Harlequin Nocturne May 2015 Box Set: Wolf HunterPossessed by a Wolf

Home > Other > Harlequin Nocturne May 2015 Box Set: Wolf HunterPossessed by a Wolf > Page 53
Harlequin Nocturne May 2015 Box Set: Wolf HunterPossessed by a Wolf Page 53

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

To her relief, her watcher wouldn’t be a full-fledged beast tonight, since the moon wouldn’t be full for another twenty-four hours, though he’d be close enough to being a beast to have set off warning signals.

  Her nerves were virtually singing.

  Show yourself, wolf. I know you’re there.

  Abby hoped he wouldn’t actually take her up on the offer. Not a creature this potent. Real toughness, a trait she’d inherited from her father, fell short of the mark when dealing with big male werewolves, a fact brought home by the ribbon of fear weaving its way up her spine over the thought of how excited this Were would be tonight, so near to a full lunar phase. He would be restless.

  Hell, she was restless. And puzzled.

  Whether werewolves were furred-up or not, her intuitive sense of them remained the same. She could pick Weres out of a crowd. She’d always known they were around. But the intensity of the spark igniting deep in her belly at that moment, when stumbling upon this guy, also resembled some sort of messed-up sexual craving. That was new. Brand-new.

  Mixed signals between fear and lust? Had to be, because no way in hell could feelings of lust be right.

  I’m no amateur, you beast.

  I’ve been around.

  In her father’s private and very personal war on werewolves, a war that had started with greed before escalating to be so much more, she had been more than useful.

  The going rate for a wolf hide chimed in at five hundred dollars in the European black markets. For a fully morphed werewolf pelt the dollar decibel moved over, altering that sum to a full ten grand. In another category altogether came rare, pure-blooded Lycan pelts, skinned before the wolf shifted back to its humanlike form. The grand total for remnants of the king of beasts was fifty thousand bucks. Enough to build a swimming pool.

  But Sam Stark’s war on Weres went deeper than dollar signs. The bigger, darker motivation for werewolf haters like her father outclassed thoughts of money and reaping vengeance on a nasty criminal element that had been feasting on humans in Miami and elsewhere for quite some time. Sam’s motivation came under the classification of genocide. The elimination of beings unlike himself.

  The goal of the TTD, an acronym for Take Them Down, was to cull all mutants with moon-tweaked genetics from the population—creatures that could pass for human some of the time, but weren’t really human at all.

  Abby didn’t like the bad stuff. She never accompanied the team when they hunted werewolves, and didn’t care to witness what they brought back. Her awareness of Weres had grown more intense as time passed, and now seemed almost personal.

  Heck, she was the last person to understand how that intuitive connection to Weres worked, but hoped it didn’t go both ways. All she had ever wanted was for werewolf violence against humans in her own backyard to stop. And here she stood, being stalked by one of those same hybrids from a species doing real damage around town.

  So, who is going to show up, and what will you do?

  Without a completely full moon, Weres looked like everyone else, with human heads, shoulders, arms and legs. Some of them would speak English.

  In human form, wolfmen were tall and tautly muscled, with plenty of supersize capabilities, such as being able to smell her from several yards away.

  Like this one must have.

  Would he eventually appear in his human skin cocoon? Fake being a jogger? Play at acting like just another guy out for a midnight stroll in a park that no one in their right mind would trespass in alone without an Uzi— unless that mindless sucker happened to be her, with a very special agenda that made dangerous places her job sites of necessity.

  This park was a nightmare.

  More human bodies were found each year in public parks than anyplace else in Miami, outside of the city center. Bodies turned up without bullet holes or knife wounds, trashed by bite marks and the deep grooves of razor-sharp claws—wounds the Miami PD had no way to explain because not everyone knew about monsters, or that they actually existed.

  The Starks knew.

  So did handfuls of other people.

  Hunters from all over the world came to Miami to join her father’s underground big-game hunting expeditions. Some of those people actually believed they were doing God’s work.

  I know what you are, wolf.

  I know you’re there.

  Reality hit hard. Odds being odds, Abby had figured that someday this kind of accident might happen. In all those years of service to the TTD, she’d never gotten within a couple yards of any big Were. She had never allowed herself to.

  Now what?

  This one was getting closer by the second—close enough to make her blood simmer. The initial quake of recognition that had rocked her backward splintered into smaller quakes. Her knees felt gummy. Her skin was hot. Weres were often volatile and always dangerous. Right then the sense of danger seemed extreme.

  Come out, damn it. Let’s get this over with.

  As Abby saw it, she was fresh out of options. It would have been useless to try to outrun a strong male when chasing prey is what they did so well, and this guy’s presence alone had nearly knocked her off her feet. There hadn’t been time to find cover after her initial awareness of him. Currently, she stood in the open, completely exposed.

  Why don’t you come out?

  Are you toying with me?

  At that moment, Abby hated the moonlight that ruled these beasts more than ever. She hated everything about the moon.

  Shit. How far was she from help?

  She’d been cornered between two of the walls separating one of Miami’s megamansions from the east end of the park. Although she had been in worse places numerous times, being stuck in the open and drenched in moonlight didn’t help her chances.

  Attached to her leg, above her right boot, a knife rested in its sheath. Her cell phone was keyed to her father and the rest of his hunters waiting for news at her father’s bar. Short of using the blade, throwing the phone at a beast in man form would be an unconscionably girlie thing to do.

  For the record, I haven’t been that kind of girl for some time now, she wanted to shout.

  “Damn moon. I hate you.”

  “In that case, this is probably the last place you’d want to be tonight,” a deep masculine voice returned from the shadows.

  Contact.

  He had spoken out loud.

  Pulses of pure adrenaline, fierce and feral, skittered through Abby, producing a series of massive electrical jolts. Her stomach twisted into knots. Her teeth slammed together. Staring at what stepped out from under the trees, her hands flew to her neck in an automatic gesture of self-defense, as if in man form or not, her visitor might go for her jugular.

  And God help her, part of her untimely inertia was due to the fact that her impression of this guy, from afar, hadn’t been wrong.

  This sucker was one hundred percent intimidating.

  Copyright © 2015 by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  ISBN-13: 9781460381229

  Possessed by a Wolf

  Copyright © 2015 by Naomi Lester

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business estab
lishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.

  www.Harlequin.com

  Dive into dark, sensual and often dangerous territory, where the normal and the paranormal collide. Take a bite out of romance with Harlequin® Nocturne.

  Two new titles available every month.

  www.Harlequin.com

  www.Facebook.com/HarlequinBooks

  www.Twitter.com/HarlequinBooks

  ISBN-13: 9781460391204

  Copyright © 2015 Harlequin Books S.A.

  The publisher acknowledges the copyright holders of the individual works as follows:

  Wolf Hunter

  Copyright © 2015 by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  Possessed by a Wolf

  Copyright © 2015 by Naomi Lester

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  www.Harlequin.com

 

 

 


‹ Prev