Wolf Hunter

“It’s a possibility. What about you? Is danger your drug of choice, or were you trying to get somewhere and got lost?”

Unclenching her hands, Abby then fisted them again, rattled by the stilted repartee. The heat, both hers and his, had become suffocating. He had a gaze like a frigging laser beam that wouldn’t let up or miss much. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was whether this guy would try to hurt her, or not.

Why don’t you make your move?

“Danger isn’t really my thing,” she said.

“Yet here you are, in a place that attracts it.”

“Not for long.”

Listening hard, Abby separated the layers of city noises. Cars paraded down the boulevards in the distance. The faint buzz of insects reached her from the trees to her right.

The air was filled with the smells of dry, sun-drenched pavement and the bitter odor of crushed grass and leaves. Above those things something else, some other scent, surfed the night air. She tagged it as the not-so-sweet odor of the unseen.

Her scalp pricked. Her racing heart gave an extra thump. This Were’s wolf was close to the surface and getting stronger. Whatever lay inside him that she had easily connected to wasn’t going to go away with a bit of conversation.

Something else bothered her, needled at her. If this guy was an Alpha, he’d have a pack close by.

Her odds in favorably dealing with the situation plummeted. At the same time, her morbid fascination for the wolfman kept Abby focused. She wanted to know so much more about him, and about what went on here. Her appetite for those things grew by the second.

Abby held herself tightly to keep from squirming. If Weres like this one possessed animalistic superpowers, he’d have already noticed that she had become a heat-sensing Geiger counter for the very thing that should have had her screaming. Her fevered flesh and skin-ruffling gyrations were the equivalent of inviting the fiery hand of death to slide between her legs.

Hell with that. Due to his looks and masculine vibe, this Were probably had a harem of women willing to take him in. He didn’t need one more willing supplicant. Besides, wolves and humans did not mix, except when those things in an anomalistic fashion resided within one being.

The situation sucked. All outcomes seemed dire. Whatever outlandish thing was taking place between this werewolf and herself had gummed up logic. He was seducing her without any effort on his part at all. He didn’t have to be blatant about it because the seduction worked. All he had to do was stand there, looking like a sexy hunk.

Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl. Get out. Get away.

You, she wanted to shout to the creature across from her, are the very thing my father and his teams despise. There has to be a reason for that.

Lifting her chin defiantly, Abby backed up a step. This is the final test. Will you pounce?

As it turned out, he didn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, he calmly asked her a question.

“Why do you hate the moon, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The question was as unexpected as the earnest ring of curiosity in his voice.

“You said you hate it,” he reminded her.

“I hate what the moon does to people,” Abby said.

Her companion glanced up at the light. “You don’t find the moon beautiful?”

“Its beauty is deceitful, as beauty often is.”

If he got the point and the allusion to himself, he didn’t show it. He took a step toward her, closing some of the distance separating them and setting off another round of sparks that burrowed well below Abby’s waistline. He continued to study her face as if whatever he sought there might be important.

What did he want? An apology for the atrocities her father and his team had inflicted upon his species? Did he want revenge, when he had to know how many humans Weres had killed in Miami in the past year alone?

In hindsight, she should have covered up the logo on her T-shirt that advertised a bar that just happened to also be a field office for Sam Stark’s hunters. She hadn’t taken the time to change, in a hurry to get outside, away from the crowd. Maybe this guy had already made note of it, which would be bad news.

Move, Abby. Hesitation is no longer an option.

No wolf could be allowed to discover where the team kept court, or seek to uncover the source of her own unusual connection to their breed. Those were secrets for keeping behind closed doors, under lock and key, especially when facing a Were male of this caliber.

Damn it, the spell he had put on her had to be broken. Her murky, inexplicable attraction to him had taken her too far off base. She had feared this kind of face to face for a long time.

Use the phone. Make that call.

Yes, and what would she say to her father if he answered the phone? That she’d screwed up this time? That she’d been mesmerized by a wolf? There was no way Sam’s team could find her like this, feverish and out of commission, when so many others expected her to be a chip off the old guy’s block.

Plus, all of a sudden she wasn’t so sure about wanting the team to find the Were across from her who was too damn pretty to be a rug on some billionaire collector’s floor.

“Got to go.”

She needed to hear the urgency in her voice. The muscles of her upper back twitched. Although her heart rate again spiked, she didn’t go anywhere because backward wasn’t the direction she really wanted to take. Every molecule in her body strained to get closer to the wolf in his human skin, while her mind struggled to find a way out of this standoff that made sense.

Do the smart thing. Turn and sprint. Hope he won’t follow.

Why hadn’t she at least tried that?

Was he touching her? No. Yet she felt as if he were.

Could he be holding her there physically with his wolf aura? Yes. Hell, yes.

This wolf was the real deal, times ten. And he was what? Being friendly? They were having a chat, as though the word species didn’t matter?

If this Were internalized her scent, or any other of his cousins trapped her with a purpose the next night, she’d make the obituaries, or worse. One swipe of a claw or a bite that deeply pierced her skin and she might become one of them.

Considering that she survived at all.

Abby’s lips parted for a speech she didn’t make. Without thinking she inched toward this Were like a bug drawn to light, her body, independent of her mind, urging that forbidden touch as if part of her actually wanted to burn. As if the secret guilt she had built up over the years about the whole hunting scene, as well as the lectures from her father, the loneliness she’d endured for so long and the image of werewolf pelts hanging from ceiling beams, would burn with her.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Abby waited for sanity to intervene, hoping it would hurry.

“Will you let me go?” she asked breathlessly.

“Of course you can go. Though I really would like to make sure you get where you’re going safely.”

An offer of safety from the scariest thing out here?

As if she was supposed to believe him.

“Nights here are always dangerous,” he said. “Tonight feels especially tense. Do you sense that?”

“Why care about me at all? You don’t even know me.”