by Paige Tyler
“Is that what happened in your case?” he asked, prompting her when she fell silent.
She nodded, remembering how that day at the mountain had started, how bitterly cold it had been when the call came in.
“They dropped off a group of four college kids on one of the tamer backcountry slopes at sunrise. It should have taken them about four hours to get down the slope to the pickup location, but they didn’t make it back. Before we lost radio contact, dispatch was able to confirm they’d left the planned route looking for adventure and gotten lost. By the time we pinned down the general area they ended up in, the sun was going down, temperature was dropping, and wet, heavy snow was falling.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It isn’t,” she replied. “Heavy snow on a steep slope is a recipe for an avalanche, especially if there’s already a lot of snow there to begin with. Some of the slopes in the area they ventured into had as much as fifteen feet of buildup, which is about as bad a situation as you could come up with.”
He didn’t say anything, this time waiting patiently for her to continue. It was hard to explain—or understand why—but it was easier talking to him about this than anyone else in the world.
“They dropped six of us into the area with survival gear and satellite phones, hoping we could find the skiers before it got too cold. It was so windy the snow was coming down sideways and I could barely see a few feet in front of me.” She took a deep breath. “By the time I stumbled across them, they’d been trying to ski down the slope in the dark and two of them had crashed out, lost their equipment, and twisted themselves up pretty good. The group was trying to walk down the slope while all four of them were in the first stages of hypothermia. I was calling in the rescue helicopter when a deep rumbling sound from higher up the slope told me I’d run out of time. I couldn’t see a damn thing, but I knew what was coming.”
Harley opened her mouth to tell him the rest but paused as she realized he’d tightened his grip on her hands, almost like he was in pain. His breathing was faster than normal and his heart was beating so hard she could actually hear it.
“Um,” she began, trying to focus on what she was saying instead of the obvious effect her words were having on Sawyer. “I knew we didn’t have a lot of time, so I shoved the four of them toward the first outcropping of rocks I saw, praying there’d be a crevice for us to hide in. I found one, but unfortunately, it was only big enough for the four of them. I tried to make myself fit in there with them, but it wasn’t enough.”
“Shit,” Sawyer said, his voice so low she could barely make out the word. “The avalanche hit you?”
“Like a freight train.” She swallowed hard. “I tried to stay on the top of the flow like they teach you in the survival classes, but it was impossible. I got scooped up and tossed around like a rag doll, hitting every rock and tree on the mountain on the way down the slope. I never imagined there could be so much pain. Every time I hit something, another bone broke.”
Glancing down again, she noticed Sawyer’s claws had extended, his fingers flexing like he was fighting to regain control. She remembered how upset she’d been as Sawyer had told her about the trauma he’d gone through. It seemed like the same for him now. Maybe it was a werewolf thing. Maybe werewolves were affected by the trauma and pain another of their kind had experienced when they turned.
“It felt like hours before I stop tumbling,” she whispered. “I was wearing an avalanche airbag pack, but it got ripped off at some point during the fall, so I was trapped there under the snow with no idea how far under I was or even which way was up. Not that it really mattered, since I was too busted up to try to dig my way out. So I laid there in the snow, not sure what would kill me first—the trauma from the impact or the lack of oxygen. I should have been freaking out, but truthfully, I was in too much pain to care.”
“How long were you buried under there?” he asked, though from the expression on his face, it didn’t seem as if he truly wanted to know.
“Five hours,” she said, replaying the few glimpses of that horrible time she remembered. “The rest of the ski patrol arrived minutes after the avalanche stopped, but even with the people I rescued pointing them in the right direction, it took them forever to find me. The debris field was over a thousand feet long and nearly as wide. Later, my friends on the patrol admitted that after the first hour, they thought they were looking for my body because I should have suffocated by then. They couldn’t believe it when they dug me up and found out I was still breathing. They didn’t think I’d even make it to the hospital.”
Sawyer’s breathing was more regular now that they were past the traumatic part of the story. “How long was it before you realized something strange was happening to you?”
Harley considered that. She’d never spent a lot of time thinking about those weeks and months right after the avalanche. In fact, she’d done everything she could to forget it.
“The doctors had me drugged to the gills for a few weeks after the accident on the mountain, assuming I was in pain from all those broken bones,” she said. “Even though my inner werewolf burned through the narcotics as fast as they gave them to me, they kept me loopy enough to miss most of what happened. It wasn’t until eight weeks later, after I was out of the hospital and back at home, that I started having nightmares about what happened. By the time my fangs, claws, and anger management issues showed up, I was sure there was something horribly wrong with me. I thought maybe the pain and trauma of falling down that mountain had driven me insane.”
“Did your family figure out what was happening?”
Harley hesitated. This was the one thing she’d worked the hardest to forget.
“I tried so hard to keep it from them,” she said, not surprised when the words came out as little more than a whisper. “I loved my family more than anything, but I knew this wasn’t something they could handle. If they saw the claws and fangs and glowing eyes, they would have thought I was a monster.” Tears stung her eyes and she blinked them back. “It turned out I was right.”
When she didn’t say anything more, Sawyer moved his chair so close his thighs were touching hers and she could feel his warmth through both of their jeans.
“It started with an argument with my brother,” she said, focusing all her attention on the thumb rubbing little circles on the back of her hand again. “He was nagging at me about showering too long and using all the hot water. Before I knew it, we went from arguing to shouting so loud the whole house heard us. My emotions had been all over the place for the past few days, the pressure building as I tried everything I could to hide the changes from everyone, and for some reason, I lost it.”
“Did you shift?”
She nodded glumly. “Further than I ever had before. When my brother freaked out, my parents and sister all ran upstairs. My dad grabbed me and shoved me away, I slashed him with my claws, tearing open his shoulder. Seeing all that blood pulled me back from the edge, but it didn’t matter by then. My whole family had seen what I was and the look of horror on their faces is something I’ll never forget. The worst was my little sister, Jenna. She’d always idolized me, but seeing her look at me like that crushed me. My mom told me to get out and never come back. I did and haven’t let myself shift that far since.”
Harley promised herself she wasn’t going to cry, but when Sawyer gently pulled her onto his lap, she did just that, the tears she’d never let fall back then coming after all these years. She waited for the embarrassment to come, but it didn’t happen. Instead, as Sawyer’s big hand came around to rub her back, she felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
He let her cry for a long time before tenderly wiping the tears away from her face with his fingers. The intimate touch felt like the most natural thing in the world.
“Did you go back to uni after you left home?” he asked.
She should probably climb o
ff his lap, but being in his arms felt too good.
She shook her head. “The idea of going back to school and becoming a teacher was out. All I could imagine was losing control in the middle of a classroom and slashing up a bunch of kids.”
“You’d never do anything like that,” he said firmly.
“Now I wouldn’t, but back then, when I was fighting the change with everything I had in me, I wasn’t so sure. Regardless, I took every penny I had left in my bank account and disappeared.”
“Where did you go?” he asked, his face so close to hers she could feel his warm breath on her skin, the scent of cinnamon coffee cake surrounding her, and it was all she could do to keep from shoving her nose into his neck so she could inhale even more of it. How had she not realized the delicious scent was coming from him the first time she’d experienced it?
Harley took another breath, letting it out in a long sigh before shaking her head to clear her senses. “A better question would be where didn’t I go? I was so scared of being found out again, I never stayed in any one place for too long. Before joining STAT, I spent time in nearly every state in the continental U.S. Except Colorado. I never went back there.”
As she relaxed against Sawyer’s muscular chest, she realized it’d been an exceedingly long time since she’d been in a man’s arms. It was amazing how comforting it was.
“Speaking of STAT, how did you end up working for them?” he asked. “Did they find you, or did you find them?”
She laughed a little at that. “It was definitely the latter. While I got very good at hiding the more obvious aspects of my werewolf nature, I constantly found myself in situations where someone needed help, and the next thing I knew, I’d toss someone through a window, or get shot at or run over by a car. It’s like I was a magnet for trouble.”
“That’s your innate alpha instincts,” Sawyer murmured, rubbing soothing circles along her back. “Your inner wolf sees someone who needs your help and you can’t help but get involved.”
She snorted. “I guess. Regardless, that’s how STAT found me. I was waitressing at a diner in Omaha when McKay sat down at a table and offered me a job. They heard about all the situations I’d gotten myself into and figured out I was a werewolf. I was terrified when he told me, but in the end, knowing there were other people like me out there who’d accept me for what I am was too good an opportunity to pass up.”
“Have you talked to your family since you left?” Sawyer asked.
Harley felt tears fill her eyes again and Sawyer’s big hand moved up and down her back until she relaxed. Damn, he had really good hands.
“Jenna is the only one I’ve kept in contact with.” She wiped away a stray tear. “I text her a few times a week and talked to her twice. She was eight when I left, and while she saw what happened, she doesn’t get why I can’t go home. She thinks it’s as simple as apologizing to Mom and Dad. I’d do it in a heartbeat if I thought they’d forgive me, but I’m nothing but a monster to them now.”
Even though she knew how they’d felt about her for years, there was something about saying it out loud that made her feel more hollow and wrung out than ever. She was on the verge of losing it again, fighting the tears that threatened to overwhelm her, when she felt Sawyer’s hands on her hips, lifting and repositioning her on his lap until she was sitting astride him. It was an intimate position, there was no denying that, but as she rested her hands on the hard planes of his chest, she decided it was exactly where she wanted to be right then.
“You aren’t a monster,” he said. “After the run-ins we’ve had with the traffickers and the supernaturals who fight with them, I know a monster when I see one, and you aren’t even close. I’m not going to apologize for your parents’ behavior. They turned their backs on you and that’s on them. But what they believe doesn’t matter. You’re a werewolf—a beautiful, perfect werewolf.”
His words made her—and her inner wolf—feel warm all over. She wasn’t sure how it happened, but one moment she was gazing at Sawyer, wondering if it was magic that had caused her to stumble across the most amazing man in the world, and the next, she was kissing him.
It was merely a gentle brush of the lips at first, like he was giving her the chance to pull back if this wasn’t what she wanted. If that was the case, he’d be waiting a long damn time.
She slipped both hands into his hair, weaving her fingers into it as she opened her mouth to his teasing tongue with a moan. He tasted even better than the cinnamon coffee cake he smelled so reminiscent of.
Harley was so into him, she didn’t even realize his fangs were out until they grazed her tongue. The sensation sent sparks of arousal through her body, making heat pool between her legs. She moaned as his burning hot lips traced their way along her jaw and down her neck. And when his fangs grazed the sensitive skin there, she growled a little—something she never ever did.
It wasn’t until his big hands slipped under the hem of her shirt, the warmth of his fingertips gliding along the sides of her ribs, that she felt her gums and fingertips begin to tingle like her fangs and claws were trying to make an appearance. She had a sudden vision of herself tearing Sawyer’s shirt open and latching on to the muscles at the junction of his neck and shoulder and biting him. Excitement pulsed between her legs at the image.
Okay, where the hell did that come from?
She didn’t have a lot of time to figure it out because her hands were too interested in the front of his button-down, preparing to tear it open. Her inner wolf knew what it wanted and at least a part of that involved getting Sawyer naked.
Harley was more than ready to give in to the werewolf inside when she heard a noise outside the villa.
She was off Sawyer’s lap in a second, pulling her gun and spinning around to face the door even as Sawyer did the same. That was when she picked up a handful of familiar scents drifting into the room. She wasn’t sure what was more surprising—that her nose was working so well it could ID people through a closed door, or that she’d smelled their scents even before Sawyer had.
Both she and Sawyer had put their weapons away by the time Caleb, Erin, and Forrest walked in. Harley thought they did a good job hiding what they’d just been doing, but if the look on Caleb’s face was any indication, he’d realized they’d been up to something. She prayed his crappy omega nose wouldn’t tell him that she and Sawyer had been making out. Beside her, Sawyer looked like he was wondering the same thing.
“Anything interesting happen?” Caleb asked, eyeing her and Sawyer curiously as he walked over to the monitors.
As Erin moved over to stand beside him, Harley couldn’t help but look twice at the odd pair. Ever since the fight in the tunnels below the Central Market in Morocco, Caleb and the abrasive MI6 agent had been acting differently toward each other. They definitely weren’t friends or anything, but the open animosity wasn’t there anymore. Maybe getting tossed around by a scaly-skinned lizard shifter had made the two of them able to see past their differences.
Or maybe they’d declared a detente until the next wrong word screwed everything up.
“Just a lot of construction,” Sawyer said, gesturing to the mountaintop still bright with lights. “No sign of any of the traffickers, but from the looks of it, they’ll definitely have the tram built and ready in time for the auction.”
“Speaking of the auction,” Harley said, hoping to distract Caleb, who was still looking back and forth between her and Sawyer with an all-too-knowing expression. “Has Jake come up with a plan on how we’re going to get up there? It’s not like we can just sneak on the tram when no one is looking.”
“Misty is doing her magic on the computer, sifting through the international arrivals from both air and sea,” Forrest said, checking each monitor to double-check the cameras and recording connections. “Luckily, the people rich enough—and twisted enough—to attend an event like this aren’t worried about hiding
their movements. Jake wants her to find some of them who are fairly similar in appearance to us, then Jes will do the makeup thing to make sure we can pass for them.”
In another life, Jes had been into theatrical makeup and special effects. The things she could do with a little polyurethane, latex, and contact lenses were almost scary. But the chances of finding clones for all of them wasn’t going to be easy.
“What about those of us who won’t pass for attendees?” she asked, worried she already knew the answer.
Forrest glanced out at the mountain before looking at them. “We have to hope they aren’t afraid of heights because they’ll be climbing up the monastery.”
Harley groaned. That was exactly what she’d been afraid of.
Chapter 10
Don’t look down.
Sawyer wedged the inside edge of his right boot against a slim ledge of rock, carefully testing it before putting his full weight on it. Reaching up with his right hand, he shoved his fingers into a crevice wide enough for them to fit, then with a heave of his shoulder and arm, he pulled himself higher up the mountain in the darkness.
Just a few hundred meters more to go.
It was an agonizingly slow way to climb, but he didn’t have a choice. The face of the cliff was made mostly of sandstone. One wrong move and he was looking at one long drop to the base. While the fall probably wouldn’t kill him—unless he smashed in his head—it wasn’t something he wanted to experience.
Boots scraped against stone and he glanced to his right to see Jake a dozen meters away, climbing as carefully as he was. On Sawyer’s left, Caleb was at least a hundred meters ahead of them and moving absurdly fast. Sawyer had already come to the conclusion that reckless and out of control were defining characteristics of the omega werewolf.