About two years before he died, Uncle Scott had added glass doors that opened straight into the forest from her bedroom, and she opened them now to stand naked in the doorway. The breeze ruffled through her curls and whispered down the curves of her back. She closed her eyes to savor the moist spring air on her breasts, her stomach, her thighs.
Something furry and vibrating bumped into her ankles, leaving behind a streak of drool.
“I haven’t forgotten you,” she said, kneeling to run her hand down Sir Lumpy’s spine. He arched into her touch. That was the kind of happy purr that could shatter glass.
Not only was he the only animal in the world that didn’t fear Summer, he was also the only living creature that kept her company on the long nights she spent on the wild. But Sir Lumpy couldn’t go where she was going. Not tonight.
Gently nudging the cat back into her bedroom, Summer stepped outside and closed the doors. His mouth opened in a silent meow on the other side.
“Sorry, hot stuff,” she said, tickling her finger over the glass where his black nose had left a smear. “Maybe tomorrow.”
Summer faced the forest. The night was dark, but she didn’t feel even the slightest nudge of fear. There was nothing in the darkness that could hurt her when she was in her second skin.
The breeze picked up, and Summer smelled a herd of deer that had passed through earlier. She could taste the fur and pheromones that had been rubbed on the trees. There were fawns among them, at least two does, and a buck. He might be good hunting later. For now, she only cared that she couldn’t smell humans in her forest.
After twenty years of living with dual natures, shapeshifting was as natural to Summer as walking. All she had to do was step from one skin into the other.
She dropped to a crouch and began to change.
Her bones expanded, contracted, reconfigured. The fingers and toes digging into the grass became paws. Her skin blossomed with fur. Her nose elongated into a muzzle at the same time that the world’s colors became duller and her hearing improved.
It only took a few minutes for Summer to finish and stand on all four legs. She was a wolf the size of a small horse, and for the first time in days, she felt truly relaxed.
Summer took off and left the dream’s haze behind, giving her muscles time to warm up before hitting top speed. Her stamina was endless. She could run a hundred kilometers a day at an easy lope. But she didn’t have all day—she needed to be home in time to dress for her meeting with Mr. Adamson, if she decided to go at all.
She rushed through the trees, splashed across a river flush with melted snow, leaped down small cliffs, and never lost a beat.
The trees vanished, opening into a field of long grass. Her passage made lightning bugs erupt into the air, dance between her flying legs, and swirl around her ears.
The constellations had crept halfway across the sky by the time that forest gave way to dorms and paved roads. Summer could mark the time by following the archer’s march toward the hills, so she knew that it took her almost an hour to reach the university. Plenty of time left in the night for spying.
The south edge of MU blended into the town, which hummed with activity. People were enjoying their Friday nights at downtown coffee shops and clubs, although many of them had spilled onto the streets to enjoy the warm night.
For a moment, Summer paused in the shadows behind The Cracked Teacup to watch the crowd.
Everyone looked content. They were in little clusters or big groups, but nobody was alone. They talked, laughed, and danced to a live band at the pavilion down the street.
The couple at a nearby table was oblivious to all of this activity. They bowed their heads together, and the man rubbed his fingers over the woman’s knuckles while she spoke. The look he gave her almost took Summer’s breath away.
No man had ever looked at her like that—like there was nobody else in the entire world.
Summer tore herself away and angled for the beach, which was devoid of campers and bonfires this time of year. She pounded sand toward Adamson Industries.
When she passed the peninsula shielding the south end of the lake, she was surprised to find that the address she had been given didn’t belong to an Adamson Industries office at all. It was a private residence—although that was an awfully modest way to describe the castle that confronted her at the end of the road.
Mr. Adamson’s home was a vast collection of towers and wings barely clinging to the side of a steep hill, as if it could tear free of its moorings and plummet into the black depths of the lake at any moment.
Summer stopped short, poised atop a cluster of half-submerged rocks. Cold water sloshed over her paws.
This was where she was expected to spend the first day of her internship without a cell phone?
Hello, creepy murder house.
The manor was dark, but a large garden at the base of the hill was brightened by white fairy lights and torches ringing a lattice gazebo. That wasn’t quite as terrifying. Summer could deal with that.
She jumped off the rocks and paced along the edge of the fence blocking the lawn. It was a modern, metal affair with barbed wire coiled around the top. Strange to see—few places around Hazel Cove bothered with much security. Maybe reclusive Mr. Adamson really was a paranoid nutjob.
Or maybe he wants to keep his supple young interns from escaping.
Banishing those crazy thoughts, Summer turned her attention to the entry gate. It was well-lit, locked, and watched by guards. No way could a giant wolf get in without being spotted.
Summer probably could have jumped the fence if she gave herself a running head start, but that was the second most conspicuous way to break into a property riddled with guards. Instead, she jogged along the edge of the fence until she got closer to the gazebo, and that was where she found it: a rabbit hole that exposed the bottom of the fence.
She wasn’t above a good dig, even if it meant that she would have to scrub under her fingernails in the morning. She tore at the soft earth until the hole deepened enough for her to wiggle her head through. Letting all of the air out of her lungs, she kicked her hind legs and squirmed to the other side with only a tiny scrape down her spine, which healed immediately.
As soon as she cleared the trees on the other side, Summer saw why there was so much light around the gazebo, which was draped in swaths of red silk and strings of golden lanterns. The citizens of Hazel Cove weren’t the only people enjoying the warm Friday night; Adamson Industries was having a party in the gardens, too. A three-piece band played among the orchard in tuxedos, smelling faintly of shoe polish and the wax used to keep violin bows limber. Women wearing elegant dresses whirled on a polished dance floor with handsome men in suits.
Cigar smoke drifted toward Summer. She huffed and blew the stink out of her nose.
Where was Mr. Adamson?
She prowled along the edge of the light, nose to the ground and eyes on the party. She could only catch glimpses of the attendees through the red drapes. There were plenty of handsome men there, young and old, blond and brunette, but all obviously wealthy beyond Summer’s wildest dreams. None of them approached Mr. Adamson’s unearthly good looks.
Summer slunk away, maintaining a low profile.
The wealthy investor must have owned half of the beach around Lake Ast. It was quite a jog to the manor on the hill, and she didn’t come across any other fences on the way. The places the guard patrolled left invisible scent trails like bright, flashing warning signs, and avoiding them was too easy.
Summer slipped into a bush and kept her ears perked. A guard passed without seeing her. He smelled like oils, plastics, metal.
As soon as he was gone, she darted across the road and climbed the hill.
The manor loomed overhead, growing until it filled her vision. She jumped over a low stone wall and found herself in another garden at the base of the main house, this one much finer than that near the gates. The perfume of apples, plums, and moist soil filled her nose. Plump bloss
oms hung from every vine. And were those berries growing on the bushes already?
There were no guards in this garden, so Summer crept forward to stick her nose in a hedge and sniff around.
What kind of gardener could grow blackberries in winter?
Even though not a single plant had been touched by fire, she could smell burned forest, the heat of mid-July, and something masculine that stirred longing inside her human heart. That wasn’t the smell of any ordinary gardener. That was the smell of the god from Hanlon Hall.
Motion directed her gaze above the hedge to a balcony jutting from one of the towers. A man was perched on the very edge of the balcony’s stone rail, with the same precarious look of the house on the hill. A centimeter forward, and he would fall.
Summer studied the man’s profile against the dark sky. Strong nose, dimpled chin, a sweep of dark hair. She had only glimpsed that profile once before, but it was permanently branded on her memory.
It was Mr. Adamson himself. He was shirtless, barefoot, and wearing only slacks.
The curves of his muscular back were lit by the light filtering through his bedroom curtains. When she had bumped into him, it felt like running into a wall, and now she could see why. He had the broad shoulders and strong arms to match his statuesque features. His skin was flawless marble.
What was he doing? Did he plan to jump into the lake?
He blew out a sigh as he gazed at the stars. His brow knitted together.
Summer knew that look. She had worn it herself on a thousand nights just like this one. It was loneliness, deep and impenetrable.
But why was he so lonely? There was an entire party’s worth of people on his lawn.
Mr. Adamson turned. Summer’s heart stopped beating at the sight of his face in full view, terrified for a moment that he might have seen her, but he only gazed down the hill. The reflection from the gazebo was captured in his eyes like pinpricks of starlight. There was a universe of heartache beyond his eyes, betrayed by the frowning curve of his lips.
That wasn’t a man that had hired an intern so that he could kidnap or hurt her. That was a man who was looking for companionship, whether he realized it or not. Summer could feel it deep in her heart.
She was so wrapped up in staring at him that she didn’t even notice when someone sneaked up on her.
“Holy shit.”
The guard that she thought she had avoided stood on the other side of the garden wall, gaping at the giant wolf in the hedge. His hand crept toward the walkie-talkie on his shoulder.
Uh oh.
The voice drew Mr. Adamson’s attention, and Summer felt his eyes pierce straight through her hide. He straightened on the balcony. “Get the wolf. Now!”
The guard grabbed his walkie-talkie to tell the others.
She launched out of the garden and tore down the hill again. But where the Adamson property had seemed empty and peaceful just minutes earlier, it suddenly teemed with men, and every single one of them was running toward her. Flashlights danced over the grass.
There was no way she could get to the fence without being seen. She had to lose them.
Summer darted toward the forest, but a wall of bodies blocked her path. Pieces of metal flashed in the glow from the guards’ flashlights. What was that acrid smell, like lubricant and metal and fire?
Cold shock washed over her. They have guns.
The forest was out of the question. Summer spun, searching for another way out.
She could swim across the lake—great idea, except that her fur weighed a million pounds when it got soaked, and Lake Ast was huge. Or she could make a break for the gate and hope that those men wouldn’t be willing to fire where the party guests could see it.
An idea struck Summer.
The party guests.
The guards were moving in fast, but humans on foot had nothing on a wolf moving with panicked swiftness. She whirled and tore across the grass, heading straight for the beach, where a dozen men waited.
She lowered her head and plowed straight into them, knocking at least three of them onto their backs.
Sorry! she thought with an inward wince. At least the sand was soft.
They hadn’t expected her to dive into a group of guards, so they couldn’t react fast enough to grab her. Summer vanished into the bushes around the side of the gazebo, snagging one of those pretty red drapes along the way and being careful not to tear it in her teeth.
Change, Summer!
It was a lot harder to step from one skin into another when her mind was a blur of adrenaline. She could barely remember what having fingers felt like.
Men crashed through the foliage in search of the wolf. She squirmed closer to the base of the gazebo, and Summer watched feet in formal shoes dance over the wood floor as her bones popped and crunched.
It was hard to track the smell of the guards with so much cigar smoke hanging over the gazebo, and she couldn’t hear them moving under the strains of the cello. They could have been anywhere—kilometers away or seconds from finding her.
Faster, faster…
Her fur dropped to the grass, baring brown skin and muscular legs. As soon as she had hands, she checked the top of her head. Her curls were intact, but it would probably look like she had stuck a hedge to her skull. Too late to worry about that now.
Summer’s tail vanished last, and she jerked the silk drape around her naked body. A couple of the women at the party looked like they were wearing nothing more than a few scraps of loose cloth, too. It was a matter of presentation. There has to be a way to make a convincing dress out of this thing.
She was still trying to figure out how to secure the silk at her shoulder when she turned around—and came face to face with the looming face of Mr. Adamson.
Chapter Four
Once, when Summer and Abram were much younger and much stupider, they had decided that they needed to build a fort where Gran and Uncle Scott couldn’t find them. They explored the depths of the forest well beyond the bounds of Summer’s established territory, and found a cave at the bottom of a ravine.
It was the farthest that Summer had gotten from the cottage in her entire young life, and she was thrilled. It was a whole new world among the boulders and brambles. Who knew what they would find there?
“This will be perfect for a fort,” Abram said, dropping his backpack at the mouth of the cave.
Summer said nothing, because wolves don’t speak. But excitement had gotten the better of her. She butted her head into her brother’s knees and nipped at his fingers, and Abram, annoyed, thumped her in the head.
They struggled, fought, and slammed into a boulder. It was fun for a few minutes—until Abram broke his ankle.
Suddenly, their goal to build a fort was a lot less important than the logistics of getting him out of a ravine again with a bum leg. They hadn’t brought enough deer jerky to stock the fort for longer than a day or two, and they had been careful to pick a ravine where nobody would find them.
“This is your fault,” Abram told her. Still, Summer said nothing. This time, it was because she was too embarrassed to change back and apologize. “You have to get Gran and tell her what we did.”
He was right, of course. Abram was always right.
While he sat, she quickly searched the cave to make sure it was safe for him to wait alone there. It smelled damp and muddy and a little bit like animal droppings. As a wolf, Summer never thought anything smelled bad, exactly—just interesting. And the cave had some of the most interesting smells she had experienced.
She sniffed around until the smells led her to the back of the cave.
That was how she startled the bear.
Summer would never forget meeting that animal’s eyes. They were startlingly intelligent and set every one of her senses on alarm. It was as though she had somehow found the soul of the forest itself slumbering in that cave—a powerful, primal force that she couldn’t begin to fathom.
A strange energy passed between them. The understand
ing of predator meeting predator. A moment where Summer realized that she was about to be attacked, and that a wolf with a human mind was no match for the elemental anger of a bear.
It was a lot like looking at her death.
If Summer had been stupefied by running into Mr. Adamson in a crowded university hallway, it was nothing in comparison to what she felt running into a sleeping bear. But being caught naked outside Mr. Adamson’s house was even worse than both of those experiences.
The man’s colorless irises seemed to glow with the light from the torches around the gazebo. Tragically, he had found a shirt on his way down to the party, but it wasn’t buttoned all the way. It gapped around his throat and bared the hollow where his collarbones met. Even though the three-piece orchestra was still playing, she felt like all noise and life beyond their two bodies had vanished.
When Mr. Adamson didn’t immediately call to his guards to arrest her, a thousand excuses whirled through her mind—none of them very plausible.
Sorry, my clothes spontaneously combusted at your party, so I decided to wear the decorations.
I survived a horrible shipwreck and washed up on your beach. Can I borrow the phone?
Or, least plausible of all, I’m a shapeshifting spy who changed back because she didn’t want to get riddled full of bullet holes by your battalion of guards.
Summer settled for saying, “Hi.”
He might as well have been carved from stone for all that he reacted to her greeting. His eyes dropped to her dress, her bare feet, the hands clutching at the drape.
When he reached out, she flinched, but all he did was pluck a twig from her hair. He flicked it to the grass. “Hello,” he said, and her leg muscles liquefied at the wry twist of his lips. Summer had to lock her knees to remain standing. “Come with me.”
Come with me? To where? The murder house? Was he going to abduct her, kill her, throw her body in the black depths of the lake?
He extended his hand, and she edged away as though his fingers were venomous snakes.
But then Summer thought back to his lonely perch on the balcony. She had been confident that he wasn’t a dangerous man in that moment, and she could still feel the lingering urge to save him, like a knot of warmth in her chest.
Shifters After Dark Box Set Page 3