Hunter's Heart: Wolf Shifter Romance (Wild Lake Wolves Book 5)

by Kimber White

  Hunter’s Heart

  Wild Lake Wolves Series

  Book Five

  By

  Kimber White

  Copyright © 2016 by Kimber White

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law or for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  A Note from Kimber White

  Books by Kimber White

  Author's Note

  The Wild Lake Wolves books have all been written so you can enjoy them as standalones. While they can be read in any order, the events within them do occur chronologically. For a full list of published books in the series and their recommended reading order, visit the series page at http://www.kimberwhite.com/wild-lake-wolves.

  Happy Reading!

  Kimber

  Chapter One

  An hour phone call with the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles would only rank as my fourth worst experience of this particular day. I crashed my head against the desk after the sixth transfer to another department and about the tenth different answer.

  “Yes!” I perked up and gripped my pencil, bouncing the eraser against the desk. “Yes. I’m sure I sent the paperwork. Please check again. Lyle. L-Y-L-E. Lyle Salvage Yard.” I smiled when I spoke. Grammy taught me early if you don’t, they’ll know you’re mad. BMV clerks smell fear better than werewolves. Another thing Grammy taught me. “Yes. That’s right. I’m waiting for issuance on three Ford F-150 salvage titles. A ’98, a 2006, and a 2014. We got the one for the Airstream already.”

  The current clerk was a mouth breather. “I’m showing an entry for Thomas Lyle. Is that the one you’re talking about? I’ll need to speak to him, directly,” she said.

  “That’s my father. I have his Power of Attorney. This is Jessa Lyle. MaryAnn, we’ve spoken on the phone before. Every month, actually.”

  She told me to hang on. She promised she’d be right back. I didn’t get a chance to tell her not to put me hold before the line clicked and went dead again. I snapped the pencil in half and threw it across the room.

  “I’m done!” I screamed to no one. When I pounded my fist against the wall, the whole trailer shook. Slow. Deep breaths. The minute hand on the wall clock jerked to the six. No point in trying to get MaryAnn back on the line. At four thirty, no doubt she’d punched out. She’d probably hung up on me on purpose just so she could clock out.

  Shit. It was four thirty. My father was due back by noon. A cold pit formed in my stomach as I checked my phone. No calls. No texts. Not a good sign. He knew to check in with me when he was out on a job. Tapping the screen, I debated calling him myself. Problem was, even the simple distraction of a vibrating phone might get him hurt or worse. See, call my father a bit of a renaissance man. The salvage yard was just one income stream. He made the bulk of his money as a bounty hunter, specializing in quarry of the supernatural kind. The furrier the better.

  Squeezing my eyes shut, I laid my palms flat on the desk and resolved to wait. If I didn’t hear from him by dark, then I could start to panic. Best thing to do now was check on Grammy and get dinner started.

  Shouting out in the yard drew my attention. I came around the desk and peered through the lace curtains. Brutus charged out from behind a truck cap laying in the yard and planted her front paws in the dirt. I couldn’t see what had her so riled. In her case, her bark was literally worse than her bite. Purebred Rottweiler, she looked the junkyard dog part. But, give her a belly scratch and the worst threat you’d face was a face licking. Nope. The real danger was Sofie, Grammy’s cock-a-poo. Damn dog bit anything that tried to pet her. Brutus’s barking was sure to bring her out of hiding, so I knew I needed to diffuse things quick.

  “Shit.” I grabbed my phone and headed for the door. I had just closed my fingers around the doorknob when a crack from a 12 gauge drove me instinctively to my knees. “Shit!”

  “Goddammit, are you crazy, woman?”

  “Oh, shit.” I tore out of the trailer and ran straight into the third worst thing that happened that day.

  “Grammy! What the hell?”

  Althea Lyle, my eighty-year-old grandmother—all four foot ten, one hundred and fifteen pounds of her—leaned over the hood of my father’s ’69 Dodge Charger and aimed a shotgun at the chest of the closest man twenty feet away. She racked another round and spit on the ground next to her. Brutus ran to her side and rubbed Grammy’s bare leg. She wore red shorts and a black Garth Brooks concert t-shirt.

  “Jessa, tell that crazy old bitch to stand down!” I put my hands up and moved slowly. I wasn’t foolish enough to put my body between Grammy and her targets. Said targets were Jeff and Gunther Harlan. The reason for their visit had the makings of the second worst thing that would happen that day. Gunther’s comment made Grammy shift her aim lower, threatening to unman him. That’s if he was lucky.

  “Grammy,” I said, keeping my tone hard. If I talked to her like she was crazy, she was liable to point both barrels at me. She wasn’t crazy. Not by a long shot. Which meant we were in deep shit.

  “What’s going on, Gunther?” I asked. I could play ignorant because, at the moment, I straight up was.

  Gunther motioned to his brother. Jeff reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a long white envelope. Handing it to Gunther, Jeff took two steps back, making sure only Gunther stayed in the line of fire.

  “Your father never showed up for our appointment,” he said. My heart dropped straight down into my size six cowboy boots. “You heard from him?”

  I shook my head. “No. But, I’ll make sure he knows you’ve been looking for him.”

  Gunther clenched his jaw and shot a look back at my grandmother. God, I hoped he wasn’t crazy enough to take a step toward her. Her nostrils flared and she adjusted her weight across the hood of the Charger. Only I recognized the small twitch in the corner of her left eye. She was barely holding it together. Grammy was scared, which meant things were far worse than I thought.

  “We paid him in advance, Jessa,” Gunther said, and the air went straight out of me. “He doesn’t deliver by midnight tonight, we’ll be back. You understand?” He threw the envelope on the ground. “That guy needs to be taken care of.”

  I nodded, leaning down to pick up the crumpled envelope. Through the paper I could see a folded photograph of Dad’s latest mark. Why Gunther thought I needed it was beyond me.

  “Good. You make Tinker understand.” I bristled at the sound
of my father’s nickname dripping off Gunther Harlan’s lips with contempt. As in Tinker Bell. But, that’s not how he earned it. Dad was an inventor too. I told you, renaissance man. I bit my lip past the urge to point out how that tinkering had saved the Harlan brothers’ asses on more than one occasion. But God, Dad took money for a job in advance? What was he thinking? Gunther stared at me with deep-set gray eyes so pale they looked like the dead.

  “Midnight,” Gunther said again. “You tell him we’re expecting proof of death on this one. Not a capture. He can find me at the Depot in the back room. You feel me?”

  I’d edged over to Grammy’s side. I wasn’t foolish enough to put my hands on her while she was riled up like this, but the muscles in her shoulders relaxed ever so slightly. She was still worried, but she wasn’t homicidal.

  “Got it,” I said. “I’ll bring him down there myself, Gunther. Everything’s going to be fine. You can tell your boss.” I emphasized the word “boss.” Gunther expressed his displeasure by narrowing his eyes. Then he backhanded Jeff against the chest and the two of them slipped into their BMW. He kicked up dirt with his back tires as he sped away.

  Brutus charged after them, growling and yelping as she went. Sofie finally showed up and joined the fray. When the Harlans made the turn down the muddy, rutted lane leading back to downtown Banchory, I finally let my shoulders drop and turned to Grammy.

  The tremors started in her shoulders and spread quickly to her fingers. I peeled the shotgun out of her hands rubbed her back. She looked up at me, her dark eyes clouded with fear.

  “Where is he?” I swallowed hard. “What happened?”

  She tucked a strand of wiry gray hair behind her ear. She wore it long, a single braid down the middle of her back. Her high, wide cheekbones, weathered with age still marked her proud Odawa heritage. She closed her fingers around my wrist and pulled me toward her trailer in the back of the lot.

  “Hurry.” Her soft whisper sent shivers of terror through me, much more so than if she’d shouted. I slung the shotgun over my shoulder and went with her.

  Grammy’s trailer butted up against the ten-foot high privacy fence the county made us erect. Grammy and Grampy had to fight to get the permits to open this place. It all happened long before I was born, but she liked to tell the story. She’d said they bought this hunk of ground on the outskirts of hell just to have a place to store all of the junk my father brought home. The salvage yard just seemed a natural fit. So, while my father tinkered in the pole barn Grampy built, he—ever the shrewd businessman—figured out how to turn what Dad didn’t use into cash. For years, it sustained them. After Grampy died, she ran it until Dad was old enough to take over.

  I don’t remember much about my grandfather. But in every photograph, I could see his love for Grammy lighting his soft blue eyes. Always touching her. Hand in hand. Nuzzling her cheek. Pulling her into his lap. My father never had that with my mother. We had no photographs of her at all. Not even from their wedding. They never said as much, but I’d deduced it was of the shotgun variety. But, when the bloom wore off, Mom didn’t want to spend the rest of her life living in a junkyard. So, she lit out the first chance she got, which was before I was even old enough to form memories.

  Grammy paused to catch her breath before she climbed the porch steps at the front of her trailer. She clutched my wrist and peered up at me. “He doesn’t want an ambulance,” she said. Nodding, I swallowed hard and reached for the door handle and walked into the second worst thing that happened that day.

  My father lay clutching his side on Grammy’s floral printed living room couch. His color ashen, he wheezed as he exhaled. I leaned the shotgun against the wall then half skidded across the carpet to get to his side. I put a hand to his forehead. His skin felt clammy and cool as I worked my fingers down his chest, gingerly pulling his shirt out of his waistband and checking for wounds.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Did a wolf do this?”

  Choking, my father shook his head. “No. I never even got that far.”

  I leaned back on my heels and cocked my head to the side. “Then what?”

  “Competition,” he managed before he collapsed into a fit of strained coughs that tore at my heart. “The Cavanaughs maybe. Coltranes coulda been. Wouldn’t be surprised if Gunther clued one of ‘em in. He’s been trying to drive my prices down for months now.”

  “He got jumped on the way to the job,” Grammy filled in. “Says he couldn’t see faces. Just boots when he hit the ground. Steel-tipped. Kicked him, they did.”

  I pulled Dad’s shirt up over his hips and saw the angry black and red welts all along his rib cage.

  “Heard one of those crack,” he gasped. “I’ll be all right though. Haven’t coughed anything up.”

  “Dad, you need to be seen by a doctor. You could be bleeding inside.”

  “No!” He put a hand up. “Jessa, we’re done for. If the Harlans find out this happened, they’ll put me out of business for good. I told ya. The Coltranes and the Cavanaughs are just waiting for something like this to swoop in and outbid me.”

  “Fine. Then we’ll give them back your advance.”

  Dad shook his head again. “Nothing doing. That money’s gone, pumpkin.”

  My heart turned to stone and the air grew thick. I was afraid to ask him how much money we were talking about. Except I already knew. Gunther said this was a kill job, not a capture. Dad wouldn’t have accepted less than a hundred thousand dollars for one of those. Enough to support us the rest of the year and a good chunk of my college tuition whenever I got the time to go back. But gone?

  “It’s okay, Jessa,” he said. With great effort, he sat up and reached under the couch cushion on which he been lying. He pulled out a sleek, black Sig Sauer P226. “They didn’t get this.”

  “They didn’t get your weapon?”

  Dad shook his head. “No. They didn’t get these.” He pulled out the magazine. “The Wolfkillers,” he said, holding the magazine out in his palm.

  My heart thudded in my chest. Wolfkillers. Tinker Lyle’s latest, greatest invention. Ammo modified with a special neurotoxin that paralyzed its target no matter where it entered the body. Which might seem like literal overkill except when you were trying to shoot a werewolf. Suckers are bloody fast and if you don’t hit them through the heart or the brain on the first shot, they tend to get back up.

  “So you think someone was trying to mess you up tonight?”

  “Yep. Take me out, get my secret weapon, show the Harlans I’m no longer a safe bet.”

  “Great. And what about your target? Gunther said you had until midnight. Is that where the money went?” I lifted the magazine.

  Dad nodded. “I made the final modifications with it. Call it a capital investment.’

  “Terrific, except you still have to deliver the contract, Dad.”

  Coughing, he nodded. “There’s still time. Just tape me up. I’ve already tracked the fucker. He’s holed up just outside of Banchory. That KOA off County Road 14. This one should be a piece of cake. He’s totally alone. Chances are he got banished from his pack. I’ve been watching him for days. Keeps to a pretty stable routine.”

  “You are in no condition to go back out there,” I said, my wheels already turning hard. An easy hit. Dad had taken me on a few over the last couple of years. He worked fast and clean. Nothing fancy. The Harlan brothers may be douchebags, but they served a purpose. They, along with my father, helped keep the werewolves over the state line where they belonged. Dad took one or two contracts a year. More than enough to cover what the income from the salvage yard didn’t. Except for now. Now, he was in real danger of losing everything.

  “Jessa,” my father said, drawing out his syllables. He knew exactly what I was thinking. “No.”

  “Yes,” I took the Nine from him and slammed the magazine back in. “KOA off County Road 14. He got a tent pitched or a camper?”

  “Jessa. It’s too dangerous.”

  My grandmother sank d
own on the couch next to him and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. I knew that look. A hint of a smile lit her brown eyes. “Thomas,” she said. “She’s ready. You’ve trained her yourself. It’s what your father and I raised you to do. Do I have to remind you what can happen if a rogue wolf sets loose on this town?” She wasn’t obvious about it, but her braid fell to the side, exposing the long, deep gashes from old scars across her neck.

  “That’s settled,” I said. “Show me your book.”

  Dad grumbled, but he knew he was no match for Grammy and me. He pointed toward the kitchen table, the strain of the effort creasing his brow. I crossed the room in three long strides and picked up the thin file folder he’d left there. Bracing myself with a hard inhale, I opened the flap.

  Tiny hairs prickled along the base of my spine as I stared into the face of my target. Derek Monroe. Such a normal sounding name for a killer. His face stared back at me from a blown up color photograph. A candid shot taken with a high-powered zoom lens.

  Derek Monroe was handsome. Rakishly so, with a thick mass of wavy brown hair parted on the side. His amber eyes stared straight through me on the page, making my heart skip its rhythm. He leaned casually against the side of a brick building, light coming into those piercing eyes, making them glow almost. He wore a simple white t-shirt stretched taut over hard muscles. Jeans with a shiny silver belt buckle and black motorcycle boots. The man could have been a model in one of those whiskey ads rather than the brutal killer I knew he was. That all werewolves were. And this wolf was battle hardened. A cruel scar cut a jagged path through his left brow and along his cheek. He took my breath away.

  “This him?” I asked past a dry throat.

  Dad nodded. “I’m not so sure about this, Jessa. We talked about you taking your own contracts, but not until you finish college.”

  “I know what I’m doing, Dad. I learned from the best. If you think you’re capable of doing it in your condition, this should be a walk in the park for me. Right?”

  He gritted his teeth but gave me a slow nod. “But, be careful. Don’t take chances. Don’t get anywhere close to him. Pick a position upwind and wait for your shot. If you don’t get one, you come home. The hell with the Harlans.”