The atmosphere in the park changed. A new scent reached him, similar to the one near the mansion’s stone wall.
Otherness, coming on.
Likeness nearby.
The heft of the pressure drift that reached Parker was altogether new. A stunning slap to the senses.
Someone else had arrived. Someone special.
Maintaining distance between himself and the guy swinging at him by keeping his hands on the idiot’s throat, Parker sent his awareness outward. His focus snapped to a spot by the distant trees, deep in shadow. And there he was. It was.
Barely visible, his form blending into the night as if a part of it, this onlooker’s presence seemed like a shout never uttered, a silent bell being struck with such force that the unheard vibrations soared through the ether, changing the air’s consistency. Except that this newcomer could definitely be heard when he wanted to be. A howl of challenge broke through the scene, causing Parker’s attackers to freeze where they were.
The two guys left standing looked at each other, turned and took off. The two on the ground hauled themselves to their feet and followed. Parker let go of the idiot he’d been holding and watched him hightail it in a southerly direction. Parker let him. He’d witnessed too much destruction in the emergency room to want to inflict his wrath if he didn’t have to. He wasn’t all beast, in fact.
What parts of his beast there were leaned toward this new presence. Chills raised goose bumps on his back. Everything seemed to center on the newcomer, for which a name tickled the edge of Parker’s tongue. Evil?
Standing stock-still, staring hard, Parker felt his heart race at impossible speed. All of his muscles spasmed at once. A man stood by the trees. Part man, that was. And part something else.
Werewolf.
Transfixed with disbelief, Parker continued to gape. The thing over there looked like nothing he had ever seen, except tonight in himself. The pale half wolf, also naked from the waist up, pointed at Parker, then at himself. Same?
Then he cocked his head and howled with an ominous, forlorn sound that echoed in the night and filled Parker’s mind with flashing pictures of mountains, valleys and forests, with an almost subliminal speed. In those landscapes dark things ran on two legs in a tight pack. Many dark things.
The images dissolved when the albino-pale wolf took off after the fleeing gang, leaving Parker rocking on his heels, having just glimpsed, however startling it was, his future.
Not the only one.
Half-crazed, bewildered, lured by that wolf’s presence, Parker started after the thing so like himself, then stumbled to a stop, hauled back by remembering the woman.
The girl. The oath.
His promise.
He teetered, torn between a man’s logic and a beast’s desires. Here lay the proof of the existence of another person like him, the very thing for which he had been hopeful and at the same time dreading. Another werewolf roamed this earth, this city, perhaps in possession of answers to the questions that had plagued Parker for months.
Parker stood rooted in indecision. The animal? The gang? The girl? Should he chase the thugs clear out of Miami, helping the people who lived here? Should he go after the beast who had come to his aid? Wouldn’t it be selfish to allow the other wolf to fight his fight?
Was it crucial for him to fulfill the promise he’d made to the woman to see her to safety and help? The badly injured young beauty who had tried to warn him of the danger? How could she know what this meant for him? How could anybody know? He had seen a werewolf!
His head whirled with questions as one of the toughest decisions he’d ever had to make nailed him in place. Find out about his own life or save the young woman’s? Whatever direction he chose meant maybe losing the other option.
Parker ached to follow the wolf. Everything pulled him that way, except her. Her and those large, green, pleading eyes she had turned on him.
Casting one more glance into the distance, uttering one more guttural growl, and filled with a longing so intense to be with his own kind that he swayed back and forth on both feet, Parker dug his teeth into the side of his mouth and turned.
A promise was a promise.
With his body all revved up with the tension of a lightning storm, and barely able to breathe, he headed back between the trees, wanting to bang his head against one of them. He’d had his shot at answers and had lost. Why?
God Almighty, why?
Not just for a pretty pair of eyes. He knew that, of course. Parker had let that wolf go because the man in him had won this round, and it was imperative the man remain in control.
No. That’s not it. There’s more.
There was another human being to be considered here. A woman owed help for many reasons, but in part because, after all was said and done, she had caused the healer in him, the best side of him, to shine.
Still more, his mind nagged.
He delved further beneath the surface of his feelings.
He was going back because…yes, dammit, because her eyes were an intelligent green. And because they had briefly connected with his in some new and inexplicable way.
He would find her, help her.
Parker closed his eyes and willed his body to stillness. Inhaling deeply, he found her trail easily enough. The woman had dragged herself from the spot where he’d left her. Droplets of her blood, smelling like crushed aluminum, blackened the ground. The unique scent of citrus-dipped flower petals mingled with the fragrance of mangled grass, disturbed earth, injury and fear.
Parker cast one more look in the direction the other werewolf had run. Then he eyed the blood by his boots, gritted his canines and forced a growl through tight teeth.
A promise is a promise.
Ducking beneath the tree cover, Parker willed his beast into submission, into the background, with a concerted effort. There would be no helping anyone like this.
Changing back from beast to man always took longer than the other way around. All those added muscles had to contract, then be stuffed into a much more lithe frame. The process took twice as much effort as the expansion did, and hurt beyond belief.
Disorientation usually followed, accompanied by the feeling of having been run over by a truck. But he’d gotten better at managing his discomfort each and every month since he’d been cursed. Since the first bone-breaking full moon eight months ago, when he’d thought his life was over.
Half the beast, half the hurt, maybe, this time?
The discomfort started as his ligaments reeled themselves in. His shoulders retracted, molding themselves back into his normal human configuration. His bones tapped out a protest. Each muscle complained. All the while, Parker held his breath.
The change was bad at the best of times. With this newest ability, this half shift, his beast parts were protesting submission with an internal tug-of-war. It took a final series of whiplash gyrations for his body to more or less finish its transition. Last thing to go, his teeth.
What was left in the crazy hybrid’s place was a shivering thirty-one-year-old human male, his skin glistening with sweat that had already begun to cool, his mind flipping over the proverbial question: What the hell just happened?
Breath ragged, legs antsy, Parker gave the moon a wary once-over through the branches and started off after the injured blonde as though he were a bloodhound on the scent.
It didn’t take him long to find her. She hadn’t gotten far, crawling on her belly, weighted down by fear and distress.
Parker was certain he had done the right thing the moment he saw her. “It’s okay,” he said, halting her progress by placing himself in her path. “I’m here.”
She made a pathetic attempt to shout, and Parker understood this need. Too much had happened to her in too short a time. Bad things. She wouldn’t know who to trust, if anybody.
Rubbing a gentle finger across her swollen lips to wipe the pooling blood away, Parker quietly reassured her. “The bad guys are gone. The hospital is close by, and I’m
taking you there right now.”
He scooped her into his arms and lifted her off the ground. She was as light as a feather, as if the weight of her life had already started to scatter.
He placed her injured head against his bare chest to steady it, and staggered sideways a step. The girl was so hot she was electric, raging fire in a feminine form. Her temperature was soaring.
Sucking in a breath, Parker rode out several more shocks accompanying this first meeting of their bodies—shocks that slid down through him, chest to groin, sparking to life the hunger he had so diligently tamped down.
Mate. Bite. Hot, tight place…
He riveted his attention to his slight bundle, shaking his head, shaking all over. Sick bastard. She’s ill, and you think you want her? Will any female do after all this time alone?
The answer to those questions drove Parker forward, in the direction of the city lights. He held the wounded female almost close enough to suffocate her, fearing to look at her again. He had to ignore the beastly needs that tipped the scales of a normal thirty-one-year-old’s insatiable libido. It was imperative he maintain the upper hand on the beast he’d just shoved back inside, the part of himself at that very moment testing his resolve.
There was no full moon. The change had been an accident, that’s all. Repeating a mistake wouldn’t make it right. But damned if that mistake didn’t carry over into an almost desperate need to have this woman—to know her, taste her, explore every inch of her with his hands and mouth. Trace the sharpness of her collarbones, bury his head in the curve of her neck. See what promises lay beneath her jeans.
He would kiss her pain away if he could. Inhale that taunting combination of citrus and petals up close. The urge to turn around and take her to his apartment was so powerful he could hardly keep to a straight line.
The plain fact was that he had to take his mind off her somehow, to keep from doing any of those things. The very idea of him thinking them came as a shock. In order to make it to that damned hospital, he’d have to pretend those green eyes of hers hadn’t bewitched him in some way.
How did someone pretend that?
“Talk.”
He would talk to her all the way to the street. Keep up a dialogue.
“Okay.” He used a soft tone reserved for badly injured patients who needed comfort and reassurance, one he had to work at to keep level.
“Well,” he said, as if they were to have a real conversation. “I’m a doctor at Metro Hospital. My parents were both doctors, so I guess you might say that healing people is in my blood.”
Along with what else?
Parker cleared his throat and started again. “Although my folks didn’t live to see me graduate, I owe the career to them. My doctoring honors them both. At least that’s the way I look at it.”
The smell of this woman’s blood, mingled with those citrus petals, drifted up with each step he took. The sensual slide of her jean-encased legs against his bare arms kept his hunger hovering like an animal on the sidelines. As a man who had sworn off dating and relationships of any kind, and who had maintained a celibate life month after month, it was no big stretch to realize why he wanted this woman so badly.
Talk!
“I don’t know about the werewolf part. I don’t understand how the wolf thing came about. That’s why I’m out here tonight, looking for answers.”
It was all right to confess his secrets here. There was a ninety-eight percent chance she wouldn’t remember anything he said. She would be beyond experiencing pain now, and residing in the grayer spaces—the places where each breath mattered and time was of the essence, but where the soul could, for an indeterminate amount of time, escape the trauma. Her body was limp, her arms and legs lifeless.
“I did my residency at Harvard and became a surgeon, a life’s dream. But no one at Harvard or anywhere else warned me about what else I was to become. No one told me anything about that.”
He inadvertently brushed the top of her head with his chin, felt a growl stick in his chest and made a stern note not to repeat the gesture.
“Thing is, I’ve started to like the changes,” he continued. “At the same time, I have to wonder how much longer I’ll be able to keep the old me together. Tonight was a surprise. If I can shift early, as I just did, provoked by excitement, threat, or even the scent of the blood of a helpless woman like you—then how can I live any sort of a public life where I’ll be around those things on a regular basis? What will keep me in check if things get worse?”
The woman in his arms could not, of course, answer that question. Who could? Yet telling her the things he’d kept inside for months, getting them off his chest, suddenly seemed like a bonus for behaving himself.
Parker chanced a downward glance at the fine, fair hair that was tangled, blood-matted and still soft as cornsilk as it brushed his arm. The bloodless face resting so close to his thundering heart, so seriously wounded, looked nearly transparent and unearthly beautiful by moonlight. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“Don’t worry,” he whispered earnestly. “You won’t die on my watch. That’s another promise.”
But was that promise for her or for himself? Yes, she felt so very good in his arms.
He could see the glitter of lights between the trees. Civilization. Moments ago he had shunned all of that, hadn’t wanted it. “Now,” he said to the woman in his arms, “I’m not so sure. It’s where you belong, little one.”
Just perhaps, Parker concluded inwardly, this little package he carried was in essence a lifeline of sorts. Something to keep him grounded on a night when he’d contemplated wildness. Something to keep him Parker, the man.
Remember that guy?
Maybe, he reasoned further as he walked, finding this woman would turn out to be the saving of his soul, instead of the other way around. A reminder for him of what really counted. With his beast battering his insides enough to break a rib or two, he was, in fact, feeling more like a man than he had in months.
He might have lost this opportunity to find another wolf, a thing he had desperately wanted, but just possibly he’d found something else instead: some of his sanity and a sense of direction. A piece of those things, anyway.
Maybe.
After so much darkness, the lights of the boulevard were blinding. After the softness of the grass, the hot pavement felt sticky beneath Parker’s boots. The noises of people rushing here and there seemed absurdly removed from what was happening to him.
The city park was large. Parker skirted it, crossed from one side of the boulevard to the other, keeping to the darker places. The hospital, his hospital, was only a block away. The woman in his arms dangled by a precarious ribbon of consciousness. Blood had soaked through her blue sleeveless top, not from a single wound, but runoff from several. Her sleek hair had fallen over part of her face, making her appear half girl, half—
“No, I’m the anomaly here. No sense wishing that on anyone else.”
Heading for the hospital’s circular driveway, Parker knew he’d be hard-pressed to explain to the E.R. staff how he’d come upon her and why he was half-dressed. He would probably be arrested before reaching the door for this awkward picture they presented, but get to that door he would. Whatever else was to become of him, he’d at least get this woman to safety, as he had promised. For whatever part she had played in returning him to himself, even temporarily, he was thankful.
Lights. Cars. Deafening noises. Those things were dreadful notations at the edge of Chloe’s consciousness. Her eyes wouldn’t open, she couldn’t take in enough air, and still her brain kept up a chaotic chatter. She felt trapped within a paralyzed body, tripping toward an unknown chasm, and all she had to hold on to was the security she felt in this man’s arms. Lulled to a slightly calmer place by his whispers, Chloe felt as if she mattered, as if this man truly cared what happened to her.
She shouted inside when he adjusted her position, though no sound emerged from her damaged vocal cords. She regretted the a
brupt change in his tone as his discourse became that of a person talking authoritatively on a cell phone. Giving orders. “Meet me at the door,” she thought he said, as another wave of lightness spiraled her further away from herself and into the ether.
“Now!” he directed.
There came a whooshing sound. A blast of cold air hit her, instantly chilling her bones. She shook as if death were trying to squeeze all of the life out of her but was having a difficult time.
They, whoever they were, had cold hands, and tried to separate her from the comforting heat of the man holding her. She protested uselessly.
She was laid on her back on a hard surface and covered up, hurting in unimaginable ways, in unimaginable places. What she desired most was for the warmth to return, for him to return. Her rescuer. Her savior. The glorious man with moonlight-tinted black hair and that serious, haunting face. She wanted to feel the rumble in his chest that his words produced. She wanted him to urge her on.
Who would protect her now from death’s clutches? Who would care whether she lived or died? There was no one in Miami, and no one left anywhere else since the car crash that had taken the rest of her family.
Please don’t leave me!
“Stay!” she tried hopelessly to say to the man who might have been as mad as a hatter, but had done something special for her tonight. The man who believed he was a werewolf.
Not a single word actually made it past her constricted throat. But the deed was what counted, not his crazy belief, Chloe told herself, before a new wave of blackness descended.
Chapter 4
“Shit, what happened to you?” Jim Woodsen, the E.R. doc on call, asked as the girl was wheeled away.
Parker stared down the crowded hallway, his heart refusing to slow. He wanted to go after her, certain he felt her reaching out to him.
“Where did you find that woman?” Woodsen persisted. “What happened to you? Man, it looks as if you’ve been in a war, Madison.”
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