High Moon

by Kati Wilde

  High Moon

  Kati Wilde

  Contents

  High Moon

  1. Ethan

  2. Makena

  3. Ethan

  4. Ethan

  5. Makena

  6. Ethan

  7. Makena

  8. Makena

  9. Ethan

  10. Ethan

  11. Makena

  12. Ethan

  13. Makena

  14. Makena

  15. Ethan

  16. Makena

  17. Makena

  18. Ethan

  19. Makena

  20. Ethan

  21. Makena

  22. Ethan

  23. Makena

  24. Ethan

  25. Makena

  26. Epilogue

  The Midwinter Mail-Order Bride

  Newsletter

  Also by Kati Wilde

  High Moon

  Her mama always warned her not to feed stray wolves…

  Running a ranch is hard enough, so Makena Laine doesn't need any complications in her life. But the development company that's determined to take her land isn't giving her much choice. They've run off her help, pulled down her fences...and she's afraid they've only just begun.

  So when she stops alongside the road to assist a cowboy with a broken-down truck, she isn't looking for more trouble, no matter how gorgeous that trouble is. Ethan Grimmson is bigger than any man has a right to be, doesn't say much, and—if she's honest—he’s also a bit scary. Yet considering that she's in danger of losing her ranch...maybe scary is exactly what she needs.

  If so, then scary is exactly what she's going to get—in the form of a giant werewolf. Because Ethan’s got teeth and claws, and he’s been drifting a long time, hunting the murderers who killed his family—until an irresistible scent drags him straight to Makena's ranch. Eventually, he'll have to rip out his heart and leave her behind; but for now, he'll protect her from the vultures circling her land. Except the threat stalking them is bigger than either could have imagined, and is leading to a showdown that might destroy them both...

  Please note: This book contains explicit love scenes, plenty of swearing, and a dirty-talking cowboy whose response to everything might as well be “The better to eat you with, my dear.” There’s also a little paranormal violence and gore, but no real cows or rabbits or werewolves were harmed in the making of this novel.

  1

  Ethan

  Because I’m a mangy coward, I roll up the windows in my truck about ten miles south of Fortune City, Idaho. Considering that those windows serve as the only air conditioning in my ancient F-150, pretty soon it’s hot as hell inside the cab and I’m stewing in my own sweat. But I’ve spent too damn long searching for answers to get sidetracked by whatever might come blowing in on the wind.

  In and out. That’s how this is going to go. I’ll stop in Fortune City for a day, maybe two. I’ll ask the questions I need to ask. Then I’ll get the hell out of town.

  And if I catch a whiff of the scent that’s haunted me for three fucking years—which is the last time I drove through this town with my windows rolled down—I’ll ignore it. I won’t go looking for the source.

  That’s the plan, anyway. But the second my boots hit gravel in the parking lot of the Ponderosa Motel, I breathe in deep. I tell myself that testing the air is just instinct—that it’s simply a way of taking in my surroundings, the same way humans do. Anyone who gets out of a vehicle somewhere new, they quickly look around and listen. As wolfkin, I look, listen…and sniff.

  But if I’m honest, I’m not just getting my bearings. I’m searching for one scent in particular.

  And there it is. Barely detectable, like a tiny faded thread in Fortune City’s tapestry of odors. But faint as it is, instantly all my senses are on high alert and my blood runs hot. It arouses everything inside me, not just my cock—though that sure as fuck gets excited, too. That elusive fragrance entices me, draws me in, and without even thinking about it I inhale another lungful of air, searching for another thread, turning my head and trying to find a breeze, anything that’ll carry that incredible scent to me again. Then I realize what I’m doing and start breathing through my mouth.

  I never should have come to this goddamn town.

  * * *

  At the Ponderosa Motel, the rooms are as good as the money you pay to stay in them—which isn’t much. But the price suits my wallet, and even though the odors from twenty different asses linger in the room…well, continuing to breathe through my mouth while I’m in Fortune City suits me for plenty of reasons.

  A sign in the motel office informs me they aren’t responsible for valuables left in the rooms. Nothing I own could be considered valuable, so after showering away the sweat and changing into a clean shirt, I leave my bag on the bed and head out on foot. Maybe all my worldly possessions will be gone when I get back. It wouldn’t be the first time everything I own has been stolen. But it’s never taken me more than an hour to track down the thieves…and a lot less time to persuade them to return my shit.

  Tracking down whoever killed my family, though—that’s eleven years and counting. But hopefully my crap luck is about to change.

  My destination sits only a few blocks away from the motel, on the town’s main street. In appearance, Fortune City looks like every other small town in Idaho’s panhandle. False fronts abound on the commercial buildings, facades that once gave the impression of prosperity, but now the missing clapboards and peeling paint just reveal age and neglect.

  According to the address on the Fortune City Prospector’s website and the mapping app on my phone, the newspaper office sits between the city library and a beauty salon. The FOR LEASE sign in the front window tells another story. I peer through the plate-glass windows into the empty office beyond. If the newspaper moved to another location, it must have been a while ago. A thick layer of dust coats the bare concrete floor.

  Well, hell. My luck really is pure shit sometimes. I won’t be getting any answers from in there. But this isn’t the end of the road. And a newspaper isn’t the only place to find information.

  I turn toward the library. A display of children’s books sits in the window. The library’s hours of operation are printed out on a sheet of white paper and taped to the inside of the glass.

  Monday & Wednesday 2pm-6pm

  Saturday 10am-5pm

  It’s Saturday, about five minutes before closing. I guess my luck isn’t all shit.

  Or maybe it is. Because the moment I enter the library, that scent is there again, strong enough that even though I’m still breathing through my mouth, I can smell her. Taste her.

  Fuck. Fists clenching, I stop just inside the hushed space, fighting the need to suck in her scent as deep as I can. Her. Whoever she is. She’s not here in the library. The scent is old, as if she was in the building sometime in the past few days or weeks, and in the closed-up library her natural perfume never really dissipated. Her fragrance is layered between a multitude of other scents but they all vanish beneath the sweetness of hers.

  I don’t know who she is. I don’t know if she’s young or old. For all I know, a grandma might be lighting me up. I only know that she’s human.

  And I know that she’s not the reason I’m here. She’s not one of the answers I need to find. No matter what my instincts are screaming. This unknown woman and my reaction to her are just distractions.

  I focus on what’s here, instead. This place didn’t start out as a library, that’s clear enough. I’ve been in barber shops with more floor space. Most likely the city got the building for cheap. The hours of operation tell me there’s not much money being put into keeping it open, so it’s probably a labor of love by anyone willing to add books to the prominently displayed donation box and
by volunteers giving their time.

  To my right is a children’s section, complete with tiny chairs painted in bright primary colors. Three rows of bookcases about six deep take up the bulk of the space. To the left, behind a heavy wooden desk that’s of nicer quality than anything else in here—probably also donated—sits a blond woman in a flowery sundress. She’s around my age, maybe late twenties or early thirties, and scowling down at her phone while her thumbs fly over the screen.

  She glances up distractedly…then glances up again, her eyes widening as her gaze travels the long road from my Timberlands to my Stetson. Interest fills her expression—the curious kind of interest, not the sexual kind. She’s pretty enough that, once upon a time, I might have tried to tease out the latter kind of interest. But this lady isn’t the source of that sweet fragrance, and after catching my first scent of her three years ago, I can’t muster up interest in other women. I tried to a couple of times in the months following that initial whiff. But my heart wasn’t in it…and neither was the rest of me. As if sex, which had always been pretty goddamn great before, suddenly wasn’t enough. All because I got a whiff of a woman who might be knitting booties for her tenth grandchild. Or who might be just a few years out of wearing booties herself.

  And who probably wouldn’t be interested in a man who isn’t truly a man—or all of the baggage he comes with. Especially since that baggage means he won’t be sticking around.

  The librarian’s brows rise in polite query. “May I help you?”

  “I hope so.” Belatedly remembering my manners, I remove my hat. “The newspaper office was closed. Did they move to a new location?”

  “Sure they did. To the World Wide Web.” She gestures to the ancient computer sitting atop a writing desk near the wall. “They closed up shop after the print edition went the way of the dodo.”

  Closed up their printing press, maybe. But they didn’t close up shop completely. “They’re updating their site every week. They must still have at least one employee.”

  “Me,” she replies, then shakes her head. “Though I’m not being paid, believe me. When Walt and Annie shut the place down, I asked them to hand over the reins to the Prospector’s website so the city can use it as a community newsletter. So if you want to know how the land use board voted regarding MDC’s request for a mining permit?” She points both thumbs at her chest. “I’m your girl. But Lois Lane, I’m not. You want to send in a birth announcement, an obituary? You want to share how the high school football team got crushed again? I’ll post it for you. But that’s all the website is nowadays.”

  Shit. “What about their old articles—the news stories from before they started publishing them online? Are they archived somewhere?”

  Not here in the library. There’s not a microfiche machine in sight and there’s no room for a paper archive.

  “Sure,” she answers easily. “In the basement at city hall. You have to make an appointment to access them. It usually only takes about two weeks for a request to be approved.”

  “Weeks?” I don’t dare wait around that long. Not in this town.

  She shrugs. “The city’s short staffed. Obviously,” she adds with a significant glance around us. “I’m not only a terrible journalist, but also the under-appreciated mayor of our fair little town, and its only volunteer librarian. And that’s all in my spare time. So scheduling in the hours to unearth articles in storage? That’ll take a few weeks.”

  Jaw clenched in frustration, I consider my options. I’ve already paid for the motel room. So I’ll stay in Fortune City overnight, visit one of the taverns I saw on my way in, and find someone with a big mouth. It’s a small town. Everyone probably knows everyone else’s business, so no doubt I’ll learn something. Maybe enough to tell me whether it’s worth putting in a request for access to those archives and coming back in two weeks.

  “Or you could ask me,” the librarian says. A touch of amusement has slipped into her voice. With her bright gaze on my face, she leans back in her chair. “If there’s one thing I’m familiar with, it’s the history of this town. Are you looking for anything in particular?”

  Yeah, I am. I’m looking for something new.

  I’ve been at this a long time. Whoever murdered my family didn’t leave any evidence except their bodies. Even the bullets that killed them were gone. Dug right out of flesh and bone.

  The cops figured that was so the ballistics couldn’t tie the bullets to a specific gun. But I know that isn’t the answer, because typical lead bullets can’t even harm one of the wolfkin, let alone kill a family of them. So whoever shot those bullets was hiding something else—a weapon that can destroy the kin.

  And silver can hurt us, sure. Just like all the human legends claim. We don’t heal as quickly when we’re injured with a silver blade or shot with a silver-laced bullet. But even with silver bullets, we don’t die if we’re shot in the chest or the gut, which is where my parents and older brother were shot.

  Yet they did die. And they didn’t die in their warrior forms, though suffering any kind of serious injury means you have to fight damn hard not to transform. Instead they died like any human would…and while they were dying, I was fighting in a desert half a fucking world away instead of fighting at their sides. By the time I got back to the States, not a trace remained of their murderer’s scent. So I’ve been trying to track the fucker down by looking for similar deaths, and looking for other murders where the bullets were removed.

  I’ve found enough to know that someone—or maybe more than one person—has been hunting wolfkin and bearkin. But it’s a damn long process. Most law enforcement agencies don’t go around offering up information like “someone dug the bullets out of the wounds” to the general public, so I’ve asked about a whole lot of gun-related deaths to find the few that involved murdering the kin. And this is a gun-happy nation, so there are a lot of gun-related deaths to sift through.

  But in eleven years, I haven’t gotten much further than discovering a few facts: The murderers dig out the bullets—maybe to hide what kind of bullets they are, maybe to reuse them—and whoever the fuckers are, they don’t leave much of a scent, if any. I’ve visited enough crime scenes that I ought to have picked up some scent linking them all. But there’s not one.

  So now I’m trying a different approach. Because it just doesn’t make any sense that one person—or even a team of people, whether human or kin—could take out wolfkin and bearkin warriors the way they have, not without sustaining losses. It doesn’t make any sense that the kin haven’t killed any of their attackers.

  Except that maybe the kin have killed some. If so, identifying that person might lead me to his associates. And I wouldn’t be looking for injuries like a gunshot wound. No, if a wolfkin or a bearkin warrior fought back, the injuries on the body would look a lot different…if there was anything of a body left to find.

  But years of doing this have taught me that most of those bodies are attached to families, friends—and most of the dead aren’t wolfkin. So going around and asking about people who’ve been brutally murdered requires me to tread carefully.

  So I put on bit of charm—or the nearest thing to charm that a gruff fucker like me can manage—and reply, “I’m hoping to do a little research, ma’am.”

  “Research?” Her lips purse slightly, and her gaze sweeps my length again. Maybe trying to see something academic behind two days’ growth of stubble on my jaw, the thick calluses on my hands, and the Hanes T-shirt that’s seen better, whiter days. “Are you a writer, then?”

  When I’m not talking with law enforcement, that’s always the best story to go with. “I am.”

  “Really?” Her interest sharpens again. “Fiction or nonfiction?”

  “Fiction.” I’m spinning a hell of a tale right now.

  “Published?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, if you finish a novel that features Fortune City and helps put our little town on anyone’s map, we’ll be happy to put your boo
k in our library. I’m sure someone will buy and donate a copy.” With a grin, she leans forward. “So what are you researching?”

  “Just the usual things that any writer is interested in,” I say easily. “Unexplained deaths, unsolved murders, local legends—especially any stories that involve wildlife.”

  She snorts a little. “Are you searching for Bigfoot?”

  I’m pretty sure the kin are behind that legend. In our warrior forms, we’re huge and covered in fur. We also walk upright, spend plenty of time in forests, and do our goddamn best to hide from humans.

  “Nothing supernatural. I’m hoping to make it more true-to-life,” I tell her. From my back pocket, I pull out a folded printout of an article from the Statesman. “This story here is what sparked my interest. The Boise paper has a brief mention of an incident that occurred here eleven years ago, and I was hoping there’s more information in the local paper.”

  Because the Statesman’s article only filled a couple of inches in print. Two people were dead, and authorities were searching for the animal or animals believed responsible. And that was about it.

  “Eleven years ago?” Though her voice is still light and friendly, her smile seems to have frozen. The amusement vanishes from her expression as she takes the paper and scans the first lines. “What were you hoping I could tell you?”

  Shit. Just that quick, I’ve lost her. Either she’s related to the deceased couple, or she’s close to someone who is—and despite her question, I’ve got a feeling that she’s not going to tell me a damn thing. But I didn’t come this far to back off now. “It says that Mikael and Halima Laine were mauled by a bear just outside of Fortune City. They assume it was a black bear, but black bears don’t usually attack humans; most of the time, they’ll run away. There’s no record of any black bear killing two people at once, so I was hoping to find out more about the circumstances. And I was wondering if they found the bear, or if they discovered any explanation for its aggressive behavior.”