Chapter 1
1
Colleen
I strip off my clothes and dive into the moonlit swimming pool in the foothills of Denver.
My children and I were dropped here at the home of a total stranger—a wolf in the Denver pack—who pledged his protection of us the moment he met us. The reason he pledged it is no mystery.
I caught his scent, and my body came alive. I have to guess he experienced the same thing.
But we hardly spoke because he was involved in some kind of drug sting, and we were spirited away to the safety of his home until he returned.
The kidney-shaped pool is beautiful, with a natural oasis look and a waterfall into the hot tub at one end. There’s a fall chill to the air, making steam rise from the warm water. The moon hangs low in a starry sky.
I swim the length of it underwater, emerging to fill my lungs. I haven’t swum in years, but being in the water soothes away some of my frayed nerves.
I took my pups and ran away from my abusive mate in Kentucky just over a month ago, and every day, I regain a little more of myself. We’re probably safe here, at least for the moment.
Even so, I’m swimming to burn off my anxiety. If Dirk—the asshole father of my pups—somehow finds us, there will be hell to pay. But I’m not going to let him drag us back, whatever he may threaten this time.
I can’t go there. I have to believe he won’t find us here—at least not tonight.
I dive back under the water and swim the full length of the pool again before emerging for air. When I do, I gasp.
The shifter’s scent reaches me first—leather and coffee and delicious male. He’s home.
DEA Agent Mark Ruhl stands at the edge of the pool staring down at me with a predatory gleam in his eyes. He’s older than I am by at least ten years, maybe more, and he looks incredible in his uniform with broad shoulders and thick corded muscles running down his arms.
I bend my knees to hide my bare breasts under the water line, and our gazes lock.
“You don’t have to be scared of me, little wolf.” His voice is a rich baritone that sends tingles across my shoulders and the back of my neck. It rumbles deep with authority but not the kind I’ve learned to beware. The kind that inspires warmth and safety. Like the authority I thought my father wielded, before he arranged my mating to Dirk.
Mark crouches down, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight. He says nothing, just holds my gaze in a way that makes my heart pound. “Are you afraid?”
My body comes alive for the first time in years. My nipples pucker in the warm water, and frissons of heat warm my core. I swallow. “N-not of you,” I admit.
His lips quirk a little at the corners. “Good. I’m sorry you were left here alone.” The corners of his eyes crinkle. “I’m glad you’re swimming. It looks like you felt safe.”
I nod. “Did everything go all right with the drug bust?”
“Yes. Everything worked out.”
I swirl my hands over the surface of the water, and my breasts cool as they come out. I immediately drop back down.
Mark’s eyes take on a silver glow, and his nostrils flare. “Were you out here to tempt me, little she-wolf?”
I shake my head although now that he says it, I wonder if my she-wolf didn’t orchestrate it.
“I think we both know that this attraction between us—” He stops speaking when I continue to shake my head, backing up.
“Okay. You’re not ready to hear that. Of course you’re not. Come back.” He beckons to me, but I don’t move. He shows no sign of irritation. Instead, he seems to soften. “You’ve been through a lot, Colleen—too much. I know you’re still scared. I just want you to feel safe right now. To know that I’m going to take care of you and those pups. I won’t let anyone touch you, I promise.”
I believe him. I mean, I believe his intentions. But he doesn’t know how powerful Dirk is—an alpha with a pack of at least 150 wolves. Nor how cruel.
And yes, I know Mark Ruhl is my true fated mate. I knew it the moment I caught his scent. Even now, my spirits lift being near him like the sun coming out after the storm from hell.
But I can’t let him mark me and claim me as his own because doing so will sign the death warrant on both of us. Possibly my children, too. Dirk is that psychopathic and that powerful.
“Come here,” he beckons again, and this time my body obeys of its own accord, creating miniature currents as I step forward to the edge of the pool.
He reaches for me, and I don’t move out of his grasp, even though he’s a near stranger and all I’ve known for the past ten years has been torment at the hands of a male. My body knows its master. My she-wolf wants to be claimed.
He shows off his shifter strength by plucking me out of the pool by my armpits like I’m a small child. Water drips from my naked body, but the cold doesn’t touch me. Steam curls off the surface of my skin.
“I’m trying very hard not to look, sweetheart.” His voice is pure gravel.
He sets me on my feet and then stoops to pick up the towel I left by the water’s edge. He does look, though. His heated, hungry gaze rakes down my body as he wraps the terry cloth around me, a low growl sounding in his throat, his cock tenting the pants of his uniform.
I should be afraid. He may have trouble controlling his wolf, which means he may mark me against my consent. But I’m only hot and tingly for him. Restless and wanton.
He tucks in the edges of the towel above my breasts. His eyes glow completely silver—his wolf wants me.
I tremble, but still not with fear.
He hasn’t let go of the towel, his fingers still tucked between my breasts, and he uses it to draw me closer. “I’m going to teach you to trust me,” he murmurs, like he’s swearing an oath. “I’m going to take care of your needs, babygirl. All your needs.”
My breath puffs out of my lips on a soft note of shock, and I attempt to take a step backward, but he hangs onto the towel, keeping me close.
“Let me show you.”
I shake my head jerkily. “I-I can’t.”
“I won’t take from you. I just want to give, babygirl.” His nostrils flare as he breathes in my scent. “I can smell your need. Are you achy between those beautiful legs of yours, little wolf?” He slowly walks me backward.
I don’t mean to answer him, but it’s like I’m under a spell. Not the kind that makes a wolf’s body physically respond to alpha dominance. Something deeper and more mysterious. My head wobbles in a yes .
My calves hit a chaise lounge and buckle. He holds me up with the towel.
“Let me kiss it better, Colleen. I need to taste you. Please, just a taste to get me through the night with you unclaimed.”
I draw in a sharp breath. This wolf isn’t backing off. But my body understands completely. My she-wolf is desperate for him. So I sit back, letting the towel fall open.
Mark doesn’t wait two seconds before he’s on his knees in front of the lounge, pushing my legs wide.
“ This pussy ,” I hear him rumble although I have no idea what he means by it. It doesn’t matter. He’s licking into me, sending me into orbit with each expert swipe of his tongue. I’ve never experienced this before, and my eyes roll back in my head as every nerve ending comes alive.
He traces around my inner lips, penetrates me with the tip of his tongue. He pushes my knees up toward my shoulders and licks me from anus to clit.
It’s intimate and embarrassing and incredibly pleasurable. I’m drunk on sensations, on his pheromones, on moonlight.
It’s a first for me. Dirk never cared about my needs, and he is the only male I’ve known.
“This pussy,” Mark repeats when he comes up for air.
“What about it?” I manage to choke out.
“So beautiful.” He lowers his head again and flicks his tongue over my clit.
I run my fingers through his closely-shorn hair, arch my breasts toward the night sky. “Mark.” My strangled cry sounds like it belongs to a different female. Certainly not to me.
“That’s right, babygirl. Are you going to come all over Daddy’s tongue?”
Did he call himself Daddy ? My pussy gushes in response. It’s so hot and wrong and embarrassing and fates, yes, I’m here for it.
“Come for Daddy.”
My body responds immediately to the command because my orgasm starts, curling my toes inward.
“Yes,” I choke hoarsely as it deepens, my muscles squeezing and pulsing.
He slides two fingers inside me, and my walls seize around them as I let out a keening cry.
He sucks my clit while pumping his fingers and gets another orgasm out of me, this one so strong that my inner thighs squeeze around his shoulders, and my hips pop off the lounge.
I stare up at the stars as they spin and shift and rearrange. When the sky stops moving, my body falls limp, my breath slips in and out.
Mark rises above me, and I flinch because his eyes are still pure silver, and the bald hunger in his expression can only be for me. “Don’t be afraid of me, babygirl. I told you I wouldn’t take. I won’t claim you until you’re ready. Not until you ask me to. That’s a promise.”
“Mark,” I murmur. It’s a lament because I know how much pain he must be in to hold back.
My mate’s hands shake as he reaches for the edges of my towel and carefully wraps it back around me. “Come here, beautiful.” He uses the towel to smoothly lift me back to my feet. “Can you walk?”
I stare at him, dumbfounded. I’ve never had anyone take such care with me. It makes me want to weep. When I don’t answer, he sweeps me up into his arms, picks up my clothes from the ground where I left them, and carries me inside.
The Denver pack alpha dropped us off this evening, opening the door with a code Mark had given him. He told us to make ourselves at home, but I didn’t feel comfortable putting the kids in a bed until Mark was here to tell us where to go.
My pups are both asleep on couches in the living room, but Jayden, my nine-year-old, stirs at the sound of us coming in, and I stiffen.
Mark immediately lowers me to my feet, obviously understanding that I wouldn’t want Jayden to see us that way.
The delirium of our stolen moment is gone, and the more familiar sense of urgency and fear creeps back in. I quickly yank on my clothes.
Mark picks up Angie, my six-year-old. She whimpers in her sleep, but her head falls heavy onto his shoulder. “I’ll carry her upstairs,” he tells me.
But there’s no way Jayden would allow himself to be carried. His life has been as hard as mine has. I gently wake him. “Time to go to bed, buddy,” I say quietly. “Come on.”
He rolls swiftly to his feet, blinking and alert. My little warrior, always trying to protect me or his little sister.
On the way up the stairs, I catch sight of my reflection in a framed mirror and stop to stare. I look younger than I did yesterday—by at least five years. More my actual age. My skin, which had grown sallow and pale from the stress, glows in the lamplight. I touch the place in my mouth where I’m missing two teeth. Dirk knocked them out the day I left him, and they haven’t grown back. My natural shifter healing abilities became suppressed as a result of the mental and emotional trauma he kept me in.
My gums ache now, and I feel the sharp edge of new teeth coming through.
I let out my breath in a puff of surprise. One orgasm was all it took.
One orgasm on the tongue of my mate, and I began to heal.
It seems too good to be true, but that’s because it is.
I can’t let Mark Ruhl claim me, no matter how he makes my body sing.
I would never endanger his life that way.
Mark
I don’t ever want the taste of Colleen to leave my tongue. Satisfying my mate is my new mission in life. I don’t know where that daddy thing came from—the kinky words just slipped from my lips as I was licking into her, but it felt right. As an alpha wolf, I’ve always been the dominant, but this is the first time I want to shelter and care for a woman. To spoil her and make sure she knows how cherished she is.
That she’s mine. All mine.
But she’s not ready for that... yet. Right now she’s in survival mode, so I need to make her feel safe and protected.
I lead them upstairs and push open the door to the guest room. I don’t turn on the light, so I don’t disturb the sleeping pup. “The three of you can stay in this room, unless?—”
“This will be fine,” she says quickly, scooting past me to pull down the covers to the bed. I lay the little girl down in the middle, and she sighs and rolls over. The boy crawls in beside his sister and closes his eyes.
I’m not sure how I’ll make it through the night with her unclaimed and under my roof, but I have to. She needs to feel safe.
I will clean out my office and turn it into a room for the kids right away, so they don’t feel like guests in my house. I want them to know that this is their home now. To a human, it might seem nuts that I’m willing to rearrange my life for three people I just met, but for a wolf, there’s no question. I’ve gone forty years thinking it unlikely I’d ever find my fated mate. I went to shifter games when I was in my twenties, as was expected, but when my alpha asked me to serve as a council enforcer, I stopped looking.
I go to the linen closet and pull out a stack of towels which I bring to Colleen. “The bathroom’s right there. I think I have a few unopened toothbrushes in the top right drawer.”
“Thank you.” She doesn’t look at me as she tucks the children into the bed.
She needs quiet and privacy, but I can’t make myself leave the doorway. I want to pull her into my arms and soothe away the pinched worry that’s returned to her face.
“Come here,” I say softly. I don’t mean to command it, but I have enough alpha in me that most everything comes out that way.
She slips past me to stand in the hallway. I leave the bedroom and shut the door.
“I can ask Cody to pack up your things in Colorado Springs,” I offer in a low voice, so I don’t wake the sleeping child. Cody is the alpha of the small pack there. Colleen had been living there and sought out his help yesterday after Jayden was hit by a car.
For a shifter, a car accident isn’t the problem, it’s having humans witness a spontaneous healing that would cause ripples. Cody had pulled them out of the hospital before Jayden was checked out and then took her to his place in case the hospital report triggered information being sent to her ex. I was in the Springs for the drug bust and met them there. Because Cody’s pack would not be strong enough to fend off Colleen’s former pack’s larger numbers if they came for her, he requested help from the Denver pack, and I immediately volunteered my personal protection.
Colleen shakes her head. “We didn’t have much there. Just a mattress and a few items of clothing.”
I grind my teeth, horrified at the way my mate has been living. “I’ll take you shopping tomorrow, then, for new clothes and toiletries. Whatever you need.”
“Thank you.” Her cinnamon scent fills my nostrils, agitating my wolf.
“Cody told me you require protection from your…” I can’t make myself say the word mate because she belongs to me. But some other male has obviously claimed her. Multiple times and in brutal ways, judging by the unhealed scars on her shoulder. Something has affected her ability to heal—no doubt the stress of what she was living with.
“Our alpha,” she supplies.
I try not to show my rage that any male deemed worthy of leading a pack would harm rather than protect those weaker than him.
“And you think he’ll bring the whole pack when he comes?”
She shakes her head. “Maybe not. I didn’t reach out to Cody until yesterday, when Jayden got hit by a car, and we had to go to a human hospital. I was afraid it would trigger some kind of notification if he’d filed a missing persons report.”
“Right. I will check on that Monday when I go to work. I can access those kinds of records. But I don’t want you to have to hide anymore, sweetheart. It would be better to put him on notice that you’re here and under the Denver pack’s protection.”
“No,” she says immediately.
A growl gets loose in my throat, making her flinch.
I reach out and touch her arm. “I’m sorry, babygirl. I’m not growling at you. I didn’t mean to snarl.”
She ducks her head to show submission in wolf fashion, and I want to punch my own face in.
“Can you tell me why you don’t want to free yourself of him?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want a war between packs over me. I don’t even know your pack, it’s not fair to ask you to protect me.”
I force down my primal need to tear her enemies apart limb by limb and lay them at her feet. I exhale slowly to get my violence under control. “It is fair to ask it,” I say simply. I know she didn’t want to hear me declare that she’s my mate, so I don’t say it now, but I’m certain she knows what I mean.
I can’t decide if she doesn’t believe me, doesn’t agree, or just isn’t ready to contemplate a new mate, but for the moment, I need to be patient and take things slowly.
“There’s something you should know about me,” I say, hoping what I tell her doesn’t spook her more.
She stiffens.
“I’m not just in human law enforcement. I’m an enforcer for the shifter council.” Essentially, it means I have a gun with silver bullets and a license to kill. When shifters get on the wrong side of human law or if they become a danger to our species, the council may rule that a shifter must be put down. I’m the guy who carries out that justice. It’s a secret role, for the protection of our families, much like the hooded executioner of medieval times. “It’s a job I would quit the moment I have a mate.” I slide a sideways glance at her to see how this landed. I need her to know that I wouldn’t put our family at risk. But I also want her to understand I’m well-equipped to take care of trouble. “I just want you to know that if things get difficult, I can handle them.”
She draws in a breath and lets it out slowly. “Good to know.”
I allow myself a moment of relief that I didn’t scare her more with my admission.
I cradle her face with one hand, my thumb brushing down her cheek. “You okay?”
She melts forward, almost leaning into me, but not quite. “Yes. Thank you.” She keeps her gaze lowered in that old-school wolf submission to dominance.
I angle her face upward. “Look at me, babygirl. I want those pretty eyes on my face. I don’t need you to show me deference.” You’re my fucking mate.
The moment our eyes lock a zing of electricity shoots through me. I scent her arousal again and barely keep in a groan. I should say goodnight, but I still hesitate. “Do you need anything?”
A long hard fuck?
My teeth in your shoulder?
Yeah, probably not.
“Just some sleep.”
Right. Sleep.
I want to kiss her—badly—but I know she needs space. I settle for dropping a kiss on her forehead. “Goodnight, little wolf.”
“Goodnight.” She meets my gaze, but her glance is almost shy.
I wait until she shuts the door behind her before I force myself to move down the hall and into my bedroom.
It’s going to be a long night.
Colleen
I find a toothbrush where Mark told me they would be and brush my teeth and wash my face, staring into the mirror some more, drinking in the changes in my appearance. I look younger. So much prettier. Almost normal. I find a comb and spend some time working it through my hair.
I hear the shower running in Mark’s bathroom.
Back in the guest bedroom, my two pups are both already sound asleep. I kick off my shoes and walk around the bedroom, examining things. The room is basic, nothing personal on the dresser. Tasteful watercolor landscapes of Colorado scenes hang on the walls. They seem to all be by the same artist. I step closer to examine the signature on one. Jeanne Ruhl. His mother? Sister?
I want to go ask. I shouldn’t miss being near a man I only just met, but I do.
Look at me, babygirl.
I love the way he talks to me—that deep voice so gravelly, heavy with sex and desire. He’s a big male—stocky, with thick muscles that bulge under his uniform. I want to see him without the uniform, too. Which is a crazy thought, considering I’ve never taken an interest in a male. I was mated to Dirk far too young to ever want to think about males again.
I start to unbutton my jeans and pull them off, and then a foolish idea takes hold. Rebuttoning my jeans, I open the door and walk down the hall. The sound of the shower has stopped. “Mark?”
His door opens immediately. His short hair is wet, and he’s wearing a soft blue t-shirt and a pair of boxers.
“What do you need, sweetheart?”
You. Being near him again both ignites and settles me. His coffee and leather scent permeates the room. I want more of what he gave to me on the chaise lounge. A glimpse into something carnal and beautiful that I’ve never felt before.
“Um, do you have a t-shirt I could sleep in?” It’s not an excuse. I swear. It’s not. I really just want to get out of these clothes, and I have nothing else to wear.
“Of course.” He holds my gaze as he peels off the one he’s wearing, causing my belly to do flip-flops. His chest appears even broader without the drape of fabric over it, and it bulges with muscles and is dusted with soft, dark curls. The urge to run my fingernails across them makes my fingers twitch.
I lick my lips, and his gaze tracks the movement, his eyes turning silver. I work to swallow as he holds the shirt out to me. “Thank you.” I can’t seem to make myself move to take it out of his hand. To walk back down the hall. All I can do is stare at the gorgeous man standing in front of me.
“Like what you see, babygirl?” His deep rumble washes over me, making all my nerve endings tingle.
Afraid I will tumble forward, into his arms—into his bedroom—I snatch the t-shirt from his outstretched hand and swiftly walk back to my room. When I’m at the door, I stop and look over my shoulder, knowing he hasn’t moved, sensing his gaze on my back. “Yes,” I admit, before I open the door and slip inside, my heart pounding.
I detect a low rumble from him as he shuts his door. A growl, but not the menacing kind.
He wants me.
Dirk didn’t want me. He used sex as another form of violence. It was a cruelty, never for either of our pleasure.
And I don’t want to think about Dirk. I strip down to my panties and pull on Mark’s large shirt, letting his scent wrap around me. I know he gave me this shirt on purpose. So I’d have his scent. He’s trying to trigger my body’s response. To show me he’s my mate.
As if I didn’t already know.