by Afton Locke
She wished she’d known he was coming. Her button-down work shirt was dirty from chores, and she surely smelled like a cow. “How about some coffee?”
“I’d love some.”
To her delight, he sat at her kitchen table, looking as if he belonged there. The house needed a man in it again, she thought as she reheated this morning’s brew.
“Did you go to South Dakota?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m transporting more people there tomorrow. I plan to move there myself.”
“Oh.” Disappointment bloomed cold in her chest while she filled two mugs with coffee. “You came to tell me good-bye, then.”
She set the cups on the table and sat across from him, watching the mixed emotions swirl in his black eyes. They had dark circles under them as if he hadn’t slept the whole time he’d been away.
“Yeah, I guess I did,” he said.
“You didn’t have to.” Her spoon clanked against the cup and clattered to the table. “But I’m glad you did. I enjoyed making your acquaintance.”
“You’re always so formal, Carrie.” He sipped the coffee and stared out the window. “Even though my friend died here, and your father probably killed him, I’m letting it go.”
The stiff flexing of his fingers told her how hard his decision must have been.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Relief washed through her as the hot coffee warmed her stomach. She had everything she wanted! He was going to leave her in peace on her ranch. The life she’d worked so hard to maintain could continue as before, unhindered.
But the coffee chilled to a hard ball inside her. He was such a good man. Maybe even more honorable than her Daddy. The shame inside her roared like a beast. She could not sit across from such goodness when so much evil permeated her to the bone.
Even though she’d probably lose the ranch, he deserved to know the truth. And she was so damn tired of hiding it. She couldn’t conceal it anymore. Not from him.
She lurched to her feet, accidentally knocking her coffee cup to the floor. Amusement glittered in his eyes as the brown puddle spread to her boots.
“I must make you nervous.” He stood. “Let me help you clean it up.”
“No,” she said with a force that surprised her. “I need to tell you something first.”
His face paled. As if he knew. “Shoot.”
Her gut contracted at his choice of words. She took a giant breath. Then another. Because what she was about to do would be harder than shoveling all that dirt.
“Daddy didn’t kill your friend.”
The warmth in his gaze cooled. “Then who?”
“I did.”
Chapter Five
Roark fell back into his chair. “What?”
“You heard me.”
His heart hammered at double speed until logic kicked in. “There’s no need to cover for your father, Carrie.”
“I’m not. I shot Jared.” She pointed to the corner. “With that rifle.”
He rested his elbows on the table and interlaced his fingers. “Why?”
“I-I thought he was a wolf.” Her voice cracked on the last word.
Wolf. Shit. Lara was right. Nausea flickered through his stomach, turning the coffee sour. The woman behind the innocent green eyes—the one he’d made love to—was a killer.
“Tell me what happened.”
She gripped the back of the chair in front of her, her knuckles even whiter than his.
“I-it was raining, like the night you arrived.” She tugged at her shirt. “I heard a noise, so I walked outside. Th-the wolf was big and brown. It growled at me and lunged low. S-so I shot it before it could jump me.”
“Go on,” he uttered despite the strangled feeling in his throat.
“I killed it.”
“What happened to the body, Carrie?”
“I buried it.
Roark blinked. “All by yourself?”
“Yes.” She winced before continuing. “When the lightning flashed, I saw a hand. The face.”
“The guy in my picture.”
She nodded and covered her mouth. “I don’t know where he came from or where the wolf went. For the past three years, I’ve been telling myself my eyes had played tricks on me during those flashes of light.”
Her tale sounded like something out of a horror movie. Jared must have shifted when rigor mortis began to pass. The timing might be a little off, but adrenaline, the weather—a lot of factors could have contributed. Either way, Roark wasn’t about to explain Wolves to her. Even though each word shredded his guts, he needed to hear every one.
“But I can’t believe that explanation anymore.” Her face flushed and tears spilled over her fingers. “Now I’ve seen his picture and know he’s real.”
Holy buffalo crap. The urge to comfort her rushed through him, as if she were the victim here. He stared at the ceiling instead, struggling to breathe slowly. “Did you call the authorities?”
She shook her head. “I thought about it, but Daddy wouldn’t let me.”
“Your father was still alive at the time?” If so, why had he sent his daughter outside in the rain to investigate a noise?
“No, but he still talked to me sometimes in spirit.” She sniffed. “I wouldn’t have gotten through the night if he hadn’t been with me, telling me what to do.”
He spread his hands on the table to steady his voice. “So, you ignored what you saw and finished burying what you’d assumed was a dead wolf?”
She nodded and hiccupped. “Took me the whole night. I got so soaked from the rain I almost died myself the week after from influenza. I wished I had.”
He crossed his arms, refusing to feel sympathetic. The old man had done the pack a favor. If the police had gotten their hands on a shifter corpse, the secrecy of Wolves would be jeopardized.
“I added the wolf deterrents so it could never happen again.”
“Where is he?” he whispered.
“Out in the field, behind the barn.” She slumped over the back of her chair. “Oh, Roark. I’m so sorry!”
Paralyzed, he watched her narrow shoulders shake and her hair tumble over the table, dragging through the spilled coffee. He bolted out of his seat and grabbed her shoulders, forcing her to look up.
Raw energy shot through his limbs at the sight of her red, tear-stained face. His fingers convulsed around the bones of her arms. The primal animal in him howled, needing to destroy her the way she’d destroyed his best friend.
At the same time, arousal bolted through his cock because the mate in him needed to love her….
“Damn you, Carrie. Damn you!”
“I said I was sorry.” Her face crumpled. “I never would have shot a man. If I could bring him back, I would.”
The revenge he’d chased for three years was finally in his grasp. Every muscle in his body coiled with superhuman restraint. A single breath blown the wrong way might send him over the edge. What would he do to her then?
“I ought to snap you in half,” he said in a voice as raw and hoarse as hers.
“Do it!”
He gripped both sides of her face and pulled her quivering lips too close to his mouth. Half of him wanted to bite them. Make them bleed. The other half needed to get lost in her kiss. Instead, they stared into each other’s eyes. Breathed each other’s air with gasping, lung-scraping breaths.
When he released her with a jerk, she darted away, slipping and falling to her knees in the coffee. Her shirt was already stained from when she’d spilled it earlier. He couldn’t believe she’d dug a grave by herself. Did her clothes have brown stains that night, too—not from coffee but mud?
Hairs prickled on the back of his neck when she headed to the phone. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to turn myself in.” She picked up the receiver. “Should’ve done it a long time ago.”
He crossed the kitchen in three strides. “No way.”
“But it’s the only way I can make things right.” Her
index finger shook as it hovered over the keypad. “I deserve to go to jail and a whole lot more for what I’ve done.”
“You can’t.” The phone was so slick with her sweat it almost slipped from his hand when he grabbed it.
“It’s just a ranch,” she argued, sounding hoarser by the second. “A small price to pay.”
“There’s more at stake here than a piece of land.”
She frowned. “What?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose, needing to unload his secrets as she’d done. But not under the influence of fresh shock.
“I can’t say right now.” He squeezed her arm. “Promise me you won’t call anyone. It would make things much worse.”
She stepped away from the phone. “Then what—?”
“Show me where he is.”
“A-all right,” she said through trembling lips.
He followed her outside into blinding shafts of sunshine, struggling to picture a rifle and a wolf on a dark, rainy night. Studying her jeans—loose enough to be practical and tight enough to be sexy—was easier.
Because he finally knew what had happened, he viewed the scene through Jared’s eyes. Why had his friend trespassed here? What had it been like to stare at the end of Carrie’s rifle? That one was easy to figure out. Hadn’t she threatened to shoot his balls off, too? If he’d been in wolf form, would he have suffered the same fate?
When they passed the front of the barn, the heavy tang of recent paint hit him. Holy buffalo crap. The whole side was brick red, covering the lucky-green horseshoe and words.
He palmed the wood. “Did you repaint this?”
“Yes. Daddy’s gone.”
Come to think of it, the big boots had been gone from the kitchen, too. “Why now?”
“I suppose you changed me.”
She’d changed him, too. Every time he saw her put him through a blender. If she could move on after suffering a loss, maybe he could as well.
His legs dragged so heavily he could hardly walk. The need to shift and process the emotional shock clawed at him. As a result, she got ahead of him, but the breeze still carried her fresh scent straight to his brain.
At last, she stopped in the middle of the field. His breath clogged in his throat at the sight of her. How could she look so innocent standing there with the sunlight glowing around her pale hair? She resembled a freaking angel.
Angel of death?
A chill washed over his arms. Would she kill him, too, especially if she found out what he was? Luckily, he’d always been able to control his shifts. If he had problems with it like Lara’s mate used to, he might be in trouble. Still, his bones ached from the effort of suppressing his nature.
“Here?” he asked, pointing to the ground at her feet.
The tough grass and gravel didn’t look any different from the rest of the land. No one would ever suspect what lay underneath.
“Yes.” She knelt and touched a pretty pink rock with marbled veins running through it. “I put it there, figuring he ought to have something nice. I said a prayer, too.”
He looked away as hot tears erupted from his eyes. Which was sadder? His friend’s grave, or the fact she’d cared enough to give him a headstone? “Leave me.”
“I-I’ll be in the kitchen.”
While her booted footsteps retreated, he stared at the open land opposite of the house. After checking to make sure she was out of sight, he dropped to his knees in the gravelly soil.
“Shit, Jared.” He slid a shaky palm across the ground. “Why the hell did you come here?”
Nothing answered except a haunting breeze, jiggling the barn’s front door in its hinges. He glared at the sky and yelled—the closest thing to a howl in human form. Rough sobs grated through his chest and throat, and tears dripped onto the ground, leaving round dots of mud. He stretched out and laid his face on the rough surface until they stopped.
“Get this, man,” he said, sitting up to wipe his face. “The chick who deep-sixed you is my fucking mate. Is that messed up or what?”
At least Carrie’s confession had given him some closure. After three years of searching, he’d finally learned the truth. He stared at Wyoming’s brown, stony mountains in the distance—a sight as familiar as his own cock.
After he transported the last of the families to South Dakota, the Lamar Canyon pack would be gone. He still couldn’t believe he’d done the blood oath, making him a Tao.
“I wish you could meet Ryker and Gee, dude,” he told Jared. “Talk about a couple of bad-asses. They threw me over an embankment.”
Time to say good-bye to everything—Jared, home, and his fucked-up little mate.
***
Roark raced through Yellowstone National Park on four paws. He couldn’t stop running. The emotions spurting through his canine muscles and tendons fueled his energy. He snapped at the air and growled at the rocks. Even dug his teeth into a sapling, threatening to pull it out by the roots.
After a long stretch of time, he returned to the enclave of hot springs, where he’d left his clothes, and returned to man form. Even though shifting was usually easy for him, this one hurt like a bitch. Each popping bone hammered his skull with the force of a migraine. So did the harsh smell of all the angry crap erupting from the land around him.
He sat on a flat rock, still warm from the sun. The rubber band got lost during his shift, so he braided his hair. With the coiled tension in his muscles released, he could meditate. An image of two teenaged boys playing over the mud pots dropped into his mind’s eye. Jared took his pants off and jumped over a steaming fumarole.
“You crazy bastard,” Roark had yelled. “You’re going to burn your dick off!”
But Jared jumped over it and laughed. “Don’t be such a pussy, Roark. I dare you.”
So, Roark had done it. He’d also tried to knock a buffalo off its feet because his friend bet he couldn’t do it. Even in wolf form, the huge beast was too much for him. He’d downed it, all right, but barely avoided getting squashed.
A couple of them stood in the distance now, two brown humps obscured by the white steam rising from the ground.
His left pinkie claw had gotten caught in the buffalo’s matted hide. He had to rip it out to escape. Jared had laughed his ass off the whole time. Roark rubbed the bare spot on his left pinkie where his nail had been.
Jared had never taken off the claw necklace. Knowing a piece of him lay in the grave filled Roark’s chest with a sense of rightness. When his eyes watered, he blamed it on the acrid vapors filling the air.
Time to say good-bye, he reminded himself.
Carrie’s tear-stained face drifted through his mind. Damn it. He missed her already. Even though Jared’s death was a nightmare, they were in it together. Telling him the truth about what she’d done had taken guts and good character.
Nice of her to want to pay for her sin, too. She was even willing to lose the one thing that meant everything to her—the ranch. He hoped she’d obeyed his order not to call the police. Living with what she’d done for three years had probably been punishment enough. Not for someone hard hearted, but for a tender, caring woman like her, yes.
Did she sleep at night, wondering when or if her secret would be discovered someday? She probably had nightmares and no one to hold her sweet little body while she quivered in her flannel nightgown.
What was he saying? The bottom line said she’d killed his friend. He could never forget it. Sure as hell couldn’t ever love her.
Lara’s conversation in Gee’s Bar returned to him. For all we know, his death was an accident.
Not an accident, but what about self-defense? He replayed Carrie’s description of the encounter in his mind. Why had Jared growled and lunged at a woman? On a dark, rainy night, combined with the loose-fitting clothes she wore, she might resemble a young guy.
He gazed at the sky and let out a breath. It sure sounded like Jared meant to harm her…because she was a rancher. Sick guilt rolled through Roark’s stomach. Lamar wolve
s hated ranchers because they killed. So, the Lamar killed back. When would it end?
During their last year together, they hadn’t horsed around in the park. Instead, they’d prowled the countryside for revenge. Hate the enemy. Kill or be killed.
Truth settled into Roark’s gut. By filling his friend’s mind with hate, he’d driven him to the ranch to murder. As a result, he’d lost his own life. And what about Carrie’s life? Was her existence for the past three years really living?
And look at him, for fuck’s sake. Drinking himself stupid in a South Dakota bar because his own life didn’t mean more than crap to him anymore.
He jumped off the rock. Jared’s death couldn’t be undone, but it didn’t have to be in vain. Let it be an end to hatred.
What about Carrie? He had no idea what to do with his mate. But he did need to see her one more time.
***
Carrie sat at the kitchen table, feeling as numb as the wooden chair she sat on. She’d cleaned up the coffee spill but hadn’t bothered fixing dinner. It would be a long time before her appetite returned.
Roark had gone to Yellowstone, and she wouldn’t blame him if he never returned. How he must hate her! But she was glad she’d told him the truth. He deserved to know. Having finally shared her awful secret with someone made her shoulders feel lighter.
She almost didn’t want him to come back because she couldn’t bear to see cold hatred in his eyes. Better to continue living as she had before, staying to herself and not calling the police.
The throb of his motorcycle outside accelerated her heart. Would he kill her to get even? Snap her in half as he’d threatened? She almost wanted him to, so it would help even out the huge debt she owed him.
When she opened the door, his face was streaked with dirt but calm.
“Are you all right?” she asked. What a silly question. How could he be?