“She needs very little guarding,” Samantha retorted. “Alpha keeps one eye on her all the time. And he hates to see worthless little pups annoying her.”
“You shouldn’t antagonize me, Samantha. It’s a hunt night,” he snarled. “It’s bad strategy to piss off one of our males. He might decide to catch you and make you pay.”
“You couldn’t catch me with a baited hook,” Samantha scoffed. “And you couldn’t take me if you did. I’m beta female in this pack, Paul. I would never let myself be mated to a little gamma nothing like you.”
Paul didn’t appreciate that remark, and he demonstrated his feelings by springing full force across the ten feet separating them and attempting to drag Samantha to the ground beneath him. Missy jumped out of the way, and fortunately Samantha was quick enough to do the same. She spun neatly out of reach and snickered when Paul grabbed air and tumbled to the hard-packed ground.
“You see what I mean?” Samantha taunted, sneering down at the fallen male. “You’re pathetic. Beneath me. I think even less of you than I do of your boss, and I think he’s a worthless little nothing who disgraces the name of the pack. Don’t think I’ll ever let you touch me, because it’s never going to happen.”
The look of rage that contorted his face made Missy fear she was about to witness bloodshed, but before the fallen Lupine’s muscles could do more than shift and bunch, a sharp command cut through the tension.
“Melissa. Come here. Now.” Graham’s hard tone matched his stony expression, but Missy quickly thought better of arguing.
In any other circumstances, she might have objected to the ring of dominance in his voice, but these circumstances fell far short of ordinary. She had stepped into his world the minute she followed him into the Ramble, and for the moment she had to live by his rules.
The rationalization worked long enough for her to hurry back to his side like an obedient little mate. She halted next to him and looked up at his granite profile. He didn’t bother to look down, but she knew he was aware of where she stood, down to the very inch. His eyes remained on his cousin.
“She seems quite obedient,” Curtis said in a tone of voice that made Missy’s teeth clench and her knuckles itch to make contact with that snarky smile. “I wonder if she’ll respond so quickly when I order her to spread her legs once I catch her.”
Disgust spoke for Missy, because her common sense had obviously taken a vacation.
“I don’t think that will be possible,” she replied, letting her expression telegraph how loathsome she found him. “I find it’s hard to come running when I’m doubled over vomiting at the thought of you touching me.”
Curtis’s arm twitched, as if it longed to strike out at her, but Graham’s menacing presence and warning growl kept him in check.
“I told you, you will never touch her. I’ll kill you before you lay a single finger on her. She is my mate, and she will run to no one but me.”
“Mate?” Curtis’s question hissed out, soft and sibilant and full of icy rage. “She’s no fit mate for one of the pack. She’s human. They aren’t worth the bite of our teeth.”
A slow smile spread across Graham’s chiseled mouth, making him look wicked and smug and too sexy for Missy’s own good. Even in the midst of their dicey situation, just watching that little grin curve his lips made her want him. She tried to ignore the spark of lust, but it got tougher when she felt an answering surge of heat rush through him and saw his glowing green eyes light with that particular heat she recognized all too well. The intensely primitive animal energy she’d recognized coursing through the crowd had been building, winding tighter with each passing moment, and now, it seemed, even Graham couldn’t contain the effect it had on him.
She shivered and forced her gaze away from his face so she could focus on the pack, but he trashed that idea by sliding a hot, rough hand around her waist to rest over her barely rounded tummy.
“Oh, I think this one is worth a lot,” he finally said, replying to Curtis’s taunt in a way that made the other man’s eyes narrow. Graham rubbed his palm in slow, soft circles over Missy’s stomach, and his gaze never wavered from his cousin’s. “In fact, I’d say she’s priceless, now that the next Silverback Alpha grows fast and strong inside her. Congratulate me, Curtis. Missy is going to make me a daddy.”
If Curtis’s expression displayed a sort of abject and angry shock, Missy figured her own wasn’t too dissimilar. Did Graham mean what she thought he meant? Had he just told his cousin that she was pregnant? That she was even now carrying a little werewolf?
He had to be out of his mind! She couldn’t be pregnant. And even if she was, the embryo would have to be less than one week old, and no one could know something like that so soon, so Graham had to be using the lie to taunt his already furious cousin.
“You lie!” Curtis hissed at them, sounding more like a reptile than a Lupine, but Missy felt inclined to agree with his accusation.
Not that she intended to contradict Graham in front of him. Whatever game the man was playing, he knew a lot more about it than she did, so she would cheerfully go along with whatever he said. She could rip him a new asshole later. When she wasn’t facing a forest full of strange werewolves.
“Do I?” Graham drawled.
“It’s a trick! A trick to buy yourself time, but you won’t be able to lie to the Council. They’ll know whether or not you really bred her—”
“I don’t need to lie, Curtis. And if you weren’t so blinded by greed and ambition, you’d realize I’m telling the truth.”
Missy thought the man’s head might explode, his rage was so blatant and so intense. She watched as his eyes narrowed to angry slits and his muscles tensed and his nostrils flared, and he turned that rage onto her.
“You bitch,” he growled, his body coiling into a tight spring as he took the first threatening step toward her. “You think you can come into the middle of my pack and ruin all my plans? I’ll rip that brat right out of your fucking stomach!”
Curtis lunged toward her, but Graham was faster. He picked her up around the waist and swung her out of the way, blocking his cousin’s charge with his own body. Missy felt the shock wave of impact ripple through his muscles and into hers, but he held on long enough to get her out of Curtis’s range. By the time he set her aside, Samantha and Annie had raced over, and he handed her to them.
“Keep her safe,” he growled, and before her eyes, he began to change.
Missy watched, torn between awe and fear, while her lover began to transform from a normal, human-looking man to something much, much more dangerous. In a matter of seconds, his muscles and tendons stretched and reshaped themselves, growing larger, denser, harder, where they covered his elongated bones. He went from an intimidatingly large man to a terrifyingly huge beast.
In his wereform, Graham stood at least seven feet tall, every inch thick and ripped with muscle. His thighs looked as powerful as a Mack Truck, and his shoulders could have blocked out the sun. Thick, plush fur grew to cover his body, a dark, rich shade of chocolate black that faded to toffee on his belly and groin and bore a light frosting of silvery gray directly between his shoulder blades. Only his eyes looked familiar, even in the wolfish face with its long muzzle and sharp, jagged teeth. She saw those eyes fix on her, and she swallowed, instinctively taking a step backward.
He held her gaze and stepped toward her. “Don’t be afraid of me. I would never hurt you, my mate.”
Mate. The word had sounded weird and exotic when he’d used it before. Now it seemed almost frightening. Even though she’d known he was a werewolf from the first moment she’d met him, she’d never really known it before. Not until now. This instant, when he loomed before her looking like a creature from her nightmares and sounding like the man she loved.
It took several deep breaths and a whole lot of mental affirmations, but Missy finally squared her shoulders and stopped backing away from him.
“I’m not afraid,” she lied, hoping no one would look to
o closely at her trembling knees and call her bluff. “I have no fear of my mate, or of any other member of his clan. The Luna of the Silverback Clan doesn’t need to be afraid.”
“Bitch!”
Graham spun around and threw himself in front of his mate just in time to foil Curtis’s next attack. This time Missy got to see a transformation at high speed, because Curtis shifted even as he jumped. By the time he and Graham met, there in a tangle of fur, teeth, and rending claws, both were in wereform and neither had any intention of giving in.
The moon stopped them.
Before teeth could tear and claws could shred, a low, haunting noise filled the clearing and launched itself into the crystalline night sky. One lone wolf sounded the howl and everything else in the woods fell into silence. Even Graham and Curtis froze, turning as one with the rest of the pack to watch the bright, silver crescent slowly rise over the treetops like dawn over the eastern ocean.
“It’s almost time,” Samantha spoke into her ear, but when Missy turned to look at her, she saw the Lupine’s eyes glued to the luminous night sky. “Be ready. When the moon is up and the howler goes quiet, run.”
The woman’s soft words made Missy’s stomach clench, and she gritted her teeth against a wave of panic.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she whispered. “I don’t know if I can.”
“You are Luna. You can do anything you need to do. And you need to do this.”
The Lupine’s words ended as the last quivering note of the howl died and the moon broke free of its woody veil. A single heartbeat of silence followed, and then the woods exploded in a fiery blaze of excitement.
Hard hands shoved against Missy’s back as her two Lupine guards leapt forward, propelling her along ahead of them.
“Run!”
And the hunt was on.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Her boots pounded against the hard earth of the forest floor as she ran to the north for all she was worth. Adrenaline drove her forward with Samantha and Annie bounding along, one at each side. They pushed hard through the dense brush, and Missy charged forward, ignoring the sharp sting of thin branches snapping against her and cutting into her exposed skin. She had never been much of a runner, and now she wished she’d run track in high school. The experience could have come in real handy.
“They’re following us!” Annie shouted so they could hear her over the pounding of footsteps and the crunch of debris under their shoes. “Curtis’s goons. They must be after Missy!”
“Tough shit! They can’t have her!” Samantha crowded closer and Annie followed suit until Missy felt caged in by them. In these circumstances, being caged didn’t seem like a bad thing.
I feel like I’m in an old episode of The Fugitive or something, Missy thought, feeling her legs already begin to deaden and become heavy from the unaccustomed demands she placed on them. Only I’m even less anxious to be caught than Richard Kimble ever was. He didn’t have sex-crazed werewolves after him!
“Left!” Annie shouted, and veered in that direction, forcing Missy to follow. She saw why when a dark figure crashed out of the trees just a few feet from their path and sped toward them. “Sam, they planned this! It’s a goddamned ambush!”
Samantha growled a response and darted in front of the approaching figure to cut him off. The ash-colored lycanthrope roared his displeasure and backhanded the brunette with enough force to send her flying several feet. Her head struck a tree trunk, and she slid to the ground in a heap. Greg, the gray werewolf, turned back to Missy and leapt forward.
“Come on! Faster!” Annie braced her shoulder against Missy’s back as if she could force the human into even greater speed, but Missy’s limited energy was already failing her.
“I can’t!” she gasped, every breath painful as it rasped in and out of her abused lungs. They felt like they were on fire, burning from the inside out.
“You don’t have a choice!”
Well, since she put it that way . . .
Missy tucked her chin to her chest and tapped into a store of energy she didn’t know she had. A fresh surge of adrenaline spun her pumping legs even faster as she and Annie struggled to escape. Even with Missy’s eyes resolutely trained on the ground in front of her, dimly lit by the heavy moon overhead, she could see Annie racing a few steps in front of her. The Lupine kept glancing back, a look of concern and unease on her face, and Missy knew the other woman was holding back for Missy’s sake.
Without the human to worry about, Annie probably could have been at the state line by this point, but she kept her pace deliberately slow so she could stay close. If Missy didn’t already feel like the most pathetic excuse for a Luna ever invented, this cinched it. She was so not cut out for this.
She figured that was pretty obvious a nanosecond later when she shrieked like a little girl. She had a good reason—what normal person wouldn’t shriek to see a 250-pound werewolf jumping out of the trees at them?—but in present company she still felt like a scared little girl.
“Annie!” she shouted for her remaining bodyguard, and darted left just in time to evade a huge, grasping hand. “Annie!”
The woman was by her side so fast Missy barely saw her move. All Missy saw was a blur of cotton and denim, and then her attacker stumbled backward under the force of Annie’s body weight slamming into his chest.
“Missy, run!”
Her head whipped around, and she saw the reason for Annie’s cry. A familiar brindled brown form wove through the trees as it loped toward her with a frighteningly long stride. It was Curtis, and he was making a beeline for Missy. Spinning like a top, she threw herself forward again and ran as if her life depended on it. At this point, it probably did.
Her boots pounded against the uneven ground and her heart pounded against her rib cage, but she could feel Curtis gaining on her. She wasn’t enough of a twit to look behind her so she could fall over a log like a horror movie scream queen, but she also knew she wasn’t going to be able to outrun him. She was a five-foot, three-inch human, and he was a six-foot, seven-inch werewolf with the stamina of a freight train. All she could do was hope she could evade him until Annie or Graham or Samantha came to her rescue. Feminist though Missy was, the idea of rescue sounded more like a blessing than an insult.
“Bitch!”
When she heard Curtis’s voice close enough behind her to whisper that kind of sweet nothing in her ear, she screamed—horror movie clichés be damned—and dodged sideways. Curtis moved faster.
He caught her by the arm and spun her around forcefully. His glowing yellow eyes sent distaste crawling through her, and the expression in them didn’t do much to set her at ease. Hate radiated off him, so intense she could almost see it distort the air between them like heat waves. She saw his eyes narrow as his lip curled in a snarl. His mouth was open, tongue lolling out as he panted from his run and from his struggle with Graham. She didn’t know how Curtis had gotten away, unless he’d bolted while Graham was distracted by the moonrise, but it didn’t much matter how he’d gotten away, just that he had and that he’d come after her.
She recoiled when he leaned closer, but he followed the motion, his wolfish muzzle pressing close and scenting the air around her. She heard the quick sniffs as he drew in her scent, felt the rush of air against her skin when he pressed his snout close up against her neck and drew deeply. She gritted her teeth against the urge to scream and jerked her head away.
“Bitch,” he growled again, rearing back just enough to meet her eyes with his own. “My cousin didn’t lie about it. He did get himself a cub, on you. A filthy human.”
He held her with one powerful paw/hand gripping each of her arms just above the elbow, but her instincts wouldn’t allow Missy to stand still. She squirmed and struggled and tried not to think about the incongruity of watching that canine mouth move and hearing human sounds issue from it. She also tried not to think about what it meant that her scent had convinced Curtis she really was pregnant.
“He w
ould shame our kind by letting a half-breed grow up to lead our pack!” Curtis ranted, shaking her in his fury. “Allowing human blood to taint the Silverback line. Well, I won’t have it. I’ll cut that brat from your belly before I let it play alpha over me!”
Missy snapped. She literally felt something give way inside her, and she knew she carried a child. She also knew she would kill anyone or anything who tried to harm him. Growling a pretty fierce sound of her own, she brought her booted foot down hard on Curtis’s bare one, then followed it with a quick knee to the groin.
Unprepared for a struggle from the “pathetic human,” he took the blow square to the balls, and his grip loosened. Doubled over in pain, he made the perfect target when Missy linked her hands into one giant fist and brought it down hard at the base of his skull. It would have felled a human, but in wereform the heavy ruff and thick muscle protected him, and Curtis remained standing, bent at the waist while he struggled for breath. Ripping free of his loosened grasp, Missy ran again and just hoped she was still heading north like Graham had ordered her to do.
An angry howl told her Curtis wouldn’t be down for long, and she dug deep for the last of her reserve strength. She found it in her belly, where the baby she now knew she carried rested, tiny and warm inside her. Thinking of nothing else but protecting him so that she could flay the skin off his father’s back when she saw him again, she fled deeper into the forest.
If she hadn’t been running for her life, she might have taken time to wonder about how she saw so clearly in the heavy darkness, but she really had other things on her mind, like listening to her back trail for the sounds of Curtis’s pursuit.
She concentrated so hard on what was behind her that she didn’t see what was in front of her until she ran headfirst into it.
Big Bad Wolf Page 20
