Chapter 18

18

Before dawn, with the sky starting to lighten, I woke in my normal human body, naked and lying on trampled fern fronds. There was a hand on my boob.

I blinked, eyeing that as I processed the warmth of an arm wrapped around me and an equally naked male body pressed against my back. I turned my head to look at Duncan. His eyes were closed, his breathing even with sleep.

Given how chilly the predawn air was, I wouldn’t have minded snuggling for warmth, but the hand was a little presumptuous. Making a face, I grasped it to move it off my chest. His arm tightened around me, and he snuggled closer, lips brushing my bare shoulder. A tingle of warmth swept through me, promising that, even though I’d not been with a man since before my husband left, my body remembered how to respond to an appealing touch.

But Duncan was still a mystery, and I didn’t want to find his touch appealing.

“We’re not a couple, dude.” I sat up and shoved his arm off.

His eyes opened, and he looked blearily up at me.

“I should have known you’d be the handsy type,” I told him .

Whether he’d known he’d been groping me or not, it wasn’t clear, but he smiled without shame. “You were magnificent.”

“I assume you mean on the hunt since nothing else happened.”

His smile widened.

Alarm flashed through me. Hell, nothing had happened, had it?

I remembered falling asleep, still in my lupine form, and dreaming of that case. There hadn’t been any sex, not as a wolf or as a human. I was positive. Almost positive. The werewolf magic often made memories of what happened while in lupine form fuzzy. Just as, when I was a wolf, memories of my human life could also be harder to grasp and process.

“On the hunt,” Duncan said, taking pity on me and clarifying. “I didn’t realize how sleek and powerful you would be. You’re bigger than your brutish cousins. If you would let yourself change whenever they troubled you…”

“I told you why I don’t.”

“Actually, you were quite vague about that and didn’t tell me. What happened to you? I saw your beauty and soul as a wolf, the exhilaration you felt being on the hunt. It was just as powerful as what I experience. How could you turn your back on that? On your nature and what you were born to be?”

“It’s none of your business.” I stood, brushing off dirt and fern fronds. Maybe I was odd, but his questions made me bristle more than waking up with his hand on my boob had.

“Okay.” Duncan shrugged easily and stood up, revealing that he’d probably been dreaming of something besides wolf cases while he’d had his arm wrapped around me.

I looked away, not wanting to gawk at him and have him believe I was interested. But he caught my glance and grinned, standing proudly, not trying to hide anything .

“I need to be back at the apartment complex by the time office hours begin.” I hoped he knew how to find the van again.

As a wolf, it would have been a simple matter to follow our scent trail back to it, but my human nose lacked such sensitivity. Though, in the aftermath of the change, the world did seem sharper, the air currents laden with far more odors than I usually noticed.

“Does that mean you don’t want to see if we’re as good together in bed as we were on the hunt?” Duncan had politely been gazing at my face, but at that comment, he glanced lower. Lust and appreciation glinted in his eyes before he looked away, dropping a mask over his interest.

Maybe I should have chastised him for the glance, but I caught myself feeling pleased. With two grown sons, I’d thought I was past the age where men would want to ogle my naked body. Now and then, out in public, I got looks, but Chad’s cheating had left me feeling beaten and broken—and that my attractiveness had long since faded.

“There aren’t any beds out here,” was all I said.

“Those ferns weren’t bad.”

“They were cold, damp, and prickly. Do you know where your van is?”

“Of course.” Duncan pointed toward trees at the start of the gully where we’d found the deer.

“Do you know where your keys are?”

He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “We’ll find out.”

We parted long enough to tend to biological needs and drink from the stream. That wasn’t something I would usually do in human form, but wolves didn’t carry hydration packs, and we’d both already quenched our thirst there the night before.

Afterward, I followed Duncan up the gully. The stream gurgled pleasantly beside us, and birds sang as the sky grew brighter. While we walked, I mulled over the case to take my mind off the rocks and roots scraping the bottoms of my feet. Ambling through the forest was a lot easier with sturdy paw pads than delicate human soles, and I looked forward to dressing.

Duncan glanced back often as we trekked toward the road. Checking to make sure I was keeping up?

Chin up, I ignored the ground poking my feet and kept pace with him. The previous night’s vision had me thinking that looking at the case through lupine eyes might reveal something, but I didn’t know if I could summon the wolf and then remember that some trifling human object had importance to me. Once I was in lupine form, I would forget my to-do list. Instead, I would take off into the closest wilderness to hunt.

“I get why you don’t trust me—nobody ever trusts lone wolves,” Duncan said after one of his glances caught me frowning pensively. “But I’ll give you my number before I go. It seems like your family has turned against you. If you ever need someone to talk to, I’ll listen. I know what it’s like to be lonely. Trust me.”

“I’m fine. I’ve been alone a while. I’m used to it.” Sort of. Even before I’d kicked Chad out, he’d barely been home. The difference now was that my boys were also gone.

“Being used to being alone doesn’t necessarily make it easy.”

“Yeah.” I decided not to argue. He probably did understand better than most. “Thanks for offering,” I made myself add, though I doubted I would take him up on it. “When are you leaving? You haven’t metal-detected all our acres yet.”

Duncan chuckled. “I haven’t, no, but the woods were primarily what drew me. There was some magic about.” He opened his mouth—to mention the magic we’d found in my apartment?—but shrugged and didn’t bring it up. He pointed through the trees, the dirt road and his van visible in the distance. “I’ll need to go soon. When I was fighting your cousins, they conveyed that they would come after me again if I stayed in their territory.”

He touched the wound on his side. The bandages had disappeared with his change, so I could see that the gashes were healing quickly, thanks to the regenerative power of the wolf. That was good, though they must have hurt when he’d received them.

“That’s probably a legitimate threat and not a bluff,” I admitted. “There’s a reason I had you drive out east instead of north.”

“They don’t hunt out here?”

“Not as often. Those with cabins in the woods for homes, like my mother, are north of Monroe. There used to be another pack who hunted over this way.” I remembered Raoul and the feud with the Cascade Crushers but didn’t want to go into it any more than anything else about my past. “My family claimed it after they left, but it’s not quite home.”

“Understood.” Duncan reached the van first and opened the door for me. Our clothes were draped on the seats where we’d left them. “I’m glad they didn’t show up on our hunt. I enjoyed being a wolf with you much more than with your cousins.”

“Yeah, I thought you were a decent hunting buddy too.”

He snorted. “The way you stroke my ego is almost as appealing as the way you stroke my fur.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, meeting his warm brown eyes as I stepped closer. I lifted a hand, intending to reach past him to grab my clothes, but when our bodies brushed, a zing of awareness swept through me again. The memory of him checking me out came to mind, and I caught myself stepping closer to him instead of the seat. He lifted a hand to my waist, callused palm cupping me.

“You are magnificent.” His gaze dipped to my lips. “If you want to remain mysterious and never tell me anything about yourself, you can also just call me for a hunt. Anytime.”

“Is hunting what you really want to do with me?”

Our chests brushed, his taut muscles hard under his warm skin, a spattering of hair making an appealing sensation against my sensitive flesh .

“Among other things.” His eyes glinted with humor, humor and a more intense emotion, the same as I’d caught in the woods. Desire. Lust.

He bent toward me, mouth opening slightly, and I leaned closer. Our lips met, warm and gentle and full of a promise of an enjoyable time. I leaned into him, tempted to give in to that. Tempted to?—

A howl in the forest made us spring apart. It carried across the wilderness, traveling miles, but my ears were sharper than the day before, sharp enough to know it had originated nearby. The wolf making the noise might even be close enough to see us.

“Anyone you know?” Our moment broken, Duncan jogged around to the driver side of the van and started dressing.

I started to say no, but my keener ears could also pick out subtleties that I couldn’t have before. It was a familiar howl, a familiar voice . Not one I’d heard in a long time, but…

“I think it’s a wolf from my pack.” I grabbed my own clothing and started dressing.

“Objecting to our nude closeness or my presence in their woods? Or your presence in their woods?” Duncan fished his keys out of his pocket and climbed in, turning the ignition.

The howl sounded again, this time even closer. The wolf was up the road around a bend or two. Was he alone? I imagined my cousins rushing us.

“Maybe all of those things.” I jumped inside and closed the door, tugging my trousers up as Duncan turned the van around. “Our nudity is probably the least offensive thing though.”

“It certainly didn’t offend me .” He grinned over at me, glancing at my bare thigh before my trousers were fully in place.

“You do seem like someone who would be fully comfortable on a nude beach.”

“Naturally.” Duncan got the van turned around and headed down the road toward the freeway .

I looked in the side mirror as we departed and wasn’t surprised to spot a white wolf watching us from the road. It had been years since I’d seen him, but that was Lorenzo, an older male that had joined our pack decades earlier. He hadn’t stayed, leaving before I had, to start a family of his own in Eastern Washington, but something must have drawn him back. He gazed after us with cool blue eyes.

Had he been ordered to watch me? Or had he simply been hunting in the area and detected intruders?

As the van rounded a bend, and I was about to lose Lorenzo from view, the white snout tilted toward the sky, and another howl echoed into the morning.

I rolled the window down an inch, trying to listen over the rumble of the engine, to hear if there was an answering howl.

Yes, not one but two voices responded with howls from the forested land across the freeway. Soon, the entire pack would know that I’d been out here with the lone wolf who’d attacked my cousins.