As exhausted as she was, Renny gave up on the idea of sleeping after an hour. Her body might be exhausted, but her mind wouldn’t rest. She lay in the darkened living room and stared up at the ceiling while her thoughts continued to race through her mind like fleeing prey. Ninety percent of them featured a tall, tattooed wolf with eyes like the midnight sky.
Stupid hormones.
They had gone into overdrive the moment she’d set eyes on Mick, the mysterious wolf man. When she’d gone into the bathroom and slipped into the clothes he had lent her, her idiot glands had struck up their own version of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Her wolf took one whiff of his scent clinging to the garments and informed her they had found their mate.
Her human side wanted to laugh. Oh, there was nothing funny about it. It just figured that with her luck, Renny would find herself destined to mate the man who saved her life, then seemed to instantly regret it.
The whole time she had been explaining her story to the mayor and the deputy, Mick had stared at her as though she had a contagious disease. Normally, she might have taken his focused attention as a sign of his interest in her, but he paired it with such strong go-away vibes that she had quickly decided he was just trying to figure out the best way to get rid of her as fast as possible. He spoke to her only when he had no choice, he did everything he could to avoid getting close to her, and he’d beaten land speed records getting away from her as soon as they’d been left alone.
It didn’t indicate much of a mutual attraction.
Her wolf whined inside her head. The male confused them. He smelled like a mate, warm and musky and intoxicating, but he didn’t act like a mate. Not the way she’d always imagined her mate would act when she finally met him.
Most shifters thought about that moment. The idea of true mates, destined to be together, lived in the collective consciousness of all of them, but wolves took the idea especially seriously. After all, their animal sides mated for life without the pesky habit of falling out of love that humans seemed to manage on a regular basis. To find a mate and know you’d never want anyone else was a powerful lure.
All the stories said that the moment a wolf met its mate, it knew. Certainty struck like a bolt of lightning sent from the Goddess. One sniff was all it took. A blind wolf could pick its mate out of a room full of other shifters just by their scent, and that instant attraction always went both ways.
Or so they said. It made Renny wonder if anyone had ever bothered to explain the process to Mick, because he certainly hadn’t reacted to her like he never wanted to be apart from her. More like he couldn’t wait to get away from her. If she’d had a lower sense of self-esteem, his behavior might have given her a complex.
Instead, it gave her a puzzle to solve. Why would the wolf she recognized immediately as her mate act as if he wanted nothing to do with her? He couldn’t deny their connection; it just wasn’t possible to repudiate a true mating. At most, she supposed a really determined shifter could attempt to ignore it, but why would anyone want to? Who didn’t want to be with their perfect partner for the rest of their lives?
Mick, the lone wolf, she realized, frowning when it occurred to her that she had never learned his full name. John Jaeger, the mayor, and Molly Buchanan had introduced themselves to her, and Zeke Buchanan had been clearly identified as Molly’s older brother, but no one had bothered to give her Mick’s full name. The wolf hadn’t volunteered the information, and in the habit of friends of long acquaintance, it obviously hadn’t dawned on anyone to address Mick by anything but his familiar nickname.
At least, Renny assumed it was a nickname. Wasn’t Mick short for Michael? Did parents actually give it as a full first name? Not that she had room to talk. Her parents had given her a nickname as a first name, her great-grandmother’s nickname. Reine-Yves Goudreau, a wolf from a French-speaking village in Quebec, Canada, had been dubbed “Renny” by her English-speaking neighbors after she married an American and relocated to the United States. Her grandson’s wife had so loved the sound of her nickname, and admired her life story so much, that she’d used it as her daughter’s proper name. For all Renny knew, maybe Mick actually was Mick’s full first name.
It made her squirm a little to realize that she’d known the man less than a few hours, spoken no more than a handful of words to him, and still would have bared her throat and let him mark her if he so much as sniffed in her direction. For all that she shared her heart and mind with a wolf, Renny had grown up in a human-dominated world. She’d even lived mostly outside of a pack structure, given how few red wolf shifters like her still existed.
To her, most of the relationships she’d seen modeled had been between humans or between mixed-species couples, and humans never had the same mating instincts as shifters. A shifter might recognize a human as her true mate, but a human never felt the corresponding match. Oh, they could fall in love with a shifter and commit to spending their lives together, but for a human there always remained the option to walk away if things went wrong. For the shifter, the bond could never be broken. If her mate left, a shifter would pine over the loss for the rest of her life.
In fact, many shifters never survived the loss of a mate. The death or departure of the one person to whom a shifter was irrevocably bound caused an emotional trauma that sapped away her life. All true mates lived with that risk, but fiercely monogamous species like wolves took it harder than most. Renny could count on one hand the number of lupines she had met who had outlived their mates, and most of them hadn’t done so for long.
Could that be the shadow she saw lurking in Mick’s dark eyes? Could he possibly have had and lost a mate sometime in his past? She thought about his appearance and guessed he must be in his mid-thirties, which was certainly old enough to have mated and lost, especially if his mate had died from some sort of unexpected trauma. Shifters rarely died of diseases, and certainly not as young as a mate of his must have been when he lost her.
If she’d guessed right, maybe this might be a good time to reevaluate that instinct about Mick being her mate. Maybe she didn’t find the man all that fascinating after all. Her life didn’t need any more complications, and nothing would be more complicated than trying to mate with a man who’d already lost the other half of his soul.
Her wolf snarled. It could care less about complications. It knew the alpha wolf was their mate, and it had no intention of turning aside because the male had been mated before. If the other female was out of the picture, then the path to their mating led straight ahead.
It might be rocky as all hell, strewn with pitfalls, and salted with potentially painful traps, but it led straight ahead.
She shifted a little on the sofa cushions. Her wolf operated on pure instinct, but Renny had the reasoning skills to know a bad bet when she saw one. Too bad her inner bitch couldn’t give a rat’s ass for the concepts of reason and logic. It saw its mate, and it would have him. End of story.
Sighing, Renny finally closed her eyes. Contemplating the effort it would take to win over a reluctant, trauma-scarred mate might just be enough to put her to sleep. Just thinking about it left her exhausted.
Renny blinked awake, surprised that she’d ever fallen asleep. Who knew the prospect of a doomed romance could work better than a sleeping pill?
She pushed herself into a sitting position, taking the movement slowly and assessing her body’s reaction as she did. Her side still ached, but the wound in her leg had progressed from painful to itchy, which was a good sign. It meant at least that the injury had healed enough to go from a serious weakness to more of a nuisance. Maybe the day was looking up.
Looking around, she immediately felt the emptiness of the space that surrounded her. Mick’s scent lingered everywhere, but in the way that said he lived here, not in the way that indicated he’d occupied the space in the last few hours.
She strained to listen to the rest of the house but heard nothing beyond the hum of the appliances and the sound of the wind stirring outside. Was she alone?
Renny got to her feet and took a second to neatly fold the blankets she’d used through the night. Her mother’s lectures about being a good houseguest still stuck with her, even after all these years.
A sudden wave of bittersweet nostalgia had her fussing with the stack of linens, aligning the edges of the covers with the corners of the pillow on which she’d piled them. Her parents had died when Renny was a freshman in college, killed in a car accident with a tractor-trailer. It had been almost eight years, and she still missed them every day.
She pushed the thought aside with effort and stepped around the coffee table to check whether she was really alone. Somehow, she had expected to find Mick waiting for her when she woke up, anxious to hurry her out of his hair and back to her car. Judging by the weak light filtering into the room, though, it couldn’t be all that far past dawn, and the male wolf was nowhere to be found.
Weird. That meant either that Mick trusted her enough to leave her alone in his home with no fear that she meant any harm to him or his belongings; or that he wanted to get away from her so badly that he was willing to take the risk that she would rob him blind or set his house on fire while he was gone. Somehow, she wasn’t willing to bet on the answer behind door number one.
Still, she checked the other rooms just make sure. It wasn’t a big house, just three modestly sized bedrooms, a single bath, kitchen, living, and dining rooms. It took maybe five minutes to search from top to bottom, and at least two of those were spent talking herself out of nosing around in the man’s drawers and cabinets. By the time she finished, she knew for certain that Mick was gone. The message sank in immediately.
He didn’t want to be near her. Renny dismissed the pang that caused in her heart and raised her chin. Well, that was just fine. She could take care of herself, after all. She didn’t need a man to rescue her, and she didn’t want to be a burden on anyone. She could handle her life just fine on her own.
Resolved, she yanked open the front door, shed her borrowed, too-big clothes that smelled of reluctant, confrontation-avoidant wolf, and shifted into her fur. The stretch of muscle stung where she’d been injured, but once she settled into her other shape, she could feel how much she’d already healed. She could handle the trip back to her car.
If she could grab her wallet and a change of clothes, she could make her own way to the garage and arrange to get a ride out with some gas. That way she’d be out of Mick’s hair with no further inconvenience to him.
Head low to pick up her own trail from the night before, Renny set off into the woods at a trot. As she’d told the others the night before, she didn’t expect anyone to solve her problems for her. She could take care of herself just fine.
If Mick had thought he could run Renny Landry out of his system, he’d been sadly mistaken. After two hours of tossing and turning in his suddenly empty-feeling bed, he had given up trying to sleep and snuck out of his own bedroom window like a teenager breaking curfew.
He told himself it was so he didn’t wake his guest, who had already been through enough, but he knew better. It was because he was a coward and an animal, too afraid that if he went out to the living room and saw the sweet little female sleeping in his clothes, he wouldn’t be able to resist touching her. Just to see if her skin really felt as soft and silky as it looked.
Goddess, he was such a jackass. He really ought to shift into something with hooves.
He returned home in his fur, shifted so he could climb back in the open bedroom window, and found himself instinctively scenting the air. He wanted to know if the she-wolf had woken yet or if she remained asleep in his living room. Either way, he had no intention of setting eyes on her again until he put on some fucking pants.
Getting his jeans zipped and his shirt buttoned took just enough time that he hoped the leash he’d put on his wolf would hold for a while. All he needed was enough control to get Renny to her car with the can of gas he kept in the garage for emergencies. He’d give her enough fuel to get herself back to town and send her on her way. Then, with any luck, he’d go back to his regularly scheduled life of drawing and writing the graphic novels that had kept him somewhere in the vicinity of sane after Beth’s death.
Too bad he hadn’t shared his plan with the she-wolf. When he finally opened his bedroom door and stepped out into the house, one sniff told him she was gone. Why didn’t that fill him with relief?
His wolf supplied the unhelpful image of the female lying in her own blood the way he’d seen her last night. It insisted that their mate—Not. Our. Mate.—was in danger and might be falling beneath another coyote attack right this minute. Any attempt to reason with it fell on deaf ears.
Mick had expected as much. His stubborn beast had a habit of ignoring him when it didn’t like his human logic. What surprised him was the way his usually rational mind seemed ready to back up the wolf.
She could be in danger, the traitorous voice whispered. And you did take tacit responsibility for her safety last night when you allowed her to stay here instead of sending her off in the custody of the sheriff’s department or the mayor. Do you really want to have to explain things to them if she’s out there getting hurt on your watch?
He tried to convince himself that if she’d left on her own, he had no right to haul her back. She was an adult and free to come and go as she pleased. Besides, how was he supposed to know where she might have run off to? What could have been so important to her that she’d risk her safety if the coyotes chasing her had lingered in the area?
Try all her worldly possessions. Didn’t she tell you all last night that she threw everything she owned in her car when she ran from her stalker? Don’t you think she might want to make sure no one had stolen them from her, or even stolen her car, after she abandoned it on the side of the road?
Mick cursed and stalked into the kitchen to grab his keys. Goddamned she-wolf was nothing but trouble, he told himself as he stomped out of the house and climbed into his truck. If he got out to the highway and found her waiting by her car like the blonde in a bad horror movie, he might just let his wolf bite her. But he’d be aiming a hell of a lot lower than her shoulder. She needed a fang to the ass if she was willing to put herself in danger for the sake of a carful of clothes and knickknacks.
Hell, he might even be so mad he forgot to sneak in a taste while he had her skin between his teeth.
Renny stared at the trail of bright fabric strewn across the asphalt and felt her hands clench into fists. Clearly, someone else had circled back to her abandoned vehicle first, and they’d decided to leave her a message. She could smell it from the tree line.
All four of the small SUV’s doors hung open, the one beside the driver’s seat hanging drunkenly from the top hinge. The bottom had been ripped from its mooring. Judging by the lack of any artificial light from the interior, Bryce and his buddies had done this hours ago, more than long enough to drain the vehicle’s battery dead.
Then again, the open hood and tangle of wires, as well as the clearly out-of-place bits of metal scattered about indicated someone had played with the engine, too. The boys hadn’t wanted to take a chance that a simple jump start might have her on her way.
Of course, crippling her car hadn’t been enough for the coyotes. The strong scent of urine wafted up both from the clothes they had tossed willy-nilly onto the highway and from the upholstery of her poor little Nissan. Shattered glass and splinters of wood marked the place where her few framed photos had been smashed on the hard pavement. From what she could tell, almost nothing she owned had survived the night unscathed.
Teeth clenched and shoulders tight, she climbed stiffly over the metal barrier separating the woods from the shoulder of the forest highway. She should have expected something like this, she told herself. She knew how vicious and vindictive Geoffrey and his minions could be when they failed to get what they wanted. Destroying her stuff likely struck them as inconsequential in comparison with what they had planned for her. They probably expected her to be grateful they had torn up only her clothes rather than her body.
She wasn’t, though. No, Renny didn’t feel so much as a scrap of gratitude. What she felt was a nearly overwhelming blaze of pure, unadulterated fury.
Mother. Fucking. ASSHOLES.
Reaching out, she snatched the remains of a chewed-up shoe from the car’s passenger seat and flung it with all her might at an unsuspecting cedar tree. A chunk of bark flew off at the impact, startling an innocent squirrel into panicked retreat.
It didn’t make her feel any better.
It also didn’t clean up the mess, repair her clothes, stitch up her slashed upholstery, or reveal the location of the purse she had left on the front seat. When she noticed the bag’s absence, Renny froze.
Immediately, she raced to the rear of the car, finding the back hatch open and the cargo area as empty as she expected. Everything had been dumped onto the ground, soiled, and ruined. Even her box of precious books had been tossed aside and marked with the telltale, arcing horizontal stain of a male dog that had lifted its leg to leave a message.
Message frickin’ received.
What really mattered to her, though, wasn’t the stuff they’d pulled out of the car’s open rear hatch, or even the empty depths of the hidden cargo compartment they’d found beneath the floor of the trunk. It was the fact that they hadn’t looked any further than that.
Carefully, Renny reached into the car and fiddled around with the molded plastic bottom of the small storage area. A couple of tugs pulled it free, and she quickly set it aside. She sent up a brief prayer when she reached into the unfinished space beneath, holding her breath until her fingers closed around a small, mostly flat object. It was safe.
“Just what the hell were you thinking?”
The harsh demand startled Renny so badly, she lost her balance and tumbled off the small SUV’s rear bumper. Her ass landed on the pavement, but her fingers still clutched her hidden treasure. The one thing Geoffrey’s minions hadn’t managed to find and destroy. The one thing she’d been smart enough to secret away.
Her emergency kit.
It wasn’t much, really, but for someone who’d been forced into a life on the run, it meant everything to Renny. It contained the keys to building herself a new life.
The purse she’d left in plain sight in the front of the car had been a decoy. Oh, it functioned well enough and held a wallet with a couple of credit cards, a respectable amount of cash, and a copy of her driver’s license. It also carried her cell phone, which she really would miss, some tampons, crumpled receipts, lip balm, and all the other miscellaneous junk that usually wound up making its way into a woman’s purse. But it was all for show.
The things she really couldn’t afford to lose, Renny had stuffed into a slim folder, barely thicker than a checkbook, and concealed under the “hidden” cargo compartment in the floor of the trunk. She’d hoped none of Geoffrey’s goons would bother to tear up the shell, and for once, the Goddess had been looking out for her.
Too bad She hadn’t bothered to warn Renny about the big, bad wolf who had snuck up on her while she retrieved her valuables. It might have saved her a bruised tailbone.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Renny blinked, surprised by the vehemence of that growled question. “Um, I came to get my stuff back.” Duh.
Mick glared down at her, not bothering to help her up off the ground. “I said I’d bring you out here in the morning. It’s not even eight o’clock. The garage won’t open till nine. You couldn’t wait another hour?”
“I’ve already put you to enough trouble. When I woke up, you were gone, so I figured I could take care of this myself and save you the aggravation.”
“How’s it look like that worked out?”
His thunderous scowl, straining jaw muscles, and clenched fists pointed to a less than successful outcome. Renny knew that facing an alpha wolf’s rage should have her trembling in her skin, but her instincts voiced no warning of danger. In fact, her wolf preened under such focused attention from its mate.
Renny wanted to smack it. “Look—”
Somewhere nearby, a cell phone rang. Her cell phone.
Mick’s head shot up, and he looked around the mess of the ransacked car. “What the hell is that?”
Renny didn’t bother to answer. She was already crawling into the open hatch and following the digital trilling to the space under the driver’s seat. She reached beneath the upholstery and fumbled around until her fingers closed on a familiar, slim rectangle. It must have fallen from her purse during the festival of destruction.
She twisted back up to a sitting position and peered down at the display. She barely caught a glimpse before her vision was cut off by the impact of flying fabric. She snatched at the obstruction with her free hand and found herself with a fistful of flannel. Mick had thrown his shirt at her face.
He also used the momentary distraction to lean into the cargo area and grab the phone from her hand. He accepted the call before she had time to protest.
“Who’s this?” he snarled into the device. He kept his eyes on Renny and made a gesture to indicate he expected her to put on the shirt.
Crap. In the anger over what the coyotes had done to her things, she’d completely forgotten that she was sitting on the side of the road bare-assed naked. She shrugged into the oversize garment.
Her acute hearing and his close proximity allowed Renny to hear both sides of the conversation. She heard the long pause before a voice replied, “Where’s Renny?”
Geoffrey’s voice had her belly clenching and her hands hurrying to fasten the buttons on Mick’s shirt. Instinct drove her to cover herself, even though the coyote couldn’t see her. Her beast couldn’t stand the idea of being vulnerable around even the sound of her stalker.
“I asked first, asshole.”
“You sound familiar.” Renny could picture the coyote’s yellow eyes narrowing, his sharp features drawing in as he frowned. “Tell me your name and where to find Renny Landry, and I’ll tell you who I am.”
“Fuck you.”
She heard Geoffrey growling over the cellular connection. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, asshole. I know Renny’s last location, and I will find her again. It’s just a matter of time. And when I find her, I’ll find you, too.”
Mick snorted. “Remind my knees to start shaking. I’m going to assume you’re the limp-dick coyote who’s been stalking Renny all the way from California. Well, I have a message for you: She’s safe now. You can’t get to her, so be a good little dog-boy and leave her alone. Do that, and you won’t have to get hurt.”
Renny winced. The overt disdain in the wolf’s voice told everyone what he thought of Geoffrey’s threats, and he didn’t sound impressed. Instead, he sounded dismissive and intimidating—two things guaranteed to enflame the coyote’s fury.
“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are,” Geoffrey hissed, sounding so enraged that she could picture his face turning red, the veins popping out on his throat and forehead. “But I’m only going to say this once. The wolf bitch belongs to me, and no one stands between Geoffrey Hilliard and what’s his. If you do, you’ll die.”
Because she was watching so intently, Renny saw the moment when Mick’s expression changed. She saw his nostrils flare and his pupils expand and knew even before he spoke that Geoffrey had said something surprising and infuriating to the wolf.
“Geoff fucking Hilliard.” Mick snorted and gave a chuckle that had absolutely nothing to do with humor. “Never thought I’d hear from you again. How’s that cut on your throat doing? I bet that left a scar.”
Renny felt her eyes widen. Did the alpha wolf know the coyote? How? Why? How the fuck could the world possibly be that small?
“Michael Kennedy Garry.” Geoffrey’s voice had gone soft and full of astonishment. “After all these years. And here I’d hoped you were dead. You were the sort to find trouble wherever you went, after all. The folks around here still talk about you, you know. About how you destroyed your pack and left the bystanders out to dry.”
“I’m no Garry,” the wolf growled. “I left that name dead next to my grandfather, and I’ll piss on it the same way I pissed on him. Don’t use it again.”
A laugh vibrated through the phone, menacing but somehow unnatural, as if stress as much as amusement had set it off. “You never could get past your daddy issues, Michael. Or your granddaddy issues. I see that hasn’t changed.”
“Neither has my ability to kick your ass, Geoff. Or have you forgotten the last time you tried to challenge me?”
Holy shit. Geoffrey Hilliard and Mick Kennedy Whoever-he-was knew each other. By the sound of it, they knew each other well.
Renny’s head spun as her mind raced through the scraps of information she could tease out of the conversation so far. Obviously, the two men had met and done so often enough or closely enough to not just know each other’s names, but for Geoffrey to know details about Mick’s family history. And Mick knew Geoffrey at least well enough to have physically fought with and defeated him in the past. When? Where? How?
What the fuck?
And had the wolf really just implied that he’d killed his own grandfather?
Geoffrey snarled, “Things have changed in the last eight years, Michael. I don’t think you’d have such an easy time of it now. I’m not a scrawny college kid anymore.”
“And I’m not worried about upsetting your sister.”
“Elizabeth was already dead.”
“Not to me.”
More growling. “Dead is dead, wolf.”
“As I’d be happy to demonstrate for you.” Mick blinked and focused on Renny again. Something in his face told her that for the past few minutes, he hadn’t really been seeing her. He’d been somewhere else inside his head. Now his eyes narrowed. “Stay away from Renny Landry, Geoff, or I’ll come after you again. Only this time, I won’t be grieving for my mate, and I won’t be holding back.”
His thumb shifted over the phone screen and ended the call. Renny watched him warily.
When he said nothing, she cleared her throat. “So.” She searched for something to say that wouldn’t get her throat ripped out. “You know Geoffrey Hilliard, huh? What a coincidence.”
Mick slid her cell phone into the pocket of his jeans and turned his back on her. “If you can find anything worth saving, grab it now. We’re leaving.”
“Hey, wait a second!”
Renny had bitten her tongue through the entire phone conversation, but now she wanted answers. How was it possible that she had collapsed onto the property of a man who knew her stalker? Talk about “of all the gin joints.”
Mick ignored her, and she frowned. She scrambled from the SUV, reached out, and grabbed his arm before he could walk away. “Mick, wait—”
She didn’t get out another word.
The moment her hand touched his skin, he went off like a nuclear warhead. At least, she felt as if she’d been hit by one. The wolf reversed their grips, seizing her by the wrist she’d held out to him and jerking her toward him. She crashed into his body and felt the impact as if his muscles had turned to concrete. He was hard all over.
All over.
His mouth slammed down on hers, all heat and hunger and barely controlled fury. She wasn’t entirely sure what he was mad at, whether it was she or Geoffrey who had earned his wrath, but when the taste of him sank into her, she no longer cared.
Coffee and pine and thick, powerful musk combined on her tongue. The flavor was so rich, it made her head spin. Seriously. If he hadn’t had her wrapped up against him by then, she would have toppled over. Her legs went weak and threatened to buckle, and still he kissed her as though he wanted to devour her whole.
For the first few seconds, shock kept her frozen. She couldn’t do anything but let him kiss her. Not that she suffered from it, of course. In the back of her mind, her wolf had thrown back its head, howled for joy, and promptly thrown itself over to wriggle around on its back like a golden retriever begging for belly rubs. Their mate was kissing them!
Then the initial surprise wore off, and Renny did the only thing she possibly could. She grabbed on and kissed him back with every ounce of passion in her soul. If this turned out to be a momentary aberration, and he went back to trying to ignore her existence the way he had the night before, she intended to enjoy every single toe-curling second of it while it lasted.
Judging by the way her belly clenched, her insides melted, and her pussy dampened, her body was totally on board. As far as it was concerned, she could just lie down on the asphalt and let her mate have her. Road rash and passing vehicles be damned. This was the kiss she’d been waiting for all her life.
If any last thread of doubt had existed in her about whether Mick was really her mate, the kiss burned it up like the fuse on a stick of dynamite. He feasted on her mouth, his tongue mating with hers like he wanted to taste every inch of her from the inside out. The feeling was mutual. She felt herself drowning in the essence of him, and her body began to ache with the need to feel him inside her, above her, behind her, touching her everywhere, in every way, all at once.
Fuck reality. She would defy the laws of physics if she had to, but Renny needed him. Now.
And then he yanked himself away from her as violently as he’d pulled her to him. One minute she was drowning in pleasure, and the next she was just drowning. Or at least, that’s what it felt like, because at some point during that kiss, she had forgotten how to breathe.
She stood there, mouth open, lungs straining, and Mick just clenched his jaw and turned away. “Let’s go.”
Go?
A voice inside Renny’s head laughed a little. No, scratch that. It giggled a bit hysterically. She couldn’t feel her arms or legs, couldn’t get oxygen to her brain, and he wanted her to master the art of independent locomotion? Was he high?
He was not, she realized, as sanity slowly began to leak back into her body. Her lungs expanded in a gasp, and she staggered for a second before she could catch herself. She’d been the one who’d gotten high, and it turned out that the alpha wolf was her drug of choice.
She looked down and around in a daze. Where was she again? Oh, yeah. On the side of the highway, naked except for another borrowed shirt that smelled of her mate, watching the male walk away from her as though she had plague, leprosy, fleas, and a raging case of shingles, all at the same time.
If he kept this up, she was going to develop a complex.
His words finally penetrated the haze of lust he’d created in her mind, and she stumbled forward a few steps. Get her things and go with him, he’d demanded. Her “things” lay in shredded, stinking piles all over the pavement. Her emergency kit, hidden from the coyotes, was all that had survived, and she’d already recovered that.
Well, the kit and her phone. The one Mick had spoken to Geoffrey on and then shoved into his own pocket. When she looked at the wolf stalking away from her, she felt pretty certain now wasn’t the time to ask for it back.
She followed Mick to the beefy pickup truck he’d parked a few yards in front of her abandoned vehicle. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t heard him drive up earlier, let alone stalk toward her across the gravel-strewn pavement. Way to be on your guard, Ren.
Mick said not a word to her, just slid behind the wheel of the truck and waited while she climbed into the passenger seat. He maintained the silence even as he put the machine in gear and pulled out onto the empty highway.
They drove for what felt like forever in a tense, tangible silence. Tangible as in if she’d been more musically inclined, she was pretty sure she could play “Chopsticks” on it. And probably display her favorite photos, all of Liberace’s candelabra, and some small, tasteful statuary.
She waited for him to say something, anything, for several minutes before she realized it wasn’t going to happen. The man who had barely spoken to her last night and done so only to yell at her this morning was back in control. He seemed happy to pretend she didn’t even exist, let alone that she was sitting less than two feet away from him wearing nothing but his shirt.
Talk about committing to your strategy. The man hadn’t just wedded his, she felt pretty sure he’d worked it somehow into his tattoos.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out from his scent, his silence, and his body language that if Renny tried to initiate a conversation about that kiss, she’d find herself out of luck. Or possibly under the tires of his truck. His “Don’t Go There” signs were flashing in bold, bright neon. Still, she had to do something or the silence was going to smash her into the pavement like something out of a Road Runner cartoon.
She searched for a safe topic, decided after another glance at his face that there wasn’t one, and settled on just asking the questions she figured she most deserved the answers to. Like, who was he that he managed to have some hidden backstory with Geoffrey Hilliard?
“So, if your last name isn’t Garry, what is it?” she finally asked.
For a minute she thought he wouldn’t answer. His gaze remained fixed on the road, his fingers curled around the steering wheel. He might have looked at ease if she hadn’t seen the way his knuckles stood out a stark white against his tanned hands.
“Fischer,” he grunted.
“Mick Fischer, not Michael Kennedy Garry.” She digested that and felt a spark ignite in her memory. Something about that name, or rather those two names together, meant something to her. Something significant.
When the spark flared into a bonfire, she almost slid onto the floorboards. Wolves. California.
Garry.
Fischer.
Elizabeth Hilliard.
Dead grandfather.
The facts served as kindling for a sudden conflagration of realization. All at once, the mysterious alpha wolf who had saved her life and rocked her world became a lot less mysterious and everything fell into place.
Mick Fischer was Michael Garry, the grandson and heir to the pack alpha of the Sawmill, California, wolf pack. He was the one that the people in the town she had moved to just a few years ago still whispered about, after checking to make sure no one could hear.
The Garrys had led the Sawmill Pack for generations, the most recent being a senior wolf named Abraham Garry. The alpha had a reputation for stable, efficient rule achieved through tyranny and corruption. When his son had mated against his will and then died shortly after childbirth killed Patrick Garry’s mate, the old man had taken his grandson in and raised him as his heir, but not as a beloved family member. The younger wolf was blamed for his father’s death and expected to walk the straight-and-narrow path from which his father had strayed.
Yeah, that apparently hadn’t happened.
Another generation of Garry wolves had mated against Abraham’s wishes. Eight years ago, Michael Garry’s half-wolf, half-coyote mate had been murdered. When he’d found out that the grandfather who had raised him from infancy had ordered the kill, Michael had torn the entire pack apart. He had hunted down and killed the enforcers who had taken his wife’s life, slaughtered the pack’s beta and corrupt hierarchy, and then ripped out his grandfather’s throat for commanding it.
And after it all, he had turned his back on the tattered remains of his pack and walked away. He had disappeared from Sawmill eight years ago, and no one there had seen or heard from him since.
The power vacuum he left in his wake was what had allowed Geoffrey Hilliard to claim the abandoned wolf territory. As the half brother of the alpha-heir’s mate, he had the nearest thing to a hereditary claim to the leadership of the small lumber town’s shifter community. He had stepped into that opening and then started a war when the locals objected. When the dust settled, he emerged as alpha and Sawmill had become a coyote town.
And then they had advertised for a librarian.
And Renny had answered.
Small world?
She closed her eyes and let her head drop back against her seat.
Try small chance at survival.
Renny had just realized that her destined mate was a man who had lost his own beloved wife and killed those responsible for her death. And if that weren’t enough, he also turned out to be the ex-brother-in-law of the coyote who wanted to rape her and kill her. And, unless she missed her guess, kill her newly discovered mate as well.
To top it off, she’d brought all of it down on the town she’d always dreamed of as her perfect sanctuary.
Fuck. Her. Life.