A Werewolf's Valentine: BBW Wolf Shifter Paranormal Romance (4 page)

What to say . . . what to say . . .

With him in her arms, she slid deeply into sleep.

Four

West

He lay awake for a long time, his body so blissed out he couldn’t move. When he finally told himself he should get up, gather his clothes, and go, inside him his wolf howled.

Okay. It wasn’t like he was in any hurry. And her arms twined around him. Seemed rude to push her away, just to be running again in the rain. In fact, it seemed a crime against everything that was good in life to leave her without a word. So he’d wait, listening in contentment to every soft breath . . .

And sleep took him so deeply and profoundly that when he woke he had no idea where he was.

Astonishment was fast followed by wariness. He
never
fell asleep like that when he was with someone. He rarely slept as a human. That could get you killed.

Sex had been something he could give and take for trade, sometimes as a gift, but so far in his life he’d never met anyone who fitted him as if she’d been made for him, fitted so well he could sleep in the shelter of her arms.

He turned his head, to find he was alone. He heard the low murmur of her voice in the far room, so he rose on his elbow, then gave in to overwhelming temptation and buried his face in the sheets where she’d lain, sniffing up her sweet-salty, spicy scent. It wired straight to his brain  . . .

Damn—he was hard again.

He spotted the bathroom, snatched up his clothes, and went in. When he came out dressed, he found her sitting on the edge of her bed, arms clasped around her elbows.

He’d meant to go—that was their deal, no promises, no expectations—but her downcast face dragged the words out of him, “McKenzi? Was it me?”

She looked up, giving him a quick smile, but it was perfunctory, almost pained. “Oh, hell no. West, last night was . . .” She shook her head. “It was awesome.
You
were awesome. Right now I don’t have better words than that because my head is full of my nephew. That was my mom just now. My dad and uncle are on a delivery run, so she asked me to drive down to the high school and pick up Rolf. Who I guess got in a fight with some young jerk he has issues with.”

West paused in the act of pulling on his coat. “A fight? Does he need help with self-defense?”

She gave him a questioning look, and again the words seemed to be pulled out of him. “Between twenty-seven different foster homes and hitting the road for good, I learned something about self-defense.”

Her brown eyes rounded in horror. “God, that sounds awful.” Then she shook her head again. “I’m afraid he might have caused it. He’s not a bully, or anything like that,” she added quickly. “I don’t know what’s doing this. Six months ago he was just a nerdy kid into Harry Potter and videogames. Now, it’s like he can’t get through a day without getting mad, or upset. Usually both. And he won’t talk to any of us anymore. I don’t know if he even knows what’s wrong.”

West said, “Then he probably won’t talk to a total stranger, either. On the other hand, sometimes it’s easier to talk to someone you don’t know.”

McKenzi’s head lifted. The small movement, the flick of her eyes, filled with hope, caused an ache in his chest, and they looked at one another while his nerves tingled as if bees filled with light crawled over him.

“Okay,” she said. “At this point we’ll try anything. If you don’t really mind. If you’re not in any hurry.”

“Got nowhere else to be,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said as she jumped up and reached for her coat. “There are blueberry muffins in the oven. If you’ll pull them out when the timer goes, help yourself. And the banjo is in that closet there, if you want to see it.”

She jammed her phone in her pocket, grabbed her car keys and her purse, and ran out the door. He sat where he was until he heard the VW’s engine fire up, then he straightened slowly, looking around the little cottage, feeling his way into new emotional territory. Usually he was gone by now, weaving his experience into a song. Or, if he needed to run as a wolf, pausing for a howl—

He looked around, wondering if he should shift and explore. It was then that he became aware that his wolf had been very quiet since he fell asleep the night before. That, too, was something new. Ordinarily the wolf would be restless, scratching at the inside of him to be on the move. He shut his eyes, listening inside, and sensed his wolf waiting. Watching.

She’s not a wolf
. If she’d been a wolf shifter, he would have known as soon as he’d walked into the cottage. But he hadn’t even thought about shifters, or shifting until this moment. Every sense had been too filled with McKenzi.

Rain poured in sheets outside. He looked out the window at it, knowing that he could leave. As a wolf, he was used to running in all weather. But he’d promised McKenzi he’d wait. Try to talk to this nephew. And there were those muffins baking.

These were excuses, and he knew it, but his wolf was still so quiet within him.

He walked to the closet and found the banjo. It was a decent five string with a tone ring, expensive some twenty or thirty years ago. Someone had restrung it since. He tuned it, then began playing softly until the oven dinged. He found an oven mitt, and was sliding the muffins out, which filled the room with a delicious smell, when the VW growled up the hill again and parked.

McKenzi came in, her tight mouth and squared shoulders indicating tension. She was followed by a skinny kid whose lank hair hung in his pimply face.

“Want some muffins, Rolf?” McKenzi said in a too-casual voice. West suspected that the problems had been worse than she’d said—or maybe that was her worry. Did the kid not know how precious that was, having people who worried? Of course he didn’t. The most useless words in the world were nags about gratitude. It wasn’t just the young who took for granted things like safety, a warm house, a clean bed, and people who cared enough to make sure you had them.

“I know you like blueberry,” McKenzi said. “Looks like they just came out, nice and hot. Hungry?”

“No,” the kid said sullenly. And to West, “Who are you?”

“Name’s West.”

West picked up the banjo, to have something to do with his hands. The kid glared at him in obvious suspicion, his reddened knuckles telling their own story. West strummed a couple of chords on the banjo, his mind sinking into music.

After a minute or so, Rolf said in a completely different voice, “You can really play that thing?”

For answer, West jammed out a Scruggs-style bluegrass chorus, then shifted to a more melodic ballad.

“Wow,” the kid said, then his eyes flickered away and down, as if he’d been caught at something forbidden.

West just kept playing, as McKenzi brought out plates, muffins, a knife, and butter. Then West set aside the banjo and grabbed a couple of muffins. McKenzi did as well. Rolf also took one, with a slightly challenging air, but when nobody said anything to him, he chomped down, making the muffin vanish in three bites, then snatched another one and ate that, too, with the ferocious appetite of the young cub.

West bent his head to hide a smile, then it hit him, what he’d been sensing. Smelling.

This kid was a cub.

No. Yes?

He leaned over to get another muffin, sniffing carefully. Even his blunted human senses picked up undertones in the boy’s acrid sweat. Here was another wolf, this one on that painful threshold between cub and young wolf.

West’s gaze lifted to consider McKenzi. Did she know it? Did any of Rolf’s people? West was certain he was right. That instinct was too subtle to define in words, but the inner animal somehow knew its own kind.

West ate the last bite, then picked up the banjo again, and started playing one of his old travel songs, composed when he was young. When the intro was done, he began to sing. The rhymes weren’t very good, the rhythms predictable because he’d made the song when all the rhythms and patterns in music were still new to him.

But he watched Rolf’s face slowly lift, the tension dissolving from his bony shoulders and knobby, fast-growing hands as he listened to the song about chasing the dream of endless summer, packmates at your sides as you run for the joy of running.

When West was done, he set aside the banjo. “Do you want to talk about what happened, Rolf?” he asked.

Too soon.

Rolf’s face tightened into anger—betrayal—and his voice cracked as he yelled at his aunt, “You blabbed to a stranger?”

He jumped up and ran out of the cottage, the door banging into the wall as rain slanted in.

“
Don’t
slam the door—” she called, slumping.

“I’m sorry,” West said at the same moment McKenzi turned to him, exclaiming, “I’m sorry.”

She looked sick with regret. “I guess I shouldn’t have dragged you into this.”

He raised his hand. “I know you don’t have any reason to trust me. But I’m going to ask you, just the same. Will you let me handle this?”

Her lips parted, her eyes huge and dilated. Beneath the pretty blue shirt her breasts rose as she drew in a deep breath, and heat kindled within him, but this time he banked it down. “Please.”

“If you can help him,” McKenzi said, then sighed shortly. “At this point, I think we’d agree to anything.”

He dipped his head, opened the door, and dashed out into the rain. It was coming down so hard that his human vision barely extended twenty feet. But that was all right. It got him to the other side of the next cottage, which was cold and dark, obviously empty. He shucked his clothes with practiced speed, tucked them in a roll under the stoop, and shifted.

At once the wolf world overlaid the human world with scents. Rain and cold were unimportant details. The boy’s flight led straight up the hill, beyond a rambling ranch house, and onto a plateau full of scrub and dominated by live oak and eucalyptus.

The trail led through those to the edge of a hill, where he discovered a raw gouge in the ground, where the sodden soil had given way. Rolf had tumbled down the hill, fetching up against a sturdy bush—in his wolf shape. His body, threatened by the fall, had managed that first shift on its own.

West plunged down, sniffing the cub all over. He was alive—unhurt—but lay there shocked, tangled in his clothing. West nipped and tugged, and the now-meaningless cloth came free, leaving a terrified narrow-skulled cub with black flanks.

West licked his muzzle, nudging him and giving him an insistent paw. Rolf rolled onto his belly, crouched and still shivering, his ears flat. West dipped his head, front paws out in a bow, then nosed Rolf into standing. Rolf slowly stood, ears twitching back and forth. Another lick, a twitch of the head, and West bounded away—Rolf following slowly, step by step.

West circled back and huff-barked encouragement.

Rolf’s ears flicked up, his tail rose partway, and this time, when West bounded away, Rolf bounded after. And so West showed him how to run, and leap, and sniff a trail, and mark a territory.

Rolf copied everything West did.

It had been years since West had been around young wolves, and he’d never been there for a wolf’s first shift. But he let his wolf take over, introducing Rolf to the wonderful world of wolf life with all its rich, tantalizing scents.

When both were thoroughly wet, and Rolf’s tongue lolled from exhaustion, West barked sharply:
Pay attention
.

Then he shifted to human form, and shifted back.

Rolf whimpered, ears flattening, as he shook all over. West circled him, nosing him at shoulder and haunch and head:
Concentrate.

Then he shifted again. Rolf shook his head slowly, nose dipping, then suddenly he flickered, and a skinny, goosebump pale boy lay in the mud.

“Good work,” West said. “Now shift back.” He turned into his wolf.

Rolf tightened all over, gritted his teeth—held his breath and clenched his fists—then let out a strangled yell of effort that turned into a yip of joy as he, too, turned into a wolf.

West circled him, pointed his nose toward the oak trees cresting the hill, then bent to sniff their trail, showing Rolf how to follow his own scent back to his home and safety.

As soon as Rolf recognized his home territory, up went his tail and ears and he trotted ahead, through the oaks toward the summit of the hill. West followed more slowly, and paused behind a shielding row of scrubby bushes. Now that he had leisure to check the territory, his nose disclosed a network of old and new trails, all made by cats. He trod carefully, senses alert as he raised his head to sniff for Rolf.

To his surprise, Rolf hadn’t vanished. Instead, he waited at the top of the rise, with the roof of the ranch house lying five hundred yards away. When West joined him, Rolf’s tail plumed, and he stretched out his paws in a play bow, his bright yellow eyes expectant above his wolfish grin, before he bounded away and streaked toward the house where a human figure appeared.

It was McKenzi, who looked at the wolf cub dancing around her, then exclaimed, “Rolf?” Then, “Oh my God, it’s you, isn’t it? This is so awesome, this is amazing! Let’s go call your Dad—no, wait, go get some clothes on. I’ll get my phone.”

She ran back to the cottage as Rolf trotted, tail high, to the ranch house.

West followed more slowly, his nose sorting scents. He reached the place where McKenzi had been standing, and recognized immediately her wonderful salty-sweet spice aroma. But it wasn’t isolated. He sniffed again, recognizing it, and then his wolf brain made the connection. Out of that tangled network of many, many cat scents new and old, one of them was hers.