On the other, “Reno” (if that was really his name) had acted like a turtle getting plucked out of a lake the second she’d tried to strike up a conversation with him.
And there was still the bothersome, inescapable thought scratching at the back of her mind that she somehow recognized him, though from where or how, she had no clue.
After all, Reno was built like a tank, with wide shoulders and lengths of thick, corded muscle that went all down his arms, barely contained by the navy-blue work shirt he had on. And in spite of his hunched position, he had to at least be six-two or six-three with rugged, handsome features and a mass of dark-blond stubble all up and down his face that accentuated his uniquely square jawline. She wished she could see more of him, but the overcompensatingly large aviators and the worn brown Stetson he wore shaded his features fairly drastically in the low light of Earl’s bar.
Just something about him that she couldn’t place…
She continued to go through the photos in her editing program, deleting extras and duplicates and saving the best so she could upload them to her stock photo account when she got home later.
She should have stayed there in the first place instead of wandering into town and striding into the only open establishment at this time of night. But being in that nearly empty rented space still felt too lonely. Too much of a shell shock from having lived in her childhood home her entire life, then the months spent living at her friend’s place a few towns over.
While her laptop caught up with the things she was doing (it was a pretty old machine), she checked her email.
At the top of her inbox, an email from Detective Riley caught her attention.
The message was pretty standard stuff, bothering her for having moved out of town without “informing him first” and pretending like they were on speaking terms as friends when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
For years, he’d been hassling her for information about her disappeared friend, Remi, who up and left Granite Falls one day without a trace. But at that point, her relationship with the young blond boy with strikingly light-blue eyes had been all but over, smashed to smithereens the day after their senior prom when he’d suddenly pulled away from her life without as much as a proper explanation.
Absentmindedly, she found herself browsing old photos in the recesses of her haphazardly organized laptop folders. And before she knew it, she was clicking on a picture she’d taken with her childhood best friend outside of their high school, back when they were both starry-eyed freshmen hoping to avoid bullies while discovering their plans for the future.
Granted, Remi had been one of the super-elite rich kids back in Granite Falls, though he never held it over her once. In fact, he was always more than willing to get lunch for her while pretending he just “had extra allowance” or whatever the excuse of the day was.
She’d loved him once, long ago. She thought they were meant for each other, and he’d said as much himself before lambasting her hopes and dreams by disappearing for years after high school up into the mysterious mansions that loomed over Granite Falls, only to then run away without another word spoken between them years later.
Her heart hammered in her chest, the image feeling so far away, yet like yesterday at the same time.
She closed the file and reminded herself that this was one of the many reasons she’d moved away from Colorado in the first place.
To leave that mystery far, far behind her.
She got a text and pulled out her phone to see that her best friend, Sheila, and her husband were inviting her over to dinner again tomorrow tonight.
Dani texted back, declining politely but grateful for the outreach. After all, it was Sheila who had invited Dani to visit Texas in the first place. And from the first moment Dani had caught a whiff of the wild, open spaces and majestic, almost magical sense of freedom and destiny here, she’d been hooked.
Six months later and her childhood home sold, Dani was now officially a Texan. Sort of.
She sensed someone watching her and looked up. But Reno seemed extremely focused on… whatever he was doing.
It was a sensation she’d become all too accustomed to in her adulthood. The sense of someone always following her, watching her.
And why wouldn’t that weird feeling of nostalgia go away already?
Before she could get any further on that front, though, the absolute silence of the bar was interrupted by the front door slamming open so hard Dani wondered how it didn’t break.
A moment later, four guys walked in, all of them tall and muscular and rangy-looking, most of them still covered in dust and grime on their work shirts and jeans.
“Evenin’, Earl,” the front one drawled. He had only an undershirt on, and he shamelessly took a drag from a cigarette he had in his mouth before he stamped it out on the bar counter in front of Earl.
“C’mon, guys, it’s almost closing time. Can you not tonight?” Earl asked placatingly.
But the air in the bar was tense. And above the earthy, almost animal smell of these guys, Dani could detect booze as well.
The front man rolled his eyes, then strode up to a chair positioned a few feet behind him. With a grin, he raised his foot and stomped down on the chair, shattering the thick wood into splinters that fell to the ground in a clatter of pieces.
“Sorry, Earl. What Copperheads want, Copperheads get.” He finished with a shrug, and Dani saw Earl blanch. Without a word, he put four beers on the bar, and each one took one without a single word.
Dani hated people like this. They reminded her of the kinds of bullies that had run Granite Falls when she’d lived there. Tall, muscular men who didn’t blink an eye as they walked around like packs of wolves, looking for weaker people to prey on who wouldn’t stand up to them.
Apparently, people like that existed out here in Texas too. Just great.
Dani wasn’t the only one tense. In spite of his relaxed posture, she could see Reno’s head turn imperceptibly to watch as the four men moved away from the bar to strut around like they owned the place.
“Your bar’s a dump, Earl,” another of the men said, kicking a chair over for fun. Dani tried to ignore them, knowing it was better to keep your head down than get it cut off by people like this, but she wasn’t one for passivity. Being passive just meant people got to walk all over you with impunity.
Remi had taught her that little fact long ago.
“If it’s such a dump, then why don’t you just leave?” Dani muttered, too late to cut off her own words.
The leader of the group’s pale-brown eyes settled on her instantly, and Dani felt a horrible, clenching feeling as all four of them appraised her with warm interest. She stared back at them, but eye contact wasn’t going to scare off these drunk jerks.
“Look at this, a little mouse who likes to run its mouth…” Like a group of predators, they fanned out and surrounded her table, the leader leaning on the edge of it, staring down at her.
“I’m not looking for company,” she said, trying hard to not grate her teeth.
“Maybe not, but I am,” he replied. “Can’t say I recognize you. You smell new to me,” he said, inhaling through his nostrils as he finished.
What was it about guys like this creepily sniffing the air around them? Or always being in packs of at least three or four dudes?
“She smells nice,” another added.
Gross.
“So you a photographer or something? What’s a little mouse like you doing in a dump like this so late? There’s a ton of fun things you could be doing with us right now. In fact, I could give you a lot of things to photograph,” the leader commented, smirking at Dani with cold, pretend innocence.
Dani shut her laptop and started to put her camera into her bag. Time to run for it.
“I doubt it. The only things I see right now are so ugly they would break my camera if I tried to photograph them,” she replied casually.
She was almost packed up, about to pick up her lap
top, when the man above her slapped his hand down on top of it. And when she looked up, the pretend niceness was gone.
“I don’t know where you think you come from, lady, but talking to a Copperhead like that is a serious offense.”
Dani’s eyes darted around her, but Earl had disappeared behind the bar while the men had been circling like vultures. And across from her, the chair where Reno had been sitting was suddenly empty, though his laptop was still open on the table. Odd. She hadn’t even heard him get up.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” the man demanded harshly, and cold fear gripped Dani’s insides as she stared up. But she didn’t give them the satisfaction of knowing she was well and truly cornered with nowhere to go and no help in sight.
She opened her mouth to reply when, suddenly, a deep voice boomed from behind her, and the man that had been glowering over her looked up, eyes suddenly zeroing in surprise on something—or someone—that hadn’t been there a half-second ago.
“I’ll give you something to look at, fucker.”
And before Dani could even turn around, a big hand snatched the man above her by the neck, yanking him off her table bodily like he was a six-ounce bluegill getting pulled out of the water.
Dani whirled around in her chair just in time to see Reno as he threw the gross jerk into the nearest assembly of tables, making them crash and collapse in an explosion of wood. The other men were at attention in an instant, circling Reno with raised fists.
“It’s just Reno. We can take him,” one of the guys said with a grin.
But that grin was wiped off in an instant as Reno’s fist slammed through the same man’s jaw, and he twisted in a one-eighty, his head ricocheting off the solid wood of the bar behind them, knocking him unconscious.
Dani didn’t have time to wonder if the guy was dead or not as the other two attacked Reno in unison. But Reno moved with unnatural speed, the air around her undulating with his momentum as he ducked one punch, then sidestepped the other before hitting one man with a left hook so hard she heard something shatter in his jaw. The other, still off-balance from his wild miss, got Reno’s heavy boot square in the chest, and the guy tumbled onto his back and rolled before crashing through a pile of stacked chairs.
And to her utter shock, Reno still had his sunglasses on, though as he moved, she could make out a hint of light blue that seemed to glow behind the dark lenses.
Dani gasped when she turned and saw that the first man, who’d been practically thrown across the bar, was striding toward them and cracking his knuckles.
In a blur, Reno positioned himself in front of her.
“I don’t know what’s got you so uppity, Reno, but the four of us saw this human first, and if I have to teach you a lesson—”
The man made a choked, gurgling sound as Reno’s hand reached forward and caught him by the throat again, this time grabbing and squeezing. Dani could see the veins in Reno’s hand and arm as his muscles flexed, lifting the other guy off the floor in that way only superheroes could do in action movies.
Only… this was all real. This was happening.
“I’m not the one who needs to be taught a lesson.” Reno’s voice was dark and surprisingly bereft of any Texas drawl now, which had been thick and kind of forced-sounding earlier.
She’d heard this voice. It was etched into her soul.
The man being held aloft snarled, and his fist came forward quickly, aimed for Reno’s face. Reno raised his free hand and blocked it easily. Then it flew forward and slammed into the guy’s nose, knocking him out cold. But in the mayhem of blurred motion and punches that sounded like thunder cracks, the sunglasses Reno had been wearing fell from his face, clattering to the floor.
And then she saw them.
Light, beautiful blue eyes the color of glacial ice. Or the earth’s atmosphere from space.
Eyes that belonged to her childhood friend, Remi.
Reno looked down at her, and their gazes met, sending a shiver of something much hotter than fear sizzling down her spine. He didn’t speak, but recognition was clear in his expression as everything around them seemed to utterly stop—even the movement of the earth—for a moment.
Remi was alive.
And he was here, in Texas.
And somehow, in the ten years they’d been apart, the tallish, often awkward boy she’d known her whole childhood had turned into a beast of a man with the body of a demigod and the face of an angel that was both familiar and unfamiliar to her all the same.
Reno blinked, then looked up at the unconscious man he still held with one hand like he was a sack of oranges, not a full-size male. Around her, the others were out cold or groaning in pain and not moving from their spots.
Then suddenly, Reno dropped the man to the floor, whirled around, and made for the exit. He strode past his table, collected his laptop, passed Earl (who’d emerged from behind the bar with shock on his face), threw what looked like a wad of bills at him, then disappeared through the door to the bar without a single word.
All this time apart and he was here?
She was furious. She was awestruck. She was happy and sad and dumbfounded all at the same time.
The door clanged behind Reno—Remi… whoever the hell that man now was—and Dani’s frozen nerves suddenly jumped to action.
She wasn’t going to wait here a moment longer to see what these guys decided to do when they came to.
And somewhere outside, the truth that the man she’d always loved, always wanted, yet now still hated was out there right now made her legs tremble.
She threw her laptop into her bag, raced for the door, and leaped outside into the pervasive darkness.
He’d disappeared on her once.
She wasn’t going to let it happen again.
3
Warm night air washed over Dani as she stepped onto the sidewalk, looking around desperately for the huge male shape that had exited mere moments before she had.
It couldn’t be him, she thought. Yet he’d been there, right next to her, jumping in to protect her like he always had.
Only it had been different this time. Possessive. Fierce. Dominant. A man unlike the one she’d known back then.
“Remi!” she called to the empty street. Aside from the aged streetlamps that cast a dull yellow hue around her and the light of the bar behind her, all the other stores and buildings nearby were empty and dark.
Dani’s feet were moving now. She didn’t know where she was going, so she just had to keep looking. He’d recognized her. She’d seen it in his eyes the second before he’d split. Her sneakers hitting the pavement in rapid succession was the only other sound on the whole street.
She only got halfway down the block, even more miffed and feeling more lost than before. “Remi!” she called again.
Then she realized that everyone called him Reno.
“Reno!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, hoping by sheer chance that wherever he was, he could hear her somehow.
For all she knew, he was already on his way to another state, maybe even another country, and she’d never see him again.
Suddenly, a hand grasped her arm from behind, gently but firmly, pulling her from the sidewalk and into the shadows of the corner of a storefront. She squeaked in surprise and shock and was about to raise her fists to fight off whoever was lurking in the shadows when a huge shadow loomed over her, caging her against the wall.
A shadow with bright ice-blue eyes.
Only now they were electric, the color of blue lightning in the middle of a thunderstorm. And as Dani’s eyes adjusted, she could see Reno’s features, swathed in shadow but still visible in the pale glow from a light on the other side of the street.
It really was him. Her childhood friend. The only man she’d ever really wanted.
Reno had both forearms planted on the brick wall at Dani’s sides, surrounding her like he was trying to shield her from the outside world.
Or maybe he was trying to keep her from esc
aping. Either way, a thrill of something powerful and sensual licked at her insides as they both stood there staring into each other’s eyes, a million unsaid things hovering around them, overpowered by the sudden, hot proximity of their two bodies.
Even if their past was blackened by the things that had happened, it couldn’t quell the unbelievable attraction she still felt for him. Attraction that, based on the thrumming inside her, had only gotten stronger in their years apart.
Without a word, Reno leaned down, claiming Dani’s lips in a harsh, possessive kiss. At first, she wanted to resist, get back to the part where she was still angry with him, but his mouth was heaven against hers, and hot want seared through her core in a blaze of desire.
She was far past thinking as she parted her lips slightly, and Reno’s tongue thrust in to meet hers, entangling and clashing in a wet, slick dance that made the hairs on Dani’s neck and forearms stand at full attention. Dani made a muffled sound against him, and Reno seemed to growl as he claimed her even deeper, taking control and stroking against her at just the right speed and pressure to make Dani ache for him from the inside out.
At least the attraction between them hadn’t been a fantasy.
Nor was the quiet beast of a man that stood above her now as Reno finally pulled back, giving her a second to breathe. Dani was glad she was standing against the wall because, if not, her legs would have certainly given out on her the second their lips had met.
In spite of his very masculine, very male features, there were still things she recognized from the kid he was. The defined V-shape of his cupid’s bow on his upper lip. The little upward tilt at the end of his nose. Or the almost-white ring of color that was dotted with flecks of blue at the very center of his irises like a ring of frost.
She would have laughed to see him with such a full, week-old-looking beard now since he’d never been able to grow more than a few mustache hairs as a kid.
And the thought reminded Dani that she was still pissed as heck at him for leaving in the first place.
Reno leaned down as if to kiss her again. And though normally she would have loved another taste of such sweet, erotic sensations, there were a lot of things on her mind that kissing wouldn’t solve right now, and she pulled back, putting a hand on his chest. Thankfully, he stopped immediately, his expression still full of worry and wonder and heat toward her.
Rogue Wolf Page 2