When he removed his shirt the first time, the discolored patchwork of bruises on his chest and back made her gasp. Sorrow and dismay softened her heart. Clearly, he’d been abused. She didn’t know what he’d done to warrant such a battering. But no one deserved to be treated that way.
She’d wanted, needed, to bring him joy. His elusive smile became for her a treasure rarer and dearer than any of the shiny bits she’d dropped on his porch.
So she’d sung for him. Not a raven’s raucous caw. But a clear, sweet melodic sound. Her special gift.
As if her song stunned him, he’d morphed into frozen marble, silent and still. Then, spitting the nails from between his teeth, he’d dropped the hammer and stepped off the porch again. He paced the yard in front of the cabin, scanning the skies, studying each of the trees. Had he found her? She couldn’t be sure.
“Thank you,” he’d said, his voice deep, but soft as a weeping willow bud.
She hadn’t known what to do. But her playful nature took over. She pelted him with a black walnut.
His mouth cracked, his lips quirking upward. He had a lovely smile, like sunlight suddenly bursting through dark, forbidding storm clouds. One that sent hot tingles rippling through her in places she’d never been warmed.
He’d grinned up at her. Or at least in her direction. Her heart clenched.
He’d touched her soul. She recognized a kindred being. She could no more stop watching him now, stop coming to his glade, than she could cease to soar in the bright wind, against the wide blue heaven in her favorite guise. The raven gave her the freedom she craved. Escape from the suffocating hold of her ever more greedy family.
When he finished building his shelves during those first weeks, he once again positioned the small baubles she had dropped. Again, in precise rows, no trinket misaligned…as if he needed tangible proof he could bring order to some part of his world. He built shelves for the interior of the cabin, too.
Gee seemed pleased the next time he visited.
“Progress,” he’d said. “You’re making a home.”
“I can live here,” the youth said. “I don’t hear voices. Just beautiful songs.”
“One day you’ll need pack. As they will need you. You will have to return.”
Ah, so he was wolf.
“Maybe.” He’d shrugged. “But not now.”
The older shifter nodded. “Get strong. Let the spirits of these woods speak to you. They have much to impart. Learn from them.”
Gee showed him a martial arts technique called t’ai chi ch’uan, part stillness, part meditation, all physicality.
“Focus. Become one with what you hear, what you see, what you sense. Use it. Control it.”
The three hundred-pound bear had lumbered through the lithe holds and movements comically, but Brick took to them easily. He practiced for hours in the quiet after dawn or the gray, gloaming time at dusk, barefoot on the dewy grass, bare-chested, dressed only in loose black drawstring trousers, holding his poses for lengthening periods, his body striated and rippling with muscles.
Gee visited less and less. The youth spent long afternoons hiking and exploring the hills and woods, then returning to the cabin to whittle animals and figurines on his porch. Sometimes whole woodland scenes, no bigger than a large man’s fist. She admired his artistry.
Eventually, he gathered up his handiwork, carefully placed the objects in a tin box, and then ventured away from the cabin. He started going into a town. Not Los Lobos, though, where she suspected he came from, where the Black Hills Wolves pack held sway. But into Shady Heart, on the other side of the mountain, where her cat shifter family ran the county, sprawling outward from the somewhat seedy business district like an oil slick on the ocean.
When he’d come home after that first foray, he no longer had his carved pieces. The next day he gathered fallen branches of green wood and began anew.
After one trip to town, he’d returned with a battered old truck. She wondered if one of her relatives had sold the rattling junker to him. Cheated him, maybe. Another time, he came back drunk, followed by a hard-looking woman who tumbled from her car, wobbly on her feet. One of the easy floozies from her Uncle Cal’s place, she was sure. Males from miles around, both human and shifter, knew they could pay for pleasure—or anything else they craved—at the Graymarket Trading Company Saloon and Casino, Cal’s palatial den of decadence and iniquity in Shady Heart—which was not shady in the leafy meaning of the word, and had very little heart to speak of.
Black eye makeup had streaked the female’s cheeks, circling her eyes like a raccoon. Too much blush, too much lipstick, too little dress. Definitely one of Cal’s flock. Human, probably. Too graceless to belong to Clan Goldspark, their mountain lion clan. And Summer hadn’t recognized her.
How much had Brick paid for her?
The woman stumbled toward him, grabbing onto his arm.
Summer had swooped down with a brittle cry and flapped around the painted female, until the woman shrieked in terror and threw her arms up to shield her face. Then she left a sticky deposit in the whore’s teased hair and soared away. The soiled dove scrambled back into her car and sped down the mountain. Brick never brought another woman home.
The following day, when he emerged from the cabin, rubbing his temples as if his head hurt, she’d peppered him with black walnuts. He held up his hands in surrender.
“You can’t be jealous, Annabel Lee.”
So he’d given her a name, had he? She liked that. She’d rained another batch of walnuts down on him, but more playfully. He caught some. Juggled. Standing in his clearing, looking up at the sky, tossing walnuts in the air and laughing. He had a deep, rich laugh. His laugh grew even deeper, richer over time. He fed the teasing, carefree, whimsical aspects of her nature. She looked forward to playing with him, to their game with the walnuts.
But not as much as she now looked forward to him removing his shirt.
One day, years earlier, he’d sat on his porch rocker whittling, whistling a little off-key, pausing to glance up occasionally, as if he knew he were being watched. A mischievous smile quirked his lips upward. When he finished, he placed a beautifully carved figure of a wolf on the railing.
She hopped down to take a closer look. His best work yet. The detail stunned her, the knife strokes on the body making each whorl of hair of the creature’s furry coat distinct. The expression around the eyes, the mouth, one of wonder and bemusement, and just the right amount of devilry. Like Brick’s own. Hinting at the shaggy scruffiness of the carver in human form. She coveted the tiny sculpture. Wanted to grasp it and soar away, to hide it in her tree house for her and her alone. He’d winked, as if he knew.
“Yours, sweetheart.”
Then he’d brushed the shavings away, slid his knife back into the sheath on his belt, gathered up his tin box with the other objects he’d carved that week and, leaving the wolf on the porch rail for her, got into the truck and rumbled down the mountain.
After he clattered away, she snatched up the little figurine, holding it carefully in her talons, and winged swiftly homeward. In her bedroom, she’d shifted to human form and held the small wolf to her heart, stroking the carved fur, warming the wood with her fingers, before tucking the figure beneath her pillow. She slept with one hand curled around the carving, and dreamed of him often.
He left the cabin on a monthly basis. She never followed him, but returned to her own house, built into a tree in the woods on the edge of the town. She did not know—did not want to know—what he did when he went into Shady Heart. She knew the town and suspected. But she blocked those unwanted thoughts from her mind.
Over the years, as the town’s animosity toward other shifters—particularly wolves, especially the wolves of the Black Hills Pack—grew, she feared for him also. But she told herself the cats would leave him alone as long as he minded his own business—something Brick excelled at—and spent his money in Shady Heart. And besides…he seemed to have no affiliation with Lo
s Lobos or the Black Hills Pack anymore. He couldn’t pose any kind of threat to her Uncle Cal’s plans.
One night, when the moon glowed full, Brick had come out of the cabin and howled up at the glittering orb, his voice hoarse, harsh, ragged. Caught in the grip of a compulsion he clearly could no longer fight. His clothes had seemed to choke him and he stripped them off down to his skin. Standing naked, face tilted to the light, he’d let the glow bathe him in silver.
That may have been the moment. The moment when everything inside her shattered, became still, reformed, truly recognized the male before her. When her heart, already lent to him on a part-time basis, became his. Completely. Irrevocably.
The considerable muscles he’d built up over the years took on added bulk as he dropped to his hands and knees, the air shimmering around him. His face twisted, his grimace somewhere between agony and orgasm, as his head grew, elongated, his nose lengthening and broadening into a muzzle, his mouth, his lips widening, stretching to accommodate fangs. His hair, oh. So sleek, so dense. So like the wolf he’d carved for her. His fur looked soft, lighter than his human hair, rich and tawny as butterscotch or melted caramel.
Something happened to her the first time she watched him shift. Something raw. Something metaphysical. Something eternal. And undeniably hot.
He’d bounded out of his yard and torn into the woods, racing below the moon. Athletic, graceful. Predatory and dangerous. She loved watching him shift, watching him running in his wolf form. Born into a clan of nocturnal cats, familiar and comfortable with the night, she soared into the skies above him, keeping pace, between him and the mother moon.
Whenever he ran, she flew with him.
Did he know?
Of course, he knew. Except for those first few weeks of the healing process, when he’d seemed soul-dead and oblivious to the world, nothing escaped him. He possessed a wolf’s acute and finely honed predatory senses, his innate skills so far beyond a mere human’s ability to see, to scent, to hear.
At dawn after that first full moon, he’d lain spread-eagled on the sweet, dewy grass, on his back in a fragrant wild-flower strewn meadow some distance from the cabin, his broad shoulders and huge chest heaving, sweat drying on his human skin, on the ridged muscles rippling from his slick pecs, down his flat abdomen, detouring to the chiseled ropes bracketing his carved hips. A dark ribbon of hair began below his navel, pointing the way, like a neon arrow, down his sin trail of delight. Jackpot.
Her mind had blanked and she lost control, shifting so abruptly into human form she’d nearly toppled out of her tree. Heat poured over her, through her, as if she’d been tossed into a boiling cauldron. She’d never really thought about sex before. Suddenly it was all she could think about.
Her breathing had hitched, her mouth hanging open. She took in shallow breaths, huffing them out. Panting. By the spirit of the Great Hawk. Panting. And her respiratory difficulty had nothing to do with the exertion of her flight, with their race in the moonlight. And everything to do with the potent, raw male strength displayed before her. Good thing the abundant summer foliage had kept her out of sight.
She hadn’t been able to tear her gaze from him. Her vocabulary failed her after spectacular. Magnificent. Powerful. Someone smarter than she needed to invent new words for this male.
He’d blinked one eye open and stared up at the lightening heavens, searched the leafy boughs of the massive sycamore that hid her.
Or did it?
“A good run, wasn’t it, Annabel Lee?”
His arms and legs spoked out from his sides.
An enormous erection jutted skyward.
He made no effort to hide it.
Chapter Two
Brick stacked the cord of green firewood on a pallet in a corner of the porch, keeping the logs uncovered to let them season. The sharp scent of pine melded with the sweeter smell of maple he’d already cut. He did the U-Haul thing with another armload, toting the split white fir into the cabin, filling the rack next to the stone hearth. Screw Glade Plug-ins. Nothing finer than the natural tang of fresh-cut wood.
He’d left his flannel shirt outside next to the chopping block. But his recent exertions had left him sweaty and—sniff—a little ripe. His flesh called out for some wet-and-soapy, but the pristine chrome-and-tile Kohler in his bathroom didn’t make the short list when the other candidate glittered fresh and natural beneath the late afternoon sun out back of the cabin.
The wolf wanted the lake. Paced inside him with restless insistence until Brick sidled closer to the front door. The sharp, crisp scent of spring socked him through the open window; the rich mineral regeneration of damp ground, new grass, wild flowers fighting to burst free. And something else. Something he couldn’t place curled around him like a fist. Got the juices flowing, his hormones bubbling. A muted growl burbled out of him. Trying to wrest control back from his other half on the pressing issue of where to dunk his fragrant carcass seemed futile.
“What’s the deal, bro?” he murmured. No answer, of course. But his skin prickled as if two paws-worth of claws did a funky Harlem Shuffle beneath the surface. “No moon tonight, Dog. But you’re edgy enough to shave my whiskers.” And so was he now. Responding to the call from outdoors, the howl within.
While his shower might be all soap sludgeless sparkle owing to an under-the-sink Home Depot of cleaning supplies and a touch of, yeah, let’s face it, a little OCD action…no amount of Tilex and Kaboom! impressed Brother Wolf. And he sure as hell didn’t want to get hung up all day counting and recounting the mold-free ceramic squares lining the walls above the tub. Not that his beast seemed inclined to let him.
So slinging a towel around his neck, he grabbed a clean shirt and hightailed his way due west.
Fuck.
Halfway there, a powerful charge of electricity pulsed through him, as if he’d gotten a wet finger stuck in a socket. Stiffening his limbs. Not to mention points south. Heat engulfed him, out of all proportion to the balmy spring day and the sun beating down on the surface of the glistening blue lake. Tendrils of spicy, intoxicating scent coiled around him. A flood of testosterone boiled his blood.
Someone had beaten him there.
A woman, her supple back turned toward him, stood completely bare, a tumble of wet, raven-colored hair streaming over her shoulders. Water licked gently at all the curved and rounded, at the tiny waist and flaring hips, the undulating ripples intermittently exposing twin dimples at the base of her spine. Her pheromones drenched him. He leaned forward, nearly coming out of his sneaks and planting his face in the soft earth, eyes bugging out as he strained to see more. Yeah. There it was. A hint of firm, curvaceous ass. Primo ass. A dimpled, heart-shaped ass that would feature in his lonely guy dreams. Leaving him to sketch in the unseen glory of her tits, the shape of her face.
And Jesus. Her scent.
The pepper of pink berries and musk of new moss, an edge of cedar, the sweetness of honey. Finished with blackberries, strawberries, a hint of early rose. Complex and many layered like fine wine, expensive perfume. He sniffed, then drew great draughts of the intoxicating fragrance into his lungs. His head reeled, his heart thudded, his breathing stuttered erratic and uneven.
Holy freakin’—he didn’t give a shit what the fuck she looked like. All he could think about was rubbing his snout over her skin, inhaling her until he drowned in her scent, and had wrapped her in his. Of licking her, tasting her, basking in the promise of that juicy flesh just beneath the surface of the lake. Of slinging his arm around her trim waist, positioning her on all fours in the mud of the shallows, burying his cock deep inside her, his balls smacking that ripe ass as he banged her, the water slurping her sleek flanks, his mouth roving over her. Sinking his teeth into the soft skin of her neck. Marking her. Mating her.
He statued again. Mating her? He’d never considered the idea before, never expected he’d ever take a mate. He was a lone wolf. Banished from his pack while still very young. Untutored. Unclear on what it even really meant
to mate another for life. Unable to stand more than a few minutes in company before the clamoring voices in his head drove him to violence. He lived contented, alone in the mountain cabin he’d fixed up over the years, turning it into a comfortable den. He could never ask any female to live that way.
But he’d never reacted to any woman with such intensity. To any female. His experience might have been somewhat limited to the more daring Black Hills wolfettes before he turned eighteen, or the easy pickings at the Graymarket Trading Company Saloon and Casino in town, but Calhoun Seven’s ladies were extremely skilled and talented—and knew exactly what to do to get a male hot and fevered. And yet…he’d never been on fire like this, flames licking into every one of his cells, turning his groin into a blazing inferno.
Within him, his beast nearly burst out of his skin, almost forcing a shift to fanged and hairy. The growl filled his chest, vibrated low in his throat. The wolf wants what the wolf wants. Somehow Dog had known, had led him down here to this place. Ready to pounce. Ready to claim. Ready to own.
“Down, boy,” he muttered. “You can’t have her. She’s mine.” He shook his head, poleaxed by the wave of fierce possession that hit him. “And how the hell did you even know?”
The wolf recognized her. Sensed her? Scented her? Sniffed and audited the blasts of fierce pheromones sent over the airwaves by Radio Free 1-800-Mate before he’d even laid his human eyes on her or caught her sensual moss and berry scent. That’s what the pacing, the edginess…the agitated anticipation…had been all about.
He’d never seen this female before. But…he knew her. Somehow he knew her. Her scent socked him again, at once woodsy, crisp, and sweet.
With a sudden burst of clarity that launched him straight into zero gravity amazeballs territory, he saw her soaring over his head, her silhouette a slash of ebony against the daytime sky. Keeping pace with him at midnight when he raced beneath the fullness of the moon. Lobbing walnuts at him in jest. Or when she rescued him from an abyss of despair by tossing shiny gifts onto his porch. His raven. His….
Wolf's Song Page 2
