by Elsa Jade
He whirled back to face her, surprise taking some of the tension out of his jaw. A lock of his dark hair curled over his brow, and he looked younger, more like the boy she remembered.
But even though they’d stepped away from the neon, his eyes still glittered with that eerie mix of preternatural hues.
“Maddie,” he said. The two-syllable beat of her name on his lips echoed like a heartbeat, reaching deep inside her to touch desires she’d thought she’d left behind. “I didn’t mean to hurt you—”
“You didn’t hurt me,” she snapped, folding her arms under her breasts as if she could stifle the thudding pain in her chest. “You fucked me and you left me. Totally different.”
“No.” His voice dropped almost to a whisper. “You left. Just as I knew you would, as I knew you had to.”
Even though she wanted to stomp away from him or run back to the bar just to show him she could, her feet felt rooted in the rock, unwilling to carry her away from him again. “That’s not true. I would’ve stayed.”
For you. But she didn’t say it.
He shifted his stare out to the darkness. “The only ones who should stay in this town are those who know what this place does to people, or those willing to turn a blind eye.” His sidelong glance at her flashed amber and crimson. “That was never you.”
Unease chipped away at the anger she wanted to hold tight. Was it something his father had done, something illegal or otherwise disreputable? The older Villalobos had been a brusque man of little humor. Not surprising, perhaps, in a rancher of his age who’d worked so hard for an unforgiving land. Even though his only son was popular and courteous and beloved by the town, he’d been strict, more than seemed necessary. Although, Maddie conceded, he’d also been responsible for Kane’s cousins, Rafael and Bastian, neither of whom had been as conscientious or admired. She hadn’t seen any of the Villalobos boys since her return. Until now.
And all those old memories were flooding back, like Angel Creek after the first flush of spring snowmelt. Fast and dangerous, churning with winter wreckage and undertows that could suck down the unwary.
Despite having Darling’s friendship, she’d always felt like an outsider. But in the years since, she hadn’t found anyplace else either. It was like she never felt at home, even in her own skin.
Until she’d fallen for Kane.
For all her high school years she’d followed him with puppy-dog eyes, and he’d never noticed. Fair enough, since prettier, smarter, and skinnier girls had followed him too, usually with more than their eyes. By the time the end of senior year was looming and with it, seemingly, the end of their lives, she’d finally been willing to act on her desperate yearnings. She wanted what he had, what he was—strong, beautiful, intimately connected to the world pulsing around him—at a time when she’d felt like the most awkward, unsightly, teenage mess anywhere.
When out of all the girls, he’d asked her to the Angel Spring Dance, she’d thought he’d seen her, really seen her. She’d been floating the week before the dance, then sick to her stomach the night of, fearing he wouldn’t show, then living the dream for a handful of hours.
For just a little while, he made her believe she was special, that she’d finally found her place: in his arms. And then it was over.
Only here she was again, floating and fearful at the same time, still wanting what she hadn’t yet found.
But this time, she’d take what she wanted, no expectations, no surprises.
*
Kane had seen that hunting look in Maddie Joplin’s changeable hazel eyes before.
And it terrified him.
She has a seer’s eyes, his father had told him. Seers were a threat because they combined the worst traits of dreamers and doers. They sensed what others willfully ignored, and they wouldn’t be stopped in their quest to unearth the truth.
“And we have secrets we must keep,” the elder Villalobos had told his son and his brother’s sons when they were little. Told them more than once, sometimes at the end of a belt if he felt they needed the reinforcement. They’d never known a time when humans really believed the stories of the fiends and nightmares that haunted their history, the shapechangers that could walk among them, but never be one of them.
Despite the bruises and welts that had decorated his backside until his kind’s formidable metabolism healed him, Kane had thought his father exaggerated. But that was before his uncle was killed by hunters, humans who did believe in monsters more than Kane had believed in them. When Bas and Rafe had come to live in Angels Rest, he’d understood why they hated humans so much, but he hadn’t felt the same.
He’d still thought there was a chance. Weren’t there shapeshifter packs and clans living throughout the world, existing in secret but in peace? If only the hunters could be made to see that shifters weren’t a menace. Different, yes, but not evil.
On the verge of claiming his alpha manhood, he’d looked into Maddie’s seer eyes—shimmering with all the many colors of the agates that waited in out-of-the-way places of the desert and mountains—and sensed she too was still searching for a place to belong, where she could be who she was meant to be.
If any human could believe him—believe in him—and maybe bring the shapeshifters out into the light of day, it was Maddie.
He knew she’d always felt she was an outsider, just like he felt, although her reasons were all surface, like the garnet stud piercing her nose, and his were all deep inside. He’d watched from a distance while she tried to tame the unruly umber waves of her hair with torture tools and stinky goo at the same time she hid her lush curves with baggy jeans and oversized sweatshirts. He’d wanted to tell her she was squashing the power he sensed struggling to escape, but he knew it wasn’t his place to tell her anything. So he could only watch and wait, until that damn dance when the spring mating moon had been waxing and he could hold himself back no longer.
She’d given him her virginity with a ferocity that shocked them both, and she’d taken a good pound of his flesh in return: she’d taken his heart.
To him, at that age, it had seemed like a fair trade. He’d left her that night with a promise to find her the next day while in his mind’s eye danced visions of a moonstone ring and all the secrets he would tell her.
By the time he got home, the moon was setting, and his father gave him two choices: let her go, or see her die.
“Forget the seer girl,” he’d said. “She’ll only bring trouble and the end of the pack. Her kind are always looking ahead to what might be instead of what is. We don’t need dreamers when we just need to stay alive. When your mating season comes, you take a quiet girl who won’t raise a fuss at the change.”
“The change?” Kane had said incredulously. “You mean moving here, to the ass end of nowhere, or, you know, becoming a werewolf? Assuming this nameless girl survives the change.”
His father had glowered, vicious yellow glowing in his irises. “If she doesn’t survive, she won’t fuss at all, will she? But make no mistake: I’ll make sure the seer girl doesn’t survive either way.”
And Kane had been forced to admit that maybe the hunters weren’t entirely wrong about who was a monster.
His father hadn’t always been so ruthless. His gentle mother had tempered the fanatical edge that had kept the Angels Rest shapeshifters off the hunters’ radar for decades. But when she died, taking an unborn child with her, all that softness was lost.
He’d traveled the world, first in the army, then with military contractors, and he’d been forced to admit his father was right. There was no place on Earth where shifters were out in the open. They kept to themselves, cautious and silent. And he had come to understand that was the best choice. Hell, humans couldn’t even stop killing each other when they weren’t destroying the natural world that sustained their very lives. What chance they’d be welcoming to another branch on the sentient species tree?
And now, with his father’s death, he would become the pack alpha as soon as he claime
d a mate.
But he was not going to be the hero he’d always dreamed. He wasn’t going to free the Mesa Diablo pack from the danger and loneliness of their isolation, and the knowledge bit at him with rabid teeth. His cousins and the dozens of mated pairs and lone wolf males hidden around the remote Four Corners region—some wolf born, some bitten and force shifted—looked to him for leadership, and he couldn’t fail them. The most he could hope for now was to keep their secrets for another hundred years.
And if that meant sacrificing his own wants by the time the mating moon waned, so be it.
But until then…
Chapter Three
‡
Kane took a step across the parking lot toward Maddie, admiring the way she widened her stance to challenge him. She had one hand propped on her outthrust hip, emphasizing the nip of her waist under her thin hoodie, and her volatile agate eyes sparked with temper at his long silence.
“Where have you been all this time?” he wondered aloud.
After a moment, she answered, “Here and there. Mostly there.”
He nodded. “Yet here we are.”
“Again,” she spoke the word echoing in his mind.
“I missed you.” It was a weakness to admit, and as alpha he would never let himself be weak again.
But he wasn’t the first alpha yet.
Though she lifted her pointy little chin with haughty disinterest, a rosy stain colored her cheeks, brighter than the garnet tucked in the groove of her ire-flared nostril. “I never once thought of you.”
The growl in her voice almost made him smile. If she’d been wolf born or already force shifted and wise to the ways of pack, he would have courted her. But he didn’t dare expose his people. And he wouldn’t risk her life to the change.
He should walk away from Maddie as he’d done once before. But he wasn’t that idealistic boy anymore, who still thought he could save his world. He’d be like every pack alpha before him: cunning always, cruel when necessary. Before the spring mating moon reached its zenith over Mesa Diablo, he’d trick some mousy female with no prospects into accepting his bite, his pack, the dangers of werewolf life. He’d hope she survived the change, to stand beside him when he became alpha to the pack, balancing his lone wolf’s wariness and aggression with the mating bond.
But for tonight, the damn moon could wait.
Slowly, he reached for her. So slowly she could’ve run if she wanted—and he swore to himself that he wouldn’t chase. Not that he gave himself any credit for giving her the out. She’d always been one to stand her ground. Sure enough, she raised her chin another notch, defiant. Impervious to her anger, the night breeze toyed with her shoulder-length hair. In daylight, Kane knew the strands were exactly the same brown shade touched with red as the mesa cliffs where his ancestors had carved petroglyphs in the volcanic basalt. He let one lock curl around his finger.
“You finally stopped fighting your hair.” He tightened another loop over his knuckle.
“No, it just won.” Despite the note of ire in her voice, she inclined her head toward his hand.
Her warm breath fluttered over the pulse point of his inner wrist, and he stifled a groan. It had been so long. He’d had lovers since her…but none like her.
So, so slowly that it strained even his inhuman muscles, he wrapped his fist in her hair. He reveled in the springy, natural texture. His fingertips grazed her tender nape. A wolf would’ve bowed to his dominating touch, but she pressed back against him.
She gazed up at him, hazel eyes half lidded. “You putting the moves on me, Kane?”
“Very slowly,” he admitted.
“Well, get going. It’s been forever.”
Before he could even raise an eyebrow, she closed the small distance between them and surfed her hands up his chest. Her fingernails flicked across the snaps on the pockets over his pecs, and he felt the subtle click reverberate through him, like a sniper’s round delicately chambered. Back in the day, he’d always known he was in her crosshairs, aiming for his head, his heart.
But this time, it was much less lofty parts of him responding to the sensual peril.
“I can’t promise you any more now than I did then,” he warned her.
“Don’t worry, I trust you less now.”
That stung. But he deserved it. More than he deserved her.
And yet she pushed up onto her toes and parted her lips. God, he remembered that mouth. Too wide—and too smart—for conventional beauty, the dusky red colored his dreams during long, lonely nights in hotter deserts and colder mountains than Four Corners.
His fingers tightened reflexively in her hair, tilting her head back just enough to expose her throat. A submissive pose, the pulse of her life’s blood laid bare, but the vulnerability was all his. The smell of a day’s work—dust and sweat and diesel—lay over her, but underneath that, the musky, resinous perfume of the firewheel flowers that bloomed through the heat wafted up from the vee neck of her hoodie. Her skin scent, by which he could track her anywhere. He took a deep, huffing breath as his wolf rose to share in the moment.
The part of him that passed as human urged him to let her go. She was not some rabbit to be just a moment’s distraction and a hunger assuaged.
But his wolf wasn’t crippled by the memory of ten years ago and knew morning might never come. All that mattered was here, now, with the mating season moon curved high above the black mesa blocking the stars.
And the wolf thought Maddie would be very, very tasty.
*
This was a bad idea, with what were you thinking? written all over it. And still Maddie ached with anticipation through the eternal moment of Kane’s lips poised above her own.
His hand was fisted tightly in her hair, but his knuckles made a cradle for her skull. The union of aggression and protection awoke something primal in her core. She dragged in a stuttering breath, suddenly more afraid of what was in her than the dark passion in his half-closed eyes. Her lungs filled with the smell of him: the sharp, fresh scent of juniper and sage. She remembered that he’d tried to hide the wildness with teen colognes, but she’d always recognized the untamed intensity underneath. At the time, the lure had been irresistible—to revel in that power herself. But she knew better now. Didn’t she?
She exhaled to give voice to some common sense maybe, but then his mouth came down on hers, and all rational thought burned to ash.
It was as if no time had passed between their last kiss and this one, as if no other bodies or bad choices had come between them. His lips slanted hard and hungry and timeless across hers, already parted to inhale her gasp. The hot, wet crush sent a backwash of lust coursing through her body, and her cleft dampened with wanting.
She snaked her hands up his chest to frame his face. Despite the late hour, his jaw was smooth, like he was still that untried boy she’d watched from afar.
But the firm bulge nudging her belly when he yanked her against him, that was all aroused male in his prime.
She hummed in pleasure, and he growled back. The low rumble zinged down her spine, half thrill, half fear.
It kind of sounded like…
He licked the inner seam of her lip while his hands slid down to cup her ass, and she forgot what that almost musical note reminded her of. He molded her curves to his taut frame. One grind of her pelvis against his thigh made her moan; a second almost made her come. His heartbeat hammered through her breasts. Knowing he was rocked by this encounter as much as she gave her the courage to break the kiss.
“Follow me,” she murmured.
Lacing her fingers through his, she dragged him away from the lights and windows of the roadhouse.
Behind Gypsy’s, a scrubby slope angled down to the creek. On summer evenings, the lawn would host musicians and those intrepid dancers willing to brave a twisted ankle in the tough crabgrass. But tonight, the darkness was empty, quiet except for the whisper of the inky water.
Maddie led Kane to the octagonal gazebo at the creek’s e
dge. For all his heavy boots and big feet, his movements were silent on the soft pine floorboards as he turned to lift her onto the wide railing and stepped between her spread knees. The hushed ploink of some tiny creature escaping into the water made more of a disturbance that the losing of her inhibitions.
She ripped his shirt wide open, the pearl closures parting with staccato echoes of her zeal, and fanned her fingers across his broad chest. God, he was built like a beast, all sleek, hard muscle and smooth, fever-hot skin. Too damn sexy. She almost hated him for it but reminded herself she’d moved past her feelings for him a long time ago. Coming back here was her first step in becoming her own woman. She didn’t need anything from him anymore—she just wanted him. For fun, for old time’s sake.
For a night.
She shoved the shirt off his heavy shoulders and down his ripped arms then paused with a murmur of surprise. “What’s this?”
He let the shirt flutter to the floor. “Pushups, bench presses, deadlifts…”
“Silly. I mean the ink. You didn’t have them before.” She traced her fingers over the tattoos marking up both arms. Lunar light shone through a couple missing slats in the gazebo roof, making the black ink in his golden skin look even darker, almost alive as his muscles jumped reflexively under her caress. “The petroglyphs?” Primitive, stylized figures of half-human creatures entwined with horned moons and radial suns. The jagged lines of mountain ranges and the undulating curves of waves connected the symbols and followed the contours of his powerful body. “It’s like a map to find your way home.”
“I never forgot.”
Her questing fingertips found the first patch of rough skin under his left arm. Where a ballistic vest would have left a hole and something had gotten through to leave a hole in him. “Seems like you found some trouble on the way back.”
His breath caught, though she could tell the circular scars were long healed. “I won.”
Right. She’d spent their years apart learning to ignore her hair. Meanwhile he’d apparently challenged bullets and come out the other side. But she wondered what had driven him away when he’d already had everything. Or so it had seemed to her.