She thought of shifting and running as a human to her home, but the ground could be hazardous to her bare feet with its cactus, thorny senna, and rocky terrain, and it was only thirty-six degrees out today. Purple and pink stripes streaked across the sky as the sun began to set, but snow clouds quickly amassed.
She took a chance and raced through the juniper and scrub oak. Half an hour later, she plowed through her wolf door out back and entered the safety of the house. She panted, staring at the terra-cotta tile floor, barely feeling relief when someone knocked on the front door. Her heart skipped a beat. Now what?
She raced into the bedroom, shifted, and threw on some clothes. Peering out through the peephole of her front door, she saw no one. Wrong house?
A black sedan sat farther down the dead-end street. All of the houses backed up on ten-acre lots, with a half acre between homes, so they had a lot of privacy. She couldn’t see if anyone sat in the vehicle, and she didn’t recognize the car.
To be on the safe side, she went into the kitchen and locked her wolf door so no one could get in when she least expected it. The coyote she’d seen would know where she lived once he tracked her scent.
Chapter 15
Expecting a snowstorm to hit by nightfall, Elizabeth needed some groceries to tide her over. The clouds had rolled in, white, voluminous, and filled with snow. She’d seen the weather reports, felt the change in the air pressure, and could smell the coming snow in the wind currents. If what she predicted would happen, they’d be in a whiteout by nightfall.
On the way to the grocery store, she spied a big sale sign in the window at a small butcher shop that she’d never visited before: Rib-eye steaks 20 percent off!
When she walked into the butcher shop, the strange scent of cat threw her. The odor bothered her because her first thought was that the butcher had supplemented his meat products with cat. Then she realized the smell was that of a couple of live cats. Feral. She would have sworn they were big cats, as in the predator-in-the-mountains type. The butcher couldn’t have had house cats or any other variety in the store, though, not when he sold food.
After buying the meat, she was still puzzling over the cat-scent mystery and didn’t fully notice the people entering the shop behind her. She’d heard their footsteps, but their arrival hadn’t registered as anything sinister. Until they quickly moved in close to her. Three men. Getting in her space. The distinctive smells of testosterone, cologne, and aggression surrounded her all at once.
Before she could object to their close proximity, one of the men quickly wrapped his arm around her shoulder and poked a gun against her ribs. “Don’t make a sound,” he whispered in her ear, as if pretending to be her lover, to her chagrin.
The butcher smiled. She had to have looked highly annoyed. Even wolfishly dangerous, if anyone had known what she was.
“You got the sale steaks, I see, honey,” the man holding the gun against her side said, more to the butcher than to her. “I was afraid you hadn’t gotten my message.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but he quickly tightened his grip around her shoulder, warning her not to say a word. He nodded to the butcher and added, “Thanks.”
Now what was she to do?
The article she’d written came to mind in a flash, but she couldn’t imagine anyone kidnapping or killing her over it. Then she wondered if Uncle Quinton had found her that fast. Why go after her at a butcher shop? Why not when she was in her home? Alone?
The three men escorted her outside to a black vehicle with dark-tinted windows—the same car she’d seen near her home. The man acting as her lover attempted to force her into the backseat.
“You’ve mistaken me for someone else,” she said to the man wielding the gun. She grabbed the car frame, not about to let him shove her inside. That could be the end of her.
And that’s when she got her first look at the men.
None had shielded their faces from her view, so she could identify every one of them. Somehow they all looked familiar… Where had she seen them before?
Oh… my… God!
“You’re the men who made a scene back at the Silver Town Tavern!” Elizabeth exclaimed, staring at the blond, bearded man in the group. She recognized his cold eyes glowering at her. He was the man from the chairlift.
“You bastard.” She lunged forward to knee him in the crotch, but the dark-haired gunman jerked her back. She’d almost forgotten he still held her arm tight, but she recognized him as the spokesman of the group at the tavern. Since he was wielding the gun, she had a feeling he had also pushed her down the slope.
Instinctively, she tried to identify their scents. Nothing—as far as a wolf scent. They had to have applied hunter’s spray and then cologne over that to make sure she couldn’t detect them as wolves. Then everything clicked into place. She thought she hadn’t been able to identify the blond man’s scent on the chairlift because the wind blew it away from her. But she and Tom hadn’t picked up any scents after her room had been broken into, either. The men had to have been using hunter’s spray then, too. There was no other explanation.