by Ranae Rose
She nearly jumped in surprise when something warm and wet touched her knee. Jack’s blood. She lifted her hand from his chest and pressed it to his side, applying pressure to the wound. It seeped out from between her fingers anyway, inciting worry so intense she shuddered. He shook too, shivering beneath her palm. For a moment she was lost in a terrifying vision of Jack bleeding to death as she tried to hold him together. Then she had an idea, and no sooner had the thought entered her mind than she transformed, her bare skin replaced with thick fur. She put it to good use, lying on top of Jack, spreading her body over his. This way, she’d be able to keep him warm, and her fur would stanch the flow of his blood – hopefully. Now all she had to do was hold out until sunset. With a sigh, she pricked her sensitive ears forward, listening for any sign of danger.
****
It was impossible to tell how many hours had slipped by in the quiet, darkened den, but by the time Jack woke, it seemed like a small eternity had gone by. Mandy had spent every minute pressed up close against him, her thoughts attuned to the rhythms of his heartbeat and his breathing as she kept him warm. She’d shifted back into her human form when his eyes had fluttered open, and was pleased to see that his wound had finally stopped bleeding.
“Any idea how long I was out?”
Mandy shook her head. “Not really.”
Jack started to get up.
“Don’t,” Mandy said, splaying her good hand across his chest. “You’ll open up your wound again.”
He nodded toward the entrance. “I need to see what time of day it is.”
“I’ll do it.” She’d been too afraid for Jack’s health to leave his side while he slept. Now, she rose and knelt by the entrance, cautiously brushing aside a thick curtain of foliage. “It’s nearly evening. I can see the sun setting behind the trees.” Even so, she blinked against the late-afternoon light. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness.
“Good,” Jack grunted.
Mandy peered over her shoulder at him and found that he was taking advantage of the light she’d let into the den. His gaze was intense and glued to her rear end. A blush warmed her other set of cheeks – the ones he wasn’t paying any attention to, and she cleared her throat. Should she shift into her wolf form? It wasn’t like she had any clothing to put on, and Jack was looking at her like, well, a hungry wolf.
His gaze finally snapped up to her face. “Almost evenin’, which means this’ll be gone soon.” He waved a hand over his blood-stained side, grinning suggestively. “’Till then…”
“Absolutely not,” Mandy said, wishing she had something to pull over her naked body for cover. Being alone in the dark shelter of the cave, naked together, was distinctly sensual, and she didn’t want to encourage his train of thought. It could only end in disaster. “You shouldn’t even be considering that in your condition.” She shot a glance at his groin and was only half-surprised to see that he was hard. “I can’t believe you have enough blood left to supply that thing.”
He grinned in earnest now. “Even in this form, I’m not quite as weak as a real human. So—”
“No.” She scowled at him. “You’re not moving until that hole in your side heals up.”
His expression became serious. “We’ve got to leave the den. Neither of us have had anything to eat or drink all day. There might not be much we can do for food, but there’s a stream nearby.”
Mandy frowned. She was too nervous to be hungry, but she’d been trying unsuccessfully to ignore the dull burn of thirst in her throat for hours. Worry over Jack had proved an adequate distraction while he slept, but there was no denying her need now. “Do you really think we should risk it?” she asked, imagining the two of them limping through the woods together.
“We don’t have much of a choice, do we?”
“What if the hunter is waiting outside?”
Jack arched a dark brow at her. “You’ve been listening for him, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, did you hear anything?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Then he’s probably not waiting outside. Besides, if he knew we were in here, he’d have smoked us out by now. No, he doesn’t know about this place. It’s a pack secret.” He smiled wryly. “Which means that you and I are the only ones in these mountains who know.”
Mandy shifted uneasily. Pack secret. You and I. Now that he was awake again, there was the pesky matter of him thinking that she was his mate. “Jack…”
“Yeah, Mandy?”
The sound of him saying her name sent a shiver of delight down her spine. There was no question that she was attracted to him – crazily so. But that didn’t mean she could just throw the life she’d built away and become the mate of a man she’d just met. And yet…maybe it would be smarter for her to wait until he’d healed to discuss it with him. “I’m really thirsty.”
He nodded. “We should shift before leaving the den. We’ll be stealthier that way.”
She nodded, a prickle of unease chasing the shiver that had coursed down her spine at the thought of transforming. Jack could do it at the drop of a hat. Would she ever be as fast? “You first,” she said. “It makes it easier for me if you shift first – that way I can look at you, and that makes me want to be with you, and that usually means transforming too.”
Jack looked at her with a peculiar gleam in his eyes – something like…satisfaction.
Mandy snapped her mouth shut. God, she was an idiot. If the look on Jack’s face was any indication, she might as well have just declared her undying love for him.
“All right,” he said. In the blink of an eye, he’d gone wolf.
Even as a canine, he still looked pleased and vaguely smug. Mandy tried to focus on him instead of on what a fool she was. When she met his eyes, her worries melted away inexplicably, replaced by the fierce desire to stay by his side – as a wolf or as a woman, it didn’t matter. She just wanted to be with him.
Jack nodded, as if in approval.
Mandy looked down at a pair of paws. She couldn’t help but give her tail a brief wag. That had been her easiest transformation yet. Maybe she was getting the hang of this.
Jack shuffled to the entrance and peeked out, studying their surroundings and sniffing the air for several moments before striding out of their earthy shelter. Mandy followed, sure that it was safe if he’d determined it to be. As they walked, she marveled at how soundless her paws were against the forest floor. Well-padded and thick with fur, they were perfect for navigating the forest in silence. She was anxiously eager to see the rest of her body, which was still a mystery. Did she look as fierce as Jack? She wasn’t as large, but other than that, all she could tell was that she had a brownish pelt. Apparently, it more or less matched her natural hair color, rather than the pale gold shade she’d dyed it.
It wasn’t long before they reached a nearby stream. Jack kept watch as she drank first, and after a day of thirst, the cool mountain water was the most delicious, refreshing thing she’d ever tasted. After drinking her fill, she stared back at the animal reflected on the surface of the water. Cocoa-furred, blue eyed and sleek bodied – it was difficult to believe that the wolf was her. Clearly, that fact was going to take some getting used to. She still thought of herself as Mandy the human, the blond Nashvillian who worked in an office. This was drastically different and more than a little liberating, in its own strange way.
Jack drank next, and Mandy kept a careful watch, imitating what he’d done moments ago. She didn’t see or hear anything, but the hair on the back of her neck stood up nonetheless. Somewhere out there was a killer. If just one of those bullets had hit her or Jack as they’d fled the cabin, they might be dead now. She cast a longing look at the setting sun. When it finally disappeared behind the mountains, she and Jack would begin to heal.
Jack raised his head, his muzzle dripping, and turned back toward the den. Mandy walked slightly behind him, winding through the narrow gaps between closely-spaced tree trunks and
ducking under boughs for cover. He moved stiffly, limping a little on the side where he’d been shot. Mandy tried reflexively to bite the inside of her lip, but of course she couldn’t. She glanced down at her paws in wonder. This was still so strange. If she hadn’t had Jack – if she’d somehow managed to transform for the first time on her own – she probably would have thought she’d lost her mind.
Jack slipped back into the den and Mandy followed, eager to be human again. The thought of the lurking killer was unsettling. She longed to hear the soothing timbre of Jack’s voice and the easy Southern cadences of his speech. Despite the fact that she’d grown up in Tennessee, she’d never developed as strong of an accent. She’d never realized how much she loved hearing it, either, until she’d heard Jack speak.
He lay down as a wolf, but became a man soon after. All Mandy had to do was imagine the heat of his skin beneath her fingertips and the softness of his lips against hers, and she was a woman again. It was as if he were the link between her two halves; her desire for him the tie that united them. That fact probably should have worried her, but she didn’t have time to fret over it now. She settled beside him, leaning against the earthen wall. “What now, Jack? I mean, after nightfall.” Right now, their main problems were their injuries. But after they healed, they’d have their hunter to contend with.
“Like I said,” he replied, laying a hand on her knee, “we’ll hunt him down.”
“You don’t think we should head to town and contact authorities?”
“Well, we’d have to show up naked if we did that,” he said, his tone pure practicality, “and I’m not so sure anyone would take us seriously. Besides that, this bastard is nothing I can’t handle. I still owe him for this.” He motioned toward the wound in his side. “And he shot at you – that’s unforgiveable.” The set of his jaw was stubborn, the hard gleam in his eyes sure and challenging. “He came for a fight with a wolf, and that’s what he’s going to get.”
If only it wasn’t so easy to believe him. She sighed as she tipped her head back against the wall, letting Jack’s hand remain on her knee. His touch felt good, and besides, she’d decided to wait until after he was better to discuss the whole actually-I’m-not-your-mate thing. Her stomach knotted with dread at just the thought. Why had he jumped to such a huge assumption in the first place?
“Here it is,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Night.”
A tiny gap had been left in the foliage that covered the den’s entrance, and it no longer admitted sunlight. Jack rose and pushed the rest of it aside, clearing the opening. A faint moonbeam spilled into the den. “Come here, Mandy.”
Before she could protest, he rose onto his knees and pulled her against his unhurt side, wrapping a thick arm around her waist. He picked up her broken hand, exceedingly gently, and held it in his own. Entwined that way, the soft glow of moonlight bathed them both.
Mandy wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting – maybe shimmering smoke and a poof! that announced their sudden health, or a long, drawn-out night of recovery, but what happened was neither. Perhaps half an hour had passed when she realized that her hand no longer ached. She flexed her fingers tentatively, and to her surprise, the painful sensation of broken bone was gone.
Jack shot her a questioning look as she opened and closed her hand.
“It’s better,” she said, her voice tinged with surprise.
“Good.” He continued to hold her close in the moonlight anyway.
“What about you?” she asked.
“I’m gettin’ there.”
She shifted position, pressing her chest against his as she peered over his shoulder and down at his side. Both the entrance and exit wounds appeared to have closed beneath a glaze of dried blood, but that was all she could tell. “It would be a lot easier to make out if you weren’t covered in blood.”
He grunted a noncommittal response, tightening his arms around her so that she was trapped against his chest. “You smell so good.” His lips tickled her ear as he inhaled, his nose buried in her hair.
“Really?” After over twenty-four hours without a shower, she would have guessed the opposite.
“Mmm-hmm. You smell like fresh rain and the little wildflowers that sprout up here in the springtime.” He threaded his fingers through her hair, combing it out and lifting it from her shoulders. It had long since fallen out of the knot she’d twisted it into before leaving Nashville. “When I first met you I figured it was some kind of fancy perfume, but it’s not. It’s you.”
A shiver of delight raced down her spine as he caressed the back of her skull, burying his hands wrist-deep in her blond locks.
“They say you know when you’ve found your perfect mate by their smell. They have a scent that just drives you wild. I used to think that either it was crap, or I was destined to be an eternal bachelor.”
A heavy feeling settled into the pit of Mandy’s stomach, and when he spoke again, it turned to alarm. “What do I smell like to you?” he asked.
“Pine, the mountains and…man,” she finished, unsure how else to describe the definite masculine note in his heavenly scent. It had been teasing her ever since she’d first met him. Could what he’d said be true? She shifted uneasily against him. Maybe the time had come for something to be said. “What exactly does being a shifter’s mate mean, anyway?”
“Your mate is the one you spend the rest of your life with,” he said, drawing her even closer, so that she straddled him. He brushed her lips with his before continuing. “You know – your other half. The bond between mates is the strongest bond on earth.”
She trembled as he kissed her, long and hard, slipping his tongue past her teeth and deep into her mouth, as if he were claiming her. She despaired, even as she enjoyed it. What had she gotten herself into? She had to go back to Nashville when this was all over. Of course she did. What would Jack say? Hating herself for it, she broke the seal of their kiss, leaning back and trying not to notice how hard he’d grown. “I’m not so sure we’re officially mates, Jack.”
His lips tickled the hollow of her throat, tempting her to tilt her head back and let him kiss a trail all the way down to her chest. “There’s no ‘official’ about it, really. It’s not like getting married. You just know, and then…that’s it.”
Just ‘knowing’ didn’t seem quite concrete enough to base a promise of lifelong togetherness on. Was she missing something – was she just not wolfy enough to understand, or was what Jack was saying a little crazy? “What I mean is that I have a life four hours away in Nashville.” She tried to gentle her tone, but was afraid that it still came out sounding harsh. “You don’t really expect me to abandon it to stay here in the mountains as your mate, do you?”
Chapter 7
He stiffened against her, his embrace becoming rigid. His lips still touched her neck, though he’d stopped kissing her. Several moments passed before he spoke. “Yes.” There was a stubborn note in his voice that reminded her of when she’d first met him, on his cabin’s front porch.
She sighed. “I can’t do that. Surely you can understand.”
He leaned back, meeting her eyes. “I understand that you’re my other half.”
She squirmed uncomfortably in his lap, attempting to ignore the hardness of his erection. Even as she tried to make him understand that she couldn’t be his mate, it was far too easy to remember riding him, and the temptation to sink down onto his cock and do it again was as real as the hold he had on her. “Jack, I really like you. To be honest, I’ve never felt half this crazy about anyone else, but—”
“When you came to my cabin, I figured you were just another ditzy tourist from the city,” he interrupted. “But I was wrong. You’re my mate, and I’m yours – how can you think that I could ever let you go?”
This was all escalating way too fast. Jack was digging his heels into the ground like a stubborn mule, and she worried she’d give in, slump against his chest and tell him she was his forever. It sounded crazy, even to her, but the temp
tation was there, beneath the reasons why she couldn’t do so. When she thought of saying goodbye to the Smoky Mountains and Jack, her heart nearly wrenched in half. She had to keep those thoughts in the back of her mind in order to keep arguing. “Maybe we can work something out.”
“Being mates is like being an alpha – either you are, or you’re not and you’re alone. There is no in between.”
“Jack—”
He clapped a hand over her mouth and she stiffened, indignant anger beginning to replace her frustration.
“Shhh,” he said softly, his lips brushing her ear. “I heard somethin’.”
She held as still as a statue, ears straining for some hint of a sound. Then it came – the subtle snap of a twig beneath someone’s foot. Underbrush crunched, causing her heart rate to spike. They’d been found.
Jack held her tight as the sound of hushed, careful footsteps grew louder and then faded as their hiding place was passed by. When she finally couldn’t hear them anymore, she breathed a sigh of relief.
Jack removed his hand from her mouth, smoothing a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. “We’ll track him,” he said. “But we’ve gotta wait a little while – let him get a head start. I can’t risk anyone like him discovering this place. We should be able to follow his scent trail easily.”
Mandy nodded, her emotions numb as she tried to wrap her mind around the concept of a hunt and an eventual killing. “What if he’s laid traps in the forest?” A phantom pain swept through her hand at the memory of the steel trap, gone as soon as she’d felt it. “There could be – I don’t know – explosives or something.” The guy was clearly a maniac and had used teargas – would it be farfetched to believe he’d planted other nefarious weapons amongst the pines and poplars?
“You don’t have to worry about that. If he blew us up, he wouldn’t have his trophies. No, he’ll want to shoot us, nice and clean. When a shifter dies, his corpse is human, unless he’s killed one very specific way.”