Baby, I'm Howling for You

by Christine Warren

  Too bad She hadn’t bothered to warn Renny about the big, bad wolf who had snuck up on her while she retrieved her valuables. It might have saved her a bruised tailbone.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Renny blinked, surprised by the vehemence of that growled question. “Um, I came to get my stuff back.” Duh.

  Mick glared down at her, not bothering to help her up off the ground. “I said I’d bring you out here in the morning. It’s not even eight o’clock. The garage won’t open till nine. You couldn’t wait another hour?”

  “I’ve already put you to enough trouble. When I woke up, you were gone, so I figured I could take care of this myself and save you the aggravation.”

  “How’s it look like that worked out?”

  His thunderous scowl, straining jaw muscles, and clenched fists pointed to a less than successful outcome. Renny knew that facing an alpha wolf’s rage should have her trembling in her skin, but her instincts voiced no warning of danger. In fact, her wolf preened under such focused attention from its mate.

  Renny wanted to smack it. “Look—”

  Somewhere nearby, a cell phone rang. Her cell phone.

  Mick’s head shot up, and he looked around the mess of the ransacked car. “What the hell is that?”

  Renny didn’t bother to answer. She was already crawling into the open hatch and following the digital trilling to the space under the driver’s seat. She reached beneath the upholstery and fumbled around until her fingers closed on a familiar, slim rectangle. It must have fallen from her purse during the festival of destruction.

  She twisted back up to a sitting position and peered down at the display. She barely caught a glimpse before her vision was cut off by the impact of flying fabric. She snatched at the obstruction with her free hand and found herself with a fistful of flannel. Mick had thrown his shirt at her face.

  He also used the momentary distraction to lean into the cargo area and grab the phone from her hand. He accepted the call before she had time to protest.

  “Who’s this?” he snarled into the device. He kept his eyes on Renny and made a gesture to indicate he expected her to put on the shirt.

  Crap. In the anger over what the coyotes had done to her things, she’d completely forgotten that she was sitting on the side of the road bare-assed naked. She shrugged into the oversize garment.

  Her acute hearing and his close proximity allowed Renny to hear both sides of the conversation. She heard the long pause before a voice replied, “Where’s Renny?”

  Geoffrey’s voice had her belly clenching and her hands hurrying to fasten the buttons on Mick’s shirt. Instinct drove her to cover herself, even though the coyote couldn’t see her. Her beast couldn’t stand the idea of being vulnerable around even the sound of her stalker.

  “I asked first, asshole.”

  “You sound familiar.” Renny could picture the coyote’s yellow eyes narrowing, his sharp features drawing in as he frowned. “Tell me your name and where to find Renny Landry, and I’ll tell you who I am.”

  “Fuck you.”

  She heard Geoffrey growling over the cellular connection. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, asshole. I know Renny’s last location, and I will find her again. It’s just a matter of time. And when I find her, I’ll find you, too.”

  Mick snorted. “Remind my knees to start shaking. I’m going to assume you’re the limp-dick coyote who’s been stalking Renny all the way from California. Well, I have a message for you: She’s safe now. You can’t get to her, so be a good little dog-boy and leave her alone. Do that, and you won’t have to get hurt.”

  Renny winced. The overt disdain in the wolf’s voice told everyone what he thought of Geoffrey’s threats, and he didn’t sound impressed. Instead, he sounded dismissive and intimidating—two things guaranteed to enflame the coyote’s fury.

  “I don’t know who the fuck you think you are,” Geoffrey hissed, sounding so enraged that she could picture his face turning red, the veins popping out on his throat and forehead. “But I’m only going to say this once. The wolf bitch belongs to me, and no one stands between Geoffrey Hilliard and what’s his. If you do, you’ll die.”

  Because she was watching so intently, Renny saw the moment when Mick’s expression changed. She saw his nostrils flare and his pupils expand and knew even before he spoke that Geoffrey had said something surprising and infuriating to the wolf.

  “Geoff fucking Hilliard.” Mick snorted and gave a chuckle that had absolutely nothing to do with humor. “Never thought I’d hear from you again. How’s that cut on your throat doing? I bet that left a scar.”

  Renny felt her eyes widen. Did the alpha wolf know the coyote? How? Why? How the fuck could the world possibly be that small?

  “Michael Kennedy Garry.” Geoffrey’s voice had gone soft and full of astonishment. “After all these years. And here I’d hoped you were dead. You were the sort to find trouble wherever you went, after all. The folks around here still talk about you, you know. About how you destroyed your pack and left the bystanders out to dry.”

  “I’m no Garry,” the wolf growled. “I left that name dead next to my grandfather, and I’ll piss on it the same way I pissed on him. Don’t use it again.”

  A laugh vibrated through the phone, menacing but somehow unnatural, as if stress as much as amusement had set it off. “You never could get past your daddy issues, Michael. Or your granddaddy issues. I see that hasn’t changed.”

  “Neither has my ability to kick your ass, Geoff. Or have you forgotten the last time you tried to challenge me?”

  Holy shit. Geoffrey Hilliard and Mick Kennedy Whoever-he-was knew each other. By the sound of it, they knew each other well.

  Renny’s head spun as her mind raced through the scraps of information she could tease out of the conversation so far. Obviously, the two men had met and done so often enough or closely enough to not just know each other’s names, but for Geoffrey to know details about Mick’s family history. And Mick knew Geoffrey at least well enough to have physically fought with and defeated him in the past. When? Where? How?

  What the fuck?

  And had the wolf really just implied that he’d killed his own grandfather?

  Geoffrey snarled, “Things have changed in the last eight years, Michael. I don’t think you’d have such an easy time of it now. I’m not a scrawny college kid anymore.”

  “And I’m not worried about upsetting your sister.”

  “Elizabeth was already dead.”

  “Not to me.”

  More growling. “Dead is dead, wolf.”

  “As I’d be happy to demonstrate for you.” Mick blinked and focused on Renny again. Something in his face told her that for the past few minutes, he hadn’t really been seeing her. He’d been somewhere else inside his head. Now his eyes narrowed. “Stay away from Renny Landry, Geoff, or I’ll come after you again. Only this time, I won’t be grieving for my mate, and I won’t be holding back.”

  His thumb shifted over the phone screen and ended the call. Renny watched him warily.

  When he said nothing, she cleared her throat. “So.” She searched for something to say that wouldn’t get her throat ripped out. “You know Geoffrey Hilliard, huh? What a coincidence.”

  Mick slid her cell phone into the pocket of his jeans and turned his back on her. “If you can find anything worth saving, grab it now. We’re leaving.”

  “Hey, wait a second!”

  Renny had bitten her tongue through the entire phone conversation, but now she wanted answers. How was it possible that she had collapsed onto the property of a man who knew her stalker? Talk about “of all the gin joints.”

  Mick ignored her, and she frowned. She scrambled from the SUV, reached out, and grabbed his arm before he could walk away. “Mick, wait—”

  She didn’t get out another word.

  The moment her hand touched his skin, he went off like a nuclear warhead. At least, she felt as if she’d been h
it by one. The wolf reversed their grips, seizing her by the wrist she’d held out to him and jerking her toward him. She crashed into his body and felt the impact as if his muscles had turned to concrete. He was hard all over.

  All over.

  His mouth slammed down on hers, all heat and hunger and barely controlled fury. She wasn’t entirely sure what he was mad at, whether it was she or Geoffrey who had earned his wrath, but when the taste of him sank into her, she no longer cared.

  Coffee and pine and thick, powerful musk combined on her tongue. The flavor was so rich, it made her head spin. Seriously. If he hadn’t had her wrapped up against him by then, she would have toppled over. Her legs went weak and threatened to buckle, and still he kissed her as though he wanted to devour her whole.

  For the first few seconds, shock kept her frozen. She couldn’t do anything but let him kiss her. Not that she suffered from it, of course. In the back of her mind, her wolf had thrown back its head, howled for joy, and promptly thrown itself over to wriggle around on its back like a golden retriever begging for belly rubs. Their mate was kissing them!

  Then the initial surprise wore off, and Renny did the only thing she possibly could. She grabbed on and kissed him back with every ounce of passion in her soul. If this turned out to be a momentary aberration, and he went back to trying to ignore her existence the way he had the night before, she intended to enjoy every single toe-curling second of it while it lasted.

  Judging by the way her belly clenched, her insides melted, and her pussy dampened, her body was totally on board. As far as it was concerned, she could just lie down on the asphalt and let her mate have her. Road rash and passing vehicles be damned. This was the kiss she’d been waiting for all her life.

  If any last thread of doubt had existed in her about whether Mick was really her mate, the kiss burned it up like the fuse on a stick of dynamite. He feasted on her mouth, his tongue mating with hers like he wanted to taste every inch of her from the inside out. The feeling was mutual. She felt herself drowning in the essence of him, and her body began to ache with the need to feel him inside her, above her, behind her, touching her everywhere, in every way, all at once.

  Fuck reality. She would defy the laws of physics if she had to, but Renny needed him. Now.

  And then he yanked himself away from her as violently as he’d pulled her to him. One minute she was drowning in pleasure, and the next she was just drowning. Or at least, that’s what it felt like, because at some point during that kiss, she had forgotten how to breathe.

  She stood there, mouth open, lungs straining, and Mick just clenched his jaw and turned away. “Let’s go.”

  Go?

  A voice inside Renny’s head laughed a little. No, scratch that. It giggled a bit hysterically. She couldn’t feel her arms or legs, couldn’t get oxygen to her brain, and he wanted her to master the art of independent locomotion? Was he high?

  He was not, she realized, as sanity slowly began to leak back into her body. Her lungs expanded in a gasp, and she staggered for a second before she could catch herself. She’d been the one who’d gotten high, and it turned out that the alpha wolf was her drug of choice.

  She looked down and around in a daze. Where was she again? Oh, yeah. On the side of the highway, naked except for another borrowed shirt that smelled of her mate, watching the male walk away from her as though she had plague, leprosy, fleas, and a raging case of shingles, all at the same time.

  If he kept this up, she was going to develop a complex.

  His words finally penetrated the haze of lust he’d created in her mind, and she stumbled forward a few steps. Get her things and go with him, he’d demanded. Her “things” lay in shredded, stinking piles all over the pavement. Her emergency kit, hidden from the coyotes, was all that had survived, and she’d already recovered that.

  Well, the kit and her phone. The one Mick had spoken to Geoffrey on and then shoved into his own pocket. When she looked at the wolf stalking away from her, she felt pretty certain now wasn’t the time to ask for it back.

  She followed Mick to the beefy pickup truck he’d parked a few yards in front of her abandoned vehicle. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t heard him drive up earlier, let alone stalk toward her across the gravel-strewn pavement. Way to be on your guard, Ren.

  Mick said not a word to her, just slid behind the wheel of the truck and waited while she climbed into the passenger seat. He maintained the silence even as he put the machine in gear and pulled out onto the empty highway.

  They drove for what felt like forever in a tense, tangible silence. Tangible as in if she’d been more musically inclined, she was pretty sure she could play “Chopsticks” on it. And probably display her favorite photos, all of Liberace’s candelabra, and some small, tasteful statuary.

  She waited for him to say something, anything, for several minutes before she realized it wasn’t going to happen. The man who had barely spoken to her last night and done so only to yell at her this morning was back in control. He seemed happy to pretend she didn’t even exist, let alone that she was sitting less than two feet away from him wearing nothing but his shirt.

  Talk about committing to your strategy. The man hadn’t just wedded his, she felt pretty sure he’d worked it somehow into his tattoos.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out from his scent, his silence, and his body language that if Renny tried to initiate a conversation about that kiss, she’d find herself out of luck. Or possibly under the tires of his truck. His “Don’t Go There” signs were flashing in bold, bright neon. Still, she had to do something or the silence was going to smash her into the pavement like something out of a Road Runner cartoon.

  She searched for a safe topic, decided after another glance at his face that there wasn’t one, and settled on just asking the questions she figured she most deserved the answers to. Like, who was he that he managed to have some hidden backstory with Geoffrey Hilliard?

  “So, if your last name isn’t Garry, what is it?” she finally asked.

  For a minute she thought he wouldn’t answer. His gaze remained fixed on the road, his fingers curled around the steering wheel. He might have looked at ease if she hadn’t seen the way his knuckles stood out a stark white against his tanned hands.

  “Fischer,” he grunted.

  “Mick Fischer, not Michael Kennedy Garry.” She digested that and felt a spark ignite in her memory. Something about that name, or rather those two names together, meant something to her. Something significant.

  When the spark flared into a bonfire, she almost slid onto the floorboards. Wolves. California.

  Garry.

  Fischer.

  Elizabeth Hilliard.

  Dead grandfather.

  The facts served as kindling for a sudden conflagration of realization. All at once, the mysterious alpha wolf who had saved her life and rocked her world became a lot less mysterious and everything fell into place.

  Mick Fischer was Michael Garry, the grandson and heir to the pack alpha of the Sawmill, California, wolf pack. He was the one that the people in the town she had moved to just a few years ago still whispered about, after checking to make sure no one could hear.

  The Garrys had led the Sawmill Pack for generations, the most recent being a senior wolf named Abraham Garry. The alpha had a reputation for stable, efficient rule achieved through tyranny and corruption. When his son had mated against his will and then died shortly after childbirth killed Patrick Garry’s mate, the old man had taken his grandson in and raised him as his heir, but not as a beloved family member. The younger wolf was blamed for his father’s death and expected to walk the straight-and-narrow path from which his father had strayed.

  Yeah, that apparently hadn’t happened.

  Another generation of Garry wolves had mated against Abraham’s wishes. Eight years ago, Michael Garry’s half-wolf, half-coyote mate had been murdered. When he’d found out that the grandfather who had raised him from infancy had ordered the kill, Michael had t
orn the entire pack apart. He had hunted down and killed the enforcers who had taken his wife’s life, slaughtered the pack’s beta and corrupt hierarchy, and then ripped out his grandfather’s throat for commanding it.

  And after it all, he had turned his back on the tattered remains of his pack and walked away. He had disappeared from Sawmill eight years ago, and no one there had seen or heard from him since.

  The power vacuum he left in his wake was what had allowed Geoffrey Hilliard to claim the abandoned wolf territory. As the half brother of the alpha-heir’s mate, he had the nearest thing to a hereditary claim to the leadership of the small lumber town’s shifter community. He had stepped into that opening and then started a war when the locals objected. When the dust settled, he emerged as alpha and Sawmill had become a coyote town.

  And then they had advertised for a librarian.

  And Renny had answered.

  Small world?

  She closed her eyes and let her head drop back against her seat.

  Try small chance at survival.

  Renny had just realized that her destined mate was a man who had lost his own beloved wife and killed those responsible for her death. And if that weren’t enough, he also turned out to be the ex-brother-in-law of the coyote who wanted to rape her and kill her. And, unless she missed her guess, kill her newly discovered mate as well.

  To top it off, she’d brought all of it down on the town she’d always dreamed of as her perfect sanctuary.

  Fuck. Her. Life.

  Chapter Four

  Mick clutched the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip and tried to think up as many words as possible to summarize what had just happened. Debacle, disaster, fuckup, mistake, snafu, and (his personal favorite) cluster fuck. Epic cluster fuck. Any one of them would do to describe the monumentally wrong decision he had made in kissing Renny Landry.

  Hot. Erotic. Delicious. Arousing. Mine, his wolf countered.

  Mick seriously considered what effect on his human half it would have if he just had the Goddess-damned animal neutered. The vet claimed it was just a simple snip.