Hard As Steele(4)

She sat up. She felt wet and sticky and soreness pulsed between her legs, but she was also deliciously sated, like a hunger that she’d never been aware of before had finally been fed.

“I can cook,” she protested. “I do it for a living.”

“I like to feed my woman.” He flashed a grin at her, and she sank back onto the couch with a happy sigh. His woman. She’d never dreamed that someone who looked like him would say those words, and with such tenderness and possession.

After dinner, she lay there in his arms as he stroked her flesh and she talked about her life in the tiny town of Lonesome Pine. She told him about Katherine, who was her best friend and a total nag and worrywart, and how she loved her job as a cook, and how the town was so small that it was possible to literally hold your breath long enough to drive from one end of the town to the other.

It had once been a boom town, home to thousands of people, during the gold rush. After the gold mine ran out, back in the late 1800s, many people had moved on, with only a few hundred people left. They supported themselves by farming.

There was also the odd rumors about the family that lived up in the hills, but she decided not tell him about that.

“Do you like living there?” he asked her.

“I basically do. There are a lot of good people in town. I’m friends with the people who own the Red Barn Diner; that’s Katherine’s uncle, Hal Bertelsen. Her dad is the mayor. I just get kind of lonely as a single girl there; it’s such a remote town, you know that nobody new’s ever going to move there. The pretty girls get married young, and girls like me just…I don’t know what we do. I honestly thought I’d die a virgin.” She paused to think about it. “I guess I have, right?”

“Again with that? Roxanne, won’t you believe me? You’re fine.”

She giggled. “If I were fine, that would make me the biggest tramp in Montana.”

“Can you be a tramp and a virgin?” he asked. “Anyway, I liked it.”

She found herself nodding off in his arms, with the heat of the fire and the warmth of his body enveloping her.

Later, she woke up. The fire was still roaring; he must have tended to it while she slept.

He was gone, and she had to go to the bathroom. The bathroom door was open, so he wasn’t in there.

After she used the bathroom, she came out and looked around, puzzled. It was still snowing outside. He wouldn’t be outside in this weather, would he? Where was he?

This was her hallucination, damn it. The hot guy didn’t get to run out on her after sex in her hallucination.

She glanced at the window at the back of the cabin, and a flicker of movement caught her eye. Curious, she walked over to the window, and saw Steele standing there in the snowstorm…stark naked. He wasn’t shivering, or hugging himself in the cold. He could easily have been standing in the sand on a tropical beach, rather than calf-deep in snow. Then, as she watched, he began to change. He sank down on to all fours, and white and gray fur rippled all over his body. His snout lengthened. His ears turned pointy and stood up. A bushy tail grew. He threw back his head and howled.

He was now a massive, beautiful gray wolf.

Steele turned and dashed off through the trees. Overhead, the full, round globe of a silvery moon looked down.

Okay, then. Just when she was wavering as to whether this could possibly be real, which would truly make her a shameless hussy who’d ordered a man to lick her in intimate parts of her body, she was reassured that she’d been right all along.

Clearly, not only was she imagining all this, but her head injury must be worse than she thought.





Chapter Three




Steele woke up with his arms wrapped around her. It was morning, and flakes were still swirling lightly outside the window, but the mad intensity of the blizzard had abated. The fire was starting to die down, and the air in the room was chilly again, but he lay there for just a minute more, drinking her in.

He breathed in the perfume of her hair, the light honeysuckle scent of her shampoo swirling in his nostrils. He smelled the delightful musk of her body. The scent of their lovemaking still lingered in the air. He pressed into her delicious, cushiony softness. She was so self-conscious about her beautiful body and womanly curves. He wished that he could spend a lifetime teaching her how wrong she was about that.

That could never happen. At best, he had another day.

As soon as the snow storm let up, he’d have to leave and never see her again.

He felt a dull throbbing in his chest and an aching misery which he’d never experienced before, but he suspected he knew what it was. He’d fallen for her, hard.

How ironic, he thought, as he disentangled himself from her and stood up. He’d never felt like this about a woman in his life – and the one woman who made his heart pound in his chest was from the wrong species.

Not wrong species like a lynx, or a bear, or a mountain lion shifter. That he could work with. The Council of Elders, the thirteen Elders who made final decisions over the affairs of wolf shifters across the nation, would be fine with any of those. Granted, he’d never be permitted to start his own pack if he were to marry a woman from a different shifter species, but the Elders wouldn’t have too much of a hissy fit over it.

But a human? Forget about it. It was the ultimate taboo for a shifter.

For a shifter of any species to reveal their existence to humans was an instant death sentence. He wouldn’t have revealed his secret to her anyway – the safety of his species was far more important than the feelings of one man. The two of them could never be together.

How had this even happened to him? At thirty years old, he’d begun to think that he’d never fall for anybody. He’d dated plenty, he’d had sex, he’d had one night stands and short lived affairs, but until he’d looked into Roxanne’s beautiful chocolate brown eyes, he’d never felt anything more than mild affection for the women he’d been with.

One look at her, and he’d felt as if a thunderbolt had hit him. He couldn’t exactly put his finger on what it was about her – her laugh, her face, her sense of humor, her hot body, her cheerfulness…God only knew, but he was hooked.

He had been weak to give in to that one night of passion, but he didn’t regret it. He’d known that it would be a night like he’d never experienced before, and he’d been right. He finally knew what it was like to really make love to a woman, not have sex with her. He knew what it felt like to plunge his body into the softest, sweetest body he’d ever felt before, and mingle his soul with her at the same time.

Now, he suspected, he’d spend eternity replaying that night in his head again and again, because even in that brief time, she’d seeped into his heart and left no room for another.

Glumly, he tossed some logs on and stoked the fire, then crouched before it, watching the flames leap.

At least she hadn’t seen him shift. The full moon wreaked all kinds of havoc with shifters. Wolf shifters, in particular, were very sensitive to it. They tended to lose control and compulsively shift during a full moon, which is why he’d gone outside and dashed off into the woods. It just took an hour of running through the forest in his wolf form and he got it out of his system.

That was one of the many reasons that shifters never lived in cities with humans. They frequently travelled through human country, they could visit, they could stay for short periods of time, but they could never stay for more than a few weeks or they risked exposing their secret.

The problem was that they had to regularly shift, or it would happen spontaneously whether they wanted to shift or not, and the full moon had an especially strong effect on shifter wolves; it caused many involuntary cases of shifting. Shifters could be sitting around at the dinner table, or on the front porch, or hanging out in a bar, and they’d suddenly shift. Living in remote areas of the country, in tiny towns where no humans lived, they were safe from discovery.

Wolf shifters could also only impregnate their mates on a full moon. Fortunately, she was human, so that was one thing he’d never have to worry about.

Roxanne’s light, happy voice floated through the air. “Good morning, werewolf.”

Shock rippled through his body. Please, tell me I didn’t hear that right, he thought to himself. She was asleep when I left her!

He turned to look at her. “What’s that?”

“I saw you turn into a wolf last night.” She let out a giggle. “My subconscious is really playing some amazing tricks on me.”

“You saw me turn into a wolf?” he pretended polite disbelief as she wrapped the blanket around her luscious body.

Damn it to hell. He’d been so sure she was asleep when he’d crept outside. He’d had no choice; the fur was rippling under his skin, snout thrusting forward, fangs itching under his gums. His wolf had hurled itself against the walls of his humanity, howling to be free. It was shift in the cabin, or shift out in the woods. No other option.

He walked in to the kitchen and put on some water to boil for coffee. There was also a box of instant pancake mix, so he pulled out some bowls to make breakfast for her.

“Yes, it’s funny. I had never actually known that I fantasized about werewolves, but apparently I do.”

“Interesting.” He kept his tone calm and neutral. “Did I turn into any other animals?”