He was at least seven feet tall, naked, broad—shouldered, and powerfully built, with wild black hair falling around a face that was startlingly human. Short dark fur still covered much of his body—thickest over his chest and forearms and down his powerful legs—but he was no beast now.
He was a man…a man with strange, vivid blue eyes.
Kiera stared at him in shock. What the hell was happening?
But explanations would have to wait. The man didn’t even look at her. In one impossibly swift motion he snatched up the fallen stun gun, slapped the side panel open, cleared the jam with a sharp twist of his fingers, and brought the weapon up to his shoulder.
The Vorn which had seemed momentarily startled by his change, lunged.
Without hesitation, the man fired.
The blast caught the beast square between the eyes, and it dropped like a ton of bricks, crashing to the ground so close to them that the earth shuddered under Kiera’s palms.
Silence crashed down after it.
The big male lowered the stun gun and turned to face her. His voice, when he spoke, was deep and rough and rusty as though he hadn’t used it in a very long time.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
18
KIERA
Kiera stared at him, still on her hands and knees in the red—stained grass, her heart pounding so hard she thought it might come out of her chest.
For a long moment, she couldn’t seem to do anything else. She couldn’t look away…couldn’t quite make her mind accept what her eyes were telling it.
Because standing in front of her—naked as the day he was born and holding her stun rifle as though he’d used one a thousand times before—was not a wolf but a man.
A really huge man.
A huge, naked, very muscular man with wild black hair and the same broad shoulders and powerful build Buck had possessed in his animal form—only now he was standing upright on two legs instead of four.
His face was human, but not entirely. There was something sharp and clean and faintly wolfish about his features—high cheekbones, a strong jaw, a straight nose, and eyes so vivid a blue they almost seemed to glow.
Short, dense fur covered parts of him where a human man would only have hair—his broad chest…the backs of his powerful forearms…his thighs and calves. It looked soft and thick and dark against his tan skin.
And God help her, she absolutely should not have been looking lower, especially not after nearly getting eaten by a Vorn, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.
Just for a second–just one glance.
And sure enough–he had two shafts in his human form too.
That, more than anything else, made her believe—made her understand at some deep instinctive level that this really was Buck. Her Buck. Her strange, wonderful, overprotective wolf.
Only now he was somehow a man too.
He was still looking at her, those electric—blue eyes fixed on her face with a mixture of concern and what looked suspiciously like nervousness.
Kiera swallowed hard.
“Who the hell are you? I mean, you’re Buck, right?” she asked, wanting to be sure.
He blinked and then said, in that same deep, rusty voice, “Yes, I’m Brux…er, Buck.”
Kiera stared at him another beat.
“So…you’re my wolf?” She still couldn't quite wrap her head around it.
