Wanted By The Billionaire Wolf (Heroes of Shifter Creek 4)

©Copyright 2015 by
Clara Moore
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Wanted by the Billionaire Wolf

By:
Clara Moore

Wanted by the Billionaire Wolf

Chapter 1: Dark

“I can feel it, this wild inside of me. It thrashes and howls and growls, until all I can do, is scream just to cover the sounds. If I had known that the solution to my darkness was so simple, I would have done a lot of things differently in my life. I would have acted sooner. The best way to keep my wild at bay is to embrace it. And if that makes me too dark for this world, so be it.”

Tears were streaming down Sharee’s face. Of all the things she would have ever expected him to say,
that
really wasn’t it. He wasn’t supposed to give up and in. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. She felt heartbroken and more than a little betrayed…which she was sure was exactly the effect
he
had been shooting for.

Damn him
, she thought furiously.
Damn him to hell and back.

“What are you doing?”

Sharee jumped. She hastily wiped the tears off her face and pushed the chair back, the little wheels rolling her away from the screen she was not supposed to be looking at. On the page, the word “END” still taunted her with its final, Arial Bold characters.

She looked up and was not surprised to find the shadow of an amused grin on Tristan’s handsome features. She was not supposed to look at his work until he asked her to, but they both knew she could never resist the temptation to peek. He hardly pretended to be annoyed by it anymore. Besides, he knew she didn’t do it out of an impulse to pry; it was just that she couldn’t help herself. Sharee lived for good stories, and Tristan’s words were just too beautiful to pass up.

They were not the only beautiful thing about him, either. By then, the two of them had reached a high enough level of intimacy that he didn’t even bother to cover up when he got out of the shower in the morning—and Sharee would never dream of asking him. Presently, he stood across the desk in the studio with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. Sharee knew that if she looked, she would see the lines of his hipbones disappear past the fluffy white waistband of the towel. She knew that if she let her gaze run along the impressive length of his figure, she would be treated to lean, strong muscles and smooth skin.

But Sharee didn’t look and didn’t let her gaze run, because Tristan was not her boyfriend. Tristan happened to be her boss, and despite the intimacy that inevitably came with assisting a genius author practically 24/7, Sharee still prided herself in her professionalism. She only allowed herself to fantasize about him within the privacy of her own apartment. 

So, even then, she forced herself to ignore his nakedness and just meet his eyes—dark blue like a stormy sea, and sharp as a razor blade. Sharee swallowed past her suddenly dry mouth. Sometimes professionalism was really hard to keep a hold on.

Focus, goddamnit,
she reprimanded herself sternly.

“Sorry,” she offered, although they both knew she really wasn’t sorry at all. “You said you might finish it during the night, I
had
to check.”

Tristan grinned openly this time. “Sure you did, darlin’.”

Sharee shivered. He had begun calling her “darling” the very first day she had started to work for him, over two years back, and he had not stopped since. The word rolled off his tongue like sin.

“What did you think?” he asked as he took a seat on the bright red armchair.

Sharee really wished he would go put on some clothes; it was hard to keep track of a conversation with him lounging about half naked.

“I thought it was very dark,” she said honestly. “Maybe a little too much.”

Tristan arched a dark eyebrow. “Too dark?”

Sharee hesitated. Tristan was generally good with constructive criticism, but even after two years, she was still mindful of not crossing the line.

“Go on, darlin’,” he said. “You know I can take it.”

She knew. She took a deep breath and resolved to get all of her thoughts out. “Tristan, this is the third main character you kill off in a year. Don’t you think it might be a little too much?”

Tristan Jacobsen was a prolific writer. His latest series centering on werewolves was going at a particularly steady pace. Like anything else that came out of his pen, it was selling by the thousands. No one could write horror like Tristan. He was generally viewed as Stephen King’s heir…even by Stephen King himself. There was something gripping and real about the way Tristan wrote about the things that go bump in the night, something ancestral that spoke to the reader.

But no matter how dark those terrors might be, his books always contained a message of hope in the end. Not so much lately. Lately, his books had gotten scarier, darker, of a darkness that left no escape. It certainly left no way out for the protagonists.

“I mean,” Sharee continued when Tristan did not react, “how do you expect people to get attached to your protagonists if you keep offing them at the end?”

“Eric Stratham is not dead.”

“He lost his battle with his were nature and went dark side,” Sharee argued. “He might as well be.”

Tristan shrugged.

Sharee stared at him. “Tristan, I mean it,” she said, as gently as she could. “People need redemption. They need hope. It’s why they love your books so much, because you always gave them that no matter how terrifying the rest of the story was.”

“Yeah, well,” Tristan stretched his arms above his head, yawning hugely, “redemption and hope aren’t always in the cards.”

“Fair enough,” Sharee admitted. “But do they really need to not be in the cards for three books in a row?”

Tristan huffed, exasperated. “Look, if they don’t like it, they can read something else.” He got to his feet and walked out of the studio, presumably in search of clothes.

Sharee stared after him, stunned. “I’m just saying,” she called out. “This is a series. You may want to consider leaving some of the characters alive for your next book!”

“I’ll think about it!” Tristan called back, in the absent tone of someone who most definitely was
not
going to think about it. At all.

* * *

Tristan emerged twenty minutes later carrying two steaming mugs. He handed her one wordlessly, and Sharee accepted the coffee for what it was—a peace offering to placate the fretting assistant within her. Admittedly, she should have been the one brining him coffee, but over time, roles had become somewhat blurry.

He was dressed simply, in a pair of faded blue jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt that hugged his body in all the right places. Sharee couldn’t help but let her gaze linger. Boy, but he was a sight! She snapped out of it quickly and looked away before he could notice the appreciation shining in her eyes. She took a long sip of black coffee, relishing the warmth of the liquid in this gray Oregon morning.

“Sabrina called while you were getting dressed.”

Sharee delivered the information casually, but she felt a pang of irrational jealousy whenever the woman renewed her attempts at whisking Tristan away. The fact that he wanted nothing to do with her felt somewhat irrelevant to Sharee when she was forced to hear her overly chirpy voice on the other end of the phone line.

Tristan cringed visibly as he took a seat behind his desk. “Again?”

Sharee shrugged. “She wanted to know if you’re free for dinner tomorrow night.”

He looked at her with something akin to terror. “You said no, right?”

Sharee hid a smirk behind another sip of coffee. “I said I’d let her know once I’d talked to you.”

“Why on Earth would you do that?”

“Look, I told you time and time again,” Sharee said as she absently shuffled some papers around on the table that served as her desk, “I’m happy to assist you with anything and everything regarding your work, but your personal relationships are your own business. I’m not going to interfere with them.”

“Maybe you should,” Tristan grumbled.

Sharee looked up sharply. He seemed startled, as though he wasn’t supposed to say that out loud. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He swallowed visibly. “Nothing, never mind,” he said quickly, disappearing behind the screen of his iMac.

Sharee watched him curiously for another moment or two, and then she decided she was probably better off not knowing just what was going through his head.

“Before you start typing away,” she said when she saw him get ready for one of his intense writing sessions, “should we go over your plan for tomorrow?”

Tristan looked around the computer at her, a lost expression on his face. “What’s tomorrow?”

Sharee stared at him. Was he serious? “You’re meeting Derek for lunch, to discuss the tour for the new book.”
You know, the one where you kill off the protagonist,
again
?
she wanted to add, but she didn’t. She figured she had made her thoughts on the subject clear enough.

“That’s
tomorrow
?”

Sharee sighed. Like most geniuses, Tristan was always prone to distraction, but lately his brain seemed to be more scattered than usual. “Yes,” she said patiently, “that’s tomorrow.”

“Cancel it. Please,” he added as an afterthought, but that one polite word didn’t do anything to sweeten the blow.

Sharee stared at him in shock. “What?”

“You heard me. In fact, I would appreciate it if you canceled all my appointments for the next three days.”

“You don’t have anything else,” she said automatically, his schedule imprinted in her mind.

Tristan grinned, pleased. “Perfect.”

Sharee took a deep, steadying breath. She felt the beginnings of a headache forming in that spot between her eyes, right on top of the bridge of her nose. “Tristan,” she said, as calmly as she could, “you can’t cancel on your publisher two months before your tour begins. You need to sort out the details.”

“I’ll do it next week.”

“You’ve pushed it back enough. You really need to do this.”

“And I will,” he said. “Next week.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake!
“Tristan—”

“Sharee, I mean it.” He cut her off sharply. “Back off.”

Sharee snapped her mouth shut. She stared at him, dumbfounded. She watched as he pushed the chair away from the desk and stood up. She watched as he strode towards the doorway, and that’s when she finally snapped out of it.

“Where are you going?” she finally found her voice to ask.

Tristan didn’t look at her as he replied, “I’m going for a walk.”

Sharee glanced out the window. Sometime during their absurd exchange, it had begun to pour.

“It’s raining… Tristan!”

Of course, he didn’t listen. He never did. She listened to the front door open and close.

Sharee sat back in her chair, stunned. Over the past couple of months, Tristan had been especially weird. He seemed to grow more and more restless by the day, so much so that not even his writing seemed to help anymore. She had tried to coax him into talking about it a few times, but she could never get past his tight-lipped defenses.

She got up and walked over to his desk. She opened the file for his latest novel again, and sat down to read those last two chapters one more time. There was a darkness there, and for the first time Sharee found herself considering the idea that maybe the increasing bleakness in Tristan’s tales mirrored his feelings. After all, it was all too clear that something was seriously bothering him.

Up until now, however, whatever gloomy thoughts were going through his head had never affected his career. As his assistant, Sharee knew she had to put a stop to it before he did some serious damage to his work. She shuddered, already dreading the conversation.

Small steps,
she told herself.
One thing at a time.

Right now, the first step would be to inform Derek that one of his best authors was not going to discuss the tour.
Again
.

Sharee took a deep breath and picked up the phone.

***