Harlequin Nocturne May 2015 Box Set: Wolf Hunter\Possessed by a Wolf (49 page)

“Hear, hear,” said the Horsemen in chorus. “So say we all!”

Sam winked. “I underestimated you. If you ever want a seat at the Company table, just let me know.”

“One step at a time, gentlemen,” Lexie said with an arched brow. “I'm not sure your benefit plan covers half the hazards I've seen these last few days.”

“Oh, come on,” said Chloe. “You're cohabiting with a werewolf. After that kind of vacuuming, how much worse could it be?”

* * *

Lexie found her way to the kitchens much later that night. The fabric of her long taffeta skirts swished as she walked, the sea-green color luminous in the dim light of the palace hallways. She was stuffed to bursting with so much good food and wine and laughter, she was about ready to collapse right where she was and sleep for a month. In fact, as she pushed through the swinging doors and saw the stainless steel tables gleaming in the overhead lights, she thought they might do as an impromptu bed. Who knew eating could be so exhausting?

Everyone but Faran had left. The kitchen was spotlessly clean, every dish washed and put away, and every surface scrubbed. It was quiet, nothing but the hum of the refrigerators filling the air.

He was leaning against one of the workstations, arms folded across his broad chest, and staring at the table before him. On the table sat a single chocolate cupcake on a plain white plate.

Lexie drifted slowly between the worktables toward him, her sequined flats tapping softly on the tiles. The air was still warm from the ovens, and she let her silky shawl slip from her shoulders to dangle from her elbows.

“Are you going to eat it or interrogate it?” she asked, drawing near. “I've never seen a cupcake tremble like that before.”

His mouth quirked, but it wasn't quite a smile. “Do you know why they call me Famine?”

She leaned next to him, her arm touching his. “Because you eat a lot?”

He took a breath. “It's the horseman I fear the most. It's not just food. It's scarcity. Of family, of community, of everything that makes the pack work. The alphas of the pack keep order, but they also make sure all systems are working. If their world is going right, there is enough to go around. No famine.”

She put a hand on his arm, feeling the hard muscle beneath his sleeve. “They're providers.”

“Wolves have a complex society. I'm on my own now. My pack is gone. But that doesn't mean I lack the instinct to keep a community safe.”

There was a lot he still hadn't said about his past, but it was coming out in bits and pieces. Lexie didn't push for details, but gathered scraps like this one up. One day there would be enough to quilt together the story of his childhood. They were coming more frequently now as the trust between them grew.

He put an arm around her shoulders. “You look gorgeous tonight.”

Lexie leaned her head against him. “You wowed your audience.”

“Do you like the cupcake?”

“It's a very nice cupcake.”

“I made it for you. Chocolate on chocolate.”

She really thought she might faint if she ate anything more. “It's lovely but I'm stuffed.”

“One bite?” He looked pleading, his blue eyes almost childlike.

Heaven help her, she couldn't say no to those eyes. “Do you have a fork?”

He looked around the kitchen. “One or two.” And then he handed her one that had been sitting next to him all along. His movements were a little too quick, as if he was nervous.

Those nerves found an answering flutter in her stomach. Something was afoot.

A little apprehensive, Lexie plunged the fork into the cupcake. It sundered the dessert in a rich waft of chocolate. The frosting quickly buried the fork, the layer of butter and cocoa thick without being too much. The cake sprang apart, just the right balance between fluffy and fudgy. It was a masterpiece.

The two halves of the cupcake parted, one half falling with a crinkle of paper frill. Lexie lifted the fork to lick it clean, but something caught on the tines.

It was a diamond ring, smudged with chocolate. Lexie's heart squeezed, seeming to leap inside her with a flutter of panic and delight. She tipped the ring from the fork to her hand, turning the gems to the light. “Oh, my gosh.”

Fire sparked from the stones, one white diamond flanked by two smoky ones. Dark and light. Man and wolf. Woman and fey. It was...perfect.

“Amelie's wasn't the only ring I've been keeping,” he said quietly. “I was going to give this to you a long time ago.”

“There was a reason it had to wait,” she said, a lump in her throat crowding her words. “I wasn't there yet. I didn't know who I was. Or who you really were.”

“We both had more to learn,” he said gently.

Tears filled Lexie's eyes and she had to bite her lips to keep them from trembling. She sniffed, trying to pull herself together while Faran watched with a bemused expression.

With brisk movements, she dusted the crumbs from the ring, licking them from her fingers. The dark, sweet taste burst on her tongue like a benediction.
Sweet heavens, can he bake!

She passed him the ring. “Here, you put it on me.”

For the first time ever, his fingers felt cold against hers. When he fumbled the tiny gold band, she knew it was nerves. That just made her love him the more.

He didn't need to worry. It fit perfectly. It suited her hand perfectly. The design and quality were impeccable. He could bake and he knew jewelry, too. “Faran, it's beautiful.”

“Um, will you marry me?” he asked. “I think I was supposed to do that part first.”

Lexie gave a hiccuping kind of laugh. She slid her arms around his neck and rested her cheek against his chest, listening to his heartbeat. She wanted to be near him, to be warmed by him and held close in the circle of his arms. Always. “Yes.”

“I love you,” he said, tilting her head up for a kiss. It was long and luxuriant, sweet and dark and not unlike the cupcake.

Which they shared, even if Lexie already had eaten too much. There's always room for chocolate, especially the grand chocolate ganache of love.

No cupcake was ever so significant, or so admired as the one Lexie and Faran consumed in the Marcari palace kitchens at two o'clock that January morning. It was the first of a spectacular history of cupcakes between them.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from WOLF HUNTER by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom.

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Chapter 1

I
t was only moonlight. A damn luminous light show...

But Abby Stark stood frozen in a pool of it.

A choice four-letter word slipped through her clenched teeth.

Tonight's recon should have been routine. It was too late to second-guess what had gone wrong. One move now, no matter how slight, and whatever was out there in the dark, whatever had stopped her in her tracks, would find her. Breaking the silence by talking into her cell phone would mean attracting any number of bad guys roaming the area.

She couldn't afford to be caught with her pants down in this notorious Miami park. Her mind brought up the words
dead meat
.

The thing out there in the dark, too close for comfort, didn't even begin to fit the term
bad guy
. Its presence left an eerie wave of ripples in the air. Otherness rolled across her skin in waves.

This visitor was not human.

Big freaking surprise.

The thing heading her way was trouble with a bite. A large male, her senses confirmed, and charismatic enough to affect her from a distance. Not just any old monster, either, according to her gut reaction. Something special. Encountering his vibe had been similar to slamming up against a brick wall face-first.

Damn it, had he come close enough to see her?

Was he paying attention?

Don't move.

Flicking her gaze from right to left brought up nothing out of the ordinary. Then again, most of the planet's darker things were difficult to catch a glimpse of in the darkness that bred them.

Adding to the problem was the rain of coldhearted moonlight highlighting every move she'd dare to make—like a circus spotlight pointed in her direction when she was supposed to be in stealth mode.

Step right up, folks. See the girl who's about to have her ass kicked.

Moisture began to gather in the valley between her breasts. Sweat dampened her forehead. Her skin burned beneath her black fatigues because her engine was revved but stuck in neutral.

How screwed was she, on a scale of one to ten?

There was nothing to be done now, Abby supposed, short of wishing for backup, though she couldn't decide what would be worse—being caught by a monster, or having her father's team of elite monster hunters know she'd been found by one of those monsters.

That's what her father called the man-wolf hybrids that had recently claimed this park.
Monsters.

Her head came up.

The night rustled as if something had just punched its way through the dark. More nerve endings fired as Abby strained to see what approached. This guy had turned the tables, making the watcher a target, rather than the other way around.

She didn't like anything about this.

Sensing Others was what she had always been good at, yet she'd been inexcusably late to this particular party. The hot flashes burning through her were a telling sign that she'd found the very thing she'd been seeking tonight.
Werewolf.
A beast that also might have found her.

Unfortunately, this sucker's presence seemed strong. It might even be a full-blooded beast, though she'd never come across one in the fourteen years she'd spent scouting for her father's team. If not one of the mysterious Lycans, this Were's pedigree had to run parallel to that status. The older the bloodline, the stronger the wolf.

Who are you?

Abby fisted her hands.

To her relief, her watcher wouldn't be a full-fledged beast tonight, since the moon wouldn't be full for another twenty-four hours, though he'd be close enough to being a beast to have set off warning signals.

Her nerves were virtually singing.

Show yourself, wolf. I know you're there.

Abby hoped he wouldn't actually take her up on the offer. Not a creature this potent. Real toughness, a trait she'd inherited from her father, fell short of the mark when dealing with big male werewolves, a fact brought home by the ribbon of fear weaving its way up her spine over the thought of how excited this Were would be tonight, so near to a full lunar phase. He would be restless.

Hell, she was restless. And puzzled.

Whether werewolves were furred-up or not, her intuitive sense of them remained the same. She could pick Weres out of a crowd. She'd always known they were around. But the intensity of the spark igniting deep in her belly at that moment, when stumbling upon this guy, also resembled some sort of messed-up sexual craving. That was new. Brand-new.

Mixed signals between fear and lust? Had to be, because no way in hell could feelings of lust be right.

I'm no amateur, you beast.

I've been around.

In her father's private and very personal war on werewolves, a war that had started with greed before escalating to be so much more, she had been more than useful.

The going rate for a wolf hide chimed in at five hundred dollars in the European black markets. For a fully morphed werewolf pelt the dollar decibel moved over, altering that sum to a full ten grand. In another category altogether came rare, pure-blooded Lycan pelts, skinned before the wolf shifted back to its humanlike form. The grand total for remnants of the king of beasts was fifty thousand bucks. Enough to build a swimming pool.

But Sam Stark's war on Weres went deeper than dollar signs. The bigger, darker motivation for werewolf haters like her father outclassed thoughts of money and reaping vengeance on a nasty criminal element that had been feasting on humans in Miami and elsewhere for quite some time. Sam's motivation came under the classification of genocide. The elimination of beings unlike himself.

The goal of the TTD, an acronym for Take Them Down, was to cull all mutants with moon-tweaked genetics from the population—creatures that could pass for human some of the time, but weren't really human at all.

Abby didn't like the bad stuff. She never accompanied the team when they hunted werewolves, and didn't care to witness what they brought back. Her awareness of Weres had grown more intense as time passed, and now seemed almost personal.

Heck, she was the last person to understand how that intuitive connection to Weres worked, but hoped it didn't go both ways. All she had ever wanted was for werewolf violence against humans in her own backyard to stop. And here she stood, being stalked by one of those same hybrids from a species doing real damage around town.

So, who is going to show up, and what will you do?

Without a completely full moon, Weres looked like everyone else, with human heads, shoulders, arms and legs. Some of them would speak English.

In human form, wolfmen were tall and tautly muscled, with plenty of supersize capabilities, such as being able to smell her from several yards away.

Like this one must have.

Would he eventually appear in his human skin cocoon? Fake being a jogger? Play at acting like just another guy out for a midnight stroll in a park that no one in their right mind would trespass in alone without an Uzi— unless that mindless sucker happened to be her, with a very special agenda that made dangerous places her job sites of necessity.

This park was a nightmare.

More human bodies were found each year in public parks than anyplace else in Miami, outside of the city center. Bodies turned up without bullet holes or knife wounds, trashed by bite marks and the deep grooves of razor-sharp claws—wounds the Miami PD had no way to explain because not everyone knew about monsters, or that they actually existed.

The Starks knew.

So did handfuls of other people.

Hunters from all over the world came to Miami to join her father's underground big-game hunting expeditions. Some of those people actually believed they were doing God's work.

I know what you are, wolf.

I know you're there.

Reality hit hard. Odds being odds, Abby had figured that someday this kind of accident might happen. In all those years of service to the TTD, she'd never gotten within a couple yards of any big Were. She had never allowed herself to.

Now what?

This one was getting closer by the second—close enough to make her blood simmer. The initial quake of recognition that had rocked her backward splintered into smaller quakes. Her knees felt gummy. Her skin was hot. Weres were often volatile and always dangerous. Right then the sense of danger seemed extreme.

Come out, damn it. Let's get this over with.

As Abby saw it, she was fresh out of options. It would have been useless to try to outrun a strong male when chasing prey is what they did so well, and this guy's presence alone had nearly knocked her off her feet. There hadn't been time to find cover after her initial awareness of him. Currently, she stood in the open, completely exposed.

Why don't you come out?

Are you toying with me?

At that moment, Abby hated the moonlight that ruled these beasts more than ever. She hated everything about the moon.

Shit.
How far was she from help?

She'd been cornered between two of the walls separating one of Miami's megamansions from the east end of the park. Although she had been in worse places numerous times, being stuck in the open and drenched in moonlight didn't help her chances.

Attached to her leg, above her right boot, a knife rested in its sheath. Her cell phone was keyed to her father and the rest of his hunters waiting for news at her father's bar. Short of using the blade, throwing the phone at a beast in man form would be an unconscionably girlie thing to do.

For the record, I haven't been that kind of girl for some time now
, she wanted to shout.

“Damn moon. I hate you.”

“In that case, this is probably the last place you'd want to be tonight,” a deep masculine voice returned from the shadows.

Contact.

He had spoken out loud.

Pulses of pure adrenaline, fierce and feral, skittered through Abby, producing a series of massive electrical jolts. Her stomach twisted into knots. Her teeth slammed together. Staring at what stepped out from under the trees, her hands flew to her neck in an automatic gesture of self-defense, as if in man form or not, her visitor might go for her jugular.

And God help her, part of her untimely inertia was due to the fact that her impression of this guy, from afar, hadn't been wrong.

This sucker was one hundred percent intimidating.

Copyright © 2015 by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom