by Anna Lowe
Kiss her, his bear whispered. Kiss her good-bye.
Kiss me, her eyes begged.
He tipped his head down as she tipped hers up, and just like that, they connected. Really connected, like he’d never felt before. Not just by lips that moved gently, mournfully over each other. They were connected in the soul. He felt it in the tingle of his blood, the warmth that seeped into his veins.
Mate! his bear sang. My mate.
He pulled her even closer, deepening the kiss, tasting her when she opened her mouth. He treasured each exquisite sensation as it exploded in his mind. The way her tongue slipped over his lips. The perfect curve of her teeth. The way her body molded to his. She was so much slighter than him, and yet it was as if she’d been carved to fit in his arms. Or maybe he’d been carved to fit around her. Whatever. Energy pulsed between them, crackling like a fire kindled in a hearth. She cupped his face without letting go of the kiss, inhaling him as desperately as he held her.
She tasted so good. She felt so warm. Her scent overwhelmed him — the true scent of summer, when everything was alive and flourishing and bright.
Then the horn beeped again, and they broke apart.
He cursed under his breath. But Summer’s eyes fluttered shut again, and she leaned back in.
All mine, his bear growled. My mate.
The voice of warning tut-tutted in the back of his mind.
It would have been so easy to get lost in that kiss. To forget all about good-bye and let his hands explore. To touch her, to make her feel good. To rub his bare skin over hers while she wrapped her legs around him.
Getting naked with her was all too easy to imagine, because he’d dreamed it a dozen times already. Peeling her clothes off, exploring what she liked. Showing her what he liked, too, and discovering new pleasures together. Feeling her trust him…
Trust. There it was again. A reminder of the reality facing them both. Summer didn’t need him to hold her back. She needed him to let her go.
He took a deep breath and held her tight for one second longer, pouring confidence and power from his body to hers. And finally, reluctantly, he released her.
They both gulped for a moment, gazing into each other’s eyes without saying a word.
“I didn’t want our first kiss to be a good-bye,” she whispered, making him smile.
Our first kiss. So he hadn’t been the only one thinking about it. He liked that. He liked the way she ran her hands down his chest, too.
“It won’t be the last one. I promise,” he said. And damn, his voice had gone all husky on him.
She caught her lip between her teeth and stared at him, and all the sorrow he’d felt earlier welled up again. He beat it back for her sake.
“I promise,” he said, and that time, his voice was hard, resolute.
I promise, his bear echoed inside.
The truck’s horn blew outside. Drew steeled himself not to let the pain show as Summer pulled slowly away from him, moving to the stairs.
“You really promise?” she asked, looking so valiant yet so afraid.
And shit, he was afraid, too. Like never in his life before. What if he couldn’t keep his promise? What if fate didn’t let him?
He shook the fear out of his head — that wouldn’t help her — and shoved certainty at her in waves. “I promise. I swear on my life.”
Chapter Three
One week later…
Summer shivered and hurried across the yard, looking up at a wintery Utah sky. God, she missed Arizona and the Blue Moon Saloon. She missed her room in the apartment over the garage.
And boy, did she miss Drew.
She missed his low, rumbly voice. His big bulk filling up the door. The sound of him carefully wiping his boots on the mat. She missed his rich, woodsy scent and warmth.
Here, she was cold and alone. So terribly alone.
She’d been in Hope Springs for a week now, and she was still on edge. The constant deception, the sidelong looks she received — they made her shiver as much as the frigid temperatures in the high-altitude desert.
The place would have been pretty if… She stopped herself there. It was a pretty place. The landscape, at least. Hope Springs homestead backed onto a huge step of the Colorado Plateau, where millions of years of earth’s history showed in a rainbow of rock layers. A light dusting of snow was all the more brilliant against the reds, oranges, and browns of the exposed earth. But the haphazard collection of run-down trailer homes seemed to have been discarded rather than arranged as a community. It was hard to tell abandoned buildings from the occupied ones. Paint was peeling, mosquito netting sagging, and no one made an attempt to beautify the area. No flowers, no tidy porches, no cheerful colors.
When she’d first stepped foot on the place, she’d been tempted to turn around, head back to Arizona, and report that the Blue Bloods were defeated, once and for all. But there was an undercurrent to the scrappy little settlement of seventy-plus shifters. An unsettled feeling that made the back of her neck itch. Maybe the hatemongers were still at work here. Maybe the danger wasn’t in the past.
“Summer!”
She halted in her tracks. Of all the things that made her shiver in Utah, none beat the nasal tone of Gretchen’s voice. She turned and forced a neutral look over her face. “Hello.”
“Come on over, honey,” the fifty-something woman called.
The honey rippled with some subtext she was afraid to read into, and come on over was a command. When Gretchen patted the crooked seat beside her, Summer’s instincts screamed at her to turn and run.
Gretchen Walker, née Whyte. Sister of Victor and Emmett Whyte — the men who’d taken the Blue Blood organization from a loose band of fist-shakers to a marauding gang of murderers. Victor and Emmett had been killed in attacks they’d staged on the Blue Moon Saloon, which served them right. But Gretchen…
Summer still wasn’t sure of the woman’s role in the rogue pack, but she didn’t have a good feeling about it.
“You settling in well?” Gretchen studied her with that piercing look, and her nostrils flared.
That was the hardest part of going undercover at Hope Springs. Wolf shifters like Gretchen were sensitive to the slightest change in facial expression, and they could sniff out a person’s emotions. Like fear. Like shame. Like disgust. Summer couldn’t let her guard down for a second.
The problem was, lies didn’t come naturally to her, and neither did deception. But hers was a life-or-death mission. The peaceful existence of countless shifters was at stake.
Plus, she could do unremarkable and emotionless like a champ. She’d had to for the awful months she’d been dragged along by the rogues. In fact, she’d unconsciously taken on that role for most of her life. No one noticed her moods. Hell, they rarely noticed her presence.
Drew noticed, her wolf murmured. He didn’t miss a thing.
She locked the thought away in the back of her mind. She couldn’t afford to let the hunky bear sneak into her thoughts now.
“Well, I’m still getting used to it all,” she said. The closer she stuck to the truth, the better her chances of going undetected. “Thanks for asking. How are you?”
She bit back a scowl, hoping Gretchen wouldn’t go into another tirade over the death of her brothers.
Gretchen sighed. “Good thing I have my boys. They keep me going.”
The “boys” were four hulking, dim-witted wolf shifters close to Summer’s age who’d been brought up on a gospel of hate. At first, she’d worried they might become the next generation of extremists. But without the strong leadership of a Victor or Emmett Whyte, Gretchen’s sons were lost, rudderless. The most they got up to was drinking, polishing their rifles, and taking potshots at any jackrabbit unlucky enough to bounce through their sights.
No, Gretchen’s sons weren’t the men Summer worried about. She worried about the Emmett Whyte look-alike coming toward her now.
Her inner wolf growled, and she forced herself not to bare her teeth.
“Hello, Mett. Care to join us?” Gretchen called.
The man went by Mett, but Summer knew who he really was. Emmett Junior — son of the Blue Blood leader she despised.
“Hiya, Aunt Gretchen.” The tobacco he chewed showed with every lazy syllable. When his eyes moved to Summer, they slid up and down her body in a slow, greedy path. “Hiya, Summer.”
“Hi,” she forced the word through gritted teeth.
“You doing good?” he asked, shifting the wad of tobacco from side to side.
She felt sick to her stomach, but she could hardly say that.
“Fine.”
“You thought about what I asked you before?”
Her fingers curled so tightly, her nails bit into her palms. Mett had come up to her soon after she’d arrived, asking her about his father’s death.
Those no-good bear shifters did it, right? he’d all but spat.
Which made it pretty damn clear where Mett stood in terms of the purity issue.
He looked just like his father. He spoke in hateful tirades just like his father. He cursed any shifter who crossed species lines, just like his father. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Mett seemed to think she’d been a volunteer on Emmett Whyte’s murderous campaigns instead of a reluctant accessory to his crimes. Mett had even slung an arm over her shoulders, breathed tobacco in her ear, and tried to comfort her.
I know you did your best to help him.
She’d just about retched. She’d done her best to get away, but she couldn’t exactly say that.
Mett made her sick. Her own past made her sick.
She’d tried wiggling away from him, but his hold only grew tighter.
Listen, I was thinking, Summ, he’d said next.
She hated when people shortened her name.
You and me…
As he went on, she went still as a stone.
We’d be perfect together. We can carry on my dad’s work. Make sure shifters keep their species pure. He’d grinned madly at that point. And just think. I bet we’d make some beautiful, pure-blooded pups together. His hand had slid from her back to her ribs, closing in on the side of her breast.
She had slapped his hand and stepped away as his grin turned to a glare.
Shit. She’d managed to cover up quickly, thank goodness.
Um, sorry, she’d said, remembering her mission. I guess I’m still, um…
She fumbled for words for a second. Disgusted? Sickened? Appalled by what his father had done?
Still mourning? Mett had filled in, calming again. The man was as Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde as his father had been. Yeah. I miss him, too. But think about it, Summ. Think of everything I could do for you.
Oh, she’d thought about it, all right. And the prospect turned her stomach every time.
A fly buzzed past while Mett and Gretchen waited for her answer.
“I guess I’m still getting settled in,” she mumbled, hoping it came off as meek instead of disgusted.
“Well, don’t you worry your pretty little head about things.” Mett grinned. “I got it all figured out.”
His words echoed in her mind, and she tasted bile. Don’t worry your pretty little head…
For so many years, she’d done just that. Back in her home pack in Minnesota, she’d worked in a diner and done some babysitting on the side. Pack politics didn’t interest her, so she’d never really paid attention to those goings-on.
She couldn’t remember when she’d heard the first grumbled tirades against shifters who crossed species lines. It sounded reasonable enough to her. Wolves should stick with wolves, panthers should stick with panthers, and so on. Live and let live, she figured.
God, how naïve she’d been.
It had all seemed so distant, so unrelated to her. But then Victor Whyte started preaching about purity of blood lines and the imminent decline of wolf shifters. From that point on, everything changed. A slow, gradual change she didn’t see coming until it was too late. Hardly anyone raised a voice to question Whyte’s rhetoric, and those who did — well, they were quickly put in their place. Eventually, Victor headed west on what he called a crusade, and most people just exhaled. Then Emmett Whyte started making noises, too, and her stepfather, Clark, had nodded with every hate-filled sentiment.
She trembled, remembering the night Clark had shaken her out of bed to follow Emmett and the others.
“Shh! Keep quiet!” Clark had hissed.
She went without protest, because she’d been brought up to follow her leaders and keep her mouth shut.
Both those things became harder and harder to do as time went on. At first, Emmett, Clark, and the others left her behind in whatever place they picked as a base while they went out “preaching,” as they called it. Later, they started using her to feel out their targets. At the time, she’d thought all she was doing was placing a few calls or asking questions around a neighborhood. Harmless little things, part of the preparation for the “negotiations” Emmett and the others had been tasked to carry out.
Or so they claimed.
But then Emmett, Clark, and the others started coming back dirty and disheveled. Sometimes, they were bloody from fighting. Even then, she didn’t ask questions, because it wasn’t her place. And when her stepfather died in an attack, she’d hated the shifters that did that to him until Emmett explained.
Clark died for our cause, fighting those who are unpure.
When she finally figured it all out, she’d been shocked. She’d been helping to hunt down mixed shifter couples. She’d arranged ambushes without even realizing it.
But…but… she’d stammered. You said you’re negotiating.
Don’t be ridiculous, child. Emmett dismissed her, as he always did.
But you’re killing them!
Of course, we’re killing them! he’d snarled in her face. They are unpure! They weaken us all!
She wanted no part of that sick crusade, but Emmett wouldn’t let her go. The day she finally worked up the nerve to run for the hills, she’d caught the sound of wailing babies and arguing men.
Kill them, Emmett was saying. Just kill them.
She’d stopped dead in her tracks. Emmett was going to kill innocent children?
Wait! She had rushed over and found the men clustered around two petrified cubs torn from their dead mother’s side.
What are you doing? She’d clutched the children to her body, protecting them instinctively. How sick are you?
They are unpure, Emmett replied in a horrifyingly emotionless tone. They die.
He might have killed her, too, if her desperation hadn’t fueled a crazy plan.
Don’t kill them! Keep them alive.
Somehow, she managed to convince Emmett to spare the cubs — for a little while. If Emmett hadn’t gotten sidetracked into hunting down the wolves and bears of the Blue Moon Saloon, who knows what might have happened?
The Blue Moon Saloon shifters had killed Emmett and his gang then taken the babies under their wing. Fay and Ben had a good home now, up in Montana with Soren’s cousin, Todd, and his mate, Anna. Not only did the Blue Moon clan save the babies — they saved Summer, too, giving her a place to work and live.
But hell, here she was, back in a den of wolves. Who was an enemy? Who might be an ally?
Sometimes, she wanted to fold into a ball and cry to go home. But there’d be no home for her, no peace if she didn’t see this through.
She masked her roiling emotions and faced Mett with a neutral expression. He looked hopeful, as if she was likely to squeal, Yes! I’d love to be your mate, you racist, murdering pig.
“I guess I still need more time to clear my head,” she said.
Gretchen scowled. And the creases on her forehead folded even more deeply when a second man joined them. A tall, blond wolf shifter whose presence made Mett take a step back.
“Hello, Thomas,” Gretchen murmured, not at all pleased.
He stepped up, tipping his hat and nodding to both women. “Hello.”
>
Every woman in Hope Springs swooned over Thomas. He had the chiseled good looks of a daytime soap opera star, the build of a champion quarterback, and a ready, genuine smile. Like Summer, he was a newcomer to the settlement, and he seemed a perfect gentleman in every way. Apparently, he was the second son of a powerful alpha from somewhere up north. A shifter coming into his prime and ready to lead a pack of his own.
And like Mett, Thomas’ eyes shone a little brighter when he looked at her.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. What was it about falling in love for the first time — in love with Drew, that is — that made her a magnet for other men? It was as if Drew had reached into her heart and turned on a light that everyone could see.
If she could have turned tail and run back to Arizona, she’d have done it there and then. But she couldn’t. She had to stay and figure out what direction this leaderless pack seemed to be taking, how much of a threat they still were.
“If you’ll excuse us…” Thomas murmured to Mett, taking Summer by the arm and leading her away.
She followed, if only to escape the clutches of Gretchen and Mett, and shot a sidelong glance at Thomas. If Mett worried her with his sick beliefs, Thomas worried her with his charisma and inborn strength. The man was an alpha through and through. If he was to take over the leadership of this pack, everyone would follow like blind sheep, exactly as she once had. And who knew how radical his beliefs were?
She watched Thomas surreptitiously. Was he capable of horrors like those perpetuated by the Whytes?
“How does it feel to be back home?” Thomas asked.
Home? Hope Springs wasn’t home. The Blue Moon Saloon was. She’d only spent a short time in Hope Springs — another brief stop before Emmett and his gang set off again on their crazy quest.
“I guess I’m still trying to figure out where home is,” she said truthfully.
Gretchen appeared out of nowhere and patted Summer’s arm with her long, bony fingers. “We’ll rebuild, honey. One step at a time.”
Exactly what she was afraid of. She looked at Thomas, wondering where he stood.
Thomas murmured in agreement. “One step at a time.”