Lover Wolf (Shifter Falls Book 2)

by Amy Green

  “The Silverman?”

  “He’s a human. He’s… something of a loner. Unbalanced. He makes his own silver bullets. He likes to hunt, and werewolves are his favorite prey. He was on my payroll until recently, when he disappeared. I thought he was finally dead.”

  “You had a werewolf killer on your payroll?” Her mother was right—there was something seriously wrong with Christian Martell.

  “When he was on my payroll, Tessa, I could keep tabs on him,” Martell said coldly. “Keep your enemies close. You have a lot to learn if you’re ever going to be my heir. But it seems that Xander recruited him away from me, probably with the promise of werewolves to kill. If the Silverman is hunting the Donovans, my girl, then the Donovans are in trouble. Just stay out of the way.” He paused. “Maybe you should get on a plane to California.”

  “I’ll take my chances, thanks.” Tessa forced the words from her throat. “Your legacy is your problem. Can I ask you one question?”

  “You can try.”

  “Where is my birth mother?”

  “She died five years ago,” he said. “She had an aneurysm. She and I were never meant to be, and you were a mistake, but I’m starting to see that everything happens for a reason.”

  God, she would like to see the expression on his smug face when he learned that she was mated to a Donovan. She had to get Heath to mate with her, and fast. She looked around the room, which was strewn with clothes, just like his bedroom. Maybe they could do it here after he was done with the sheriff. How long did it take, anyway? “I’m glad this whole thing has made you rethink your philosophy,” she said to him, “but I have to go.”

  “Done with your dear old dad already?” he taunted her.

  “If you’re not going to call off Xander and the Silverman, you’re no use to me, so yes.”

  That made him laugh, though the sound was far from warm. “You’re learning. Maybe I’ll make you my heir yet.”

  Like hell you will, she thought, and hung up. What an asshole. She couldn’t believe she was that man’s daughter.

  She looked around the apartment. Heath’s apartment. She had once thought that all of this was not her problem, that she could just go on with her human life. She’d fought this. But it was her problem. It was their problem. And suddenly, she found she didn’t mind. She didn’t want her old life back, where she worked at the Black Wolf for Kyle every day, fending off passes, before going home to her lonely apartment to sleep. Life since Heath had entered it had been crazy and frustrating and dangerous, but it had never been boring. More importantly, it felt like hers. Like her life, her real one. The one she was supposed to have, the one she had been waiting for without knowing it.

  She had never felt at home with her parents, not only because of their terrible parenting methods, but because she didn’t belong. She wasn’t one of them. She was the daughter of an alpha wolf. She was going to be the mate of another. This was her fight. And suddenly she felt ready to fight it.

  But first, she had important information to tell Heath. And then she had to get his clothes off. It was a tough job, but someone had to do it.

  She opened the door, nodded to Wes, and they went downstairs to wait for him to finish with the sheriff.

  15

  The sheriff of Grange County, Heath realized, was smart and distressingly competent. Her weakness was that she was human.

  So incredibly, stubbornly human.

  “Listen,” he explained again. He was sitting behind the small, messy desk in his office, while she was in the chair. “I had Scott Kraemer’s neck in my hands in that alley. Don’t you think, if I wanted him dead, I would have done it then?”

  “You weren’t angry then,” she pointed out. “You were surprised, and you didn’t know what he’d done.”

  Heath blinked at her. “I’d seen him grabbing her. Trust me, I was very angry.”

  She actually looked down at her notebook, where she’d been taking notes during this conversation. Her hair was dark, the braid silky. The braid intrigued him. He could see that she was an attractive woman—though it was only an idle observation, since he had no desire for any woman except Tessa—but the braid was an interesting detail. Heath was a devoted, lifelong observer of women, of what they wore and what they did and what they liked, and braids were a relatively rare way for a grown woman to wear her hair. It suggested a girlish side, maybe a little of the bohemian beneath her buttoned-up exterior.

  Again, intriguing. Not in a sexual way, of course. The good sheriff was giving off not the slightest scent of sexual attraction to him—she was giving off a mix of nervousness and distress he couldn’t quite put his finger on, though it wasn’t exactly fear. Besides, his thoughts kept straying to the way Tessa’s breasts had felt against his chest when he’d kissed her, the way her tongue had tasted, and he found himself increasingly impatient to get out of this interview, go somewhere private, and strip every inch of clothing off of her before doing what he’d wanted to do for months.

  Sheriff Walker looked up at him again, and his view of the braid disappeared. “Look,” she said. “I’m not stupid.”

  “No,” he replied. “You’re not.”

  She blinked at that, because humans were never so blunt. They wasted time with words they didn’t mean. “I know it’s unlikely that you left this bar to go track down Scott Kraemer just so you could kill him.”

  “Like I said,” he replied. “Tessa was unconscious. I wasn’t sure what drug he’d given her, whether she would be okay, whether she would wake up. I called the doctor and stayed by her bedside, watching her. I wasn’t about to leave her alone for hours.” Just the thought outraged him—there was no power on earth that would have moved him from Tessa’s bedside during those hours—but he tamped it down. He was supposed to be delaying the sheriff, not losing his temper at her.

  “I know,” she said. “And we haven’t found a witness in the bar downstairs who saw you leaving. Though we’re mighty short on witnesses at all so far,” she added, glaring at him from beneath her dark, pretty brows. “Everyone is amazingly close-mouthed in Shifter Falls.”

  “Is that so?” Heath leaned back in his chair. “Curious. You don’t have that problem in Grange County? I’m sure the citizens line up in front of your office to give you information. Better yet, they’d line up to give information to a cop from out of town.”

  “I told you, Scott Kraemer’s murder happened in my jurisdiction, which means the case is mine,” she said. “I intend to close it. It doesn’t matter if every shifter in the Falls decides to become mute. I’m still going to find the wolf who killed him.”

  “You just said you don’t think that wolf was me,” Heath pointed out. He gestured around his office. “Yet here we are.”

  “My point is, you could have sent someone,” she said. “I know that you shifters work in packs, and that the pack members take orders from their leaders. I know you’re one of the Donovan brothers, and your half-brother Brody is the pack alpha. That tells me you could have given the word, and someone would have gone out and killed Scott Kraemer for you.” She straightened in her chair. “I’m close, aren’t I? Just tell me who it was, Mr. Donovan, and we can wrap this up right now, without any further trouble to you.”

  Heath put his elbows on the desk and pressed his hands together. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something about how shifters really work.”

  She blinked and stared at him.

  Damn, he had no idea why he bothered. He should have just continued to bullshit her without telling her any truth. But maybe it would do her good to learn exactly what she’d walked into here. And besides, he had a weakness when it came to good-looking women, even ones he wasn’t going to touch.

  “First of all,” he told her, “you’re right that we work in packs. And you’re right that I’m a leader of my pack, and that technically I could tell someone to go kill Scott Kraemer, and that someone would most likely do it.”

  “I knew it,” she said. “Go on
.”

  She was listening. That was good. “Where you’ve got it wrong,” he explained, “is that to do such a thing would be the end of me as a leader. Because a wolf who leads others is always—always—a man who does his own killing. A wolf who sends another wolf to do his dirty work, especially the spilling of blood and the taking of a life—which we do not take lightly, by the way—is no leader at all. Even my father, the hell-bound monster that he was, did his own killing. His pack leaders may have helped him, but if Charlie didn’t spill the blood himself, no one would have followed him for the thirty years they did.”

  Sheriff Walker swallowed. “You’re saying your father killed people?”

  “We have shifter justice here, sheriff,” Heath said. “We mete it out our own way. And yes, my father killed people in his lifetime.” He paused, thinking about the rumors about Brody’s mother. Even Heath didn’t know what the truth was there. “Not all of it was justice in my father’s case, but what’s done is done, and my father is dead. Where you also have it wrong is that if I ever actually sent one of my wolves to kill someone, I would never turn around and give his name to you. The pack is a brotherhood. That isn’t how it works.”

  She let out a frustrated sigh. “Look, a wolf did this,” she said, closing her notebook. “A wolf ripped open two humans. You just said your pack is a close brotherhood. You know who did this, Mr. Donovan. And if you don’t know right now, you can find out in minutes. If it wasn’t on your orders, then it was some kind of… rogue.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” he said, surprising her. He rested his chin on his hands and watched her for a long moment. “If a wolf had done this, I’d know who it was. So would my pack. No way would a member of the pack be able to hide such a thing from his brothers, or his alpha. And we would not tolerate a rogue killer. In fact, we would have stopped him after the first kill, before he had the chance to make the second.”

  She glared at him. “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that a wolf didn’t do it, sweetheart,” he said gently.

  “That’s ridiculous.” She was getting mad now, and he was pleased to see some spunk beneath the dutiful cop’s uniform. “You can’t know that. And stop calling me sweetheart.”

  “I do know it,” he said. “My brothers and I examined the first murder scene. We scented the killer. And the killer is most definitely human.”

  “I’m supposed to take that as evidence?” she asked incredulously. “A couple of wolves smelled it?”

  “Be very careful now,” he said softly, trying not to get angry. He didn’t mind her spunk, but he took issue with her snide, dismissive tone. “You are in the middle of werewolf territory here. You know nothing about this terrain, or what we can do. Werewolves have stronger senses than humans do. It’s been documented for hundreds of years. I suggest you think before you tell me I’m lying.”

  A muscle flexed in her jaw, but she was listening to him, which made him grudgingly respect her. She was a human, but maybe she wasn’t an entire waste of space. “Maybe you’re not lying about your power of smell,” she said tightly, “but you sure as hell could be lying about what you scented at that scene, since I have no way of verifying it.”

  “That means you have to trust me,” Heath said softly.

  She pushed her chair back and stood. “We’re done, Mr. Donovan.”

  He blinked. Had it been long enough? He wasn’t sure. “You’re sure you don’t have anything else to ask me?” he said to her. He held out his hands. “I’m an open book.”

  She had turned to the door, but now she turned back. “You only seem like an open book,” she said, as if the words had been bottled up and she was just now letting them out. “You and your brothers. I’m trying to solve a murder here, and none of you are helping. I tried talking to Ian, but he just growled at me. Brody won’t even face me.”

  That was because Brody hated lying, Heath knew. Brody wasn’t a talker or a charmer. He’d given that job to Heath, while the others went and did the real work.

  Suddenly, he was tired. His shoulder still hurt like hell, he hadn’t slept, his soon-but-not-yet mate was driving him crazy, and the Martells were after his territory. “Did you even bother talking to Devon?” he said, just to fill the silence. “I know I never do.”

  Sheriff Nadine Walker went pink—actual pink—at the mention of Devon’s name, and Heath nearly perked up right out of his chair. His big, gruff brother had mentioned last night that he’d had dealings with the pretty, uptight sheriff in the past. Suddenly Heath wondered exactly what those dealings were.

  “I wouldn’t talk to Devon Donovan if you paid me,” she said, confirming all of his suspicions.

  Heath sighed, not letting on that this little tidbit had brightened his day. Maybe his mountain of a brother wasn’t quite so impenetrable after all. “I believe you are being paid, sheriff,” he said. “No one pays me, so I get to avoid him. I admit that Devon is a little rough around the edges.”

  “He’s a danger,” she said, her eyes flashing. “He’s reckless and impossible and rude. If I could keep him in a holding cell I would, just for being an asshole.”

  Heath felt his eyebrows rise. “Uh oh,” he said. “What did he do?”

  “Never mind that,” she snapped. She was more unbalanced now, at the mention of Devon, than she’d been for the entire interview. “I’ve been told he’s gone out to the woods somewhere, and as far as I’m concerned he can stay there. I’ll solve this murder without him.”

  She turned and left his office, leaving him stunned. Well, well. Devon. His brother hadn’t had a woman for as long as Heath could remember—there was never even a rumor of it. He didn’t date—who would date Devon, anyway?—and he didn’t go looking for easy prey at the Dirty Den. Instead, he spent his time sniping at Heath for what he considered his slutty ways. If Heath didn’t know that Devon was a grown alpha wolf with what he assumed were alpha wolf urges, he’d think his brother was a virgin.

  But aside from the speculation about Devon’s sex life, or lack of it, the sheriff’s reaction had told him something very valuable.

  She’d called his brother reckless, impossible, rude, and an asshole. What she hadn’t called him was a suspect.

  No matter what she thought about Devon Donovan, she didn’t think he’d killed those men.

  16

  Heath followed the sheriff out of the office and into the bar just in time for the front door to swing open and a uniformed cop to come through. He was about thirty, with close-cropped hair and an unfamiliar uniform.

  “Sheriff,” he said to Nadine Walker, “we have reports of a fire in the woods.”

  The sheriff frowned. “It’s too early for forest fires. And we’ve had rain for days.” She turned and looked at Heath. “Does this sound familiar to you?”

  “A fire could be quite dangerous,” he pointed out mildly. “I believe it’s some cause for alarm.”

  She leveled a glare at him that would have felled a lesser man, then followed the cop out to the street.

  Heath turned to find Tessa standing at his shoulder. “Ian?” she asked.

  “With the help of a few others, yes,” he admitted. “They won’t let the fire get out of control. It’ll take Sheriff Walker at least an hour to get there over the back forest roads. By then, she’ll find nothing at the campsite but Xander Martell’s charred underwear.”

  Instead of laughing, or giving him sass, Tessa put a hand on his arm. “We need to talk.”

  He looked down at her again. Her expression was serious, almost apprehensive. He was struck again by how beautiful she was, her porcelain skin flawless in the dim light of the bar, her hair a light, natural blonde, her eyes wide, her lips soft and—he knew—very sweet to the taste. For once, he just looked his fill for as long as he wanted without looking away. She looked back at him, seemed to be taking him in the same way. Then she bit her lip, and he caught it. The scent, faint to his senses, but different than before.

  She was
ready.

  Not just physically, though there was that. She was giving him a mate’s stare, eye to eye, bold and somehow possessive. No woman had ever looked at him that way before. It made his blood run quietly hot, his nostrils flare, his skin feel tight. He forgot about the sheriff and the bar and his brothers and everything else.

  “You’re right,” he said to her. “We have business to do.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, but he stopped her. “Just one minute.” He stepped away from her and found Wes, who was nearby, like he was supposed to be when he was guarding Tessa. He leaned close to Wes’s ear.

  “Lisa Tomlinson,” he said. “She moved to Florida, right?”

  Wes nodded. “Last month.” Lisa Tomlinson had been the mate of Nat Breen, one of the pack’s senior members. Nat had died, and Lisa had eventually left town to live with her sister.

  “Their place is empty?”

  Wes nodded again. Lisa and Nat had lived in a bungalow just outside the city limits. Lisa had left the place to the pack, to be used as the pack saw fit, when she left. There had been no time to make a decision about it yet.

  In the meantime, it was a perfectly good place. Private. And Heath knew where Lisa had left the key.

  “That’s where I am,” he said to Wes. “With Tessa. Do not disturb. Am I clear?”

  Wes’s eyebrows went up a fraction, but he nodded, unsurprised.

  “Strictly private,” Heath told him. “The only one you can tell is Brody. And only if he asks.” He thought it through, then added, “and only in an emergency, as in someone is dead. Otherwise, no interruptions.”

  “I got it,” Wes said.

  Heath nodded at him. Then he picked up the bag he’d left at the foot of the stairs. He turned, took Tessa’s hand, and walked out the door.

  “Should I ask where we’re going?” she asked when they got in his pickup again.

  “Somewhere private,” he said. “Pack property.”