It didn’t indicate much of a mutual attraction.
Her wolf whined inside her head. The male confused them. He smelled like a mate, warm and musky and intoxicating, but he didn’t act like a mate. Not the way she’d always imagined her mate would act when she finally met him.
Most shifters thought about that moment. The idea of true mates, destined to be together, lived in the collective consciousness of all of them, but wolves took the idea especially seriously. After all, their animal sides mated for life without the pesky habit of falling out of love that humans seemed to manage on a regular basis. To find a mate and know you’d never want anyone else was a powerful lure.
All the stories said that the moment a wolf met its mate, it knew. Certainty struck like a bolt of lightning sent from the Goddess. One sniff was all it took. A blind wolf could pick its mate out of a room full of other shifters just by their scent, and that instant attraction always went both ways.
Or so they said. It made Renny wonder if anyone had ever bothered to explain the process to Mick, because he certainly hadn’t reacted to her like he never wanted to be apart from her. More like he couldn’t wait to get away from her. If she’d had a lower sense of self-esteem, his behavior might have given her a complex.
Instead, it gave her a puzzle to solve. Why would the wolf she recognized immediately as her mate act as if he wanted nothing to do with her? He couldn’t deny their connection; it just wasn’t possible to repudiate a true mating. At most, she supposed a really determined shifter could attempt to ignore it, but why would anyone want to? Who didn’t want to be with their perfect partner for the rest of their lives?
Mick, the lone wolf, she realized, frowning when it occurred to her that she had never learned his full name. John Jaeger, the mayor, and Molly Buchanan had introduced themselves to her, and Zeke Buchanan had been clearly identified as Molly’s older brother, but no one had bothered to give her Mick’s full name. The wolf hadn’t volunteered the information, and in the habit of friends of long acquaintance, it obviously hadn’t dawned on anyone to address Mick by anything but his familiar nickname.
At least, Renny assumed it was a nickname. Wasn’t Mick short for Michael? Did parents actually give it as a full first name? Not that she had room to talk. Her parents had given her a nickname as a first name, her great-grandmother’s nickname. Reine-Yves Goudreau, a wolf from a French-speaking village in Quebec, Canada, had been dubbed “Renny” by her English-speaking neighbors after she married an American and relocated to the United States. Her grandson’s wife had so loved the sound of her nickname, and admired her life story so much, that she’d used it as her daughter’s proper name. For all Renny knew, maybe Mick actually was Mick’s full first name.
It made her squirm a little to realize that she’d known the man less than a few hours, spoken no more than a handful of words to him, and still would have bared her throat and let him mark her if he so much as sniffed in her direction. For all that she shared her heart and mind with a wolf, Renny had grown up in a human-dominated world. She’d even lived mostly outside of a pack structure, given how few red wolf shifters like her still existed.
To her, most of the relationships she’d seen modeled had been between humans or between mixed-species couples, and humans never had the same mating instincts as shifters. A shifter might recognize a human as her true mate, but a human never felt the corresponding match. Oh, they could fall in love with a shifter and commit to spending their lives together, but for a human there always remained the option to walk away if things went wrong. For the shifter, the bond could never be broken. If her mate left, a shifter would pine over the loss for the rest of her life.
In fact, many shifters never survived the loss of a mate. The death or departure of the one person to whom a shifter was irrevocably bound caused an emotional trauma that sapped away her life. All true mates lived with that risk, but fiercely monogamous species like wolves took it harder than most. Renny could count on one hand the number of lupines she had met who had outlived their mates, and most of them hadn’t done so for long.
Could that be the shadow she saw lurking in Mick’s dark eyes? Could he possibly have had and lost a mate sometime in his past? She thought about his appearance and guessed he must be in his mid-thirties, which was certainly old enough to have mated and lost, especially if his mate had died from some sort of unexpected trauma. Shifters rarely died of diseases, and certainly not as young as a mate of his must have been when he lost her.
If she’d guessed right, maybe this might be a good time to reevaluate that instinct about Mick being her mate. Maybe she didn’t find the man all that fascinating after all. Her life didn’t need any more complications, and nothing would be more complicated than trying to mate with a man who’d already lost the other half of his soul.
Her wolf snarled. It could care less about complications. It knew the alpha wolf was their mate, and it had no intention of turning aside because the male had been mated before. If the other female was out of the picture, then the path to their mating led straight ahead.
It might be rocky as all hell, strewn with pitfalls, and salted with potentially painful traps, but it led straight ahead.
She shifted a little on the sofa cushions. Her wolf operated on pure instinct, but Renny had the reasoning skills to know a bad bet when she saw one. Too bad her inner bitch couldn’t give a rat’s ass for the concepts of reason and logic. It saw its mate, and it would have him. End of story.
Sighing, Renny finally closed her eyes. Contemplating the effort it would take to win over a reluctant, trauma-scarred mate might just be enough to put her to sleep. Just thinking about it left her exhausted.
Renny blinked awake, surprised that she’d ever fallen asleep. Who knew the prospect of a doomed romance could work better than a sleeping pill?
She pushed herself into a sitting position, taking the movement slowly and assessing her body’s reaction as she did. Her side still ached, but the wound in her leg had progressed from painful to itchy, which was a good sign. It meant at least that the injury had healed enough to go from a serious weakness to more of a nuisance. Maybe the day was looking up.
Looking around, she immediately felt the emptiness of the space that surrounded her. Mick’s scent lingered everywhere, but in the way that said he lived here, not in the way that indicated he’d occupied the space in the last few hours.
She strained to listen to the rest of the house but heard nothing beyond the hum of the appliances and the sound of the wind stirring outside. Was she alone?
Renny got to her feet and took a second to neatly fold the blankets she’d used through the night. Her mother’s lectures about being a good houseguest still stuck with her, even after all these years.
A sudden wave of bittersweet nostalgia had her fussing with the stack of linens, aligning the edges of the covers with the corners of the pillow on which she’d piled them. Her parents had died when Renny was a freshman in college, killed in a car accident with a tractor-trailer. It had been almost eight years, and she still missed them every day.
She pushed the thought aside with effort and stepped around the coffee table to check whether she was really alone. Somehow, she had expected to find Mick waiting for her when she woke up, anxious to hurry her out of his hair and back to her car. Judging by the weak light filtering into the room, though, it couldn’t be all that far past dawn, and the male wolf was nowhere to be found.
Weird. That meant either that Mick trusted her enough to leave her alone in his home with no fear that she meant any harm to him or his belongings; or that he wanted to get away from her so badly that he was willing to take the risk that she would rob him blind or set his house on fire while he was gone. Somehow, she wasn’t willing to bet on the answer behind door number one.
Still, she checked the other rooms just make sure. It wasn’t a big house, just three modestly sized bedrooms, a single bath, kitchen, living, and dining rooms. It took maybe five minutes to search from top
to bottom, and at least two of those were spent talking herself out of nosing around in the man’s drawers and cabinets. By the time she finished, she knew for certain that Mick was gone. The message sank in immediately.
He didn’t want to be near her. Renny dismissed the pang that caused in her heart and raised her chin. Well, that was just fine. She could take care of herself, after all. She didn’t need a man to rescue her, and she didn’t want to be a burden on anyone. She could handle her life just fine on her own.
Resolved, she yanked open the front door, shed her borrowed, too-big clothes that smelled of reluctant, confrontation-avoidant wolf, and shifted into her fur. The stretch of muscle stung where she’d been injured, but once she settled into her other shape, she could feel how much she’d already healed. She could handle the trip back to her car.
If she could grab her wallet and a change of clothes, she could make her own way to the garage and arrange to get a ride out with some gas. That way she’d be out of Mick’s hair with no further inconvenience to him.
Head low to pick up her own trail from the night before, Renny set off into the woods at a trot. As she’d told the others the night before, she didn’t expect anyone to solve her problems for her. She could take care of herself just fine.
If Mick had thought he could run Renny Landry out of his system, he’d been sadly mistaken. After two hours of tossing and turning in his suddenly empty-feeling bed, he had given up trying to sleep and snuck out of his own bedroom window like a teenager breaking curfew.
He told himself it was so he didn’t wake his guest, who had already been through enough, but he knew better. It was because he was a coward and an animal, too afraid that if he went out to the living room and saw the sweet little female sleeping in his clothes, he wouldn’t be able to resist touching her. Just to see if her skin really felt as soft and silky as it looked.
Goddess, he was such a jackass. He really ought to shift into something with hooves.
He returned home in his fur, shifted so he could climb back in the open bedroom window, and found himself instinctively scenting the air. He wanted to know if the she-wolf had woken yet or if she remained asleep in his living room. Either way, he had no intention of setting eyes on her again until he put on some fucking pants.
Getting his jeans zipped and his shirt buttoned took just enough time that he hoped the leash he’d put on his wolf would hold for a while. All he needed was enough control to get Renny to her car with the can of gas he kept in the garage for emergencies. He’d give her enough fuel to get herself back to town and send her on her way. Then, with any luck, he’d go back to his regularly scheduled life of drawing and writing the graphic novels that had kept him somewhere in the vicinity of sane after Beth’s death.
Too bad he hadn’t shared his plan with the she-wolf. When he finally opened his bedroom door and stepped out into the house, one sniff told him she was gone. Why didn’t that fill him with relief?
His wolf supplied the unhelpful image of the female lying in her own blood the way he’d seen her last night. It insisted that their mate—Not. Our. Mate.—was in danger and might be falling beneath another coyote attack right this minute. Any attempt to reason with it fell on deaf ears.
Mick had expected as much. His stubborn beast had a habit of ignoring him when it didn’t like his human logic. What surprised him was the way his usually rational mind seemed ready to back up the wolf.
She could be in danger, the traitorous voice whispered. And you did take tacit responsibility for her safety last night when you allowed her to stay here instead of sending her off in the custody of the sheriff’s department or the mayor. Do you really want to have to explain things to them if she’s out there getting hurt on your watch?
He tried to convince himself that if she’d left on her own, he had no right to haul her back. She was an adult and free to come and go as she pleased. Besides, how was he supposed to know where she might have run off to? What could have been so important to her that she’d risk her safety if the coyotes chasing her had lingered in the area?
Try all her worldly possessions. Didn’t she tell you all last night that she threw everything she owned in her car when she ran from her stalker? Don’t you think she might want to make sure no one had stolen them from her, or even stolen her car, after she abandoned it on the side of the road?
Mick cursed and stalked into the kitchen to grab his keys. Goddamned she-wolf was nothing but trouble, he told himself as he stomped out of the house and climbed into his truck. If he got out to the highway and found her waiting by her car like the blonde in a bad horror movie, he might just let his wolf bite her. But he’d be aiming a hell of a lot lower than her shoulder. She needed a fang to the ass if she was willing to put herself in danger for the sake of a carful of clothes and knickknacks.
Hell, he might even be so mad he forgot to sneak in a taste while he had her skin between his teeth.
Renny stared at the trail of bright fabric strewn across the asphalt and felt her hands clench into fists. Clearly, someone else had circled back to her abandoned vehicle first, and they’d decided to leave her a message. She could smell it from the tree line.
All four of the small SUV’s doors hung open, the one beside the driver’s seat hanging drunkenly from the top hinge. The bottom had been ripped from its mooring. Judging by the lack of any artificial light from the interior, Bryce and his buddies had done this hours ago, more than long enough to drain the vehicle’s battery dead.
Then again, the open hood and tangle of wires, as well as the clearly out-of-place bits of metal scattered about indicated someone had played with the engine, too. The boys hadn’t wanted to take a chance that a simple jump start might have her on her way.
Of course, crippling her car hadn’t been enough for the coyotes. The strong scent of urine wafted up both from the clothes they had tossed willy-nilly onto the highway and from the upholstery of her poor little Nissan. Shattered glass and splinters of wood marked the place where her few framed photos had been smashed on the hard pavement. From what she could tell, almost nothing she owned had survived the night unscathed.
Teeth clenched and shoulders tight, she climbed stiffly over the metal barrier separating the woods from the shoulder of the forest highway. She should have expected something like this, she told herself. She knew how vicious and vindictive Geoffrey and his minions could be when they failed to get what they wanted. Destroying her stuff likely struck them as inconsequential in comparison with what they had planned for her. They probably expected her to be grateful they had torn up only her clothes rather than her body.
She wasn’t, though. No, Renny didn’t feel so much as a scrap of gratitude. What she felt was a nearly overwhelming blaze of pure, unadulterated fury.
Mother. Fucking. ASSHOLES.
Reaching out, she snatched the remains of a chewed-up shoe from the car’s passenger seat and flung it with all her might at an unsuspecting cedar tree. A chunk of bark flew off at the impact, startling an innocent squirrel into panicked retreat.
It didn’t make her feel any better.
It also didn’t clean up the mess, repair her clothes, stitch up her slashed upholstery, or reveal the location of the purse she had left on the front seat. When she noticed the bag’s absence, Renny froze.
Immediately, she raced to the rear of the car, finding the back hatch open and the cargo area as empty as she expected. Everything had been dumped onto the ground, soiled, and ruined. Even her box of precious books had been tossed aside and marked with the telltale, arcing horizontal stain of a male dog that had lifted its leg to leave a message.
Message frickin’ received.
What really mattered to her, though, wasn’t the stuff they’d pulled out of the car’s open rear hatch, or even the empty depths of the hidden cargo compartment they’d found beneath the floor of the trunk. It was the fact that they hadn’t looked any further than that.
Carefully, Renny reached into the car and fiddled around w
ith the molded plastic bottom of the small storage area. A couple of tugs pulled it free, and she quickly set it aside. She sent up a brief prayer when she reached into the unfinished space beneath, holding her breath until her fingers closed around a small, mostly flat object. It was safe.
“Just what the hell were you thinking?”
The harsh demand startled Renny so badly, she lost her balance and tumbled off the small SUV’s rear bumper. Her ass landed on the pavement, but her fingers still clutched her hidden treasure. The one thing Geoffrey’s minions hadn’t managed to find and destroy. The one thing she’d been smart enough to secret away.
Her emergency kit.
It wasn’t much, really, but for someone who’d been forced into a life on the run, it meant everything to Renny. It contained the keys to building herself a new life.
The purse she’d left in plain sight in the front of the car had been a decoy. Oh, it functioned well enough and held a wallet with a couple of credit cards, a respectable amount of cash, and a copy of her driver’s license. It also carried her cell phone, which she really would miss, some tampons, crumpled receipts, lip balm, and all the other miscellaneous junk that usually wound up making its way into a woman’s purse. But it was all for show.
The things she really couldn’t afford to lose, Renny had stuffed into a slim folder, barely thicker than a checkbook, and concealed under the “hidden” cargo compartment in the floor of the trunk. She’d hoped none of Geoffrey’s goons would bother to tear up the shell, and for once, the Goddess had been looking out for her.
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