SIX
Malinda hugged her knees to her chest. Sitting on the bed in her private room, she rocked herself back and forth like a little girl.
Her auburn hair had fallen out of its ponytail again and fell forward to hide her face. She trembled and squeezed her eyes tightly shut and tried to convince herself it had all been a bad dream.
Jorge, the nice groundskeeper for the palatial estate, was dead. Torn apart, limb from limb, by an animal.
An animal.
For the tenth time, she got up and checked to make sure her door was locked before huddling back onto the bed again.
The world had turned insane.
She’d been here less than a week, working for the rich and eccentric Garrett Millieur. The money he was giving her was enough that she would have endured almost anything. Even becoming a nanny to a shut in.
Now she at least had an idea of why Garrett refused to let his son out of the house. The grounds were being prowled by a lethal animal. A wolf. One the size of a woolly mammoth. She trembled again as she remembered the glimpse she’d seen of it out the bathroom window.
It was the thing’s eyes she remembered the most. Yellow. Feral. Terrifying in their menace.
It was the same look she had glimpsed behind Garrett Millieur’s eyes. He was as scary as that wolf had been. He chilled her to her bones.
And heated her blood to a boiling point. Whenever they were alone together, she was drawn to him in a way that she had never been attracted to any man. She had come close to… doing things to him that would have changed their relationship in a hurry. Things she would have regretted in the morning no matter how good they would have felt in the moment.
This place was a madhouse. She knew she had to leave. Something was making her stay.
Angry at herself, still frightened by the scene of Jorge’s body in the backyard, she clenched her jaw tightly and stormed into her bathroom. It was dark now, full night after the horrible morning when she learned what a wolf can do to a full grown man.
Malinda ran water in the deep bowl of the sink and splashed it on her face. She hadn’t been out of her rooms all day. Hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t seen anyone, including young Brandon. That poor kid. Did he even know the danger he lived in every day? Did he know that was why his father kept him inside?
Why keep him in here all the time, though? He could be escorted to a car to school and back again. He could take trips into the city and play in the parks and be as safe as any other ten-year-old in the city was. He shouldn’t be held prisoner in his own home because some damned hairy wolf was stalking the grounds.
There had to be something else.
Not to mention there was no sane reason to allow the wolf to live after it had killed a man. Oh, God, had this happened before? Had this wolf killed someone else?
She scooped more water into her hands and threw it at her cheeks. Her image stared back at her in the mirror, brown eyes searching and, to be honest, a little lost.
“You should come downstairs,” Garrett said to her from the bathroom door. “You must be hungry.”
Jumping sideways, she knocked into a freestanding towel rack and sent it crashing to the floor. Her heart was racing and she was worried it wasn’t because he kept invading her space without her permission. “Damn it, Garrett! You can’t keep coming into my room like this! I work for you. I am not your possession! Damn you!”
He waited patiently until she took a moment for a breath. “I knocked this time, Malinda. I pounded on your door. When you didn’t answer, I was worried.”
She crossed her arms and tried to hold onto her anger even though it was wriggling away from her. He’d been worried about her. He’d come up here where she’d locked herself away to make sure she was all right.
Wait.
“I locked that door,” she accused him. “You have a key to my room?”
“Of course. I have a key to all the rooms in my home.”
Her mouth hung open. “You can’t have a key to my room!”
“Then don’t lock yourself in here all day.”
“What did you expect me to do? There’s a damned wolf in your backyard and all you can do is let him kill the people who work here! I was scared. I was scared to death that, you know, my life might be in danger.”
“I can protect you.”
“Why don’t you kill it?” she asked abruptly.
That stopped him in his tracks. There was something he wanted to tell her. She could read it in his eyes. She was still trembling, she could feel it in the muscles all along her back. Somehow, his eyes made her feel safer. Earlier today, they’d scared her to death. Now, she felt she could fall into those eyes and let Garrett hold her tight and safe.
He had turned and walked out of the bathroom before her racing thoughts caught up with what was happening.
She took off after him and he was maybe ten steps away from the door to the hallway when she reached out and caught his arm.
The world turned.
In his arms, held tight to his chest, she wondered when he had taken off her blouse, or when her fingers had undone the last button on his shirt, so that their skin touched warm and smoothly as they breathed deeply, their mouths locked together.
Wordless sounds of excitement murmured in her throat. Her fingernails scratched across his strong back. Heat pulsed in very intimate parts of her body and she wanted so badly to be free from the rest of her clothing and have him touch her. Everywhere.
There was a moment when she was pushing away from him and trying to grab hold of her conscious will to act and think.
The moment fled when one of his hands fisted into her hair.
He pulled her head back so that his mouth could trace down the line of her neck and she caught her breath and heaved her chest against his. Suddenly, she was being walked backward, across the floor, to the bed. He would lay her down there, and she would embrace him, hold him down on top of her, let him lick at that spot behind her ear just like he was doing now…
When his teeth sank into the flesh of her shoulder she yelped and came back to herself.
They were already on the bed. The mattress was soft underneath her. His body was nestled down in-between her legs, spreading her wide. His hands felt for the button of her pants and she gasped like a cold breeze had just blown across her warm skin.
“No,” she whispered, then louder, “no, we can’t. We can’t.”
“We can,” he growled, the certainty in his voice convincing her of how true it was.
She could let this happen. She could finally let him take her and know if her fantasies about him even came close to how good it could be.
No. Damn it, Malinda, think! Pull yourself together.
“Garrett…”
Then he had her zipper down and his fingers touched the warm, wet spot of her arousal, pressing at it over the cotton of her panties, and she drifted on a sea of pure ecstasy.
His pants were kicked to the floor. Hers joined them soon after and it was her that took them off. She remembered that much. She was still telling herself this was wrong, for so many reasons, but she was no longer telling him to stop. She didn’t want to stop. She wanted this. She wanted him to do this to her and make it so that there was no reason to stop until they were both fulfilled and satisfied and drained.
Outside, the beast lurked, ready to pounce. In here, she was safe.
He growled as his stiff manhood found her soft, willing slit. Growled, as his eyes flared.
Safe. She was safe.
In the arms of…
Of…
Of!
Her orgasm came quickly, unexpectedly, and blew away any thought in her head except what was happening right here, right now in her bed.
Garrett was not gentle with her. She didn’t want gentle. She had always wanted the men she was intimate with to take her hard, like a man should. He put her over the edge three more times by ramming himself into her, exciting her clit with every impact, making her heart race and her breath come in quick pants as she tried to match his rhythm while his hands explored her skin. He touched her all over. Her sides, her hips, her ass, her tits.
When his teeth replaced his fingers on her left nipple she cried out.
Then he was tensing around her, thick inside of her, and the moment happened for him as his hands held her arms down, forcing her to take what he was giving and the world collapsed in to just the two of them, to the center of her being where he pulsed and shook her core.
It was the most thorough sexing she’d ever had.
Slowly, her mind reconnected and she realized what she had just done. Sex. With her boss. With a man she feared even while being impossibly attracted to him. Well. No taking that back.
“Um,” she said, and then faltered for the rest of the sentence.
He was breathing roughly, his hands still clasped around her wrists, his cock still in her, twitching as it relaxed, sending little thrills through her that met with her own aftershocks and threatened to send her into orgasm all over again.
“I feel,” he whispered into her ear, “like I should apologize.”
Men. Every one of them was stupid. “I could have stopped you,” she reminded him. “I wanted it. You got that, right?”
He nodded into her shoulder.
When he let go of her, finally, she wrapped her arms around his back, playing with the curve of his spine just above his ass. “Then there you go. We both wanted it. It’s been a hard day for both of us, I guess. Sometimes adults need to release their tension like that, right? Besides, like I said, I could have stopped you if I wanted to.”
He lifted himself up enough to look directly into her eyes. “No,” he said. “You couldn’t have.”
In his eyes there were streaks of yellow-gold, an animal color that reminded her of the wolf again. She tensed, unable to move, until he gently kissed her forehead, and she was able to shake off whatever was wrong and push herself out from under him.
He slid out of her as she did. Mmm.
Standing up, he turned his back to her, bending to retrieve his clothes. “But like you said, sometimes adults have to… release their tensions. I’m sure that’s all it was.”
He slid on his pants, then reached for his shirt.
Was he disappointed? Was that what she heard in his voice? Maybe, she thought, these few minutes together had meant more to him than she realized.
Checking the clock on the bedside table she found that it hadn’t been five minutes. It had been over an hour since she’d fallen into bed with him. An hour? Oh, dear God. That never happened. And that had been a quickie with no foreplay.
Oh. Wow.
“Uh, I should probably take a shower.” She’d been about to say more, but she stopped, seeing movement along the wall.
“What is it?” he asked, following her gaze across the floor to where a small gray shape—
Garrett moved with blinding speed and had the thing picked up in one hand before Malinda could even blink. He stomped to her door and threw it open, stepping out into the hallway, leaving her to the jumble of her thoughts.
What was that all about? Most men at least gave a woman a kiss before slipping away after sex. A kind word. An empty promise. Something. This was almost like he didn’t want her to see whatever it was.
Not that she didn’t know. She lived in New York. She knew what a rat looked like. There was no avoiding the things even in a rich palace like this. She was glad Garrett had removed it from her room, although the way he did it was a little strange, she had to admit. Whatever. Of the problems she had facing her here in this house, a rodent running across her floor didn’t even make the list.
There was a wolf roaming the grounds killing people.
Garrett scared her, sometimes, when he went into one of his rages.
Brandon, Garrett’s son, was being held prisoner in his own home.
And somewhere near the top of the list was what had just happened here in this room. Sex with her boss. Mind-blowing, unforgettable sex that had made her whole body quiver.
Her reaction to him was not normal. That much she knew. The gravity between them was something she just couldn’t fight. As mad as she got at him, she still felt the pull of his heart to hers. As scared as she might be of him sometimes, she would still let him do her like that next time. And the time after that.
She had been afraid of him this morning. More than afraid. He’d thrown himself into a rage at the breakfast table. A rage that had somehow changed him. Cracked that damned cool façade that he held in place so easily all the time. He’d slipped and let her see the other side of him. A side that reminded her of the wolf outside the walls. Fierce eyes, quicksilver temper. It had been like watching him change, physically, right in front of her eyes.
Then he had ordered her locked in her room, and for one crazy moment, she had allowed herself to think it was because he didn’t want her to see what was coming next for him. It was like she really was seeing a change come over him. A change that would turn him into the animal she could see behind his eyes. An animal. A real animal.
Like the one that had trapped and killed Jorge on the grounds.
There was that crazy thought again. Werewolves. Men who could turn into animals and who lost all control of themselves. Men who did terrible things without a single memory of it ever happening.
Men who could kill, in the shape of a wolf, and never remember it even happened.
Could it—?
No.
It might be something like—
No.
But if Garrett was the animal that killed Jorge—
No, no, no!
This wasn’t a movie. Werewolves didn’t exist. Men were men. Animals were animals.
Garrett was both.
That thought crawled its way into her mind while she was buttoning up her jeans, her shirt mostly in place even if her hair was still mussed from what Garrett had done to her. She could sense the animal in him. She knew there was something different about him. Something that wouldn’t be explained by anything rational.
Maybe she should accept what her mind was trying to tell her.
She shook her head. If she said the word “maybe” to herself one more time, she was going to go crazy. Or she might already be there, because she was becoming more and more convinced that to stay sane, she’d have to embrace a little crazy.
Garrett could not be a werewolf.
Only, yes. He could.
Tugging her sneakers on as she hopped from foot to foot, she ran out into the hallway, down the stairs, from room to room, looking for him. She had to know one way or the other, even if it meant he laughed in her face.
Somehow, she knew he wouldn’t. She was right about him. Damn it.
In a room that must be an office or a study of Garrett’s, Malinda found him standing in the middle of the floor, holding the rat by its neck. He was scolding it for being in her room. She heard what he was saying, and that was the only way she could describe it. He was scolding a rat.
“You will not spy on her like that. On us! Never again. Do you understand?”
He shook the rat by the neck until it squeaked and its little paws were spinning wildly. Garrett’s back was to her, and he hadn’t noticed her yet, so she just stood there and stared. One more singular event in the madhouse of Garrett Millieur.
With a final shake he flicked the rat away from him. It went spinning through the air until it landed with a soft thud on the carpeted floor.
And then it changed.
The rat stretched out, squirming, wriggling, becoming longer and bigger and less rat-like. Fur withdrew into skin that became a pale white. Paws grew and toes snapped and cracked and shook themselves into the shapes of fingers. The tail slithered into the spine. The snout crumpled in on itself with more popping and snapping noises, flattened out into cheekbones and an aquiline nose and thin lips with a thin mustache. A balding head protruded up as ears slid down and reshaped themselves.
The rat stood up on human legs. Shaking in his master’s presence, Wilson Sherman trembled and panted. “I understand, sir. Thank you, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”
Naked and scrawny, he was a pitiful sight. Malinda would have felt sorry for the man, if his beady eyes hadn’t seen her standing there and turned menacing.
“We have company, it appears,” he said to Garrett.
“I know,” was his answer. “I scented her coming down the hallway. She’s discovered our secret, Wilson. Now, for the love of God, go put some clothes on.”
Wilson bowed from the waist, then straightened and stalked past Malinda as if his cock wasn’t swinging in the breeze and his scrawny little ass wasn’t bare-naked. His sneer told her he would not forget that she had seen him like this. Not forget, and not forgive.
Malinda wasn’t going to forget it, either. She had just seen… He had just changed… He was a rat. A shape shifting rat that had just become Wilson Sherman before her very eyes.
A wererat? Was there even such a thing?
Garrett sighed and held his hand out to her. “It looks like we have a lot to talk about.”
That’s an understatement, Malinda thought to herself. She wanted to demand answers from him but she was too shocked to do anything but nod her head and shuffle slowly into the room with him. He sure as hell had a lot to answer.
Like whether or not he was the killer lurking in the shadows of the backyard. The wolf in man’s clothing.