Once Bitten_Wolves of Hemlock Hollow

by Heather McCorkle

  Polished hardwood floors led the way to a modern yet classy-looking reception area. Halfway to the desk, someone stepped in my way. At easily six and a half feet tall, he was the tallest man I had ever seen this close up. Broad shoulders filled out a black T-shirt like they were trying to burst from it. Huge biceps coiled like snakes waiting to strike. This beast of a man had at least fifty pounds of muscle on Raul, and Raul was nicely built. Eyes so blue they looked as if they had been chipped from a glacier regarded me with veiled interest from a clean-shaven face framed by pale blond hair. And dammit if he didn’t smell absolutely amazing, like pine and clean water. Not the overly sweet pine scent that came from aftershave or cologne, but the pine of a forest and the clear water of a snow-fed river. Though the last time I had seen him had been on my dark porch step, I recognized him immediately.

  How could I not? The thrill that raced through me when I met those icy eyes brought back the memory of his burning touch.

  “You’re not Raul,” I said a bit breathlessly.

  Despite his effect on me—or because of it—anger started to boil inside me, making my jaws ache.

  One side of his lips curved up. “Thank the Gods. He is…detained at the moment, and I have been sent in his place.” The first part was a whisper said through a sneer. His voice reverberated along my bones like chords played on an amplified base guitar. It was a very nice feeling.

  Clearly, he didn’t like Raul, and that made me like him a little bit more. Yeah, like that was possible. What the hell was I thinking? My attraction to anyone right now could not be trusted.

  He held out a hand. “May I get your bags for you?”

  Manners and good looks, a dangerous combination, one I did not trust. Fingers wrapping tighter around the straps, my eyes narrowed. “No, you may not. What do you mean, ‘sent’?”

  Turning sideways, he motioned to a hallway. “May we at least take your things to our room and go somewhere more private to talk?” His speech wasn’t so much old-fashioned as it was the precise wording of one whose first language wasn’t English, and had taken their lessons a bit too seriously. But it was nice. Really nice.

  My eyes danced across his broad chest. Going somewhere private with him was a bad idea in a colossal way, but I didn’t have much choice. Even with my training I couldn’t take him. I motioned toward the luggage carts behind the reception desk. “Fine, but just send my bags up, that way we can get this over with.” I was determined not to go upstairs with him until I had made up my mind about whether or not I’d be safe with him alone.

  It did not escape my attention that he had said “our room” with a casual air that implied he was confident it wouldn’t bother me. To be honest, with a body and a face like that, it almost didn’t. I must have taken a blow to the head somewhere between my porch step and bathroom to even entertain the idea of trusting some big, good-looking guy again. I wasn’t ready to trust anyone. But I was picking my battles, as my dad had taught me. Tall, Light, and Handsome cocked his head and raised his blond eyebrows.

  “Fair enough.” He held his hands out toward my bags with an expectant look.

  This time I had no choice but to give them up. He accepted them with a slight nod and carried them over to the desk. The dark-haired female receptionist smiled a little too large for my liking. I didn’t care that she was flirting with him. Sexual relations were the last thing on my mind right now. Or so I told myself as I watched his perfectly shaped ass. They exchanged words that I barely paid attention to. Instead, I peeled my eyes off him and scanned the hallways, making note of the rooms and doors. Only the door I had entered through seemed to lead back outside. Far from ideal if I needed to make a break for it.

  “Shall I have them park your Jeep? We can go for a walk,” Not-Raul called over his shoulder.

  I clutched the keys inside my pocket tighter. “Hell no. We’ll take it to wherever we’re going.” If I had my Jeep I could flee and leave his ass behind if things got too spooky.

  “Fair enough. I am all for a lady behind the wheel,” he said quiet and low, making it sound sexier than I wanted it to.

  I tried not to shiver, but his effect on me was too strong. Dammit.

  Letting my bags out of my sight was one thing, but my only wheels out of here was another altogether. Sure, this man seemed nothing like Raul, all polite and proper where Raul was edgy and daring, but that didn’t mean I could trust him. My libido was not going to get the best of me again. But, he had helped save me from Raul, so he couldn’t be all bad. And then there was the way his skin had felt against mine… True, it had just been his palms on my arms, but the fact that had felt so amazing made me wonder what more would feel like.

  I shook my head to clear it. There were things I had to know, about Raul, about what was happening to me. I didn’t really have much of a choice but to go with this guy. The fact that I wanted to made me more cautious. He shrugged, laid a few bills on the desk, and strode back toward me.

  He held his hand out and I stared at it like the snake it could very well be. Slowly, he lowered it and nodded as if this was a perfectly acceptable reaction.

  “I am Ty. I am sorry we had to meet like this. If I had known Raul was after you, been another step ahead of him, I could have prevented this entire thing.”

  My spidey senses began to tingle. “You’re not a cop, are you?”

  Every muscle in my body tensed in preparation to run. It was a stupid instinct when I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I couldn’t help it. Heart in my throat, I waited for his answer. Brows scrunching together, he shook his head, the motion releasing some of my tension, but not all of it. Just because he wasn’t a cop didn’t mean he wasn’t an authority. Cops could be funny like that. Detectives, PIs, DEA, some of them didn’t call themselves cops, but that didn’t make them any less of one in my eyes, which was only a small part of why I didn’t trust them. Having watched them haul my dad away at a young age had forever tainted my view of them.

  “No, I am a professor.”

  That was so not what I had been expecting that it rendered me speechless. Part of me relaxed a bit. All those years of sitting in lecture halls had given me a healthy respect for professors. Still, self-preservation made me hang on to my suspicions. For one, I’d never seen a professor this hot. He could be lying. We started to walk for the door. The moment we were out of the receptionist’s hearing, I asked, “A professor that was following or tracking Raul? Why? And what do you mean you could have prevented what happened? What do you think happened?”

  Ty held his hands up before him. “Easy. One at a time. Yes, I was following him, trying to find out what he was up to. The rest we will need a bit more privacy to answer.”

  I ground my teeth as he opened the door for me. I wasn’t against a man being gentlemanly, but I didn’t want him at my back. The casual way in which he did it made it seem like something ingrained in him. Great, a gentleman on top of being hot. Just what I needed. They were an endangered species that I had a soft spot for. One thing I didn’t need right now was soft spots. I walked backward through the door, keeping my eyes on him. “Why should I let you in my Jeep? How do I know I can trust you?”

  The cool night air swept around me.

  “Fair enough after what happened to you, and you should not trust anyone right now. That said, you are behind the wheel, in control of my fate. And I did try to save you. If you do not trust me after we talk, you can leave me there and return to your life.”

  “Fair enough,” I threw his own words back at him. It wasn’t enough, but the cold metal of the mace pressed against the waistband of my jeans was.

  Once outside, he walked straight for my Jeep as if he knew it was mine. Then I realized he had probably watched me pull up. Yeah, that wasn’t creepy at all.

  “Nice classic you have here. ’79?” Ty asked. The impressed tone of his voice sent a thrill through me.

  I didn’t want to warm to him, but his appreciation of my rig hit yet another soft spot. “’75. It’
s unlocked,” I said as I walked around to the driver’s side.

  Somehow, he beat me there and opened the door for me. My traitorous heart thudded harder. Brows raised, I stared at him for a moment before climbing in. He closed the door after me and strode around the Jeep. Dressed all in black as he was, he blended with the night in a way that set my nerves on edge and on fire at the same time. With those long legs of his, he didn’t even need to use the rocker bar as a step to climb in. The grace with which he folded his tall, broad frame into my Jeep was a bit distracting, causing me to forget my anger for a moment.

  Doing my best to hide my blush behind my long hair, I picked the screwdriver up out of the cup holder and started the Jeep. Being that he seemed to be a jeans and T-shirt kind of guy, I shouldn’t have been worried what he would think of my low-budget way of starting my ride. But he had an air of sophistication about him that made me uncomfortable. The way he perused the inside of my Jeep with a boyish smile spread across his face softened me and eased my embarrassment a bit.

  “This is amazing.”

  I smiled and motioned toward the modern stereo. “It isn’t exactly stock. But I try to keep it close. Where do you want me to drive?”

  He pointed. “To Clark Fork Park. Only a few miles away.”

  Pulling out into the light traffic, I followed his directions.

  “Did you catch Raul the night…that night?” I asked. I’d almost said the night he bit me, but the words wouldn’t come out. Even though this guy has seen it, knew what happened, it still felt too crazy to say out loud.

  “I did.”

  Damn his voice was sexy. Like, slide over your skin and turn your nipples to ball bearings sexy. I gripped the steering wheel harder.

  “But he left a note on my Jeep, telling me to meet him here.”

  Ty shook his head. “A friend of his left it there. They were going to meet you here, take you to his family.” He didn’t look happy about that.

  I raised a brow at him. “And you what? Intercepted them?”

  “Not exactly. Shortly after I caught Raul, the authorities caught both of us. When they let me leave, I tracked down one of Raul’s men and persuaded him to tell me their plan.”

  Their plan. I did not like the sound of that. The traffic around us suddenly didn’t seem thick enough. More people would be better.

  “What did you do to him?” I asked. Blunt though it was, I had to know what kind of man I was dealing with.

  Brows furrowing into deep grooves, Ty sat up a bit as he turned to look at me full on. “Nothing untoward, I assure you. Though he would have had it coming.” Yeah, English was definitely not this guy’s first language. The way he phrased things was as much of a clue as his slight accent. But as much as I hated to admit it—even to myself—that part of him was kind of charming.

  “Okay. Sorry, I have to ask. English isn’t your first language, is it? That, or you aren’t from this century.” The skin along the back of my neck tingled at that thought. But no, I couldn’t go there. Not yet.

  A slightly crooked smile tugged his lips up in one corner. “I get that a lot. No, English is not my first language. But I like to think my grasp of it is not that atrocious.”

  I shook my head. “Not at all. It’s impeccable, which is how I could tell. That and the lack of contractions.”

  He let out a short, humorless laugh. “Yes, well, contractions are the downfall of any language. They are often not even a combination of the proper words one means to speak.”

  So many more questions burned in my brain, too many. If I kept asking them, there was no way I’d be able to concentrate on driving. Hence the whole detour into the language subject. But that was all the small talk I could take. I allowed a tense silence to fill the Jeep. Well, tense for me. Ty leaned back into his seat and watched the scenery pass by. After a bit, his manner started to relax me, too. It was nice to drive with a guy who didn’t feel a need to talk, or worse, to critique my driving. The universe was clearly against me ignoring my libido. I mean, seriously, what kind of guy could be so charming while not doing or saying anything?

  Over four miles later, we pulled into a parking lot set within a grouping of trees. Through the open window I could smell water—a lot of it. A few people milled about carrying various bags. Couples and individuals mostly, all going about their normal lives as if nothing were amiss in the world. But then, I suppose nothing might be amiss in theirs. I was the one who was about to receive news I didn’t want to hear. No matter if it was something from a horror movie like I suspected, or simply that I would never see Raul again and miss my chance to pulverize his scrotum.

  I leaped from the Jeep, walked around the front of it, and stood with my arms crossed, tapping a foot on the sidewalk. It seemed to take Not-Raul an eternity to unfold his huge frame from the Jeep and join me. I didn’t want to think of him as Ty. The name made it more personal, and I didn’t want to get personal with this guy. Well, part of me did, but I was ignoring that part.

  He moved with an air of confidence that suggested he was a fighter: slow, steady, and aware of everything around him. Not good. Yet very sexy. Swallowing down my impatience and sex drive, I followed in silence as he started down a tree-lined sidewalk. Questions burned my mouth but I didn’t dare ask with all the people milling about us. Everything I had to say was going to sound crazy as hell and I didn’t want anyone to overhear.

  “I am sorry we had to meet this way, Sonya.” They were the first words he had said to me since I’d stopped asking questions.

  That he knew my name was only slightly disturbing considering all the other disturbing things that had been happening to me lately.

  “Me too. So what happened to you that night? You said you were coming back, when you didn’t, I figured you were a delusion caused by whatever drug Raul slipped me.”

  Delusion, yeah, fantasy was more like it, of the Thor in clingy Under Armor variety. But I wasn’t about to say that. Why did this guy affect me so much?

  “The authorities took me in, thinking I was the one who had attacked you. I set them straight and came back for you,” he said.

  “But I never called the cops.”

  No one did, I was sure of it. If someone had I wouldn’t have lain on the bathroom floor for two days in a pool of my own blood.

  “Not your authorities. Mine,” he said.

  The hushed tone along with the way he looked away from me made it clear he didn’t mean the Montana State Police versus the Idaho State Police. No, he meant something else entirely, something that had to do with the fangs that sprung from my jaw every time I got pissed. Just thinking about it made my heart race as though it were trying to escape the truth. A huge part of me fantasized that he was with the DEA and was after Raul because of some wicked new psychotropic drug he was pedaling. That would make far more sense to my scientific mind. Which was exactly why I knew that wasn’t it. Being raised by a dad who practiced Odinism and a Cherokee mom who believed in the old ways meant sense and logic weren’t places I often got to visit.

  The sound of moving water drained some of my tension away as we wound along a riverside dotted with trees here and there. The further we walked, the more scarce people became. Whether it was due to the lack of people, or the shadows in which I could hide, the trees soothed me, eased my anxiety. Once we reached a part of the path void of others, I stopped and moved into Ty’s way. We were alone and I was done with all the eluding. Damn, but he was tall. And that chest looked really hard. My fingers wanted to dance across it. I had to step back and crane my neck to see his face.

  “Your authorities, Montana police, you mean? If the police knew about the attack, why didn’t anyone contact me?”

  Blond brows rose. “Those are the first questions you have for me?”

  My patience wore as thin as rice paper. “Yes.” It came out sounding like a growl, a growl that freaked me out more than a little.

  My gaze flicked to the nearest couple walking some distance away on the path. Maybe c
oming all the way out here with him had been a bad idea. I took a step back in the direction of the oncoming people.

  He held his hands up in surrender then leaned against the trunk of a tree. “As you suspect, the police do not know. I meant my kind’s authorities, not Montana’s. What Raul did to you broke our laws. He will stand trial for it. I was sent by them to be your kennari.”

  I swallowed hard and decided to go for the first tough question I could take. “What exactly did he do to me?”

  Guarded eyes shifted from the undulating green river to me. “What do you think he did to you?”

  One side of my top lip curled up, exposing the fangs that had sprung forth on an instinct that I can only assume was born of my anger and fear. “Don’t play games with me,” I snarled.

  His gaze didn’t waver from mine. “I am not. I need to know how much you are ready to accept so I know how fast to take your instruction.”

  So much was wrong with that. But the words confirmed my suspicions. I was going to have to sound like a crazy person and see where this led. “He bit me and it…changed me. I thought he had drugged me at first, but then…” I motioned to the fangs.

  The world started to sway a bit, growing fuzzy around the edges as it closed in around me. Tears stung my eyes, again, dammit. I couldn’t explain it away with science and that made me feel crazy, made my world feel crazy.

  “Look, I’m ready to hear it. I need to know what’s happening to me. It’s just all a bit insane, you know?” My voice broke, making me want to crawl into a hole and hide. I hated letting others see when I felt weak.

  “I know. I am sorry.”

  Suddenly Ty stood before me. His big arms wrapped around me, pulling me in against his chest. Going stiff, I held my breath. The warmth of his hard body soon melted through my resistance. Without meaning to, I relaxed against him, sinking into his arms and molding myself against his chest. The scents of sweet pine and an aloe glycerin soap enveloped me. The tide of my troubles receded. Somehow this stranger put me at ease in a way no one else ever had. Something about him tugged at something inside me. I both loved and hated the feeling at the same time. After a long moment, I forced myself to pull away.