Chapter
One
I closedthe front door of Alice’s little Victorian home, stood on her porch, and tried to figure out what the hell had just happened.
The mid-afternoon sunlight was unseasonably warm for the first week of April, and a werewolf’s body temperature ran several degrees hotter than a human’s, but a prickly chill made me want to rub my arms.
Alice’s icy voice echoed in my head in an endless loop:I thought we were clear about the plan for how this would go.
Even outside the house, her wards sizzled on my skin and stung my sensitive nose as if I were next to a high voltage wire. If I tried to go back inside, they’d either seriously injure or kill me. She’d made her house a fortress.
She’d invited me in last night, and now she’d kicked me right back out.
I don’t need a protector, Sean. I’m not looking for someone to take care of me, or fight my battles for me.
Alice’s honey-vanilla aroma had soaked into my skin. I’d spent our sleeping hours holding her close, my werewolf nose pressed to the back of her neck where her fragrance wasstrongest. Her loneliness had a scent too—sharp and metallic like the blade of a knife, with a hint of that high voltage smell.
I wanted to curl around her and keep her safe and warm. But when I’d suggested we meet tonight for a date, the tension that lashed through her body despite how relaxed she’d been in my arms only minutes before and the way her eyes had narrowed and her magic tingled on my skin…all those reactions saidno way in helleven before she’d shot me down with words.
She wanted me to go away and stay away.But I didn’t want to stay away. And my wolf…
Deep inside my mind, my wolf raised his head and howled in frustration.
The bones in my arms and legs ground together as my wolf strained to force me to go back inside. I had to push the wolf down into submission. This was the first time in the twenty years since I’d become a werewolf that I’d had to do that in any situation other than in anger.
Undeterred, my wolf sent me an image of myself in wolf form on Alice’s bed, curled around her, alert and on watch as she slept.
In danger, my wolf growled.
I’d seen and sensed it too when she’d spoken of the scars on her back. And at Hawthorne’s last night, the way Alice studied everyone, assessing their threat potential automatically, had made it clear she was wary and on alert by nature. She didn’t let her guard down, even in a bar owned by a member of the Vampire Court who didn’t allow violence of any kind in his establishment and put enormous enforcers conspicuously out front and inside the bar in case anyone got funny ideas.
Danger nipped at her heels; that was as obvious as her love of good whisky and quiet solitude.
I used to know some bad people, she’d said when I’d asked about the terrible scars on her back. And then she’d changedthe subject abruptly by initiating sex. I’d let her distract me, but I hadn’t forgotten either the scars or her words. Now both my human brain and wolf’s mind fixated on putting together the scant clues I’d gathered in the past few hours.
Her wards hummed and buzzed on my skin. The only explanation for Alice’s warded fortress of a home was someone posed a significant and immediate threat. She’d saidbad people. She was a mage, so that probably meant a cabal. Possibly the feds too.
My wolf made an angry and unhappy sound.
I don’t need a protector. Her comment wasn’t defensive or an offhand, careless dismissal, but a statement of certainty. Her wards and everything about her confirmed she was a fighter and a powerful mage very capable of facing her enemies. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that despite her fierceness, she still might need me, evenwantme, to fight at her side.
I glanced at my watch. Damn it, I had one hour to go home, shower, and get to Maclin Security for a client meeting to review pricing and plans for a security system upgrade.
Still, I lingered on Alice’s porch and wondered if she somehow knew I hadn’t left. I wanted her to open the door, even if it was just to demand to know why I was still here. But it didn’t open for me, and I knew she wouldn’t come to the door if I knocked. Just as she’d never call my number, which she’d flippantly saved in her phone not asSean Maclin, but under the nameWolf. In fact, she’d probably only saved it to spare my feelings and then deleted it the moment I walked out of the house.
I’d stayed awake for an hour as she slept, studying the scars on her back, calming my wolf, and strategizing what I’d say and do to persuade her to see me again once we woke, only to have all my plans blow up in my face.
Nothing had ever felt so final as her rejection. A good conversation last night at Hawthorne’s, the best sex I’d ever had just after dawn and again just now, and then out the door I went.
Wham, bam, thank you, Wolf.
She’d probably intended to drive me away with her ruthlessness; instead, it intrigued me more. Not to mention my wolf enjoyed a good chase.
But there was nothing for me to do for now but get on with my day while my wolf paced and growled in my mind. My skin prickled with the force his displeasure.
Since my vehicle was in the driveway, Alice’s small blue car was parked at the curb. People who worked for the vampire Charles Vaughan had delivered it while she and I slept.
I growled. Anger made my wolf’s legs rigid as steel, so my knees felt stiff as I walked down Alice’s front steps and headed for my car.
