Bride of the Wolf

She was afraid he would take the baby away.

You’re crazy. But somehow he knew he was right. She wanted to keep the baby, even though she didn’t know the first thing about what he was.

Because she didn’t know what he was.

Easing down into a chair, Heath looked at his callused hands. Loups-garous healed fast, and a Change could erase most all the damage that could be done to a man by wind and weather, knife and gun. But if you pushed your body hard enough, even a hundred Changes couldn’t erase all the marks left by a lifetime of hard living.

He almost reached up to touch his neck again, that one wound so bad it had almost killed him. The scar he’d never lose. He remembered that wanted poster in the general store. How did he think he could ever take care of the baby, even when it was old and strong enough to do without the things only a female could provide? What kind of life could he make for a child?

Better than the life he’d had. The kid would never know what it was like to …

He shook off the memories and looked at his son. The boy seemed to be holding Rachel as hard as she was holding him, his little fists clenched in the shawl around her shoulders and his head snuggled under her chin. He turned in her arms just enough so he could look back at Heath.

There wasn’t any way the kid could understand what Heath had said, but his little round eyes spoke just the same.

I need her.

Hellfire.

“I ain’t interferin’ between you and Lucia,” he said, looking away from both of them. “You do what you think is right.”

A little at a time, Rachel’s shoulders relaxed. She rested her cheek against the baby’s, looking just like a picture of the Madonna Heath had seen once in a church. Benevolent, distant, untouchable.

“You must be very tired, Mr. Renshaw,” she said, her voice a lot easier than his thoughts. “Lucia will rest in my room. If you will hold the baby, I’ll make biscuits and coffee.”

A Madonna who wanted to cook for him. And wanted him to hold the baby.

“I don’t expect nothin’ like that from you, Mrs. McCarrick,” he said gruffly. “We got Maurice.”

“I’m sure he is an excellent cook.”

“Good enough for us, I reckon. Maybe not what a lady is accustomed to.”

The word lady came out sharper and angrier than he’d meant. He only had to see the new stiffness in her body to know she was back to old Rachel again.

“You cannot possibly have any idea what I am accustomed to,” she snapped.

“The way you talk says plenty,” he snapped back.

“Because I have an education? How is that proof of prosperity, Mr. Renshaw? In fact, I have known what it is to—”

She clamped her lips together and blushed. He saw pain in the hollows under her eyes and in her pinched lips. Pain he had noticed before but didn’t want to see.

Who in hell was she? And what exactly had she “known”?

“Mr. Renshaw,” she said suddenly, the way someone does when they want to change the subject in a hurry. “There is another issue we must discuss. Where do you propose to sleep tonight?”

The question caught him by surprise. She must have noticed the other bedroom and realized it was his. It made sense that she would want him out of the house right away.

But there was that sense of something hidden that Heath had felt before; it was in her voice and in her eyes, crouching behind her propriety, clawing its way closer to the surface and shredding what was left of the Madonna’s mask. An unexpected wildness in the brown eyes that glanced at him and quickly away.

He flared his nostrils to take in her scent, so subtle under the stronger smells—laundered cotton, the lingering fragrance of soap, a hint of perspiration. And another he knew as well as he did every bend and twist of Dog Creek.

The truth caught his body before his mind. His cock hardened, straining against his britches, and his breath came short.

Rachel was aware of him. Not just as Jed’s foreman, someone she didn’t like or trust, but as a man. Male to her female. Her scent gave her away sure as the smell of bluebonnets announced the coming of spring. She was thinking about things no married woman should. Things he had decided a prim-and-proper lady like her would probably never think about at all.

And he was thinking the same, even though she wasn’t pretty, couldn’t be trusted and thought he was beneath her.

When she ought to be beneath him, her legs wrapped around his waist …

Heath cursed under his breath. Didn’t matter who or what she was. He couldn’t stop his body from reacting. He’d never been inclined to fight what it needed, even when he wanted nothing as much as to stay far away from anything with tits.

Once, years ago, he’d make the mistake of touching a woman like her. Her kind always denied that kind of wanting because it went against what they wanted to believe. Females like Frankie expected nothing but money from a man. They were as honest as any woman could be; they knew what they were and didn’t try to pretend any different. He could leave their beds and never have to look at them again.

If he ever got into Rachel’s bed …

Heath didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to feel anything for Rachel Lyndon. Not even mindless animal lust.

He grinned at her. “That an invitation, Mrs. McCarrick?” he asked.

Chapter Five

SEEING HER FLINCH didn’t help nearly as much as Heath thought it would. She went so pale that he thought she was going to swoon, and he almost got up to catch her.

She didn’t swoon. The color rushed back into her face, and her eyes went so cold that they could have covered the range in ice.

“I see I have been mistaken in assuming that you were worthy of my husband’s trust,” she said.

If a man had said that to Heath, he would be looking at a broken jaw. But Heath had never come close to hitting a woman. Not even the ones who’d tried to kill him.

“I’ll be movin’ out of the house tonight,” he said, getting up.

She set to rocking the baby, pretending Heath didn’t exist. That rankled more than any spiteful thing she could have said.

“Did Joey tell you about the hands?” he asked, just to make her look at him again.

The poisoned air between them cleared away, and it was all businesslike the way it should have been from the first. “He mentioned something about their leaving,” Rachel said without taking her eyes from the kid. “It will be difficult to run the ranch without them, will it not?”

“It ain’t your worry, Mrs. McCarrick.”

She met his gaze with that familiar spark of defiance. “It is if it affects the baby.”

“It won’t. I already know where I can—”

What in hell was wrong with him? He was explaining himself to her like some sniveling clerk telling his boss the missing money wasn’t his fault. The kid was making him go soft as a banker’s hands.

And it wasn’t as if he had to worry about running the ranch much longer.