Caught By the Wolf (After Midnight #1)

CHAPTER ONE

Ella

She was lost.

She stopped and turned in a slow circle, seeing nothing but trees. And more trees. Behind those trees…more trees. The trail had disappeared under her feet an hour ago, and of course her phone had no signal, so no digital map to guide her back to her car.

How had this happened?

It was her day off. Her first one in almost two weeks, and she’d had plans.

Sleep in. Have some real coffee, the special blend she’d ordered online.

A hearty breakfast, then an easy hike on a marked trail, home by midafternoon when she’d put her feet up, eat the leftover lasagna one of the patients had left for the nurses at the hospital, and lose herself in a movie. Simple plans. Modest plans.

She should have known better. Ella Scott and plans had never once gotten along.

She had a gift for walking into things. Everybody said so.

She’d walked into an occupied supply closet at her old hospital and gotten an eyeful of two coworkers who were not restocking anything.

She’d walked into a surprise party she hadn’t been invited to and had to sing to a stranger.

She’d walked into a bar fight in Missoula right as the first punch flew and barely managed to avoid a black eye.

Thirty-one years of showing up in the wrong place at the worst possible moment.

And thirty-one years of knowing exactly what men saw when they looked at her.

Round. Round face. Round butt. Round everything.

The kind of body that got polite smiles and then the quiet sliding of eyes toward the slender girl two seats over.

She’d stopped expecting anything else a long time ago.

Curvy girls didn’t get the fairy-tale rescue.

Curvy girls got the you’re so funny and the friend zone and the eventual realization that no one was ever going to look at them like they were something worth losing their mind over.

So. Lost in the mountains on her one day off. Honestly, it tracked.

She held her phone over her head anyway, because that always worked in the movies, and got nothing but a cramp in her shoulder. Cell service in Stone Creek simply sucked.

Not that there was anyone to call. That was the sad little truth she didn’t poke at too often.

She’d come to Stone Creek with two suitcases and a plan to start over, and starting over had turned into work, sleep, work, cover the other nurses’ shifts when they wanted time off, because, well, she didn’t have a life.

No one was waiting for her to come home.

No one ever had been. Women like me didn’t attract that kind of luck, or men.

Okay. Enough of that. Downhill. Downhill led to water and water led to roads.

Her father had taught her that. He’d been an avid outdoorsman who took his little girl everywhere, which was why she still enjoyed hiking.

It made her remember him. She picked the least deadly-looking slope and started walking.

The deeper she dropped, the closer the trees crowded in.

Down here in the bottom the old growth had never been logged—trunks wider than her arm span, crowns knitted shut overhead so the light came through green and thin.

No trail. No boot prints. Nothing that said people came this way at all. Deep woods. Real deep woods.

All she was missing was a red hood and a basket of goodies for grandma.

And everyone knew how that story ended. The wolf ate the girl.

Although in the version her college roommate used to tell after two margaritas, the girl hadn’t exactly complained about it.

Stop it, Ella told herself. You are lost in the wilderness.

This is not the time to think about your non-existent love life and how you really wished that wasn’t true.

Men who look like the ones in those stories do not want women who look like you.

You’ve known that since the first time a guy told you you’d be so pretty if you just lost a little weight. Accept it. Move on.

As she moved further down the mountain, she noticed the birds had gone quiet.

There’d been birds all morning, a whole rude choir of them, and now the woods had gone still in a way that lifted the hair on her arms. She worked in medicine.

Some quiet meant a patient was sleeping. Some quiet meant grab the crash cart.

Then she heard the engine, and relief hit her so hard she almost laughed out loud. An engine meant a road or a person, and either one meant she’d be home with her lasagna by dark. She followed the sound down around a rock outcrop the size of a house.

And walked into the middle of something she was never supposed to see.

Two trucks sat in the clearing below her.

Mud on the plates. The men were carrying weapons and dressed in what looked like bulletproof vests.

These men were not hunters. Or at least they weren’t legally hunting.

She’d grown up around hunters. Hunters didn’t spread out along a tree line with their guns held low and ready.

Hunters didn’t post a lookout. And hunters didn’t need night-vision scopes like the ones on the tailgate.

Five men. No game hanging. No tags. No orange anywhere.

Poachers. The bad kind. The kind the whole hospital had been whispering about for the last few months. Someone was running illegal trophy hunts in Stone Creek.

“Okay. Once the hunters arrive, we go in and get them what they came after.” This came from a man who appeared older than the others. Gray hair, gray beard, a canvas jacket gone soft with wear, and the kind of unhurried authority that told her without a word that he was the one in charge.

Back up, Ella. Slow. You saw nothing. You were never here. Tomorrow you leave an anonymous note for the game warden and let this be his problem, and tonight you eat your lasagna and thank God for boring—

A man came around the tailgate and looked up. Right at her. She froze. “Hey, Pruitt. We’ve got company.”

The older man turned around. He wasn’t startled that a strange woman was standing on the ridge above his illegal everything, and his face didn’t even change. He looked at her the way she looked at a patient chart. Gathering information. Deciding what to do about it.

What to do about her.

“Boys,” he said. He didn’t even raise his voice, and that was the part that would stay with her longest—that a man could say one low word and five armed strangers would move like he’d fired a gun.

Ella ran.

She was not built for running. She was a curvy girl, so God knew she was not built for running.

She was built round and generous. A lot of woman.

The kind men glanced at once and then politely looked elsewhere.

Curvy girls did not sprint through the forest. Curvy girls walked briskly and with dignity, and there was no dignity anywhere in this—not in the wheezing, not in the bouncing of her breasts as her sports bra failed to live up to the promised high impact support, not in the way her stomach and wide hips slowed her down while thinner women would have already been gone.

She ran anyway.

Branches grabbed her shirt. One caught her cheek and stung deep enough that she knew it drew blood. Behind her, she heard them moving, unhurried, methodical.

“Oh, God,” she whimpered. What should she do?

Her lungs were on fire, and her legs were only minutes from giving out. But Ella kept going, down a slope half on her feet and half on her backside, using words her mother didn’t know she knew.

Somewhere behind her a man called to another. Calm. Unhurried. Like they had all day.

That scared her more than anything. Panicked men crashed around and made mistakes. These men were working.

Worse than that, they were hunting.

Hunting her.

The trees quit in front of her, and she nearly ran straight off the edge into a small ravine. She skidded, arms out, her sneakers sliding in loose rock. Twenty feet down, stone all the way, a creek at the bottom. She turned and ran to her right—straight into a dead end.

She’d run herself into a stone pocket with cliffs on two sides, because of course she had. Thirty-one years of walking into situations she shouldn’t have, and she’d saved the best one for last.

Last as in if the men found her…

She desperately looked for somewhere to hide, some way out. There wasn’t one. She picked up a rock and turned around to face the men.

They came out of the trees. Spread wide. Rifles low. Taking their time, because they had it.

The man named Pruitt walked in front, and he wasn’t even winded.

“Ma’am.” Polite. That was the worst part, the politeness. “That was a good run.”

“I didn’t see anything.” Her voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect.

Nursing gave you that, at least. Years of look at me, stay with me, you’re okay built you a voice that held even when your legs didn’t.

“I got turned around on a hike. I don’t know what any of that was and I don’t care. ”

“And nobody knows where you are, do they, girl.” Pruitt let out a chuckle.

And the thing was—he was right. Nobody knew where she was.

Nobody was waiting on her. If Ella Scott disappeared into these mountains, the first person to ask a single question would be the nurse who didn’t like her anyway and would report her for being late.

And when she didn’t show up, her supervisor would mark it as an unexcused absence and find someone to cover.

Another shift would pass and then another before anyone became concerned.

No one would come looking until it was far too late.

Because quiet, curvy women who kept to themselves rarely got the dramatic search party. They just… faded. And the world kept spinning.

The men had herded her into this granite corner on purpose. She understood it all at once. The slow, patient momentum of them following her. They’d known she’d have nowhere to run, and exactly where she’d end up. She’d never been escaping. She’d been livestock, herded into a chute.

Pruitt took a step toward her. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”

The forest answered him before she could.

A wolf came out of the trees to her left. A black wolf, huge, and silent. Nothing that big should have been silent, but he’d made no sound at all, and now he stood between her and the guns.

Ella had seen wolf shifters. She’d patched one up after he’d lost a fight with a pickup truck. He’d been a big man in human form, and a little bigger than an ordinary wolf when shifted.

This wolf was nothing like that. This wolf was the size other wolves told scary stories about. Black from ears to tail, heavy through the chest, and standing dead still.

Waiting. Watching.

He didn’t look at her. He looked at the men. A sound came up out of him, low and steady, more felt than heard, and Ella watched grown men with rifles forget how to move.

Run, said the smart part of her. Now’s your chance. Escape while you can.

Because now she had a bigger, more dangerous threat.

What would the wolf do to her once he’d dealt with the men?

As if he’d heard her thoughts, the wolf turned his big head and looked back at her—just once, quick, like he was checking on her—and his eyes were gray. Storm-cloud gray. Not an animal’s eyes at all.

Nobody had ever looked at Ella Scott like that in her entire life. Like she was the only thing that mattered. Like she was worth the risk of five rifles. Like her curvy body was something a creature this powerful would put itself in front of without hesitation.

Which was ridiculous. Granted he was a huge-ass shifter, but there were guns pointed at both of them now.

There was no way they could escape.

But every instinct she had handed her an answer that made no sense at all.

He wasn’t here for them.

He was here for her.