant’s tenancy a quick turnaround. Possibly the woman was part of that man’s family.
She’d probably have her pants on today.
Smiling felt strange. So did the compulsion to go down there. He didn’t know why this woman’s presence was so intriguing to him that his vow of celibacy strained at its leash.
He was way too hungry for everything that cabin had to offer, for anyone’s good.
As for women? He hadn’t dared to sleep with one since he’d been mauled by a hell demon and his life, as he’d always known it, had ceased to exist. He had no idea how the beast, now an integral part of him, would deal with emotion. He wasn’t sure if this nightmare could be passed to others by way of something as insignificant as a scratch or a kiss.
There seemed to be no rule book for werewolves. No manual. Hell, it was possible there were no others like him, and he’d have to continue to play it by ear.
“Sorry,” Gavin whispered to the female below, though his insides quaked with a longing for what she could offer that bordered on visceral greed.
He craved warmth and closeness and the freedom to fill his lungs with the perfume surrounding this woman like an aura. He wanted to run his hands over every inch of her, and see where that led. Test himself. Push himself.
But he had a job to do and a vow to fulfill. He’d find the beast that had ruined his life, and take that beast down. “Not her,” he said to quiet his inner wolf. “Definitely can’t bother this woman.”
Want her, his wolfish side protested with a sharp stomach twist.
“Yes. Okay. I suppose I do,” Gavin admitted as he started down the hill toward the cabin as if pulled there by an invisible chain.
* * *
“Stop right there.”
Obliging, the man by the fence stopped at the gate.
Even if she hadn’t guessed that her nighttime visitor would return, Skylar’s first thought actually would have been ranger due to the light green pants and the shirt with a badge on the pocket.
She wasn’t sure how she noticed the clothing details though, given her initial surprise over how incredibly attractive the rest of him was and how well he fit her dream guy’s stats.
Tall and rangy, his outfit did little to hide masses of lean, well-honed muscle. Other dreamed attributes were there, too: the broad shoulders and narrow waist, the dark brown hair with its loose waves curtaining a chiseled face. From where she stood, it appeared that every body part seemed perfectly balanced and in accord with his beautifully united whole.
Just as she’d imagined.
This was downright uncanny, and maybe even a little scary. Still, while the hunky outdoorsman looked strong, he didn’t look primeval. His fingers didn’t end in razor-sharp claws, though she seemed to recognize him on whatever level of consciousness telegraphed heat.
Skylar felt her temperature begin to rise. Sensitive spots at the base of her spine tingled—a sign that though he hadn’t spoken yet, this guy truly was last night’s visitor, in the flesh.
“You’ve lost your gun,” he finally observed.
Velvet. Yes. His voice was like a velvet blanket, the vocalization of his appearance.
Skylar’s heart fluttered in her chest.
“Do I need it?” She regarded this guy almost rudely, unable to stop the flood of internal warnings about the impossibility of dreams coming to life.
But she couldn’t have made this guy up. He was standing in her yard in the last light of a long day, and was close enough for her to see his face.
She wasn’t dreaming now. That face and its perfectly symmetrical features struck her as being way too familiar.
“The apron suits you,” he said in a teasing manner that might have been inappropriate since they were strangers outside of her fantastically naughty dreams. Nevertheless, she smiled and ran one hand down the front of the dish towel she’d tied around her waist, glad she had on jeans for this reunion.
Her other hand clutched the gun hidden behind her back.
“I guess you’re determined to stay, ignoring the advice of the locals,” he went on.
“I have business to conclude here.”
“Can I ask what that business is?”
“Cleaning up my father’s things. He lived here on and off until recently.”
The ranger kicked dirt off his boots and looked down, suggesting that he knew what had happened to her dad.
“I’m sorry for your loss.” He glanced up again to meet her scrutinizing gaze.
Nervously, Skylar glanced away. The flutter inside her chest spread to her arms. She gripped the gun tighter so she wouldn’t drop the damn thing.
“Were you watching my father, too? He had an accident, they said.”
Skylar let the word accident hang in the air before continuing. “Was anyone patrolling around here when he died?”
Unable to resist the urge to look at him again, almost as if he requested it, she dragged her focus upward until their gazes connected across the small front yard.
Shudders rocked her with the immediacy of the connection, and she shifted from foot to foot to cover the quakes. He stared back at her with a seriousness that set off more alarm bells. His penetrating eyes were very light against his bronzed skin. Though she was unfamiliar with the dream man’s eyes, she was sure these were his.
You’re a handsome sucker, I’ll give you that.
But how do I know you?
Why have I modeled a dream after you?
If she’d met this guy before, she would have remembered, and yet her treacherous body was responding to him as though he’d stepped right out of her dream and was presenting himself to her now in order to culminate all those pent-up feelings.
While reading body language was a trick both her father and her own classes in medical school had taught her, this situation was different. Meeting his gaze was like sharing secrets without having to speak. It felt weird, and also incredibly sexy in a messed-up way.
“Two of us were on duty that night, but not near here,” he said in answer to the question she’d almost forgotten.
“Night?” she echoed. “Dad was hiking at night?”
“I don’t know that for a fact,” he replied. “Sorry again.”
Even in stillness, the ranger seemed to be moving, evidence of the wild streak he harbored. Chances were good he was a loner, preferring to live on the fringes of the city, communing with trees. Weren’t all forest rangers born with some kind of special calling for the great outdoors?
How about werewolves?
Glad she hadn’t said that out loud, Skylar fisted her free hand in the dish cloth, trying on the word figment for size. This ranger, so like the man in her dreams, was quite possibly a figment of her overwrought imagination.
“You don’t need the gun,” he said in a lowered tone. “Not with me.”
Although his blue-eyed gaze held steady, Skylar also noted a hint of weariness in his features. He might have been up all night. He could have been near here the whole time, either guarding this cabin’s sole resident, or drawn to her for reasons that went beyond being neighborly. Reasons like sharing unusual dreams or offering genuine condolences in person for her loss.
Fingers tight on the gun behind her back, Skylar smiled. “Do all rangers have X-ray vision, or just you?”
He shrugged. “Merely an educated guess since you showed me the gun last night.”
“It’s a precaution. After all, how do I know you’re what you say you are?”
“You’re right to mistrust strangers. That’s a good sign.”
“A good sign of what?”
“Wariness, where it’s necessary. Caution. A healthy respect for self-preservation.”
He pulled a small radio from his belt and held it up. “This is how I check in.” He spoke to the radio. “Harris here, on the eastern slope.”
An answer crackled back from the radio, and Skylar heard enough to make her feel better about believing him. His voice, as he spoke, also made her familiarity with it more unsettling. Disconnecting from the dream was proving to be tough.
Puzzled, she said, “I recognize your voice.”
Ranger Harris nodded. “We spoke last night.”
It’s so much more than that. What though?
“Why did you come back today?” she asked.
“I thought I’d check on you. Make sure everything is okay.”
“Do your rounds take in all of the cabins out here?”
“Usually. But very few people are in residence right now.”
“I passed four cabins on my way to this one.”
“Most folks don’t live in them year-round. And those who do have taken off for a while.”
Breaking the disconcerting eye contact, Skylar looked to the east. “Because of what happened to my father?”
“Your father had an accident.”
“So they say.”
Other than offering a brief nod, he didn’t react to her remark.
“You’re alone out here. I just thought you might like to know we’re around,” he said.
“Rangers, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Skylar crossed her arms over her chest, bringing the gun front and center. If nothing else, she needed the weapon to protect her from herself. This guy’s gaze made her feel naked, though he didn’t appear to be staring at anything other than her face. Outwardly, he acted like a gentleman, the warden of this place, but the sparks tickling her insides weren’t appeased by his surface calm, his coolness or his distance.
Hearing him had set off a chain reaction. Too many of her fantasies were built on that voice. In the flesh, this guy, whoever he was, stranger that he might be, was like catnip to a serial dreamer.
Skylar reached for the flush creeping up her neck, hoping to stop it from reaching her face.
“How did they find him?” she finally asked.
Ranger Harris tilted his head to ponder the question.
“Who found my father’s body?”
“Hikers, I believe,” he replied.
“Near here?”
“On the other side of this hill.”
“At night?”
“He was found sometime after sundown, I heard.”
Skylar lowered the gun. “He was barely recognizable.”
“Then I hope you didn’t have to see that, Miss...”
“Donovan. Skylar Donovan.”
He nodded.
“No one in my family saw him. His partner at the hospital identified his body, and she believed it best we didn’t see him...under the circumstances.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sorry for what? she thought. For my father’s death? For making me want to forget we’re strangers?
Pressing back a strand of hair that had slipped from her ponytail, Skylar remembered how Danny preferred her hair shorter than she wore it. He hadn’t liked her in jeans like the ones she wore now. Her cop had been critical about so many things she liked to do and certainly never would have approved of her being out here alone. Control freak would have been a good description of his personality.
She had gone along with Danny’s preferences for the sake of trying to appear normal, feel normal, be part of a couple...when she had always known it wouldn’t work out in the end.
Her next shiver was in the bastard ex-fiancé’s honor.
“Are you okay?” the man across from her asked.
“Yes,” she lied. “Anyway, I suppose accidents happen.”
“Too often,” he agreed.
“Especially in this kind of terrain?”
“The trails are tricky,” he concurred. “Moreso when wet.”
He hadn’t budged from his position near the gate. Skylar wondered if he wanted to but was afraid he’d frighten her. Realizing how nuts it might be to trust him at all, she said, “Would you like something to drink? I’ve got lemonade.”
“Lemonade would be nice. Thanks. It’s been a fairly warm day, despite the end of summer, and I didn’t take time for lunch.”
“Come in, then. We can sit on the porch.”
“I’d like that. Mind if I wash my hands?”
“There’s a hose by the corner of the cabin, and a bar of soap in a pail.”
The ranger opened the tiny gate and closed it behind him. Having him on her side of the fence gave her an unanticipated thrill, despite the fence being no more than hip high and easy enough to knock over with one good shove.
The closer he got, the more her body reacted to him. She wanted to get close to this guy, feel him, smell him. She wanted him down and dirty, filthy hands and all.
That damn dream...
Ranger Harris was a delectable mixture of all the things that made a man a man. Equally rugged and elegant, he moved with the casual, effortless grace of an animal, sinew and muscle seeming to work without the impediment of an underlying bone structure. Predatory animals moved like that. Tigers, lions, cheetahs.
Wolves.
Skylar nearly dropped the gun and fumbled to secure it in her grip. Hell, did she have to distort everything?
This guy, with his badge and radio, was not the creature of her dreams. He wasn’t a creature at all. Her idea that he could be one virtually screamed of her desire to get over what had happened with Danny. Her imagination was twisting situations to match wishes that were nothing more than a bunch of dangling loose ends.
“There’s a towel on the rack,” she called out.
“Thanks.” He crouched down to lift the hose, his green shirt stretching across his shoulders and threatening to tear at the seams. His dark hair, thick with a slight curl, brushed against the back of his collar when his head tilted forward.
She had always loved hair like that. Hair made for running fingers through. Hair that would tickle bare skin in moments of intimacy, and provide something to hang on to.
Skylar cringed, and gave herself a stern silent reprimand.
I will not take this guy to bed.
No way was she going to indulge in her first one-night stand in the middle of a forest, even if he were willing to take her up on what she was thinking.
That’s what her mind said.
Her body told her otherwise. There had been far too many erotic thoughts about rugged men lately to ignore what was right in front of her. And he was interested in her. He couldn’t hide that fact any more than she could hide her interest in him. He kept looking her way.
Something came to life within her as she watched him. The sensation wasn’t familiar, and was centered so deep down inside her body it mimicked the feel of a rising sexual climax.
Working hard to keep from sliding a hand between her thighs to ease the pressure building there, Skylar withheld a sigh that might have given away her fanciful state of neediness. Everything about this cabin and what happened around it was strange. She felt strange...and very much like the predator here.
How’s that for a switch?
“I’ll get the pitcher,” she said as the internal flares going off reached unbearable levels, threatening to burn her up if left untended. She wanted to rush into this guy’s arms. Would he be shocked if she did?
“I’ll be right back,” she said. Yet she didn’t turn away, fascinated by the way the ranger’s pants adhered to every line and curve of his masculine, muscular backside. Fully aware of how forceful his thrusts into a woman would be with powerful musculature like that.
The oncoming twinge of greed made Skylar cross her legs. Danny had been in good shape, but this guy was exceptional. Almost too perfect. If she looked harder, would she find proof of a hidden wildness that made perfection an art form? One little slip on his part, and he’d growl? There’d be fur in unusual places and spring-loaded claws on those wet hands?
He was looking at her intently.
She’d forgotten to go for the lemonade.
Cheeks flushed with heat, Skylar tried to smile. “I was wondering if you’re working tomorrow night, too.”
He turned off the water and got to his feet. “I’m here all week.”
“Should be easier to see tomorrow, with the moon full.”
“You’re right.” He dried his hands on his pants, forgoing the towel.
There were no claws on those hands.
“Does the approach of a full moon make animals restless? I think I hear them at night,” Skylar said.
Now she was pushing things. She was an idiot.
He came closer than she should have allowed, and faced her squarely. He smiled, but with an expression of sadness. Heartbreaking sadness.
Why?
Whatever she had expected, it hadn’t been that.
As he slowly moved toward her, she felt every inch he traveled as if the air between them compressed. When he stopped, they were nearly chest to chest, and she had to look up to see his face.
Liquid lava coursed through her veins, pumping, scorching, flowing fast. Her forehead dampened. Her heart raced. She was hot enough to be combustible and breathing hard. All these reactions confirmed that she hadn’t been wrong about one thing. Something was going on between them on a crazy personal level. Their chemistry had been instantaneous and wasn’t to be ignored.
Animal magnetism taken to extremes.
Lust at first sight.
Dreams trespassing into the realm of reality.
In that moment, she wanted no backstory or history with a man who spoke of relationships and marriage. No rules governing behavior and no regrets of any kind. This was the man she desperately wanted with an all-encompassing physical desire. His hands on her, for real. His mouth torturing her mouth, right now. His body inside hers, his every move making her writhe with pleasure.
Hell...she wanted to bite and scratch and become the beast. She wanted to dig her nails into him and wrap her legs sinuously around his waist. She wanted desperately to let go and be who she really was inside, without anyone else riding shotgun on her behavior.
Screw the dreams. These fiery cravings were real and pulsing and painfully acute. If she acted on them, she wouldn’t wake with her own hand between her legs because this guy would be there to do that for her.
“I’ve changed my mind about the porch.” Her voice was throaty and pitched low.
His eyes kept her riveted, casting a familiar spell. Skylar heard thunder, though the skies were clear. She felt lightning strike her, stapling her to the ground, and yet she was able to move.
Brazenly, she reached for his hand. She brought it to her breast and spread his long fingers over the thin fabric of the blue linen shirt covering her. His heat blended with hers, forcing her heart into a frantic tempo.
Miraculously, his face showed no surprise at this kind of sexual aggression. Maybe, like her, he’d known what was going to happen. With his free arm, he gathered her tightly to him. Warm lips brushed her forehead with the softness of a sigh.
Why in God’s name was she doing this?
Because she felt an unearthly attraction to this man, that’s why. No, not just attracted to, possessed by, and therefore willing to ditch caution for him, and for what they were about to do.
She looked into light blue eyes that sparkled with curiosity and contained no visible wolfish variation. Just a man, then. A really sexy man. One she didn’t have to have a future with, only a passing moment of eroticism that would be a culmination of her one-sided bed play.
She brushed off the little alarms going off in the back of her skull in favor of the quakes and the heat of the ranger’s seductive nearness. It was hardly surprising that she’d go for this. She needed to take the risk.
This guy wasn’t Danny. Danny lacked in some departments and was intimidated by her lust for sex. She had tamped down those lusts the entire time they were together in favor of hiding her wilder side. After being corralled so long, some of those needs were pushing back.
The man holding her stroked her face, sending waves of little shivers through her body. Did he understand what was happening to her or was this blatant offer of female physicality merely every ranger’s wish come true?
He moved first, backing up, his breathing as labored as hers. Calmly, he took the gun from her and tucked it into his belt. Then he reached for her hand.
She said nothing, couldn’t have managed one word. His touch was electric and uncommonly sensuous.
In silence, he led her up the steps toward the front door of the cabin of secrets, where some of those secrets, scary as they might be, strange as they had become, were about to be shared.
Only then did Skylar whisper a curse and a prayer.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_b1845c03-4274-599b-8bce-b9ee0fdeab6a)
Secrets.
Desire unleashed.
Gavin had touched this sexy woman and was still standing there in human form. His hand had been on her breast, and that hand had remained his own without altering its shape or hurting her.
So maybe he could do this, he thought. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things that made monsters of men, he’d prevail in something he wanted so badly.
The cabin was small, a one-bedroom affair, so the bedroom wasn’t hard to find. Once they reached it, Gavin lifted the woman beside him into his arms. In silence he held her, fearing to speak, afraid to ruin what was going on between them. He was sure she felt as strongly about it as he did.
Her eyes told him so. Big green eyes in a pretty oval face, with a small tapered nose, high cheekbones and beautifully arched brows—all of those features expressive and showing her impatience.
She looked young and felt light, almost buoyant, in his arms, but she buzzed with energy as she laced a slender arm around his neck and snaked her fingers into his hair, just above the nape of his neck. Heat flared white-hot in the spot she touched, and he held back a groan.
He could not afford to come unglued.
Pulse soaring, body hardening, Gavin checked a growl when her lush pink mouth parted and she ran her tongue over her lips, unconsciously wetting them in a seductive sweep without taking her eyes from his.
Siren.
Seductress.
Put here to tempt him. Push him. Test his limits.
Her exhaled breath smelled like the lemons she’d used to make the drink offered to him, but her lips offered so much more, if he dared to cross a line he’d set for himself so achingly long ago.
Gavin wanted nothing more than to devour that pouty mouth and draw from her a moan. He was close enough to her to do that, yet he didn’t kiss her, could not kiss her now, because that level of intimacy was too dangerous and might be too much for either man or wolf to bear.
Already her closeness was tricky. His skin rippled with tension. Nerves were firing, exaggerating his pulse, sending it skyrocketing. These reactions might have been normal when facing a situation like this—a beautiful woman offering herself to him on a warm evening, and out of the blue. But of course nothing about this meeting was normal. He sensed this, and so did the creature he carried inside him.
The wolf was stirring, wanting in on the deal. How far would he get? How much did he dare?
He’d have to put this woman on the bed in order to find out, and couldn’t make himself release her. Tight against him, she was safe—a prisoner, his captive. Christ! He felt her need melt into him. Her anxiousness called him out, and the wolf inside him twisted into knots, wanting to accept her challenge.
Did this woman feel how fast his heart was beating?
“Kiss me,” she said, meeting his eyes, tugging him forward with both of her hands fisted in his hair. “Make it real.”
Real? Was that just her way of telling him to get on with it?
Take your time, Gavin.
Don’t listen.
The excitement he felt had to be measured. Nothing was to be taken for granted or rushed.
He didn’t kiss her. Not yet. One step forward and his knees bumped the mattress. Gavin loosened his grip on the sleek body he wanted to tear into. She was covered in faded jeans and a fitted shirt—a lot of layers to peel back while testing himself.
She felt so damn good, and smelled even better. Her body was slim, taut, pliant. Through the shirt, her ribs were ridges beneath his fingers. In place of curves, she was composed of lovely muted angles.
Gavin liked all of this.
He knew exactly what to do and how to do it, if he dared to press this further and face the consequences of accepting the woman’s gracious invitation so close to the full moon.
Not long now and he would become the beast, at least in part. Thank God his mind remained his own and in the driver’s seat when that happened. The same couldn’t be said for the monster that had savaged him not far from here.
Not far from this cabin.
The woman’s hands moved, and Gavin sucked in a breath. Warm fingers slid beneath his collar in a meeting of overheated flesh.
God. Help. Him.
He had to be cautious, careful, diligent. He had to keep sharp and pay attention when all he wanted to do was lose himself in the woman’s succulent body and bury himself inside her, where he’d forget the rest of the world for a brief time.
He wanted that very much.
He set her on the bed. Her arms came away from him, limbs falling, muscles wired. She continued to look at him as if she knew him already, as though this wasn’t the first time they faced each other in this way. That should have bothered him, Gavin supposed, but it wasn’t the time for reasoning. His hunger was growing, and so far he was okay.
All right.
He sat down beside her on a lavender-scented bed not intended for two. The woman watched him with her eyes wide-open and her lips quivering ever so slightly.
I can do this.
This is what I need.
When she blinked slowly, he felt the loss of her gaze, as if part of him had been torn away. In her eyes he was a man, not a freak.
“Look,” he whispered to her. “Look at me.”
She did, letting out a breath.
With careful hands, in quick movements, he pulled the shirt over her head and tossed it to the floor. The sight of her creamy ivory bareness made him pause to take stock. She was splendid, flawless, made for him. The back of Gavin’s neck prickled with appreciation.
Small, rounded breasts rose from a smooth chest beneath a graceful slope of shoulders. The delicate lace of skimpy blue lingerie covered those breasts, held in place by thin ribbons that ran up and over her shoulders to disappear beneath a tangle of tawny golden hair.
Pressure rose in Gavin’s chest and groin as he waited out a moment of incomparable agony. Then he eased those ribbons down, leaving them to cross her fair skin like slender slashes of watercolor shadow.
He closed his eyes, aware of the irony.
He was that shadow.
When she touched him, he jumped. She’d tucked a hand inside his shirt, between the buttons, so that once again their fiery skin met. Gavin fought back a sound he was sure would have fallen somewhere between a groan and a growl.
Her touch spurred him on.
Captivating scents, rich and floral, saturated her skin, the see-through lace covering her and the pillows behind her. He had smelled this fragrance before, from afar, and it was what had brought him here, to her.
Her skin was dewy, soft. A flat stomach stretched to the button on her low-slung jeans. Sharp-edged hip bones raised the denim, highlighting the concavity between them that, wolf willing, he’d get to settle himself into. But that was wishful thinking, and he was getting way ahead of himself.
Lowering his mouth to her breasts, Gavin placed a kiss between them, feeling relatively safe if he stayed away from her mouth. With a spike in his pulse, he absorbed the ungodly pleasurable sensation of the delicate lace against his lips.
He placed a second kiss on the exposed edge of one rounded breast, knowing this might be pushing things and that he was about to become undone.
Taking his time wasn’t going to work. Climbing into bed with her wasn’t, either. He was starting to sweat, burning up from the inside out, and his hands were quaking. Maybe she was the wrong woman to try his luck with. He’d never ached for a woman this badly, and he didn’t want to lose the connection.
Damn it, how would he explain stopping this now?
She was too exquisite to be a test run for his current predicament. He was rock hard, his body begging to be inside her. That kind of inner turmoil tended to spark the wolf to life.
He felt the wolf rising now in direct proportion to the stiffening of his cock. His throat was no longer his own. He didn’t dare make a sound with this pressure building.
In hindsight, he should have known better than to come here, this close to a full moon, for any reason. Being drawn to this woman only made matters worse.
Wildness coated the underside of his skin. Although fur wouldn’t burst from his pores tonight, the wolf’s drive was what Gavin feared. He couldn’t be entirely sure which needs were ruling his desires, his or the wolf’s. Surely the wolf’s hunger had become his own.
Gavin brushed a stray tendril of gold from the woman’s forehead, fighting to remain sane when the wolf desired powerful thrusts and the slapping sounds of bodies fiercely merging. The wolf wanted to bite and bruise and voted for ruined beds, broken furniture and swollen mouths.
Fast. Hard. Take it now. That was the way of the wolf. And maybe also the thoughts of a man who had long gone without.
Be careful.
Keep control.
Gavin’s teeth slammed shut when she whispered in his ear.
“Now,” she said. “You and me, here, now.”
To get a grip on a restraint that was rapidly slipping away, Gavin shut his eyes.
If I do as you ask, I’ll never be able to see you again. I’ll never look into your eyes again or feel the softness of your skin. You’d know me for what I am, what I’ve become. My secret would be out.
Those were words he could never say out loud. But the truth was that she didn’t want him to stop this. She was trembling and ready to take him on. The look in her eyes explained it all.
She reached for his shoulders, dug her fingernails into his shirt as if to tear away barriers and accept everything he had to give.
Forgive me...
He could try to be a man, and only a man, one more time.
For you.
Pulling her from the pillows, Gavin released the clasp keeping her lacy bra between them. As she fell back, he covered one of her breasts with his hot, breathless mouth.
The wolf swam in his bloodstream, causing his heart to thunder as Gavin drew her in, circling the pink raised tip with his tongue. A lick and a draw and then he bit down lightly, teasingly, sweating with the effort of holding passion back. None of this was enough by far, yet it was clear that he wouldn’t get much further if he hoped to maintain some control.
More thunder hammered his skull and beat at him from behind his ribs. Beneath his belt, his body was demanding this union, though shadows lengthened in the room, darkening the floor. Night was near, and inside of that darkness roamed a monster this woman needed protection from.
Two monsters, actually.
When he looked down, it was to find his shirt hanging open from mid-chest down, with a few buttons missing. The woman beside him was running her hands over his stomach with a touch like hot coals—over his abdomen and halfway around to his lower back. He arched with each incendiary caress, maintaining eye contact, holding his breath.
Her nails grated against his ribs to leave long red grooves. She let out a sultry, sexy-as-hell sigh that shook Gavin to his core. This was her own growl of need and longing, an expectation of the otherworldly boundaries she planned on obliterating with him, and a promise to see this through, whatever he had in mind.
“Who the hell are you?” he whispered as his chest met hers.
Her lips separated, luring him into a kiss, daring him to devour her. And what the hell, he would have done it anyway, damn the beast, damn the curse that mocked his life.
Or so his thoughts went until he heard a distant sound that froze him inches from her, and kept him from taking that beautiful mouth for all it was worth.
The roar echoed in the clearing around the cabin and instantly chilled Gavin to the bone. He hesitated for several agonizing seconds, horrified. “No. Not now. Not yet,” he whispered.
The woman in the bed also heard the noise. White-faced and wide-eyed, she sat forward, her heart beating as furiously as his.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Nothing you’d want to meet.” Even that much of an explanation seemed to expose too much, Gavin thought.
Damn the timing. He should have known better than to put his mind and energy elsewhere when he was sure the monster had returned.
On his feet in a flash, Gavin reached for the radio still tucked into his belt before deciding against using it. Who would believe him or want to face whatever made that awful roar?
With a graceful swing of one arm, he retrieved the gun from the floor and set it on the bed.
“I’m sorry.” After taking one last look at the woman who’d distracted him into nearly forgetting a vow, and with his heart filled with regret for having to pass up what she offered here tonight, he added, “Really sorry.”
Then he turned for the door.
She scrambled after him. He heard the sounds of her bare feet on the old wooden boards. “What was that?” she repeated. “Tell me.”
“Wolf,” he said. “Big one. Badass. Doesn’t belong here.”
“You have to go after it?”
Her voice kept him hard and hating the separation.
“I have to find that beast before it finds other things to harm,” he explained.
“Aren’t wolves usual out here?”
Gavin stopped at the front door thinking that people were so damn naive. But though this woman looked bewildered, she didn’t appear to be the slightest bit hurt by his hasty withdrawal, and only truly curious about the sound they’d heard. She didn’t ask him to explain his abrupt behavior. She was looking at him with hunger dilating her beautiful green eyes.
Grabbing her by the shoulders, Gavin tilted her head back with a small shake. She didn’t object, just bit her lower lip hard enough to bring up a droplet of blood with her tiny white teeth.
“Christ!” He wanted her so blessed badly, and to prove it, he kissed her mouth so savagely, she uttered a cry of surprise.
He kept on kissing her, deepening the union of their mouths, devouring all he found, breathing her in, tasting her sweetness. And she met him with the fervor of a storm.
God, yes, she was a storm encased in fragile human skin. But it was okay. He could get away now that he had an excuse. She wouldn’t have to see what might happen to him if he stayed.
Unsure of how long the kiss lasted, Gavin finally drew back. He’d done it, kissed her, and felt a kind of weary triumph about that. But he had to go, leave her, take care of this. Although he wanted nothing more than to stay, the monster out there in the dark had torn him apart, injected a beast into his bloodstream and then left him to die. That beast was outside right now, close enough to reach out and touch.
He had no choice here.
“Close the windows and lock the door,” he said with his lips inches from hers. “I shouldn’t have come here like this. I should have known better than to let it get so close.”
He turned to go, torn and hurting.
“What do you mean? What’s getting close?” she called after him as Gavin, broken and unfulfilled, strode across the yard, vaulted the fence and headed for the hillside, leaving perhaps the sweetest night of his life behind.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_b3f30482-675b-59c9-a73e-4c8636a1cef3)
Skylar didn’t call for the ranger to stop as she stood in the doorway staring at the darkness settling over the mountains. The noise they’d heard hadn’t just interrupted her first unplanned one-night stand, it had jangled her nerves.
Harris’s haste in getting away from her would have seemed like a slap in the face if it had been for any other reason than going after whatever had made that terrible sound. His disappearance gave her breathing room to contemplate what she’d been about to do—to him, with him.
This whole night had proved a fairly spectacular hiccup in her present situation, and she wasn’t all that clear about what she wanted right then—a man or a creature that was more than a man. She wasn’t certain that a mere man could have done it for her.
Freud would have had a field day with that information.
So would her big sister.
Trish, as the most stable of the four Donovan sisters, wouldn’t appreciate that her sibling was in heat and lusting for a tryst with anyone who came along, let alone lusting for a werewolf. After a conversation like that with Trish, there’d be a reservation in a white padded cell and some little blue pills—a scene that hit too close to home.
Skylar stared outside.
Harris had warned her to lock the door. Yet as far as she knew, wolves, no matter what size, couldn’t handle a doorknob. So what good would a lock have done to protect her from the animal Harris said he needed to chase?
Reason told her that Ranger Harris had lied, that he might be hiding something.
Part of her wanted to listen to his advice anyway. The other newly rebellious part that would have taken a stranger to bed urged her to follow him and see for herself what was urgent enough to end their lovemaking session before the real fun began.
The guy had been seriously distressed over the sound they’d heard. There was no way she’d imagined that. And though her body, too, was trying to warn her about this sound, and shudder after shudder rocked her stance in the doorway, Skylar couldn’t let lies and secrets become an integral part of her new reality.
She was different here. She was letting go of her own secrets, one by one, and open to taking new risks.
Should she go after the ranger? In the dark?
What if her father had fallen to his death while chasing figures from his dreams?
She wasn’t familiar enough with the trails to find footing or have directional cues without proper sightlines. Her cell phone wasn’t good for much because the GPS was almost nonexistent.
As for wanting to jump into the sack with this guy, maybe she just needed a night with an honorable man for a change. Harris, at least, ran out on her before placing a ring on her finger.
Backing up, Skylar listened hard to Harris’s fading footsteps. With him went the rest of the evening’s light.
Her heart refused to slow as she backed from the doorway. Confusion reigned. The room dimmed around her, but Skylar didn’t reach for a lamp. Seconds flew by, then minutes.
Finally, she shut the door and leaned against it with her eyes closed, picturing Harris’s tight, tanned flesh pressed to her bare skin. Feeling, even now, his breath on her face.
* * *
Gavin picked up the trail of the monster much more easily than he could have hoped, almost as if the bloodthirsty beast wanted him to.
He didn’t know what to make of that, but it was too late to consider anything other than finding his prey. His blood was up. His muscles were seizing. The beast inside him recognized this other beast in an unseemly way.
I’m not like you, Gavin wanted to shout. I’m no killer.
But shouting would amount to a calling card and telegraph his presence...if the thing didn’t know already.
As he jogged up the steep path, the old thoughts returned, though answers to his questions had never been within reach. If he wasn’t like that monster, he had to suppose that the blood passed from beast to beast somehow got diluted in the transfer.
His wounds made him suffer a change, but until he knew more about what had happened to him, he had to think of his cursed condition as a disease.
Hell, the differences between him and his maker had to be studied. He couldn’t exact a physical change without a full moon, yet he’d been attacked without one. Feelings inside of him shifted, internal stirrings came and went, but no full transformation happened for him without that commanding silver light. When he did morph, he became a strange mixture of both man and wolf, and not more of one thing than the other.
This damn beast was wolfish, with a lot of something extra added that had no relation to Homo sapiens. There was no full moon tonight, nor had there been the night before, which solidified the supposition that this monster either remained permanently furry, or could fur-up at will, with or without the moon’s kiss.
So different. Yet I sense you, beast, as though what I’ve become isn’t too far removed from what you are.
Part of that beast truly had become part of him.
Gavin’s thoughts kept churning as he climbed the hillside trying to sift through facts, in search of answers.
He’d tried locking himself away to avoid the moon’s treacherous call, which only made things worse. Unable to change its form, his body had betrayed him anyway. He’d nearly gone mad with the shakes, unconscious spells, roiling stomach upheavals and bouts of fever. His mind had eventually succumbed to the madness. He’d lost control of his temper, lost his mind to the pain of withholding the transformation and ended up in some godforsaken place on the mountain with no recollection of how he got there or what he might have done while his mind was in a fog.
Lesson learned. It was a freaking sharp-witted curse that developed immunity to thoughtful manipulation.
He had to give in to the physical changes in order to remain in charge mentally. Succumbing to the moon’s lure was necessary. As long as he changed shape, he was okay. Keeping as far away from other people as was possible near the full moon had allowed him to weather this out.
He got that now, and guessed that without the wolfish form there’d be no survival of this monster’s horrific species, hence the absolute need to shift. That furry demon’s teeth and claws had created another similar freak, and so that had to be the way the moon’s cult passed on. If he stayed in these mountains whenever there was a full moon, he’d be safe enough, he hoped. Others would be safe.
Gavin stopped suddenly, skin chilling, senses wide open.
The atmosphere around him had changed, creating new pressure that was like a punch to his chest. He heard rustling sounds and thought them ludicrous for a monster excelling in stealth, as though the beast were leaving him a trail of breadcrumbs.
There was no mistaking the smell. He knew this monster’s scent, having been up close and personal with it. Why was it here? Did it want to finish what it had started two years ago? Finish him off?
Is that why you stuck around?
Gavin’s heart rate accelerated. He’d left his weapon in the car before visiting the woman in the cabin. Damn it, he should have borrowed her gun.
The wolf inside him clawed at his insides with nails like talons, sensing trouble. An icy shiver of anticipation ran up his spine.
“Come out.”
He spoke at a normal decibel, feeling the presence of Otherness as if it were a bad rash.
“You can’t possibly imagine I don’t know you’re there, or what you are.”
More rustling noises came from his right. Gavin slowly turned toward the sound, saw something. Felt something.
The creature he’d sought for so long was here, all right, and standing its ground.
Against the outline of the trees, nearly hidden in the shadow, a huge form took shape. Bigger than anything he could have imagined, the giant specter loomed over the surrounding brush like the main character in a horror movie.
On that fateful night, the thing had moved so fast, Gavin hadn’t seen what was coming. But he saw something of its outline now and his inner alarms went off like a string of firecrackers.
This was no mere man-wolf combination. Nor, as he’d guessed, was it anything remotely like him, at all.
Its massive shape left little for Gavin to appeal to, speak to, reason with. Thoughts of getting close to it with any kind of hand-held weapon were absurd. Killing it with a spray of bullets seemed equally as unlikely. He hadn’t really expected this abomination to allow him another close-up this soon—he had meant to chase it away from the cabin. Hell, seeing it now, he wanted to run the other way.
No doubt this monster would be faster.
“So here we are,” he made himself say to ease a small portion of the fear knotting up his insides. “Should I call you family?”
There couldn’t be more than one of these beasts, he hoped, because where’d be the justice in that?
“It had to be you who did this to me. Can you recognize another freak?”
His nemesis didn’t move, making this potentially deadly scenario all the spookier.
“What are we to do now, since I can’t let you go around killing and maiming people?” he asked, having to talk though this creature could strike at any moment. Talking seemed necessary. He felt like shouting. One more night, and he would have been stronger, at least. He would have had claws and speed and double the muscle. Though his humanness danced on a thin thread of control tonight, there was no full moon to help him.
“I was supposed to protect those people who died. That’s my job. Now what? You do whatever the hell you like?” he said. Then he paused to regain the strength in his voice. “If not exactly like you, I’m no longer like them, either. Not like those people.”
Like the aftershocks of an earthquake, a series of low growls shook the ground beneath him. Darkness wavered. Leaves rustled. This beast’s rumble was terrible, threatening, ominous, but the monster stayed in the shadows.
When Gavin let loose a responding growl, the creature stepped forward on legs the size of a grizzly’s. Transfixed, unable to get a handle on the creature’s exact size and girth, and fairly sure he didn’t want to, Gavin jumped back. This was a damned nightmare.
“Son of a...”
Gavin tried to ignore the tingling in his hands. Angling his head, he heard a crack of bone on bone. Licks of white-hot fire made every joint ache as a wave of lightheadedness washed over him, twisting his stomach into fits. He knew this feeling, recognized these sensations, and they came as a shock.
The beast in front of him was able to call forth Gavin’s beast, and maybe even set it free early. Was that because what stood across from him had created him? Blood calling to blood?
Through a slowly revolving whirl of turmoil, Gavin heard his own growl of angry protest. “I’m not like you!”
And though it seemed impossible for anything else to get through the pain and shock of what he was experiencing, something else nipped at his attention, dragging him away from the outrageous situation at hand. Too riled up to put a name to that distraction, and feeling too ill to respond to it, Gavin kept his focus riveted to the beast less than ten feet away from him. He was close enough to hear it breathing. He heard its giant canines snapping, and the memory of teeth like that tearing into him, ripping the flesh from his bones, made his stomach turn over.
This was no werewolf. This truly was a demon. And Gavin’s mind warned that he might not be able to get out of this in one piece. Not this time.
When the creature’s growls suddenly ceased, the world went deathly quiet with a silence that seemed surreal. Though Gavin’s muscles ached to transform and his fingers stung with the threat of popping claws, the grip this specter had on him loosened. It, too, had noticed the distraction, and turned its mind elsewhere.
The enormous werewolf, which could have squashed him like a bug, advanced no farther. After waiting out several hundred of Gavin’s thunderous heartbeats, it turned away from him. Uttering a low roar of grumbling displeasure, it drifted away as completely and swiftly as if it had merely melted into the night.
Sounds from behind made Gavin spin around, afraid the creature had reappeared at his back. Lunging forward, taking the advantage, he rushed toward the sound, striking an object hard, taking it to the ground.
His breath whooshed out. His muscles screamed for the strength necessary to do some damage to the thing that had damaged him so very badly.
“This ends here, one way or the other!”
The moment he said those words, Gavin realized it wasn’t the beast he’d tackled. The body beneath him was small, fragile, and it squirmed beneath his weight, smelling like soap and the soft fabrics covering it.
Closing his eyes, Gavin fought back an oath. This wasn’t the monster. Not even close.
When he reopened his eyes, he found a familiar face looking back. A small white circle of features that were pale enough in the moonlight to be almost transparent.
“What the hell?” was all he managed to say between deep, rasping breaths of mortified relief.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_d61eb986-c0dd-50ec-8e07-a6148c46590d)
“You can get off me now.”
Breathless from the momentum of the attack, Skylar shook so hard, she stuttered.
Without being able to see Harris’s expression in the dark, she felt every racing beat of his heart through the chest pressed to hers.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Following you.”
“I asked you to stay inside.”
“About that. I seem to be going through a rebellious streak that makes me impervious to reason. I’m sorry if I startled you.”
“Hell, woman, my warning must not have been nearly strong enough to convince you of the danger.”
“I was pretty sure you could handle one lone wolf.”
“Lone wolf? You have no idea...”
Maddeningly, Harris didn’t finish the statement as he fought for his breath.
“I thought you heard me coming,” she said. “You were speaking to me, weren’t you?”
“I was talking to myself.”
“Is that a habit rangers often pick up?”
“Yes.” He took some time to go on. “It’s not safe here. Not safe anywhere near here. It was foolish of you to ignore me.”
“Yes, well, right now the problem is being able to breathe.”
Harris only then seemed to realize he was on top of her. Slowly, he backed onto his knees. Seconds later, he offered her his hand and a word of caution. “We have to get you out of here.”
Skylar took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. The man was little more than a dim outline in the dark, but she saw him turn his head as if expecting someone else to appear.
Holding tightly to her right wrist, he said, “I can’t do my job if people run all over these hills in the dark. There are always a few who think they’re above the rules.”
Skylar stumbled forward when he snapped his arm. “Meaning I’m one of those.”
He didn’t challenge her remark.
“Did you find the wolf?”
“No.”
He was lying again. She could tell by the way her inner radar was going off.
“I’ll go with you to look for it,” she suggested.
“You’ll do no such thing. You can leave this place as quickly as possible. In fact, I’ll take you.”
“I don’t need a chaperone.”
“On the contrary, I have every reason to believe you might.”
He began to walk, more or less dragging her with him. “Please listen to me, Skylar. There’s a dangerous animal on the loose, and that’s no joke. If you’re out here, I’ll worry about you. Distractions can make these situations so much worse. Surely you can understand that?”
They slid in a damp patch of dirt on the slope, but righted easily enough. Skylar resolved to pay more attention to her feet. She wasn’t going to be the bimbo of horror flicks who always tripped and fell in the scary scenes. She had always been fleet.
She wasn’t afraid to be out here with Harris beside her, yet she felt uneasy, and as if they were being watched.
“I think my father might have been chasing a wolf when he died,” she confessed, matching Harris’s lengthy strides. “If so, then I want to see it skinned.”
Harris’s sharp intake of air wasn’t her imagination. Something out here had bothered him, and bothered him still. He was wired and on edge. He kept looking around.
“I’d like to hear about that, but this isn’t the time or place for conversation. You’ll have to trust me on this.”
“Okay,” she said.
The relief in his voice was evident. “Good.”
The odd feeling of them not being alone stuck with her on their steep downhill descent until she had to speak of it.
“I think we’re being followed.”
His response was to utter a choice four-letter word and to walk faster. Skylar wasn’t going to argue with him about getting to safety this time. The new presence she sensed was heavy enough to siphon some of the air from her lungs. The night had grown colder, and each breath she struggled to take felt icy after the day’s heat.
“Maybe it’s a ghost,” she whispered.
Harris urged her into a jog.
Thing was, she thought, if ghosts existed, this one hovering in the woods might turn out to be what was left of her father. But if it was her father, why did the spirit feel so dark? Why was she suddenly afraid?
She let Harris lead her through the night, clinging to his hand. She’d been right. They were being followed, and the man in front of her knew this as well as she did. Clearly whatever he had been chasing out here now stalked them, and it was something Ranger Harris feared.
Halfway down the path, Skylar resisted the impulse to stop and face whatever tracked them. Only then would she confront the awful fear building inside her.
Her guide didn’t seem to share her impulse to stop. His hold on her wrist remained unyielding as he led her over rough, unfamiliar terrain ignoring holes and vines as though he saw every detail in the dark.
She couldn’t see a blasted thing.
He didn’t produce a flashlight, either, seeming to rely on his own internal GPS system. She supposed that rangers had to be familiar with the areas they patrolled and that Harris walked these same paths over and over on a daily basis. All she saw were glimpses of his back, highlighted whenever the moon peeked out from the clouds.
Deliberately, she didn’t offer the use of the flashlight she’d used to find him in the first place, now tucked inside her pocket. She was fascinated by how Harris maneuvered and afraid that if she shone that light behind her, the sanity she presently held on to might desert her. She was sure something otherworldly lurked on this hillside.
She thanked God that Harris wasn’t the kind of creature she’d almost expected him to be—though the voice he shared with the man in her dreams continued to plague her. He didn’t use that voice now, though there were questions that sorely needed answers. Questions having to do with wolves being bold enough to stalk two humans, or if it might be some other Colorado animal. Mountain lion. Bear. Recently escaped homicidal human.
The icy sensation of being tracked didn’t ease up as they ran. Traversing the downward path, Skylar felt positive she heard sounds of the creature breathing beyond the two of them.
She kept as close to Harris as possible and his grip on her remained a comfort. But although they had gone a fair distance already, the cabin’s porch light didn’t appear. Were they lost?
A gravel road suddenly loomed up out of nowhere, noticeable by its ghostly gray color.
“Stop,” she said, tugging at Harris’s hand. “This isn’t anywhere near the cabin. The road to Dad’s place is dirt.”
“Just a few steps more,” Harris urged.
When she saw the car, Skylar remembered what he’d told her about leaving it there. “We’re on the opposite side of the hill. Are we driving to the cabin?”
“I’m thinking it might be better to take you someplace else for the rest of the night.”
“You heard that stalker, too?”
“What stalker?”
More lies, in the form of withheld information. The rigidity of Harris’s arm gave away the fact that he knew much more than he let on.
“Answering a question with a question won’t get us very far,” Skylar pointed out.
“Maybe not, but my Jeep will.”
They reached the car, found the doors unlocked.
“That’s all you’re going to tell me?” she challenged, facing him over the car’s roof.
“I don’t want to scare you.”
“It’s too late for that. Is the rush in honor of a dangerous outlaw on the loose? I have a right to know.”
“Would that make you get into this car?”
“I’d just like to know what we’re running from.”
Harris blew out a breath. “I don’t know what it is for sure, okay? I only know that something is out there, and my job is to keep you safe.”
The moon was brighter here, away from the trees. Ranger Harris gestured for her to get into the car.
“I’ll take you to town, where you can get a room for the night,” he said.
“You, too?”
“Afraid not.”
Did he sound regretful about that? Skylar wished she could see his face more clearly.
“Should I trust you?” she asked. “We’re running from the unknown, but I don’t know you, either. Is it wise to get into a car with you?”
“True. I am a stranger to you. But at the moment, I solemnly promise you that I’m the lesser of two evils on this mountain.”
Cooperating, Skylar climbed into the vehicle. The worn leather seats smelled like the great outdoors. Like dirt and greenery and Ranger Harris.
She said, “Maybe I should have taken a closer look at that badge on your shirt.”
He pulled the badge off and tossed it to her as he slid into the driver’s seat. “Be my guest.”
Without a doubt, this guy could be infuriating. But what he had tossed her felt like a real badge. She’d seen a few in her time, so this probably meant Harris was one of the good guys.
Skylar closed her fingers over the metal as if it were a talisman to wield against things that went bump in the night.
“Anything you need we can pick up at the store,” he said. “I have an account there.”
“Does this store have alcohol?”
Harris turned the key and started the engine. “I’m sure it does.” After a pause, he added, “We don’t have to talk about what happened tonight if you’d prefer that.”
“You mean about what chased us, or what nearly took place in my bedroom?”
“Should I apologize for acting on that last one?”
“No.” Skylar closed her eyes briefly, listening to the familiar nuances in his voice that fanned her inner heat. “It wasn’t your fault.”
The car kicked up a spray of gravel as it moved. Skylar felt Harris’s attention on her.
“I needed a diversion,” she explained.
“From what?”
“The rest of my life.”
“Losing your father?”
“That’s the most recent blow.”
“Then I’m sorry we were interrupted, though it was probably for the best.” Harris sounded earnest.
“Yes. For the best,” Skylar agreed, leaning sideways as the car made a sharp left turn around a stand of pine trees. “It wasn’t really a wolf that made you run out on me, was it?”
Harris glanced in her direction without comment.
They rode in silence after that, which made the bumpy ride more uncomfortable. Eventually it became clear that the man beside her wasn’t going to offer anything resembling a decent explanation for what had happened in or around the cabin tonight. Then again, neither could she.
“You might want to pack your father’s things during the day and stay in town at night,” he suggested some time later.
“Being in town most of the time would be inconvenient.”
Again, Skylar felt the intensity of his silent appraisal.
“As a favor to me, then,” he said.
“Do I owe you one?”
“If not, you might humor me as the local law enforcement.”
Skylar winced. Because of Danny, the words law enforcement had a sour ring to them. In essence, she’d gone from one kind of cop to another without thinking. This was far better than the werewolf dream, though.
“Well, I can’t jump out of a moving car, so I guess tonight’s a done deal,” she said.
“Good.”
As they rounded another dark curve in the road, the soft glitter of distant lights appeared. Skylar supposed her safety would be assured down there among the masses, if safety was really an issue.
It was that rebel part of her—the part that had sent her traipsing up a mountain path after dark and had given her an appreciation for sensuous dreams, gorgeous werewolves and strangers with seductive voices—that told her to ignore this ranger’s plan after tonight and instead find out what the hell was going on.
Her dad had kept secrets, and that hadn’t ended well. The man beside her kept things to himself. She had to know who or what was out there, and whether being followed tonight had anything to do with her father’s death, less than two weeks ago. She had a hunch that it did.
With good old Donovan perseverance and a dash of stubborn determination, she vowed get to the heart of these mysteries if it was the last thing she ever did.
With or without the man next to her...in her bed.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_650d7c21-4b9c-534b-bf97-558d1e688d98)
Gavin read Skylar Donovan easily and checked his concerns. She was only his business up to a point. After that, his feelings for her couldn’t interfere with a task that was too weighty for distractions.
He’d seen the demon. Facing it again, he had survived. And that was one hell of a mystery.
The thing hadn’t attacked. If it had scented him and identified him as a Were—one it had created in a bloody mess of poisoned flesh—surely Skylar Donovan’s presence should also have piqued its interest. All that succulent ivory skin and her sweet, sweet perfume that right now made him want to look at her instead of the road.
The beast couldn’t have missed that.
No beast could have missed it.
Case in point was his own inexplicable longing for her. More than anything, he wanted to stop the car and show her he could maintain some control if he was allowed to have her.
It wasn’t only his vow to protect the public that made him want to see to Skylar’s safety. It was sheer, unadulterated greed. He wanted to save Skylar Donovan for himself.
She was the sum total of everything he’d lost when that beast attacked him, and so much more. She was lace and perfume, defiance and mystery in a slick feminine casing that escalated his need for those things. He’d be damned if he’d allow the monster to harm one hair on her beautiful head.
Despite this newfound possessiveness, he realized that Skylar really wasn’t his to keep. She was human, and he wasn’t. Oil and water didn’t mix. Neither should wolf and human DNA.
He’d kissed Skylar and wanted his mouth on hers now. Her plush lips were all he thought about when they weren’t confronting giant rabid werewolves that by all rights shouldn’t exist.
I shouldn’t exist, either, as I am now. You deserve better, Skylar.
But maybe she’d been sent here from the heavens as the kind of distraction that would keep him sane and grounded?
Don’t look for excuses.
He might be torn apart by the depth of his longing for her, but he had to let this woman go, keep his distance, harness his thoughts and get away from her as soon as possible because his resolve was already weakening where she was concerned, and his energy was needed elsewhere.
The beast had returned. He’d seen it. Instead of taking it down, he’d been seriously unprepared, due in part to Skylar.
“No more kissing.”
Though he muttered this softly and to himself, she heard it.
“Is that a promise?” she said.
Grimacing, rubbing his forehead, Gavin felt conflicted. By being here with Skylar he was allowing the monster to get away. By allowing it to get away, he was helping Skylar Donovan avoid the ugly fate that had befallen him.
“Nothing personal,” he said to her.
“If you say so.”
Lights appeared around them too quickly. Gavin drove the car into the motel parking lot at the edge of town and switched off the engine. They got out of the car without speaking.
She slammed the door.
“Just give them my name.” He pointed to the office.
“Ranger Harris has carte blanche here?”
“It’ll do unless you run up a tab.”
She tilted her head. “You actually have a tab in this place?”
Gavin nodded. “I sometimes need to crash before the long drive home.”
“Then you don’t live close by.”
“Close enough when I haven’t been up for several nights in a row. Way too far away otherwise.”
Skylar Donovan walked around the car and right up to where he stood. “You’re going back out there, aren’t you?”
“I’m on duty for another hour or so.”
He worked hard to keep his hands to himself, unsure of why he was so attracted to Skylar that he’d want to push the limits of his self-control, or delay his highly charged personal vendetta.
This leggy blonde was just so blessed tempting, the choice seemed tough. It was as if she’d gotten under his skin and nestled there alongside the wolf.
“Does that mean you have to be alone?” she asked.
“Tonight it does.”
“Why? Why would you take that chance and go back out there when you know we were followed?”
“It’s what I do, Skylar. It’s something I have to face and take care of without risking harm to others.”
Skylar. He liked her unusual name and liked saying it. Outside of her evident ornery streak, he liked everything about Skylar Donovan that he’d seen so far. Maybe he even liked that stubborn streak.
She might be small, yet she was no shy flower. She was too courageous for her own good, though. She had walked up that mountain alone tonight without being sure of finding him.
Somehow, at that moment, she seemed a lot more than just temptation in tight blue jeans. The delicious scent that had lured him to her in the first place wafted around her like a corona. Golden hair caressed her shoulders in uncombed waves highlighted by shafts of moonlight escaping the cloud cover. The same moonlight that made his forehead dampen with the strain of withholding his wild side.
“So you admit we were followed and have no idea who it might have been?” she asked.
He shrugged to hide the evidence of another unruly spike in his heart rate that pulsed upward and into his jaw. Hell, he wanted to get under her skin, seize the moment and take some long-overdue R&R while he could. Surely that was fair after what he’d been through?
When she’d left the cabin, after what had almost taken place in her bedroom, Skylar had tugged on her shirt—the same shirt he’d removed in a fit of passion—without properly stretching it into place. Narrow sections of bare skin showed above the waistband of her jeans—smooth, pale and terribly seductive.
No way.
Can’t have you.
I’ve got to go back out there.
All true warnings, but Gavin’s body argued adamantly against them, and against reason. Having sampled her, tasted her, felt her beneath his hands, his body repeatedly returned to those sensations as though she’d been imprinted on him. After looking into her big green eyes and finding a shared connection, Skylar Donovan truly did feel like part of his future.
This wasn’t right, of course, or normal. She was just a woman he had stumbled upon who’d ended up striking his fancy. Her open-mindedness in terms of sex and lust and freely meeting her own needs had sealed the deal. That was all. He hadn’t met anyone like her in a long time.
“Will I see you tomorrow?” She ran her hands over the warm hood of the Jeep the way he imagined her running them over him, and his body responded with a ripple of lustful tension.
With his pulse erratic and a new pressure in his chest, Gavin said, “In the morning I’ll be back to take you home.”
“Okay. Until then.”
When she turned from him, Gavin briefly shut his eyes to block the sight, attempting to keep his distance, keep himself from pulling her back and making a complete fool of himself.
He watched her walk away. Her hips swayed in the fitted jeans he hadn’t been lucky enough to get off her. The taut, slender back that had arched passionately during their kiss emphasized a small waist he’d like to encircle with his hands.
Rebuking himself for staring at her like this, Gavin didn’t stop looking. He’d sent her away, and she’d obliged. Her allure might be strong, but he couldn’t let it rival the moon’s—the moon at that same moment sending out signals that he intercepted as clearly as if the giant orb contained a telepathic intelligence.
Tomorrow night he’d change into something that would scare Skylar to death. All thoughts of closeness and intimacy would be a thing of the past if she were to witness his transformation.
In this new reality, however, Skylar had become as potentially dangerous to him as the moon that ruled his shape. She’d become both a distraction and a necessity in no time flat. He had to let her go and didn’t want to.
Really didn’t want to.
“Definitely no kissing,” Gavin said aloud to bolster his willpower.
Over her shoulder, Skylar Donovan smiled. “Don’t be too sure about that, Harris. I’m here for a few more days.”
Gavin took two steps backward, and then two more, his heart beating out a protest about getting into the car. His fingers curled against his palms. His muscles rippled and twitched. As absurd as it seemed given that he had known this woman for only one day...leaving Skylar Donovan was just about the hardest thing he had ever done.
* * *
Skylar heard the car drive out of the parking lot, and her determination to remain independent faltered. In spite of everything she’d been through, she felt forlorn and alone.
Still, she had to admit that Harris’s behavior bordered on chivalrous. He was willing to foot the bill tonight at this motel in order to see to her safety, which meant he did believe there might be trouble out there in the dark.
“A civilized ending to a strange night?”
Resigned to her current fate, Skylar gave the motel a wary once-over. It was a standard two-story, U-shaped design from the fifties. The building wrapped around the parking lot on three sides, with all the rooms and doors front-facing, and two sets of stairs leading to the second-floor balcony. Most of the windows were dark. A small blue neon sign pointed to the reception area.
Skylar went inside.
A middle-aged woman with short blond hair, wearing a red fleece vest, greeted her from behind a counter and raised an eyebrow when Skylar mentioned Harris’s name. Gratefully, that woman kept what she might have been thinking about a woman showing up in this place on his dime, to herself.
Handing over a key, this receptionist said, “Room twenty-one. That’s his favorite,” as if being in his favorite room mattered. She then produced an ice bucket and a glass, and looked past Skylar for the missing luggage.
“Will you need anything else?”
“A toothbrush would be nice.”
Skylar smiled as though nothing were out of the ordinary about not having a purse or a toothbrush, omitting the explanation of not being able to stop at the cabin for some of life’s conveniences because a madman might show up there.
Or a wolf that knew how to open a door.
“Emergency amenities are on the bathroom counter,” the woman said, returning the smile with less enthusiasm and leaving Skylar to assume that Ranger Harris had more than one female fan in the area. “The room is on the second floor.”
“Thanks.”
Skylar climbed the stairs and waited for several minutes before attempting to go inside room twenty-one, which, like the rest of the rooms, overlooked the mostly empty parking lot. Summer was over, so tourists would be scarce. Since no lights were on, she guessed she might have this floor to herself, and dreaded that.
She wished the ice bucket came with a bottle of wine. Suddenly ravenous, she wanted a salad and a steak. This wasn’t the kind of motel with room service, though, and since she had no wallet, dinner wasn’t in the cards. Her growling stomach would just have to suck it up and deal.
Staring out at the lot, and up at the nearly full moon emerging from the clouds, she felt lost and slightly out of sorts. The cozy cabin stuffed with her father’s things made her feel more at home and part of something. Here, in a strange motel without her credit cards or her cell phone, she was cut off and isolated.
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Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
Into the woods… Skylar Donovan comes to her late father’s Colorado cabin to find answers that explain his death. Instead, she meets a handsome Forest Ranger with a dark side, a stranger who appears in her dreams as something other than a man…Werewolf Gavin was bitten by a monster in the hills he has sworn to protect and has committed his life to searching for the beast. Now Gavin must protect Skylar from the evil he is stalking – but the forbidden lust that burns between them might be the greatest danger of all.
“Does the approach of a full moon make animals restless? I think I hear them at night,” Skylar said.
Now she was pushing things. She was an idiot.
Gavin came closer than she should have allowed and faced her squarely. He smiled, but with an expression of sadness. Heartbreaking sadness.
Why?
Whatever she had expected, it hadn’t been that.
As he slowly moved toward her, she felt every inch he traveled as if the air between them had been compressed. When he stopped, they were nearly chest to chest, and she had to look up to see his face.
Liquid lava coursed through her veins. She was hot enough to be combustible and was breathing hard … all these reactions serving to confirm that she hadn’t been wrong about one thing. Something was going on between them on a crazy personal level. Their chemistry had been instantaneous and impossible to ignore.
Animal magnetism taken to extremes.
Lust at first sight.
Dreams trespassing into the realm of reality.
LINDA THOMAS-SUNDSTROM writes contemporary and paranormal romance novels for Mills & Boon
Desire™ and Mills & Boon
Nocturne™. A teacher by day and a writer by night, Linda lives in the West, juggling teaching, writing, family and caring for a big stretch of land. She swears she has a resident Muse who sings so loudly, she often wears earplugs in order to get anything else done. But she has big plans to eventually get to all those ideas. Visit Linda at lindathomas-sundstrom.com (http://lindathomas-sundstrom.com) or on Facebook.
Seduced
by the Moon
Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To my family, those here and those gone, who always believed I had a story to tell.
Contents
Cover (#u70474a0b-d1dd-586b-a16a-7d2949fb0016)
Introduction (#ue2330bc8-77a0-533c-a99c-2328fb2169ad)
About the Author (#ud8f9329c-c0c2-55ab-bb8c-c7a0d7a78b53)
Title Page (#u22fcf517-1472-5edf-a7c6-03530270ef66)
Dedication (#u683296e6-0f70-58eb-be7b-d475caebcc79)
Chapter 1 (#u7d7b4f63-9c07-507f-af72-ce58cb0a7302)
Chapter 2 (#u4447796d-9eb9-5c64-a3b3-d48af140cf5b)
Chapter 3 (#uc2348519-93ae-510c-b9c2-a95fe2af51c2)
Chapter 4 (#u829470d7-82aa-5a29-95bf-a87ebd5eff0d)
Chapter 5 (#u91544c47-056f-55a5-a195-463cf74eacf0)
Chapter 6 (#uecb034f8-924a-5c92-b410-5f5b2f463ddf)
Chapter 7 (#u2b3abd92-731e-52d0-ad82-46e81daf261b)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_9996bda7-af32-583f-b4b4-22620c99668e)
Skylar Donovan was being haunted by the same dream.
Four nights in a row.
An erotic, half awake, half asleep nightmare from which she awoke in tangled sheets, body slick with sweat, with her hand between her thighs.
Looked like nothing had changed tonight, either.
The minute Skylar closed her eyes, the dream returned. Moonlight lit the mountains. Shadows edged that light. And through the dark came the echo of a man’s voice: a mesmerizing wordless whisper that was the equivalent of a highly charged sexual invitation.
Her dream guy was there again. Hell, it was impossible to tune him out. The remote Colorado cabin she bunked in had no TV for white noise, and she’d left her headphones behind.
He called to her, and she responded to the raw sensuality in his voice. Though his words weren’t clear, his provocative tone left her ready to do something about the effect he had on her, whether he was real or not.
These damn dreams would have topped the charts as the best wet dreams ever...if it were an actual man she lusted for instead of a hallucination. Something her mind had created as a distraction from recent painful events. Everyone knew that fantasy was a notoriously viable way of coping with loss.
Problem was, this nighttime lustfest wouldn’t stop. Neither would the questions she didn’t dare acknowledge out loud.
Who was he?
What was he?
What would this creature’s skin feel like against her? How about his mouth? With a voice so totally seductive, surely the rest of him would be sublime.
Although Skylar knew the difference between dreams and reality, there were no clear-cut definitions here. With her eyes closed, she fell under his spell. His image stuck to her with supernatural glue.
Wide shoulders above a broad muscular chest. Thick torso. Narrow waist and hips. Dark hair worn long. His stance was determined, his face sometimes raised to the star-filled sky. And over everything was an aura of wildness that catapulted things into nightmare territory. Because there wasn’t the slightest chance of mistaking her nocturnal seducer for a normal human being. He was, in fact, anything but normal.
He was a magnetic combination of man and beast with a ridiculous twist on the DNA sequencing of two species that couldn’t share the same physical space in reality. A unique being with its own name.
Werewolf.
Hell. Yes. Werewolf.
With a presence powerful enough to sift through REM.
Of course these were just dreams. She got that. She wasn’t an idiot.
Well, maybe she was. Because...
She was so very hot for the creature that stood on that hilltop and looked like a man at times, though that outline was deceptive. She felt vulnerable when he was around, and slightly out of control. But maybe she was only an eavesdropper, and he waited for someone else. Something else.
Was the moon his mistress? Wasn’t that how things worked for werewolves?
Why, then, was he yanking her chain?
A sudden spike in her heart rate, far beyond the usual range, jolted Skylar’s eyes open. Anxious, she rolled over on the mattress and sat up, sweat trickling between her breasts, heart pounding too damn fast.
Tonight was different somehow. This time the voice had seemed closer and very, very real. It left an echo in the room.
Not dreaming now?
To prove that, Skylar slipped from the bed and padded to the window. She moved the curtain, expecting to catch sight of her velvety tormentor, wondering again why she allowed a figment of her imagination to continue to interrupt what should have been a good night’s sleep.
She saw nothing out there, but God, had she actually expected to?
Resisting the urge to laugh at herself, Skylar rested her forehead on the cool window glass. Probably she had allowed her mind to supercharge some poor nocturnal creature’s cry into something it wasn’t. That’s all those sounds were.
Not a voice.
She wasn’t nuts, just tired, worn out and sleep deprived. She also supposed that these nighttime escapades could be tied to the power of suggestion, caused by the discovery of her dad’s cache of items in the attic. That old trunk and the things she found inside it.
Her dad, it seemed, kept dirty little secrets to himself here in Colorado, so far away from his family. And it had taken coming to this remote cabin to go through his things for Skylar to realize she hadn’t really known David Donovan at all.
One more glance outside, at the night, and she turned back to the bed. Curling up on the mattress with her knees to her chest, she used her usual abundance of common sense to reason things out.
Maybe dreaming about a supernatural lover merely showcased a healthy need to get past the termination of her relationship with Danny, her ex-fiancé. She had left him a couple of months ago, before actually getting to the altar, and everybody needed time to adapt.
It wouldn’t take a professional opinion to point out that the sexy dreams she seemed committed to having could be her mind’s way of filling the void made by that kind of change, especially since it was followed fairly closely by her father’s untimely death...
The father who, as a famous psychiatrist dealing in other peoples’ problems, had, it turned out, sometimes dabbled in his own world of make-believe.
Werewolves were his idea, after all.
Not only had her dad believed those creatures existed, he must have thought they roamed the mountains of Colorado, right outside this cabin’s door—which was likely the reason he often retreated here under the premise of needing alone time.
Beasts, for God’s sake.
Like the one in my dreams.
So maybe fantasies were contagious and could be inherited, and stumbling on her father’s secrets had spawned her own nocturnal reveries.
Skylar pulled the blanket up to her neck. Seconds later, she flipped onto her back, staring at the ceiling of the small rustic bedroom.
“Screw the pity party,” she murmured. Because truthfully one thing, at least, was clear. She felt liberated by the empty spot on her ring finger.
Seeking comfort in the lavender-scented feather pillow, Skylar vowed to stick to her plan: finish going through and packing up her father’s things and then return to her apartment in Miami, where her wedding dress still hung on a hanger. The dress would have to be returned eventually. If she ran into Danny, she’d just have to deal.
She could do that.
In truth, her life sucked sometimes. No mother, no father and no fiancé...but what the heck? She had three loving sisters and the deed to this cabin.
“Bring it on, sexy nightmare!”
Plumping up the pillow, Skylar blew out a breath and dared to close her eyes. Refusing to behave, her heart spiked again.
Swear to God, she was sure the man in her dreams was out there now, waiting for her. Whispering to her. Compelling her to listen.
And why the hell shouldn’t she?
* * *
Gavin Harris turned his face to the night wind, catching a whiff of a fragrance completely foreign to the rest of the forest smells surrounding him. It was a sudden sensory bombardment that didn’t belong here and was, even as he breathed it in, a detour from his agenda.
Eyes shut, he wrapped his senses around the uniqueness of the rich, sweet scent, separating each component with his fine-tuned wolf senses.
Female, he concluded. Young, supple flesh. Musky pheromones. Traces of soap and denim. Tantalizing feminine scents that weren’t in any way related to the more monstrous odors he sought tonight, but were oh so compelling.
He shook his head hard to ward off the distraction, and muttered, “Forget it.” Investigating the source of these new smells would mean detouring from his objective, which had to remain his greatest priority. He was on watch, hunting his own version of big game.
That objective was an important one. Vital.
But damn...
The rosy feminine perfume floating to him from the cabin in the clearing below him caused a visceral physical reaction similar to being shocked by a cattle prod. All the little hairs on his arms stood up. Tingling nerves made his muscles twitch.
He smelled the woman in that cabin as easily as if she stood in front of him, in person.
And she was alone.
Stepping forward brought the cabin into view through a gap in the trees. Gavin leveled his gaze on the dark windows and inhaled deeply, concluding that the woman down there was the only human in the area at the moment. She occupied a cabin that had been originally been built by old Tom Jeevers, making it smell a whole hell of a lot better than its line of former occupants had.
Something else?
The agitated, tinnier scent of anxiousness wafted to him, adding a second, spicier layer to the woman’s floral bouquet. Either she was anticipating something, or was in some kind of trouble. A fight with a companion, lover or husband, maybe, that caused a ruffle in the atmosphere? The long-anticipated arrival of a lover who was late?
“Lucky bastard,” Gavin muttered. If she had a husband, that guy would get to smell her every damn day.
With a quick glance up at the sky, Gavin widened his stance, knowing he shouldn’t linger too long in the moonlight. Though the moon wasn’t completely full tonight, that bugger was close enough to that phase to affect him in adverse ways. All the enhanced senses were just a start.
A quick glance down the length of his body found it not actually foreign, but increasingly unfamiliar as each lunar phase progressed. The extra muscle that he hadn’t worked out in a gym to maintain helped to add bulk. His height had stretched a good inch or two above his normal six-one.
His jeans were tighter. Shirts now strained at the seams. The only measurements remaining the same were his feet, slammed into his boots.
Then there was his hair. The tangle of chin-length waves were darker and much longer than he was used to, tickling his ears, making him wonder how long he’d been patrolling this section of the mountain ignoring most of the perks of civilization.
Could it have been two years?
Damn if everything hadn’t changed in the span of those years. Out of necessity, he’d pretty much become a loner. And though he patrolled this area of the Rockies regularly, during those past two years four people had died. One of them was the last man to occupy the cabin now emitting a woman’s enticing pheromones.
Oh, yes. And within those two years he, Gavin Harris, Colorado Forest Ranger, had regrettably, unforgettably, become a beast tethered by a silver chain to the devilish disk in the sky. Moon. As absurd as that seemed.
He closed his eyes again, shook his head. Having a woman down there, so very close, and smelling like heaven, served to highlight his shitload of personal issues.
People who abused the clichéd phrase no crying over spilt milk had never experienced their skin turning inside out or their muscles expanding to nearly twice their size in the span of sixty seconds. They’d never felt the pain of fingers splitting open to spring a full set of razor-sharp claws, and a jaw disconnecting bone by bone.
After taking another deep breath, Gavin dropped to a crouch. The sultry smells floating upward from the cabin were disturbing to him for so many reasons. One major problem was that they could easily mask the other, more feral odor he’d been out here searching for.
The woman’s presence was trouble, any way he looked at it, and also a reminder he didn’t need about the better times in his past. And the woman in that cabin might be in danger out here from bigger, badder things than him.
Who are you? he wondered. Hasn’t anyone warned you about this place? Told you that four deaths in and around the area are four too many, and that a woman by herself might be asking for trouble?
Determined to let this go, Gavin straightened and half turned. That woman wasn’t his problem. He had more serious things to worry about. There was a damn good possibility he wasn’t the only monster nearby, and if that theory proved true, odds were less than good that he’d ever see another sunrise.
“Leave her alone. Get out of here. Let her be,” Gavin warned himself.
Not so fast...
An additional beam of light drew his gaze.
He turned back.
The cabin’s door opened, throwing a narrow strip of yellow across the boards of the covered porch. A figure emerged to stand in that beam, and although the features were shadowy from this distance, Gavin’s heart exploded in a flurry of racing beats.
The woman stood in the open doorway as if his thoughts had drawn her out. As if she knew he was there, watching her, and felt his presence.
Seeing her jolted the beast inside him.
He’d been right about this woman. Anxiousness rode the breeze. She was tense, uptight and high-strung, like an animal about to spring.
But she was also small, blonde, and only half-dressed.
Gavin stared at the half-dressed part, and the long, lean, very bare legs that melted into delicate ankles and shoeless feet.
His inner wolf gave a soft, muted whine that scattered when he cleared his throat.
Christ, temptation was a bitch.
So was being a goddamn werewolf.
As for you, woman...
His attention snapped to identify another smell.
Metal.
The woman on the porch had a gun?
Gavin realized with a sudden flash of intuition that the icy chill now ripping through him wasn’t due only to the alluring sight of the woman, or the scent of her weapon, but to the thing closing in on them from the mountain.
He must have gauged the strange lure of this area correctly if the prodigal beast he sought returned two days early. Forty-eight hours shy of that next full moon.
“Ah, hell...”
With renewed wariness, he glanced again at the cabin and the beauty on the porch whose white T-shirt highlighted her slender torso, and whose face was hidden by a cloud of fair hair. He already felt protective of her. Felt as though he knew her somehow.
She might have courage enough to try to protect herself, but no gun he knew of would save her if the thing he chased turned its attention her way. He whirled, his boots digging up clumps of dirt. No time to waste. If the visitor heading this way was what he hoped it might be, he needed to lead that abomination away from the cabin.
With a final look over his shoulder, Gavin took off at a jog because his gut told him he needed to stop this killer before it claimed another poor soul.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_41d2a9f4-8e43-54ea-87fa-0ed8f96a310c)
Although no one showed up to confront her as she stood on the porch, Skylar knew she was no longer alone, and that she wasn’t dreaming this time. Not a chance in hell.
Her father’s gun felt heavy and cold in her hands. It was loaded, and she knew how to fire, just as all the Donovan girls did. Their father had been diligent about his daughters’ self-defense.
That didn’t stop the shaking, though. She had to hold the gun with both hands as she faced the unknown. Someone was out there. This was real. And at this time of night, that felt like bad news.
Of course, it could be a lost hiker. Maybe it was her father’s crusty caretaker coming by to check on the property, or out for a late-night stroll. But the persistent flush of internal heat told her that those possibilities were false and that someone else was here.
Instead of retreating inside and locking the door behind her, Skylar stood her ground, scanning the night beyond the meager pool of porch light where evidence of a visitor lay in the sudden silence of insects.
Biting her lip hard enough to taste blood, she ventured a call. “Where are you? Who are you?”
The silence was unnerving. She worked at drawing a breath.
“Not going to show yourself? I’m here, waiting.” She pointed the revolver at the trees on the hillside, upped her volume. “And I’m not happy about it.”
The taunt produced no results, but she couldn’t give up. Someone was there, somewhere. What if it wasn’t some innocent hiker? Suppose her father’s killer had returned?
She had to consider that possibility. She refused to believe that her diligent, first-rate climber dad might have fallen to his death. The conclusion she’d come to, independent of her sisters’ opinions, was that if David Donovan had fallen, someone must have pushed him.
“So who are you? Have you come for me?” she said to the quiet night, getting nothing back. No response at all.
“No time for hide and seek,” she called out in a last-ditch effort to make contact as she backed up slowly, crossing the threshold in a shuffle of bare feet.
A change in the air made her pause. Moving the gun, she refocused her aim on a point just south of the path up the hillside.
“Best to stay inside,” a man’s voice advised from somewhere near the closest trees. “And lock the door. It might also be a good idea to leave here tomorrow.”
Skylar’s heart skidded over one too many beats, leaving her breathless. “Who are you?” she called out.
“Ranger, patrolling the area. There’s been some trouble around here.”
She waved the gun. “I know that, and I know how to use this.”
“Better to move on before you have to use it,” he said. “A woman alone is far too tempting as a target.”
“How do you know I’m alone?”
“It’s my business to know who’s in the area.”
“You’ve been watching the cabin?”
“As much as I can, but right now I’m needed elsewhere.”
“Where’s your car, or whatever rangers use to get around in?”
“Over the hill behind me.”
“You run around on foot in the dark?”
“There aren’t too many paths worthy of a vehicle around here, beyond the main road.”
“I don’t need you to stand guard,” Skylar said. “Thanks, but you can get on with your business.”
“Fine. Just offering a friendly warning. Can’t be too careful this far out of town.”
Skylar waved the gun again. “I’m well aware of that.”
“Well, good night, then,” the invisible ranger, if that’s what he really was, said.
“Good night,” Skylar echoed.
The night air changed again, rearranging itself as though something heavy had been removed and the darkness filled in the vacuum left behind. The result was a powerful charge that left Skylar swaying on her feet.
This could have been her imagination, she supposed as she shrugged off a new round of chills. But one thing was clear. She had no doubt whatsoever that this ranger’s voice was the voice from her dreams.
The same damn one.
She’d bet her life on that.
* * *
“You’re too far out there,” Trish said over the phone the next day in the authoritative tone reserved for bossy older sisters.
“It’s temporary, so I don’t mind.” Skylar rubbed her bloodshot eyes. Ten minutes of sleep while sitting by the window all night, gun in hand, wasn’t nearly enough for a clear head.
“I need to get this cabin boxed,” she added, like she did every time she spoke with Trish, which was every day. Sometimes twice.
“I’ll come and help,” Trish said.
“No, you won’t.”
“Then Lark can visit. She can ask for time off.”
“I’d rather choke.”
Trish’s voice deepened. “Do you know any of the neighbors?”
Like most lawyers, Trish didn’t like being crossed or argued with for any reason. As the oldest Donovan sister, Trish would lay out her argument logically and plan on wearing her down with repetition.
Skylar didn’t want to go home and didn’t want company while she explored the circumstances surrounding her father’s death. Unless hell froze over, she wasn’t going to share that objective with her sisters and get them all riled up.
Besides, the good Lord only knew what would happen if she were to utter the word werewolf, or mention being harassed by someone who hadn’t really shown themselves last night. If Trish knew any of that, half of Colorado would be on their way over before the phone disconnected.
Which might not have been such a bad idea, actually, if Skylar’s stubborn streak would have allowed it.
“The caretaker for this place lives a couple of miles down the road, Trish. I have his phone number right here.”
Trish snorted her disapproval. “Miles? Like that’s comforting?”
“I have a gun.”
Skylar’s announcement preceded a beat of silence over the line.
“You what?” Trish eventually said.
“It was Dad’s. I took it from the trunk.”
“What trunk would that be?” Trish asked. Demanded, really, in her best cross-examination style.
“The one I found in the attic here. It’s loaded and I know how to use it. We all do.”
Trish sighed unhappily. Trisha Lilith Donovan saw far too many weapons in her job as a prosecuting attorney to be comfortable with any of them. And Trish, as the eldest sibling and the only Donovan kid not named after a bird, felt responsible for the rest of the motherless girls.
“I suppose being engaged to the cop for twelve months also had its perks in the weapons department?” Trish suggested.
Skylar lowered the phone to take a deep breath so that Trish wouldn’t hear it. Trish had said “the cop,” avoiding the use of Danny’s name.
Skylar raised the receiver when she heard Trish calling her name.
“Skye? Skylar?”
“Sorry. I have something cooking on the stove. Can we talk later?”
“You’re putting me off. We haven’t discussed—”
“Good. Thanks,” Skylar interrupted. “I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”
“Skye, wait. I’m sorry I brought up the cop. Really sorry.”
“No sweat. I’ve moved on, that’s all.”
“I know, but...”
“It’s all right. I haven’t been a baby for twenty-three years now. Nor have I ever needed help in making up my mind about something.”
“I know that, too. But you will always be my baby sister. You can confide in me.”
“I’m all right, I swear. My fiancé was a bastard, and it took me too long to figure that out. I’m off the hook now. That’s how I look at the breakup. Possibly it was an act of divine intervention in my favor. I feel relief, if you want the truth. We’ll talk again tomorrow. Okay?”
“Oh, all right.”
“Bye, Trish.”
Skylar signed off before the arguments could start up again, and with them the apologies about things not working out with Detective Danny Parker, who had gotten her close enough to matrimony to actually buy the dress.
But it had never been a match made in heaven, and she’d known that, deep down inside. She’d merely been going through the motions.
Worse, in terms of regrets, was realizing she’d gone along with Danny’s little mental abuses, and had been swept up in them, rather than openly exerting her true rebellious personality. That hadn’t been like her at all, really. And she hadn’t been lying to Trish about the relief.
Palming her cell phone, Skylar checked the screen for calls, half expecting Trish to call back. Then she set the phone on the table. Service was spotty in the mountains, and only seemed to like this small area in the front room of the cabin—a fact that wasn’t exactly comforting, she supposed, though Trish didn’t need to know that, either.
“And if you knew what else I found in that trunk of Dad’s, Trish, you’d send in the tanks,” she muttered.
Not only had she found the gun in that trunk, well-oiled and ready to go, it was loaded with unusual ammunition that had to have helped shape her dreams. She was sure that silver bullets weren’t the norm for anyone, outside of people chasing their own form of madness.
Glancing up at the ceiling as if she could see through the rough wooden beams, she said, “Neither are they standard in a psychiatrist’s medicine bag.”
In the past, she would have called Danny to talk about this, but she was on her own now—which left her imagination wide-open. Because shiny silver ammunition, unless merely something a collector might covet, was de rigueur for hunting...
“Werewolves.”
Skylar turned toward the window, attuned to the drop in temperature that signaled another day’s end. Nightfall wasn’t far off.
“Damn it, Trish. I need to find out what our father was up to, and why it might have killed him.”
Solving the mystery of her father’s frequent disappearances was paramount, as was finding out why he needed so much time away from everyone he supposedly loved.
But hell, Dad. Silver bullets?
In all truth, she had to admit, being in this cabin for a few days by herself, with her dad’s things, had caused her more discomfort than seeing Danny’s face when she told him the engagement was off.
The men in her life were gone, and she was far too intelligent to imagine that velvet-voiced rangers could have stepped out of her dreams.
As for monsters...
The moon would be completely full in another twenty-four hours, a big deal in werewolf lore, at least in the movies. If the approaching moon was some kind of supernatural stimulant, all werewolves would be affected. If there were such things as man-wolf creatures, her dream lover would be affected, too. And with her dad’s gun under her pillow, she’d be ready for anything that dream had to offer.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_4cd7c6e1-3540-5a03-a6e0-1c418237c2cc)
Gavin hadn’t found the trail of the creature he sought. Although he’d gotten close enough to taste its feral presence, one too many detours had brought him back, time and time again, to stare at the cabin, wishing to see her.
He hadn’t meant to circle back. He had, in fact, been heading in the opposite direction. Yet here he was again, staring down at the blasted cabin, telling himself, “Don’t be an idiot. No one needs a woman that bad.”
Obviously, he didn’t believe that on some level.
The beast he hunted, which had a fondness for blood and sacrifices, disappeared just after midnight. After following its malevolent stench south, the damn thing vanished into thin air. He’d spent a fruitless night backtracking all over the mountain, and more time searching throughout the day to make sure he hadn’t missed anything crucial. Now, once again, darkness wasn’t far off, putting him a hell of a lot closer to the phase of the moon that counted.
He eyed the cabin warily, figuring that if his interest in the woman down there kept up, he’d have to chain himself to the Jeep to avoid showing up on her doorstep, in person. The next time he confronted that woman, she might do more than point the weapon in his direction. She might actually pull the trigger.
He thought about that gun, and what it might do to him.
It was possible that he could he survive a bullet at close range, but it would certainly slow him down. When the beast inside him took over, several bullets might be required to make a permanent dent.
In theory, anyway.
He’d only tested his survival skills once, when he was accidentally hit by an arrow fired at him by mistake. That hunter now spent time in a cell.
And by the way...that arrow had been a bitch.
Gavin searched the clearing.
The cabin looked quiet in the evening light, though he knew the woman hadn’t taken his advice and hit the road. A ribbon of gray smoke rose from the chimney.
Stubborn streak?
Who in their right mind remained resistant to a ranger’s warning, or stepped outside in the middle of the night to face anyone or anything that might be out there?
Not courageous, necessarily. More like impulsive.
Maybe she gets off on danger.
And just maybe he’d make it his business to find out.
Besides, he was ravenous for company, and the smoke coming from the cabin carried the smell of food. If he knocked on the door, was there was a remote possibly she’d invite him in for a bite?
Gavin shook his head, rubbed his eyes.
She shouldn’t be alone. The last death out here had been gruesome. Some poor doctor found in a gulley, sliced to shreds. Gavin had an idea about how that might have happened, and that idea didn’t include a slippery trail. But he couldn’t speak of it to anyone. Who’d believe him?
The doctor who had occupied the cabin died just ten days ago, which made the new occupant’s tenancy a quick turnaround. Possibly the woman was part of that man’s family.
She’d probably have her pants on today.
Smiling felt strange. So did the compulsion to go down there. He didn’t know why this woman’s presence was so intriguing to him that his vow of celibacy strained at its leash.
He was way too hungry for everything that cabin had to offer, for anyone’s good.
As for women? He hadn’t dared to sleep with one since he’d been mauled by a hell demon and his life, as he’d always known it, had ceased to exist. He had no idea how the beast, now an integral part of him, would deal with emotion. He wasn’t sure if this nightmare could be passed to others by way of something as insignificant as a scratch or a kiss.
There seemed to be no rule book for werewolves. No manual. Hell, it was possible there were no others like him, and he’d have to continue to play it by ear.
“Sorry,” Gavin whispered to the female below, though his insides quaked with a longing for what she could offer that bordered on visceral greed.
He craved warmth and closeness and the freedom to fill his lungs with the perfume surrounding this woman like an aura. He wanted to run his hands over every inch of her, and see where that led. Test himself. Push himself.
But he had a job to do and a vow to fulfill. He’d find the beast that had ruined his life, and take that beast down. “Not her,” he said to quiet his inner wolf. “Definitely can’t bother this woman.”
Want her, his wolfish side protested with a sharp stomach twist.
“Yes. Okay. I suppose I do,” Gavin admitted as he started down the hill toward the cabin as if pulled there by an invisible chain.
* * *
“Stop right there.”
Obliging, the man by the fence stopped at the gate.
Even if she hadn’t guessed that her nighttime visitor would return, Skylar’s first thought actually would have been ranger due to the light green pants and the shirt with a badge on the pocket.
She wasn’t sure how she noticed the clothing details though, given her initial surprise over how incredibly attractive the rest of him was and how well he fit her dream guy’s stats.
Tall and rangy, his outfit did little to hide masses of lean, well-honed muscle. Other dreamed attributes were there, too: the broad shoulders and narrow waist, the dark brown hair with its loose waves curtaining a chiseled face. From where she stood, it appeared that every body part seemed perfectly balanced and in accord with his beautifully united whole.
Just as she’d imagined.
This was downright uncanny, and maybe even a little scary. Still, while the hunky outdoorsman looked strong, he didn’t look primeval. His fingers didn’t end in razor-sharp claws, though she seemed to recognize him on whatever level of consciousness telegraphed heat.
Skylar felt her temperature begin to rise. Sensitive spots at the base of her spine tingled—a sign that though he hadn’t spoken yet, this guy truly was last night’s visitor, in the flesh.
“You’ve lost your gun,” he finally observed.
Velvet. Yes. His voice was like a velvet blanket, the vocalization of his appearance.
Skylar’s heart fluttered in her chest.
“Do I need it?” She regarded this guy almost rudely, unable to stop the flood of internal warnings about the impossibility of dreams coming to life.
But she couldn’t have made this guy up. He was standing in her yard in the last light of a long day, and was close enough for her to see his face.
She wasn’t dreaming now. That face and its perfectly symmetrical features struck her as being way too familiar.
“The apron suits you,” he said in a teasing manner that might have been inappropriate since they were strangers outside of her fantastically naughty dreams. Nevertheless, she smiled and ran one hand down the front of the dish towel she’d tied around her waist, glad she had on jeans for this reunion.
Her other hand clutched the gun hidden behind her back.
“I guess you’re determined to stay, ignoring the advice of the locals,” he went on.
“I have business to conclude here.”
“Can I ask what that business is?”
“Cleaning up my father’s things. He lived here on and off until recently.”
The ranger kicked dirt off his boots and looked down, suggesting that he knew what had happened to her dad.
“I’m sorry for your loss.” He glanced up again to meet her scrutinizing gaze.
Nervously, Skylar glanced away. The flutter inside her chest spread to her arms. She gripped the gun tighter so she wouldn’t drop the damn thing.
“Were you watching my father, too? He had an accident, they said.”
Skylar let the word accident hang in the air before continuing. “Was anyone patrolling around here when he died?”
Unable to resist the urge to look at him again, almost as if he requested it, she dragged her focus upward until their gazes connected across the small front yard.
Shudders rocked her with the immediacy of the connection, and she shifted from foot to foot to cover the quakes. He stared back at her with a seriousness that set off more alarm bells. His penetrating eyes were very light against his bronzed skin. Though she was unfamiliar with the dream man’s eyes, she was sure these were his.
You’re a handsome sucker, I’ll give you that.
But how do I know you?
Why have I modeled a dream after you?
If she’d met this guy before, she would have remembered, and yet her treacherous body was responding to him as though he’d stepped right out of her dream and was presenting himself to her now in order to culminate all those pent-up feelings.
While reading body language was a trick both her father and her own classes in medical school had taught her, this situation was different. Meeting his gaze was like sharing secrets without having to speak. It felt weird, and also incredibly sexy in a messed-up way.
“Two of us were on duty that night, but not near here,” he said in answer to the question she’d almost forgotten.
“Night?” she echoed. “Dad was hiking at night?”
“I don’t know that for a fact,” he replied. “Sorry again.”
Even in stillness, the ranger seemed to be moving, evidence of the wild streak he harbored. Chances were good he was a loner, preferring to live on the fringes of the city, communing with trees. Weren’t all forest rangers born with some kind of special calling for the great outdoors?
How about werewolves?
Glad she hadn’t said that out loud, Skylar fisted her free hand in the dish cloth, trying on the word figment for size. This ranger, so like the man in her dreams, was quite possibly a figment of her overwrought imagination.
“You don’t need the gun,” he said in a lowered tone. “Not with me.”
Although his blue-eyed gaze held steady, Skylar also noted a hint of weariness in his features. He might have been up all night. He could have been near here the whole time, either guarding this cabin’s sole resident, or drawn to her for reasons that went beyond being neighborly. Reasons like sharing unusual dreams or offering genuine condolences in person for her loss.
Fingers tight on the gun behind her back, Skylar smiled. “Do all rangers have X-ray vision, or just you?”
He shrugged. “Merely an educated guess since you showed me the gun last night.”
“It’s a precaution. After all, how do I know you’re what you say you are?”
“You’re right to mistrust strangers. That’s a good sign.”
“A good sign of what?”
“Wariness, where it’s necessary. Caution. A healthy respect for self-preservation.”
He pulled a small radio from his belt and held it up. “This is how I check in.” He spoke to the radio. “Harris here, on the eastern slope.”
An answer crackled back from the radio, and Skylar heard enough to make her feel better about believing him. His voice, as he spoke, also made her familiarity with it more unsettling. Disconnecting from the dream was proving to be tough.
Puzzled, she said, “I recognize your voice.”
Ranger Harris nodded. “We spoke last night.”
It’s so much more than that. What though?
“Why did you come back today?” she asked.
“I thought I’d check on you. Make sure everything is okay.”
“Do your rounds take in all of the cabins out here?”
“Usually. But very few people are in residence right now.”
“I passed four cabins on my way to this one.”
“Most folks don’t live in them year-round. And those who do have taken off for a while.”
Breaking the disconcerting eye contact, Skylar looked to the east. “Because of what happened to my father?”
“Your father had an accident.”
“So they say.”
Other than offering a brief nod, he didn’t react to her remark.
“You’re alone out here. I just thought you might like to know we’re around,” he said.
“Rangers, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Skylar crossed her arms over her chest, bringing the gun front and center. If nothing else, she needed the weapon to protect her from herself. This guy’s gaze made her feel naked, though he didn’t appear to be staring at anything other than her face. Outwardly, he acted like a gentleman, the warden of this place, but the sparks tickling her insides weren’t appeased by his surface calm, his coolness or his distance.
Hearing him had set off a chain reaction. Too many of her fantasies were built on that voice. In the flesh, this guy, whoever he was, stranger that he might be, was like catnip to a serial dreamer.
Skylar reached for the flush creeping up her neck, hoping to stop it from reaching her face.
“How did they find him?” she finally asked.
Ranger Harris tilted his head to ponder the question.
“Who found my father’s body?”
“Hikers, I believe,” he replied.
“Near here?”
“On the other side of this hill.”
“At night?”
“He was found sometime after sundown, I heard.”
Skylar lowered the gun. “He was barely recognizable.”
“Then I hope you didn’t have to see that, Miss...”
“Donovan. Skylar Donovan.”
He nodded.
“No one in my family saw him. His partner at the hospital identified his body, and she believed it best we didn’t see him...under the circumstances.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sorry for what? she thought. For my father’s death? For making me want to forget we’re strangers?
Pressing back a strand of hair that had slipped from her ponytail, Skylar remembered how Danny preferred her hair shorter than she wore it. He hadn’t liked her in jeans like the ones she wore now. Her cop had been critical about so many things she liked to do and certainly never would have approved of her being out here alone. Control freak would have been a good description of his personality.
She had gone along with Danny’s preferences for the sake of trying to appear normal, feel normal, be part of a couple...when she had always known it wouldn’t work out in the end.
Her next shiver was in the bastard ex-fiancé’s honor.
“Are you okay?” the man across from her asked.
“Yes,” she lied. “Anyway, I suppose accidents happen.”
“Too often,” he agreed.
“Especially in this kind of terrain?”
“The trails are tricky,” he concurred. “Moreso when wet.”
He hadn’t budged from his position near the gate. Skylar wondered if he wanted to but was afraid he’d frighten her. Realizing how nuts it might be to trust him at all, she said, “Would you like something to drink? I’ve got lemonade.”
“Lemonade would be nice. Thanks. It’s been a fairly warm day, despite the end of summer, and I didn’t take time for lunch.”
“Come in, then. We can sit on the porch.”
“I’d like that. Mind if I wash my hands?”
“There’s a hose by the corner of the cabin, and a bar of soap in a pail.”
The ranger opened the tiny gate and closed it behind him. Having him on her side of the fence gave her an unanticipated thrill, despite the fence being no more than hip high and easy enough to knock over with one good shove.
The closer he got, the more her body reacted to him. She wanted to get close to this guy, feel him, smell him. She wanted him down and dirty, filthy hands and all.
That damn dream...
Ranger Harris was a delectable mixture of all the things that made a man a man. Equally rugged and elegant, he moved with the casual, effortless grace of an animal, sinew and muscle seeming to work without the impediment of an underlying bone structure. Predatory animals moved like that. Tigers, lions, cheetahs.
Wolves.
Skylar nearly dropped the gun and fumbled to secure it in her grip. Hell, did she have to distort everything?
This guy, with his badge and radio, was not the creature of her dreams. He wasn’t a creature at all. Her idea that he could be one virtually screamed of her desire to get over what had happened with Danny. Her imagination was twisting situations to match wishes that were nothing more than a bunch of dangling loose ends.
“There’s a towel on the rack,” she called out.
“Thanks.” He crouched down to lift the hose, his green shirt stretching across his shoulders and threatening to tear at the seams. His dark hair, thick with a slight curl, brushed against the back of his collar when his head tilted forward.
She had always loved hair like that. Hair made for running fingers through. Hair that would tickle bare skin in moments of intimacy, and provide something to hang on to.
Skylar cringed, and gave herself a stern silent reprimand.
I will not take this guy to bed.
No way was she going to indulge in her first one-night stand in the middle of a forest, even if he were willing to take her up on what she was thinking.
That’s what her mind said.
Her body told her otherwise. There had been far too many erotic thoughts about rugged men lately to ignore what was right in front of her. And he was interested in her. He couldn’t hide that fact any more than she could hide her interest in him. He kept looking her way.
Something came to life within her as she watched him. The sensation wasn’t familiar, and was centered so deep down inside her body it mimicked the feel of a rising sexual climax.
Working hard to keep from sliding a hand between her thighs to ease the pressure building there, Skylar withheld a sigh that might have given away her fanciful state of neediness. Everything about this cabin and what happened around it was strange. She felt strange...and very much like the predator here.
How’s that for a switch?
“I’ll get the pitcher,” she said as the internal flares going off reached unbearable levels, threatening to burn her up if left untended. She wanted to rush into this guy’s arms. Would he be shocked if she did?
“I’ll be right back,” she said. Yet she didn’t turn away, fascinated by the way the ranger’s pants adhered to every line and curve of his masculine, muscular backside. Fully aware of how forceful his thrusts into a woman would be with powerful musculature like that.
The oncoming twinge of greed made Skylar cross her legs. Danny had been in good shape, but this guy was exceptional. Almost too perfect. If she looked harder, would she find proof of a hidden wildness that made perfection an art form? One little slip on his part, and he’d growl? There’d be fur in unusual places and spring-loaded claws on those wet hands?
He was looking at her intently.
She’d forgotten to go for the lemonade.
Cheeks flushed with heat, Skylar tried to smile. “I was wondering if you’re working tomorrow night, too.”
He turned off the water and got to his feet. “I’m here all week.”
“Should be easier to see tomorrow, with the moon full.”
“You’re right.” He dried his hands on his pants, forgoing the towel.
There were no claws on those hands.
“Does the approach of a full moon make animals restless? I think I hear them at night,” Skylar said.
Now she was pushing things. She was an idiot.
He came closer than she should have allowed, and faced her squarely. He smiled, but with an expression of sadness. Heartbreaking sadness.
Why?
Whatever she had expected, it hadn’t been that.
As he slowly moved toward her, she felt every inch he traveled as if the air between them compressed. When he stopped, they were nearly chest to chest, and she had to look up to see his face.
Liquid lava coursed through her veins, pumping, scorching, flowing fast. Her forehead dampened. Her heart raced. She was hot enough to be combustible and breathing hard. All these reactions confirmed that she hadn’t been wrong about one thing. Something was going on between them on a crazy personal level. Their chemistry had been instantaneous and wasn’t to be ignored.
Animal magnetism taken to extremes.
Lust at first sight.
Dreams trespassing into the realm of reality.
In that moment, she wanted no backstory or history with a man who spoke of relationships and marriage. No rules governing behavior and no regrets of any kind. This was the man she desperately wanted with an all-encompassing physical desire. His hands on her, for real. His mouth torturing her mouth, right now. His body inside hers, his every move making her writhe with pleasure.
Hell...she wanted to bite and scratch and become the beast. She wanted to dig her nails into him and wrap her legs sinuously around his waist. She wanted desperately to let go and be who she really was inside, without anyone else riding shotgun on her behavior.
Screw the dreams. These fiery cravings were real and pulsing and painfully acute. If she acted on them, she wouldn’t wake with her own hand between her legs because this guy would be there to do that for her.
“I’ve changed my mind about the porch.” Her voice was throaty and pitched low.
His eyes kept her riveted, casting a familiar spell. Skylar heard thunder, though the skies were clear. She felt lightning strike her, stapling her to the ground, and yet she was able to move.
Brazenly, she reached for his hand. She brought it to her breast and spread his long fingers over the thin fabric of the blue linen shirt covering her. His heat blended with hers, forcing her heart into a frantic tempo.
Miraculously, his face showed no surprise at this kind of sexual aggression. Maybe, like her, he’d known what was going to happen. With his free arm, he gathered her tightly to him. Warm lips brushed her forehead with the softness of a sigh.
Why in God’s name was she doing this?
Because she felt an unearthly attraction to this man, that’s why. No, not just attracted to, possessed by, and therefore willing to ditch caution for him, and for what they were about to do.
She looked into light blue eyes that sparkled with curiosity and contained no visible wolfish variation. Just a man, then. A really sexy man. One she didn’t have to have a future with, only a passing moment of eroticism that would be a culmination of her one-sided bed play.
She brushed off the little alarms going off in the back of her skull in favor of the quakes and the heat of the ranger’s seductive nearness. It was hardly surprising that she’d go for this. She needed to take the risk.
This guy wasn’t Danny. Danny lacked in some departments and was intimidated by her lust for sex. She had tamped down those lusts the entire time they were together in favor of hiding her wilder side. After being corralled so long, some of those needs were pushing back.
The man holding her stroked her face, sending waves of little shivers through her body. Did he understand what was happening to her or was this blatant offer of female physicality merely every ranger’s wish come true?
He moved first, backing up, his breathing as labored as hers. Calmly, he took the gun from her and tucked it into his belt. Then he reached for her hand.
She said nothing, couldn’t have managed one word. His touch was electric and uncommonly sensuous.
In silence, he led her up the steps toward the front door of the cabin of secrets, where some of those secrets, scary as they might be, strange as they had become, were about to be shared.
Only then did Skylar whisper a curse and a prayer.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_b1845c03-4274-599b-8bce-b9ee0fdeab6a)
Secrets.
Desire unleashed.
Gavin had touched this sexy woman and was still standing there in human form. His hand had been on her breast, and that hand had remained his own without altering its shape or hurting her.
So maybe he could do this, he thought. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things that made monsters of men, he’d prevail in something he wanted so badly.
The cabin was small, a one-bedroom affair, so the bedroom wasn’t hard to find. Once they reached it, Gavin lifted the woman beside him into his arms. In silence he held her, fearing to speak, afraid to ruin what was going on between them. He was sure she felt as strongly about it as he did.
Her eyes told him so. Big green eyes in a pretty oval face, with a small tapered nose, high cheekbones and beautifully arched brows—all of those features expressive and showing her impatience.
She looked young and felt light, almost buoyant, in his arms, but she buzzed with energy as she laced a slender arm around his neck and snaked her fingers into his hair, just above the nape of his neck. Heat flared white-hot in the spot she touched, and he held back a groan.
He could not afford to come unglued.
Pulse soaring, body hardening, Gavin checked a growl when her lush pink mouth parted and she ran her tongue over her lips, unconsciously wetting them in a seductive sweep without taking her eyes from his.
Siren.
Seductress.
Put here to tempt him. Push him. Test his limits.
Her exhaled breath smelled like the lemons she’d used to make the drink offered to him, but her lips offered so much more, if he dared to cross a line he’d set for himself so achingly long ago.
Gavin wanted nothing more than to devour that pouty mouth and draw from her a moan. He was close enough to her to do that, yet he didn’t kiss her, could not kiss her now, because that level of intimacy was too dangerous and might be too much for either man or wolf to bear.
Already her closeness was tricky. His skin rippled with tension. Nerves were firing, exaggerating his pulse, sending it skyrocketing. These reactions might have been normal when facing a situation like this—a beautiful woman offering herself to him on a warm evening, and out of the blue. But of course nothing about this meeting was normal. He sensed this, and so did the creature he carried inside him.
The wolf was stirring, wanting in on the deal. How far would he get? How much did he dare?
He’d have to put this woman on the bed in order to find out, and couldn’t make himself release her. Tight against him, she was safe—a prisoner, his captive. Christ! He felt her need melt into him. Her anxiousness called him out, and the wolf inside him twisted into knots, wanting to accept her challenge.
Did this woman feel how fast his heart was beating?
“Kiss me,” she said, meeting his eyes, tugging him forward with both of her hands fisted in his hair. “Make it real.”
Real? Was that just her way of telling him to get on with it?
Take your time, Gavin.
Don’t listen.
The excitement he felt had to be measured. Nothing was to be taken for granted or rushed.
He didn’t kiss her. Not yet. One step forward and his knees bumped the mattress. Gavin loosened his grip on the sleek body he wanted to tear into. She was covered in faded jeans and a fitted shirt—a lot of layers to peel back while testing himself.
She felt so damn good, and smelled even better. Her body was slim, taut, pliant. Through the shirt, her ribs were ridges beneath his fingers. In place of curves, she was composed of lovely muted angles.
Gavin liked all of this.
He knew exactly what to do and how to do it, if he dared to press this further and face the consequences of accepting the woman’s gracious invitation so close to the full moon.
Not long now and he would become the beast, at least in part. Thank God his mind remained his own and in the driver’s seat when that happened. The same couldn’t be said for the monster that had savaged him not far from here.
Not far from this cabin.
The woman’s hands moved, and Gavin sucked in a breath. Warm fingers slid beneath his collar in a meeting of overheated flesh.
God. Help. Him.
He had to be cautious, careful, diligent. He had to keep sharp and pay attention when all he wanted to do was lose himself in the woman’s succulent body and bury himself inside her, where he’d forget the rest of the world for a brief time.
He wanted that very much.
He set her on the bed. Her arms came away from him, limbs falling, muscles wired. She continued to look at him as if she knew him already, as though this wasn’t the first time they faced each other in this way. That should have bothered him, Gavin supposed, but it wasn’t the time for reasoning. His hunger was growing, and so far he was okay.
All right.
He sat down beside her on a lavender-scented bed not intended for two. The woman watched him with her eyes wide-open and her lips quivering ever so slightly.
I can do this.
This is what I need.
When she blinked slowly, he felt the loss of her gaze, as if part of him had been torn away. In her eyes he was a man, not a freak.
“Look,” he whispered to her. “Look at me.”
She did, letting out a breath.
With careful hands, in quick movements, he pulled the shirt over her head and tossed it to the floor. The sight of her creamy ivory bareness made him pause to take stock. She was splendid, flawless, made for him. The back of Gavin’s neck prickled with appreciation.
Small, rounded breasts rose from a smooth chest beneath a graceful slope of shoulders. The delicate lace of skimpy blue lingerie covered those breasts, held in place by thin ribbons that ran up and over her shoulders to disappear beneath a tangle of tawny golden hair.
Pressure rose in Gavin’s chest and groin as he waited out a moment of incomparable agony. Then he eased those ribbons down, leaving them to cross her fair skin like slender slashes of watercolor shadow.
He closed his eyes, aware of the irony.
He was that shadow.
When she touched him, he jumped. She’d tucked a hand inside his shirt, between the buttons, so that once again their fiery skin met. Gavin fought back a sound he was sure would have fallen somewhere between a groan and a growl.
Her touch spurred him on.
Captivating scents, rich and floral, saturated her skin, the see-through lace covering her and the pillows behind her. He had smelled this fragrance before, from afar, and it was what had brought him here, to her.
Her skin was dewy, soft. A flat stomach stretched to the button on her low-slung jeans. Sharp-edged hip bones raised the denim, highlighting the concavity between them that, wolf willing, he’d get to settle himself into. But that was wishful thinking, and he was getting way ahead of himself.
Lowering his mouth to her breasts, Gavin placed a kiss between them, feeling relatively safe if he stayed away from her mouth. With a spike in his pulse, he absorbed the ungodly pleasurable sensation of the delicate lace against his lips.
He placed a second kiss on the exposed edge of one rounded breast, knowing this might be pushing things and that he was about to become undone.
Taking his time wasn’t going to work. Climbing into bed with her wasn’t, either. He was starting to sweat, burning up from the inside out, and his hands were quaking. Maybe she was the wrong woman to try his luck with. He’d never ached for a woman this badly, and he didn’t want to lose the connection.
Damn it, how would he explain stopping this now?
She was too exquisite to be a test run for his current predicament. He was rock hard, his body begging to be inside her. That kind of inner turmoil tended to spark the wolf to life.
He felt the wolf rising now in direct proportion to the stiffening of his cock. His throat was no longer his own. He didn’t dare make a sound with this pressure building.
In hindsight, he should have known better than to come here, this close to a full moon, for any reason. Being drawn to this woman only made matters worse.
Wildness coated the underside of his skin. Although fur wouldn’t burst from his pores tonight, the wolf’s drive was what Gavin feared. He couldn’t be entirely sure which needs were ruling his desires, his or the wolf’s. Surely the wolf’s hunger had become his own.
Gavin brushed a stray tendril of gold from the woman’s forehead, fighting to remain sane when the wolf desired powerful thrusts and the slapping sounds of bodies fiercely merging. The wolf wanted to bite and bruise and voted for ruined beds, broken furniture and swollen mouths.
Fast. Hard. Take it now. That was the way of the wolf. And maybe also the thoughts of a man who had long gone without.
Be careful.
Keep control.
Gavin’s teeth slammed shut when she whispered in his ear.
“Now,” she said. “You and me, here, now.”
To get a grip on a restraint that was rapidly slipping away, Gavin shut his eyes.
If I do as you ask, I’ll never be able to see you again. I’ll never look into your eyes again or feel the softness of your skin. You’d know me for what I am, what I’ve become. My secret would be out.
Those were words he could never say out loud. But the truth was that she didn’t want him to stop this. She was trembling and ready to take him on. The look in her eyes explained it all.
She reached for his shoulders, dug her fingernails into his shirt as if to tear away barriers and accept everything he had to give.
Forgive me...
He could try to be a man, and only a man, one more time.
For you.
Pulling her from the pillows, Gavin released the clasp keeping her lacy bra between them. As she fell back, he covered one of her breasts with his hot, breathless mouth.
The wolf swam in his bloodstream, causing his heart to thunder as Gavin drew her in, circling the pink raised tip with his tongue. A lick and a draw and then he bit down lightly, teasingly, sweating with the effort of holding passion back. None of this was enough by far, yet it was clear that he wouldn’t get much further if he hoped to maintain some control.
More thunder hammered his skull and beat at him from behind his ribs. Beneath his belt, his body was demanding this union, though shadows lengthened in the room, darkening the floor. Night was near, and inside of that darkness roamed a monster this woman needed protection from.
Two monsters, actually.
When he looked down, it was to find his shirt hanging open from mid-chest down, with a few buttons missing. The woman beside him was running her hands over his stomach with a touch like hot coals—over his abdomen and halfway around to his lower back. He arched with each incendiary caress, maintaining eye contact, holding his breath.
Her nails grated against his ribs to leave long red grooves. She let out a sultry, sexy-as-hell sigh that shook Gavin to his core. This was her own growl of need and longing, an expectation of the otherworldly boundaries she planned on obliterating with him, and a promise to see this through, whatever he had in mind.
“Who the hell are you?” he whispered as his chest met hers.
Her lips separated, luring him into a kiss, daring him to devour her. And what the hell, he would have done it anyway, damn the beast, damn the curse that mocked his life.
Or so his thoughts went until he heard a distant sound that froze him inches from her, and kept him from taking that beautiful mouth for all it was worth.
The roar echoed in the clearing around the cabin and instantly chilled Gavin to the bone. He hesitated for several agonizing seconds, horrified. “No. Not now. Not yet,” he whispered.
The woman in the bed also heard the noise. White-faced and wide-eyed, she sat forward, her heart beating as furiously as his.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Nothing you’d want to meet.” Even that much of an explanation seemed to expose too much, Gavin thought.
Damn the timing. He should have known better than to put his mind and energy elsewhere when he was sure the monster had returned.
On his feet in a flash, Gavin reached for the radio still tucked into his belt before deciding against using it. Who would believe him or want to face whatever made that awful roar?
With a graceful swing of one arm, he retrieved the gun from the floor and set it on the bed.
“I’m sorry.” After taking one last look at the woman who’d distracted him into nearly forgetting a vow, and with his heart filled with regret for having to pass up what she offered here tonight, he added, “Really sorry.”
Then he turned for the door.
She scrambled after him. He heard the sounds of her bare feet on the old wooden boards. “What was that?” she repeated. “Tell me.”
“Wolf,” he said. “Big one. Badass. Doesn’t belong here.”
“You have to go after it?”
Her voice kept him hard and hating the separation.
“I have to find that beast before it finds other things to harm,” he explained.
“Aren’t wolves usual out here?”
Gavin stopped at the front door thinking that people were so damn naive. But though this woman looked bewildered, she didn’t appear to be the slightest bit hurt by his hasty withdrawal, and only truly curious about the sound they’d heard. She didn’t ask him to explain his abrupt behavior. She was looking at him with hunger dilating her beautiful green eyes.
Grabbing her by the shoulders, Gavin tilted her head back with a small shake. She didn’t object, just bit her lower lip hard enough to bring up a droplet of blood with her tiny white teeth.
“Christ!” He wanted her so blessed badly, and to prove it, he kissed her mouth so savagely, she uttered a cry of surprise.
He kept on kissing her, deepening the union of their mouths, devouring all he found, breathing her in, tasting her sweetness. And she met him with the fervor of a storm.
God, yes, she was a storm encased in fragile human skin. But it was okay. He could get away now that he had an excuse. She wouldn’t have to see what might happen to him if he stayed.
Unsure of how long the kiss lasted, Gavin finally drew back. He’d done it, kissed her, and felt a kind of weary triumph about that. But he had to go, leave her, take care of this. Although he wanted nothing more than to stay, the monster out there in the dark had torn him apart, injected a beast into his bloodstream and then left him to die. That beast was outside right now, close enough to reach out and touch.
He had no choice here.
“Close the windows and lock the door,” he said with his lips inches from hers. “I shouldn’t have come here like this. I should have known better than to let it get so close.”
He turned to go, torn and hurting.
“What do you mean? What’s getting close?” she called after him as Gavin, broken and unfulfilled, strode across the yard, vaulted the fence and headed for the hillside, leaving perhaps the sweetest night of his life behind.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_b3f30482-675b-59c9-a73e-4c8636a1cef3)
Skylar didn’t call for the ranger to stop as she stood in the doorway staring at the darkness settling over the mountains. The noise they’d heard hadn’t just interrupted her first unplanned one-night stand, it had jangled her nerves.
Harris’s haste in getting away from her would have seemed like a slap in the face if it had been for any other reason than going after whatever had made that terrible sound. His disappearance gave her breathing room to contemplate what she’d been about to do—to him, with him.
This whole night had proved a fairly spectacular hiccup in her present situation, and she wasn’t all that clear about what she wanted right then—a man or a creature that was more than a man. She wasn’t certain that a mere man could have done it for her.
Freud would have had a field day with that information.
So would her big sister.
Trish, as the most stable of the four Donovan sisters, wouldn’t appreciate that her sibling was in heat and lusting for a tryst with anyone who came along, let alone lusting for a werewolf. After a conversation like that with Trish, there’d be a reservation in a white padded cell and some little blue pills—a scene that hit too close to home.
Skylar stared outside.
Harris had warned her to lock the door. Yet as far as she knew, wolves, no matter what size, couldn’t handle a doorknob. So what good would a lock have done to protect her from the animal Harris said he needed to chase?
Reason told her that Ranger Harris had lied, that he might be hiding something.
Part of her wanted to listen to his advice anyway. The other newly rebellious part that would have taken a stranger to bed urged her to follow him and see for herself what was urgent enough to end their lovemaking session before the real fun began.
The guy had been seriously distressed over the sound they’d heard. There was no way she’d imagined that. And though her body, too, was trying to warn her about this sound, and shudder after shudder rocked her stance in the doorway, Skylar couldn’t let lies and secrets become an integral part of her new reality.
She was different here. She was letting go of her own secrets, one by one, and open to taking new risks.
Should she go after the ranger? In the dark?
What if her father had fallen to his death while chasing figures from his dreams?
She wasn’t familiar enough with the trails to find footing or have directional cues without proper sightlines. Her cell phone wasn’t good for much because the GPS was almost nonexistent.
As for wanting to jump into the sack with this guy, maybe she just needed a night with an honorable man for a change. Harris, at least, ran out on her before placing a ring on her finger.
Backing up, Skylar listened hard to Harris’s fading footsteps. With him went the rest of the evening’s light.
Her heart refused to slow as she backed from the doorway. Confusion reigned. The room dimmed around her, but Skylar didn’t reach for a lamp. Seconds flew by, then minutes.
Finally, she shut the door and leaned against it with her eyes closed, picturing Harris’s tight, tanned flesh pressed to her bare skin. Feeling, even now, his breath on her face.
* * *
Gavin picked up the trail of the monster much more easily than he could have hoped, almost as if the bloodthirsty beast wanted him to.
He didn’t know what to make of that, but it was too late to consider anything other than finding his prey. His blood was up. His muscles were seizing. The beast inside him recognized this other beast in an unseemly way.
I’m not like you, Gavin wanted to shout. I’m no killer.
But shouting would amount to a calling card and telegraph his presence...if the thing didn’t know already.
As he jogged up the steep path, the old thoughts returned, though answers to his questions had never been within reach. If he wasn’t like that monster, he had to suppose that the blood passed from beast to beast somehow got diluted in the transfer.
His wounds made him suffer a change, but until he knew more about what had happened to him, he had to think of his cursed condition as a disease.
Hell, the differences between him and his maker had to be studied. He couldn’t exact a physical change without a full moon, yet he’d been attacked without one. Feelings inside of him shifted, internal stirrings came and went, but no full transformation happened for him without that commanding silver light. When he did morph, he became a strange mixture of both man and wolf, and not more of one thing than the other.
This damn beast was wolfish, with a lot of something extra added that had no relation to Homo sapiens. There was no full moon tonight, nor had there been the night before, which solidified the supposition that this monster either remained permanently furry, or could fur-up at will, with or without the moon’s kiss.
So different. Yet I sense you, beast, as though what I’ve become isn’t too far removed from what you are.
Part of that beast truly had become part of him.
Gavin’s thoughts kept churning as he climbed the hillside trying to sift through facts, in search of answers.
He’d tried locking himself away to avoid the moon’s treacherous call, which only made things worse. Unable to change its form, his body had betrayed him anyway. He’d nearly gone mad with the shakes, unconscious spells, roiling stomach upheavals and bouts of fever. His mind had eventually succumbed to the madness. He’d lost control of his temper, lost his mind to the pain of withholding the transformation and ended up in some godforsaken place on the mountain with no recollection of how he got there or what he might have done while his mind was in a fog.
Lesson learned. It was a freaking sharp-witted curse that developed immunity to thoughtful manipulation.
He had to give in to the physical changes in order to remain in charge mentally. Succumbing to the moon’s lure was necessary. As long as he changed shape, he was okay. Keeping as far away from other people as was possible near the full moon had allowed him to weather this out.
He got that now, and guessed that without the wolfish form there’d be no survival of this monster’s horrific species, hence the absolute need to shift. That furry demon’s teeth and claws had created another similar freak, and so that had to be the way the moon’s cult passed on. If he stayed in these mountains whenever there was a full moon, he’d be safe enough, he hoped. Others would be safe.
Gavin stopped suddenly, skin chilling, senses wide open.
The atmosphere around him had changed, creating new pressure that was like a punch to his chest. He heard rustling sounds and thought them ludicrous for a monster excelling in stealth, as though the beast were leaving him a trail of breadcrumbs.
There was no mistaking the smell. He knew this monster’s scent, having been up close and personal with it. Why was it here? Did it want to finish what it had started two years ago? Finish him off?
Is that why you stuck around?
Gavin’s heart rate accelerated. He’d left his weapon in the car before visiting the woman in the cabin. Damn it, he should have borrowed her gun.
The wolf inside him clawed at his insides with nails like talons, sensing trouble. An icy shiver of anticipation ran up his spine.
“Come out.”
He spoke at a normal decibel, feeling the presence of Otherness as if it were a bad rash.
“You can’t possibly imagine I don’t know you’re there, or what you are.”
More rustling noises came from his right. Gavin slowly turned toward the sound, saw something. Felt something.
The creature he’d sought for so long was here, all right, and standing its ground.
Against the outline of the trees, nearly hidden in the shadow, a huge form took shape. Bigger than anything he could have imagined, the giant specter loomed over the surrounding brush like the main character in a horror movie.
On that fateful night, the thing had moved so fast, Gavin hadn’t seen what was coming. But he saw something of its outline now and his inner alarms went off like a string of firecrackers.
This was no mere man-wolf combination. Nor, as he’d guessed, was it anything remotely like him, at all.
Its massive shape left little for Gavin to appeal to, speak to, reason with. Thoughts of getting close to it with any kind of hand-held weapon were absurd. Killing it with a spray of bullets seemed equally as unlikely. He hadn’t really expected this abomination to allow him another close-up this soon—he had meant to chase it away from the cabin. Hell, seeing it now, he wanted to run the other way.
No doubt this monster would be faster.
“So here we are,” he made himself say to ease a small portion of the fear knotting up his insides. “Should I call you family?”
There couldn’t be more than one of these beasts, he hoped, because where’d be the justice in that?
“It had to be you who did this to me. Can you recognize another freak?”
His nemesis didn’t move, making this potentially deadly scenario all the spookier.
“What are we to do now, since I can’t let you go around killing and maiming people?” he asked, having to talk though this creature could strike at any moment. Talking seemed necessary. He felt like shouting. One more night, and he would have been stronger, at least. He would have had claws and speed and double the muscle. Though his humanness danced on a thin thread of control tonight, there was no full moon to help him.
“I was supposed to protect those people who died. That’s my job. Now what? You do whatever the hell you like?” he said. Then he paused to regain the strength in his voice. “If not exactly like you, I’m no longer like them, either. Not like those people.”
Like the aftershocks of an earthquake, a series of low growls shook the ground beneath him. Darkness wavered. Leaves rustled. This beast’s rumble was terrible, threatening, ominous, but the monster stayed in the shadows.
When Gavin let loose a responding growl, the creature stepped forward on legs the size of a grizzly’s. Transfixed, unable to get a handle on the creature’s exact size and girth, and fairly sure he didn’t want to, Gavin jumped back. This was a damned nightmare.
“Son of a...”
Gavin tried to ignore the tingling in his hands. Angling his head, he heard a crack of bone on bone. Licks of white-hot fire made every joint ache as a wave of lightheadedness washed over him, twisting his stomach into fits. He knew this feeling, recognized these sensations, and they came as a shock.
The beast in front of him was able to call forth Gavin’s beast, and maybe even set it free early. Was that because what stood across from him had created him? Blood calling to blood?
Through a slowly revolving whirl of turmoil, Gavin heard his own growl of angry protest. “I’m not like you!”
And though it seemed impossible for anything else to get through the pain and shock of what he was experiencing, something else nipped at his attention, dragging him away from the outrageous situation at hand. Too riled up to put a name to that distraction, and feeling too ill to respond to it, Gavin kept his focus riveted to the beast less than ten feet away from him. He was close enough to hear it breathing. He heard its giant canines snapping, and the memory of teeth like that tearing into him, ripping the flesh from his bones, made his stomach turn over.
This was no werewolf. This truly was a demon. And Gavin’s mind warned that he might not be able to get out of this in one piece. Not this time.
When the creature’s growls suddenly ceased, the world went deathly quiet with a silence that seemed surreal. Though Gavin’s muscles ached to transform and his fingers stung with the threat of popping claws, the grip this specter had on him loosened. It, too, had noticed the distraction, and turned its mind elsewhere.
The enormous werewolf, which could have squashed him like a bug, advanced no farther. After waiting out several hundred of Gavin’s thunderous heartbeats, it turned away from him. Uttering a low roar of grumbling displeasure, it drifted away as completely and swiftly as if it had merely melted into the night.
Sounds from behind made Gavin spin around, afraid the creature had reappeared at his back. Lunging forward, taking the advantage, he rushed toward the sound, striking an object hard, taking it to the ground.
His breath whooshed out. His muscles screamed for the strength necessary to do some damage to the thing that had damaged him so very badly.
“This ends here, one way or the other!”
The moment he said those words, Gavin realized it wasn’t the beast he’d tackled. The body beneath him was small, fragile, and it squirmed beneath his weight, smelling like soap and the soft fabrics covering it.
Closing his eyes, Gavin fought back an oath. This wasn’t the monster. Not even close.
When he reopened his eyes, he found a familiar face looking back. A small white circle of features that were pale enough in the moonlight to be almost transparent.
“What the hell?” was all he managed to say between deep, rasping breaths of mortified relief.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_d61eb986-c0dd-50ec-8e07-a6148c46590d)
“You can get off me now.”
Breathless from the momentum of the attack, Skylar shook so hard, she stuttered.
Without being able to see Harris’s expression in the dark, she felt every racing beat of his heart through the chest pressed to hers.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“Following you.”
“I asked you to stay inside.”
“About that. I seem to be going through a rebellious streak that makes me impervious to reason. I’m sorry if I startled you.”
“Hell, woman, my warning must not have been nearly strong enough to convince you of the danger.”
“I was pretty sure you could handle one lone wolf.”
“Lone wolf? You have no idea...”
Maddeningly, Harris didn’t finish the statement as he fought for his breath.
“I thought you heard me coming,” she said. “You were speaking to me, weren’t you?”
“I was talking to myself.”
“Is that a habit rangers often pick up?”
“Yes.” He took some time to go on. “It’s not safe here. Not safe anywhere near here. It was foolish of you to ignore me.”
“Yes, well, right now the problem is being able to breathe.”
Harris only then seemed to realize he was on top of her. Slowly, he backed onto his knees. Seconds later, he offered her his hand and a word of caution. “We have to get you out of here.”
Skylar took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. The man was little more than a dim outline in the dark, but she saw him turn his head as if expecting someone else to appear.
Holding tightly to her right wrist, he said, “I can’t do my job if people run all over these hills in the dark. There are always a few who think they’re above the rules.”
Skylar stumbled forward when he snapped his arm. “Meaning I’m one of those.”
He didn’t challenge her remark.
“Did you find the wolf?”
“No.”
He was lying again. She could tell by the way her inner radar was going off.
“I’ll go with you to look for it,” she suggested.
“You’ll do no such thing. You can leave this place as quickly as possible. In fact, I’ll take you.”
“I don’t need a chaperone.”
“On the contrary, I have every reason to believe you might.”
He began to walk, more or less dragging her with him. “Please listen to me, Skylar. There’s a dangerous animal on the loose, and that’s no joke. If you’re out here, I’ll worry about you. Distractions can make these situations so much worse. Surely you can understand that?”
They slid in a damp patch of dirt on the slope, but righted easily enough. Skylar resolved to pay more attention to her feet. She wasn’t going to be the bimbo of horror flicks who always tripped and fell in the scary scenes. She had always been fleet.
She wasn’t afraid to be out here with Harris beside her, yet she felt uneasy, and as if they were being watched.
“I think my father might have been chasing a wolf when he died,” she confessed, matching Harris’s lengthy strides. “If so, then I want to see it skinned.”
Harris’s sharp intake of air wasn’t her imagination. Something out here had bothered him, and bothered him still. He was wired and on edge. He kept looking around.
“I’d like to hear about that, but this isn’t the time or place for conversation. You’ll have to trust me on this.”
“Okay,” she said.
The relief in his voice was evident. “Good.”
The odd feeling of them not being alone stuck with her on their steep downhill descent until she had to speak of it.
“I think we’re being followed.”
His response was to utter a choice four-letter word and to walk faster. Skylar wasn’t going to argue with him about getting to safety this time. The new presence she sensed was heavy enough to siphon some of the air from her lungs. The night had grown colder, and each breath she struggled to take felt icy after the day’s heat.
“Maybe it’s a ghost,” she whispered.
Harris urged her into a jog.
Thing was, she thought, if ghosts existed, this one hovering in the woods might turn out to be what was left of her father. But if it was her father, why did the spirit feel so dark? Why was she suddenly afraid?
She let Harris lead her through the night, clinging to his hand. She’d been right. They were being followed, and the man in front of her knew this as well as she did. Clearly whatever he had been chasing out here now stalked them, and it was something Ranger Harris feared.
Halfway down the path, Skylar resisted the impulse to stop and face whatever tracked them. Only then would she confront the awful fear building inside her.
Her guide didn’t seem to share her impulse to stop. His hold on her wrist remained unyielding as he led her over rough, unfamiliar terrain ignoring holes and vines as though he saw every detail in the dark.
She couldn’t see a blasted thing.
He didn’t produce a flashlight, either, seeming to rely on his own internal GPS system. She supposed that rangers had to be familiar with the areas they patrolled and that Harris walked these same paths over and over on a daily basis. All she saw were glimpses of his back, highlighted whenever the moon peeked out from the clouds.
Deliberately, she didn’t offer the use of the flashlight she’d used to find him in the first place, now tucked inside her pocket. She was fascinated by how Harris maneuvered and afraid that if she shone that light behind her, the sanity she presently held on to might desert her. She was sure something otherworldly lurked on this hillside.
She thanked God that Harris wasn’t the kind of creature she’d almost expected him to be—though the voice he shared with the man in her dreams continued to plague her. He didn’t use that voice now, though there were questions that sorely needed answers. Questions having to do with wolves being bold enough to stalk two humans, or if it might be some other Colorado animal. Mountain lion. Bear. Recently escaped homicidal human.
The icy sensation of being tracked didn’t ease up as they ran. Traversing the downward path, Skylar felt positive she heard sounds of the creature breathing beyond the two of them.
She kept as close to Harris as possible and his grip on her remained a comfort. But although they had gone a fair distance already, the cabin’s porch light didn’t appear. Were they lost?
A gravel road suddenly loomed up out of nowhere, noticeable by its ghostly gray color.
“Stop,” she said, tugging at Harris’s hand. “This isn’t anywhere near the cabin. The road to Dad’s place is dirt.”
“Just a few steps more,” Harris urged.
When she saw the car, Skylar remembered what he’d told her about leaving it there. “We’re on the opposite side of the hill. Are we driving to the cabin?”
“I’m thinking it might be better to take you someplace else for the rest of the night.”
“You heard that stalker, too?”
“What stalker?”
More lies, in the form of withheld information. The rigidity of Harris’s arm gave away the fact that he knew much more than he let on.
“Answering a question with a question won’t get us very far,” Skylar pointed out.
“Maybe not, but my Jeep will.”
They reached the car, found the doors unlocked.
“That’s all you’re going to tell me?” she challenged, facing him over the car’s roof.
“I don’t want to scare you.”
“It’s too late for that. Is the rush in honor of a dangerous outlaw on the loose? I have a right to know.”
“Would that make you get into this car?”
“I’d just like to know what we’re running from.”
Harris blew out a breath. “I don’t know what it is for sure, okay? I only know that something is out there, and my job is to keep you safe.”
The moon was brighter here, away from the trees. Ranger Harris gestured for her to get into the car.
“I’ll take you to town, where you can get a room for the night,” he said.
“You, too?”
“Afraid not.”
Did he sound regretful about that? Skylar wished she could see his face more clearly.
“Should I trust you?” she asked. “We’re running from the unknown, but I don’t know you, either. Is it wise to get into a car with you?”
“True. I am a stranger to you. But at the moment, I solemnly promise you that I’m the lesser of two evils on this mountain.”
Cooperating, Skylar climbed into the vehicle. The worn leather seats smelled like the great outdoors. Like dirt and greenery and Ranger Harris.
She said, “Maybe I should have taken a closer look at that badge on your shirt.”
He pulled the badge off and tossed it to her as he slid into the driver’s seat. “Be my guest.”
Without a doubt, this guy could be infuriating. But what he had tossed her felt like a real badge. She’d seen a few in her time, so this probably meant Harris was one of the good guys.
Skylar closed her fingers over the metal as if it were a talisman to wield against things that went bump in the night.
“Anything you need we can pick up at the store,” he said. “I have an account there.”
“Does this store have alcohol?”
Harris turned the key and started the engine. “I’m sure it does.” After a pause, he added, “We don’t have to talk about what happened tonight if you’d prefer that.”
“You mean about what chased us, or what nearly took place in my bedroom?”
“Should I apologize for acting on that last one?”
“No.” Skylar closed her eyes briefly, listening to the familiar nuances in his voice that fanned her inner heat. “It wasn’t your fault.”
The car kicked up a spray of gravel as it moved. Skylar felt Harris’s attention on her.
“I needed a diversion,” she explained.
“From what?”
“The rest of my life.”
“Losing your father?”
“That’s the most recent blow.”
“Then I’m sorry we were interrupted, though it was probably for the best.” Harris sounded earnest.
“Yes. For the best,” Skylar agreed, leaning sideways as the car made a sharp left turn around a stand of pine trees. “It wasn’t really a wolf that made you run out on me, was it?”
Harris glanced in her direction without comment.
They rode in silence after that, which made the bumpy ride more uncomfortable. Eventually it became clear that the man beside her wasn’t going to offer anything resembling a decent explanation for what had happened in or around the cabin tonight. Then again, neither could she.
“You might want to pack your father’s things during the day and stay in town at night,” he suggested some time later.
“Being in town most of the time would be inconvenient.”
Again, Skylar felt the intensity of his silent appraisal.
“As a favor to me, then,” he said.
“Do I owe you one?”
“If not, you might humor me as the local law enforcement.”
Skylar winced. Because of Danny, the words law enforcement had a sour ring to them. In essence, she’d gone from one kind of cop to another without thinking. This was far better than the werewolf dream, though.
“Well, I can’t jump out of a moving car, so I guess tonight’s a done deal,” she said.
“Good.”
As they rounded another dark curve in the road, the soft glitter of distant lights appeared. Skylar supposed her safety would be assured down there among the masses, if safety was really an issue.
It was that rebel part of her—the part that had sent her traipsing up a mountain path after dark and had given her an appreciation for sensuous dreams, gorgeous werewolves and strangers with seductive voices—that told her to ignore this ranger’s plan after tonight and instead find out what the hell was going on.
Her dad had kept secrets, and that hadn’t ended well. The man beside her kept things to himself. She had to know who or what was out there, and whether being followed tonight had anything to do with her father’s death, less than two weeks ago. She had a hunch that it did.
With good old Donovan perseverance and a dash of stubborn determination, she vowed get to the heart of these mysteries if it was the last thing she ever did.
With or without the man next to her...in her bed.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_650d7c21-4b9c-534b-bf97-558d1e688d98)
Gavin read Skylar Donovan easily and checked his concerns. She was only his business up to a point. After that, his feelings for her couldn’t interfere with a task that was too weighty for distractions.
He’d seen the demon. Facing it again, he had survived. And that was one hell of a mystery.
The thing hadn’t attacked. If it had scented him and identified him as a Were—one it had created in a bloody mess of poisoned flesh—surely Skylar Donovan’s presence should also have piqued its interest. All that succulent ivory skin and her sweet, sweet perfume that right now made him want to look at her instead of the road.
The beast couldn’t have missed that.
No beast could have missed it.
Case in point was his own inexplicable longing for her. More than anything, he wanted to stop the car and show her he could maintain some control if he was allowed to have her.
It wasn’t only his vow to protect the public that made him want to see to Skylar’s safety. It was sheer, unadulterated greed. He wanted to save Skylar Donovan for himself.
She was the sum total of everything he’d lost when that beast attacked him, and so much more. She was lace and perfume, defiance and mystery in a slick feminine casing that escalated his need for those things. He’d be damned if he’d allow the monster to harm one hair on her beautiful head.
Despite this newfound possessiveness, he realized that Skylar really wasn’t his to keep. She was human, and he wasn’t. Oil and water didn’t mix. Neither should wolf and human DNA.
He’d kissed Skylar and wanted his mouth on hers now. Her plush lips were all he thought about when they weren’t confronting giant rabid werewolves that by all rights shouldn’t exist.
I shouldn’t exist, either, as I am now. You deserve better, Skylar.
But maybe she’d been sent here from the heavens as the kind of distraction that would keep him sane and grounded?
Don’t look for excuses.
He might be torn apart by the depth of his longing for her, but he had to let this woman go, keep his distance, harness his thoughts and get away from her as soon as possible because his resolve was already weakening where she was concerned, and his energy was needed elsewhere.
The beast had returned. He’d seen it. Instead of taking it down, he’d been seriously unprepared, due in part to Skylar.
“No more kissing.”
Though he muttered this softly and to himself, she heard it.
“Is that a promise?” she said.
Grimacing, rubbing his forehead, Gavin felt conflicted. By being here with Skylar he was allowing the monster to get away. By allowing it to get away, he was helping Skylar Donovan avoid the ugly fate that had befallen him.
“Nothing personal,” he said to her.
“If you say so.”
Lights appeared around them too quickly. Gavin drove the car into the motel parking lot at the edge of town and switched off the engine. They got out of the car without speaking.
She slammed the door.
“Just give them my name.” He pointed to the office.
“Ranger Harris has carte blanche here?”
“It’ll do unless you run up a tab.”
She tilted her head. “You actually have a tab in this place?”
Gavin nodded. “I sometimes need to crash before the long drive home.”
“Then you don’t live close by.”
“Close enough when I haven’t been up for several nights in a row. Way too far away otherwise.”
Skylar Donovan walked around the car and right up to where he stood. “You’re going back out there, aren’t you?”
“I’m on duty for another hour or so.”
He worked hard to keep his hands to himself, unsure of why he was so attracted to Skylar that he’d want to push the limits of his self-control, or delay his highly charged personal vendetta.
This leggy blonde was just so blessed tempting, the choice seemed tough. It was as if she’d gotten under his skin and nestled there alongside the wolf.
“Does that mean you have to be alone?” she asked.
“Tonight it does.”
“Why? Why would you take that chance and go back out there when you know we were followed?”
“It’s what I do, Skylar. It’s something I have to face and take care of without risking harm to others.”
Skylar. He liked her unusual name and liked saying it. Outside of her evident ornery streak, he liked everything about Skylar Donovan that he’d seen so far. Maybe he even liked that stubborn streak.
She might be small, yet she was no shy flower. She was too courageous for her own good, though. She had walked up that mountain alone tonight without being sure of finding him.
Somehow, at that moment, she seemed a lot more than just temptation in tight blue jeans. The delicious scent that had lured him to her in the first place wafted around her like a corona. Golden hair caressed her shoulders in uncombed waves highlighted by shafts of moonlight escaping the cloud cover. The same moonlight that made his forehead dampen with the strain of withholding his wild side.
“So you admit we were followed and have no idea who it might have been?” she asked.
He shrugged to hide the evidence of another unruly spike in his heart rate that pulsed upward and into his jaw. Hell, he wanted to get under her skin, seize the moment and take some long-overdue R&R while he could. Surely that was fair after what he’d been through?
When she’d left the cabin, after what had almost taken place in her bedroom, Skylar had tugged on her shirt—the same shirt he’d removed in a fit of passion—without properly stretching it into place. Narrow sections of bare skin showed above the waistband of her jeans—smooth, pale and terribly seductive.
No way.
Can’t have you.
I’ve got to go back out there.
All true warnings, but Gavin’s body argued adamantly against them, and against reason. Having sampled her, tasted her, felt her beneath his hands, his body repeatedly returned to those sensations as though she’d been imprinted on him. After looking into her big green eyes and finding a shared connection, Skylar Donovan truly did feel like part of his future.
This wasn’t right, of course, or normal. She was just a woman he had stumbled upon who’d ended up striking his fancy. Her open-mindedness in terms of sex and lust and freely meeting her own needs had sealed the deal. That was all. He hadn’t met anyone like her in a long time.
“Will I see you tomorrow?” She ran her hands over the warm hood of the Jeep the way he imagined her running them over him, and his body responded with a ripple of lustful tension.
With his pulse erratic and a new pressure in his chest, Gavin said, “In the morning I’ll be back to take you home.”
“Okay. Until then.”
When she turned from him, Gavin briefly shut his eyes to block the sight, attempting to keep his distance, keep himself from pulling her back and making a complete fool of himself.
He watched her walk away. Her hips swayed in the fitted jeans he hadn’t been lucky enough to get off her. The taut, slender back that had arched passionately during their kiss emphasized a small waist he’d like to encircle with his hands.
Rebuking himself for staring at her like this, Gavin didn’t stop looking. He’d sent her away, and she’d obliged. Her allure might be strong, but he couldn’t let it rival the moon’s—the moon at that same moment sending out signals that he intercepted as clearly as if the giant orb contained a telepathic intelligence.
Tomorrow night he’d change into something that would scare Skylar to death. All thoughts of closeness and intimacy would be a thing of the past if she were to witness his transformation.
In this new reality, however, Skylar had become as potentially dangerous to him as the moon that ruled his shape. She’d become both a distraction and a necessity in no time flat. He had to let her go and didn’t want to.
Really didn’t want to.
“Definitely no kissing,” Gavin said aloud to bolster his willpower.
Over her shoulder, Skylar Donovan smiled. “Don’t be too sure about that, Harris. I’m here for a few more days.”
Gavin took two steps backward, and then two more, his heart beating out a protest about getting into the car. His fingers curled against his palms. His muscles rippled and twitched. As absurd as it seemed given that he had known this woman for only one day...leaving Skylar Donovan was just about the hardest thing he had ever done.
* * *
Skylar heard the car drive out of the parking lot, and her determination to remain independent faltered. In spite of everything she’d been through, she felt forlorn and alone.
Still, she had to admit that Harris’s behavior bordered on chivalrous. He was willing to foot the bill tonight at this motel in order to see to her safety, which meant he did believe there might be trouble out there in the dark.
“A civilized ending to a strange night?”
Resigned to her current fate, Skylar gave the motel a wary once-over. It was a standard two-story, U-shaped design from the fifties. The building wrapped around the parking lot on three sides, with all the rooms and doors front-facing, and two sets of stairs leading to the second-floor balcony. Most of the windows were dark. A small blue neon sign pointed to the reception area.
Skylar went inside.
A middle-aged woman with short blond hair, wearing a red fleece vest, greeted her from behind a counter and raised an eyebrow when Skylar mentioned Harris’s name. Gratefully, that woman kept what she might have been thinking about a woman showing up in this place on his dime, to herself.
Handing over a key, this receptionist said, “Room twenty-one. That’s his favorite,” as if being in his favorite room mattered. She then produced an ice bucket and a glass, and looked past Skylar for the missing luggage.
“Will you need anything else?”
“A toothbrush would be nice.”
Skylar smiled as though nothing were out of the ordinary about not having a purse or a toothbrush, omitting the explanation of not being able to stop at the cabin for some of life’s conveniences because a madman might show up there.
Or a wolf that knew how to open a door.
“Emergency amenities are on the bathroom counter,” the woman said, returning the smile with less enthusiasm and leaving Skylar to assume that Ranger Harris had more than one female fan in the area. “The room is on the second floor.”
“Thanks.”
Skylar climbed the stairs and waited for several minutes before attempting to go inside room twenty-one, which, like the rest of the rooms, overlooked the mostly empty parking lot. Summer was over, so tourists would be scarce. Since no lights were on, she guessed she might have this floor to herself, and dreaded that.
She wished the ice bucket came with a bottle of wine. Suddenly ravenous, she wanted a salad and a steak. This wasn’t the kind of motel with room service, though, and since she had no wallet, dinner wasn’t in the cards. Her growling stomach would just have to suck it up and deal.
Staring out at the lot, and up at the nearly full moon emerging from the clouds, she felt lost and slightly out of sorts. The cozy cabin stuffed with her father’s things made her feel more at home and part of something. Here, in a strange motel without her credit cards or her cell phone, she was cut off and isolated.
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Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Into the woods… Skylar Donovan comes to her late father’s Colorado cabin to find answers that explain his death. Instead, she meets a handsome Forest Ranger with a dark side, a stranger who appears in her dreams as something other than a man…Werewolf Gavin was bitten by a monster in the hills he has sworn to protect and has committed his life to searching for the beast. Now Gavin must protect Skylar from the evil he is stalking – but the forbidden lust that burns between them might be the greatest danger of all.