Saved by the Wolf (A BBW Paranormal Wolf Shifter Romance)

by Marie Mason

  SAVED BY THE WOLF

  Copyright 2015

  MARIE MASON

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print without the author’s permission.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The book contains Mature Content.

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Logan McCall had always wanted to be a family man—in spite of—his playboy reputation. Find his mate, have a few pups and settle down into a long, loving relationship. That sounded good, real good to him.

  During a storm that rocked Chicago for three days, Logan found fate had a wicked sense of humor when it sent nurse Katie Wilson tumbling into his life.

  Driving along a snow covered highway in the middle of a blizzard, Katie swore off men. It was a man who had put her in this dangerous situation. Well, a man and her stubborn pride. Unwilling to waste the romantic getaway that had already been paid for at a secluded mountain cabin just outside the city, she decided to enjoy the weekend all by herself—if you didn’t count the adult toys she had packed in her suitcase and the multiple pints of ice cream she planned to buy on her way out of the city.

  The last thing she’d been expecting on her binge-eating, binge-crying weekend was being Saved by the Wolf.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Katie knew the moment the first snowflake hit her windshield that she had made a colossal mistake. At first, she’d been so proud of herself, leaving the city before the storm hit. What she hadn’t expected was the vicious northeast turn it had taken. It seemed to be dogging her tail, following her the entire way.

  Of course, deciding to take the romantic getaway at the mountain cabin her boyfriend had rented for them—using her credit card for the non-refundable deposit, even though he made four times as much as she did!—was just the latest in the string of colossal mistakes she’d seemed to have made over the last year of her life.

  Turning her wipers on high to try to gain some visibility, she realized the futility of…well, everything.

  Why had she talked herself into going to the cabin in the dead of winter? Well, technically it wasn’t the dead of winter. It was closer to spring than winter, but still…she was driving in a freaking blizzard! If this weekend had gone off as planned, she wouldn’t be driving her ten-year old car up the steep mountain side. Instead, she would have been sitting in the passenger seat of a luxury SUV, a vehicle meant to travel through such weather conditions. She’d be sitting at the side of the man she loved, Dr. Brad Can’t-keep-my-dick-in-my-pants Huston.

  She gave a half-snort, half-hysterical sob when she thought of the ass she’d been involved with until just hours ago. She’d like to think of herself as naive instead of unbelievably stupid. Unbelievably stupid that she’d been involved with a man who was fucking his way through the entire nursing staff at Chicago Memorial. Something she’d found out the hard way.

  She was new to the city, having only moved here six months ago. She was an emergency room nurse, so she didn’t socialize with many of the other nurses, there simply wasn’t time. When Brad had been called to the ER to attend one of his patients, it was as if the dating gods and goddess had finally smiled down on overly abundant Katie Wilson.

  She’d watched the tender way he’d dealt with his patient struggling with high blood-pressure. When he was writing up the discharge orders, he’d asked her out so casually, she’d agreed before she knew what she was doing.

  They’d dated for a month, every Thursday night, just like clockwork. That should have been her first sign. He never varied in his routine, always saying he had to work should she suggest they go out on a Saturday night or heaven forbid, a Friday night.

  She’d accepted it, starting to weave vague dreams of being a doctor’s wife and having to deal with his busy scheduled. That dream had turned into a full-fledged nightmare this afternoon.

  Katie’s spirits were as gray as the overcast sky.

  She knew it had to do with this time of year. The holidays were long over and spring was nowhere to be seen. Winter seemed to be lingering and lingering. There was no doubt she snorted this time. Lingering was too mild of a word. Storm after storm had pounded the city for weeks.

  And this latest one appeared to be the worst yet.

  Hunching over the steering wheel, she concentrated on staying on the two-lane mountain road. There was no place to pull off even if she wanted to. The weather was so bad she’d decided not to stop for groceries which would have included the thirty-one flavors of ice cream she’d planned to use to drown her sorrows. Now she had no food except for a few non-perishable items she’d packed ahead of time.

  Brad was supposed to have met her at the hospital after her shift. The plan had been to stop and get enough food to last them the weekend on the way to the cabin. He had arrived a little earlier than expected. The picture of his white butt cheeks as he’d pounded into one of her co-workers in the supply closet flashed through her mind.

  For the first time since starting her trip, she wondered if she really had lost some of her marbles. Not that she’d been thinking when she’d left the hospital. But she had thought she’d have time to make it to the cabin before the storm worsened. It had moved faster and in a different direction than the forecasters had predicted and she’d be lucky to finish her journey without having to call for a tow truck to come to her aid.

  She’d almost landed in the ditch at the side of the road a couple of times in the last few minutes. What should have taken her an hour was turning into a two-hour ordeal.

  Going away in the middle of winter to a strange cabin in the woods might not have been the smartest move on her part. But hurt pride had been making the decisions for her all afternoon. Twenty minutes later, she’d reached her destination.

  “Well, well, well,” she murmured as her headlights swept past a wooden mailbox. “Maybe Brad didn’t have such bad taste after all.” The house before her looked like it should be on the front of a ski resort brochure, not on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. Well, that wasn’t really true. There were ski lodges in the area; they were just fifty miles away.

  Through the curtain of snow that was still falling, the log exterior looked warm and inviting. Safe. Feeling a little bit better, she thought maybe she would use some of the adult toys she’d packed. No sense in letting a new pair of batteries go to waste.

  Her car struggled up the steep driveway to the house. She started to slide halfway up, but managed to straighten the car out and keep going until she reached the flat area in front of the garage which was built on the side of the house. Tapping on her brakes, she stopped before hitting the garage door. The rental company had mailed her the keys to the house and a garage door opener. They’d had to since it was her name on the credit card. Taking out the opener, she pressed the button and it opened as if welcoming her home.

  For the first time that night, she allowed herself to smile. She had no trouble moving forward and drove inside the spacious two-car garage and let out a sigh of relief as she turned off the engine. She’d made it to her destination safe and sound.

  There was
an inside door to the house so Katie didn’t have to go back out into the storm. When the key she had didn’t open it, Katie cursed in frustration. Even if she knew where the rental office was, there was no way in hell she could make a trip back down the mountain tonight. Hell, she’d be lucky to make it back down when it came time to leave Monday morning. During the last half hour, the storm had increased in intensity.

  Taking a deep breath, she told herself not to panic. Yet. She folded back the welcome mat to look for a key. Stranger things had been known to happen. When that didn’t produce the desired result, she stood on tiptoes and ran her fingertips over the door casing.

  “Monkey guts,” she mumbled. She looked around the well-appointed garage and realized there were a thousand and one places a spare key could be hidden. Deciding that maybe her key only worked in the front door, she got out her garage door opener.

  This time her curses weren’t so PG rated when the clicker didn’t open the door and she couldn’t raise it by hand. Great, now she was stranded in the garage. Or was she? She spied a small metal door at the back and took back all the nasty things she’d been thinking about her guardian angel the last twelve hours.

  She’d have to walk around the garage to the front door, but at least she could get out. Opening her trunk, she took out her tire iron. She’d been on her own too long not to be prepared for any emergency. She hated to think about breaking one of the windows in the house. They looked damn expensive, but she’d worry about that later. Her situation could turn dangerous very quickly if she didn’t find adequate shelter. She’d just eat peanut butter sandwiches for lunch the next month—okay, two months, maybe three—to pay for any damage she did.

  Taking the garage door opener with her, she also propped open the door as an added precaution in case she did need to get back into the garage. She walked around front, cursing as her feet sank into the snow covering the ground. She sighed. As always, she started to celebrate her good luck too early. It had started to drift and she had to wade through at least two feet of snow on her way to the front of the house.

  She really hoped that guardian angel was enjoying herself wherever she was, because Katie certainly wasn’t.

  Logan McCall knew he had his choice of women in the greater Chicago area. Hell, he had his choice of women from all over the world. Why? He was rich, handsome, and a member of the McCall wolf pack, the most influential shifters in the city. If not the greater United States.

  Right now, he was on his way out of the city with what could be the storm of the century racing along beside him. This morning he had received a call from his caretaker, Morgan, worry evident in the man’s voice. His wife was eight and a half months pregnant with their first child and he didn’t want to get snowed in on the mountain with her due date so close. Logan understood completely—family came first.

  But the man was worried about the amount of snow and the below freezing temperatures being predicted. He didn’t want to leave the house unattended in case the electricity went out. An unheated house plus plummeting temperatures equaled some serious problems, the worst of which would be frozen pipes. The house could be kept warm with the fireplaces and the generator Logan had installed when he built the cabin. But the fires had to be tended and the generator kept fed with gasoline.

  That was the reason he was driving to a remote mountain cabin.

  The reason there wasn’t a beautiful woman by his side to help pass the time was because Logan McCall was a man—a wolf—ready to find his mate and settle down.

  He’d built his house in the mountains outside of Chicago so he would have somewhere to go and let his wolf out once in a while. When he stayed in the city too long, his wolf got antsy. Unlike his older brother Jarod who could truly be called the wolf of Wall Street because he loved the city life so much.

  As he drove up the road leading to his house, he noticed there were more and more driveway connections on the two-lane road. He didn’t like the fact that the area was becoming more populated. What he really didn’t like were the investors buying up homes, or building them, to rent to vacationers.

  He’d built his home long before that had become the trend and resented the intrusion. It brought too many strangers into the area. Too many who might not appreciate the fact that they had a wolf shifter living next door. Prejudice against shifters still existed, even in the modern world.

  Oh, there were many that would appreciate the fact that they were staying next to a millionaire shifter. Last year he’d had some trouble with a few college coeds who had wanted to cash in on his playboy reputation and had turned up at his cabin uninvited, hoping he’d take one look at their puffed up hair and packed on make-up and ask them to stay. They would have stood a better chance if their bodies hadn’t been stick thin.

  As the snow started falling faster, he debated just saying to hell with it, and letting the chips—or snowflakes—fall where they may. A couple of busted water pipes would probably be the extent of the problem. He was rich enough; he could afford any repairs that needed to be done.

  But something kept nagging at the back of his mind and now he found himself half way there, his sturdy four-wheel drive eating up the miles despite the wind and snow and plunging temperatures. He wasn’t worried about getting snowed in. Even if the electricity did go out, he knew there would be gas for the generator and he had both an electric and gas stove, so fixing food wouldn’t be a problem. The cabin was always stocked with staples and the food in the freezer would stay frozen for at least a couple of days. Plus, he could always shift and hunt if he started running low on food.

  He checked in one last time with his assistant to make sure everyone in his department had left for the day. He and his brother took great pride in taking care of their employees, even the ones who were not pack members. He had no doubt the building housing McCall Holdings was already empty. He and the other department heads had decided to dismiss their workers early in order to give everyone who wasn’t already prepared plenty of time to get home and stocked up on supplies.

  All of them except his brother. Luckily, Jarod really only directly supervised one employee—Sara, his personal assistant. And Logan knew his brother wouldn’t let anything happen to her. Sara was Jarod’s mate. A mate the man had been avoiding—denying—for the last several months.

  He shook his head at the other man’s stupidity. If Logan was ever lucky enough to find his mate, he’d launch an all out attack until she was withering beneath him in bed, too tired and satisfied to say anything but yes when he proposed to her.

  But then Jarod had always been the stubborn McCall brother.

  Logan made it to his house in good time even though the storm had settled in for the long haul by the time he got there. Pulling into the driveway, his headlights swept across the large expanse of lawn in front of his house.

  He loved this cabin in the woods. His family laughed when he called the six bedroom, four bath log home a cabin. He couldn’t help it if his wolf needed room to run—both inside and out. The rambling house perched on the side of the mountain had more than enough accompanying land to accommodate Logan’s need to run wild and free. Hell, half the McCall pack could take up residence in the forest surrounding his house in wolf form and they would be hard pressed to run into each other.

  It was exactly what Logan wanted. The front, with its plate glass windows and wide wooden deck, looked out over the mountains. Forest surrounded the house on three sides. He’d had it built over five years ago when the stress of his duties at McCall Holdings had started to get to him. Now he came here any time he needed to unwind.

  He’d realized about that same time that his brother Hunter was the smartest of the three male siblings, second only to their sister who had given up the corporate world to raise her family. Hunter had never entered the corporate world. A man married to the military best described his younger brother.

  Logan made the slight incline with no problem. He frowned when his headlights revealed indentations left by a
set of tires. The snow had already partially covered them. They were too new to be his caretaker’s tracks. The man had left early this morning. Who had been by his house? His wolf, who had been happy and content the entire trip, sat up suddenly.

  “Shit.” Logan cursed as he hit the garage door button on his rearview mirror and nothing happened. The weather must be blocking the satellite signal and he didn’t have a remote. He cut the engine and stepped outside.

  He cursed again as the cold stabbed through him. Even though his wolf kept his body a perfect temperature, which ran hotter than the average human’s did, he still hated the first burst of cold on his exposed skin. He loved the snow, but not the cold that went with it. Damn good thing he wasn’t a polar bear shifter, he thought, flipping up his collar.

  He’d just put his key in the front door lock, when a noise caught his attention. His wolf rumbled deep inside him and he stilled, listening for it again. It sounded like something was scratching against the side of the house. Most animals stayed away from his cabin, knowing there was a much larger, deadly predator around. Every now and then, a bear would wander down from the mountain. The sound wasn’t quite loud enough to be made by a bear. Unless it was injured and weak.

  Just what he bloody needed to deal with tonight. Leaving his key in the lock, he walked along the front deck to the side porch. The roof had protected most of it, although there were snowdrifts along the outside of the railings. He couldn’t wait to make his coffee in the morning and sit outside watching it snow.

  He hadn’t come up here for that purpose, but he realized he’d been needing a weekend from everything. He was growing tired of the city. The constant need to be on the move. He wanted to sit back, relax and forget cell phones and the Internet had ever been invented.

  He sounded like a damn country song, but it was true. And like those songs, he wanted to find the woman who would steal his heart so she could sit there right beside him.