Howl at the Moon

by Christine Warren

  "Well, that's just tough. This is not the right time or the right place." Her voice held exasperation and a hint of nerves. "It can wait."

  "I can't." Another step. He could see tension lurking around her eyes, and he didn't like it. "I think now is exactly the right time. As for the place…" He shrugged. "I offered to take you someplace else. You refused."

  "Because it's not appropriate," she snapped, and her eyes glinted. "This is where I work and this is when I work. I'm not going to fight with you here. Especially not just because you got a bruised ego just because I didn't beg you to stay on the phone with me until all hours of the morning. You'll get over it."

  Noah eased forward until he stood so close, she had to lift her chin to keep eye contact.

  "You think that's why we need to talk?" He let himself give a small smile and shook his head. "You've got it all wrong, sweetheart. I don't want to talk about me. I want to know what's bothering you."

  Sam looked up at Noah and frowned. She wasn't exactly thinking clearly at the moment, not with her mind racing in twelve different directions over Annie and him and the pack and a cartel of mad military scientists. And not with him wearing that uniform that made his shoulders look a mile wide, or with him standing so close she felt bathed in his scent. He didn't wear cologne, thank the moon, but if she could have bottled the smell of him, she could have made a fortune. He smelled of musk and man and warm skin, all underlain with the clean, subtle spice of his soap. She could have licked him, just to savor that scent. Clearly he already threw her off-balance, and now even his words had stopped making sense.

  "What?" She shook her head to try to clear it.

  He gave a long-suffering sigh, grabbed her backpack with one hand, and used the other to grip one of hers. "Come on." He towed her behind him. "We can talk and eat at the same time. If you can't take too much time from work, we'll just go across the hall to the club dining room."

  That got Sam's attention. She dug her heels into the rug and shook her head. "No. We can't talk in there."

  He paused, looked down at her for a second, then changed course for the front door. "Fine. The deli down the street is excellent. We'll go there."

  Sam tried to muster up a protest, but nothing came out. Instead, ten minutes later she found herself sitting at one of the deli's five tiny tables and bumping knees with Noah. She unwrapped the white paper from her sandwich with great concentration and wondered why she hadn't just refused to go with him. It wasn't like he could have forced her, so why was she here?

  Because, she acknowledged, for the first time in her life something bothered her that she couldn't share with her pack.

  Lupines were sharers, by nature and nurture, and Silverbacks shared more than most. For millennia, it had helped ensure the pack's survival, and Sam couldn't be sure it wasn't still helping. There really was strength in numbers, and when one pack member had a problem, he turned to the pack for a solution. Pack meant protection, security, family, and safety, and Sam was starting to feel like this situation with Annie had taken all those things away from her. If she couldn't turn to her pack, whom could she turn to?

  Her subconscious, apparently, had nominated Noah.

  He'd taken one bite of his sandwich, chewed, and swallowed before his patience quite obviously ran out. "So what could you possibly have been doing while we talked last night that set this off?" he demanded, his gaze as blunt as his question. "Because you're not going to try to tell me it was something I said."

  Her head shook before she could stop it, destroying her chance for an easy excuse. "No," she admitted. "It wasn't you."

  "Then what was it?"

  She fiddled with her roast beef. Part of her wanted to crawl into his lap and ask him to fix everything, to tell him the whole messy story, even though she knew perfectly well there wasn't anything he could do. The rest of her had almost thirty years of training in pack protocol and kept reminding her that the pack took care of pack problems. Of course, the alpha seemed happy for Noah to involve himself in the pack, and if Graham trusted him, the pack trusted him.

  She felt a strange pounding in her head and realized she must be developing her first real-life headache.

  She would have preferred to skip the experience.

  "Samantha," Noah prompted, his foot nudging hers under the table. "Tell me."

  "It's a long story."

  "I have faith in you. Condense."

  She quarter-smiled. It was too small to qualify as halfs. "It's complicated, too, and you've probably never even heard of most of the players." She saw him about to protest and lifted a hand to stop him. "Which means that you'll have to stop me for questions if you get lost."

  She saw him relax fractionally, and this time her almost smile at least felt genuine. She still didn't feel a hundred percent comfortable about sharing any of this with him, but she felt compelled to do so. Who else could she share it with? Outside the pack and the friends close enough to be privy to all the pack's business, Noah was the only one she could think of whom she could trust. Plus, she liked that he wanted to know. She liked that he was interested in what bothered her, as well as what turned her on.

  "I guess it all boils down to the fact that I'm worried," she said, pushing away her half-eaten sandwich and leaning her forearms on the table. "About my best friend. I think she might be in trouble."

  "I'm guessing that's not a euphemism for 'pregnant.'"

  That startled a laugh out of her. "Hardly. She doesn't even date. If she were pregnant, we could start a new religion."

  Noah reached out and took her hand in his, rubbing a thumb across her knuckles. Sam tried to concentrate on something other than how incredibly good it felt.

  "Tell me."

  "She's been acting a little weird for weeks." She stared down at their hands, her smaller and paler one cuddled in his large, calloused grip. "Canceling plans and working day and night, but that didn't really bother me. She loves her job, so when she's caught up in something, she'll do that, just disappear and focus all her energy on it until she's satisfied. She does it once or twice a year. I'm used to her ignoring phone calls."

  "But?"

  "But this time she's disappeared."

  "Your friend is Lupine?" Noah asked, and she nodded. "Are you afraid something has happened to her? Have you tried calling her family to see if any of them have heard from her?"

  She shook her head and used her free hand to brush her hair away from her face. "No, I know where she is. She sent me an e-mail."

  Noah stared at her for a minute, his brows drawing together in confusion. "I don't get it. If you know where she is, how are you worried that she's disappeared?"

  "I'm not explaining this well." Sam blew out a breath. Her scattered explanation illustrated how disorganized her thinking had become. Too many worries, not enough solutions. "I'm not worried that something has happened to her. I'm worried that something is going to happen to her."

  It was the moment of truth, and Sam didn't even hesitate, just told Noah the truth and knew instantly that she would feel better for having said it. "Annie is a scientist, and I'm afraid that the research she's working on now could get her into a lot of trouble. Not even the Alpha knows what she's doing, but from what I can understand of what she's told me—and that's not a lot—everyone on earth is going to want to get their hands on her data. She may have found a way to isolate the genetic sequences that made Lupines strong and fast and make their senses so acute, and that would mean there might be a way to give those traits to other people. Like humans."

  * * *

  CHAPTER NINE

  Noah felt his pulse stutter and hoped like hell Sam was too preoccupied to notice. He had to fight to keep his breath even and his muscles from tensing in shock. Annie Cryer was Sam's best friend?

  Human or not, he felt like letting out a howl just then. Could any other part of this miserable assignment possibly go wrong? Maybe he could get shot in the balls by a cherub with bad aim, or something. That would perk hi
m right up.

  Mentally gritting his teeth, he blew out a breath and shook his head. "I'm afraid you lost me, sweetheart."

  "Don't worry; I've lost me, too."

  "Is something like what you're saying even possible?"

  "If Annie says it is, then I believe her. Don't ask me to explain how, because I don't have the slightest clue," she said, "but there must be a way. I mean, I read in the paper a few months ago that scientists in England or someplace had found a way to splice some human genes into a mouse. When you think about how genetically different a human and a mouse are, doing the same thing with a human and a Lupine would have to be easy."

  "Okay, I'll take your word for it. But what makes you think this has anything to do with Annie disappearing?"

  She frowned and nibbled on her lower lip while Noah tried not to stare. "We're both operating purely on speculation, but she thinks someone has been watching her. And one of her colleagues is… less than trustworthy. He's all about the glory of the latest discovery. She's afraid, and I have to agree with her, that if someone wanted to know every last detail about her work, it wouldn't be hard for them to get it out of Gordon."

  Noah listened carefully to the story, because this was information he needed, but it wasn't easy to take it all in while wrestling with the urge to roar and trying to maintain an expression of mild concern. He deserved a frickin' star for this. To hell with a bird.

  Sam told him about the fears the Others had, especially the Lupines, about being used as lab rats or guinea pigs or, even worse, being drafted to fight wars their species had no part in. She described Annie's behavior at the lab on Friday and Saturday, Entwhistle's attitude, and the way Annie seemed to think he'd become extra curious lately. Then Sam mentioned the paper she'd found with the military-sounding committee listed as one of the author and her suspicions about what the government might want to do with Annie's data.

  "I tried to get her to go to Graham," Sam explained, "but she made me promise to give her a week. She said she was near a breakthrough that could change the whole situation, so like an idiot, I agreed. Her week is up tomorrow, and now she's disappeared. And I can't go to the Alpha without her. How the hell would I explain any of this? I don't even understand any of it myself!"

  Noah nodded in sympathy, his mind racing. If not even Graham knew about the things Sam was telling him, she and Annie had done an unbelievable job keeping their secret. No wonder he hadn't been able to find out much from the pack members he had interviewed. The real source had been sitting right in front of him all along. Slowly working her way into his heart.

  He stifled the urge to punch the wall. What the hell was he supposed to do now? Chose between them? His job and the woman who made him consider for the first time what it would be like to make a family of his own? Whose sick idea of a joke was this?

  Sam squeezed his hand. "Noah? Are you okay? You look… upset."

  "I'm fine." Carefully he schooled his features into relaxation. He could not afford to screw this up now. It sucked so bad already that he sure as hell didn't need to make it worse. "I'm just suffering one of the downsides of being a man."

  "Which is?" She sounded wary.

  He laughed. "Nothing embarrassing, I promise. I'm upset because one of the things men have in common is that we want to fix things. I want to fix your problem for you, but damned if I can think of a way to do it. It's… lowering."

  And it was. What was even more lowering was the knowledge that fixing the problem he'd come here to handle would mean making her situation even worse.

  Again she squeezed his hand. "Don't worry. I didn't tell you all this so that you could fix it for me. Though if you come up with any ideas, let me know." She smiled at him wryly.

  Could he possibly feel like a bigger piece of shit?

  "I will." He searched her face. "What are you planning to do?"

  "There's not all that much I can do, really. Not until Annie comes back, which she said should be on Sunday. I've been poking around a little to see if I could dig anything useful up on the kind of experiment Annie's doing. Maybe if I found what other groups were doing, I could find out who might want to get their hands on her data most urgently. That's how I found that article. But other than that, I feel like I've hit a brick wall." She pulled a face, one that made Noah want to kiss her and smooth it away. "Annie's the planner. She's the brains of the duo. I've always been more of the dumb muscle."

  At that, he did kiss her, leaned over the table and brushed his mouth over hers. "Samantha Carstairs, I think 'dumb' is the second-to-last word in the world I would use to describe you."

  "What's the last word?"

  He grinned at her. "'Ugly.'"

  She burst out laughing, which had been his goal. "Thanks. That puts things into perspective, now doesn't it?"

  "I hope so." He made a show of glancing at his watch. "Wrap that sandwich back up. We need to get back to work. I have an interview in another fifteen minutes."

  "I'm not hungry. I'll just throw it away."

  "No, you won't." He snatched it out of her hand before she could take it to the trash can and rewrapped the white deli paper around it. "We're taking it with us. You didn't eat enough for a church mouse, let alone a grown woman. You can snack on it at your desk."

  Holding the sandwich in one hand, he recaptured hers in the other and led her back out to the sunlit sidewalk.

  They walked a few paces hand in hand before he looked down at her and found her watching him with a slight smile on her face. When their eyes met, she leaned into him, bumping her shoulder against his.

  "Thanks for forcing me to have lunch with you, Noah," she said. "And for making me talk. Somehow just getting the whole story out makes me feel a little better. Of course, I still wish I knew what to do about all of it, but I'm glad it got it out. So, thanks for listening."

  Noah smiled down at her while shame crept down his spine like a scorpion, looking for the best spot to sting.

  "Anytime, sweetheart," he murmured. "Anytime."

  It amazed Sam how much work she accomplished that afternoon, not to mention that she was able to finish the rest of her sandwich while she did it. Her appetite had come back, and she felt like at least part of the weight she'd been carrying around since last weekend had lifted from her shoulders. Everything wasn't fixed—not by a long shot—but talking to Noah about it had at least made her feel more capable of dealing with whatever happened. Somehow, he had that effect on her; he just made her feel better all around. It was a little scary.

  For all that her friends liked to tease her, Sam had had a few dates over the years, even a couple of serious relationships. Once, right after she'd finished college, she had been sure she was in love. She'd been gearing up for the whole thing—mating, marriage, pups, the whole shebang. It hadn't been until she'd ended the relationship after finding that her lover's definition of "mate" differed drastically from hers—she had believed it meant happily ever after, and he'd thought it meant happily ever after a different piece of tail—that she'd started to think that the emotion she had felt had more to do with expecting love than actually finding it.

  Lupines tended to mate young. Despite their life spans' being roughly equal to or greater than those of humans, a higher proportion of them died from violence—challenges, wars, attacks, and feuds—than humans, so there was a dip in Lupine mortality between the ages of twenty and forty. It meant they lost the largest percentage of their population during prime breeding years, so they tended to make up for the losses by mating and having pups young. By the time she got out of college, Sam had been twenty-two and ready to settle down. Or so she had thought.

  When she looked back now, she was glad for how things had worked out, but it had skewed her perspective on relationships in ways she was just beginning to notice. It had made her think relationships were things best approached intellectually, based on common backgrounds and common goals. She'd thought of lust as absolutely the worst first step in finding a mate, until she'd met and
lusted after Noah, only to find out he offered her a lot more than a tremble in her tummy. He made her laugh, he made her think, he made her crazy, and he even made her feel safe. He lightened her heart, damn him. How was she supposed to protect herself against that?

  Why should she have to?

  Sam's fingers froze over her keyboard as the question flashed in her mind. Why should she have to? Why wouldn't it be okay for her to develop a relationship with Noah? A real relationship, the kind with strings and no expiration date? What was stopping her?

  She tried to think logically. She didn't know of any laws against it. The Lupines had gotten rid of the ban against interbreeding centuries ago, and the humans hadn't had time to enact one since the Unveiling. Hopefully, by the time they thought of it, Rafe and the Council of Others would have gathered up enough political influence to keep that from happening. The pack would accept it; they could hardly refuse to, not with the Alpha mated to a human female. Everyone could see they'd produced three healthy pups, with another on the way. Sam didn't even think her family would object. They'd been among Graham's earliest supporters when he'd announced his mating, not just because he was a relative—a third cousin on her mother's side—but also because they were fair people who made judgments based on character, not species. So why should Sam try to keep from letting anything develop between her and Noah?

  True, she didn't know if he felt the same way about her. He flirted with her outrageously, and he didn't hide the fact that he found her attractive. He obviously wanted her; she had no doubts about that. She didn't know if it meant any more to him than sexual attraction, but who could ever tell that? If she'd met him in a bar or at a Howl or on the subway and started dating him, she still wouldn't have known if he wanted a relationship with her or just a way to pass the time. Should she let a fear of being dumped one day keep her from trying? It would be a sad day when Samantha Olivia Carstairs let fear keep her from anything.

  Feeling a smile spread across her face, Sam glanced down the room to where Noah sat talking to Bobby Metcalf. Noah's attention was focused on the young Lupine as they spoke quietly but earnestly. Her smile widened. Noah had told her when they got back from lunch that he had an off-site interview later this afternoon that would take him out of the office starting at four. He didn't expect to return until after seven, he said, so he would see her in the morning. Samantha turned back to her computer, humming softly. Somehow she thought she'd see him—a lot more of him—much sooner than that.