Chapter 18
KIERA
Kiera stared at him, still on her hands and knees in the red—stained grass, her heart pounding so hard she thought it might come out of her chest.
For a long moment, she couldn’t seem to do anything else. She couldn’t look away…couldn’t quite make her mind accept what her eyes were telling it.
Because standing in front of her—naked as the day he was born and holding her stun rifle as though he’d used one a thousand times before—was not a wolf but a man.
A really huge man.
A huge, naked, very muscular man with wild black hair and the same broad shoulders and powerful build Buck had possessed in his animal form—only now he was standing upright on two legs instead of four.
His face was human, but not entirely. There was something sharp and clean and faintly wolfish about his features—high cheekbones, a strong jaw, a straight nose, and eyes so vivid a blue they almost seemed to glow.
Short, dense fur covered parts of him where a human man would only have hair—his broad chest…the backs of his powerful forearms…his thighs and calves. It looked soft and thick and dark against his tan skin.
And God help her, she absolutely should not have been looking lower, especially not after nearly getting eaten by a Vorn, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.
Just for a second–just one glance.
And sure enough–he had two shafts in his human form too.
That, more than anything else, made her believe—made her understand at some deep instinctive level that this really was Buck. Her Buck. Her strange, wonderful, overprotective wolf.
Only now he was somehow a man too.
He was still looking at her, those electric—blue eyes fixed on her face with a mixture of concern and what looked suspiciously like nervousness.
Kiera swallowed hard.
“Who the hell are you? I mean, you’re Buck, right?” she asked, wanting to be sure.
He blinked and then said, in that same deep, rusty voice, “Yes, I’m Brux…er, Buck.”
Kiera stared at him another beat.
“So…you’re my wolf?” She still couldn't quite wrap her head around it.
He nodded.
“I know you didn’t expect this. Forgive me. I’m not a wolf all the time. I’m a Lykan—a kind of Monstrum.”
“A Monstrum! But I’ve been working with them for ages now—how come I never heard of you?”
He shook his head.
“I stowed away on the Mother Ship when our universe went up in flames, consumed by the Darklings. I…” He shook his head again, his expression tightening with pain. “Forgive me. It’s…so hard to talk about.”
“No, that’s all right—of course it’s hard. I mean, you lost your whole world.”
Kiera pushed herself slowly to her feet, never taking her eyes off him.
He was still standing there as though waiting for her judgment, the stun rifle hanging forgotten in one hand.
Up close, she could see details she hadn’t noticed at first—the way the fur on his chest thickened slightly over his pectorals…
the powerful ridges of muscle in his arms and his flat stomach…
the strange, beautiful contrast between his very human mouth and those faintly wild, lupine angles to the rest of his face.
He looked both alien and male in a way that made her skin feel too tight all of a sudden. And to think, she’d been sleeping with him every night for over a week. Even worse, she’d been allowing him to watch her with the pleasure blooms in the bath!
Just the thought made her cheeks get hot, but she tried to push the embarrassment away. After all, how could she know that her rescue wolf was actually a seven—foot—tall muscular Monstrum warrior? Still…the way he’d watched the pleasure blooms fucking her…
Stop it, she scolded herself silently. You almost got killed five minutes ago. Shouldn’t that be your main focus?
But she couldn’t quite stop staring. And apparently, he noticed.
A faint flush darkened the tops of his cheekbones, and he shifted his weight slightly, as though suddenly aware of his own nakedness. Which honestly, if Kiera hadn’t been so stunned, would have been almost funny considering all the times she had been naked in front of him.
“I don’t understand,” she said at last, dragging her gaze back to his face with some effort. “So you were pretending to be a wolf all this time?”
He shook his head at once.
“Not pretending—I was stuck in my primal form—my animal form. I tried and tried to change—to shift. But I couldn’t do it until I saw that beast coming for you.”
As he said it, his eyes shifted—just for a moment—from electric blue to blood red. He turned to look at the fallen Vorn, which was still breathing in deep, stunned gusts where it lay sprawled in the grass.
“It almost killed you—I should finish it off,” he said, and his voice had dropped to a low, menacing growl of pure fury.
“No, no,” Kiera said quickly. “It’s not the Vorn’s fault—Higgs is the one who set him loose. Who set all the animals loose this morning.”
Buck frowned and his eyes flashed red again.
“Higgs—is that the name of the stinking male who tried to attack you?”
Kiera almost laughed at his description.
“Yup, that’s him. Old Higgs isn’t going to win any prizes for personal hygiene anytime soon.” She took a breath and tried to steady herself. “Come on.” She held out a hand to him. “Let’s go get the large animal mover so we can get the Vorn back in his area and then we can talk.”
“No need to get equipment.”
He lifted his head and straightened his shoulders and Kiera’s breath caught in her throat.
He really was enormous.
She had known Buck was huge, obviously—he had been the size of a small horse in wolf form—but seeing him standing upright was something else entirely.
He had to be a full seven feet tall, maybe a little more, and all of that height was thick and solid with hard, functional muscle.
Not pretty—boy gym muscle either–real strength.
The kind that came from being made to fight and run and survive.
For one wild second, Kiera had the completely ridiculous thought that if Jerome had ever stood next to him, her ex—fiancé would have looked like a decorative throw pillow.
Before she could say anything else, Buck placed the stun—gun in the grass, went to the stunned Vorn, bent, and gripped it by the back hooves.
Then he started dragging it.
Kiera’s mouth fell open. The Vorn had to weigh close to two tons–if not more. It was built like a buffalo crossed with a nightmare and now that it was sedated, it was nothing but dead weight made of muscle and teeth.
Buck hauled it across the grass as though it was inconvenient but not truly difficult. She could see his muscles working, but he didn’t seem to be breathing hard as he towed the gigantic beast across the field.
Wow, Kiera thought faintly.
She picked up the stun—gun and hurried after him, half afraid he might somehow vanish if she took her eyes off him for too long.
Buck never faltered or stopped for a break. He dragged the Vorn all the way back to its enclosure and flung the creature inside with a final, efficient heave that made the ground shake faintly. Then he stepped back and looked at Kiera.
“It’s done–better secure the fence before it wakes up again,” he rumbled.
“Huh? Oh, right! Of course.” Kiera made herself stop staring at him and hurried to the control post to check the perimeter nodes. The barrier shimmered strong and steady now–the energy grid humming with its usual pale blue light.
She boosted the field strength another notch just to be safe and then turned to one of the nearby work—bots—a silver, bipedal unit with broad utility arms and a placidly expressionless faceplate.
“You,” she said sharply, pointing. “Stay right here by these controls. If anyone—anybody at all—comes near this enclosure or any of the others, you alert me immediately. Understood?”
The work—bot’s faceplate flashed green.
“Understood. Will alert at once,” it said in an emotionless voice.
“Good.” Kiera took a breath. Then she looked back at Buck. “Come on.”
He was standing there waiting for her with that same strange expression—part hope, part worry, part something she couldn’t quite read.
Now that the immediate crisis was over, the adrenaline was beginning to ebb from her system, leaving her shaky all over.
But beneath the shakiness was something else–curiosity.
She had about a hundred questions. Because this was Buck–her Buck.
The same being who had slept curled around her and listened to her talk and herded runaway theebles and looked at her with those strangely human eyes as if she were the center of his world.
Only now he was standing in front of her in humanoid form, huge and naked and real. It was hard to wrap her head around.
“Come on,” she said again, more softly this time.
Then she turned and led him back toward the home-dome, her heart still pounding and her mind still racing. Behind her she could hear the quiet tread of his bare feet in the grass.
Inside the dome, the silver door sealed behind them with a soft, final whoosh.
Kiera looked at him.
He looked back at her.
And suddenly the small, curved room felt much too warm.
They had a lot to talk about.