Suddenly Wolf(3)

“It worked,” he said with no small amount of relief in his voice.

“Yup,” Daegan said from the bathroom as he turned on the shower and began stripping from his clothes. “Hand her over. I’ll get her cleaned up.”

Isaac glanced down at his own clothes covered in the woman’s blood and shook his head. “I’ll clean her up.”

Daegan gave him that “whatever, bro” look he did so well, but it was obvious to Isaac that his brother wasn’t happy. Isaac stepped into the shower fully clothed, half expecting the woman to wake up, but she didn’t. She stayed unconscious as Isaac managed to get most of her clothes off by shredding them with his claws.

His wolf howled joyously in his mind, and images of licking her all over danced in his head, but the part of him that was rational realized the woman probably wouldn’t be impressed. It didn’t matter that she was also a wolf now. Until her first shift she probably wouldn’t understand what had happened to her, and he didn’t think she’d be happy if she woke up while he explored her body.

He washed away as much blood as he could, pleased to find the gunshot wound in her abdomen mostly healed. A few moments later Daegan opened up the shower door and stood there holding a towel open. This time Isaac unbent enough to let her go. Jealousy was misplaced. The woman was mate to both of them, and now that she wasn’t in immediate danger of dying they had a lifetime—a long werewolf lifetime—to get to know each other.

Daegan wrapped the still-unconscious woman in the towel, nodded his head once, and then carried her from the room. Isaac turned his attention to his own clothes but ended up shredding them as well. The warm water would have set the blood into the fabric. There was no way he was ever washing that out, so he cleaned himself up, wrapped a towel around his hips, and headed into the bedroom to check on their woman.

Daegan had placed her under the blankets, but positioned himself on top. He lay beside her, his head propped on his hand as he watched the woman sleep comfortably. She was still very pale, but the change would take care of that soon enough. Isaac looked at his brother, raised an eyebrow, and waited for an answer to his most obvious question.

Isaac shrugged. “I didn’t think she’d appreciate waking up sandwiched between two strangers. She might be a werewolf now, but she’ll still think like a human woman for a while.”

Isaac nodded. They’d shared many a willing human female between them, but they needed to be patient. This woman was their mate. They’d be together a long time, and they sure as hell didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot. Waking with them both in her bed might not be the best way to impress their mate.

Add to that the fact that newly made females had a tendency to underestimate their improved physical strength and Isaac was more than willing to wait for her to wake up. “I’ll make some coffee,” he said and turned to the kitchen.



* * * *



Andrea woke slowly. As always she didn’t really want to climb out of bed—it was too damn cold in this part of the country in the mornings, even in summer—but she had jewelry to make and customers to serve, so she went to roll out of bed.

That’s when she noticed her pajamas were missing. When did I get naked?

The attempted robbery, the drunken fool who’d shot her accidentally, and his idiot friends all spun wildly through her brain. She grabbed at her gut, where she’d been wounded, almost crying out at the lack of pain. What the fuck?

She threw the blankets off her, amazed to find no evidence of a wound. But she remembered being shot, didn’t she? Had she dreamed it?

But then her fingernails caught her attention, the line of dark stain under each of them had not been there earlier, and she lifted her hands closer to her face for a better look. The stench of old blood assailed her nostrils, and she dropped her hands into her lap.

Was she dead?

This wasn’t exactly her idea of heaven. She glanced around at the familiar room and decided she probably wasn’t in hell either. Maybe she was in some kind of afterlife waiting room—she’d read about them in some literature once—or maybe she really had dreamed it all.

“It’s okay, Andrea,” a voice said from her left. Panic slammed her. She scrambled off the bed, uncaring that she was naked, and dropped to a fighting position as she faced the man that belonged to the voice.

“What do you want?” she demanded and then growled. Actually growled like a dog, the noise rumbling up from deep in her throat. “What the fuck?” She hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but the entire situation was proving to be ridiculous. Maybe she was hallucinating, and she was really still just slumped in the main room of her shop bleeding to death.