Chapter 4
Silas
I’d been running the tree line for two hours before I let myself circle back.
There was nothing quite like sprinting at full speed through the forest, chasing deer, and splashing around in streams. Though I’d told Katie I needed to hunt because that was the simplest thing I could think to say at the time, I didn’t need to actually hunt.
Someone who can eat steak doesn’t eat rabbit, and deer were a real pain in the ass to catch. So were rabbits, for that matter.
It was just that when I held human form too long outside my territory, my wolf required a certain amount of freedom or it would eventually mutiny and shift me more or less whether I liked it or not. Today, though, I had a more productive use for my wolf than chasing squirrels.
I needed to find the creature that had its eyes on my mate.
Unfortunately, the skinwalker’s trail had been cold by the time I picked it up.
I’d found nothing but the residual chemical stench and a scatter of tracks.
I’d pushed the trail until the terrain forced me toward the highway corridor and the scent dissolved into exhaust and asphalt, and then I turned back because I had left my mate barricaded in a cabin and I needed to watch over her.
I returned to the cabin at dawn, settling into the junipers at the edge of the property and staring at the boarded windows for a while, ears tracking the sounds inside. My wolf demanded that I rush in, wake my mate, and claim her immediately, but I knew she needed rest, so I waited.
The sky behind the Sandias turned gradually from black to a bruised purple-gray, then the first edge of gold broke over the ridge. Finally I heard her moving around inside the cabin.
I lifted my head and angled both ears toward the window. The boards had gaps, slim ones, but enough to let sound through.
“Okay.” Her voice sounded like she’d been conducting an internal court case and had finally moved to oral arguments.
“I’m awake. I can feel the mattress. I can feel the floor through my socks, and I am wearing socks, which I don’t remember putting on, which means I either put them on myself in my sleep or there is a man who can turn into a wolf who put socks on me at some point while I slept, and honestly both of those are equally—no, okay, the wolfman is worse. ”
Venturing closer, I peered between the boards in the window, watching her walk into the bathroom with the bed sheet wrapped around her. She turned on the shower, letting the water warm up as she moved to the bathroom sink.
Then she started debating the mirror, looking endearingly determined. “When did he even have time to put the socks on? I guess I passed out pretty hard after he… turned into a wolf. Did he sneak back in at some point? Did he put them on me before he left?”
It had been the latter. She had fallen sound asleep with the blanket pulled up to her chin, but her cute bare feet had been sticking out of the bottom, and I didn’t want her getting cold.
Her comfort and wellbeing mattered suddenly more to me than my own, and so I had painfully forced myself back into human form for a minute longer, after seriously considering how difficult it would be to put a pair of wool socks onto her feet with my wolf-form mouth and paws.
I watched as she let the sheet slip from her body and stepped into the steaming water of the shower, her self-debate still clearly audible.
God, she was so fucking hot.
I breathed in her deep, intoxicating scent. The scent of my mate.
After about ten minutes, she emerged, drying herself with a nearby towel before quickly wrapping it around herself. Her hair hung in damp waves around her shoulders.
I didn’t want to wait anymore.
Shifting this far from my territory in my wolf’s exhausted state was going to hurt.
It already hurt. Every extra hour I spent in human form out here was an hour I’d have to claw back later, and forcing a shift without the slow build of proximity to my land meant doing it on sheer will, which felt like being slowly turned inside out through my own spine.
I did it anyway.
The change rolled through me in a wave of searing joint pressure and restructuring bone.
My vision washed white, then came back sharp and precise, the world narrowing from the wolf’s superior peripheral awareness to the forward-focused field of a man.
Straightening up from all fours, I braced a hand against the juniper trunk until my legs remembered how to be man legs.
The cabin door was still barred from the inside, of course, but I’d picked this place as a hideout specifically because it had an old storm cellar accessible from both inside and via a small trapdoor outside.
Shoving aside the pile of old firewood which concealed the hidden entry, I let myself down into the musty cellar, then made my way up a stone staircase, through a small storage and utility room where the water heater was located, and finally into the main part of the cabin.
Katie was standing in the middle of the bedroom with the towel wrapped around her and her wet hair loose around her face.
She turned at the sound and went completely still.
Her eyes were clear and dark and fixed on me with the exact expression I’d seen when she saw me in the alley.
Not fear, exactly. This was a mix of curiosity and annoyance and barely concealed arousal.
Her gaze dropped for a half-second, then came back up fast. My state of dress had not improved since the alley.
I’d have to put on the clothes I kept here in case I arrived in wolf form as I had today, but I had other priorities right now.
With her wet hair and bare shoulders, the instinct that had been manageable looking through the window was considerably less manageable up close.
“You’re back,” she said.
“I’m back.”
“And you’re—”
“I generally don’t shift with clothes on. They don’t survive it.”
She processed that. “That’s very inconvenient.”
“It is.”
A beat passed. Her chin lifted slightly.
“You said you’d explain everything when you got back.”
“I did.”
“So.” She waited.
I crossed the room in three strides and stopped close enough that she had to tip her head back to hold my eyes. Her breath caught in her throat, then returned fast and almost desperate. I could smell her raw need in the air between us.
I leaned down until my mouth was close to her ear.
“And I will.” My voice came out rougher than I’d intended, scraped raw from the shift. “But is that what you really want right now?”
Her cheeks blazed, and I could see the pulse at her throat quicken.
She pulled back just enough to look at my face, searching it the way she’d searched the mirror.
“You’re not a hallucination, are you?”. It wasn’t quite a question, but it was full of wonder.
“No.”
Relief along with an unmistakable anticipation moved through her face so quickly they were almost one thing, and her scent told me she was ready for what my instincts were demanding.
I reached out and pulled the towel from her.
* * *
Katie
The towel pooled at my feet and I stood there naked in the dim light coming through the gaps in the boarded windows. I froze in place as butterflies fluttered in my stomach.
His eyes moved over me with unhurried possessiveness. My breasts, the dip of my waist, the flare of my hips. Then lower. When his gaze settled between my legs, my pussy responded with a clench so sudden my breath hitched.
“Beautiful.” He said it matter-of-factly, without inflection.
My nipples were hard. Obscenely, pointedly hard, standing at full attention. The cool cabin air wasn’t helping, but neither was the six-foot-something, naked, huge-cocked man-beast standing close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his chest.
“I still want an explanation,” I said, but my voice didn’t sound nearly as convincing as the first time I’d said it.
He stepped closer. Not touching yet, but close enough that I could count the scars on his collarbone and see the way his abdomen flexed when he breathed. His cock was thickening between us, filling and rising with a lazy inevitability that short-circuited my higher brain function.
Don’t look at it.
I looked at it.
Do not look at it again.
It was worse up close. Or better. It depended on which part of me was doing the assessment.
“There’s a creature hunting you.” His hand came up. With one finger, he traced the line of my collarbone from the hollow of my throat to the point of my shoulder. “It wants to mate with you. If it succeeds, you’ll die.”
The words were genuinely terrifying. But his finger was still on my shoulder, and the processing was going to have to wait. Every nerve ending in my body seemed to have rerouted itself to the single point where his fingertip rested against my skin.
“The thing from the mountain.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re—what? Some kind of…” The sentence died. What was I supposed to call him? Werewolf felt campy. Shape-shifter felt like a sci-fi novel.
“I’ll explain that later.” His finger reversed course, tracing back along my collarbone, then descending.
It followed the centerline of my chest, traveling the valley between my breasts without touching either one.
The restraint was on purpose, almost surgical, and it was driving me out of my mind.
“Right now I need you to understand that you’re not safe.
Not in your apartment, not in a hospital. Nowhere except where I can reach you.”
“And where’s that?”
“With me.”
His finger kept its slow descent. Over the flat of my sternum, down my belly, tracing the midline maddeningly slowly. He stopped just above my pubic mound and rested there, the heat of that one fingertip radiating outward until I could feel it between my thighs.
“You don’t know me.” My voice had gone breathy and thin. I hated it. “You don’t know anything about me.”