Awakened by the Wolf

by Kristal Hollis

  Cassie resisted a retort about not being his maid. By the time she thought of it, the shower was running. Barging into the bathroom to make the grand announcement was probably a bad idea.

  She headed into the kitchen for a broom. A bloodied nose and bruised balls were bad enough. She didn’t want Brice to cut his feet on broken glass.

  She flipped on the kitchen light and stared, slack-jawed.

  Oh, no.

  “He didn’t.”

  Oh, yeah. He did.

  The fog numbing her senses evaporated. In its place came the startling reality that although Brice Walker was a wolfman, he was also a pig.

  Cassie no longer felt sorry about the pain she’d inflicted. If he’d been standing in the kitchen at that moment, she would’ve beat him with the broomstick. He could’ve eaten anything else in the whole darn kitchen, but no. He had to eat her pie.

  The freshly baked, made-from-scratch cherry pie promised to Rafe Wyatt in lieu of a cash payment for her clunker’s scheduled oil change. Now she’d have to cancel the car service. Again!

  She glared at the white dribbles of milk and red splatters of pie filling on the counter. In the sink sat a dirty plate. A sticky spoon. A suspiciously spotless pie pan.

  Gross!

  Brice had licked it clean. Cassie knew he had. Probably drank straight from the milk carton, too.

  “Men!” It seemed some male traits were shared between species.

  Grumbling, she grabbed a cloth and scrubbed the dishes and countertop clean before hurrying to the bedroom with a death grip on the broom. By the time she dumped the last of the broken glass into the trash, her irritation had mellowed. To be fair, Brice hadn’t known she bartered pies for services when he ate it.

  Cassie tossed her dirty nightshirt into the laundry basket. She had found the worn baseball jersey on the closet floor when she moved in and couldn’t resist wearing it to bed. She should’ve known borrowing something without permission would bring bad luck.

  She knelt beside her battered suitcases and sorted through her clothes until she found a comfortable pair of shorts and a thin, long-sleeved T-shirt. The shower shut off, so she dressed quickly and straightened the bed. By the time she’d finished, Brice had yet to emerge from the bathroom. Suspicion made her glare down the hallway.

  Brice had commandeered her new razor to shave that scruff from his face. The certainty of it threatened to rekindle her temper. Good sense snuffed it out. No matter the history between her and Margaret, Cassie was the hired help. She shouldn’t make too many waves.

  Massaging the muscles in her neck, she dutifully pulled his clothes from the closet and laid them on the bed. She’d play butler to a grown wolfman if it meant she would continue to have a place to live.

  After rummaging through the dresser drawers, she called out, “I can’t find your underwear.”

  “I don’t own any,” he answered from the hall.

  A zip of excitement swirled in her lower belly. She slammed the drawer shut. “I didn’t need to know that.”

  Clean-shaven, with his damp hair slicked back but for one rebellious wave, so black it almost looked blue, tumbling over his formidable brow, Brice leaned against the door frame, naked. Of course.

  She tried not to look at his penis, but there it was again. A massive rod of rigid flesh, jutting proudly from a nest of dark hair. Human or not, Brice Walker was definitely all male.

  An arid wind whipped through her being. On its wings rode the devil himself. With a stern mental shove, she shooed him away.

  Circumstances being what they were, Cassie couldn’t afford to give in to temptations that she had no experience managing. She’d focused on work and school. Allowed no time for boys, or men. No distractions, no detours. Nothing could get in the way of finishing her business degree—her golden ticket to a better future.

  “Didn’t I tell you to cover that thing?” Proud that her voice didn’t squeak, she tossed him the jeans and shirt.

  Humor crinkled his eyes, and seemed to simmer with a mischievous desire she would do well not to encourage. “Most women can’t wait to get me out of my clothes.”

  Cassie understood why.

  Made for the cover of GQ, his face had the most perfectly balanced features she’d ever seen on a man. Slightly swollen from her ramming palm maneuver, his straight nose rested between sharp chiseled cheeks arrowed toward his generous, masculine mouth, the corners turned up in taunting tease.

  “I’m not most women,” she said, watching him dress.

  The dark hairs that dusted his limbs and swathed the broad expanse of his chest did little to disguise the angry, dark slashes running up his sinewy arms and across his strapping shoulders. More streaks scored his left hip bone down to his knee. He favored the right leg, which bore deep, saw-toothed indentions around his entire calf.

  Her gaze lifted to the jagged, purplish-red half-moon marks on his neck. Proof something had tried to rip out his throat. She touched hers in sympathy.

  When Cassie had stumbled upon Brice’s room during one of her mother’s multitude of hospitalizations, he’d lain still as death, covered in layers of bandages. On a ventilator, he opened his eyes for a few mere seconds and locked onto her heart.

  The front page of the Maico Monitor had heralded Walker Boys Mauled by Feral Boar.

  “You weren’t attacked by wild hogs, were you?” Cassie’s throat burned at the savagery he’d endured.

  Brice zipped his jeans and slid his arms into his shirtsleeves. His long, nimble fingers fastened the small, flat buttons with a fluid grace. “No,” he answered, his voice a soft caress.

  Chill bumps puckered on her skin, though Cassie was far from cold. She rubbed them off. “Was it another Wahima?”

  “Wa-hi-ya.” Exasperation lit his eyes, though none was reflected in his tone. “Four Wahyas attacked while my brother and I were hunting.”

  “Is that how you became one of them?” Cassie sat on the bed and tucked her hands beneath her thighs to resist the urge to offer physical comfort. She needed to keep a tight rein on the feelings Brice awakened. Nothing good would come from setting them loose.

  Brice’s sigh sounded weary, or maybe frustrated, considering his mouth’s downward turn. “Wahyas are born, not made.”

  “Wait. You were born that way?”

  Brice’s shoulders bowed like a cobra ready to strike. “Stop looking at me like I’m some sort of freak.”

  Touchy. Touchy.

  “Sorry.” Cassie hugged her knees to her chest. “I’m trying to understand.”

  Brice’s nostrils flared, sucking in a long, deep breath that expanded his chest. He appeared to be counting again. She could almost hear the numbers tick one by one until he reached thirty.

  “It’s probable humans and Wahyas share a common ancestor. Somewhere along the evolutionary trail, our DNA metamorphosed, and we developed the ability to shape-shift into wolves. We aren’t mutants, we aren’t diseased and we aren’t monsters.” His emphasis reeked of sarcasm. “We’re civilized.”

  “Then why were you attacked?”

  “They were rogues.” Brice sat next to her. Not so close they touched. Not so far as to leave a space.

  Cassie’s body hummed from the energy passing between them. The tiny vibrations sharpened her awareness of her own femininity in stark contrast with Brice’s overwhelming masculinity.

  “Rogues?” She coughed to disguise the breathiness in her voice. Seriously, she needed to figure out how to moderate her body’s responses to him. Quickly. Before she became the rabbit trapped in a foxhole alongside the big bad wolf.

  “Rogues are Wahyas who have no loyalty to a pack,” Brice said. “Most are curs who prey on the weak.”

  “You don’t strike me as weak.” Defying the scars and pronounced limp, Brice projected a will
of steel and the muscle to enforce it. Someone would have to be insane to believe him weak.

  “I stepped in a steel trap.” Brice lifted his right leg, though his jeans hid the old injury. “The rouges saw an opportunity and took it. Mason died protecting me.”

  Cassie’s heart swelled in her throat. Brice had nearly died, too.

  While everyone else inundated him with their sobs and wails, waiting for the inevitable, she had read to him, shared the little gossip she knew, held his hand when tremors of pain had wracked his body, willed him to breathe when his lungs failed. Kissed his tightly bandaged head, begging him to live.

  The day she saw him awake, she left the hospital and never visited him again. What was the point? On the road to recovery, he didn’t need the likes of her mooning over him any more than he did now. “I’m very sorry for the terrible ordeal you went through.”

  Chapter 5

  Bitterness fisted in Brice’s throat. What he had suffered was insignificant considering his brother died because of him and his damn nosy nose.

  Cassidy mysteriously revitalizing his scent receptors couldn’t be a good thing. Neither were the gentleness in her voice, the genuineness in her eyes or the mess of curls cascading over one shoulder.

  Brice twirled a red ringlet around his finger. A man might promise foolish things to feel those silky strands sweep his stomach or tickle his inner thighs. He rubbed the curl against his cheek. The feminine softness eased the ever-present knot in his chest.

  No woman had affected him to such a degree, and it was a damn shame Cassidy did. He had time only for a passionate night or two, and she didn’t seem the type for a brief, inconsequential fling.

  He dropped the curl. “Shoes?”

  She retrieved a pair of loafers, but he needed more support for his leg.

  “Not those. I left a pair of Timberlands somewhere.”

  “They aren’t here,” she said, rooting around the closet.

  “Check under the bed.” He tilted his head as she hunkered down, shoulders touching the floor, hips high in the air.

  “I can’t see anything,” she grunted. “Wait, I feel something.”

  Brice felt something, too. It grew more demanding each time she rocked forward to reach beneath the bed. Oh, the things he could do to her.

  “Ah-ha.” She surfaced, his shoes in tow, and promptly dumped them in his lap. “Anything else?”

  His gaze rested on her chest, so close and damn near eye level. The way her nipples puckered against the fabric of her T-shirt when she breathed soothed his residual annoyance from walking into the room to discover she had discarded his jersey.

  The urgency to feel her touch again threatened to overpower his restraint. Wahyan females had sleek, sinewy bodies. Cassidy’s skin had a suppler texture. Her muscles, although strong, were more pliable. He’d enjoyed how she pillowed him when he’d pinned her to the porch and wondered how gratifying it would be if she pulled him into her softness rather than fought him off.

  Brice massaged the bunched spot between his eyebrows. The handful of aspirin he’d taken after his shower hadn’t kicked in. His entire body throbbed. Overworked muscles teetered on the verge of spasm, his leg hurt more than it had in a long time, the bridge of his nose pinched every time his nostrils flared to catch Cassidy’s scent, and his groin, for chrissakes, was sore from a solid kneeing and tight from on-and-off-again erection.

  After he visited Granny at the hospital, he might crawl into an empty room and ask Doc Habersham for a morphine drip. Banishment be damned. Brice needed some relief.

  “Grab me a pair of socks.” Most of the time Brice recognized the general look of an irritated woman. The sharply arched eyebrow, the tightly pursed lips, a hand resting on a hip, fingers tapping out a count. Any man, human or wolfan, should have enough sense to placate that look.

  Apparently, tonight he didn’t. When Cassidy didn’t respond, he nodded toward the dresser. “Bottom left.”

  She gave an exaggerated “Ugh.”

  “What?” Brice opened his palms in a halfhearted shrug, intrigued by her vacillation from sweet and doe-eyed to pissed and prickly in a matter of seconds.

  She snatched open the drawer, threw him a pair of white socks and stomped out of the room. “Would it hurt you to say please and thank you?” echoed down the hall.

  Wahyas had little need for those particular human social graces. While living with Granny, he’d been more conscious of the etiquette. She would expect him to treat Cassie with the utmost Southern charm. However, if he did, the effect might backfire. Cassie’s annoyance provided a safety barrier. A breach could lead to a world of trouble he had no time to mediate.

  Tying his shoes, he stared at the two ragged suitcases in the corner and the sparse belongings that only an hour ago had been angry missiles. He didn’t know why she had so little, but when he left he would make sure Cassidy Albright had everything she needed.

  His stomach lurched, preparing an imminent launch into his throat.

  Oh, God. Not this again.

  When he’d awakened in the hospital after the attack, the scent of blood and bowel and death had imprinted in his nose, blocking all other smells. He seldom ate because of the debilitating nausea. Nothing cleared the stench and the relentless ordeal pushed him to the feral edge until one morning, after a brutal night of vomiting, he woke up and couldn’t smell a damn thing. No one could explain why.

  With his stomach settled, he ate solid food again, and he could relax around people because their scent no longer slapped him in the face like decomp. Being scentless was a godsend.

  For about six weeks. Then he realized the downside.

  No earthy musk before the rains. No whiffs of smoke from campfires in the fall. No more sweet-smelling flowers or fresh-cut grass. No comforting scents of family, or friends, or the enticing fragrance of females.

  Yeah, he could survive without ever smelling anything again, but his experiences were muted and dulled. Much like watching a Technicolor 3-D blockbuster on a twelve-inch black-and-white television. A lot was lost in the downgrade.

  Over the years, the devastating loss became a penance. A constant reminder that if he hadn’t been so curious about tracking a strange scent, he wouldn’t have stepped in a trap, the rogues wouldn’t have found them and Mason would still be alive.

  God-awful nausea reeled in his stomach with a vengeance. Hands balled into her comforter, Brice pressed the shabby material to his face, grateful and relieved her scent lingered in the threads. Sucking in a deep, exaggerated breath, he held her unique fragrance in his lungs, counting the seconds. Her residual essence filtered through not only his body but also his soul, warming every nook and cranny of his being. Stirred by the phantom familiarity, Brice’s wolf instinct prowled his conscience.

  Mine!

  No, she wasn’t. He had only a few days to settle matters with his grandmother. Then he had to leave. For good. His future lay outside Walker’s Run, and he intended to embrace it alone. He had best keep his cock in his pants and his hands off Little Miss Albright’s feisty body, except to smell her. Luckily for them, it would take time for his errant mating urge to reach the fucking point of no return. He could handle a few days of temptation.

  Meeting him in the hallway, his temptress chucked him a set of keys. “My car will get you to the hospital and back. It just needs a few cranks to start.”

  “Oh, no.” Brice caught her arm before she locked him out of the bedroom. “You’re coming with me, Cassidy.”

  “It’s almost midnight, and I have to be at work at six.” She twisted out of his grip. “And call me Cassie. Cassidy is too formal considering—” her eyes took all of him in “—well, everything.”

  Brice stood straighter. Plenty of women had stared, ogled and gawked at him. None had blushed so prettily or affected him the way she d
id.

  He wanted to tease her. Test her boundaries. And conquer them.

  No, no, no!

  No conquering allowed.

  “All right, Cassie, you have two options.”

  “Oh, really?” She cocked her hip and folded her arms across her waist. Such a cute little protest.

  “Put on your shoes and come with me like a good little girl.” He stepped close enough that she had to tilt her head to keep eye contact.

  She didn’t balk. “Yeah, that doesn’t work for me. What’s the second?”

  “Barefoot and braless, hog-tied in the backseat.” He made a point to stare at her chest until her nipples pebbled against her thin T-shirt.

  “What kind of choice is that?” Her skin colored to the exact shade he wanted to see.

  “The kind where you get to choose the manner in which you’ll accompany me, Sunshine.” He jingled the keys. “Don’t take too long, or I’ll think you’re into kinky.”

  Chapter 6

  “Why are we crawling through the bushes?” Aggravation weighted Cassie’s whisper.

  Brice grinned because she continued to follow him, creeping along the outside of the hospital in search of the window to his grandmother’s room. “I’m banished,” he answered in a hushed tone.

  When he’d tried to explain his situation on the trip into Maico, Cassie had held up her hand and refused to look at him while she drove. Her silent irritation had pounded him until they reached the hospital parking lot. In an attempt to smooth things over, he’d thanked her for coming and added how much it meant to him to see his grandmother again.

  Cassie’s defenses faltered, and the hardness she projected dissolved. Compassion filled her eyes, and the more amicable side to her personality emerged.

  The transformation made him forget that he didn’t deserve her sympathy, because when the tension dropped between them, the thoughts that filled Brice’s mind were not his past failures but a new hope. He didn’t understand it. Didn’t expect it to last. However, he sure as hell would make the most of it while he had it.