Chapter 2
Willow sat in the living room facing the wall of windows and watched the storm roll in from a distance. The lightning, the rain, the roiling clouds. Nature’s fury unleashed with raw power.
A small fire crackled in the hearth, a pot of chili simmered on the stove.
She’d finished her second book hours earlier and was well into Safeword: Arabesque, thoroughly enjoying her visit with old friends — Isaac’s warm caring, Frisco’s rules and ironclad consequences if they weren’t followed to the letter, Cam’s loyalty and honor.
She was getting warm just thinking about it.
But the arriving tempest had her attention for the moment. So much violence rolling across the mountains and valleys.
The storm surged up the mountain with a low, gathering growl, then hit in a sudden, sideways fury.
Rain hammered the roof in pounding bursts, a drumbeat that rattled the glass walls and sent thin rivulets racing down every pane.
Outside, the trees lost all pretense of dignity.
Limbs thrashed and flung themselves about like dancers in some wild, wind-whipped frolic — bowing low, snapping upright, twisting at the waist to fling their dripping hair.
Pines swayed from the hips, oaks spread their arms as if to ward off the squalls, and every gust only made them wilder.
She was curled on the couch, her e-reader on the table beside her when, somewhere lower on the mountain, a deep crack split the storm’s rhythm, followed by another, then a whole staccato of them — the sound of trunks giving way.
She rose from the couch and moved to the glass in time to see the mountainside below her shift in slow motion.
An entire swath of forest was sliding, the ground itself turning liquid, carrying trees, earth, and rock in a grinding, snapping tide.
The power didn’t bother flickering before it died.
The avalanche of mud and trees was over in less than two minutes, the view below carved with a raw, ugly scar.
The trees around her cabin still stood firm, their roots holding fast.
She took a steadying breath, moved her chili pot off the stove and set it on the hearth.
Outside, rain slapped the porch roof in hard bursts as she dashed to the grill.
She wrestled the grate free, carried it in dripping, propped fresh firewood to settle the grate over the fire, and adjusted her setup to keep the chili warm enough to simmer without burning.
From there, it was a matter of triage. She grabbed the cooler from her SUV, dumped in all the freezer ice and the packs she’d brought, then transferred her perishables into it.
It was colder outside, so she carried the cooler to the screened porch and wrapped one of the thick comforters around it to hold in the chill.
If she was quick each time she opened it, it’d probably stay cold enough a good twenty-four, maybe thirty-six hours.
And then she stood on the porch, the driving rain misting her through the screens, and breathed. The air smelled of turned earth and rain, sharp enough to taste. The mountain had moved, and she was still here.
She stepped back in and looked at her cozy setup. With a fireplace and plenty of food, she didn’t need power. She’d wanted solitude and it looked like she’d be stuck here a while.
That was fine with her. Perfect, in fact.
She sat on the sofa and checked the battery power on her ereader. It was an e-ink device and had at least three ten-hour days left, but she had a battery pack if she was here longer. Her phone had a full charge and was turned off. She was good.
* * * *
Boone shook off the last of the change and stood four-footed in the dim wet. Ears high. Nose working. The storm had eased, but the air was still thick with it — sharp wet pine, ripped-up earth, the hot-metal tang of lightning burned into the clouds.
He padded out from the covered porch, across the yard, and made his way through dense trees, paws automatically finding the firmest ground. Water ran in small streams between roots. The forest smelled of broken roots, crushed leaves, and the sharp scent of mud pulled from far below.
The wind carried more. Rain-cold air. Sap bleeding from torn trunks.
He moved down the mountain, weaving between trees, keeping his weight light. Paw pads found the soft give of moss, the slick slide of wet leaves. Branches above still shivered, shaking down drops that spattered his ears and back.
The slide’s edge was a sudden rip — one moment forest, the next a raw gap.
The forest floor simply gone, the mountain carved open.
He stepped closer, claws digging in. Looked down.
Tree bodies tangled below, roots in the air, their scent heavy with sap and rot-to-come.
The strip of road that had run through here was gone, with only wet, broken stone jutting from the dirt where the pavement ended in nothing.
He stood there a long moment, tail still, listening to the quiet drip of rain and the rush of water finding new paths. Behind him, the forest kept breathing. In front of him, the mountain waited to settle.
The wolf turned and raced back up the mountain, close enough to the hawk’s scent to be assured her cabin was still standing before he made his way to his cabin’s back deck.
Mustn’t change until he was back under a roof. Even with the cloud cover, the rules said you couldn’t change under open sky anymore.
He’d left his jeans on the screened-in porch, and he stepped into them once he was back on two legs.
“Verdict?” Silas asked.
“We can get ourselves off the mountain if we hike down, around the slide, but the truck isn’t going anywhere. Please tell me the Yeti’s charged?”
“It should be around ninety percent,” Kenny said. “I’ll grab it so we can plug the fridge in. If the sun comes out later, we’ll be golden. If not, we can run the fridge every third or fourth hour. Nothing else is critical.”
“We should check on the hawk,” Silas said. “Offer to keep her perishables over here. Maybe we can all cook together, her supplies with ours. She might not know how to cook over a fire.”
“Let’s not turn this into a contest of who can bed her,” Kenny said. “This weekend is about bonding, not competition.”
Silas blew out a breath. “Yeah yeah. You’re right, of course.”
Boone didn’t say anything, but he was a little disappointed. He agreed with Kenny, and yet, the female hawk had smelled… enticing.
* * * *
The storm had faded to a gentle rain by the time Willow made it past one of her favorite parts in Safeword: Arabesque, where Isaac gives Cassie her first over-the-knee hand spanking — the surrender, the heat. She could practically feel it on her own skin.
Perhaps it was because this very activity was Willow’s introduction to kink, but she loved that scene.
And now Isaac had her at the old motor-hotel turned private kink club, her wrist cuffs connected to the old monkey bars over her head with Isaac flogging her tits while another man flogged her back.
Willow had already orgasmed at least a couple-dozen times by this point, barely a third of the way into the super-long novel, and she was fully prepared for more in the coming pages. Her body was loose, humming, ready.
Until she heard footsteps approaching. Heavy ones. More than one pair.
She stood and walked to the front wall of windows and saw three men. They wore jeans, boots, and tees, striding out of the woods like they’d been conjured from the digital pages of her book.
She opened the door and stepped onto her porch — barefoot, flushed, still tingling — and even her underwhelming hawk nose recognized the wild, unmistakable scent.
Wolf.
Her system flooded with adrenaline and her pulse kicked hard against her ribs. She didn’t freeze, but every sense sharpened, and every cell went on alert.
Her gun was on the side table by the sofa, so she went straight to threat analysis. At thirty yards out, her hawk vision had no trouble analyzing their intent. She might not have the hearing or scent abilities of a wolf or vampire, but she could spot a mouse in a field from miles away.
She didn’t just see their faces, she tracked the tiny shifts. The flex of a jaw. The angle of a brow. The twitch in the corner of a mouth. Pattern recognition did the rest.
No tension in their shoulders. No fast blinking. No clenched jaws. They weren’t vibrating with hunger or aggression. They weren’t on edge.
They were calm. Curious, but not hunting.
Twenty yards now. The one in front walked with natural authority. The tall one with bulging muscles on the left scanned the cabin like he was mapping it. The third, on his right, hung back a little, watchful eyes narrowed and calculating, but not hostile.
Her pulse jogged instead of sprinting now, a leftover from the sudden jolt of seeing them, but this wasn’t danger.
They stopped fifteen yards away, and the one in front smiled up at her. “Just checking to make sure everything’s okay over here. We have a solar generator for our fridge, and if you need to stow some stuff, we should have room.”
The wolf to his right took a deep breath. “Chili?”
She nodded. “I have it on the fireplace to simmer. I think I’ll be okay until tomorrow. I have a heavy-duty cooler, and I dumped the ice and a few icepacks in. Put it on the back porch.” She sighed. “Assuming the bears don’t come to check it out.”
“The driveway up the mountain is hosed,” the big guy said.
“They aren’t likely to have it in shape for us to get our vehicles back down the mountain for at least a couple of days.
I know we’re strangers, but…” He looked at the lead wolf, who said.
“I’m Kenny, Alpha of the Chattanooga pack.
Silas is my beta, and the big guy is Boone, our gamma. ”
His micro-expressions and subtle body language patterning told her he was telling the truth, and that information changed everything. “I’m Willow. Please, come in. I have apple cider I put on the porch instead of in the cooler, and a gallon of sweet peach tea.”
One doesn’t make a wolf alpha stand outside and look up to you. Willow wasn’t tight with the supernatural community, but she knew the rules. He wasn’t her alpha, but you showed respect to the large-group leaders.
Silas held a container up. “I brought pulled pork with my special barbecue sauce. Enough for one meal, but since you have chili, you might not want to spoil your dinner.”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe I’ve ever in my life spoiled my dinner. I look forward to tasting your special barbecue sauce.”
It wasn’t until she stepped back into her cabin that she realized the place reeked of all her orgasms.
There was nothing to be done for it though. The wolves were going to smell it. No way around it.
She braced for a comment, a reaction, but no one mentioned it.
Silas walked with her to the little kitchen area, and her mouth watered at the scent of the pulled pork in the bowl he held inches from her face when Kenny said, “Safeword Arabesque? Well, I guess that explains a few things.”
She turned to see him holding her e-reader, but she was not going to be ashamed. Not after James. Not after… no. Just no.
“I’m a healthy American woman with needs, and that’s my favorite kink book.”
The large guy stepped behind Kenny and read over his shoulder. “Nice, two men flogging her at the same time, breasts and upper back. The old monkey bars as a bondage device is a nice touch. I’m not a big reader, but damn, maybe I need to change that.”
“Ya’ll put the nice hawk’s book back down and mind your own business,” Silas told them, and he forked some of the meat up and offered it to her. She looked at the fork, looked at the man, and then took the fork from him and fed herself.
And then gave a long, low moan that sounded like sex. Fuck. “Oh, wow, that’s good.” She took another bite and tried to ignore the scent of arousal all through her cabin. Not just hers now, but the three wolves too, and strong enough for a hawk to scent it.
Arousal. Not disgust. Their faces told her pattern-recognizing-vision the same thing.
But still, she felt she needed to explain.
“Look, I broke up with my boyfriend, and I’m here as kind of a healing thing. Getting away, being with my own energy, with my phone off so my mother and sister can’t bitch at me for breaking up with someone they thought was perfect for me.”
“Another hawk?” Kenny asked.
She shook her head. “Human, but I really liked him. He’s a good guy, he’s just…” she sighed. It wasn’t like they didn’t already know she’s kinky. They’d smelled it, seen it. Fucking read it.
“He’s vanilla, but he’s bossy, so I thought I could bring him over to the kinky side, but…” She shrugged. “He was disgusted by the things I wanted, so it was never going to work.”
“You have to be somewhere by a certain date?” Kenny asked. “We can help you down the mountain, or carry clothes down for you if you’d rather fly. I assume we can get a ride to a rental car place, to get home, but our vehicles are going to be up here a while.”
She shook her head. “Since we can’t just drive away, I figure if I’m stuck here a week or two, they can’t charge me more than the days I paid for.”
Kenny chuckled. “We’ll need to get back for a meeting on Wednesday at the latest, though Tuesday might be better. I kind of like the idea of being stranded from civilization too, though. Tell you what, we’ll give you the evening to your book and your chili.”
He put a small flashlight on her table. “Up to you whether we take your cooler tonight and put your things in our fridge, or whether you want to bring it tomorrow. We’ll get started fixing breakfast at…” He looked at the other two, then back to her. “Does eight work for you?”
“I’m an early riser, so that’s fine, but earlier’s good if that’s your preference.”
He nodded. “Seven, then. We have eggs, bacon, sausage. Not sure if we’ll manage biscuits.”
“I can do biscuits over a fire,” Silas said. “We’ll have the pulled pork to go with the eggs, and I have blackberry preserves to put on pancakes.”
“I was planning on eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes,” Willow said. “I’ll bring a cast-iron pan and the potatoes, if you’ll have room for me on your fire, and I can add to the eggs and bacon stash.”