Chapter One
“Christina,” Lex mouthed, his words but a whisper despite the heightened pitch of his usually gruff voice.
Mute, though my mouth hung open, the air I’d sucked into my lungs on a long gasp burned as I failed to let it out. I blinked my wide, dry eyes. Nothing changed. I still hadn’t adjusted to the fact that, for once in my life, I’d been able to get up close and personal with my wolf. I’d run my trembling hands through his lush, thick fur just moments ago, the way I’d envisioned doing so a thousand times or more over the course of my life. An act like that had only been permitted in dreams up until now.
With a substantial huff, my lungs expelled the air I’d held onto as if it remained the only thing I could control. Still, as the fire extinguished even as I gasped to regulate my breathing, my chest ached. Shock, my mind registered. Lex, I thought as I looked at the naked man before me. My wolf, I countered, questioning what I’d just witnessed. My oversized, and to this point in my life ever-present but largely distant, wolf spirit had finally appeared to me. He’d let me touch him, run my fingers through his black and gray mane, and then he’d turned or transformed into Lex. A man stood before me where an over-sized wolf had just been seconds ago. I hadn’t even blinked, to my knowledge.
Studying Lex’s thick, black hair, I saw my wolf’s mane reminiscent in it. My fingers wiggled with the urge to touch it, to confirm the two were one and the same. My wolf is Lex. Lex is the man I slept with. I’m obsessed with both, and they are both the same being. It’s not possible. Round and round my thoughts went, short and cryptic, confusing to the point of exasperation. As an icy chill brought my shoulders in tight, I raised my arms to hug myself. I mused that anything in the world could warm me at this moment. In fact, I actually laughed, short and clipped, in my head, though my face remained a stone likeness of bewilderment.
One touch of my frozen fingers on my arms sent the chill cutting right through my thin sweater. Once they fell away, I looked at my hands, wondered exactly where to put them. Turning them over, I looked at my palms, asked them for the truth. I needed either proof to believe or a rational argument for disbelief. Did I really just touch my wolf? Did he really just become Lex as if some magician had touched him with a wand?
Not even a blessed puff of smoke for deception had occurred. One body had just melted into the other. My head fell, the weight of it too much to bear for my tense neck. I looked at my shiny black heels in contrast with the shadowed gray pavement. Imperfect, cracked, rutted, I sympathized, understood its plight even as my toe ground back and forth into it. Inching my face up, but still away from Lex, the scaffolding, representative of the stark hope of better things to come, of man’s hopes and dreams in this big city, played with the shadows of the dimly lit alley, made me doubt all my eyes had seen.
“Christina, please,” Lex begged, “please say something. You’re scaring me.”
Returning my gaze to him, the outer edges of my vision blurred. I cocked my head to one side, searched my mind for some practical explanation. Despite my disorientation, through my hazy vision, Lex remained a man in front of me. Tall, chiseled, all sinewy muscle that I’d once kissed, and had been dying to kiss again for weeks. I’d desperately wanted him back in my life. Now, I questioned my sanity, for that and a myriad of other reasons. Still, his naked body begged to be touched. I was a woman, one distraught, bordering on the hyperventilation of hysterical at the moment.
Slowly, I reached a shaky hand toward him. The tips of my fingers landed lightly on the top of his chest. He sucked in a breath that made his chest rise. The noise startled me, causing my hand to jump a bit before finding purchase on him again. His heartbeat, as rapid as mine, beat under my fingertips. Regardless, his thumped hard, more fiercely than I’d ever thought a heart could. I panicked, worried he’d hurt himself with the change. An instinct to help, to save, slowed my breathing, steadied my hand to some degree even while my muscles remained poised to jump into action if the need arose.
I let my hand, held tight to remain as it was, brush down over the peaks and valleys of his abdominal muscles. At one time, I’d reveled in the fact that I’d been blessed enough to touch such a man, one built as I’d only seen in magazines or on TV. Right now, though, I still wondered if he was real. I couldn’t wrap my thoughts around the fact that those muscles had somehow, in some unexplainable way, been under that luscious coat of hair when I’d petted the side of my wolf.