Savage Instinct

by Anwar, Celeste

  Nydia blew her nose in the tissue she was holding.

  Richard placed his hand under her chin and lifted her head so that he was looking in her eyes. “Nydia, you’re starting to embarrass me acting like such a child. My sisters are very loving individuals, and I can’t imagine them acting like teenage drama queens unless you provoked them.”

  She jerked her head away. Her arched eyebrows drew down over her eyes. “Excuse me? Exactly what did I do to make them act like that?

  Richard rolled his eyes. “Women. I haven’t seen anything that would make me come out here crying and feeling sorry for myself.”

  “I came out here because I didn’t want to get into a physical altercation with them.”

  It was Richard’s turn to frown. “Are you saying you’d hit my sisters? What in the world is wrong with you, Nydia? You’re acting insane,” he said, raising his voice.

  “I didn’t say I’d hit them, but they damn sure made me want to. And I am not insane, and I resent the hell out of you acting like all this is either in my head or all my fault. You can’t have it both ways. Either your sisters are acting like little spoiled brats and treating me bad, or I’ve shown my butt to earn their disrespect.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “Well. You said it.”

  Nydia planted her hands on her hips. “So I showed my butt because I offered to help prepare dinner? They wouldn’t let me go in the kitchen, and I could hear them in there complaining about having to cook special dishes because I’m a vegetarian. Alice said she should sneak some chicken into my beans and rice, and I’d never know the difference.”

  Richard laughed at her. Actually laughed.

  Nydia fumed, feeling the angry tears threatening to come back full force.

  A smug look swept over his face. “Nydia you have a tendency to be difficult to get along with. You have to have your food prepared special, and you are a freak about the cleanliness of everything, and to be quite honest with you, my sisters are probably reacting to you being an uptight BITCH! If you would relax and roll with the flow, everything would be alright.”

  Richard reached out and grabbed her by the arm, and this time his grip was painful on her bicep.

  Nydia planted her feet, refusing to move. “I have done everything within my power to get along with your family today. I have spent the majority of the day walking on eggshells for fear that I would do something wrong and make them disprove of me. Well, I’m here to tell you that if your family cannot accept me for who I am then I’m leaving. I don’t need all of this crap in my life.”

  She would be damned if she would allow him to blame her or make her the one to blame for this family’s need to exclude the newcomer. She knew the family could hear the fight, and for once in her life, she didn’t really care what others thought about her at the moment.

  She jerked her arm free of his grip. Richard clenched his hands into fists.

  She wasn’t afraid of him or anyone else there. She bowed her chest, feeling her resentment swell. “I’m getting in MY car and heading home. Why don’t you go in the house with your stuck up sisters and make sarcastic remarks about me the rest of the night? I’m through with being treated like there’s something wrong with me. You people need to grow up and learn to act like adults.”

  “Yeah. You do that. I should have never brought you up here to meet them. It was a mistake I won’t make again.”

  “That’s fine with me!”

  “I can’t believe I wasted the past three months of my life on your little ass. I’m through catering to your whims,” Richard said, looking smug and lifting his chin in arrogance.

  “Catering to my whims?” she asked, outraged. Nydia’s palm itched to smack the look off his face, but she decided she’d be the better person and not resort to violence.

  She stormed away, holding back the tears that she could feel stinging her eyelids. She was going to cry, again, and she knew it, but she didn’t want to give Richard the satisfaction of seeing tears running down her face.

  She felt guilty that the relationship hadn’t been what she’d thought it was, and with that realization, her hurt and anger mingled together, overwhelming her with emotion.

  Slamming the car door, she jammed the key into the ignition. The engine roared to life.

  Nydia put the car in reverse and gave it enough gas it shot backwards towards the woods, coming within a foot of hitting a massive spruce standing in the front yard. She spun the wheel, switching to drive, and spun the car around. She half expected Richard to run up, jerk her door open, and demand that she calm her butt down and come back inside. The sense that she needed to hurry pervaded her.

  She pointed the car toward the driveway, feeling the world close in on her.

  She needn’t have bothered moving fast and worrying he’d try to stop her. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she saw him walk back up the steps and into the house.

  Outrage didn’t begin to describe what Nydia felt.

  The bastard didn’t give two shits that they’d just broken up!

  How many times had she groveled at his feet, apologizing so many times she wanted to throw up, just because she thought he’d leave her and she couldn’t stand being alone or going to bed angry? She’d been taught to apologize and to work problems out by talking, that forgiveness was everything in a relationship. He’d never acted like anything was his fault—only hers.

  She stepped on the gas pedal like she was trying to put it through the floor. The car shot forward, startling her into giving a little yelp. The car swerved from one side of the road to the next as she sped down the country lane.

  She’d wasted time hashing it out with Richard when she should have just cut her losses and gone home back to her place in town. She was an idiot for thinking he’d take her side over his family’s. Now it was full on dark and the moon, though full, did little to ease her jangled nerves.

  The trip back down the mountain seemed to take longer in the dark. A mist settled over the road, forcing her to slow down or risk veering over the edge of the road.

  What had seemed picturesque in the daylight now seemed sinister in the night. Gone was the bright green foliage of spring, replaced by black and grey trees with branches that seemed to reach out to her passing vehicle with fingerlike appendages. Every time she took a curve too wide and heard the scrape of twigs or brush against her car, she jumped in her seat and bit her lip until it nearly bled.

  She felt like even the forest was out to get her.

  “Bastard,” Nydia muttered to herself. “That’s the last time I waste my time on a man.”

  She glanced out the driver’s side window, seeing nothing beyond the glass but inky darkness broken by the shafts of tall pine trees and the smoky mist that slinked across the background like a snake.

  The sight gave her the creeps.

  “Now I’m stuck out here in the damn boonies while you and your sisters just laugh it up. Oh, she’s a bitch and overreacting. She’ll be okay on her own. You stay here with us, Bubba,” Nydia mocked her now ex-boyfriend’s sister’s voice.

  They hadn’t said it with their mouths, but she could see that they thought about her on their faces.

  Nydia was not crazy, and she wasn’t in the habit of overreacting unless provoked. The fact that Richard had been blind to what they were doing only made her angrier at the unjustness of the entire situation. She hated feeling like she’d somehow done something wrong when she knew damned well she hadn’t.

  She shifted into second gear, feeling her car gaining speed on the winding trip down the mountain. The engine groaned but the car slowed to a more manageable speed.

  Somewhere in the dark, she knew sandy turnouts dotted the mountain for vehicles that lost their brakes. She’d seen them on their trip up and asked Richard about the curious sight.

  When he’d told her what they were for, she’d shuddered. Now, braking around every curve, she hoped she didn’t end up in one of them too.

  She’d be stranded until
she could walk somewhere for help. Her cell phone didn’t get any service this far out of range of the cell towers.

  Nydia grit her teeth. Her hands wrapped around the steering wheel with a death grip that made her knuckles ache. Tension tightened her neck muscles, giving her a headache at the base of her skull that threatened to creep up her scalp and make her whole head hurt.

  She might not have taken off in such an emotional state and risked getting into an accident if not for Richard’s sisters, Alice and Alex, the twins.

  Twins from hell.

  She still couldn’t fathom what she had initially done to those people to make them so standoffish and cruel to her. It was her first time meeting his parents. When he’d said they were a little bit country, she thought she’d understood what he was hinting at and been prepared to be on her best behavior, her most charming.

  From the moment her butt touched the couch in their living room, Alice and Alex acted like they had a problem with her. Richard sat next to her, but he’d seemed distant and unwilling to hold her hand. Hell, he’d been unwilling to defend her from them at all, like he was afraid of losing face, or ashamed of her—she wasn’t sure which.

  Just remembering it made the angry tears well in her eyes again.

  “Crybaby,” she said to herself, hating how much she’d allowed herself to be affected by them. She felt like a spineless wimp.

  At least she’d stood up to Richard and not been the doormat she’d felt like all evening.

  Nydia wiped at her eyes, having a hard time seeing through them to keep an eye on the road. When she came to the end of the long dirt road where the paved county road took over, she didn’t bother to stop, she simply slowed down enough to make a wide turn onto the county road and once she felt her tires hit the gravel of the far shoulder she stepped on the accelerator again.

  Nydia misjudged her control of the car’s tires changing from dirt to pavement. Gravel spun out from beneath the wheels. She could hear the rocks ping beneath the car and felt the wheel jerk as her sedan whipped to one side of the curve.

  She overcorrected herself, swerving into the other lane with a gut wrenching lurch. Almost at the same moment, her headlights illuminated a pack of wolves standing in the road.

  Reflex made her body tense all over and her eyes squeezed shut, braced for impact. She screamed and slammed on the brakes with both feet, feeling her car hit something so big so hard that the wheel vibrated in her hand and a loud bang thundered through the windows.

  The car jerked to a halt.

  Outside, she could see the pack of wolves run into the woods surrounding the road, disappearing out of sight.

  Nausea welled in her stomach. She clutched her gut, breathing hard, swallowing back the bile that hovered in the back of her throat.

  Her heart pounded so hard she thought she might pass out.

  She knew she’d hit a wolf, but everything had happened so quickly, she hadn’t actually seen what she’d hit or if it was pinned under the car and flung out somewhere on the shoulder. The thought that she’d hurt or killed another living creature made the sick feeling return tenfold.

  Before she could decide what to do, a man stood up and collapsed on the hood of her car.

  “Oh my god!” she screamed, her hands flying up to her mouth to contain her horror.

  His gaze met hers a brief moment through the windshield and then his knees buckled, forcing him back to the ground in front of her car.

  “I’ve hit a man,” she said to herself. She pushed the gear stick into park and ripped her door open, running around the front of the car to where the man lay.

  She paused a brief moment, stunned to see he was buck naked and bleeding profusely from a wound in his chest. Recovering from her shock, she rushed to his aid and crouched on the ground beside him to check his faint pulse.

  He was so still and pale, she’d think him dead if not for the blood pumping sluggishly from a jagged spot just above his heart.

  “Oh my god,” she said again, panic making her thoughts broken and frantic. “Are you all right? Can you talk? Where do you hurt? Where’s the nearest hospital? Should I even move you?” she stammered, bombarding him with questions.

  She dragged her phone out of her pocket, dialing 911. When the message for no service answered, she groaned in frustration and stuck it back in her jeans.

  Dirt, mud, and flecks of gravel and pine straw stuck to his body everywhere he’d sweated or bled. Without a second thought, Nydia pulled off her tee shirt and began wiping the debris away from his chest, trying to find the source of the blood.

  Something sharp snagged her questing fingers. She swiped at the spot, and he jerked and coughed, making blood seep from the wound. On closer inspection, she could see a broken piece of metal sticking out of his chest.

  A quick glance at her bumper told her the metal hadn’t come from her car.

  She wadded up her shirt and pressed it to the wound, hoping she didn’t make it any worse than it already was.

  The man groaned.

  At least he was alive and not just a smear on the pavement beneath her car.

  “Did those wolves attack you? Where are you from? Why were you in the road in the middle of the night? Where are your clothes? Do you realize that we could have both been killed?”

  “Aiden. My name’s Aiden Kinsey. Just get me the fuck out of here,” he said, gritting his teeth in pain. He held her shirt to his chest, and she could see the periwinkle turning dark red around the edges of his fingers and palm as it soaked through.

  Nydia pulled on his other arm, trying to lift him to no avail. “I need your help. You’re too big for me to lift.”

  Nodding, he gripped her hand and struggled to his feet. Nydia stood under his arm, supporting him as she walked him to the passenger side of her car. She flung the door open, and he collapsed in the seat. Nydia leaned over him and buckled the seatbelt, tucking the shoulder strap behind his head so it wouldn’t irritate his injury.

  Shutting the door, she ran around the car and got into her seat, punching the car into drive. If she’d thought her nerves were bad before, they were practically supernova now. Her tension was so high she thought she might burst if anything else happened.

  She whipped the car back onto the road. The wheels screamed on the pavement as she accelerated.

  “Don’t kill us,” he muttered weakly from his seat.

  “I’ll try not to. I’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

  “No!”

  The way he said it startled her. She glanced at him, meeting his fevered green eyes and seeing worry etched across his face. He couldn’t be thinking clearly now, not with his injuries.

  He caught her gaze and held it, riveting her mind into a blank slate for several seconds until she managed to shake the sensation off and regain coherent thought. The unending adrenaline rush must be getting to her.

  “You’re hurt. You’re not thinking right,” she said. She dragged herself away from the endless pool of his eyes and returned to the road, feeling foolish for staring at him so long.

  “No hospital. It isn’t safe,” he said, his voice gravelly and weak.

  “What?” She directed her eyes back on the road. “Are you crazy?”

  “Someone attacked me. They’ll be looking for me at the hospital.”

  “Then we’ll call the police.”

  “They can’t protect me from them. They’ll just think I’m crazy.”

  She nodded, agreeing with him there. “What do you want me to do then? You can’t stay like this. You’ll die. I’m a spa technician, not a doctor, but you’ve got something stuck in your chest and I don’t think a bandaid is going to do you a lot of good.”

  “Take…me to your…home. They’ll be…watching…my place by…now, waiting...” Every word he said seemed to take longer and longer to come out. Unconsciousness beckoned him.

  “I can’t do that,” she said. “I can’t take you home.”

  “You…have…to. You…hit me…with…
your…car. I…could walk…if you hadn’t hit me.”

  “What if you have internal bleeding? You might have some broken ribs. You could die on my couch.”

  “I’ll be okay. Just go,” Aiden said.

  Nydia swallowed. The chances that they’d pin this on her and take her straight to jail were probably pretty good. Guilt swamped her, forcing her into a decision to comply. She just hoped she didn’t end up with a dead white boy in her kitchen before the night was up.

  Chapter Three

  Aiden knew his powers of healing and shifting were weakened by his injury and the poisonous silver in his blood. She didn’t know it, but she’d saved his life when she plowed through the pack of wolves and disrupted the fight. Sure, Riker had pushed him into her path, but he could handle a woman if he had to.