BIG BAD WOLF Christine Warren

CHAPTER 1

Abstinence wouldn’t be quite so bad, Graham decided, if not for the lack of sex.

Nursing his fifth scotch and wishing it were a fifth of scotch, the alpha of the Silverback Clan of New York City spent his Saturday night in a manner no self-respecting werewolf should ever have to endure—single and celibate.

At least he didn’t have to spend it alone, he reflected, although the type of companionship he could expect to find at his friends’ post-wedding engagement party left a lot to be desired. A bit long in the tooth for his taste. Graham preferred women who hadn’t been painting the town red back when his ancestors still thought of the cotton gin as a newfangled contraption. Plus, seeing that he’d just broken off his on-again-off-again relationship with one particular vampire, he didn’t feel any great compulsion to go start a new one. Immortal women all seemed to be just a little too demanding.

Why he bothered to sulk here in the corner, rather than excusing himself and getting out there to meet the Lupine woman of his dreams, remained a mystery. He couldn’t blame a fear of commitment like so many human men seemed to do. Werewolves relished the idea of a mate-bond and lived to beget lots of new generations of baby Lupines, and even Graham looked forward to the day when he would rear his own cubs in the traditions of his clan and his ancestors. Commitment sounded just fine to him. It wasn’t fear that had him in this mood; it was boredom.

Graham suffered from a huge, honking case of the same old–same olds. Everywhere he looked, he saw the same faces, the same habits, heard the same gossip, and seduced the same women. Oh, their names and hair color might change, but deep down, they were all the same to him. The realization depressed him. What had happened to the carefree, rakish wolf he used to be? These days he acted more like a priest than a playboy.

He blamed the women, of course. What other reason was there for an attractive, healthy Lupine in his prime to suddenly go cold turkey from the pleasures of sex? He still enjoyed the act, after all, so his problem wasn’t physical. Never in his life had he experienced any problem getting an erection when the situation called for one. He had no trouble getting it up, but lately he’d had a bitch of a time getting it back down, and that he blamed on his partners.

If he remained dissatisfied after a sweaty, breathless romp, he must be romping with the wrong woman, right? The conclusion sounded logical to him. As long as he ignored the fact that he’d been lucky enough to sample some pretty amazing women.

Take Natalie for instance. The blond vampire he’d recently broken off with made most supermodels look like sideshow freaks. With her pale hair, pale skin, and radiant blue eyes—not to mention the body of a Venus—she looked like an angel sent to earth to reward the truly righteous. The fact that she had the morals of an alley cat and the ruthless ambition of Napoléon Bonaparte explained why she’d spent the last three months writhing beneath Graham instead of singing in a heavenly choir. No one had ever accused him of being righteous, or even true.

The point was that he had no reason to be bored. Natalie knew sexual tricks to put a houri to shame and had the stamina of an undead Olympic athlete. She was willing to try anything, no matter how depraved, and if it got her off, she’d do it again until she could give lessons to the experts. How in God’s name could he have gotten sick of that?

He didn’t know, but he had.

He’d gotten sick of all the women, and all modesty aside, Graham Winters had had a lot of women. Some were little more than one-night stands, some recurrent companions, and some, like Natalie, had bordered on casual relationships, but none managed to hold his interest for more than a few weeks. The only reason Nat had lasted so long had more to do with his disinclination to deal with the fit he’d known she’d throw than with any real desire to keep her around. He’d tried just about anything he could think of to spice up their last few weeks together, but eventually even exotic tricks hadn’t been able to keep his interest.

When he’d started leaving all-night orgies with his muscles trembling in exhaustion and his dick still hard as a pike, he had thrown in the towel. Now that he knew no woman could satisfy him, he saw no reason to keep torturing himself with sex that wore him out everywhere but where it counted. That had led to Natalie’s dismissal, complete with the expected and unpleasant scene, and eventually to this—his thirteenth night of celibacy, spent in Dmitri’s living room celebrating his friend’s post-wedding engagement party.

Taking another sip of liquid fire, Graham glanced around the room and wondered how much longer etiquette required him to stay. He viewed Dmitri as a brother, and he genuinely liked Regina, so he was glad to share in the celebration, especially since he’d had to duck out on his best-man duties at their reception in order to deal with a fire in the kitchen of the nightclub he owned. What he wasn’t so glad of was the speculative glances currently being aimed in his direction by a large number of the room’s single—and some not-so-single—women. He worked at ignoring their interest, but he knew it was only a matter of time before one of them decided to lay off the staring and make a move.

“I vote for the redhead. She looks like the type who’s ready for anything. Plus I don’t think she’s wearing panties.”

His friend and beta appeared at Graham’s side, carrying a dark brown beer bottle and wearing a repressed smile. Logan Hunter knew all about Graham’s predicament and seemed to find it amusing. Graham shot him a narrow look.

“She never does,” he grumbled. “But I doubt Shelley is going to put the make on me, not after the last time we went out.”

“Did you spill a drink on her dress or something?”

Graham shook his head. “I criticized her, um, technique.”

Logan winced around a chuckle. “Ouch. Okay, maybe not the redhead then.” He glanced back to where Shelley stood, whispering to a couple of other women. “Could be her friend, the one almost wearing the green dress. Do you think those are real?”

“On vampires, they’re always real. They can’t afford to bleed out during surgery just to get implants.” He gave the other woman an assessing look. “Besides, not even silicone can make tits that firm. Hildie works out.”

Raising his beer for a drink, Logan rolled his eyes. “And I’m sure you’d know. But you could at least make an effort. Lady knows you need to do something to lighten your mood. What the hell is up with you tonight anyway?”

“Three guesses,” Graham muttered. “I’ll even spot you the first two.”

Logan grimaced. “Shit. Curtis.”

“Right both times.”

“What’s he done now?”

“Same old, same old. This week he tried to get Bill Lakeland to take an interest in examining the validity of the challenge Dad and I fought when he decided to retire and leave the business of alpha to me.”

Logan nearly choked on his beer. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I wish.”

“I don’t care how many packs consider Bill an expert of the traditional procedures for alpha challenges, you took that fight fair and square. Your father wouldn’t even cut your mother any slack in a challenge ring, let alone the son he raised to continue his family dynasty!”

“You know that, and I know that . . .”

“And so does anyone who was there watching. You took that challenge fairly and by the skin of your teeth. For a few minutes, I wondered if both of you were going to leave the circle alive.”

Graham’s mouth twisted. “So did we.”

“So how does he figure he can protest the outcome?”

“Beats me. I doubt he thought he’d really get anywhere with that kind of nonsense. Chances are he was just pulling my chain.”

“And how long has that been his favorite hobby?”

“Let’s see. I’m thirty-four and Curtis is seven years younger, so . . .” Graham pursed his lips and pretended to think. “About twenty-seven years, I think.”

Logan nodded. “And you did what to set him off again?”

“Be born first, be my father’s son, and be more of a Lupine than he’ll ever be?”

“Right. So you’re just going to go on ignoring him?”

“That’s the plan.” Graham saw the disgust in his friend’s expression and smiled. “Trust me, it’s easier to ignore him than it is to dignify his idiocy with a response. If I got worked up every time he pulled a stupid stunt just to piss me off, I’d be the first Lupine in recorded medical history to have to take blood pressure medication.”

Logan sighed. “True enough.” He took a long pull on his beer and gave the room another thorough glance. “Which means that you could definitely use a distraction tonight. So? Who’s it going to be.”

“No one.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not in the mood for a woman.”

“You know, you’ve been saying that with distressing regularity lately, my friend,” Logan pointed out. “I don’t know about your blood pressure, but you might want to talk to a doctor about your libido if this keeps up.”

Graham glared at him. “There’s nothing wrong with my libido. It’s not me; it’s the women. Haven’t you noticed they’re all the same?”

“Well, where it counts, I suppose. . . .”

“That’s not what I mean. Or maybe it is. I don’t know. I just know I’m . . . bored.” He gestured around the room with his whiskey glass. “Not a fresh face in sight.”

“Since when do you go for a fresh face? I thought you were an ass man.”

“Since I realized I’d seen all of these faces a hundred times before.”

“Come on,” Logan chided. “There has to be a woman here you haven’t slept with.”

“Regina.”

“She doesn’t count. Dmitri would break your legs, wait a couple of hours for them to heal, then break them again. And after that, he might get cranky. I’m talking about the rest of them. The ones who aren’t married to your best friend, and aren’t from our pack, since they’re all practically family.”

Graham took a quick look around, followed by a longer look. On his third sweep of the assembled crowd, he stopped and pointed toward a grouping of furniture occupied by three very attractive females. “There,” he said. “Those three. I haven’t slept with a single one of them.”

Logan followed his gesture and sighed. “Yeah. Regina’s closest friends, who are probably the only human women here tonight, and we both know you don’t do humans.”

A grin flashed across Graham’s face. “I thought about doing the one on the right. Ava. She’s the one Dmitri had me staking out before he changed Regina. I came real close to watching her from the other side of a pillow, instead of from the front seat of my car. But she’s human.”

“According to anyone who’s ever done business with her, that’s just a front. She’s really a shark.”

Graham shrugged. “Anyway, you asked who I hadn’t slept with. They’re it.”

“Just those three.”

“I think so.” Draining his glass, Graham scanned the room one last time, dismissing each of the women he passed. His eyes never seemed to pause more than half a second on any of them, no matter how attractive or how skimpily dressed, until they drifted over one curvaceous female bottom and skidded to a grinding halt.

He could almost smell rubber burning.

His eyes caressed the full, generous lines of her backside encased in a form-fitting skirt of some clingy black material. The fabric draped over that delectable tush, showing him each rounded curve in heart-stopping detail. To his surprise, he couldn’t tell if she was wearing panties, but unlike Shelley’s lack of lingerie, the idea of this woman bare beneath her dress aroused more than just his curiosity.

“And her,” he growled, all his attention focused on the woman whose face he still hadn’t seen. If it looked half as good as what he had seen, he’d be a very happy man. “I haven’t had her. Yet.”

Missy sidled into the party more than two hours late, but the way she figured it, Reggie was lucky she’d come at all. Especially in this dress.

She tugged surreptitiously at the hem, trying to make it fall more than four inches below her crotch. No dice. Every time she pulled, the hem sank, but so did the neckline. She could flash the world from either above or below, and neither held much appeal.

How in God’s name did I let them talk me into this? she wondered for the gazillionth time. Not even threats and bribery should have induced her to put on this poor excuse for a dress and let her friends serve her to her latest fantasy fix on a silver platter. She’d barely escaped the last two rounds with her pride intact. She should have run screaming at the idea of round three. Unfortunately, it was way too late for that.

Missy supposed it had been too late the very minute the five friends had experienced their brainstorm during a particularly enthusiastic—and alcoholic—episode of their biweekly girls’ night get-togethers. After much too much wine, one of them had made the fateful observation that despite their status as single women, they each had a decent-sized pool of male friends, family members, and co-workers who could be counted as potential dates. Just because one woman didn’t find her dream man among her own male acquaintances didn’t mean that one of her friends wouldn’t. So they had come up with the brilliant idea of setting one another up on a series of blind dates called fantasy fixes; more than just regular dates, the fixes were supposed to be opportunities for each woman to live out her sexual fantasies with a man her friends had prescreened for safety and discretion.

It had sounded like a great idea at the time, filtered through about a bottle of sauvignon blanc, but as soon as she had sobered up, Missy had experienced some misgivings.

Translation: she had panicked.

Always the shyest and most conservative member of their clique, Missy wasn’t the type to live out sexual fantasies with men she’d barely met. She was the kind to plant daffodils along the bottom of a white picket fence while her enormous brood of children were in school and her banker or lawyer or accountant husband was at his office winning the family bread.

Unfortunately, her friends had devious natures and insidious stubborn streaks, and with Missy’s own compulsion to please on their side, they took ruthless advantage. They knew Missy harbored an intense reluctance to go on her fantasy fix dates, but she’d done the first two rounds because they’d asked her to, and because she didn’t want them thinking she was an even bigger coward than they already believed.

But a soft heart and a latent sense of determination only went so far. Two rounds had been the limit of Missy’s good nature, and they must have guessed that, because this time they had arranged for her to meet her fix at an event she couldn’t avoid—Reggie’s engagement party.

Never mind that Reggie’s wedding had taken place two weeks ago. It had all been arranged with so little notice that it had left the officiant with a bad case of whiplash, hence the post-ceremony engagement party to include all those left out of the wedding itself—which turned out to be most of the combined acquaintances of the bride and groom.

Missy had not been one of the people left out of the ceremony; she’d been the maid of honor. But that didn’t mean she’d had even the slightest chance of wriggling out of attending tonight’s function. Reggie and Missy had been best friends since high school, and Missy could never skip a party in her friend’s honor. So here she was, dressed like a French whore and trying desperately to come up with a way to make this third fix turn out just like the other two, because she had the hideous feeling that this time luck would not be on her side.

She gave up tugging at the front of her dress and wormed her way into an alcove where she turned her back to the room and yanked the dress down over her ass. It pulled the neck down until her breasts threatened to fall out of the clingy material, but if she just kept her face to the wall, no one should be able to see that and what they could see would be almost decently covered.

She didn’t think Ava, Danice, and Corinne had spotted her yet, but she knew it was only a matter of time. They would be keeping an eye out for her, since she was so late and had refused to answer any of their calls to her cell phone thanks to the blessing of caller ID. Once they realized she had arrived, her reprieve would be over and she would have to face her latest fix, whoever he happened to be.

The last two rounds, the gods themselves must have been looking out for her, because those fixes couldn’t have gone better if she’d planned them herself. Her kidnapping mountain man had turned out to be her older sister’s high school boyfriend, and the idea of being trapped with little Missy Roper in a secluded cabin for forty-eight hours with nothing to do but test out the huge old feather bed in the corner had turned him an interesting shade of green. He’d given her a pair of his sweats, encouraged her to change out of the flesh-baring clothes her friends had picked out for her, roasted her some marshmallows, and checked himself into a hotel room until it was time to deliver her back home. As he walked her to the door of her apartment building, he’d even made her promise not to tell Ava how their fix had really turned out. Like full disclosure had even been a possibility. She’d rather have told her parents she’d decided to become a leather-clad, bisexual dominatrix.

She’d rather have become a leather-clad, bisexual dominatrix.

Those same gods must have appreciated her prayers of thanks afterward, because they looked out for her on fix number two as well. In that one, the buff fireman who had rescued her from the deliberately stuck elevator at Ava’s office building had been willing to give her the ol’ college try—right up until he had pulled off her mitten-knit hat and seen the dull ash-blond color of her hair. That’s when she started to remind him of his four-year-old daughter, which in turn reminded him of his ex-wife, and that reminded him of how much he wished he were still married.

Instead of a quickie in a stopped elevator, Missy had spent close to two hours listening to the tale of Bobby’s broken heart and cooing over pictures of his high school sweetheart and their little girl. Little Mandy had looked like a real sweetheart, and even if Missy couldn’t see the resemblance, she vowed to send the child a birthday card every year to show her gratitude for unknowingly rescuing Missy from her rescuer.

She hadn’t even had to worry about Bobby spilling the beans on that one. The day after her rescue, he’d moved back to Boston to be near his daughter and try to persuade his ex-wife to take him back. All Missy needed to do was blush whenever anyone asked her what happened and she was home free. The way conversations with her friends usually went, blushing had been no problem at all.

Missy occasionally wondered if “friends” was really the right word to describe their little clique. Reggie seemed more like her sister than her friend—someone who loved her unconditionally but also delighted in tormenting her, who sometimes drove her crazy, and who would defend her to the death or the homicide. Corinne and Danice were more like drinking buddies. They had a great time together, despite the fact that they had less than nothing in common, and no one could make Missy laugh harder.

Then there was Ava.

Ava simply defied description. She presided over the lot of them like a temperamental bitch-goddess, dispensing gifts or torment, depending on her mood. Ava wasn’t the sort of person you just “liked” or “got along with.” She made you work too hard for that, but she was loyal and fierce, and Missy could easily picture her ripping the heart out of anyone stupid enough to hurt one of her friends. Missy loved her for that, which probably explained why she put up with all the crap Ava managed to put her through.

Like tonight.

Missy had dressed in this ridiculous pseudodress, taken a cab to the Upper East Side, and walked through Reggie and Dmitri’s front door looking like a call girl on the clock, all because of Ava. If not for the other woman’s meddling, Missy would have shown up looking like she usually did, in slightly baggy khakis and an oversized sweater, or in an ankle-length skirt and a diaphanous tunic top. Basically looking like a kindergarten teacher.

Since that’s what she was, Missy saw nothing to be ashamed of. After all, where would the world be without kindergarten teachers? Lacking the basic skills of sharing and tying their shoelaces, that’s where. Her friends could make fun of her profession all they wanted. Missy loved kids, and she refused to feel embarrassed that the innocence of her career mirrored the current innocence of her sex life. Besides, if her friends and this sad excuse for a dress had their way, that innocence wouldn’t last the night.

Peering warily over her shoulder, she tried to locate the rest of her clique. At least then she’d know what parts of the room to avoid. She saw Reggie standing next to Dmitri—surprise, surprise—while they chatted with a distinguished-looking older gentleman with a shock of gray hair. He was the senator Missy had always thought looked like her Grandpa Harry. Well, except for his fangs. Grandpa Harry had a temper, but even he had never sucked a person’s blood. Tonight, though, Missy didn’t particularly care what the senator chose to suck as long as he kept Reggie engaged in conversation and away from Missy. One down, three to go.

She found the others all clustered together in a small conversational grouping near the fireplace. Ava lounged in an overstuffed armchair, making it look more like a throne, while Corinne and Danice sat on the sofa to her left. Each held a glass of champagne, and they all kept casting glances at their watches, the door, and one another, in that order. Ava appeared less than pleased.

It served her right, Missy thought, quickly facing the wall before they spotted her. It would have served them all right if she hadn’t bothered to show up at all. No rational person could have blamed her. She had just walked into a room full of vampires and werewolves and God only knew what else, looking like chum at a shark convention, so she could be set up on a date she really didn’t want to go on with a man she’d never met and whom she had no interest in dating, let alone sleeping with. Maybe she ought to rethink this whole “friends” thing.

Okay, now you’re just being unfair, she scolded herself. A deep breath necessitated an immediate follow-up consisting of a tug to her neckline. She couldn’t really blame her friends for not setting her up with the man she actually was interested in sleeping with, since his name remained a secret she intended to take to her grave. She knew her chances with him ranked somewhere below laughable and probably on par with her chances of bearing the next immaculate conception, because as the entire Other social world of New York knew, Graham Winters did not date humans.

Missy stared morosely into the leaves of a potted ficus while she absorbed the sharp sting of that knowledge. It wasn’t news; she’d known it from their very first meeting, but even after six weeks, she still hadn’t quite managed to work her way out of crushing disappointment and into grudging resignation. She still floundered in the morass of wishful thinking, thanks to her unruly hormones. The darn things put her on full alert every time she set eyes on his drool-inspiring body or knee-weakening gold-green eyes. That reaction gave her yet another reason to keep her face to the wall. The last thing she needed was to let him distract her. Since he was Dmitri’s best friend and best man, she knew he was probably in the house somewhere, so she’d be wise to stick to the shadows and avert her eyes until she could make her escape.

But, Lord, wouldn’t she just love to get her hands on him! She sighed wistfully and dismissed the mental image of running her fingertips over his broad, muscled chest, down his lean sides, over the rippled surface of his abdomen—

Christ! If she didn’t cut this out, she’d leave herself open to attack. Her friends could spot her any minute, and when they did, she had no doubt they’d swoop down on her like a pack of attack dogs and drag her kicking and screaming to meet her fix. Now that she thought about it, such a scenario would explain the dress, too. They knew she couldn’t struggle in the darn thing without it snapping like an overstretched rubber band. If she so much as threw a punch, her breasts would probably fall right out of the bodice. The idea of the dress’s reaction to a swift kick made her shudder.

Her friends were even more devious than she had imagined, and frankly, instead of intimidating her, the idea made her that much madder. After all, she could appreciate that they wanted her to have a good time, but really, she was beginning to feel more like a john or a hooker than a date. While the idea of being fixed up with a man to fulfill all her fantasies had sounded like a good one at the time, sobriety and two failed attempts had brought her to her senses. There was only one man Missy could imagine hopping into bed with after having exchanged less than twenty words, and since he wasn’t interested, she found that she wasn’t, either.

When rebellion struck Missy, it struck with a vengeance. To hell with her friends and their fantasy fixes! Missy was a mature, independent woman capable of making her own decisions and getting her own dates. In fact, it would serve them all right if she thumbed her nose at their chosen match for her and picked up a sailor to take home! Hell, she should just pick some guy out of the assembled guests at random and take him home! If she couldn’t have the man she wanted, she could at least have a man of her own choosing. That would show them that Melissa Jane Roper was not a woman to be trifled with.

Or at least, she was a woman who picked her own men to be the triflers.

Feeling brash and defiant, Missy spun around to face the room. She would pick up a man, one who was about as far from the fantasy fix—and from the object of her secret fantasies—as she could find, and she’d take him home and end her six years of semi-voluntary celibacy without the “help” of her interfering friends.

How about them apples?

Her defiance lasted all of three and a half seconds. That’s when she saw Danice leap to her feet and heard her yell, “Melissa Jane Roper, where the hell have you been?”

At that point, bravado abandoned her, self-preservation instincts kicked in, and Missy did the smartest thing she could think of.

She turned tail and ran, just as fast as her three-inch heels would carry her.

She made it all the way across the living room, beating a path straight for the French doors that let out onto the side patio. She teetered on the very edge of making good her escape when a warm, solid object stepped into her path and blocked her exit. Missy slammed into it hard enough to knock her slightly silly, but the thing that really stunned her was feeling the immovable object wrap powerful arms around her and press her against the entire length of a very muscular and decidedly masculine body.

“Well, well, well,” the object rumbled in a voice so low, she could feel the vibrations through the soles of her shoes. “Where do you think you’re going in such a hurry, gorgeous? I was hoping you might decide to stay awhile. With me.”

CHAPTER 2

Graham had seen the object of his unexpected lust spin around and race toward him as if the fires of hell licked at her heels. Clearly, he must have done something very good to earn this kind of reward. He couldn’t think what it might be, but he didn’t care. When Miss Sexy Ass flung herself headlong into his arms, he offered up a quick prayer of thanks and decided to worry about the particulars later.

He initially wrapped his arms around her to keep her from falling, but he pressed her closer and held on for a slightly less noble cause. She smelled amazing—sweet and rich and edible—and she felt luscious pressed up against him, all soft and warm and deliciously rounded. The breasts flattened against his shirt were surprisingly delicate compared to the generous rear he’d already drooled over, but their nipples beaded on contact, nudging his chest, and he reminded himself that size didn’t really matter. Not when he compared it to the importance of her killer ass, her mouthwatering scent, and the soft curve of her belly, which was currently pressed tight against his very appreciative groin. For all that, he could forgo the pleasures of a huge pair of tits and still consider himself a very lucky man.

He took a deep breath and felt the fit of his trousers tighten. God, no woman’s scent had ever gone to his head like this. He appreciated a female’s fragrance as much as the next Lupine, but normally, human women couldn’t grab his attention with a pair of pliers. They tended to smell like artificial chemicals and sterile soaps to his kind. Even when it wasn’t offensive, it wasn’t exactly compelling, either. But this woman had him panting with nothing more than her luscious scent and her equally luscious curves.

“Well, well, well,” he murmured, and he could hear the lust vibrating in his tone. He hoped she wouldn’t be intimidated by it, because he doubted there was any way on earth he could have concealed it. “Where do you think you’re going in such a hurry, gorgeous? I was hoping you might decide to stay awhile. With me.”

He watched her head jerk up at his words and found himself looking into a pair of meltingly brown eyes the size and shape of china saucers. A man would have to be very careful not to get sucked down by the undertow he saw in those things. He ignored the vague sense of recognition he felt when he looked at her, because he felt certain they’d never met before. Graham was not the sort of man who forgot a figure like this woman sported. He’d been bored, not blind, but if he had his way, this woman would be relieving that boredom. At least for the night.

He smiled his most seductive smile, the one that made women melt and pant and compare him to a fallen angel, and loosened his grip enough to lean back. He looked down at her and patiently waited for her to respond to his pass. When she did respond, though, it wasn’t precisely what he’d expected.

“Um, excuse me,” she muttered, tearing her chocolaty gaze from his, ducking beneath his unsuspecting arms, and darting behind him to let herself out the French doors.

“What the hell?” He scowled. No woman had ever turned down that kind of invitation from him.

Beside him, Logan laughed. “Never thought I’d see the day.” The other Lupine grinned. “The amazing Graham just struck out with a woman. And a human woman at that.”

Graham scowled, both at Logan’s taunting words and at the reminder that he’d gotten all tied up in knots over a woman from another species, no matter how good she smelled. What the hell was wrong with him?

He wasted about half a millisecond wondering about it before his instincts kicked him in the ass. He didn’t care if this woman was from another planet. He still wanted inside her. Badly.

Shooting Logan a sharp glare, Graham caught the door before it could swing closed behind Miss No-Time-to-Chat.

“That was only the first pitch,” he said. “Next one goes over the fence.”

Ignoring his friend’s snort, Graham disappeared through the doors and into the night, intent on pursuit and capture.

Hello, Twilight Zone, it looks like I’ve come to visit, Missy thought even as she jerked herself out of the arms of the man of her dreams and darted outside. She wondered if she had conjured the encounter just by fantasizing about him earlier. That was the sort of story line the Zoners really went for, right? And since she’d just finished reminding herself how entirely uninterested Graham had been in her before fifteen seconds ago, an alternate reality made the most sense of any explanation she could think of. Either that or she’d dreamed up the whole thing. Now, that explanation had logic and all sorts of other sensible possibilities going for it.

Jogging across the living room with lights blazing and civilized, carpet-covered hardwood had been tough enough in her strappy three-inch heels, but Missy quickly found jogging across the pitch-black patio to be impossible. Reggie and Dmitri must have assumed no one would want to go outside on this unseasonably cold spring night, because they hadn’t left a single outside light burning. That might be fine for the other guests, but for Missy it threatened to break her ankles.

She stumbled to a halt on the uneven brick and debated kicking off her shoes and running barefoot. Then she noticed the cold of the masonry seeping up through the thin soles of her sandals and discarded the idea. All her friends wore heels as well, so the going wouldn’t be any faster for them. If luck stayed with her, she might still be able to out-hobble them.

She peered into the darkness around her and blinked, trying to force her eyes to adjust to the dim light. The high garden walls blocked most of the streetlights, and since the moon was still not full, she couldn’t rely on its pale light to illuminate her path. The day anyone could see stars in the night sky over New York City would be the day after it sank into the mouth of the Hudson.

Wishing for the enormous purse she usually carried, complete with a flashlight for just this sort of emergency, Missy cursed the tiny clutch that had been provided to go with the slinky black dress and began to pick her way slowly toward the courtyard gate and the street beyond. If she could just get a cab before her friends caught up with her, she could be back in her apartment and swathed in flannel PJs inside twenty minutes. Add a cup of cocoa laced with Baileys and she might once again resemble a happy camper.

The hand that clamped around her upper arm and dragged her to a halt dashed her hopes of happiness and startled her so badly, she squealed. Not screamed, not shrieked. Squealed, like one of her girlish students confronted with an inquisitive gerbil. Embarrassed, she spun around to face her pursuer and found herself looking up into Graham Winter’s too-handsome face.

Oh, Lordy, she thought, swallowing hard past the knot in her throat. I have just entered the Twilight Zone. Why else would he keep looking at me like that? Unless I died of embarrassment from wearing that dress and this is my eternal reward . . . .

Now that would be a heaven worth dying for, she decided, even while her logical mind told her to get a grip and find out what he really wanted, because as much time as she had spent noticing the mouthwatering Lupine over the past six weeks, she felt positive he’d never even realized she existed. When he paid any attention to Reggie’s friends at all, it usually consisted of circumspectly ogling Ava or casually bantering with Danice. He’d never bothered to give Missy a first—let alone a second—glance, so why was he now looking at her as if she were a particularly juicy soup bone?

“Um, hi,” she ventured when he failed to say a word. “Did you want something?”

She saw a flash in his sexy green-gold eyes and realized she shouldn’t have been able to see much of anything in the dark. Were his eyes glowing?

She tried to back up a step, but he held her firmly. She cleared her throat. “It’s very nice to see you again, Graham, but I was just leaving. Maybe I’ll see you around some other time. Buh-bye.”

She twisted halfway toward freedom before his hand on her arm stopped her. Looking back at him, she saw his mouth turn down in a scowl.

“When have I seen you before?” he demanded, his tone of voice less than happy.

Now that was proof positive about how little attention Graham had ever paid to her. She’d been Reggie’s maid of honor, and he’d been Dmitri’s best man. They’d walked down the stinking aisle together, and he couldn’t even remember where he’d seen her before?

Miffed, and more than a little hurt, she tugged at her arm and scowled back at him. “Around. I’m a friend of Reggie’s.”

“Where are you going?”

She gave up trying to yank her arm away and began trying to pry his fingers off of her one by one. They stayed stubbornly motionless. “I was going home,” she grumped, “until you decided to go all Conan the Barbarian on me.”

“Why were you in such a hurry? You ran right past me.”

“Actually, I ran right into you, but that’s neither here nor there,” she said, looking around as if she could wish a crowbar into appearing close by. Nothing else seemed capable of breaking his grip. “Like I said, I need to get home. There are some people here I’d rather not see, if you must know.”

Impossible as it seemed, his scowl deepened. “A man people?”

She started to shake her head, then caught herself. No need to appear quite as pathetic as she really was. “What business is it of yours?”

He responded to her defiance by tugging her body closer and breathing in as if he were trying to inhale her, ridiculous heels and all. He planted his other hand on her behind, pressing her hips against him until she could feel the thick, shocking length of his erection prodding her through layers of cloth.

“I’d like to make it my business,” he growled, and oh my God, was his hand kneading her ass? “I’d like to make everything about you my business. That means I want to know if I have to get rid of some moron before I can start convincing you to . . . spend some time with me.”

Missy reeled at his answer. Of all the things he might have said to her, she couldn’t imagine one that would shock her more. The man who had been so unimpressed with her for six weeks that he couldn’t remember who she was, was now telling her he was willing to go through a potential rival in order to have her all to himself? Okay, where was Rod Serling?

She stiffened, because for a split second it occurred to her that maybe Graham was supposed to be her fix. She’d certainly fantasized about him enough lately, but the fantasy her friends had drawn for her third round had been about an intellectual type and playing doctor. Missy could no more picture Graham playing a detached medical professional than she could picture herself playing a whip-wielding dominatrix. Some things just exceeded the limits of her imagination.

There was no way Graham could be her fix, so why had he suddenly decided he wanted the woman he’d never bothered to notice? Maybe this wasn’t The Twilight Zone; maybe she was on Candid Camera. She was about to look for a live TV audience when she heard the door from the living room open and the sound of a woman’s high-heeled shoes tapping against the brick. Suddenly it didn’t matter why Graham wanted to take her away from the party, just as long as he did. Now.

She stopped struggling to get away and instead let him press her up against his groin until she swore she could vouch for the fact that he’d been circumcised.

“No moron,” she reassured him, struggling valiantly not to melt and run all over him like warm hollandaise sauce. If she could just get him to smuggle her away from the house before Ava found her, she could explain later about where they’d met before and why he couldn’t really be interested in her. “No man at all. You know, it is too bad that we’ve never gotten a chance to get to know each other, isn’t it? Since you brought it up, why don’t we get out of here and really take the opportunity to get acquainted?”

Knowing she only had one chance to get him to rescue her before her friends reached them, she bit the bullet, took a deep breath, and slid her hand down his chest, over his taut abs, and down over the bulge beneath his fly until he went absolutely still and tense before her. “What do you say?”

He didn’t say anything. He scooped her up in his brawny arms, tossed her over his shoulder, and sprinted for the patio gate. Two minutes later they were three blocks away and still flying, and Missy was trying to figure out how to explain to the werewolf she’d just teased that she really didn’t intend to sleep with him.

Miracle, anyone?

He didn’t set her down until he reached his second-floor bedroom. His house sat adjacent to Vircolac, the club he owned and operated for the Other population of New York, and on a Friday night like tonight the club was loud and boisterous, but his bedroom was quiet, private, and secluded. So secluded that Missy knew for certain no one would hear her if she screamed. She didn’t particularly want to think about why she might decide to scream.

The minute her feet touched the floor, she scrambled backward, trying to put some distance between them. The difference between fantasizing about something and actually doing it had just hit home for her. With a sledgehammer.

Graham stalked after her, his chin lowered and canted forward in a predatory posture, his powerful body moving lithely and inexorably toward her. He looked tight and coiled, like a cat ready to pounce, or a wolf ready to leap to the kill. The expression in his glowing, greenish eyes made Missy feel a lot like lunch.

Or maybe a midnight snack.

“Um, Graham, I think we need to talk about this.” She kept her eyes on him, afraid to blink when he had that look of intent etched across his angular features.

“No talking,” he growled. His voice had lowered, becoming even rougher and deeper than she remembered, like honey-coated gravel. “Too late for talking. Time to mate.”

She almost tripped over her own feet when she stepped off the edge of the carpet and met the bare wood floor where it disappeared beneath the door. She backed steadily toward the hall. If she could just make it that far . . .

She did, thumping back against the door with an awkward, “Oomf!” She’d been closer than she realized, but she hoped it had been close enough. Her trembling fingers closed over the cool metal doorknob and began to turn. Before her nerves finished processing the signal from her brain, Graham surged forward and pinned her against the unyielding wooden surface.

Missy yelped. Her purse flew into a dark corner. She tried to pull back, but caught between Graham’s stony muscles and the closed hardwood door, she discovered a new appreciation for an old cliché.

Graham leaned forward and buried his face in her neck, his late-night stubble rasping against her skin. His hot breath scalded her, and the feel of his mouth against her flesh made her shiver. When his lips parted and his teeth closed delicately over the tendon that ran from neck to shoulder, her shiver turned into a shudder, and her panting turned into a whimper. His rough tongue rasped her skin, and he groaned.

“The way you taste,” he growled, his hands gripping her and pulling her tight against an erection as surprising as it was intimidating. Restless fingers kneaded her hips. “So sweet. So hot. Want more.”

Oh, God! Missy’s head dipped back without her permission, baring her throat to Graham’s hungry mouth. Her brain was telling her to scream, to run, to turn the damned doorknob and get the hell out of there. But her hormones were telling her to stay, to beg, to wrap her legs around his waist and hold on for the ride she might never be invited on again. Instead of doing either, she stood frozen against the door, trembling and panting, and felt an embarrassing dampness soaking through the thin cotton of her panties.

“Smell so good,” Graham grunted, nuzzling around her neck to lap at the hollow at the base of her throat. He ran his tongue up the soft white curve, and her muscles spasmed in a convulsive swallow. “Wet, thick, creamy. Want it.”

With every word, his voice became more guttural until she could barely understand what he was saying. Was he speaking English, or some Lupine language made up of rumbles and snarls? But in spite of herself, she understood the feel of his hands and his hardness and his hot, hungry mouth.

His weight pinned her lower body to the door, freeing his hands to explore her. She felt one glide over her ribs and close around her breast, roughly squeezing the soft mound. The other reached up to tangle in her hair, angling her head for his convenience before he swooped down and claimed her mouth in a kiss.

He ate at her, nibbling and tugging and sucking on her lips until they parted, then licking and teasing and taunting until they opened wider. His tongue plunged deep and took her. Missy moaned, and he stole the sound and swallowed it, taking it into himself as he forced himself inside. Truthfully, she didn’t require much force. All Graham had to do was flick his tongue against the roof of her mouth and she opened wide and begged his tongue to enter her. He thrust it deep, over and over, in and out, in the primal rhythms of sex.

It drove her crazy, the way he seemed determined to taste every inch of her mouth without allowing her to do the same. She’d dreamed of this so many times, and in all of those dreams her favorite part had been when she’d gotten to touch and taste him for herself. Whimpering her displeasure, she waited until he thrust deep, then tangled her tongue with his and sucked.

His flavor amazed her, as rich and dark as Turkish coffee, as addictive as caffeine and twice as stimulating. Abandoning her grip on the doorknob, she wrapped both arms around his shoulders and pulled herself up against him.

Growling, either a threat or a promise, he wedged his foot between hers and forced her legs apart. His knee came up high between them until it shoved the hem of her clinging skirt up, high along the pale satin of her thighs. Already stressed beyond its design, the dress abandoned all pretense and rolled up like a window shade to settle in a narrow band around her waist.

Missy gasped in shock, but Graham just purred his satisfaction into her mouth and slid his hands down over her hips to cup the backs of her thighs. One after the other, he forced her legs to hitch up and wrap around his waist until he held her up with her arms around his shoulders and his hands beneath her ass and his groin pressed intimately against her.

Behind her closed lids, Missy felt her eyes roll back in her head. She’d never been so aroused in her life. If she’d had a weak heart, she felt sure this would have killed her. As it was, that overstressed organ raced and stammered with every new sensation he forced on her. His kiss consumed her, and as amazing as he tasted, she felt pretty sure she’d black out from lack of oxygen if he didn’t let her catch her breath soon.

She pushed against his shoulders and turned her head to the side, succeeding only in making his mouth shift from her lips to her throat. He kissed her, lapped her, nibbled at her, drawing the flesh hard against his teeth in a rough love bite. Her head knocked hard against the door, but she barely felt it. Instead, she felt his hands slide from her bottom down the backs of her thighs to just above her ankles. He urged her legs higher against him and showed her how he wanted her to hook her ankles together behind his back to ride his hips more securely.

Immediately his hand shot back up her leg, this time traveling along the sensitive inner surface until he cupped her through the soaking crotch of her panties.

Missy hadn’t worn hose, since Ava had forbidden anything so “common.” Instead, she’d reluctantly donned a pair of sheer, silk thigh-highs that clung to her legs like perfume. Ava had also dictated that Missy should wear a lace bra so see-through it barely qualified as lingerie and a pair of matching thong panties. When she dressed for the party, Missy had strapped on the bra but drawn the line at the butt floss. She refused to spend an entire evening fighting the urge to tug the cloth out of there, so she pulled on a pair of her own white cotton bikinis instead. Now, she wished she’d worn a stainless-steel chastity belt, because the feel of Graham’s hand cupping her through the thin layer of cotton almost killed her. She whimpered and pressed down onto his fingers.

“Graham, please!” she whimpered. She wasn’t sure what she was begging for, but it didn’t matter, not as long as he kept touching her. As long as he didn’t think she was begging him to stop, everything would be okay. She got the impression a nuclear assault wouldn’t stop him, though, so she figured it was safe to be non-specific.

He growled again, the sound even more animalistic than before. Instead of being frightened, Missy gloried in it. This was beyond her realm of experience but not beyond the realm of her fantasies. The idea of being wanted so badly by a man that his control threatened to fracture around them was at least as arousing as what his hands and mouth were doing to her. She felt drenched in her own fantasy world, felt like an entirely new, brazen creature, one she’d never known before. She gave in to this new side of herself, reveling in the freedom and adventure of it nearly as much as in Graham’s hard body pressing against hers.

She buried her hands in his thick, dark hair and pressed his face closer against her. He lifted her higher against the door and lowered his head until he could catch the neckline of her stretchy dress in his teeth. One sharp tug and the thing disintegrated in his mouth. He turned his head, spat out the pieces, and when he looked back at her breasts, covered only by the sheer silken bra, his eyes glowed an even brighter green.

“Taste,” he rumbled, and that was all the warning Missy got before he ripped open her bra and his hot, avid mouth closed over her left nipple.

He sucked greedily, forcing the ruched peak hard against the roof of his mouth, drinking from her as if she were his only source of nourishment. Missy moaned. She felt like he drew her soul out of her through her breast, but all she wanted was for him to pull harder, to take more of her into the wet furnace of his mouth.

He did. He sucked with bruising strength, then pulled back until just the nipple remained inside his mouth. His straight, sharp teeth nipped at her, hard enough to sting but not hard enough to injure, and he leaned forward again, stretching his jaw wide and sucking at her flesh until almost her entire petite breast disappeared between his lips.

His free hand reached up and closed about the other peak, kneading with rough motions, pulling at her erect nipple with strong, lean fingers. She felt them tugging at her, making her crazy, and even as they moved, the hand between her legs went to work. He hooked his forefinger in the crotch of her panties and tore, ripping the panel right out from between her legs. Then his fingers were sliding through her slick folds and spreading the abundant moisture around her swollen lips and soft, hidden valleys.

Finger and thumb closed around the nub of her clitoris as if it were another nipple, tugging and pinching in a gentle mimicry of his hand on her breast. Missy cried out, her heels digging into the small of his back, her thighs clenching as she tried to lift herself away from his tormenting fingers.

Away? Toward? God, who knew?

His growl this time held as much menace as passion. His fingers abandoned her clit to tangle in her pubic hair and pull her back down where he wanted her. She moaned and settled into place even as her thighs tried to close against further sensory overload. His waist held her knees apart, keeping her spread and available, and he took shameless advantage. He tweaked her nipple again, making her yelp, then his hand shifted and smoothed, and he penetrated her with one long, unyielding finger.

She cried. Real, honest-to-God tears rolled down her face at the feel of him inside her, even only this much of him. She wanted more, but her long-neglected passage protested at even this small invasion. Missy hadn’t had sex in six years, not since college, and then her partner had been nothing like Graham, the experience nothing like this rioting orgy of heat and pleasure and sweat. She wondered now how she would be able to take him if even his finger stretched her so uncomfortably. She felt his finger withdraw and press back a second later, followed quickly by another. Two strong digits pressed deep, tunneling through her body’s resistance and showing her why it was much too late for doubt.

If he was going to pleasure her to death, she intended to enjoy as much of the experience as she could.

Using one hand to tug at his tousled hair, she dislodged his mouth from one breast just long enough to guide it to the other. He greeted her neglected nipple with a quick nip and a soothing pass of his rough velvet tongue before sucking it deep into his mouth. Missy felt every draw like a pulse between her legs, and knew Graham could feel it, too, when he began timing the thrusts of his fingers to the clenching of her inner muscles.

God, he was trying to kill her!

Desperate to feel more of him inside her, she slid one hand down between their bodies and into the waistband of his slacks.

The soft heat of her palm met his busy fingers between her legs, wringing from him a soft growl. One that morphed into a breathless curse when her fingers closed carefully around his eager erection.

Missy echoed the sound with a murmur of satisfaction, squeezing his thick shaft and savoring the smooth texture of his skin and the heavy, solid feel of his arousal. Her fingers couldn’t quite close around him, because her hands were very small and Graham was very not. He filled her palm to overflowing, and Missy wanted to know if he would fill her body the same way.

She drew her hand away with the intent of finding out. Graham punished her desertion with a sharp nip to her breast and a deep, twisting thrust of his fingers. Missy cried out and bucked against him, but she remained determined. If he thought turning her on even more would make her change course, he could think again. She was having way too much fun to abandon her new toy just so he could catch his breath again. She quickly, if clumsily, unfastened the buttons of his trousers and tugged down the zipper, freeing his arousal from its confinement with a sigh of satisfaction. Graham’s entire body stiffened, and he pulled his mouth and hands away from her heated flesh, grasping her hips and shaking her until her eyes met his.

“Now!” he bit out, and the harsh, spare urgency in his voice made her shudder. He lifted her hips higher until his erection parted her swollen flesh and pressed firmly against her entrance.

Missy saw the savage need in his eyes and felt a wash of excitement instead of the fear she had half-expected. Panting, she nodded with uneven, jerky motions and pressed her forehead to his.

“Now,” she echoed, and had time for one shallow breath before her world tilted dizzily on its axis.

That breath ended on a scream as Graham’s fingers bit hard into her hips, lifted her briefly above him, and then slammed her weight down to meet his violent thrust. His thick length tunneled endlessly into her, forcing her muscles to stretch wide to accommodate his girth. Sensations overwhelmed her. She couldn’t decide if they consisted mainly of pleasure or pain. In that moment, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was inside her, thrusting hard and deep until he ground to a halt, nudging roughly at her cervix.

“Graham, wait!” she gasped, her mind whirling and her body protesting. She needed a minute, just a minute, to catch up with him, to adjust to his penetration and the unsettling feeling that something within her had changed in the instant that their bodies were joined.

Bracing her hands against his shoulders, Missy fought hard to regain her breath, her equilibrium, her identity. She felt like her entire self had boiled down to the rippling clasp of her body wrapping snugly around his. “Wait. Please.”

Though her eyelids had turned to heavy weights, she struggled to meet his gaze, to maintain that connection to reality when everything around her had gone topsy-turvy. In the dim light of the bedroom, Graham’s eyes flashed with an eerie glow.

“Too late,” he growled, pressing her hard against the door as he began to move within her to a relentless, driving rhythm.

In her position, impaled on his thrusting length, held in place by the tenuous grasp of her watery legs around his waist and the biting grip of his fingers on her hips, Missy could do nothing else but cling to Graham’s shoulders and let him conquer her like a foreign empire.

He pounded into her hard and fast, and she struggled to decide if she loved it or hated it. She’d thought she knew what sex was, but Graham Winters was showing her she had no clue. Lunging deeper inside her than she had thought possible, his corded muscles bunching and shifting against her, this man—this werewolf—seemed intent on teaching her that what she’d thought of as sex had as much in common with this urgent, primal act as a Chihuahua had in common with a Lupine.

His hands shifted to her ass and tugged. “More,” he rumbled, his lips drawing back in a snarl. “Take more.”

More? God, she could barely take what he was already giving her! How could there possibly be more? She shook her head, unable to speak, fighting for each ragged breath she managed to draw into her starving lungs.

“More!” he insisted, and his demand became an order. The hand on her ass tightened and pushed, while the other moved to her stomach and thrust between their heaving bodies. One strong finger hooked beneath the soft flesh of her mound and pulled. The movement forced her to cant her hips upward, tilting her pelvis and changing the angle of their joining until she felt him slide impossibly deeper inside her.

Missy sobbed at the feel of another inch of silk-covered steel gliding home. His penetration butted against her cervix, nudged her darkest corners, and now she could feel his pelvis grinding between her legs, feel his hips against hers in a new, heavier impact. Finally he had buried his whole length inside her, and he filled her so deeply, she tasted his thrusts in the back of her throat.

“Graham!”

Her cry was a plea, a protest, and a demand for more. She had no idea which she meant most sincerely, but Graham answered only the last, ignoring the others completely. Pinning her against the door, now hot and slick from their sweaty bodies, he rode her hard, hilting inside her with each thrust, making her muscles ripple and contract on each entrance, collapse and yearn on each withdrawal.

She wanted desperately to thrust back against him, but her position made it impossible. He controlled her every movement, holding her still and open for his powerful thrusts. She felt the constricting band of her tight dress where it had settled around her waist, felt the rasp of his dress shirt under her hands and against her breasts. She felt the rough fabric of the trousers he still wore low around his hips while he took her. She’d never felt anything so savage or so amazingly good.

The tension built inside her until she sobbed for release. He bent his knees for leverage, thrust high and hard inside her, and Missy’s world dissolved in an endless, pulsing climax. Her body clamped tight around him, milking him with slick, wet muscles until Graham slammed her back against the door and roared.

Fingers gripping, muscles clenching, he crushed her between the hard wood and his hard body while he emptied himself inside her in hot, heavy spurts.

She melted around him, clinging to his waist and his shoulders with the last of her strength. Her breath sawed in and out of her lungs on ragged gasps. Her muscles felt like melted pudding, and they trembled under the least little exertion. If not for the solid door behind her and Graham’s heavy weight in front of her, she would have trickled to the floor and lain there for at least a week.

Graham stirred, and Missy wondered where he got the strength. His hands cupped her bottom and held her in place while he crossed the room with three long strides. He tumbled her onto the bed with a thud. In the middle of the silk-covered mattress, Missy blinked and grunted while Graham settled his weight on top of her. He heaved a rough sigh and buried his face in the crook of her neck, his tongue lapping the salt from her skin with lazy strokes. She read more sleepy satisfaction than amorous intent in his actions and offered up a breathless prayer of thanks. She had just about enough energy left to close her eyelids and she’d be out like a light.

Her hands groped along the mattress, looking for a blanket to pull over them, but she found nothing. The only covering on the bed was the fitted silk sheet. In fact, she couldn’t remember seeing sheets or blankets or even a bedspread pooled on the floor from a restless night’s sleep. Too tired to wonder about it, she contented herself with Graham’s body heat, which seemed more effective than an electric blanket anyway.

Tangling her legs with his, she shifted her hips and felt him still nestled half-hard inside her. She mulled it over for a moment, decided she liked the sensation, and wrapped her arms around him. Her last thought before she tumbled into unconsciousness was that no woman could possibly need a fantasy fix if she got to spend one night of her life with a lusty lycanthrope.

CHAPTER 3

Honey and vanilla.

Graham’s nose twitched, followed closely by his penis, as he slid gradually from sleep to waking. With his eyes still closed, he concentrated on the scent surrounding him, an intoxicating blend of honey and vanilla that reminded him of shortbread and sex and warm, melted ice cream. The thought made his stomach growl.

He nuzzled his face into a soft nest of hair and inhaled deeply to make sure he hadn’t just dreamed up this woman with her mind-blowing scent and her passionate responses. Always before, her scent had been obscured by the environments they had met in, ones full of humans who used soaps and lotions and perfumes with such a heavy hand that Graham had learned long ago to block off his ultra-sensitive sense of smell in self-defense. If the woman beside him had applied any artificial scents last night, time and sweat had long since erased them. All that was left was the sweet, delicious scent of a woman he’d searched for all his life. Now that he’d found her, he’d be damned if he’d let her get away.

Unless he was very much mistaken, Graham Winters had just found his mate.

Normally, a new mating—especially for a pack alpha—was a cause for celebration. When your entire culture was based on the pack mentality, anything that led to the perpetuation of the pack won praise and respect, so he ought to be feeling just terrific at the idea that he’d finally found the one woman he could be happy with for the rest of his life. He just had two problems.

The significance of the first slammed into the back of his head like an iron pipe with a grudge the minute he looked down at her. With her hair soft and rumpled on the pillow, her makeup worn away by time and exertion, she looked completely different from the way he remembered her. Instead of the brazen, blond sexpot in the too-tight dress, she looked like a little girl, all fair skin and pink cheeks and child-like innocence. Her thick brown eyelashes lay in soft arcs against her cheeks, and her rosy lips were parted and slightly pouting

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 403