Hunger.

That’s what Abby felt. Hunger. For knowledge of him. For the chance to get closer to him.

Either she’d gone insane, or Cameron had the ability to hypnotize her with his wolf power, because she grappled with a spectacularly idiotic, completely suicidal compulsion to have the itch forming down deep inside her scratched by a razor-sharp claw.

The highly erotic vibrations he gave off were the epitome of a perilous death trap.

“What do you want?” she demanded in frustration.

He replied in a voice like soft, sifted gravel. “I was wondering if perhaps you have a death wish?”

She’d known better. So why did her body want to meet the animal in him?

LINDA THOMAS-SUNDSTROM writes contemporary and paranormal romance novels for Mills & Boon® Nocturne™ and Mills & Boon® Desire™. A teacher by day and a writer by night, Linda lives in the West, juggling teaching, writing, family and caring for a big stretch of land. She swears she has a resident Muse who sings so loudly, she often wears earplugs in order to get anything else done. But she has big plans to eventually get to all those ideas. Visit Linda at lindathomas-sundstrom.com or on Facebook.

Wolf Hunter

Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my family, those here and those gone, who always believed I had a story to tell.

Contents

Cover

Excerpt

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Extract

Copyright

Chapter 1

It was only moonlight. A damn luminous light show...

But Abby Stark stood frozen in a pool of it.

A choice four-letter word slipped through her clenched teeth.

Tonight’s recon should have been routine. It was too late to second-guess what had gone wrong. One move now, no matter how slight, and whatever was out there in the dark, whatever had stopped her in her tracks, would find her. Breaking the silence by talking into her cell phone would mean attracting any number of bad guys roaming the area.

She couldn’t afford to be caught with her pants down in this notorious Miami park. Her mind brought up the words dead meat.

The thing out there in the dark, too close for comfort, didn’t even begin to fit the term bad guy. Its presence left an eerie wave of ripples in the air. Otherness rolled across her skin in waves.

This visitor was not human.

Big freaking surprise.

The thing heading her way was trouble with a bite. A large male, her senses confirmed, and charismatic enough to affect her from a distance. Not just any old monster, either, according to her gut reaction. Something special. Encountering his vibe had been similar to slamming up against a brick wall face-first.

Damn it, had he come close enough to see her?

Was he paying attention?

Don’t move.

Flicking her gaze from right to left brought up nothing out of the ordinary. Then again, most of the planet’s darker things were difficult to catch a glimpse of in the darkness that bred them.

Adding to the problem was the rain of coldhearted moonlight highlighting every move she’d dare to make—like a circus spotlight pointed in her direction when she was supposed to be in stealth mode.

Step right up, folks. See the girl who’s about to have her ass kicked.

Moisture began to gather in the valley between her breasts. Sweat dampened her forehead. Her skin burned beneath her black fatigues because her engine was revved but stuck in neutral.

How screwed was she, on a scale of one to ten?

There was nothing to be done now, Abby supposed, short of wishing for backup, though she couldn’t decide what would be worse—being caught by a monster, or having her father’s team of elite monster hunters know she’d been found by one of those monsters.

That’s what her father called the man-wolf hybrids that had recently claimed this park. Monsters.

Her head came up.

The night rustled as if something had just punched its way through the dark. More nerve endings fired as Abby strained to see what approached. This guy had turned the tables, making the watcher a target, rather than the other way around.

She didn’t like anything about this.

Sensing Others was what she had always been good at, yet she’d been inexcusably late to this particular party. The hot flashes burning through her were a telling sign that she’d found the very thing she’d been seeking tonight. Werewolf. A beast that also might have found her.

Unfortunately, this sucker’s presence seemed strong. It might even be a full-blooded beast, though she’d never come across one in the fourteen years she’d spent scouting for her father’s team. If not one of the mysterious Lycans, this Were’s pedigree had to run parallel to that status. The older the bloodline, the stronger the wolf.

Who are you?

Abby fisted her hands.

To her relief, her watcher wouldn’t be a full-fledged beast tonight, since the moon wouldn’t be full for another twenty-four hours, though he’d be close enough to being a beast to have set off warning signals.

Her nerves were virtually singing.

Show yourself, wolf. I know you’re there.

Abby hoped he wouldn’t actually take her up on the offer. Not a creature this potent. Real toughness, a trait she’d inherited from her father, fell short of the mark when dealing with big male werewolves, a fact brought home by the ribbon of fear weaving its way up her spine over the thought of how excited this Were would be tonight, so near to a full lunar phase. He would be restless.

Hell, she was restless. And puzzled.

Whether werewolves were furred-up or not, her intuitive sense of them remained the same. She could pick Weres out of a crowd. She’d always known they were around. But the intensity of the spark igniting deep in her belly at that moment, when stumbling upon this guy, also resembled some sort of messed-up sexual craving. That was new. Brand-new.

Mixed signals between fear and lust? Had to be, because no way in hell could feelings of lust be right.

I’m no amateur, you beast.

I’ve been around.

In her father’s private and very personal war on werewolves, a war that had started with greed before escalating to be so much more, she had been more than useful.

The going rate for a wolf hide chimed in at five hundred dollars in the European black markets. For a fully morphed werewolf pelt the dollar decibel moved over, altering that sum to a full ten grand. In another category altogether came rare, pure-blooded Lycan pelts, skinned before the wolf shifted back to its humanlike form. The grand total for remnants of the king of beasts was fifty thousand bucks. Enough to build a swimming pool.

But Sam Stark’s war on Weres went deeper than dollar signs. The bigger, darker motivation for werewolf haters like her father outclassed thoughts of money and reaping vengeance on a nasty criminal element that had been feasting on humans in Miami and elsewhere for quite some time. Sam’s motivation came under the classification of genocide. The elimination of beings unlike himself.

The goal of the TTD, an acronym for Take Them Down, was to cull all mutants with moon-tweaked genetics from the population—creatures that could pass for human some of the time, but weren’t really human at all.

Abby didn’t like the bad stuff. She never accompanied the team when they hunted werewolves, and didn’t care to witness what they brought back. Her awareness of Weres had grown more intense as time passed, and now seemed almost personal.

Heck, she was the last person to understand how that intuitive connection to Weres worked, but hoped it didn’t go both ways. All she had ever wanted was for werewolf violence against humans in her own backyard to stop. And here she stood, being stalked by one of those same hybrids from a species doing real damage around town.

So, who is going to show up, and what will you do?

Without a completely full moon, Weres looked like everyone else, with human heads, shoulders, arms and legs. Some of them would speak English.

In human form, wolfmen were tall and tautly muscled, with plenty of supersize capabilities, such as being able to smell her from several yards away.

Like this one must have.

Would he eventually appear in his human skin cocoon? Fake being a jogger? Play at acting like just another guy out for a midnight stroll in a park that no one in their right mind would trespass in alone without an Uzi—unless that mindless sucker happened to be her, with a very special agenda that made dangerous places her job sites of necessity.

This park was a nightmare.

More human bodies were found each year in public parks than anyplace else in Miami, outside of the city center. Bodies turned up without bullet holes or knife wounds, trashed by bite marks and the deep grooves of razor-sharp claws—wounds the Miami PD had no way to explain because not everyone knew about monsters, or that they actually existed.

The Starks knew.

So did handfuls of other people.

Hunters from all over the world came to Miami to join her father’s underground big-game hunting expeditions. Some of those people actually believed they were doing God’s work.

I know what you are, wolf.

I know you’re there.

Reality hit hard. Odds being odds, Abby had figured that someday this kind of accident might happen. In all those years of service to the TTD, she’d never gotten within a couple yards of any big Were. She had never allowed herself to.

Now what?

This one was getting closer by the second—close enough to make her blood simmer. The initial quake of recognition that had rocked her backward splintered into smaller quakes. Her knees felt gummy. Her skin was hot. Weres were often volatile and always dangerous. Right then the sense of danger seemed extreme.

Come out, damn it. Let’s get this over with.

As Abby saw it, she was fresh out of options. It would have been useless to try to outrun a strong male when chasing prey is what they did so well, and this guy’s presence alone had nearly knocked her off her feet. There hadn’t been time to find cover after her initial awareness of him. Currently, she stood in the open, completely exposed.

Why don’t you come out?

Are you toying with me?

At that moment, Abby hated the moonlight that ruled these beasts more than ever. She hated everything about the moon.

Shit. How far was she from help?

She’d been cornered between two of the walls separating one of Miami’s megamansions from the east end of the park. Although she had been in worse places numerous times, being stuck in the open and drenched in moonlight didn’t help her chances.

Attached to her leg, above her right boot, a knife rested in its sheath. Her cell phone was keyed to her father and the rest of his hunters waiting for news at her father’s bar. Short of using the blade, throwing the phone at a beast in man form would be an unconscionably girlie thing to do.

For the record, I haven’t been that kind of girl for some time now, she wanted to shout.

“Damn moon. I hate you.”

“In that case, this is probably the last place you’d want to be tonight,” a deep masculine voice returned from the shadows.

Contact.

He had spoken out loud.

Pulses of pure adrenaline, fierce and feral, skittered through Abby, producing a series of massive electrical jolts. Her stomach twisted into knots. Her teeth slammed together. Staring at what stepped out from under the trees, her hands flew to her neck in an automatic gesture of self-defense, as if in man form or not, her visitor might go for her jugular.

And God help her, part of her untimely inertia was due to the fact that her impression of this guy, from afar, hadn’t been wrong.

This sucker was one hundred percent intimidating.

Chapter 2

Abby stared in shocked silence as the Were in his human incarnation advanced in a balanced combination of hard angles and mounds of lean muscle.

He stood tall enough to tower over her, and was twice as broad. A first glance proved him to be brutally handsome. His energy was electrifying. Looking at him kicked the scalding Miami summer temperature up several notches and turned her shudders seismic. Her heartbeats thundered in a way that any Were worthy of its species would be attracted to.

Searching, she saw nothing wolfish in his outline, though an aura of Otherness radiated from him like visible radio waves. His casual, almost nonchalant stride screamed of combustible energy tightly contained in a human casing. His long limbs and wide shoulders were topped by a tanned sculpted face and thick chin-length hair that fell somewhere on the color spectrum between gold and bronze.

Oh yes. This guy was a breed unto himself, and completely unlike anything she had come across before. He was a magnetic combination of rugged and elegant.

Too gorgeous to be human.

He wore a blue long-sleeved shirt rolled at the cuffs to expose sun-kissed forearms. An open collar showed off more skin. His jeans were faded, and she caught a flash of heavy black boots, though he advanced soundlessly with his gaze riveted to her.

Abby felt color drain from her face. Mesmerizing wasn’t the word to best describe him. Magnificent seemed a better choice. Also deadly. This beast, with his incredibly honed body outlined by the tight, fitted shirt, moved toward her little circle of light with the grace of an animal...because he was an animal, at least in part. And the overtly masculine, almost hypnotic physical details that described him were likely some kind of built-in bait for reeling in prey.

The devil always lay in the details. Her father had warned her about this many times.

Never get close to the enemy.

Hell, she’d just smashed that golden rule to smithereens through no fault of her own.

Beneath her outward quakes, Abby’s insides trembled with a mixture of fear and defiance and something else she didn’t dare address—that new thing that had no business showing up alongside this large golden wolf.

Hunger.

That’s what she felt. Hunger. For knowledge of him. For the chance to get closer to him.

Either she’d gone insane, or this guy had the ability to hypnotize her with his wolf power, because she grappled with a spectacularly idiotic, completely suicidal compulsion to have the itch forming down deep inside her scratched by a razor-sharp claw.

The breath she exhaled after holding it for so long was steamy. Aside from her need for self-preservation, and against her better judgment, this werewolf in his human form affected her in ways that were totally wrong. The highly erotic vibrations he gave off were the epitome of a perilous death trap.

She got that. She knew better. So why did her body want to meet the animal in him? What possible explanation could account for her absurd desire to fold herself into his heat?

“What do you want?” she demanded in frustration.

He replied in a voice like soft, sifted gravel. “I was wondering if perhaps you have a death wish.”

The world went white-hot beneath this Were’s unwavering gaze. Moonlight seemed to amplify every sensation rippling through Abby, all of those sensations pointing to him. No doubt about it, her sexually suggestive reactions were as dangerous as the Were himself.

She’d never been an out-and-out rebel, really, she thought now, though she had lived on the edge, more or less fending for herself since her mother died of a prolonged illness when she was a kid. In the past, she’d had no reason to flaunt her father’s strict authority, since he had provided, if not earnest affection, a roof over her head.

So, was there an actual rule about people having to do the right thing at the right time, or only what was good for them?

Breathlessness made her light-headed, a symptom of anticipating more trouble to come. Needing air, unable to stand the silence, Abby spoke in a voice shakier than she would have liked, given that werewolves, as with other predators, could ferret out fear.

“Death wish?”

He nodded. “Everyone in Miami is familiar with this park’s unfavorable mortality statistics.”

Inner warning signals went off again. Red flags waved. If she couldn’t outrun this sucker and he wished her harm, she’d have to fight.

Keep him talking. Gauge his intent.

Was he a member of the pack killing people out here? The way he rolled his shoulders reminded Abby of how much muscle lay under that cool blue cotton, and how that muscle would soon adapt to a new shape. If not an organic werewolf, known from Sam’s lectures as a Lycan, he’d have to have been bitten by another werewolf, and that bite had injected the wolf virus into his bloodstream. Human and wolf particles had fused to form a freakish new entity.

Did this guy’s raw, undulating maleness stem from the kick of some mystical ancient virus in his bloodstream, or had he always been a heartthrob?

“I know about the park,” she said.

She hadn’t really looked closely at his face. It was bad enough that the bronzed skin beneath his chin, exposed between open buttons, beckoned to her with the lure of the forbidden.

Would his flesh be smooth, so close to becoming a wolf? Abby cursed the urge to press her fingers there to find out—an action that would probably add one more body count to those unfavorable statistics he’d just mentioned.

Keep strong.

Resist the craziness.

Never get close.

“Then you do know this park is probably the last place a woman should visit, alone and at night,” he said quietly.

“Only women?”

“Anyone.”

“Am I alone?”

“That seems to be the case.”

Abby gestured at him with a wave of one hand. “You don’t count?”

Sarcasm didn’t make her feel better about her predicament. The Were’s eyes remained on her in an uncomfortably intense way, giving Abby the impression that he could see through her clothes and down through her skin to the place where the sparks of her crazy curiosity about him glittered.

She hoped to God he couldn’t see that.

Stomach tightening into a ball of uncertainty, and with her body temp soaring to a disgusting degree, she waited for what might come next, facing the Were, whose specialized internal furnace would soon fuel a werewolf’s shape-shift.

“You do know that bad things sometimes hide in the night?” he cautioned with no threatening move in her direction.

“Are you one of those bad things?”

“I could be. How would you know?”

“Well, then, I guess I’d better go before you have a chance to provide the answer.”

“That might be a good idea,” he agreed.

Movement, though, was impossible. Turning her back to this guy would be a bad idea, no matter how friendly his approach had been. Big reminder: though he looked like a human, and talked like one, he wasn’t.

Feeling the weight of the cell phone in her pocket, Abby tried to remember that Weres weren’t the only treacherous faction in town. Her father, Sam Stark, was as deadly as any werewolf and quite possibly twice as lethal, since Sam had no tolerance for anomalies like this one, and his hatred was usually backed by an element of surprise.

She wondered what color this guy’s pelt would be. Bronze, like his hair? Golden, like the rest of him? With moonlight reflected in each strand of his sleek, slightly mussed mane, whatever color of wolf he turned out to be would amount to tons of cash for the Stark accounts if the team found him. He’d bring a small fortune and it shouldn’t be any concern of hers. This wolf and others like him hurt people when the moon was full.

How close to the surface is your wolf tonight? she wanted to ask. Are you a killer?

Any of those things spoken aloud would let him know she had pegged him for a hybrid, taking things from bad to worse in a hurry. The team’s plan had always been to drive Weres like this one into the open, into the moonlight that betrayed what they were, and strike fast, strike hard. No mercy.

But this wasn’t a killing night. Tonight her job had been only to locate some Weres. See who was around.

“And I found you,” she whispered as her interest in the gorgeous Were reached broiling status internally, as if her mind and body were engaged in a war of ethics, while the big fellow on the edge of the light continued to prove how good his acting skills were.

It was a standoff. Checkmate.

Who would make the first move?

Daringly, Abby let her gaze drift upward to his face before immediately wishing she hadn’t. His features were chiseled, with high cheekbones and a full mouth. He had a strong jaw and arched brows. She refused to meet his wide-set eyes.

Daring to speak again in a voice husky with strain, she said, “What are you waiting for?”

After a long pause, he replied, “Why don’t I walk you home?”

Abby shook her head. “Don’t think so, but thanks all the same.”

“There could be others out here, much worse than me.”

“Really? Much worse?”

“I can assure you of that.”

“Then why are you out here?” she asked.

“I like to walk and think.”

“In the dark?”

“Yes.”

“Here?”

He shrugged.

“Maybe you’re some kind of danger junkie,” she suggested.

“It’s a possibility. What about you? Is danger your drug of choice, or were you trying to get somewhere and got lost?”

Unclenching her hands, Abby then fisted them again, rattled by the stilted repartee. The heat, both hers and his, had become suffocating. He had a gaze like a frigging laser beam that wouldn’t let up or miss much. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was whether this guy would try to hurt her, or not.

Why don’t you make your move?

“Danger isn’t really my thing,” she said.

“Yet here you are, in a place that attracts it.”

“Not for long.”

Listening hard, Abby separated the layers of city noises. Cars paraded down the boulevards in the distance. The faint buzz of insects reached her from the trees to her right.

The air was filled with the smells of dry, sun-drenched pavement and the bitter odor of crushed grass and leaves. Above those things something else, some other scent, surfed the night air. She tagged it as the not-so-sweet odor of the unseen.

Her scalp pricked. Her racing heart gave an extra thump. This Were’s wolf was close to the surface and getting stronger. Whatever lay inside him that she had easily connected to wasn’t going to go away with a bit of conversation.

Something else bothered her, needled at her. If this guy was an Alpha, he’d have a pack close by.

Her odds in favorably dealing with the situation plummeted. At the same time, her morbid fascination for the wolfman kept Abby focused. She wanted to know so much more about him, and about what went on here. Her appetite for those things grew by the second.

Abby held herself tightly to keep from squirming. If Weres like this one possessed animalistic superpowers, he’d have already noticed that she had become a heat-sensing Geiger counter for the very thing that should have had her screaming. Her fevered flesh and skin-ruffling gyrations were the equivalent of inviting the fiery hand of death to slide between her legs.

Hell with that. Due to his looks and masculine vibe, this Were probably had a harem of women willing to take him in. He didn’t need one more willing supplicant. Besides, wolves and humans did not mix, except when those things in an anomalistic fashion resided within one being.

The situation sucked. All outcomes seemed dire. Whatever outlandish thing was taking place between this werewolf and herself had gummed up logic. He was seducing her without any effort on his part at all. He didn’t have to be blatant about it because the seduction worked. All he had to do was stand there, looking like a sexy hunk.

Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl. Get out. Get away.

You, she wanted to shout to the creature across from her, are the very thing my father and his teams despise. There has to be a reason for that.

Lifting her chin defiantly, Abby backed up a step. This is the final test. Will you pounce?

As it turned out, he didn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, he calmly asked her a question.

“Why do you hate the moon, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The question was as unexpected as the earnest ring of curiosity in his voice.

“You said you hate it,” he reminded her.

“I hate what the moon does to people,” Abby said.

Her companion glanced up at the light. “You don’t find the moon beautiful?”

“Its beauty is deceitful, as beauty often is.”

If he got the point and the allusion to himself, he didn’t show it. He took a step toward her, closing some of the distance separating them and setting off another round of sparks that burrowed well below Abby’s waistline. He continued to study her face as if whatever he sought there might be important.

What did he want? An apology for the atrocities her father and his team had inflicted upon his species? Did he want revenge, when he had to know how many humans Weres had killed in Miami in the past year alone?

In hindsight, she should have covered up the logo on her T-shirt that advertised a bar that just happened to also be a field office for Sam Stark’s hunters. She hadn’t taken the time to change, in a hurry to get outside, away from the crowd. Maybe this guy had already made note of it, which would be bad news.

Move, Abby. Hesitation is no longer an option.

No wolf could be allowed to discover where the team kept court, or seek to uncover the source of her own unusual connection to their breed. Those were secrets for keeping behind closed doors, under lock and key, especially when facing a Were male of this caliber.

Damn it, the spell he had put on her had to be broken. Her murky, inexplicable attraction to him had taken her too far off base. She had feared this kind of face to face for a long time.

Use the phone. Make that call.

Yes, and what would she say to her father if he answered the phone? That she’d screwed up this time? That she’d been mesmerized by a wolf? There was no way Sam’s team could find her like this, feverish and out of commission, when so many others expected her to be a chip off the old guy’s block.

Plus, all of a sudden she wasn’t so sure about wanting the team to find the Were across from her who was too damn pretty to be a rug on some billionaire collector’s floor.

“Got to go.”

She needed to hear the urgency in her voice. The muscles of her upper back twitched. Although her heart rate again spiked, she didn’t go anywhere because backward wasn’t the direction she really wanted to take. Every molecule in her body strained to get closer to the wolf in his human skin, while her mind struggled to find a way out of this standoff that made sense.

Do the smart thing. Turn and sprint. Hope he won’t follow.

Why hadn’t she at least tried that?

Was he touching her? No. Yet she felt as if he were.

Could he be holding her there physically with his wolf aura? Yes. Hell, yes.

This wolf was the real deal, times ten. And he was what? Being friendly? They were having a chat, as though the word species didn’t matter?

If this Were internalized her scent, or any other of his cousins trapped her with a purpose the next night, she’d make the obituaries, or worse. One swipe of a claw or a bite that deeply pierced her skin and she might become one of them.

Considering that she survived at all.

Abby’s lips parted for a speech she didn’t make. Without thinking she inched toward this Were like a bug drawn to light, her body, independent of her mind, urging that forbidden touch as if part of her actually wanted to burn. As if the secret guilt she had built up over the years about the whole hunting scene, as well as the lectures from her father, the loneliness she’d endured for so long and the image of werewolf pelts hanging from ceiling beams, would burn with her.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Abby waited for sanity to intervene, hoping it would hurry.

“Will you let me go?” she asked breathlessly.

“Of course you can go. Though I really would like to make sure you get where you’re going safely.”

An offer of safety from the scariest thing out here?

As if she was supposed to believe him.

“Nights here are always dangerous,” he said. “Tonight feels especially tense. Do you sense that?”

“Why care about me at all? You don’t even know me.”

“It’s what I do.”

“You make a habit of accosting women in dark places, and then woo them with the promise of a compromise?”

“I try to make sure that no accosting goes on, actually.”

“Are you some sort of vigilante?”

“Something along those lines, yes.”

“I don’t recall asking for your help.”

“Can you assure me that you know the difference between looking for danger and actually finding it?” he countered. “No one comes to this park after dark for fun or shortcuts. Not even if they carry a knife.”

Okay. So she hadn’t really supposed he wouldn’t know about the knife, scent being one of a werewolf’s strongest attributes, and silver being repugnant to them. But why hadn’t he hidden his knowledge of the knife, when it couldn’t be seen? The forged silver blade would be a wolf’s worst nightmare if it touched skin. No human could have smelled it.

Maybe that knife was why he hadn’t made his move.

Tilting his head slightly, he said, “Something about you drew me to you, if you want to know the truth.”

“Yeah, like I haven’t heard that line a million times,” she said. “I work in a bar.”

No matter how hard it became, she had to keep reasonably calm, at least on the outside. A frightened human’s scent, she’d been told, was a veritable aphrodisiac for hyped-up hybrids.

But how did their sense of awareness translate to a human that might not be frightened enough and, instead of fear, held an illicit fascination for this one?

“Are you really so fierce, I wonder?” he asked.

“You have no idea.”

“You’ve no need for company?”

“Not yours.”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Then go, and I’ll watch your back.”

“Or stab me in it.”

“Direct, but way off the mark. I don’t have any reason to harm you. And you have the knife.”

“Maybe the weapon deters you?”

“Honestly, I like to think of myself as one of the good guys. What does that knife say about you?”

It was a good question. Because of it, Abby’s conscience nagged. What if he turned out to be okay, after all? There were decent folks along with the bad in most cultures, though her father had not once mentioned that possibility with werewolves.

She did know about this good-bad thing in other animals, though, being an animal control officer three days a week. There were nice dogs and bad dogs, and she had quickly learned how to tell the difference. Telling signs started with the eyes.

Could that ability translate to decoding good and bad Weres?

Who was he really?

How different was this Were’s world from hers?

What did it feel like to carry a fully formed wolf inside, and be part of such a dangerous minority that had to hide from the masses?

No one had explained those things to her, because no human she knew had the answers. Her father killed werewolves on sight. If he had interrogated any of them, she’d never heard about it.

Here was her chance to find out about the so-called enemy, and she couldn’t afford to take that chance. Not out here. Not like this, when it had become increasingly obvious that she wasn’t thinking properly.

Will you really let me go, wolf, or is this some sort of cat-and-mouse game?

Time to find out.

“Well, then, I’ll be on my way. I’d like to say it’s been fun...” Her sentence faded when he took another step forward, bringing his heady physical powers of persuasion with him.

Abby widened her stance defiantly, her body exhibiting more visible signs of distress. The mere fact that she had questioned herself and her motives for being here meant that she’d started to cave. The Were knew this. Animals zeroed in on weakness. His silence told her he recognized what her body wanted in spite of her arguments to the contrary, and in spite of their differences.

He would have noticed her flushed face and averted gaze. He’d feel the return of heat she gave off and intuit with his wolfish senses about the very private spot between her thighs that had seldom been accessible to anyone, yet had become a quaking mass of need for a stranger.

Not just any stranger.

What was wrong with her? Who could interpret the idiocy of what she’d been thinking and feeling? One more step, and she’d feel his breath on her face.

This is not okay.

“But you’d be lying.” He completed the sentence she had left dangling, in a tone that wafted over her like a length of fine, drifting silk. “About the fun.”

“Yes,” Abby admitted. “I’d be lying.”

She knew right then and there that it was too late for escape. Electrified excitement charged through her. Moonlight sparkled around them like a desert sandstorm, dulling the edges of reality, making closeness to a wolf seem viable. Making sexual fantasies with one seem viable.

Hell, possibly she did have a death wish.

And God...his eyes, drawing her to return his gaze, turned out to be gold, like the rest of him. A light, pure gold.

“I won’t hurt you. Go on. Take off.” The gruffness of his voice suggested that he might be sharing her inner turmoil.

“If you follow me, you’ll know where I live. I can’t allow that,” she said.

He held up both of his hands in a gesture of placation. “Then I’ll just wait here. I won’t follow.”

Abby’s left hand hovered over the pocket that held her cell phone. Her right hand straddled her right thigh above the knife by her boot. But she didn’t use either escape route, imagining she already felt his heated breath on her cheek.

Up close, this guy was outrageous. He oozed male masculinity and owned the term raw animal magnetism. This wolf was sex on long, lean legs, and seduction by design. He smelled like a man, not a monster. Drifts of aftershave, damp cotton fabric and musky male moistness floated in the air.

She wanted him in a really bad way, and there was no excuse. Her chest hurt. Bones ached from standing at attention. Her heart felt as if it had been squeezed, and not one breath she took in seemed sufficient to fix her oxygen deficit. It had been a long time since she’d been this close to anyone of interest. Her life had been that of a loner for reasons that necessitated never allowing anyone in.

At her father’s bar, she had remained more or less camouflaged, which made coping skills in dealing with her inner angst so much easier. She did her job. She did what she was told to do in order to be left alone afterward. Alone time away from Sam Stark and his gang had always been a reward.

Did it take a creature so unlike herself to make her desire something more? Someone not completely human who had to understand what it was like to feel out of place?

Damn it, she had caved. Someone had to pull her away because she couldn’t do it herself. The dichotomy of what she had been taught versus what they had going on here ratcheted up the tension of her internal tug-of-war. There had to be some good with the bad, and she wanted proof of that.

The pulses of desire passing through her were richly intense. Just looking at this guy was a treat and a pleasure. Doing anything more, however, might be suicidal.

“You have the police on speed-dial?” Her companion pointed to her pocket. “In case you meet someone else out here who’s not so accommodating?”

Another surprise. The concern in his tone sounded genuine.

An inexplicable flush burned its way up Abby’s neck and into her cheeks. The exposed triangle of flesh at the base of this guy’s neck had become like a glimpse into a world completely foreign to her—a world that was off-limits, new and untried, yet something she suddenly and desperately wanted to find out about.

Would he act on her show of weakness at last? Take advantage? Push her over the edge?

Abby briefly closed her eyes.

Despite everything in her life so far, and while knee-deep in danger, she wanted very badly to see what lay beneath his baby-blue shirt.

She wanted to know what made this Were worth so much to the team, and why he hadn’t yet hurt her, when the people in her life wouldn’t have given him the same consideration.

More than anything, she desired to run her tongue along the crease of his lips, drink deeply from his Otherness and truly indulge in the flavor of night. She would get those longstanding questions about his species over with, once and for all.

Right now.

“Perhaps you’d like me to go first?” he asked soberly. “The sooner you’re out of the area, the better. That’s a fact.”

He raised a hand as if he’d touch her, then let it fall before he did. Hoarsely, and as though the words stuck in this throat, he said, “My advice? Run away, little girl. Run fast.”

On quaking legs, Abby stubbornly stood her ground. “You first.”

His sigh struck her like a soft caress. “All right.”

When he took a step back, the strange bond that had sprung into place between them stretched tight.

“Good night,” he said without leaving her or turning away. The bastard just stood there, his golden gaze riveting.

Perhaps sensing how the mood had changed, he shook his head and smiled warily. Though misplaced, the smile dazzled, lifting the corners of lips Abby fantasized about licking, and making him seem way more human and approachable.

Suddenly, she felt like the animal here.

His unexpected exhibition of lightness seemed a confirmation, a mutual acknowledgment that the link that had sprung into place between them had grown red-hot and all-encompassing for no apparent reason, other than that old adage about the craziness of animal attraction.

That smile made something inside Abby shatter. Pieces of the reasoning process scattered like confetti. Sparks imploded down deep inside her with an interior fireworks display, creating a craving for this Were like no other, a craving the equivalent of a wave of primitive primal need.

Swearing beneath her breath, Abby realized that she truly hadn’t finished with this Were. She knew with absolute certainty that the treacherous moon above their heads that was nothing more to most people than a silver disc orbiting the earth was now about to become either her keenest enemy...or her future lover.

Fully aware of the risks, and discounting the consequences, she took that last stride forward...

And looked up just far enough to see the surprise on the gorgeous Were’s face.

Chapter 3

“What the...?”

Cameron Mitchell took a good look at the woman standing before him and frowned. She was within touching distance, and he hadn’t put her there. The woman had gotten right up in his face.

Her actions were a complete surprise, and not wholly unwelcome. His feelings for her had come on strong from the first glance, and as unlikely as it seemed, her feelings appeared to parallel his. Still, acting on those feelings would be a huge mistake.

They were strangers, talking because of the way these immediate attractions went. Though the urge to touch her was impossible to resist, and he didn’t want to resist, he did have to maintain control. She wasn’t the reason he patrolled the park, and was, in the end, a distraction.

Still, his groin ached over the lushness of her scent. The inhuman parts of him swirled in reaction to the way she licked her lower lip after speaking, with the tip of a small pink tongue. Looking at her made the wildness trapped inside him long for release, and there was only one way to solve that problem.

Crazy woman! She telegraphed her willingness to break down barriers in a way that even the dullest senses could have picked up on. But the heat signature that had drawn him to her in the first place would also be a homing beacon for other Weres in the area, and a lightning rod for lunatics.

He couldn’t have her. The sooner she got out of range, the better. He had to let her go. Discounting others in the area, there was no way to predict what might happen if he acted on his sudden addiction to her, or if she might end up getting hurt. Though his wolf wasn’t in charge tonight, it hovered close enough to be in favor of taking this opportunity.

And the wolf’s motives, he had discovered, were unreliable.

Hell, woman, I could be one of those criminals. I could be lethal.

She had to know how easily she could be overpowered by a larger source. Surely she understood that this park was off-limits for a reason. She had confessed to knowing the awful statistics.

She eyed him keenly in return with an intelligent emerald-green gleam that suggested she was no fool. Her defiant stance lent her a certain air of capability. Yet she had been alone at night in a place where no other human dared to trespass. This meant no one would probably be coming to her rescue, and that if he desired to give in to the force of his rising libido, she’d be his for the taking.

He put a hand to his forehead, hoping to stall those thoughts, and posed a string of silent questions.

Why are you here?

Why this odd attraction?

Unable to help himself, he studied her.

For all her defiant attitude, she was small. He topped her by a full head or two. She had a hard-muscled sensuality that cut into him as though she had wielded the blade near her boot—the blade that sang to him of its presence as if it were alive.

She wasn’t a classic beauty or the stuff most men couldn’t forget after a first glimpse. No hourglass curves, big breasts or blond curls. Lean, taut arms were exposed by a sleeveless black shirt. Baggy cargo pants hid the sculpted lines of her legs. Straight, shoulder-length hair, a brilliant shade of auburn with purposefully dyed dark black tips, seemed to him an edgy color combination.

She moved again, closer.

Damn her.

Her fragrance intensified, filling his lungs with each breath he drew in. Every woman had her own unique smell, but this one...this one smelled like candy.

One touch. Only one.

He pressed his palm to her cheek and waited to see her reaction. Her eyes blazed. His own reaction wasn’t so simple. The beast inside him began to unfurl, adding depth to his illicit desire to possess her. His need to circumvent control began at a cellular level and dug in deep.

“Don’t you get it? I can be dangerous,” Cameron said to her. “There’s something about you.”

She did not reply. How could she, after that confession?

Neither did she run.

Which made matters worse.

Her skin felt like velvet, an intoxication that streaked through him. The fact that he hadn’t been with a woman for a long time came home to haunt him. He hadn’t indulged since the damn gangbanger he’d been cuffing in a raid bit him, changing his life forever.

I’m in control. I can do this. Stay firm and see to her safety.

He chanted that silent internal directive several times before deciding that she had to do the moving. He couldn’t be trusted. Not completely. Not so close to a full moon.

How do I make you go? Scare you? Be the bully you had expected me to be? Maybe another touch will frighten you into doing the right thing.

Testing that theory, Cameron let his open hand linger on her cheek, almost able to hear time ticking away. Yet she didn’t take him up on the invitation of a hasty retreat.

He felt so damn beastly.

A roar of conquest rumbled in his chest as his heart changed rhythm to adapt to hers, lifting and falling in a series of vertical spikes. With utmost willpower, he fielded an oncoming rush of adrenaline.

The nameless woman’s legs were apart, with her feet planted. She had fisted her hands at her sides. Her teeth were clenched. But in her eyes lay another kind of unspoken invitation.

When his fingers slid slowly downward, she flinched as if she’d been stung, and blinked slowly. The level of her defiance in the face of rules governing two strangers meeting in dangerous places made his needs escalate. Cops were adrenaline junkies out of necessity, but this situation flowed out of the box. He was hot for her and wanting closeness. Any kind of closeness.

A growl erupted from his throat unchecked. Hell, he hadn’t meant to do that.

The woman beside him swayed in reaction to the sound. Her delicate face lost some of its color. Long lashes fluttered. Her chest rose and fell quickly with each new breath. But she stood there with her pulse racing hard enough to lift the skin beneath her right ear, movement that caused the two small diamond studs in her lobes to sparkle.

When she finally moved, it was in a way Cameron truly hadn’t expected. She stepped closer, pressing her chest to his, her hips to his. Suggestively.

Her eyes were on the top button of his shirt. She kept her gaze there while her body telegraphed quite clearly what she expected to happen.

Cameron swore. Restraining himself took real effort and came close to being the hardest thing he had ever attempted, after being a cop for five long years. More than anything, he wanted to throw her on the ground and prove just how dangerous he could be. His wolf liked the idea.

“You haven’t gone,” she said, speaking now through seductively moist parted lips.

“Neither have you.” The blood in his veins thrashed, racing toward the places already erect and ready for action.

“I’m thinking about going,” she said.

“Maybe you should think harder.”

She shook her head. “My advice to you is to take it or leave it before I change my mind.”

Another streak of heat tore through Cameron, magnified by surprise. What had she just said?

She had no qualms about this? About sex with a stranger who could have been anyone, and was, in actuality, so much more?

“I don’t know what game you’re playing, or what you’re up to,” he said, “but I just told you I never accost women in dark places, and I wasn’t lying.”

“Okay. Leave it, then.”

Cameron stared down at her, his stability tumbling. Finding this female had temporarily taken his mind off pressing problems. Imagining what he’d like to do to her was a luxury. But finding her alone in this park on a night like this—especially on a night like this—made all those sinful thoughts unacceptable.

Several gangs called this place their home turf. The whole area stank of wolf gone mad, and those mindless badasses, minus the fur, were out tonight and always up to no good. No werewolf could resist the play of moonlight so near to a full. He hadn’t been able to ignore it.

He could barely ignore this, or her.

Despite his eagerness, and after a monk-like few months, mating with this woman, on this spot, just wasn’t possible. He was what he was, and had been for a while. Wolf particles had been introduced to his bloodstream, creating and sealing a wolf to his system, leaving him unstable.

It had taken days of severe agony in order to recover from the initial nightmare of the bite that had made him a hybrid. In his mind, the image of the hyped-up bastard that had chomped on his arm remained fixed.

He might have lost his mind completely for a few of those terrible days afterward. Nothing of that existed now, other than the brief remembrance of uttering prayers about needing to be put out of his misery.

Yet he had survived. And closeness to others had become impossible, at home and at work. He stopped returning the stares from women on the street, and made no dates. He quit having drinks after-hours with the guys on his beat. All that withholding was paramount, and out of necessity, until he found out as much as he could about his present state, and about the control necessary to maintain it.

He existed now in werewolf infancy, with no way to anticipate what might happen if his emotions got involved. What if he hurt a woman by accident?

So you, he wanted to say to the female with the shining green eyes, are the ultimate temptation.

Until he knew everything, and maybe not even then, he wasn’t relationship material. And it was a given that a one-nighter with a pretty woman in a notoriously feral park wasn’t a win-win for anybody, under any circumstances. This close to a full moon, any thought to the contrary would be pure lunacy.

If you knew what resides at my core, Green Eyes, and what I have become, you would run off, screaming.

I hate what the moon does to people, she had said.

Those words still echoed in his mind.

Its beauty is deceitful, she’d said.

Looking at her now, he wanted to say, If you only knew what deceit actually is.

His wolf stirred, raising goose bumps on the back of Cameron’s neck. The wolf was searching for an early way out. This wolf, Cameron feared, might want to bite somebody back.

Oh yes, I want you, both man and wolf agreed when eyeing this woman, though in spite of the physical need pounding through him, he had told this woman he was a gentleman.

No joke.

Still, he had to admit that she possessed a streak of wildness unlike anything he’d encountered in a female, and this sparked his pleasure buttons. Part of him voted to take her up on her offer of closeness. Heck, most parts did. He was hard in all the right places and aching to act.

Didn’t everyone need company on a dark summer night?

Even a monster?

As the scent of female hormones floated in the moonlight, Cameron’s heart thundered. Her face was dewy, and enticingly damp. The slightest flush of pink had returned to her cheeks. Those large emerald eyes, slowly lifting to the level of his neck, his jaw, and continuing upward, were wide open. Her generous lips opened as if she’d say something else or take back what she’d said about him either taking her up on her offer, or leaving it.

He almost wished she would take all this back.

Cameron ran his hand over her black T-shirt, his heated palm sliding slowly from the rounded collar to the swell of her breasts. The shirt was thin. He felt her fullness as if there were nothing between his hand and her skin. And indeed, she was lacking undergarments that would have taken precious time to remove.

The raised buds of her nipples were an erotic discovery and a telling symptom of her heightened state of arousal. She was exotic, narcotic, and had become his drug of choice on a moon-filled night.

After all, the whole gentleman thing only went so far.

The sting in his fingertips announced the closeness of claws that had no business intruding on tonight. A ghostly shudder of lengthening ligaments tickled Cameron’s spine as his baser side pined for release, when in reality, he and the wolf were one, and inseparable.

The feisty woman’s heart beat frantically beneath his hand. She dripped with the same moonlight that would soon issue a command for him to trade one shape for another, and the light made her features appear more angular, and riddled with shadows. She was moonlight personified...and he was going to use her. Because, swear to God, she looked as if she could handle what he wanted to do to her, and like it.

Stroking upward from her breast, wedging himself tighter against her, Cameron allowed the beastly cravings some room, just this once, and angled his ravenous mouth toward hers.

Chapter 4

His face came close. Their breath mingled. The stranger’s supple mouth closed over hers with a kiss that made Abby stagger.

She let him touch her. Let him kiss her. Their closeness was combustible. With that first meeting of their eyes he had become the need. The must have. Rampant desire for him ruled her, fed her, drove her toward a storm of emotion that wanted him inside her. Nothing else would do.

She couldn’t allow herself to examine the reasons behind this sudden irrational craving.

So, really...who was the animal here?

She kissed him back, giving in to the sensations. His hot, demanding, talented mouth rendered her breathless. When their tongues touched, a blistering dance began between mouth and lips and bodies straining to get at each other.

He tasted like midnight. Like moonlight on a mountaintop. Like a howl of wildness echoing through a vast valley. And a lot like the physical manifestation of greed. No human connection could be like this, she realized. None ever had.

Her mouth clung to his, nipped at his. As the kiss went from dry to damp, moving quickly toward savage, Abby raked his lower back with her fingernails, wadding up his shirt to get at the taut flesh beneath, desperate to make him pay for what he was doing to her. Both of them needed to share the pain of accessing the forbidden.

His skin radiated the heat of a hundred bonfires, burning, singeing. His mouth piled fire on top of fire in an overlapping grid of flames. Being close to him was a pleasure that existed in a land beyond thought and consequences, falling into the realm of her pure carnal fantasy.

Maybe this was why werewolves were feared. Because of what they had to offer.

His masculine body felt solid and rock-hard against hers. His embrace became an all-consuming bliss. She pulled at his shoulders and wrapped her hands in his hair, wanting to be closer to him still, processing the danger as sublime.

Her feet left the ground. Air whooshed out of her lungs as her back hit the grass. Her companion dropped to his knees and stretched out on top of her, as breathless as she was.

And this felt good.

Writhing beneath his weight, Abby tore at him with trembling hands, her fingers finding his waistband, and beneath it more fiery skin that simultaneously burned and beckoned.

Hell, in a minute, she would howl, even if she didn’t know how.

When he paused, she formed challenging words against his lips. “What’s wrong? Did you get an A in self-control?”

In answer, a growl rolled from his throat and into her, its vibration the biggest surprise of all. As if that growl had tickled something hidden inside her, Abby felt the rise of her own voice, coming from a place she hadn’t known existed.

The sound she made shot through her, emerging as an echo of his. Her body twitched in shock.

“Well, well,” her sexy companion whispered, his golden gaze boring into her. “I suppose that makes things infinitely easier.”

He lifted her up before his remark had time to register, and set her on her feet. He peeled her T-shirt over her head, then ripped open his shirt with a pop of pinging buttons. Warm hands eased her pants and underwear over her hips, and down her thighs.

She was naked, and quaking in anticipation of his next move. But he stood there, looking at her with a gaze that nearly did her in.

Damn him and the moonlight he rode in on, she was not going to beg.

He sidled up to her at last, the heat radiating off his shirtless chest like that of an inferno. His arms encircled her waist. Their chests met with a jarring impact. They were going to do whatever it took to address this raging passion. There would be no stopping it. She was in the arms of the enemy, and had willingly crossed enemy lines.

The scratching sound of a zipper opening stirred Abby’s blood. His hands stroked upward over the curve of her buttocks, and up her spine. His fingers splayed over her rib cage. When he elevated her again, she wrapped her legs around his waist.

Her boot heels dug into the backs of his thighs. The boots and the knife in its leather sheath were all she had now, but notice of those things distanced as the glorious cock he settled her over took all remaining breath away.

She clung to him as she slid down his length, the pleasure of having him between her legs exquisite and extreme.

“I’m not afraid of the night,” she said without knowing why. “And I’m not afraid of you.”

“Not afraid? Then that makes one of us.”

The white-hot Were backed her against a tree for balance, and pulled off her boots. He glanced at the silver-bladed knife attached to her calf.

“The knife stays,” Abby said. Then the ability for speech left her.

Not satisfied with their bodies locked together in a way he couldn’t manipulate, her lover took her again to the grass. He perched above her, and with one hand found the moist, quaking spot he needed to again enter her overheated depths.

Abby opened for him, wanting every last bit of what he had to offer, and unwilling to wait. He sank into her with a thrust that stretched her to her limits.

Abby gasped and threw her head back as she took him in, working to draw him deeper, while at the same time accepting his drowning kiss. Sensations overwhelmed from two sources at once, flowing gloriously from her mouth to what lay buried between her thighs.

The taking wasn’t an easy one, or time-consuming. Foreplay belonged in the bedroom, between real lovers, and this was something else altogether. This was nuts.

Her Were entered her again and again, hard enough to tickle the sensitive spot already close to a climax. Spasms began to build that forced her hips into him, urging him on as she closed herself around him.

Having him inside her was at once heaven and hell and a mistake she might live to regret, but it was exciting. When he withdrew, Abby dug into him with her fingers, drawing blood with her nails to again make him pay for being a beast, the enemy, and for his part in this crazy liaison.

Thoughts flashed by at lightning speed. She’d never see him again. A few stolen moments were all they had. If her father found out about this moonlight tryst, he’d kill her with his bare hands.

The scent of blood filled the air. His blood. A sound of surprise slipped from his throat, though he didn’t stop kissing her. His response to her fingernails was to thrust into her deeper, over and over, building a rhythm that made Abby see stars.

Unable to hold off what loomed so close to the surface, a cry of growled pleasure tore from her. Her eyes fluttered open. Abby found herself again looking into his beautifully inhuman eyes, and the intensity of the connection she found in them brought more lightning and tripled the emotional storm.

She cried out again as he hit the place that had never been touched, never been found, so deep down inside her. The look in his golden eyes as he did so pierced her soul, knocking down barriers she had long held in place to keep emotion at bay.

She opened that last little bit...and came.

Arching her back, hit by a sizzling, fiery orgasm, Abby bucked off the grass as each successive wave of deliciously vicious pleasure overtook her.

The world drifted in whirling flashes of bright, multicolored cartwheels that mirrored the moonlight. Sound ceased. Breath suspended as her body went rigid in the throes of a ceaseless, endless ecstasy. The man providing the pleasure held himself motionless, pinning her to the orgasm without easing up. Like her, he fought hard for each labored breath.

“Yes,” he whispered, encouraging her to give in to the pleasure. “Yes, little wolf.”

She crested wave after wave of ecstasy until the waves finally began to recede. It seemed like hours before the shudders ceased and the orgasm faded. Her breath finally returned as the spasms fled. Her limbs slowly regained feeling. But Abby kept her eyes shut, afraid to open them, afraid to look at the man, the stranger, the creature, who had made this incredible thing happen.

What would she possibly say? Given what you are, we should have used a condom?

Nevertheless, she had no way around it. She had to face him. Face this. She had to get up, get dressed and walk away.

He wasn’t there when she opened her eyes. She saw only a dark stretch of moon-dappled grass that made reality come crashing down. She was on her hands and knees in the dirt. Her knees were aching. Her palms were scratched. Their mating session had taken on aspects of the surreal.

He hadn’t gone. Abby heard him breathing. Her ardent lover curled around her, with his bare chest pressed to her back. They had changed positions sometime during this exotic escapade, and had gone after each other like two animals rutting.

His arms were wrapped around her waist. Both she and this creature were slick with sweat and completely silent in the aftermath of what they had done.

How right her father had been about some things, she thought. Weres were dangerous. They were treacherous without having to kill someone in order to earn that reputation.

“Are you okay?”

His question sounded oddly out of place. The resonance in his tone pulsed in her ears. She expected him to get up and walk away, having had his fill of her. Thank you, ma’am.

Abby could not think of a single verbal jab or witticism to reply with, though she opened her mouth to try. Damn him, his question had been nice.

It was time to get up and get away.

What had she done?

Sliding out from beneath her lover, Abby got to her feet. Feeling only slightly self-conscious about being naked at midnight in a public park, she muffled a startled cry as a piercing pain ripped through her right thigh, hurting so badly, she sagged back down to her knees.

Muscles seized. Her vision began to tunnel. A haze of inky darkness descended as strong arms swept her up and a voice whispered, “It’s okay. I have you. Curse this damn park and everyone who has ever set foot in it, because I knew there would be trouble tonight.”

Chapter 5

Abby’s eyes fluttered open to a moving tableau. Earth, grass, trees passed by, everything wrapped in a startling, stinging round of pain.

She gasped and sucked in a lungful of air.

“It will be okay,” a familiar voice soothed. “We’ll get help.”

More pain crashed over her. But as Abby breathed in the night air and steeled herself against the discomfort in her leg, she realized the discomfort wasn’t life-threatening, and that whatever had happened had merely come as a shock.

“You’ll be all right,” the voice repeated. His voice. The man who was also a Were.

Her wits returned. The landscape wasn’t moving. She was, caught up in his arms. The Were carried her. She wasn’t out of it enough to fail to realize that she was completely naked, and to remember that she and this guy had just shared a round of mind-numbing sex. Her lungs were filled with his scent. Her mouth felt swollen. Beside the pain in her leg, she ached deep down inside.

Had she passed out? Fainted? If so, it would be a first.

Glancing sideways, Abby saw that he was dressed, and that her clothes dangled from his closed fists.

“Put me down.” Her voice sounded fairly strong and demanding.

The golden beast stayed infuriatingly silent.

“You forgot my boots,” she said without looking up at him. “And I’ve forgotten the magic word. Please put me down.”

“It would be better if you directed me where to take you, if that isn’t to the closest hospital.” He spoke in the same sexy voice that had first roped her in, though it now carried a trace of anxiousness.

“What happened?”

“You’ve been shot.”

“What?”

“You’ve been shot, and we need to get help. We need that leg bandaged. I can’t just set you down if you can’t walk out of here. I can’t take that chance.”

He gave his head a toss to move the glossy curtain of hair that had fallen to cover half of his face. The gesture tweaked another ache deep inside Abby.

“We weren’t wrong about this park and what goes on here,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to take the brunt of that. You shouldn’t have been out here in the first place. Spending any time here...well, both of us should have known better.”

Frigging park. She’d actually been shot after making the biggest mistake of her life so far? Was that some sort of Karma?

“Bullet?”

He nodded. “Only grazed.”

“Who would do that?”

“The shot was probably meant for me.”

That announcement didn’t make Abby feel better or provide a clearer picture of what had just happened. She glanced around again, wondering who would shoot at this guy without the onset of a full moon.

She didn’t like what came to mind.

Could it be a gang warning them to keep off their turf? Other than that, who prided himself on being a kind of guardian angel for the darker areas of Miami, knowing what sort of things inhabited those places?

Good old Dad.

But Sam Stark and the team in residence this month hadn’t mentioned coming out tonight. They had nothing to gain from hurting anyone in human form, and none of them possessed the ability she had to detect species other than their own. There was no reason for the team to hunt. Plus, her father wouldn’t have missed a target. As a sharpshooter, Sam’s marksmanship was first rate.

Abby turned her head to thoughtfully scan the dark to the east of where they walked.

Couldn’t be Sam. Unless her father had in fact been looking for her, and had taken a potshot at the man keeping her from doing her job.

Unless Sam had witnessed the sexual escapade and been angry enough to get that point across.

In that case, maybe her father had meant to hurt her.

She checked out her leg and the raw skin on the outside of her thigh. Blood hadn’t pooled there, so it was, in fact, only a graze. Still, it stung like hell, and her nerves hadn’t calmed down much.

Can’t be Sam.

Nevertheless, she couldn’t be entirely sure.

The object of her sexual fantasy continued to hold her. If her father remained in the area and took better aim now, he’d have a twofer. With the next shot, Sam would lose an important piece of his business on the one hand, while bagging a Were with the other, without knowing his daughter’s lover was Were. The same beautiful wolf that actually appeared to care about what happened to her, and might even care more than her father did.

How would she explain any of this at a hospital?

“I can walk,” she said.

“How fast?”

“Fast enough.”

Broad shoulders strained against the fabric of his open shirt. When the Were turned his head, Abby felt tension ruffle through him that made her senses stir uncomfortably.

“We’ve lost them for now. Too many others patrol the sidelines of this one section of the park for gangbangers to willingly trespass so close to the boulevard,” he explained.

“Yet they’re not gone.”

That remark earned her a sober glance.

“No,” he agreed. “They’re out there somewhere, waiting.”

“For what?”

“Possibly to try another shot, better aimed this time.”

“Why would they go after you, if, in fact, they did?” she asked.

“You mean a reason that didn’t involve getting lucky with you?”

The remark sounded like forced lightness—an excuse that didn’t work, a cover-up that sent Abby’s mind into overdrive.

She tried again. “Who are you?”

“Just a guy.”

“Oh no. Not just a guy. It doesn’t take a genius to know that.”

When he didn’t respond, Abby said, “Okay. Listen. We don’t owe each other anything, like sharing names, phone numbers or Sunday dinners.” She glanced at the surroundings for the source of his nervousness, shoving aside her own discomfort.

“I don’t feel anything remotely like the kind of pathetic female in need of carting around or being rescued from her own mistakes,” she said. “I can manage a grazed leg.”

When he looked at her questioningly, a prickle of fear underscored Abby’s sense of balance. Uncertain about whether this guy’s closeness caused the flutter in her belly, or if something else wasn’t quite right, she gritted her teeth. The icy chill at the base of her neck brought up a fresh round of anxiety.

In contrast, the shirt pressed against her hip and shoulder felt soft and silky. Abby recalled all too well the smoothness of the Were’s back beneath it, and how she had marred that skin with her nails.

Holding up one hand, she saw blood under her fingernails. She remembered the heat-tempered smell of blood in the air. That had been his blood. Now, the scent of hers mingled with the memory of his.

Another jolt of pain struck, slightly milder this time and ending up as a dull, persistent throb that Abby had to compartmentalize. Danger lurked. They had to get out of the park.

“Put me down and I’ll be on my way. You don’t have to take me anywhere. You aren’t responsible for what happened, and don’t have to wait around to get to know me better.”

“That’s a bit presumptuous, don’t you think? Imagining that I’d want to know you better?”

“Actually, I can feel how much you’d like that.”

He didn’t smile. Though he was hard enough beneath his jeans for Abby to feel the ongoing state of arousal that told her how much he might appreciate another round of death-defying sexual antics on any available surface, the Were’s expression was deadly serious.

“Someone’s coming,” she guessed.

“Yes.”

No way could she ask whether that someone was human, or something other than human, because that would let the cat out of the bag regarding her ability to detect Weres.

“I can walk,” she repeated. “I promise.”

He looked down at her, his face a mask of doubt.

“Promise,” she said.

He stopped walking long enough to set her on her feet—reluctantly, Abby thought. Although her leg protested when she put weight on it, luckily it didn’t give out.

Grabbing her clothes, ditching the embarrassment of being naked and upright, Abby tugged the T-shirt over her head.

“Who is out there?”

“No one you’d want to meet,” he replied.

“I noticed you took the time to get buttoned up.”

“Two naked people would have created quite a scene when we reached the street.” His eyes met hers. “I hurried.”

Upon closer scrutiny, her midnight lover was on guard, his angular features shadowed. He didn’t like whatever he sensed in the dark.

“How many are there?” Abby yanked on her pants.

“Enough to make us want to clear out of here as fast as possible.”

“So, you actually were trying to get me to safety?”

His sad expression made his face seem older, though no less appealing as he said in the manner of a confession, “What I’ve done is to let them know about you. I knew better, but you...” He let that fade and started again. “You were a surprise.”

Those words dug into Abby’s psyche as if there were two meanings inside them, if she could only comprehend. She felt tense and unable to explain to the Were she’d just thrown caution to the wind with that she knew who and what was out there in the dark as well as he did. She kept tight-lipped about mentioning that she knew about him.

Possibly her father had also been there moments before. Maybe the TTD scoured the area for reasons other than locating her, and had made a mistake. However, the new presence suggested an oncoming storm of Otherness.

Forgetting her recent decision to keep some distance from the creature beside her, Abby leaned against him to button her pants. That simple touch went a long way toward robbing her of what little breath she had left. He was hard, hot and way too good-looking for any decent thoughts to prevail.

“Oh hell!” Pushing away from him, Abby centered her weight. She had to concentrate on the moment, and whether she could really rely on a wounded limb to get her out of there. If so, it would be a miracle.

“Hell, you say? I’ll second the sentiment.” Her lover grasped her hand. “But I’m not ready to visit the land of fire and brimstone quite yet. And neither, I’m guessing, are you.”

“You got that right,” Abby solemnly muttered.

* * *

Cameron took off at a run, pulling the woman with him, relieved to find out how fast she was and that she wasn’t going to question him further or complain.

She kept up, her barefooted stride soundless on the grass and her slender arms pumping. The only evidence of her injury lay in her limp. She breathed heavily through the bruised mouth that he’d have given a lot to kiss again right that minute if he didn’t feel responsible for her safety. Thoughts about responsibility made anything having to do with her body off-limits, except getting it the hell out of there.

Four manned-up wolves were on their trail, and had ventured into protected property, potentially drawn by the woman’s scent now that he’d sexually enhanced it a thousandfold. Still, it was more likely they were after him for his part in patrolling a place they called their own, with his intent to keep them far from the busy Miami streets. For the past two months, his nightly prowling had created an invisible fence between them and the unsuspecting population.

Were those wolves dangerous? Seemed like it. But what more could happen to him after his last meeting with the fanged-and-clawed crowd? Besides, he’d taken a vow to protect and serve this city, and had to live up to that vow.

Also, at the moment, the need for a quick escape saved him from having a real conversation with the woman beside him.

Although telling her what he did for a day job, his name and rank, might have eased her mind, because people usually trusted cops, confessions at this point might also have made things worse. If regretful of the brief time they’d shared, she could file a complaint. She might cry foul over the same actions she had helped to initiate.

The situation was tricky. What would the department say about his after-hours patrol, on his own time? How would he explain it, when in no way did it make sense to allow his comrades or Internal Affairs a closer look at him or his nocturnal activities?

There were secrets to be kept on both sides of this mistake in the park, and zero chances for a future relationship with the woman he had hold of. The task was to get her to safety, then back off, forgetting wicked thoughts about her sleek, naked thighs and the kind of pleasure he’d discovered between them.

She’d been a distraction only, a kink in his plans. He needed to find other Weres for reasons that went beyond revenge. He needed information about his new state and what he could expect down the road. This park seemed like the only place to find those things.

And, he added in thought with a sideways glance at the woman beside him, the truth was that there had been someone else out here minutes ago. Werewolves, even while in their human skin, seldom used guns, and he’d smelled the metal.

“Are you coming?” he asked.

The woman beside him looked paler, and still limped. Her hair streamed behind her as she ran. She didn’t look directly at him. Cameron’s heart thudded annoyingly as he gripped her hand tighter.

For the first time since that vow with Miami law enforcement, he felt as though he had more than just a casual stake in the outcome here. Tonight, his investigation and the woman it had brought him felt personal. Was personal.

Racing between a line of young palm trees, a sign of the approaching streets ahead, Cameron chanced another look at his passionate, nameless lover, and found her expression questioning. God bless her sleek little hide, no hint of fear showed on her face—only a kind of steely determination.

She was indeed much more than she seemed. She was, in fact, a tough little thing.

Too bad for us, whoever you are.

Hell of a lot of bad timing here.

In the back of his mind lay the question of whether the immediacy of their connection meant something. The look in her eyes, and the way those eyes had seared into him, suggested there might be more in store.

A nagging suspicion suggested that he had better find out what this connection to her meant and if, after all was said and done, he truly would be able to forget her. In the meantime, because she had sidetracked his intention to capture and interrogate another Were tonight, his personal quest for information about himself had been put on hold.

Chances were good that they’d get off easily and chock tonight’s events up to nothing more than a casual, if unusual, event that happened to men and women all the time, all over the world. Casual sex between strangers. Case closed.

Snapping his teeth together so hard that his jaw burned, Cameron said, “Fire up, woman,” to the enigmatic female by his side, and increased his pace.

* * *

Abby’s legs felt weaker than normal and in need of a break. She’d just had a lover between them, and evidence of that was an ache that spread outward from her womb like cracks in a breached wall.

Her breathing was harsh, her chest taxed. Over the sounds she made, she heard their pursuers. At least two of them, and maybe more. These were Weres the one holding on to her didn’t want to meet, or didn’t want her to meet.

The park was brimming with monsters tonight. The one gripping her hand dialed back his speed after calling for more of it, considerately matching his stride to hers. Leaving him would have been a good idea, if it weren’t for the other creatures not far behind that likely had the scent of her bloody leg in their noses.

Every few seconds, she stole a glance at her lover, wondering as she watched his shirttails fly and his bare chest muscles ripple, how anyone on the bad end of society, including his own gene-spliced alternate species, could possibly expect to deal with him in any confrontational circumstance.

She felt the power in him, and had taken some of that power inside her. Remnants of that energy washed over her now, and yet every move he made seemed angled to make him appear human. Nevertheless, could an angel hide its wings for long? Could a devil hide its horns? A werewolf was a werewolf, and she had just been intimate with one.

Oh yeah, and guess what? She had liked it.

“Don’t slow down on my account,” she said as they rounded a corner. “I can take it.”

Her mind clung to the thought that if she had mistakenly accused her father for her wound, and didn’t call in soon, Sam would come after her for real—maybe not out of fatherly love for his daughter, but out of a strong business sense. There had never really been much love or admiration between them. Hardly any at all. Actually, none at all.

With her fingers securely curled in the Were’s hand, they raced past a brick wall that had seen better days and smelled of moss, finding an alley of palms. Dogs barked behind the tall fences, pinpointing Otherness without having to see it as she and the wolf passed.

Although the uneven earth here made sprinting difficult, Abby was determined to shake the Weres on their trail and remove herself from the picture. She was eager to pretend tonight never happened, and hopeful that the guy next to her would do the same. She had tucked into her mostly boring little life of being an animal control officer by day and a bartender by night.

All for the best.

When she got back to the office, she’d report the bad guys like she was supposed to do and pray that this big, beautiful Were would take his moonlight shift someplace else. She’d be convincing. She would get over this, and forget about him. The grazed leg she’d keep to herself.

Without a hint of warning, her companion slammed to a halt. He spun her around to face him and said soberly, “Go. Now. Don’t look back.”

“I can...”

“Now.” It was a command. “You do know your way? You weren’t lost?”

“I know where I am.” Abby barely got that out before again feeling his breath on her face. Her eyes closed as his mouth met hers almost angrily, and in the manner of someone who might never get enough of what he’d found. His tongue swept over her teeth, and across her lips. She kissed him back.

Lord help her, this wasn’t over. Can’t be over.

The kiss lasted only seconds before he tore himself away. Letting go of her hand, he gave her a shove.

“Go,” he reiterated. Whirling from her, he began walking, not away from the creeps following at a distance, but toward them, with his head lifted and his long stride purposeful.

The sheer weight of his larger-than-life presence filled the night as Abby watched him go. Her heart did not stop its infernal pounding.

Sensing her hesitation, he stopped only once to glance back. Across a span of withered grass their gazes met. He didn’t acknowledge a similar reaction to the one that had her reeling, or let on that he felt the same. Blood striped his shirt. Her fingernails had put some of it there. Her injury had done the rest.

Mirroring the twitch that set his shoulders, Abby finally spun around. Without reaching for her phone or making the call that might have sent the team scrambling, and maybe even helped this one lone wolf in the short run, she sprinted for the road.

She’d take no chances. This big Were was nothing she’d be willing to share. He’d be her secret. Her very private secret, added to so many others.

On the plus side, she might have been a fool tonight, but at least she wasn’t going to be a dead one.

The TTD motto served her well here.

Live to fight another day.

Chapter 6

Cameron felt himself distancing from normal human perceptions of his surroundings, as though his humanness danced on a last remaining thread of control.

Angling his neck, he heard a crack. Then another. But this wasn’t a night for the beast to exert itself to a full extent—at least, as far as he knew. So whoever was out here would be in the same boat, minus the badge tucked inside his pants pocket.

As if he had wished them into existence, the miscreants came around a corner in single file, which would have presented him with an opportunity to gain something of an upper hand in a fight, if it weren’t for the fact that they had moved too close to a busy street for a fight to go undetected.

“Are you boys heading in the wrong direction?” he called out.

“What direction would that be?” the shaven-headed guy in front responded.

“Oh, I don’t know. Toward trouble, maybe?”

They didn’t laugh. Halting a couple yards away and meeting shoulder to shoulder in a united front, as animals in the wild sometimes did when eyeing a potential meal, they studied him impersonally with flat black gazes. The odor of wolf gone bad hung heavily in the air.

Cameron held up his hands and kept his voice light. “Just doing my job. Keeping the streets safe.”

The tallest of the gang, wearing a torn white T-shirt and baggy pants, took the initiative. “Why don’t you do your job someplace else?”

Cameron shook his head. “No can do. This is my beat.”

“You’re a cop?”

Cameron shrugged.

“A filthy badge-carrying pig?” The speaker turned to his companions. “I thought I heard him squeal.”

The other three gangbangers chuckled on cue, cut off when the lead dog spoke again. “Or was it the girl that squealed?”

Cameron’s hands opened and closed, readying for a skirmish. “What girl would that be?”

“The one you let get away. The naked one.”

“Well,” Cameron said, “I’m wondering what that has to do with you.”

“That bitch needs riding. She’s been broken in.”

Cameron squeezed his hands tighter, sure he felt one claw spring through his fingertip, though that couldn’t be right.

“Go home, boys,” he said. “There’s plenty of help here on the street if I whistle, and I’m sure you have better things to do than wait for what will happen.”

“We’ll make a deal,” the leader of the unholy pack said. “You stay away from this park, and we’ll let you off with a warning this time.”

“Why? Are you hiding something out there?” Cameron asked.

“That’s none of your business. You might be a cop, but we know what else you are. We can spread the word.”

“Really? What am I?”

“A freak,” the guy said. “And all alone out here most of the time.”

Cameron nodded. “Does that make us cousins? Should I feel warm and fuzzy?”

“What you should feel is scared.”

“Scared of you?”

“Us, and others like us who can be your worst nightmare.”

“Sorry,” Cameron said honestly. “My worst nightmare has already come and gone.”

He realized someone was approaching from the street behind him before he had finished the statement. An authoritative voice rang out. “Is there trouble here?”

Recognizing the voice, Cameron called back, “Davidson, is that you?”

“Mitchell? Yeah, it’s me. Stegman is in the cruiser. Do we need to call him?”

Cameron eyed the pack of animals that looked at the moment like any Miami southside street gang with too much attitude. He smiled. “So, what will it be, boys? A truce, for tonight?”

“That would be a shame,” the tall guy replied. “Because I really feel like fighting, and the odds are in our favor.”

“The odds, I think, will be slim, since cops also carry guns.”

The big dog waved the suggestion away. “It just so happens that we eat guns for breakfast.”

Cameron nodded. “We’ll do some damage, though. I’m sure your pals here will agree that you might want to take your games elsewhere.”

“We don’t play games,” the lead dog snapped.

“Then maybe you should consider it,” Cameron warned, though it became obvious by the way the gang advanced, and the way they simultaneously reached for whatever they had tucked into their waistbands, that the damn hybrid idiots weren’t going to take his advice.

Davidson, a veteran cop and as smart as cops came, trotted around the corner. The poor guy had no idea what was in store, or that Miami could actually produce something worse than a street gang claiming public territory for their own.

If Cameron’s claws weren’t aching to spring a full night ahead of time, he might have been able to warn his badge-carrying brother of the danger ahead. But he looked down at his hands to make sure the sensation wasn’t real as the mindless Were pack barreled forward with the force of a battering ram.

Chapter 7

Cameron leaned up against a warm wood-paneled wall and scanned the room with half-closed eyes. The night outside those walls called to him. His skin twitched in reaction to the light floating through the open doorway. Answering that call was imperative, as soon as he could.

Like most pubs in Miami, the room around him was dim and smoky with an undercurrent of sweat and booze and too many men crammed into a small space. The odors fermented in his system, making breathing difficult.

He counted fourteen law enforcement officers in the crowd, plus a handful of detectives. Seven of those in attendance he knew by name; the others weren’t associated with his beat. The rest of the bar’s occupants were regulars, by the looks of things, and quite at home in the well-worn ambiance of the place. He, on the other hand, was a carefully managed mass of nerves.

Each of the men in his party were on their fourth or fifth raised glasses in honor of a fallen comrade named Stegman, the victim of the ongoing war between law enforcement and raunchy street gangs on the south side. That’s what they thought, anyway.

All of them had patted the shoulder of the man who had been responsible for taking their comrade’s killers down. Cameron’s shoulder. The shoulder aching to be free of shirts and praise and small indoor spaces because something far more primitive than the almost-constant hunt for bad guys existed outside the bar’s walls. Moonlight.

Madame Moon was full tonight and whispering to him like a lover. She taunted him mercilessly with the call of the wild, and he had to maintain a calm outward appearance at the moment, despite his growing anxiety. But centered within the chaos of his life rose a spiraling vortex of insatiable longing for freedom and for the chill of silvery light on hot, bare skin. Hunger had become a ravenous beast in itself, unpredictable and always insatiable.

“Hey, Mitchell!”

A creased-faced, gray-haired officer who went by the name of T. Garrison gave Cameron a friendly punch to the left biceps. Cameron smiled and touched his arm as if the guy had a powerful swing.

“We owe you for what you did. Davidson told us the story of how you chased those guys.” Garrison gestured exuberantly. “Next drink is on me. So is the one after that.”

In their off-duty drinking, these guys were doing justice to multiple bottles of fine Irish whiskey. Cops took care of their own, seriously mourning their fallen brothers and realizing every day that they might be the ones never to make it home from work.

They cared. Cameron sure as hell had to give them that. But he didn’t feel like a hero and preferred not to be treated like one. He had done what he had to do to keep a lot of people safe, and had, with Davidson’s help, removed four messed-up thugs from the mix. The only good thing here was that Davidson hadn’t known what they really were.

Like most of these guys on the force, he did his job—just in a slightly different way, with extra hours and the added bonus of special senses. Still, he hadn’t been able to save the man they were toasting. He couldn’t tell anyone in this room what those gangbangers really stood for, and what they’d had in mind when they’d geared up for a fight.

And here, in the crowded bar, fewer than twenty-four hours later, Cameron felt claustrophobic.

“Barmaid,” Garrison shouted. “Another round for this man.”

Though Cameron smiled his thanks, he hardly heard the offer. A fresh scent rode the breeze by the door, causing his surroundings to blur, taking Garrison’s friendly face out of focus. When added to the blistering heat of the summer night and the fall of light crossing the threshold, the fragrance came across as being something important to identify, something familiar and heady.

Roses. Also another scent that stirred Cameron’s baser instincts as he inhaled deeply and looked around the room for the source—a search that stopped near the long length of gleaming mahogany wood across from him.

Cameron’s heart gave a thump that he felt all the way to his boots. His wolf gave a whine that twisted his gut. Not quite sure if he could be imagining this, or if one beer had been one too many, he blinked and took a second look, his insides roaring, adrenaline surging.

Female pheromones, light as dandelion fuzz and seductively alluring, rode the room’s darker male buzz. Those pheromones came from the female standing behind the bar. Not just any female, either. Oh no.

A riot of mixed emotions hit him all at once, as did an instantaneous pulse of interest. Blinking slowly, Cameron choked back a growl of surprise.

Of all the bars in the world... Hell, he had walked into hers.

* * *

What are you doing here?

Get out.

Go away.

Abby had noticed him the minute he’d entered the building, and reacted with a grunt of stunned surprise.

Among the crowd of cops and detectives jammed into every corner of floor space, she perceived the big Were as intensely as if he was still inside her, on their hands and knees in the grass.

Swearing out loud, she doubled over to recuperate, repeating unladylike oaths several times more. This had to be a dream. Her worst nightmare. The Were whose name everyone here chanted couldn’t possibly forget the sight or scent of the woman he’d called his little wolf in a moment of shared passion. She hadn’t been able to get him out of her mind for one single minute.

Above the heads of the others, his height stood out. His unnaturally good looks caused her heart to stutter, as those looks had the first time she’d set eyes on him. This second sighting didn’t lessen the impact. Her thighs quivered uncontrollably. The space between those thighs thrummed as if interior body parts were warming up for a repeat of their mutual sexual assault.

He was there, ten feet away.

The big bad wolf had found her.

Unsure of what to do, Abby feared that any move might give her anxiousness away. But she couldn’t tear her gaze from him.

“Damn. You’re a cop?”

His hair, too long for a cop’s usual tidy look, kept her from viewing his face clearly—that incredibly, inhumanly beautiful face that had been like a sucker punch to her solar plexus.

And the body.

God, that body.

His taut bareness had been tight up against hers, hard, willing, and slick with sweat from the exertion of their mindless coupling.

“You can’t be here. Not now.”

He wore black and white tonight, another bit of irony that paralleled his hybrid state. A crisp white long-sleeved shirt hugged his chest. Black jeans perfectly defined his incredible physique. Again, his shirtsleeves were casually rolled up over his forearms, showing off some of the corded strength she had tested firsthand.

She saw no evidence of the blood that had marked him the night before, or signs of cuts and bruises signifying the fight he must have been headed for after pushing her away. Yet tonight he soaked up accolades for having been part of something big that had happened after she left him.

A Were and a cop.

How could that happen?

She felt dizzy with the realization that he stood under the same roof. As she continued to stare, the passing moments seemed suspended from time.

Cameron Mitchell. She mouthed the name, remembering the taste of his wolfish Otherness and the exquisite talent of his mouth and body. His job might have explained his presence in the park, but how about his willingness to take her on there? Sex in a public place wasn’t a usual cop routine, she was fairly sure, and could, in fact, get him sacked.

So, had the chances he’d taken been instigated by a simple slip of morals, or by the wolf curled up inside him? Without a full moon over their heads, had Cameron Mitchell’s animal side required him to let off steam in a sexual way?

What about her part in that?

Abby finally managed to look around at the rest of the sea of faces. She recognized a few. Though the Miami PD often frequented this bar, he had never been here, and shouldn’t have been there tonight for reasons beyond her own embarrassment. Her father mingled with the regulars, three stalwart hunters among them. The back room held guns and rounds of ammunition that no wolf pack could withstand.

If Sam and his hunters somehow knew about the Were in their midst...if her father saw her reaction to him, or something she did gave this Were away, the game would be on.

The moon was full tonight.

That goddamn moon.

As far as she knew, there would be no way for a werewolf to avoid it. Silver light would suck the wolf right out of its nesting place and make that wolf prowl.

Bad news.

She chanced another glace at Cameron, so bloody perfect from head to boot. Though her acting skills were decent, she doubted they’d get her through this. Already, her breath was ragged and forced, and her pulse soared. She hadn’t slept or eaten since her return from the park the night before. Her injured thigh, bandaged tightly beneath her jeans, throbbed like a son-of-a-gun.

She was about to lose it, and had to get away from him soon.

Trembling hands made her drop a glass, which earned her a frown from her father. She smiled back at Sam and shrugged, knowing she couldn’t afford to draw more attention to herself. On this night, both Cameron Mitchell and Sam Stark played at being one of the boys.

The energy in the room was high, and escalating. The cops in attendance were well on their way to becoming sodden. Hunters eagerly awaited the midnight hour so they could get their kicks. And Cameron Mitchell wasn’t as human as he looked.

Abby scanned the doorway, where moonlight streamed across the threshold. More light seeped through slats in the shuttered windows. These things were catnip for wolves, and also a kind of perpetual poison. And it seemed obvious, by the swiftness of her own reactions, that she wasn’t immune from either thing—that bloated moon, or the creature across the room that now stared back at her as if he’d seen a ghost.

Yes, it’s me. So what?

She’d been made, found, identified. Turmoil churned inside her, souring her surroundings. With this incredible Were’s presence breaking through what defenses she had left, the only viable option she had was to scurry away and hide. And he wasn’t going to allow that. His eyes made that quite clear.

Setting her cleaning cloth down, Abby met those eyes. A rush of adrenaline pounded through her. Leftover sparks that had never fully died out sent waves of inexcusable lust for him coursing through body parts he had already conquered as the intensity of the inexplicable connection to him resurrected within her.

Her breasts strained at her shirt, taut and aching. Her panties moistened with the desire to again have him inside her.

Turning from the sight of him, breaking eye contact, Abby stepped toward the hatch in the bar, ignoring a patron calling her name. When she looked back, he was beside her, having moved too quickly with nonhuman reflexes.

“Abby,” he said in a casual voice that took her by surprise. “Nice name.”

Gold eyes, darker indoors but no less bright or piercing, waited for her to again find them. Tightness closed around Abby’s heart. Her throat went dry.

How, she thought fleetingly, hadn’t anyone else noticed his unusual eyes?

“I’m sorry.” Her gaze dropped to the mouth that had simultaneously tortured and pleasured her. “Do I know you?”

“Maybe not. But it’s still a nice name.”

Damn him. The memory of his lips nipping at hers threatened to get the best of her, as did the recall of his first thrust into her accepting, malleable body. In the forefront of her mind sat an acknowledgment of his appetite for passion that had seriously moved things inside her.

Abby moaned softly.

“I’ve been looking for you.” His tone had turned unbearably intimate.

“All of your life?” she countered wryly, her pulse banging in time with some distant, inaudible beat.

“You never told me your name.”

“You never asked.”

“Or where you live.”

“So now you know.”

Seconds of silence passed, loaded with tension.

“I searched for you all day, covering most of the bars on the west side.”

She had mentioned working in a bar. Thankfully, he hadn’t noticed the logo on her shirt. Did that mean fate had brought him here, or just plain old bad luck that a downed cop’s friends had chosen this place to honor their comrade?

Abby waved at the crowd. “I hear kudos are due for your nocturnal heroics.”

He didn’t reply. He wasn’t the type to brag.

Abby lowered her voice. “You found the guys following us?”

“Ah, so you do know me.”

She gave him a serious look.

He nodded. “I did find them.”

“They didn’t hurt you?”

“I’ve covered up the battle scars. Another cop wasn’t so lucky.”

She said with a sorry attempt to modulate her tone, hoping her aggravating breathlessness wouldn’t show, “Why did you search for me when the deal was to move on?”

“I didn’t know we had a deal.”

“Then you terribly underestimated me.”

Abby had the feeling he wasn’t saying half of what went through his mind. Then again, neither did she. She was two for two on the danger scale, and quickly upping the ante.

“Would you like to talk, Abby?”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“Abby,” he said again, as if tasting the name.

Though she felt a throb begin at the base of her spine in anticipation of what he might say next, Cameron Mitchell didn’t follow with anything important. In fact, he allowed her a few seconds to get a grip on herself instead of the edge of the bar.

Abby tried to center herself. Grinding her teeth together to keep from shouting, she pressed both hands over her hips to smooth not only her shirt but also the twitching body beneath it—reactions that were a complete giveaway as to his effect on her.

“Well, here I am,” she said. “What now?”

“We talk in private. That’s a start.”

“You’re a hero, and these guys want to be with you tonight.”

A hero and a gentleman. An irresistible combination.

“You’re resistant,” he observed.

“I’m trying to ignore you, and you’re not making it easy.”

He said nothing and continued to study her.

“There were two of you out there?” She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue before biting down with her teeth on the lower one.

“Three, in the end, when other cops arrived,” he said.

“And you were doing your job by watching the park. It actually was a real job?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “for what happened. That other cop was a friend of yours?”

“I consider all of them friends.”

Abby acknowledged that response with an inclination of her head, and waved at the door. “You’ll be back out there tonight?”

Moonlight is what you’ll need. Your secret is out.

“I’m out there nearly every night,” he confessed. “Working overtime has become a habit on nights when I can’t sleep.”

“But not in uniform. You didn’t wear one last night, and you’re not wearing one now.”

“I’m on my own time.”

“Patrolling that park to look for bad guys, alone, increases the odds of getting hurt,” she pointed out.

“Maybe. It is, however, a necessity.”

He had answered hesitantly, as though he had disclosed more of his secret than he’d meant to. Abby supposed that everything he said could be taken two ways, because this was a creature straddling both worlds. Cameron Mitchell had one foot in this one, and the other foot someplace foreign, and straight out of myth. Would any purely human soul truly be able to understand what that felt like?

Would Sam, if he knew that a Were could be a cop?

Abby wanted to shout out to her father that Cameron Mitchell was one of the good guys, after all. The fact that there really were good Weres was a validation of her former theory that now made her feel sick.

How many others like Cameron Mitchell had her father’s team captured unquestioningly with the shoot-on-sight method of hunting? Had Sam ever taken the time to find out?

“Some of the people in this bar will also be out there tonight,” Abby said meaningfully.

How much could she give away with Sam looking on?

“Guys who aren’t cops, but have a similar agenda.”

Had Cameron understood her cryptic remark? He glanced at the crowd over his shoulder.

“Possibly more of them than you know,” Abby cautioned. “For reasons other than the reasons you might expect.”

A secret in return for a secret. He’d go away and avoid the park tonight, and she’d only have to live in private with the fact of what she had done the night before, with him.

Did this veiled warning to him about the danger in this room fall under the category of helpful werewolf hints?

“You’re not talking about yourself, I hope.” An edge of concern returned to Cameron’s voice as he turned back to her. “You wouldn’t go outside on a night like this?”

“Nope. I’m not in need of another good lay, since the last one was decent enough to last me awhile.”

Cameron Mitchell studied her openly, blatantly, not caring if anyone noticed. His face showed no emotion. His tone was carefully managed. “Meet me in an hour.”

“No.” Abby slammed a glass down on the bar. With all the noise going on, no one in the crowded room paid attention. Each successive round of drinks meant that voices got louder. More people had come in, blocking Sam’s view of her flushed face.

She couldn’t breathe.

“Meet me,” Cameron Mitchell repeated.

“Bite me,” Abby whispered. “Oh, wait, you did that already, plus a whole lot more.”

He seemed to think over her remark. She expected a growling reply that didn’t come, and let loose a sigh of exasperation. She was sweating, a sign of her body rebelling against this test of her willpower. She fielded the urge to hurdle the bar and either jump into this Were’s talented lap, or sprint for the door. High drama either way. Endless trouble.

He wasn’t helping. He caused her internal chaos.

No. That wasn’t exactly true. She had brought this on herself, by being unable to resist him last night.

No way she was going to find out what he would be like tonight when moonlight hit him, though—the same moonlight she had always detested for its role in twisting monsters out of their napping places. Moonlight that also had the power to affect her in strangely personal ways that she would not dare mention to the wolf across from her.

Nor would she be clearer about the danger awaiting this Were tonight. Sam had a lot of friends, a couple of them nearing where she stood transfixed by a creature they had hard-ons to hunt.

Her lips moved, though she wasn’t sure what she’d say until she heard it. “It’s quite ironic, you know, that you’ve come to the one bar in Miami that you should have avoided at all costs.”

As Cameron Mitchell searched her face in a replay of his riveted attention of the night before, Abby counted her heartbeats without having to press a finger to her neck. The suspense of this meeting mounted. Emotions flowed as if a tap had been left open. She felt anger, fear, love, hate, longing and lust—all there at once as this man’s eyes continued to hold her hostage. His gaze was both fire and ice, disconcerting and suggestive, taunting and sympathetic. His golden eyes were equally strange, and utterly familiar.

“I know what you are,” she said.

That surprised him. The mouth that had pleasured her so completely and adeptly nearly twenty-four hours earlier opened. But he didn’t speak. Instead, he carefully scanned the room before returning his attention to her. Then he raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“I knew last night what you are,” Abby said. “I knew what followed us out there, and what those gangbangers who killed your friend really were.”

The room seemed to darken once she’d gotten that out. Movement slowed. Voices dulled to a background murmur. None of that was real, though, and only the effect of meeting this wolf again so soon, and in less than stellar circumstances.

Did she want to speak to him of things beyond this terse confession? Yes. In another minute, though, her father would come over to see why she hadn’t filled orders, and who this guy was. If luck was with her, after one look at his daughter—at the pink face and the visible quakes—Sam might merely assume her to be ill, and cut her some slack.

Or else he might put two and two together and come up with wolf.

Swiping at the trickle of perspiration sliding down the side of her face, Abby wondered what would happen until then. Possibly another standoff between Cameron Mitchell and herself?

She felt so damn hot. And the wolf who was a badge-carrying member of the Miami PD had gone mute.

More than any of that, the thing she feared more than all the guns in Miami lay just past that doorway, up in the sky. Like a giant magnet, the moon whispered to her as though she were one of the moon’s cult, and as though that light ruled what flowed in her veins to some minor degree.

“Abby.”

She tossed her hair, unwilling to listen to anything her one-night stand had to say. The dilemma of what to do next was an excruciating one. If she stayed still, the hammer would fall. Being near to this Were made it too difficult to keep herself in line.

She felt jazzed, wired up—not all of that due to the fact that she had toyed with a wolf and was dealing with the consequences. The bigger fact here was that she had been scouting for Weres for so long, she might have started to feel like a wolf herself.

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