Jace (River Pack Wolves 2)
Jace (River Pack Wolves 2)—New Adult Paranormal Romance
His wolf is out of control. She’s a wild thing that won’t be tamed.
Ex-Army Specialist Jace River has a lock on his bedroom door, but it’s not to keep anyone out; it’s to keep his nightmares from breaking loose. His wolf is an out-of-control killer, which means he can never risk shifting, never truly be part of his pack, and definitely never take a mate.
Piper Wilding works for the Army as a civilian, traveling the world for her work in counterintelligence and fighting the bad guys while bedding down the good ones. The best part? It keeps her far from her asshole father in Seattle, the rest of the Wilding pack, and the pressure to take a mate. Settling down isn’t her thing, and after what happened to her mother, Piper vowed she would never be tied down by magic or men again.
While Jace’s wolf keeps him Sleepless in Seattle, Piper returns home to find her missing kid brother. When she breaks into the River brothers’ safehouse, sparks fly and claws come out. Her sexy skills threaten to bring out Jace’s wolf, and Jace’s good-guy hotness reminds Piper how tempting shifter men can be. They’re like fire and gasoline, and as they race to find Piper’s brother, the heat threatens to burn down all their carefully constructed walls. But falling in love has never been so dangerous—and being together means taking risks that neither might survive.
The flames singe his fur. The screams tear through his soul. But Jace’s beast is wild, uncontrollable, and rampaging through the falling embers of the tiny village. He tries to hold his wolf back, but it dives through a wall of fire to the cowering people inside. The hut is an inferno, and the husband and wife are trapped. His wolf snarls and lunges at them, ramping their screams even higher… somehow, Jace wrestles his beast away from clamping down on their flailing arms and exposed necks. Then a cry breaks through the crackling heat—a child. His wolf hungers to go after the plaintive sound; Jace fights to stop it, but the beast is too strong. It scents the child’s raspberry smell through the acrid smoke and dashes after her. It crashes through a corrugated wall like a demon, the flimsy construction no obstacle for a wolf like him—twice the size of any normal shifter and unleashed from human control.
The girl shrieks when it finds her. She clutches her doll tighter and shrinks into the corner, covering the stringy black hair on her head with a tiny hand. His beast roars and lunges for her, fangs bared—
Jace heaved upright in his bed, panting and fighting to keep from shifting. To keep the beast contained within his body and his dream. His claws were embedded in the mattress—he had ripped long slashes deep into the stuffing, and his blankets were a nest of shredded linen. He gritted his teeth and growled as he forced the claws to retract. Too close.
“Fuck,” he breathed out, rubbing his face with his now-human hands. The moonlight spilled into his bedroom, giving just enough glow to see the door—still locked. He had triple locks installed on his apartment in the city, but here at his family’s estate, he’d only been able to talk his mother into installing one. She didn’t understand, didn’t know what he turned into when the nightmare got hold of him. She was a shifter, too, but she had her wolf under control… like every other normal person.
Jace’s wolf had always been freakishly strong—twice the size of his brothers, flipping unbelievable in strength, and always a little on the wild side. Even as a pup, he had to work to get his beast to obey his human thoughts—to belong to him, like every other shifter seemed to manage with ease. Then Jace went overseas with the Army and served his country like he had always dreamed of doing… and something happened. He lost it. Lost control. Became the beast.
And people paid for it with their lives.
A shudder gripped him, and Jace forced himself to breathe out the last of the nightmare from his system. That was the quickest way to bury the beast deep inside again. The nightmare always brought it out, as if by reliving the scene over and over, he could change the past. But he couldn’t. He could never right that wrong… but he should be able to keep his beast under control while staying in his mother’s house, for fuck’s sake. If not, he might have to go back to the city, something he didn’t want to do. Not until he and his brothers, Jaxson and Jared, had caught up with this Agent Smith character. They’d given him an ass-kicking, and he was on the run, but he’d been kidnapping shifters straight off the streets of Seattle and performing some kind of medical experiments on them. The River pack had rescued a bunch of shifters, but who knew how many Agent Smith still had tucked away in some dungeon?