Chapter 1
Culled Against Her Will
When Anna Davis woke, her chemo-ridden limbs, no longer thin and bruised, pulsed with vitality and power.Am I asleep? Still dreaming?Hair clung to her face and brow. She lifted a honey brown lock away from her face and stared at it. She’d been nearly bald after her recent round of therapy, wearing wigs and scarves to hide her patchy scalp. Now her hair hung loose around her shoulders. It hadn’t been this color since her late twenties when she’d gone bottled blonde. She pushed back the tangled locks.Where am I?
Anna predatorily tracked her surroundings with a sweeping gaze.
The room had a low ceiling, concrete walls, and a floor littered with heavy, colorful blankets. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she caught the scent of something more than damp wool. Amazingly, her vision zoomed in and out, reminding her of the autofocus feature on her son’s digital camera, until she could clearly see who she’d been scenting.
A naked man, who appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties, sat cross-legged against the opposite wall. The lean muscles across his wide chest and arms created a maze of grooves and hard angles in his chiseled torso. A crop of black hair fell around his ears. His head was down, but she knew his eyes were the color of rubbed sage. Just like she knew his full, sensual lips curved like a bow ready to fire when he was deep in concentration.Conor Evans.
“I should have known,” she said, unable to keep the anger from edging her voice. Another person might have been grateful to suddenly be cancer-free, but Conor hadn’t cured her. “I made peace with death. You had no right to make me into this…this thing.”
Conor flexed his arms as he combed his fingers through his dark hair, the move pushing the loose curls off his square, masculine face. The sight of him made her lower parts clench with need. In twenty years, he hadn’t changed. Anna couldn’t say the same. She’d been curvy her whole life, something she’d never been ashamed of, but age had a way of making the curves sag a bit, and cancer had a way of deflating the rest. Self-consciously, she touched her body. The emaciated woman she’d been before waking up in this room was gone. Even though her lush body had reappeared, it didn’t matter how good or healthy she felt, she only had one thought:I didn’t choose this life.
Last week, Conor showed up at her chemo treatment and begged her to let him save her. He wanted Anna to become like him—a werewolf. When she’d worked as his assistant, he’d told her about his tribe and their ritual of culling. He’d explained that the last cull had taken place during the Great Depression. His mother, a struggling jazz singer, had been one of theinvited. Shortly after, Conor had been born—a first generation lycanosapien. An evolutionary breed of werewolf and human.
Conor still looked so young for someone who had lived more than eighty years. Seeing him made Anna realize she’d never stopped thinking about Conor—never stopped loving him. Turning down his offer had been difficult and painful, but she’d made her peace with dying and had been firm when she’d told himno.
What he’d done to her, taking her and changing her without permission, was forbidden by his kind. Werewolves only took the willing. This wasn’t herchoice, she thought again, while trying to ignore the small, niggling hope worming its way into her brain.
When they’d met in the 90s, Conor had been a doctor—a researcher in the field of medical biology—and Anna had been his assistant while she finished her education. She’d been married at the time with a baby. All the same, she’d fallen in love with Conor, and he’d trusted her with his secret. For the sake of her family, she refused to leave her husband Robert for Conor. Later, Robert cheated on her, but she couldn’t deny that she’d claimed the first betrayal—a betrayal of the heart. Had Anna left Robert in the beginning, she might have saved them both—along with their son—many years of grief.
God! Her son. Sam. He was twenty-one now. Her stomach lurched. Because Conor had changed her, she’d outlive her own child—the main reason she’d turned him down.
Anna couldn’t take the quiet tension in the small room. “Why? Make me understand, Conor. Why would you go against your own laws to do this to me?”
Conor’s didn’t speak. His penetrating gaze made her uneasy, but not afraid. He wouldn’t go through all this trouble just to harm Anna. She looked around the room again to avoid his stare. She grasped at the blankets under her butt and her fingernails scraped against the dirt floor beneath. Strangely, the contact with the cool earth calmed her nerves.
This had to be one of the many dens on the tribe’s large plot of land in the Ozark Mountain Range in northern Arkansas. She’d always wanted to see the beauty he’d described when he talked about home—the rolling hills, clear springs and falls, the flowering catalpa trees, and the fresh scent of pine.
Conor leaned forward, pressing his knuckles against the floor and moving to his knees. He sniffed the air—a quick inhalation. He cracked his neck to one side before his gaze locked with hers. In this position, Anna could see that his gray-green eyes were nearly black.
He crawled toward her. She pressed her back into the wall and turned her head, not afraid, but somehow instinctually knowing that direct eye contact could make the situation escalate. His hot breath huffed over her skin.
“What are you doing?” She couldn’t keep the shakiness from her voice.
The heat from his body warmed her skin as he closed the distance between them. Anna froze when he rubbed his rough cheek against hers, his hands traveling down her arms while an inhuman growl rumbled from his chest and his words left no room for debate. “You. Are.Mine.”
Crap! A part of her wanted to yank off her panties and throw her legs wide open while screaming,Take me now! But the saner part of her brain bitch-slapped her libido and told it to back off. “Get away from me,” she said, trying to put as much command in her tone as he’d had in his. She wanted to tell him to fuck off. She wasn’t his or anyone’s for that matter. She belonged to herself and no one else.
Conor chuffed, his breath blowing against her ears. Anna turned her head slowly and met his eyes. “Don’t you dare fucking big, bad wolf me, Conor Evans.”
Hearing his name made him blink. He growled, but backed off. “I could be in a lot of trouble for bringing you here.”
“Then why did you do it?” Why would he take the risk? His veins pulsed and rippled like snakes under his skin. She’d never seen him like this, not even the one time he’d shifted into wolf form for her as proof of his species’ existence. His eyes watered as his soulful gaze met hers. “I couldn’t let you die.”
“So you’d rather die. That makes no sense.”
He pursed his lips and shook his head. “I want you to live, Anna. You had days, weeks at the most. I couldn’t convince you and I couldn’t think straight. I could never think straight when it came to you.”
A sob escaped from Anna’s lips. She put her hand to her mouth to stifle another cry. “I didn’t want this life, Conor. I didn’t.”
He closed the distance between them, this time wrapping his arms around her shoulders and drawing her in. “I love you, Anna.”
It was the only apology she would get from him.
