“I’m sorry. You must think I’m crazy,” I said.
He cocked his head to the side to regard me curiously. “Must I?”
I stared at him for a moment, then gestured down to the remains of the rabbit. “I wasn’t exactly acting normal last night, was I?”
“No, but I’ve never met a solitary female in heat before.” He shrugged, the soft cotton of his t-shirt drawing tight against the tightly corded muscles of his chest. “I imagine being a little out of it is to be expected.”
I stared at him for a moment, thinking over the bizarre wording he had just used. The only people I’d known to ever use “female” as a noun for identifying women in a sentence like that had been ragingly sexist. Coupling that with him saying I was in heat and the whole thing seemed unspeakably creepy. I hugged the shirt around myself, as if I could will it to cover more.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but could you let me borrow your phone or something? I’m in kind of desperate need for pants,” I said.
“Who are you calling?” he asked as he took a few steps closer to me.
I automatically backed up. The hot stranger hadn’t done a thing to make me feel threatened beyond saying some weird stuff, but I just instinctively knew I didn’t want to get too close to him yet. There was some undercurrent going on through all of this that I couldn’t yet make sense of.
“My roommates. One of them should be able to find me and bring me clothes.” I glanced away from the stranger for a moment, noting just how deep the woods looked here. “Where are we exactly?”
“Redwood Regional Park.”
That made me stare at him again, shocked by how much distance I had covered in my sleep. The little house we were renting wasn’t that far from the university, but now I was at least ten miles from there. And naked.
“Did you drive me here? How did that happen?” I demanded.
His brows drew together and he looked as if he was trying to figure something out. Something absurd, by the expression on his face. After a moment he closed the distance between us in three quick strides and grabbed hold of my arms, making me yip in shock and fear. Rather than attack me, he buried his face in the side of my neck and inhaled deeply, then followed around to the other side and back into my hair.
There shouldn’t have been anything erotic in something so strange as sniffing me, yet my body felt differently. A rush of arousal that made me light-headed struck me and I wavered a bit on my legs, feeling overwhelmed by his nearness. Even through the flannel I could feel the heat of his hands on my arms. The scent of him on the shirt had been appealing before, but it was nothing in comparison to his presence so close.
When he pulled back from taking my scent, I could see his pupils were dilated and his tan skin was slightly flushed. I wondered if glancing down would find his jeans drawn tight. He released me as if I had burned him and took a few steps backwards to put space between us once again.
“You’re a wolf and you haven’t a clue,” he said at last. “I thought you were just solitary like me, but...you’re not, are you?”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “I’m not a wolf. I’m not a female like I’m some kind of animal. I’m a woman, okay?”
He laughed as if I’d said something outrageously funny, then move back to lean against the rocky outcropping he had perched on before. I noticed he was trying to keep his distance since he had sniffed me, which was confusing on top of everything else.
“How can you not know? You shifted. I saw you in your wolf form last night. How can you not know what you’re doing?” He looked me over like I was some particularly fascinating specimen dropped into a laboratory.
“I have dreams,” I began, reluctantly. “And sometimes I sleepwalk.”
“And you have no pack,” he pointed out. “I can only smell humans on you. What happened to your parents?”
I hesitate, wondering just how insane this could get. “I’m adopted. I don’t know anything about my birth parents except that they abandoned their daughter. My adopted parents live in Sacramento and they’re...they’re normal people. They don’t do freaky stuff like this.”
The stranger frowned. “Freaky stuff like what? Being what you are?”
I shook my head, not knowing how to even respond to that. “Look, I’m standing out here naked and kind of cold. Could you at least tell me your name?”
“James Littlewolf.” He paused after he said the name, one corner of his mouth curling up wryly. “I’m like you, except I actually grew up knowing it.”
“Christina Tybault.” I looked around the woods again with a sigh, then turned back to him once more. “Could you stop talking in riddles and just tell me what’s really going on?”
Chapter 2
“You’re a wolf,” he said simply. “Usually called a werewolf in English, but it’s not the same as werewolves in movies. You’re born a shifter and you die a shifter. There’s no way to catch it or cure it. It’s just what you are. We usually start shifting between one or five, but I suppose if something traumatic happened that could be delayed somehow.”
He looked me over again as if weighing his next words. “And our females—excuse me, women—have a heat cycle just like wild wolves do.”
“Humans don’t have heat cycles.” I tried to ignore the nagging, gnawing hunger inside of me, but being so close to him was only making it worse. I took a step backwards to make more space between us. “We don’t even make it obvious when we’re ovulating. That’s just...not how people work.”
He gave me a slightly pitying look, then raised one hand. I watched in fascination as the soft tissues slid to change their configuration as the bone beneath shifted and changed shape. Dark fur grew up, looking nothing like the hair of any primate I’d ever seen. It was unmistakably a wolf’s fur and the appendage was now somewhere between a hand and a paw. With the long, dark claws at the end of each digit it looked more terrifying than either hand or paw could have been alone.
“We’re not human,” he said simply. “So we don’t work like humans do.”
I exhaled heavily, at a loss for any further argument. “Could I do that?”
He shook his hand and in the course of that gesture shifted it back into an ordinary looking human hand once more. “Maybe someday. In theory, every wolf has the potential to be an alpha, but you have to have the temperament for it and some actual support from the rest of your pack. An omega with all the potential in the world might stay that way forever if the rest of the pack keeps her down.”
“I have no idea what any of that meant,” I pointed out.
He rolled his eyes, but it seemed as though the gesture was more one of self-deprecation than mocking me. “I’ll try to explain it all. I’m just not sure how well I can do that for you right now.”
“Why?”
He pushed himself away from the rock and crossed over to me once again. I could see the tension in his body, the way his pulse jumped in his throat when he came nearer to me. His eyes closed as he leaned in toward me, inhaling my scent again as he circled around me.
“I’m a mature male with his own territory. You’re a lone female in heat. Can’t you figure it out?” he asked in a low, dangerous voice.
His words were like velvet rubbed down my spine and I shuddered in spite of myself. “You mean you want to...to have sex with me?” I stammered.
“No,” he purred as he circled around behind me. I felt the heat of his hands as they grasped my upper arms again. He had to run several degrees warmer than any other person I had ever known. It just radiated off of him, driving away the chill of the foggy morning in the forest.
I could feel his warmth as he pressed himself to my back, molding around me. His lips brushed against the outer shell of my ear, his breath tickling behind it. “I want to breed you.”
Pulling away was the right choice. It was the sensible, cautious response. Running into the woods and trying to put as much distance between us as possible appealed as well, but
I knew he could out-race me. He was a creature of these woods, clearly more at ease with what he was than me. If I ran, he would chase and he would win. Of that I was completely sure.
That didn’t mean I had to lean back into him. I didn’t have to tip my head to the side to offer up the long, smooth line of my neck to whatever he wanted. I didn’t have to roll my hips back to feel the outline of his arousal through confining denim. I didn’t have to do any of that, and yet I couldn’t stop myself all the same. Maybe he was right and I was in heat.
James growled when I offered him my throat, then lightly nipped at the soft flesh there with his teeth, making me hiss. His hands slid down from my arms to my hips, then start inching the flannel shirt up to expose more of me.
“I can’t resist you if you’re going to keep doing things like that,” he murmured, then pressed a kiss to the side of my neck before nuzzling his way back up to my ear.
“Doing things like what?” I asked, my voice breathless.
“Rubbing yourself on me. Offering yourself.” One of his hands at the hem of the shirt had curled into a fist and I could feel his clenched knuckles against my bare thigh. “I should get you to my cabin and leave you there alone.”
The thought of being left alone in this state was agonizing, but I recognized the sense in what he was saying. We didn’t know each other at all and if what he was saying was right, this would have a very high chance of getting me pregnant. Which was a bad thing to risk with some strange man I’d just met in the woods, I felt.
“Why not just take me home? Or I can call someone to come and get me,” I suggested.
Drawing away from him was agonizingly difficult, taking every bit of willpower I had. I managed to pull a few inches away from him so that our bodies weren’t pressed together. Then his hand released the hem of my borrowed shirt and I breathed in relief. My relief only lasted a moment before his hand had slid around to the front of my body to press gently but insistently against my stomach to pull me close to him again. I whimpered as the tempting heat of him was pressed to me once more. His lips brushed the side of my neck.
“There are other males out there,” he murmured, as if that explained everything. “I might be able to resist you, but why would I offer up the woman I want as my mate for others to take?”
The casual chauvinism in that rhetorical question was enough to pierce the fog of lust and I jerked away from him, spinning to face James once more. “I’m not an object to be taken.”
He held his hands up and, to my surprise, his face looked contrite. “No, you aren’t. You have to understand how rare you are, though. There’re just a handful of healthy, fertile female werewolves left in the world. I think there are two unmated ones in the entire Bay Area.” He paused, looking at me in contemplation. “Make that three now.”
“Three in one metropolitan area.” He said that as if it was somehow supposed to be striking, but I was having difficulty wrapping my mind around it. Before that morning, I hadn’t been aware there were any female werewolves. “So what? It’s a big world.”
“San Francisco is unusual. There’s only one available female—sorry, woman—in the entire state of Oregon as far as I know. A handful more in Washington. We’re rare and our women most of all.” He took a step back and to the side to get more space between us, his expression troubled. “When I first found you I thought you had come here to be my mate.”
“Excuse me?” I could figure out exactly what he meant by that turn of phrase, but it was still an outrageous assumption on his part. I crossed my arms and hugged myself, toes curling in the cool moss beneath them. “Why would you even think something like that?”
“Why else would you come to me?” he countered. “There’s plenty of unclaimed territory out in national parks. Plenty of places to run off and hide and hunt if that’s what you wanted. There are males in San Francisco you could have gone for, if you wanted one of them, but you didn’t. You came to my territory, to me. Maybe your wolf-side recognized things your human mind wasn’t ready to accept.”
“I doubt it.” I made a sound of disgust, shaking my head.
Yet even as I said it, my dreams of the night before came back to me. I had run through the forest, looking for something. For someone. I could remember hunting the rabbit, but meat hadn’t been my motive. I could have found squirrels on campus easily enough if that had been what I was after. I had followed the trail of someone specific. Someone male. Someone that, perhaps, my less civilized side had recognized as what I truly needed.
When James spoke again, his voice had a harsh edge to it. “Then I’ll get you to my cabin. I can’t get reception out here, but you can make a call on the land line from there.”
I was quiet for a moment, feeling as if I had just tossed away something precious without realizing its value quickly enough. That was absurd, of course. He was just some random guy I’d run into in the woods, after all. A guy who was possessive of a woman he’d just met, even. The fact that he had given me a shirt and was trying to resist whatever bizarre lust spell I was under spoke well for him, at least. He was the least creepy random-guy-in-the-woods ever.
“I’m sorry,” I said to his back as he started walking.
For a moment it seemed as though he might ignore me entirely. I had to pick my way through the undergrowth carefully, worrying all the while about stepping on something sharp with my bare feet. Stepping on snails or slugs wouldn’t be a picnic either, but I was far more concerned with potential injury than grossness. After eating a raw rabbit, I didn’t really feel like life could get much more disgusting.
“What are you apologizing for?” he asked, shooting me a brief look over his shoulder. When he noticed how slowly I was making progress, he stopped with a sigh and waited for me to catch up.
“For...I don’t know. Disappointing you, I guess.”
“You don’t have to apologize for that.”
I suppose I didn’t have to, since it wasn’t as if I had purposefully mislead him or like he should be able to expect emotional and sexual fulfillment to just come running off into the woods to join him, but I still felt guilty for some unexplainable reason.
Chapter 3
After we had walked a few more feet and James stopped walking again. “Why don’t you shift? You’re not used to walking without shoes and it’s really slowing us down.”
“Um.” I looked down at myself, feeling vaguely disgusted at an inadequacy I’d never known I had. “I don’t know how.”
“You did it last night, so somewhere deep down inside you do know,” he corrected, then held a hand out to me and closed his eyes. “Give me the shirt. I won’t look.”
I hesitated, but he was right that trying to walk like this was a huge pain in the ass. I unbuttoned the flannel and shrugged it off, then draped it over his hand like a coat hook. I closed my eyes as well and tried to focus on my body to find how to change it. I felt every nerve, every muscle, the placement of every limb, then tried pushing my thoughts in a new direction. How would my legs feel if I walked on my toes and my heel worked more a knee? How would I see the world with a neck and skull positioned for walking on all fours? I wouldn’t need clothes to keep off the chill of the air if I had a fur coat. What would it feel like to be covered in hair like that?
My dreams of shifting came back to me as I concentrate and I could remember just how all of those things felt. Settling into that feeling was like the mental equivalent of slipping on a pair of comfy old slippers. I could feel my body twisting, changing, but there was no alarm in it. When I dropped down onto all fours on the forest floor, I opened my eyes to gaze around in wonder. The colors were muted and muddied, my eyes no longer as sensitive to them, but my nose had taken up the slack. There was a richness to the world beyond any human language, because humans couldn’t experience the world like this. I moved my ears, finding that novel, and listened as though I had never heard the forest before. In truth, I hadn’t. Not like this.
James said something, but it was
surprisingly difficult to work out what it was. As sensitive as my ears were, they were also different from my human ones. I picked things up that I hadn’t before, making his speech somewhat garbled at first. I caught the word “go” in there, though, and his gesture made it clear what he was communicating. I trotted after him, now finding an easy rhythm as I wove my way along the forest floor.
We continued hiking for some time until we crossed a road that cut through the trees and came to a little cabin covered in dark wood siding. The scent of James was strong around it from years of occupation, but I could pick up other scents as well. A few other wolves had come by at points in the past—wolves like us, not real ones—and he had hunted and brought the meat back as well. Old blood and fur added their perfume to this strange new world of scent I’d discovered.
He opened the door and let me through first. The cabin wasn’t especially large, but seemed comfortable. There was little in the way of decoration on the walls, but canvasses had been stacked and were leaned upright, turned so that whatever was on them—if anything—couldn’t be seen right away.
Once I was inside, I tried to remember what it felt like to be on two legs again. I could feel my body rippling, uncertain, before I settled back into human flesh. I stayed crouched on the floor after the shift, stunned by just how little my senses had changed in going back. My eyesight was better, but my ears and nose remained far more sensitive than they had been before.
“What’s wrong?” James asked as he draped the shirt over my shoulders to cover my nudity.
“Everything’s so...different,” I said. “I can smell and hear things I couldn’t before.”
There was a couch in the center of the main room of the cabin. From my crouched position on the floor I watched him circle around me, then flop onto it with a sigh.
Chosen Mates (Beasts of the Bay Bundle) Page 20
