Terrified, and trying to ignore the gnawing in her stomach, she felt Cameron’s wolf stirring within him as strongly as if it stirred inside her. In their moments of intimacy, and like a wicked sort of contagion, some of his wolf had to have been transferred to her.
Her unspoken protests over this tumbled and roared as her mind jumped from idea to idea. As crazy as it seemed, she thought she felt the beating of his heart inside her chest—much slower than hers and equally as irregular.
Her muscles began to contract, causing her to stumble. Squeezed nerve endings erupted with high-pitched whines. Soft grunts and groans escaped through her open mouth, loud in the relative quiet of the area of the park she’d chosen for her hiding place.
“No one in their right mind comes here.”
Cameron Mitchell had agreed with that assessment last night, and he would know.
Reaching the narrow pathway between the houses of the rich and famous, Abby sighed with relief. No more crowds. Not one hint of a car in the distance. The trees here slowed the shed of the moon’s silver rain, though not quite enough to stall the inevitable for long, for any wolf.
Will you find me before you shift, Cameron?
She would let him find her.
An angry sound rent the darkness. It took seconds to understand that she had uttered a strangled cry.
The dark atmosphere of the park engulfed her as she slowed her pace. Cameron’s unmistakable presence closed in from behind and she nearly called out for him to turn around, and to beware. This area had been okay in the past, but felt wrong tonight. Totally, inescapably wrong.
She felt wrong.
The first snap of overstretched ligaments in her shoulders struck without warning. Searing shivers of pain moved through her like messages being passed across old-fashioned telephone wires, temporarily sidelining any attempt to move on.
With both hands on the old block wall, Abby felt an icy dab of moonlight on the back of her neck. Robbed of breath, she sank to her knees. Kneeling in the grass with her head lowered, she awaited the inevitable. “Find me, damn you, if that’s what I deserve.”
Strong hands yanked her upright. Tossed against the wall, hitting it so hard the last bit of air in her lungs rushed out, Abby felt a warm body press close. The angry touch she had expected didn’t come. Neither did the questions she would have asked in his place. Gentle fingers brushed the hair back from her face. Familiar breath wafted across her lips with an impossible lightness in the midst of a rolling dark.
“I’m here,” he said.
His voice. His body. She would have known him anywhere, in any circumstance, with her eyes closed.
Cameron had shoved her out of the light. Her heart matched his heart’s amped-up beat as he massaged her underlying fear with his tone.
“Abby. Listen. You don’t need to be afraid of me. I won’t hurt you. I haven’t come here to harm you.”
“I...know.”
Her vocal cords weren’t working properly. Abby faced the beautiful Were with her eyes half-closed.
“Did you hear me, Abby?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe me? Can you talk?”
“In a minute. Need some air.”
“I’m not sure we have a minute, if what you said is true about the people in the bar. There are things I have to know, like what you think.”
Reckoning time had arrived for her, along with a familiar fleeting thought that if Sam knew about this meeting with Cameron, as well as the last one, her life would be over.
But Cameron was here beside her. Cameron was a cop, not a monster.
She dared to voice the truth.
“I don’t understand it. Never have understood,” she said, looking at the naked skin of Cameron’s chest. “I just know you, and others like you.”
“Are you saying that you’re able to recognize Otherness?”
She nodded.
“And that you know what we are? What I am?”
She nodded again.
“Okay.” He spoke slower, gripped her tighter. “What about those people back at the bar? Are they after people like me? Is that what you were trying to tell me?”
“Hunters come there each month to party. You didn’t know? Didn’t you smell the odor of death on them? They are a universal killing machine.”
Tension spread to his voice. “You used the term werewolf hunters.”
“That’s what they are. Hunters, intent on your kind.”
“If there are such things, it would mean other people are aware of our existence.”
“Plenty of them,” she said.
Cameron Mitchell paused before speaking again. “What do they do with that knowledge, Abby? How much do they know? Do they see what you see?”
Out of a million questions, Abby picked one to address. “They see nothing I don’t point out. They count on me to tell them about Weres.”
“What?”
“I’m the one with the connection to your kind. I find you, and then I tell the hunters where to look.”
Echoes of her confession tightened her stomach now that she had glimpsed more details about the so-called enemy, and this one in particular. He was so damn fine. His eyes were bright in the shadows.
Just then, as the night pressed in, and Cameron Mitchell along with it, Abby became fully aware of her bareness, and the fact that Cameron hadn’t mentioned that.
They were temporarily hidden from the moonlight, crammed into the space where two walls merged, and yet the moon lit everything beyond their tiny puddle of shadow. Abby breathed in that light and spit it back out. A warning signal buried inside her mind suggested that the light was trying to reach her, and that if she moved back into it, moonlight would change everything.
Maybe, though, she just empathetically sensed Cameron’s imminent transformation. His muscles were twitching. His body temp rang in at about a million degrees.
She had no option for avoiding his penetrating gaze, and sensed his ability to see right down into her soul. She struggled to block him from finding out about her secret longing for his kind, hoping he couldn’t taste that secret the way she tasted his.
“It’s not safe here,” she warned.
There were so many ways to take this warning, which had been meant as much for herself as for him. The prickle of fear plaguing her announced that something was amiss, and that by encountering more moonlight straight-on, a bad thing might happen to her. She’d spent years dreading whatever that bad thing might be, never willing to find out. That’s why she had avoided full moons, and why she needed to avoid this one tonight. The secrets she withheld had already gained in stature and weight, growing larger with each new breath.
She felt wolfish standing next to Cameron, but had always felt a little bit like that. Did she actually want to be a wolf, like Cameron? Is that what she wanted, down deep? Was she capable of it?
“Explain, Abby, why you...” Cameron began.
“I can’t. That’s the truth. I don’t know what’s happening to me, or how I know what you are. I’m not sure I want to know.”
She kept her eyes locked to his. “How did this happen to you? What happened to you?”
“I was bitten in a fight.”
“You weren’t like this before? Weren’t always a wolf?”
He shook his head. “The bite broke the bones in my arm and tore vessels to shreds.”
“Did you get help? Did anyone help you?” She was desperate for answers that would prove him an ally, and no future adversary.
“I didn’t believe in werewolves, Abby. I didn’t know they existed. But I saw this guy’s teeth, and his claws, and knew it wasn’t Halloween. Because of the blood loss, I was taken to the hospital, where a suspicious doctor patched me up and then told me to go home. I now believe that doctor might have been something other than fully human and that for my own good he subtly advised me to get away from that hospital.”
Abby didn’t want to hear more, but was fascinated by his story. He’d be
en bitten. He’d had this happen to him. It wasn’t his fault. Cameron had been a good guy in a rotten situation. This kind of thing hadn’t been addressed by Sam Stark, either, whose theory was that once bitten, the man became a mindless monster.
“Is being a wolf bad?” she managed to ask. “How bad?”
“I’m here,” he said. “I deal daily with a situation that might have had a worse outcome.”
Her shaking had gotten worse, and Abby couldn’t make it stop. Cameron Mitchell’s body against hers didn’t prevent more tremors from attacking, or keep the light-headedness away. Her chest felt tight. Her ribs ached. The waistband of her jeans inhibited all prospects of the deep breaths she needed to fill her lungs.
“Get...them...off me,” she said, her voice hoarse.
The Were’s face was close. She wanted him to kiss her, turn her into a wolf, take her away from all this. Anything to stop the plague of questions.
“What, Abby? Get what off you?”
“Clothes. Pants. Please.” Abby forced those words out, wriggling in Cameron’s grip, wondering if his continued nearness might push her toward the answers she had been avoiding.
This Were had affected her in a new way. Meeting him again tonight served to emphasize and amplify her connection to him.
“Abby, I don’t understand.”
“Back off!”
He didn’t oblige. Instead, he drew closer to her, placing his hands on the wall beside her to form a cage of formidable muscle and bone. One of those arms had been ripped apart by a bad wolf’s teeth and claws. He had recovered, with serious consequences.
For a second—a fleeting tick of time that might have gone on forever for all she knew—Abby closed her eyes and rested her face against his chest, giving in to the impulse to be with him, and become like him if she had to.
Then she rocked back, hitting her head on the wall, gasping in surprise. Her ears filled with a roar—the roar of the return of the forbidden longing to possess Cameron Mitchell and be possessed in return. The longing to tear at him, devour him, mate with him over and over, no matter what the rest of the world might think.
Her eyelids fluttered from the strain of holding herself back. Her lips parted. “Help me.”
Cameron’s fingertip, sharp with an exposed claw, forced her chin upward. Sick with the sight of that claw, Abby nevertheless looked into his eyes. In silence they rode out the buzz of an electrical charge sealing the bond that firmly united them. The harshness of their breathing was the only noise in an otherwise quiet night.
Then Cameron kissed her.
He kissed her as if he needed to hurt her and love her simultaneously, and as if he’d pull the secrets out of her one by one.
He kissed her, letting her know that he alone had the power to face those secrets head-on and understand. It was a wet, smoldering kiss, utterly demanding and without letup. An angry action, almost painful, but also beautifully satisfying.
His mouth merged with hers, directed hers, taking and giving back, nipping, sucking, licking. He kissed her as if he’d eat her alive, consume her completely, and as though nothing less might do. Because nothing less would.
But the moment had been stolen, and was in the end merely a fleeting escape from everything else. When her lover stepped back, taking her with him, moonlight covered Abby’s head and shoulders like a mantle of silver cloth. Light also covered him, and each angle of his exquisite face, highlighting the shadows beneath his eyes.
Chills swept over Abby’s feverish skin. Those same chills covered Cameron’s smooth bronzed flesh.
“Little wolf,” he repeated. “No mistake.”
Those were the only words Cameron got out before the luminous gold eyes became the only recognizable feature in a moving mass of muscle and sinew, and the man who was about to morph into something else entirely acted on her last request by slicing her jeans to shreds.
* * *
The woman beside him stared with an expression of terror and curiosity. No fidgeting. No running away. Nothing but the slightest sagging of her legs before she caught herself.
She stood there, not only naked from the waist up, but thanks to his claws, mostly naked from the waist down. Her breasts glistened with a fine sheen of sweat, lifting with each breath she took. Cameron wanted his mouth on her, on those breasts. His wolf gave an expectant shudder.
Her pants had been reduced to lengths of denim fringe attached to a waistband sitting low across her narrow hips. He remembered the pleasures of her concave belly and the jutting angle of her bones. Abby was lean and hard, defiant and brave, but not unyielding.
He could have her there. Take her right then. On the ground or against a tree, he could bury himself in her blistering depths, and she’d allow it, want it, want him. And that was a miracle.
A wink of silver caught his eye, tearing his attention away from Abby’s perfection and temporarily holding his human shape together. The knife she had carried the night before was strapped low on her calf, its hilt gleaming faintly with an almost demonic glow. He had learned quickly about the destructive properties of silver. Without a shape-shift or the presence of a full moon, he still loathed to touch that particular metal. Seeing such a weapon tied to Abby’s leg seemed like one small barrier between them.
She had to feel the chill of that silver blade. Abby, whether or not she knew it, was a wolf as yet unformed. Everything pointed to that fact. Already, without the pants, she breathed easier. The tight elastic bandage encasing one of her thighs and smelling like antiseptic and old blood didn’t seem to bother her.
Wolfish growls echoed inside Cameron’s chest as he contemplated his need to possess her. That had to be all right. His recognition of Abby’s unborn wolf had to have been what cemented them together so completely. The moon had given them a blessing.
Little wolf...
Abby’s secret reacted to his coming-out party. Though her body didn’t shift, wolf light shone in her eyes as she dealt with a system that wanted to change, but didn’t yet know how to go about it. Wolf was the source of her exquisite heat and her craving for freedom. It was the reason she desired him.
Have I done this to you?
Have I kicked your secret into the present, making the world a more dangerous place for you to be?
Though she shook, she continued to meet his eyes, perhaps unable to turn away from what she was seeing up close.
“Abby.”
He shoved her back against the wall, freezing his human form with the utmost willpower, and tore aside her underwear. He was inside her before her next rattled breath, delving into her with his hands on her bare thighs and a knee between her legs.
His jeans brushed across her hips with a swish of fabric on bareness. The wall scratched her back. But that first thrust wasn’t deep enough. He hadn’t yet reached what he wanted to find.
Supporting her with his weight, he lifted one of her legs, breathing the magnitude of his desire into her mouth, receiving a mutual silent cry of need from Abby.
“It’s still not enough. Can’t you see this, Abby?”
She must have understood, because she wrapped that sleek leg around him in a replay of the night before. She opened for him, biting his cheek when his mouth retreated for the slightest intake of air.
Her hips began to move, angling forward to meet each plunge he made with a cock so hard, it hurt. As his fervor to reach her sweet spot increased, sounds of pleasure bubbled up from her throat.
“Take me in, Abby. That’s it. Let me in.”
The only way he could stop this was if someone beat him off her. Within the petals of her hot, damp sex, he found an alarming sense of peace. A place for him. A homecoming.
Sure he’d lost his mind, Cameron stroked her heat over and over until she gave in that final, significant way, surrendering to the bond, to the connection, to this and to him.
The ecstasy made him howl with his lips crushed to hers. Breathing into her and taking in her breath in return, he reached the core of Abb
y Stark. They came in unison with explosive, shuddering orgasms that rocked them both and left him reeling.
Locked in Abby’s embrace, buried deep inside her body, Cameron felt his wolf rear up. Riding the high of exquisite ecstasy, his wolf hurtled toward the surface where it refused to fade back, and could no longer be contained.
“Okay,” he said to Abby. “Okay. This is me.”
He had only time to set her on her feet, and loathed the coolness of the air that circulated between them, before the fire in his chest again spread upward into his shoulders, and trails of sparks tripped overstretched fibers.
Ligaments began to stretch in the usual order of neck, shoulders, chest, hips, legs, making sounds like elastic snapping against hot, wet flesh. Pain exploded in an abominable flash as his shoulders realigned and both knees buckled.
His stomach heaved up a roar. His spine cracked. Acute distress accompanied this morph, because the joining of man and wolf probably wasn’t supposed to exist in nature, and pain was nature’s way of rebelling.
Who the hell knew why such a thing had ever taken place, or been allowed in the grand scheme of things from the start?
“This is me, Abby,” Cameron repeated as his face began to burn with a pain reminiscent of being poked in both eyes. Cheekbones cracked and rearranged. His neck thickened with a chorus of vertebral chatter. Leg muscles elongated. Expanding chest muscles pulled at his rib cage.
Although the shift had gotten slightly faster with each passing moon, it took minutes more for the rest of his bones to settle into their new shape. When they did, he glanced down to see random patches of light brown hair sprouting on his chest and arms.
Hell and damnation, he would never get used to this.
He was a man, redefined. Not an animal on all fours with a fur coat, but a man-wolf combination with the man’s mind intact—upright on two legs, with more muscle and acute senses than anything else on the planet.
His jeans were too tight, but he didn’t discard them. The thickness of his skin felt strange. Body parts that hadn’t already been hard for Abby now hardened. The hair on his head lengthened, and swept across his broadening shoulders. Inside his mouth were teeth that made claws seem like child’s play, and bloodied his lips.
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