CHAPTER 1
The smell of burnt timber clung to the warm, late-afternoon mountain air.
Even through his ultraviolet light blocking helmet and clothing, Razor’s acute Breed senses recoiled at the stench. Whatever fire had been raging earlier in the day was over now. Its heat was extinguished, its smoke blown away, but that only meant he had arrived too late. The damage was already done.
Fuck.
Ignoring the sharp odor that scraped his throat with every breath, Razor ran faster up the side of the wooded incline.
After thirty hours on his motorcycle from Florida to this isolated corner of Colorado, impatience sizzled in his veins. He’d ditched his bike off a rugged dirt road about a mile behind him. He didn’t need to draw unwanted attention on his approach. Besides, as one of the Breed he could make the rest of his trek much faster on foot.
His boots tore up the loamy ground as he sped for the small cabin he’d been surveilling remotely by drone for the past several months. He’d been watching the location as a favor to an old friend, but the dread he felt now was personal.
Too personal.
He didn’t know how he’d let himself get so invested in a task, but there was no denying the clawing ache that ripped a hole in his chest as he got his first glimpse of the small clearing and the cabin at its center.
Or, rather, what little remained of it.
Timber walls had been reduced to cinders. The river rock chimney stood scorched and blackened, a grim marker for the house that was no more. The metal skeletons of assorted furnishings smoldered among the ashes and ruin.
The annihilation was too complete to be an accident.
The surrounding woods had been left virtually unscathed by the fire, but the cabin had been obliterated with precision. And without mercy.
Razor stepped closer, his boots crunching in the charred rubble.
The bitter odors of fuel and fire choked him, but it was the unmistakable scent of death that set his jaw and made dread coil inside him. His pulse hammered, cold and heavy, as he glimpsed the shape of a petite body that lay burned beyond recognition near the center of the destruction.
A snarl rumbled low in his chest.
The woman he’d come to retrieve and bring to safety was dead.
Damn it. He was too fucking late.
He’d failed his old friend.
He’d failed this innocent woman too.
Razor literally owed his life to Theo Collier, so when the human had asked him a few months ago to keep a protective eye on Laurel Townsend, Theo’s former lover, Razor had accepted without hesitation.
He could still hear Theo’s fearful tone when he’d called yesterday to say that he needed something more than surveillance from Razor. He wanted him to bring Laurel under Razor’s personal protection as quickly as possible. He’d claimed it was too urgent—too dangerous—for him to say anything more over the phone, and he’d begged for Razor’s trust.
Anytime you need my help, you have it. No questions asked.
That had been Razor’s pledge to the human after Theo had saved his life some twenty years ago. That promise tasted like ash as he approached the scene.
The fact that Laurel’s vehicle wasn’t at the firebombed cabin had given Razor a small shred of hope. He’d thought maybe she had managed to escape the inferno.
That hope was nothing but cinders now too.
Her face bloomed to life in Razor’s head. He had hours of video surveillance feed of the quiet cabin, but only scant few frames of the beautiful, but reclusive, brunette who lived there.
A picture reel played through his mind’s eye in an instant—her lovely face with its peachy freckles and bright green eyes, her long dark hair bouncing at her back as she drove up to the cabin in a black open-air Jeep then began to carry in bags of groceries.
She had been all soft, generous curves and wholesome sweetness in her gauzy white peasant top and faded jeans, and the sight of her had ignited an unbidden desire in Razor that he didn’t want to acknowledge, even now.
Especially now.
