Jonas sensed someone beside him. Tess. The wolf hunter was joining him in the hunt for his sister, despite her animosity for his kind.
He didn’t have time to consider how to thank her for that. They were together and on the same page. They were connecting on a level too deep to acknowledge. Tess wasn’t questioning his reasons for needing to find the white wolf so badly. She wasn’t looking at him. His emotions were carrying her along, sweeping her into his business on a grand scale and spiraling her into unparalleled danger.
Fuck was the first word that came to his mind to describe what was going on tonight, and it was a word he repeated over and over as he strained, hoped, prayed, to see a flash of white.
The foggy mist rolled back each time he and Tess charged forward, as if the mist was leading them away from the rocks. Jonas just couldn’t stop himself from trying to cut his way through that unnatural dark. He couldn’t hear anything beyond the beating of his heart.
“Gwen!” He still had a voice. His shout caused Tess to groan.
There was nothing to catch or hang on to with an opponent that had no real form. On the surface, the mist was just that...mist.
“Gwen!” Tess shouted, putting a lot of energy behind the call, as though she also had a stake in the outcome of this chase. Jonas could have loved her for that. But there was no sign of his sister. No damn sign at all. And he could not fathom how that could be true.
The wind that picked up felt cool on Jonas’s overheated face. It whipped through loose wayward strands of Tess’s golden hair, so that she had to press those strands back in order to see. Like the dark fog floating in it, this was an unnatural wind, since there wasn’t an overhead leaf moving.
He had known this would be bad, and yet the probability of this dark entity being only a piece of the will of the master who had sent it was an idea too terrible to face.
“Wolf!” Tess shouted, her voice less forceful now that she also realized they were fighting a losing battle.
Was it a losing battle?
Jonas knew he had to stop fighting. The idea forming in his mind was an idea worth considering. If this dark thing had truly captured Gwen, Death’s misty minion wouldn’t still be here and leading them on a merry chase, would it?
He dialed in his wolf with a stern reprimand and felt the wolf retreat. Rocking on his feet as the last of the strange shape-shift dissolved, Jonas stuck out a hand, caught hold of Tess, said, “Wait.”
She paused with her muscles on adrenaline overdrive and quaking.
“Wait,” he repeated until she looked at him.
To stop her from protesting or speaking...
To keep their opponent from doing further damage by taking up more time and energy when those things might be needed later...
And to steady himself from backtracking on the idea that had taken root...
Jonas pulled Tess to him. Resting his lips on hers briefly, he then bore down on her mouth with a savage ferocity that would either seal their fate or prove a point.
* * *
Caught up in a world of sensation that was spinning out of control, this latest surprise stunned Tess senseless. In the midst of chaos, Jonas was kissing her.
It wasn’t just a kiss, though. This was also a sample of the level of this fierce Lycan’s frustration over losing his pet.
Or was it more than that?
His mouth was both torturous and an unexpected delight. The breath he exhaled was fiery and added to the flames of interest for him that she had already been tamping down. An excruciating electrical current soared through her that wasn’t related to the jumper cables she had used to ward him off.
All of that in the midst of danger.
The stiffness of her body thawed beneath Jonas’s talented mouth. He was kissing her without letup, leaving no leeway for complaints. She found it strange how her hope for those complaints dissipated when Jonas slipped his tongue between her teeth.
His mouth was incredibly hot. His body was hotter. Pressed tightly to him for the third time in their short acquaintance, Tess felt her own temperature rise. She should have been torn between remembering her vows and the exquisite new pain of wanting this male so very badly, but couldn’t think about that either. Lycans, she discovered, had made an art form out of kissing.
Without her consent, her body was surrendering to this meeting of their lips, tongues, chests, hips. The sheer force of Jonas’s hunger demanded that she give in. On some level, their mutual attraction was as overpowering as it was irrational. By going down this road and setting a single foot upon this path, some kind of intimacy was bound to happen eventually. But she had hoped he’d be gone before then.
Nothing Tess had ever encountered tasted like he did. His mouth was demanding. Beneath the unrelenting pressure of his lips on hers, new emotions were being pulled to the surface from deep within her.
The depth of this intimate connection with Jonas was stirring up feelings of wildness, as though his wolfishness was contagious and being transferred to her. Visions came, taking over her mind with images of her running through green fields by Jonas’s side, while howling at the moon. Wolf thoughts. Wolf pictures. Wolf madness.
That isn’t me... Tess’s mind protested. But those images also faded as the beast continued to devour her, and her hands, seemingly of their own accord, clung to his wide, supple back.
And then he spoke—silently. Softly.
“Tess...”
The way he silently sent her name was like a further touch.
“I’m sorry, Tess.”
The pressure of his lips eased slightly as Tess considered his apology. Sorry for what? The kiss? Bringing that black thing here, if that’s what he had done? Maybe the kiss was merely an outlet for easing pains she didn’t yet understand.
Struck by that last thought’s feeling of rightness, Jonas’s kiss suddenly seemed to be full of possibilities that didn’t necessarily include her for the reasons Tess had been anticipating. The realization was that she was being used.
“Meet me,” he sent. “Tomorrow.”
With his arms still encircling her, Tess couldn’t move.
“Can’t speak out loud,” he sent. “Have to use the pathway open to us.”
Those words added to Tess’s moment of weakness.
“I don’t think that thing can read us, Tess. It can’t hear what we say this way.”
And there it was...the reason for the kiss and the closeness that had her panting inside and longing for more. Jonas had forced intimacy on her in order to throw that other entity off in some way.
Why? Was it so that in seeing Jonas give up the chase, the dark entity in the mist might leave without getting what it had wanted?
Why would a kiss produce that result? After coming here, surely that dark mass wouldn’t give up so easily.
The closing of Jonas’s arms around her brought her thoughts back. “All of what you’re thinking is partially true, though it explains nothing really and only touches on the depth of my desire to get close to you.”
“You’re using me,” Tess sent back, though Jonas’s lips had left hers.
“Yes. But it’s not what you think.”
“Because you know so well what I’m thinking?”
The heat that had elevated her temperature only moments before now crept into her face, and Tess blinked slowly to hide the foolishness she felt for having thought, having believed for a few brief seconds that this was something else.
“Tomorrow,” he repeated, speaking out loud. “I will explain.”
Tess couldn’t look at him. She cast a sideways glance at her surroundings. There was no black mist. Fields were again visible in the moonlight. Trees were trees. She wasn’t running through those fields or howling because she wasn’t anything like the beguiling male beside her.
The bad news was that she had just been
made a fool of and had been caught in what might turn out to be the biggest mistake of her life.
When Jonas turned from her, Tess kept quiet. She watched him take a few steps in the direction of his cabin before speaking to him again.
“Where did she go, Jonas?”
He turned back.
“Your fierce companion,” Tess clarified.
His need to follow up on that question was easy to see. He wore a worried expression on his finely etched features. Creases lined his brow and his hands were fists. She saw no evidence of the claws he had wielded tonight without the moon’s permission. Right then, Jonas looked like an ungodly handsome human being beset by far-reaching problems.
Jonas was anxious to find his white-pelted pet and couldn’t hide that fact. Having been groin to groin with this Lycan five minutes ago, Tess felt as though she had developed the ability read him like an open book.
“I can’t stay,” he said.
“Who asked you to?” Tess returned.
His attention was intense. “The silver in your system won’t hurt me.”
“We’ve already discovered that.”
“Would you have wanted it to?” he asked.
“That was the plan.”
“Was? What about now?”
“Now, you’re mocking me, and I don’t appreciate it.”
He stared at her appraisingly. “She might have been hurt. That hideous thing might have hurt her.”
“Then you’d better find her. Find out,” Tess said.
His gaze slid to the distant field. “I can’t explain to you how important she is to me.”
Tess couldn’t even nod her head. “I think I got that.”
“Tomorrow,” he reiterated. Then he turned from her, giving her a ringside view of the ribbonlike string of marks she had scratched into his back with her silver blade in a now regrettable moment of all-consuming, over-the-top passion.
She waited until Jonas had gone before managing to take a first step. She whispered a final personal lament. “I’m sorry, too, wolfman.”
The night had been a long one and wasn’t over yet. She started toward home, scouring her surroundings for any hint of either Jonas’s white wolf or the dark entity his pet had gone after so viciously. No sign of either turned up.
Her cabin was dark when she reached the front gate. Windows were shutterless, the way she had left them. One of those windows had been broken by Jonas, whose scent would be everywhere inside her home and on most of the things she would touch. She couldn’t do anything about his scent but would have to board up that hole before exhaling a breath of relief.
“Damn you, wolf.”
At the gate, Tess paused with her senses open, probing the area for a hint of anything out of the ordinary, the way she usually did out of a need for caution. Things would have seemed normal and the way clear if it wasn’t for the wave of chills covering the back of her neck. Premonition chills. Warnings. But she was almost too tired to care.
With her knife in one hand and her bow in the other, Tess retraced her steps to the edge of the trees bordering her yard. Nothing jumped out at her. No one spoke or showed up. She got no sense of having more unwelcome company, though the damn chills seemed to have come to stay.
“Overactive imagination due to extreme moral distress,” she muttered, unable to face one more odd escapade after so many of them in the days since Jonas’s arrival in her area. Promising herself to buck up and be the hunter destiny had predicted she’d be.
So, okay. He had kissed her, and she had liked it.
How was that for a confession?
She could almost see other wolf hunters shuddering.
Another hour went by as she stood guard, half-expecting another round of trouble. Eventually, the moon no longer shed enough light for her to see beyond the fence. She had no idea what the time was and never really bothered with the ticks of a watch or wall clock. Out here, day was day and night was night.
Cautiously, she made her way inside the house and locked the door after her. She broke the doors off an old cabinet in the hallway and nailed them over the broken window. Satisfied that things were at least calm for the time being, she fell fully dressed onto her bed, attempting to count all of the rules she had broken in the past forty-eight hours...because in a situation like the one she found herself in, what good was counting sheep?
Chapter 20
Jonas’s voice was raw from calling out to Gwen. He was sick, weary and not yet willing to give up the search for his sister.
The cabin was just as he’d left it when he had returned there to look for her the first time, over an hour ago.
The place smelled empty. Felt empty.
All that made him sicker.
Jonas leaned against the porch railing to recalculate the odds of finding a wolf that didn’t want to be found, hoping that the god-awful black mist hadn’t figured out who that white wolf was. Death himself wouldn’t have been so naive, so Jonas supposed that having Death send a lesser minion on this mission had been in the Dale family’s favor.
Perhaps this entity had never dealt with werewolves and couldn’t see through the wolf’s disguise. If that was the case, Gwen still had to be out there somewhere. And if that unformed beast had taken her, harmed her, surely Gwen’s big brother would have known.
Searching the dark, unable to erase the tension spiraling into his neck and shoulders, Jonas listened to the night birds in the distance and prayed that he might see Gwen coming across the field. Every stray bit of light out there made his heart skip a beat.
Going inside was not an option. Retracing his steps on the hillsides would have been a waste of energy. There had been nothing solid enough in that mist for his sister to have plunged her teeth into, which had to mean that Gwen was either chasing that dark devil out of the area or lying in wait for its return.
She wouldn’t run away. Not Gwen. She wouldn’t hide.
“Damn it, Gwen. Moving to South Dakota might have been a waste when viewed through the lens of hindsight.”
How could he have predicted how quickly they would be found?
And then there was Tess. He refused to think about that kiss and hated that she hadn’t understood why he had kissed her. His mind had to be taken elsewhere for those seconds, minutes, that the kiss had lasted in case the foggy bastard had the ability to read it.
Allowing his mind to wander back now to the exquisite feel of Tess’s mouth and the way she had surrendered to the emotions overtaking them would bring more pain when he wasn’t sure he could take anymore. There was no use wallowing in what he could never have.
He was surrounded by two unruly females that were so much more than they appeared to be on surface details alone. He had no real future with one of them and was trying hard to prolong the future of the other so that his sister might someday experience a kiss like the one he and Tess had shared.
The night couldn’t last forever, Jonas told himself. Gwen would come back before dawn if she was in any way able to. Until then, he had to wait. He had to offer Gwen his open arms and whisper gentle words to appease whatever fears she harbored.
So he sat down on the steps with his senses trained on the distance. His thoughts kept veering back and forth between the memory of what had happened out there and the image of Tess Owens on the floor of her cabin with two fresh burn marks on her arms.
He had to forget that kiss and the way it had stirred him up.
He had told Tess that he’d explain everything tomorrow, to temporarily appease her. How he was going to do that was another problem. Because Tess was a wolf hunter, he was going to have to lie...about everything.
* * *
The sound Tess heard wasn’t the thrashing of her heart. Nor was it an animal’s mating call. She sat up to listen.
Scratching?
Anxiety over the way
things had gone down tonight hadn’t eased by much, and now made a curtain call. She was off the bed and leaning against the wall by the window with the silver blade gripped in one hand before the sounds came again—softly, and reminiscent of an animal trying to dig something out of a crack in the wood with its paws.
Doesn’t have to mean anything.
Doesn’t have to be ominous, Tess told herself.
That was before she caught an idea of what this visitor was and the word ominous took on a whole new meaning. One of them was here. Outside. Her senses screamed wolf.
Angry to have been right in her prediction of more trouble to come, Tess walked boldly to the front door and shoved back the latch, still dressed in her leather armor and with the knife ready.
A quick scan turned up no one on or near the front step, but it was here, all right. The image in her mind was unmistakably wolf.
“What else could you possibly want?” she asked in a firm voice, purposefully keeping her ongoing reaction to Jonas’s kiss out of her main train of thought in case this was him. A replay, or even a visit from Jonas right then, would have been unfortunate for both of them. She was in no mood to deal with hunky, unruly werewolves who looked like God’s gift to the species.
The scent got stronger. Tess stepped into the dark, ready to face whatever had shown up. The fact that no one replied to her question or presented their wooly Were self was a further annoyance that undermined her determination not to show fear.
“Come out, wolf,” she said.
The next noise sounded like whining and brought with it a trickle of chills that dripped slowly down Tess’s back. She turned toward the gate, using her silver-enhanced night vision to search the yard, and saw something. Nerves jangling, Tess waited a while longer before speaking again. In an unsteady voice, she asked, “Gwen?”
More whining sounds reached her that struck Tess as being distress calls for help. Cautiously, Tess crept toward the sounds, calling out to the animal she now knew was out there.
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