Wolf Hunter

Moonlight is what you’ll need. Your secret is out.

“I’m out there nearly every night,” he confessed. “Working overtime has become a habit on nights when I can’t sleep.”

“But not in uniform. You didn’t wear one last night, and you’re not wearing one now.”

“I’m on my own time.”

“Patrolling that park to look for bad guys, alone, increases the odds of getting hurt,” she pointed out.

“Maybe. It is, however, a necessity.”

He had answered hesitantly, as though he had disclosed more of his secret than he’d meant to. Abby supposed that everything he said could be taken two ways, because this was a creature straddling both worlds. Cameron Mitchell had one foot in this one, and the other foot someplace foreign, and straight out of myth. Would any purely human soul truly be able to understand what that felt like?

Would Sam, if he knew that a Were could be a cop?

Abby wanted to shout out to her father that Cameron Mitchell was one of the good guys, after all. The fact that there really were good Weres was a validation of her former theory that now made her feel sick.

How many others like Cameron Mitchell had her father’s team captured unquestioningly with the shoot-on-sight method of hunting? Had Sam ever taken the time to find out?

“Some of the people in this bar will also be out there tonight,” Abby said meaningfully.

How much could she give away with Sam looking on?

“Guys who aren’t cops, but have a similar agenda.”

Had Cameron understood her cryptic remark? He glanced at the crowd over his shoulder.

“Possibly more of them than you know,” Abby cautioned. “For reasons other than the reasons you might expect.”

A secret in return for a secret. He’d go away and avoid the park tonight, and she’d only have to live in private with the fact of what she had done the night before, with him.

Did this veiled warning to him about the danger in this room fall under the category of helpful werewolf hints?

“You’re not talking about yourself, I hope.” An edge of concern returned to Cameron’s voice as he turned back to her. “You wouldn’t go outside on a night like this?”

“Nope. I’m not in need of another good lay, since the last one was decent enough to last me awhile.”

Cameron Mitchell studied her openly, blatantly, not caring if anyone noticed. His face showed no emotion. His tone was carefully managed. “Meet me in an hour.”

“No.” Abby slammed a glass down on the bar. With all the noise going on, no one in the crowded room paid attention. Each successive round of drinks meant that voices got louder. More people had come in, blocking Sam’s view of her flushed face.

She couldn’t breathe.

“Meet me,” Cameron Mitchell repeated.

“Bite me,” Abby whispered. “Oh, wait, you did that already, plus a whole lot more.”

He seemed to think over her remark. She expected a growling reply that didn’t come, and let loose a sigh of exasperation. She was sweating, a sign of her body rebelling against this test of her willpower. She fielded the urge to hurdle the bar and either jump into this Were’s talented lap, or sprint for the door. High drama either way. Endless trouble.

He wasn’t helping. He caused her internal chaos.

No. That wasn’t exactly true. She had brought this on herself, by being unable to resist him last night.

No way she was going to find out what he would be like tonight when moonlight hit him, though—the same moonlight she had always detested for its role in twisting monsters out of their napping places. Moonlight that also had the power to affect her in strangely personal ways that she would not dare mention to the wolf across from her.

Nor would she be clearer about the danger awaiting this Were tonight. Sam had a lot of friends, a couple of them nearing where she stood transfixed by a creature they had hard-ons to hunt.

Her lips moved, though she wasn’t sure what she’d say until she heard it. “It’s quite ironic, you know, that you’ve come to the one bar in Miami that you should have avoided at all costs.”

As Cameron Mitchell searched her face in a replay of his riveted attention of the night before, Abby counted her heartbeats without having to press a finger to her neck. The suspense of this meeting mounted. Emotions flowed as if a tap had been left open. She felt anger, fear, love, hate, longing and lust—all there at once as this man’s eyes continued to hold her hostage. His gaze was both fire and ice, disconcerting and suggestive, taunting and sympathetic. His golden eyes were equally strange, and utterly familiar.

“I know what you are,” she said.

That surprised him. The mouth that had pleasured her so completely and adeptly nearly twenty-four hours earlier opened. But he didn’t speak. Instead, he carefully scanned the room before returning his attention to her. Then he raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“I knew last night what you are,” Abby said. “I knew what followed us out there, and what those gangbangers who killed your friend really were.”

The room seemed to darken once she’d gotten that out. Movement slowed. Voices dulled to a background murmur. None of that was real, though, and only the effect of meeting this wolf again so soon, and in less than stellar circumstances.

Did she want to speak to him of things beyond this terse confession? Yes. In another minute, though, her father would come over to see why she hadn’t filled orders, and who this guy was. If luck was with her, after one look at his daughter—at the pink face and the visible quakes—Sam might merely assume her to be ill, and cut her some slack.

Or else he might put two and two together and come up with wolf.

Swiping at the trickle of perspiration sliding down the side of her face, Abby wondered what would happen until then. Possibly another standoff between Cameron Mitchell and herself?

She felt so damn hot. And the wolf who was a badge-carrying member of the Miami PD had gone mute.

More than any of that, the thing she feared more than all the guns in Miami lay just past that doorway, up in the sky. Like a giant magnet, the moon whispered to her as though she were one of the moon’s cult, and as though that light ruled what flowed in her veins to some minor degree.

“Abby.”

She tossed her hair, unwilling to listen to anything her one-night stand had to say. The dilemma of what to do next was an excruciating one. If she stayed still, the hammer would fall. Being near to this Were made it too difficult to keep herself in line.

She felt jazzed, wired up—not all of that due to the fact that she had toyed with a wolf and was dealing with the consequences. The bigger fact here was that she had been scouting for Weres for so long, she might have started to feel like a wolf herself.