Jonathan cleared his head of forbidden thoughts because now was not the time to indulge. She wasn’t supposed to know of his existence or his organization’s. It was best to keep the vow he’d taken to remain in the periphery as far as the hunters were concerned.
He beefed up his concentration.
The beat of Miami’s all-consuming, after-hours partying lay in the distance like someone else’s audible heartbeat being broadcast on a citywide public-address system. On this silent stretch of deserted street, he heard his own heartbeat and imagined he heard the hunter draw a breath. Then the silence was broken by a sudden popping sound—the familiar ping of his own vertebrae starting to realign.
Surprise!
Heat flashed across his skin. The same sort of electrical heat he’d tasted from the hunter. Stick your finger in a socket kind of stuff that happened every time he shifted, and yes, also every time he laid eyes on this particular female.
He had inched forward, out from beneath the awning’s flimsy cover, without realizing he’d done so—led by his stiffened male body parts, he supposed—to find himself standing on the curb.
He looked down, saw his shadow and sighed.
In one gigantic supernatural heave, fueled by the flood of falling moonlight, Jonathan rearranged his outline, taking him from human to beast in the time it took him to turn his head. Changing him from a thirty-two-year-old strapping man to a large, imposing creature, half man and half wolflike entity.
Two shapes, human and wolf, meeting in the middle.
All the better to eat you up, leather-girl.
Tilting his wolfish head, Jonathan felt the closeness of those two other wolves. He perceived their anger. Inhaling again the sticky-sweet fragrance of defiance marring the scene, he then loped in her direction for a closer look, despite the rules.
That sexy young woman planted smack-dab in the thick of danger might be a hunter and all business, but she was also the one. For him.
Every one of his instincts told him this—whether or not hell might freeze over before she ever found out.
CHAPTER TWO
That sudden sting of razor-sharp claws was a shocking development. Nikki knew she had been hurt decently, but her anger over being attacked knocked the pain to the background.
The freak had come at her fast. Now he was stumbling. She’d hit him with enough tranquilizer in that dart to take down an elephant, which meant she only had to deal with the remaining monster, wherever he was.
“One down.”
The burn of her anger felt like being dunked in a volcano. Liquid fire replaced the blood in her veins as she tensed. Her lips went numb.
Vocalizing the oath stuck on her tongue was impossible. She’d already hesitated a few seconds too long. She whirled as the second monster propelled itself forward, slashing wildly at her with its hands and teeth. She dropped to a crouch in time to avoid further injury. The monster roared his defiance over her show of agility with its mouth wide-open.
Opportunity knocked.
Raising the gun, she sprang to her feet and jammed the heavy metal into the advancing werewolf’s mouth, breaking several of his front teeth. Ducking out of the way while he registered that blow, she hit the brick with one shoulder, bounced back and rammed the shocked Were hard with her body.
But he was a quick sucker, and so much bigger.
His gigantic arms were around Nikki before she knew what was happening. His feral face, hairy, stretched, strange, was against hers and smelling like garbage. Trying not to inhale the ghastly odor, Nikki had to breathe when what was left of the monster’s teeth chomped down on her right shoulder.
An instantaneous moment of panic ensued as she registered the pinch of her skin. Struggling to free herself, Nikki rallied enough to punch the beast in the face with her balled left fist.
Enraged, the werewolf picked her up and threw her, his strength as massive as his girth. Nikki heard the thud of her body hitting the wall, registered the burst of pain accompanying the impact, and let out a howl of her own, human-style.
“Freaking monster!”
With its bloody, injured mouth agape, the beast came back for more. Of course it would, Nikki reasoned. The beast was an abomination, and knew it. He carried no moon marks on his appendages that would have proven his status as a genetic Were, or of having been initiated into the Were clan by a genetic werewolf. No whitish-silver circle of scar tissue marred his pelt.
This guy was a bastard, a freak, a changeling. A sick, mentally deficient wolf whose diluted, mutated blood kept him half-crazed. If captured now, after an attack on a human, he would be put down for the safety of everybody who had never considered the word werewolf a part of their reality.
Nikki’s right arm dangled uselessly as she scraped herself off the wall to hurl herself at the beast a second time. She rammed him again with her body curled up, succeeding in beating the air from his lungs. At the same time, though, the monster shoved her a good one, right back into the brick wall.
Feeling the pain of her shoulder separating from the socket, stars floated through Nikki’s vision. She vowed to remain upright, but couldn’t.
Her legs wobbled, buckled. She started to slide. She heard the roar of the rogue wolf, thought perhaps now was a good time for her to get up, run, regroup, and watched, as if in slowed motion, as that werewolf suddenly crumpled to its knees.
She caught a whiff of a newcomer, sensed a presence. With a hand on the wall, Nikki tried to raise herself. She stopped, looked up, saw him.
Not a wolf, she noted at first with relief.
It was a man who stood beside her in the shadows. A half-naked one, shirtless, shoeless, with sandy-brown hair and a rugged outline.
His hands held the dart gun he’d used on the big sucker falling on his face beside her. The same gun that this man now slowly raised to aim at her.
“For your own good,” she heard him say in a deep, rich tone before her good shoulder exploded in flames and her world went black.
A flagrant breach of contract, Jonathan told himself as he stared down at the source of his recent illicit dreams.
In the human shape he’d assumed in order to handle the dart gun, he kneeled down beside the hunter, searched her face for signs that she might have been given something to keep her immune from the same tranquilizer she doled out.
He decided she was out cold.
“Better this way. Really,” he mumbled, knowing he had to get her, and himself, out of there, and that there was no time to lose.
He took his wadded-up shirt from the waistband where he’d stuffed it, tore off a sleeve as if it were paper and tied it around her bloody arm as a makeshift bandage. Swiftly, easily, he lifted the hunter up off the sidewalk and into his arms. She might have been tall, but she was light. And she was too inexperienced to be in this area of the city alone.
“You should have known better,” he chastised, stepping into the moonlight, sputtering as his second shape-shift that night began. “So should I.”
Fully morphed and immensely strong, he careened around a dark corner, watching his step with regard to the possibility of people using the street as their own personal lover’s lane. His steps faltered when a beat patrol cop appeared in the distance, in a most untimely fashion, pushing the scent of ironed uniform and aftershave Jonathan’s way.
Nothing to do but improvise.
He set the hunter on her feet, pressed her up against a wall well beneath an overhanging art-deco-meets-colonial-Virginia roofline, and held her upright with his buzzing body tight up against hers.
Lover’s lane, it is.
And what an odd couple they were, he added to himself, beginning the equally painful reverse shift back to his human form with the muted sounds of his ligaments, bones and sinew straining to suck themselves in and then back together. Her in black leather. Himself, shift completed in the nick of time to leave him panting from the effort of changing shape so many times in a short period—and thanking God, for once, for Miami’
s anything goes attitude.
Thing was, though, he was now tucked up close to his dream woman at last. Way too close. Her lightly floral, slightly musky scent filled every breath he took. Heady, sexy stuff.
Heck with oath-breaking and interfering with her tag, this was a major mistake by comparison.
“The mother of all mistakes.”
Cop close by or not, this hunter’s presence sent a thrill through him. The tight leather vest she wore reined in breasts that were round, high and sort of soft against his bare chest. Her hips—the ones he’d ground himself to for that nosy cop’s benefit—were sharp boned in front, yet deliciously rounded on the sides.
Jonathan wanted to cup her derriere with his hands so that he could see for sure about those curves, and didn’t dare. He was already breathing with difficulty. For reasons other than his last transformation, his heart was racing.
He was hard in all the wrong places.
To make matters worse, this hunter had indeed been given an antidote to the tranquilizer for just such emergencies as this one, and was already starting to come around. Her eyes sluggishly opened. Foggy at first, those eyes rapidly cleared to a bright, piercing, aquamarine blue.
Her lips, full and way too succulent, parted. Her pink tongue stroked their dryness, riveting his gaze there, before disappearing as she tried to speak past the realization of her present mishap.
“What the—” she began rhetorically in a voice that was just as sexy as he had imagined. Like the rustle and sigh of an expensive party dress slipping from the shoulders of a woman in need.
He, on the other hand, was speechless, and would have laughed if his mind hadn’t already been shouting for him to get away from her, pronto. She was affecting him way too much. The situation was extreme in scope.
Plus, he couldn’t afford to let her speak. If she screamed, shouted, raised her voice at all, the meandering cop would be on them like bugs on pastry.
“Don’t,” he whispered to her with the force of a command. “Cop at eleven o’clock. Stay still.”
Her face, oval, smooth-skinned, tightened. She didn’t take orders well.
“You shot me,” she charged.
“For your—” he began.
“Bullshit,” she said, cutting him off. “If there’s a cop, he’ll help me.”
“I thought I just helped you,” Jonathan countered.
She squirmed, got nowhere. Hunters were stronger than normal humans and had a lot more nerve, but this one he leaned up against had been injured, drugged and surprised. He was willing to bet that surprise was the problem upsetting her the most.
“If I hadn’t dropped that big guy back there,” he said, “you’d be in shreds.”
“What do you know about…” She paused without finishing that sentence, tilted her head, said, “Shit. You’re one of them.”
Her blue eyes widened, now seeming to take up most of the upper portion of her face, but they showed no fear.
“No,” he corrected, fisting his hands so that they absolutely would not roam over her anatomy. “Not one of them.”
“Liar!”
He raised an eyebrow and let that one alone.
“Those two tags will be registered and picked up any second,” she said, turning her head to check out the cop’s presence. Then her eyes narrowed, found Jonathan’s. “Unless that’s what you’re attempting to keep me from.”
“I don’t think finding drugged werewolves lying curbside would be good for anybody. Especially true for that cop.”
“Great. A monster and a traitor to his own kind has some sense. How unique,” she snapped. Still, her eyes held to his in a way that shuddered through Jonathan, keeping him hard and hungering for what he at last had within his grasp. The fact that he thought he’d seen a flash of recognition in those eyes of hers was only his imagination working overtime.
The woman he held on to was placing blame, uncertain of what was happening to her. Chances were she had never been found out, confronted or pressed up against one of those same creatures she sought. Creatures she obviously didn’t consider humanlike. When a similar shudder rippled through her, forcing her hips tighter against his, she gasped in frustration. Her mouth remained open, as if she’d shout after all, though she did no such thing.
Just in case she might change her mind, Jonathan took hold of her right arm above the elbow and yanked hard. There was a terrible noise as her dislocated shoulder snapped back into place. The hunter stifled a groan, closed her eyes. Beads of moisture appeared on her forehead, but she didn’t cry out.
Admiring her for that, Jonathan waited for her eyes to reopen. When they did, she tore her gaze from his, breaking the strangely intense connection that neither of them could ignore completely, one that Jonathan experienced as a jolt of physical pain much like the aftermath of a bad shape-shift.
Immediately, he wanted her attention back. He wanted those beautiful blue eyes of hers on him. Was this craving of his a symptom of the off-kilter relationship between hunters and Weres? he wondered. Should he devour her just for the heck of it, as he wanted so badly to do, and face the consequences later?
What were those consequences, anyway? He was a man most of the time. Out of the moonlight, their body parts would match up perfectly.
The cop was closer now. A good excuse for an excuse.
“Kiss me,” Jonathan said.
The hunter looked stunned by the request, said, “Bite yourself.”
“Miami’s finest is right on top of us.”
“I’d rather kiss him.”
“Then what? Show him the wolves and have him hold your hand until your team arrives?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“What would you know? You’re a monster.”
“You’re a little more than human, yourself, I might point out.”
Jonathan could taste the cop’s nearness. The hunter probably could, too. She grimaced, hissed, “Go to hell, fur ball.”
“Sorry,” he said, brushing her tight mouth with his own, fending off the overwhelming desire for more that came with the act. “The hell thing? Been there.”
He kissed her before she had a chance to voice the retort that parted her lips. He kissed her, touching the so-called enemy with his mouth, and his plan to let her go went spiraling into the distance, forgotten.
Longing streaked through him with g-force, leaving him feverish, unbalanced, desirous of more of the same. The hunter’s mouth was warm, moist. She tasted slightly of the chemicals in that dart gun and a little bit like champagne. Her body was rigid against his, yet when his tongue met with hers, urging hers to dance along, a groan vibrated up through her throat and into him.
Frustration and anger rode that groan, and also something rebellious, and for Jonathan, totally addicting. In discovering that, the hell they had so loosely been tossing around came down to strike them both.
Jonathan felt the strike sear through him, heard its sizzle, and knew that she did, as well. After that, the kiss changed. Inexplicably, the hunter’s mouth softened, became malleable, then demanding. She sucked his lips between hers, nipped at him, met his ardor—allowing him in, taking an equal part in this forbidden act.
Her body strained against his, taunting, teasing, as only a woman’s body knew how to do.
Not only a hunter, but a temptress.
Jonathan’s own body, keyed up and feverish from a self-imposed, monklike recent chapter in his life, responded willingly to her unexpected show of passion. He knew he should distance himself from her for all sorts of good reasons. Important reasons. But being near her blurred the lines. Kissing her felt special, unique, right.
The word devour came back to haunt him. The reddish haze he’d felt earlier floated in and around them as if it were a red flag being waved in front of a bull.
Jonathan slid his mouth off her mouth, ran his lips along her cheek, then down her jaw, angling toward the hollow of her throat. He breathed in
her scent, closed his eyes, then went suddenly still.
“Hey, you two. Move along,” a voice suggested none-too-politely. “This isn’t a red-light district!”
The cop was right beside them. For a second, Jonathan thought seriously about scaring the pants off the guy so that he could further explore what he’d found in this woman. However, the downed rogue wolves were lying on the pavement not too far away. A black van would arrive in seconds to scoop them up and take his hunter back.
Duty calls, damn it.
Still—Would his hunter fall if he were to let her go now? he wondered. She might not be strong enough, with her injuries and the effects of the dart, to stand on her own two feet.
She also might be melting into her after-a-tag bliss, and anybody, werewolf notwithstanding, would have done it for her in a bit of mouth-to-mouth exploration.
But he had gotten something from this closeness that she didn’t know about. Not yet, at any rate. Something a genetically enhanced wolf like himself could not possibly have missed.
Standing there, and knowing this hunter probably didn’t have too many vulnerable bones in her body in order to be what she was, Jonathan experienced the tug of an overwhelming desire to protect her, all the same. Although Fate might have lent him a hand, in this case, he wasn’t happy about it. He didn’t want to see her hurting. In spite of the crazy twists and turns in their respective stories, he wanted to help her, gain her trust. The first step in that direction was to keep her secrets from the cop.
Keeping the vibrating growl that resonated deep inside of his chest to himself, Jonathan broke off the heady contact to face the cop invading his space. He pasted on what had to be a really bad semblance of a grin.
“All right, Officer. We were just going,” he said.
“Yeah, looks that way,” the cop replied smartly. “With you shirtless, and all.”
“Just came from a ball game. Needed to air out and get in some downtime.”
“Not on my beat. I’ll tell you that right now.”
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